The Gangster (10 page)

“Look out, Mr. Bell!” the Van Dorn front desk man telephoned Isaac Bell in the detective bull pen. “Opera singer coming at you! I had to release the electric lock before she broke down the door.”

Coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, the “Florentine Nightingale,” burst into the bull pen and embraced Bell. Despite the Knickerbocker’s steam heat, she was bundled in a coat, and her throat was swathed in an immensely long red scarf that trailed behind her. Her eyes were wild.

“Isaac!” she cried in a voice trained to carry to the back of a five-hundred-seat house. “Where is Joseph?” Knickerbocker permanent residents like her and Caruso, several theater impresarios, and the Van Dorns, shared a sort of small-town neighborliness. People dropped in to visit, lingered in hallways, and addressed each other by first name.

She was thirty-five years old, a shapely, Rubenesque dark-haired beauty with an expressive face, a love of drama, and a will of iron. She had made her American debut last year in San Francisco, before the earthquake. Caruso himself praised her voice and her acting. “Not yet a star,” he had told Bell when Bell described hearing her sing in San Francisco. “But soon! Mark my words. The world will kiss her feet.”

“Joseph,” Bell answered, “is in Washington.”

“But I am desperate. Look what they do.” She thrust a letter at him. “Open!”

Bell recognized the paper. He unfolded it and saw what he expected, the now-familiar skull and dagger and the black hand. Mano Nera was stepping up in the world, first the helpless, then the well-off, now the famous.

Bella Tetrazzini
,

Were our need not great, we never trouble such artist. But we have no choice. Four thousand dollars must fall in our hands and so we turn to you singing for great success at Hammerstein. Please, Bella Tetrazzini, prepare the money and wait for instruction. Must have before Thursday.

With great respect,
Your friends in need

“Don’t be afraid,” said Bell, “we’ll—”

“I’m not afraid! I’m angry.”

“When did you get this?”

“Twenty minutes ago. In the afternoon mail.”

“Is this the first you’ve received?”

“Two last week. I thought it make joke.”

“Do you have them?”

“I burned them in the fire. Isaac, I need guard. I’m going to sing in San Francisco again. For the earthquake victims.”

“When do you leave?”

“Tomorrow. I think maybe I should not be alone with only my maid. I need Van Dorn guard.”

Bell thought fast. His Black Hand Squad was up and running, though with no clients, the White Hand Society having terminated their contract. The hunt for Russo, the blaster, had shifted west from St. Louis. The Van Dorn Denver field office was looking for him in the mining camps. Russo could well be heading for San Francisco, which had a large Italian colony.

He fingered the letter. Definitely the same paper.

“Helen?” he called out. “Where’s Helen Mills? There you are. This is for the Secret Service. Take it to Agent Lynch. Wait a minute. Helen? . . . Excuse me, Luisa, I will be right back.” He led his intern away from the desk, out of earshot. “What’s that bulge?”

“What bulge?”

Bell pointed. “That.”

In her family’s Dupont Circle mansion, Bell had seen Helen wear the latest styles of one-color, single-piece shirtwaist suits. Here, she wore the traditional young office girl’s separate shirtwaist tucked into a trumpet skirt.

“That bulge is me.”

“Not that. That pocket pistol under the pleats. Hand it over.” He opened a big hand and waited for her to put the gun in it. “You know that Van Dorn apprentices are not allowed to carry guns.”

“It’s my father’s.”

“I’ll return it to him next time I’m in Washington.”

She checked the hammer was on an empty chamber and handed Bell the pocket pistol, butt first.

“Just for the record,” said Bell, “interns are not even permitted a nail file.”

“What if I break a fingernail?”

“Rub it on a brick wall.”

“Mr. Bell?”

“What?”

“Are you going to tell me that you never hid a gun when you were an apprentice?”

“I didn’t get caught. Go! Show Lynch . . . And Helen?”

“What is it?”

“See if you can find out something that Lynch really wants.”

“He wants to take me to Coney Island.”

Bell grinned. “Something he wants from us. Some business Van Dorns can do for him. I have a funny feeling about this counterfeiting.”

He returned to Tetrazzini.

“I will escort you personally to San Francisco on the train. When we get to San Francisco, our field office will take good care of you. Mr. Bronson, the detective in charge, is a top-notch man and happens to be a great fan of the opera. I’m told he took to his bed when you left San Francisco.”

