The Gangster (32 page)

“Well done on the anarchists!” Joseph Van Dorn said when Bell reported. “But the assurance that ‘gorillas’ are not as dangerous as radicals doesn’t exactly make me rest easy. Particularly as the President has decided to make your ‘one speech only’ open to all. He wired me this morning that he’s going to lead the workmen in a parade.”

“A parade,” said Bell with a sinking heart. What if he was wrong about Branco killing in close? A parade was an invitation to a sniper, and a criminal as freewheeling as Branco could change tactics in an instant.

Van Dorn echoed his thoughts. “The parade is madness. He intends to lead it in the Steamer. I asked, would he at least put up the automobile’s top? Look what he wired back.”

Van Dorn thrust a telegram across his desk.

SNOW ON LABOR
SNOW ON PRESIDENT

Bell asked, “Who’s marching in the parade?”

“Everyone.”

“Even the Italians?”

“Especially the Italians. Last we spoke in Washington, he had a bee in his bonnet about immigrants learning English to facilitate fair dealings between classes of citizens. He was tickled pink when I told him that the Italian White Hand Society is our client and what fine English Vella and LaCava speak.”

“Why don’t you invite Vella and LaCava to the parade?”

“Excellent idea! I’ll bet TR shakes their hands.”

“Invite Caruso and Tetrazzini, while you’re at it.”

“I wouldn’t call either sterling pronunciators of the King’s English.”

“Any hand the President shakes that is not a stranger’s hand will make me happy,” said Bell. “Along with a snowstorm to blind the snipers.”

Van Dorn turned grave. “But in the event that a providential snowstorm doesn’t blind a sniper, how else are you closing the vise around Branco?”

“My operators are watching Culp’s gates and his boat landing round the clock.”

“I thought you told the President the river was frozen.”

“I put a man on an ice yacht.”

“Where’d you get an ice yacht?”

“Bought myself one in Poughkeepsie.”

“Who other than you knows how to sail it?”

“Archie Abbott.”

“I wondered where that fool had gotten to. What else are you doing?”

“I have a tapper up a pole listening to the Raven’s Eyrie telephone.”

“
Outside
the walls?” asked Van Dorn.

“Yes, sir. Outside.”

“What about telegraph?”

“It’s all in cipher.”

“I would lay off the telegraph wire. Culp conducts business from the estate. Tele
phone
tapping is one thing; the law’s so murky. But we don’t want to be liable to charges of tele
graph
tapping for inside knowledge of Culp’s stock market trades. What else?”

“What else would the Chief Investigator recommend?” Bell asked his old mentor.

Van Dorn sat behind his desk silently for a while. He gazed into the middle distance, then made a tent with his fingers and stared inside it. At last he spoke. “Go back to that woman.”

“Francesca?”

“Find out what she didn’t tell you.”

Bell was itching to return to his detectives watching Raven’s Eyrie and guarding the siphon tunnel dig. “She already admitted to every crime in the book.”

Van Dorn said, “She knew she was headed to prison, at best, and more likely the hangman. She may have talked your ear off, but she’s drowning, Isaac. She had to hold on to something, something for herself.”

Archie Abbott woke before dawn in a cold bed in a cold room. He pulled on heavy underclothing and over it a snug suit of linen. Then he donned thick woolen hose, trousers, and waistcoat. He encased his feet in high felt boots. Finally, he buttoned a fur
jacket over the woolen waistcoat and a pea jacket over the fur. He covered his head and ears with a fur hat and pulled goggles over his eyes.

He stepped outside, crossed the New York Central Railroad tracks, and hurried down to the frozen river. His ice yacht waited in a boathouse at the edge of the cove. The runners were frozen to the ice. He kicked them loose and pushed the yacht outside.

The breeze in the shelter of the cove was barely enough to stir the pennant at the masthead. But Isaac Bell had commissioned an exotic doozy from J. B. Culp’s own builder, with fifty extra feet of sail and lead ballast to try to keep from flipping upside down in a squall, and that breath of air started it moving like a restless horse. Abbott climbed hastily onto the car—the cockpit at the back end—and grabbed the tiller just as the yacht bolted onto the open river.

A bitter breeze struck the rigid sail. Abbott sheeted it in tight and concentrated on the tiller to dodge oversize ice hummocks, rocks along the shore, and wind skaters flashing by with sails on their backs. She was a light-footed gazelle. She felt like she was making thirty miles an hour until they overtook a New York Central express. Judging by the locomotive’s flattened smoke, Isaac Bell’s ice yacht was cracking forty-five.

When the sun cleared Breakneck Mountain and cast thin, cold rays on Storm King on the other side of the river, Archie turned the boat toward Raven’s Eyrie. Unlike the other Hudson River estates where lawns rose from the water’s edge, Culp’s place was easily recognized by the fir trees that screened its walls.

He crossed the frozen water in a flash and commenced the first of many cold, cold passes by Culp’s dock. Some Van Dorn
had to freeze half to death keeping vigil and Abbott was the one, atoning for his stupidity and staying out of sight of the Boss on the slim chance that Antonio Branco may suddenly embark by ice yacht. At least Isaac hadn’t condemned him to be one of the operatives on hogshead duty—watching from inside the barrel left at the service entrance and spelling each other only in the dark—though he would have if Archie wasn’t too tall to fit.