“
Mille o tante grazie,
Isaac. I’m not afraid, but who can say . . . Isaac? Don’t you have a fiancée in San Francisco?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

As soon as she left, Bell telephoned Enrico Caruso. “Would it be convenient for me to come up and see you?”

Ten minutes later, Caruso welcomed him into his suite. They had met recently in the hotel’s lower lobby bar, where residents knew to find a quiet drink in the afternoon. The tenor was only a
few years older than the detective, and they had hit it off when they discovered they both had survived the earthquake uninjured.

Caruso was wearing a woolen dressing gown and had his throat wrapped in three scarves to Tetrazzini’s one. His drawing room housed an eight-foot Mason & Hamlin grand piano and a wheezing machine of tanks and nozzles that emitted clouds of steam to moisten the air.
“La Voce!”
he said, stroking his throat. “Do feel free to remove your coat.”

Bell did so, gratefully. Panama jungles were cooler and drier than Caruso’s suite.

The singer stubbed out his cigarette and lit a fresh one. “I missed you at my
Pagliacci
!”

“I was busy getting dynamited.”

“All work and no play . . .”

“Tetrazzini got a Black Hand letter.”

“I know. I told her to go to you.”

“How about you? Did you get a letter?”

“No,” the singer said. “Why do you ask?”

“If they are the same gang that kidnapped Maria Vella and are dynamiting businesses, they might be stepping up, trying to see how high they can make threats pay. Luisa is not as famous as you by a long shot. What if they’re experimenting with her to see how it works? Before they go after a really big fish.”

Caruso beamed. He had a big cheerful face with a high brow and it lit up bright as an electric headlight. “So suddenly I am a fish.”

“A big fish.”

“But of course.”

“A big fish makes a big meal,” said Bell. “They demanded
four thousand from Luisa. What would they ask from you. Forty?”

“At least.”

“I will keep you posted. Archie will be standing by if you need help while I’m in San Francisco.”

“San Francisco?” Caruso smiled. “Isn’t your fiancée in San Francisco?”

“As a matter of fact, she is,” said Bell, and Caruso broke into a new song not likely to be heard at the opera:

“’Round your heart a feeling stealing

Comes to drive away regret,

When you know you’re not forgotten

By the girl you can’t forget.

“How will the beauteous Marion feel about you sharing a transcontinental railroad train with a fiery soprano?”

Bell joked back that Luisa’s maid, the formidable Rosa Ferrara, took firm charge of the coloratura’s virtue. But he was thinking that if the threat against Luisa Tetrazzini was a test of the Black Hand’s power, then when she refused to pay, they would go all out to make an example of her. And, he realized with sudden icy clarity, that the timing of the Black Hand letter was no coincidence. They knew she was traveling to San Francisco.

The farther from New York they attacked, the more threatening they would appear to future victims.

Shepherding Tetrazzini and her maid Rosa aboard the 20th Century Limited for the first leg across the continent, Isaac Bell kept
a sharp eye on the gangs of immigrant laborers. Grand Central was in tumult—tracks and platforms shifted, steam shovels shaking the ground—as the demolition of the old station proceeded simultaneously with construction of the new terminal. Wally Kisley stood watch at the 20th’s gate, dressed like a drummer in a loud checkerboard suit and pretending to read a newspaper. Mack Fulton was wheeling a handcart of luggage about the platform. Archie Abbott glowered officiously in the blue and gray uniform of a New York Central conductor.

At Chicago’s LaSalle Station, where they arrived on time twenty hours later, Van Dorn operatives from the head office guarded their change of trains. They made it to Union Station and boarded the Overland Limited without threat or incident, though Bell was not happy to see newspaper headlines ballyhooing the singer’s journey across the continent. Dinner that evening was the Overland chef’s version of her famous dish, Turkey Tetrazzini, and, at Omaha, opera fans mobbed the platform and forced their way onto the train, shouting,
“Brava, Diva! Brava, Diva!”

Tetrazzini held court in the club car, swathed in scarves and uncharacteristically silent. Rosa Ferrara pantomimed the explanation, patting her own throat and whispering, “
La Voce!
Signora is resting her voice.”

Isaac Bell kept a hand inside his coat, gripping his Colt, and watched the fans’ faces. How easy it would be for a man or even a woman to thrust a stiletto from the crowd. He paid attention to their eyes, looking out for a telltale flash of ice, or fire, until the conductors had shooed the last of them off the train.

Peace prevailed at Ogden, two days later, where a wire from
the Denver office was waiting for Bell. The Denver Van Dorns had missed Russo by hours. They speculated that he was headed to San Francisco, but an Italian who fit his description might have bought a ticket in the opposite direction, east to Kansas City.

In other words, thought Bell, Russo could be anywhere—including right here in Ogden. Nine railroad lines converged in the junction city, which would appeal to a man on the run. The lone Van Dorn Ogden operative, an aging, retired sheriff, met the train. Bell authorized him to dispense cash to rail dicks to keep an eye out for Russo.

The Overland continued steaming west, over Great Salt Lake on the Lucin Cutoff Trestle, and across Nevada. At Reno, powerful pusher engines joined on, and the train commenced the steep climb into the Sierra Nevada. Ascending for forty miles, the tracks crested at the seven-thousand-foot elevation. The train entered the long, dark Summit Tunnel and suddenly stopped.

Moments before the clash of brakes, and startled cries of passengers thrown from their seats, Isaac Bell and Luisa Tetrazzini and Rosa Ferraro had been exclaiming at the spectacular views of mountains soaring to the sky and lakes sparkling below. Now, in the dark tunnel, all was confusion. It turned swiftly to chaos when a gun battle broke out at the front of the train, with the crack of pistols, the crash of rifles, and the roar of a 12-gauge as the Overland’s express messenger shot back.

Bell bolted from Tetrazzini’s state room. “Lock the door behind me.”

“Gangway!”

Isaac Bell ran full tilt toward the sound of guns echoing in the tunnel.

Smoke darkened the corridor.

Whipping his pistol from his shoulder holster, shouting at passengers in his way, he stormed through the stateroom car and into the forward club car, which rode directly behind the express car. He pushed through the vestibule and pounded on the express car’s fortified door.

“Jake! It’s Isaac Bell. You O.K. in there?”

He had, as was Van Dorn custom, introduced himself to the express messengers who guarded registered mail, bearer bonds, cash, and gold. An extra, armed hand was always welcome, and favors were returned. Bell shouted, “I’ve got the back covered. No gunmen here.”

“Not here, either,” said Jake, unlocking the door. He had a double-barreled sawed-off in his hands and a puzzled expression on his face. “Fire on the tracks, barricade of rocks, and shooting like a war in the tunnel, but I don’t see no—”

Bell turned and ran back to Tetrazzini’s state room, tearing
down the narrow corridors along the state rooms, shoving people from his path, praying he wasn’t too late.

Her door was still locked.

Through it he heard glass break and a terrified scream.

Bell levered off the corridor wall, sprang with all his strength, and hurled his shoulder against the door. It flew open, and the tall detective exploded into the state room, gun in his right hand, left fist cocked. He saw Luisa and Rosa on the day couch, seated where he had left them, their backs pressed against the cushions, their faces white with shock.

Through the smoke pouring in, a man materialized. He would have looked like a Gilbert and Sullivan pirate, with a grimy face and a gleaming stiletto clenched in his teeth, except for the Bodeo Italian Army revolver he was using to clear the sash of broken glass. His eyes fixed on Bell. The octagonal barrel flickered toward him. Bell landed a punch on his forehead and he fell backwards. The tunnel was narrow, rough-hewn through the mountain. The killer banged against the stone and slid down between the wall and the train. But as he fell, he managed to pull the trigger. The Bodeo’s .41 caliber slug creased Bell’s neck. It missed his jugular but plowed a fiery furrow in his skin, and the impact of the heavy bullet passing so close nearly knocked him over.

Luisa screamed.

Swaying on his feet, Bell pointed his pistol out the broken window and peered through thickening coal smoke down at the gravel ballast under the car. The man he had punched was struggling to stand. He was still holding his gun, and still had the knife in his teeth. Bell dove out the window, landed beside him,
and slugged him with his automatic. This was one Black Hand gangster Isaac Bell had no intention of shooting. This one he would make talk.

The gunman staggered beside the train. Bell tackled him. Still, he tried to run. Bell clamped a hand on one ankle and swung at his knee with the heavy automatic. The man tripped and fell. Bell grabbed his shoulder, but the burning in his neck was draining his concentration. His quarry wriggled loose, over the rail, and under the train. Bell rolled over the rail and spotted him by the flickering of the fire burning ahead of the locomotive. He grabbed the intruder’s foot, and they wrestled in the shallow trough under the car, scraping fists on the splintery crossties and ballast, banging their heads and backs on the chassis.