Other boats started skittering down the river, flying Poughkeepsie and Hudson River Ice Yacht Club burgees and speeding, like his, on the edge of a smashup. Archie joined in impromptu races with them and the sail skaters. Bell had issued strict orders not to draw attention by winning races, for word of a new fast boat would get back to J. B. Culp in a flash. But it was still a welcome change of pace and a natural cover for the Van Dorn watch.

The visiting room in the women’s section of the Tombs was divided by a wall broken with a small mesh-covered window. Francesca Kennedy looked so gaunt that Isaac Bell suspected their steak dinner had been the last she had eaten. Her face was pale, her expression sullen.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came for what you didn’t tell me,” Bell said bluntly.

“Didn’t I give you enough to send me to the gallows? Oh, what am I talking about? I keep forgetting.”

“Forgetting what?”

“It’s not the hangman anymore. It’s the electric chair.”

“I came—”

“Go away, Isaac. Anything I didn’t tell you I didn’t want to tell you.”

She was seated on a stool. Bell indicated the stool on his side. “May I sit down?”

She ignored him.

Bell pulled up the stool and sat face-to-face with her, inches from the mesh. “I came to change your mind.”

“Forget it.”

“I’ve spoken with some men in the prosecutor’s office. It is possible that I can persuade the District Attorney to offer you some kind of a break.”

“You want to give me a break? Get me out of here.”

“I can’t.”

“Let me go home.”

“I can’t.”

“So I can’t remember what I didn’t tell you.”

“I can’t get you out of jail, Francesca. No one can. But maybe I can make it better.”

She glanced about her. “Better than this wouldn’t be hard.”

“I’m thinking of
much
better. If we can convince a judge that you should be in an asylum.”

“I don’t think the bug house is better.”

“There are still some excellent private sanitariums.”

“Really? How excellent?”

“For wealthy patients. Very wealthy patients.”

“I’m not wealthy, Isaac. And I’m sure as heck not
very
wealthy.”

“I can arrange it,” said Bell.

“Pay out of your own pocket?”

“The agency will pay at first. At some point after we seize Branco’s assets, we can tap into them.”

“Won’t the government keep them?”

“Not if the Van Dorn Agency deserves a bounty. And certainly not if we, in essence, pay you for your testimony against Branco with Branco’s money.”

“That would be ironic.”

“How so?”

“Is this on the square?” she asked, and for the first time she let Bell see that she was scared.

“Yes.”

“You’ll really do it?”

“You have my word you will get a square deal.”

Francesca Kennedy nodded. “I’ll take your word . . . Shake on it.” She slipped her fingers through the mesh. Bell squeezed them before the matron interrupted with a sharp “No hands!”

Francesca flashed her a pleasant smile and said, “Sorry.” To Bell she whispered, “It’s ironic, because Branco used to be a regular customer.”

“You knew Branco? You said you didn’t.”

“Not as the Boss . . . I didn’t lie to you, Isaac. I just didn’t tell you everything.”

“When was this?” asked Bell, thinking to himself, Bless Joseph Van Dorn for steering him back to her. The “old man” had invented the best tricks in the detective book.

Francesca took a deep breath. “Back when I was streetwalking. He set me up in an apartment. All I knew was, he was a rich grocer. Gave me this little apartment and a few bucks a week if
I’d stay off the streets. I said to him, ‘What are you, jealous of my other customers?’ and he said, ‘You’ll get killed on the street and you’re too valuable to get killed.’ Fine with me. Nicest thing anyone ever said to me. Besides, he was right. You die on the street; it’s just a matter of time. Anyhow, ’til he showed up at the Waldorf, I hadn’t seen him in ages—not since I started ‘confessions’ with the Boss. But he had kept sending the dough and paying the rent.”

“Didn’t you recognize his voice?”

“Not through the grille. And he talked different, too. Different words. I feel kind of dumb, but I never thought for a second he was the same man.”

“Where was the apartment?” asked Bell.

“I still have it. Or did ’til now.”

“Would he hide there?”

Francesca shrugged. “He never came to my place. When he wanted me, we’d meet at an apartment he kept on Prince Street.”

“His home that blew up?”

“No, he didn’t live there. I never saw his home. Our place was over near Broadway. He just kept it for me. And whoever else I guess he had.”

“What was the address?”

Antonio Branco returned to Raven’s Eyrie the way he had left, through the cave. His handsome face was battered from the fight with Bell and Abbott, both eyes blackened, his nose swollen.

“Detectives are watching my safe house.”

“You’ve become a less valuable asset,” J. B. Culp shot back.

“It means nothing.”

“You are turning into a liability.”

Culp was ready to pick up a gun and shoot him. End this whole thing before it got worse. He had his story ready: Italian fugitive snuck in here. I caught him trying to steal my guns. Thank God I got the drop on him. Reward? No thank you, give the money to charity.

He was about to turn around and pluck the Bisley off the wall when Branco surprised him by answering mildly, “I am moving my business to Canada.”