The locomotive whistled. Three short shrieks were amplified by the rock roof and walls, and Isaac Bell realized that the engineer had to back the train out of the tunnel before his passengers were asphyxiated by the engine smoke. The Black Hander Bell was fighting realized it, too. His eyes glittered on the nearest wheel, three yards from where they struggled. As the air brakes released with a deafening blast, he grabbed Bell’s arm and threw his weight on it to wrench it across the rail.

The train started to roll, and Bell felt the rail and the ties vibrate with the heavy grinding of iron on steel. He fought to free his arm with the little strength he had left. The wheel flange—the iron lip that kept the train on the tracks—was inching down on him like a butcher’s slicing machine. He pounded the man’s kidneys. A heavy coat absorbed the blows, and the Black Hander did not budge. Bell bent his knee, dragged his ankle toward his free hand, and snatched his throwing knife out of his boot. He
raised the knife. A protrusion from the moving chassis struck his hand, and the blade started to slip from his fingers. He squeezed hard and plunged it into his assailant’s kidney.

The man convulsed. Bell threw him off, jerked his arm from the rail, and flattened himself in the trough between the tracks. The car passed over him, as did the next stateroom car, the club car, the express car, and the tender. When at last the locomotive rolled away in gusts of steam and smoke, Bell sat up and took stock. He had two working hands. His neck began to ache savagely, and he was breathing hard, gasping to fill his lungs with the thin, smoky mountain air. The man who had stopped the train to attack Luisa Tetrazzini was staring at him with grinning teeth and empty eyes. Oddly, he seemed to have grown taller, until Bell observed that the head glaring blankly at him was on the far side of the rail, severed from its torso.

His stiletto had fallen beside his head.

Bell searched his coat for the sheath, then pocketed the weapon, retrieved his throwing knife, and staggered out of the tunnel.

Marion Morgan, a young, willowy straw-blonde with a beautiful, fine-featured face and a level gaze, was waiting at the railroad ferry pier. Isaac Bell sprang from the boat, ahead of the crowds, and swept her into his arms. “I am so glad to see you.”

They kissed warmly, oblivious to hundreds brushing past. After a while, Marion released him. “I cannot help but notice that you have an enormous bandage on your neck.”

“Cut myself shaving.”

“It looks like you’re still bleeding.”

“Just a scratch.”

“You’re white as a ghost.”

“Excitement . . . And joy.”

“Shouldn’t you be in a hospital?”

“I should be in bed. What are you doing for the afternoon?”

“But where is your opera singer?”

“I had Bronson’s boys meet the train at Oakland. They’ve got her covered.”

“Then come with me.”

“Where?” The last time he had seen her she was living in a tent, as were most in the earthquake-ravaged and fire-gutted city. From what he had seen from the ferry crossing the bay, not a lot had been rebuilt in the burned districts.

“I borrowed a sweet little cottage from my new boss.”

“What new boss?”

“I just got a wonderful job on a newspaper. I’ll tell you all about it. Later. After we change your bandage.”

In the short time they had been engaged, Isaac Bell had come to trust Marion’s judgment and insight totally. Experienced in business and trained as a lawyer at Stanford—graduating with the first class—she was the only person outside of his fellow detectives with whom he would discuss a case.

“The killer not only found Tetrazzini’s car in a dark tunnel swirling with smoke, but her exact stateroom window. He was
well informed. Once again, I feel this so-called Black Hand bunch are considerably more organized than illiterate immigrants straight off the boat.”

“No doubt their leader is,” Marion conceded. “Did the railroad police happen to recognize the killer?”

“No. Why would they?”

“He attacked three thousand miles from New York, and he, or his henchmen, piled stones on the tracks ahead of your train, both of which suggest he was a California man following orders from New York. And he was obviously familiar with the railroad, so I’m wondering whether they had ever arrested him for stealing rides.”

She had changed into a silk robe that complemented her sea-coral green eyes, and Bell watched avidly as she prowled the tiny cottage, refilling their flutes with Billecart-Salmon Brut Rosé champagne and returning to their bed. “What do you think?” she asked.

“I think we should sleep on it.”

A heavy hand pounded the front door.

Marion called, “Who is it?”

“Bronson,” thundered through the wood. “You in there, Isaac?”

“What?”

“Russo’s in Ogden. I’ll slide the telegram under the door.”

Marion said, very sadly, “After I bandage your neck, I’ll ride the ferry with you to the train.”