The Gangster by Clive Cussler
The Italian surprised him, saying, “You win-a the war.”
“Better believe it.”
“Not how you think. You make-a Fordham College. You make-a Boston University. Me? Steamer Class for stupid dago.”
“What are you gassin’ about?”
“I have more hungry men than you. Micks move up. Dagos just start. Ten years, you all be college men. Ten years, we own the docks.”
“You’ll never own the docks.”
He laughed. “We make-a side bet. After you pay-a ransom.”
“What if I don’t?”
“We dump drugs in river.”
“Geez . . . O.K. How much?”
“Half value.”
“I gotta talk to my cousin.”
“Ed Hunt said no deal.”
“Ed already said no deal? Then no deal.”
“Hunt died.”
“Ed’s dead?”
“Do we have deal?”
Tommy McBean could not imagine Ed Hunt dead. It was like the river stopped. And now the Wallopers was all on him.
“What killed him?”
“It looked like a heart attack.”
Antonio Branco walked from the waterfront to Little Italy.
They would be bloody years, those ten or so years to take the New York docks. The Irish would not let the theft of their drugs and the killing of Hunt go by without striking back. Chaos loomed and pandemonium would reign.
At Prince Street, he went into Ghiottone’s Café, as he often did. The saloon was going strong despite the hour. Ghiottone himself brought wine. “Welcome, Padrone Branco. Your health . . . May I sit with you a moment?”
Branco nodded at a chair.
Ghiottone sat, covered his mouth with a hairy hand, and muttered, “Interesting word is around.”
“What word?”
“They are shopping for a killer,” said Ghiottone.
“The grocer” can’t fool everyone. Especially a saloon keeper who works for Tammany Hall. Cold proof of the chaos that threatened every dream.
“Why do you tell me this?”
Ghiottone returned a benign smile. “A padrone recruits employees. Pick and shovel men. Stone masons. In your case, you even recruit padrones. Who knows what else?”
“I don’t know why you tell me this.” Did Ghiottone know how close he was walking to death?
“Are you familiar with the English word ‘hypothetical’?” Ghiottone asked.
“What ipotetico are you talking about?”
Ghiottone spread his hands, a signal he meant no harm. “May we discuss ipotetico?”
Branco gave a curt nod. Perhaps the saloon keeper did know he was close to death. Perhaps he wished he hadn’t started what couldn’t be stopped.
“The pay is enormous. Fifty thousand.”
“Fifty thousand?” Branco couldn’t believe his ears. “You could murder a regiment for fifty thousand.”
“Only one man.”
“Who?”
“They don’t tell me. Obviously, an important figure.”
“And well-guarded. Who is paying the fifty thousand?”
“Who knows?”
“Who is paying?” Branco asked again.
“Who cares?” asked Ghiottone. “It came to me from a man I trust.”
“What is his name?”
“You know I can’t tell you. I would never ask who brought the job to him. Just as he would never ask that man where it came from. In silence we are safe.”
What blinders men wore. “Kid Kelly” Ghiottone seemed unable to imagine that he was linked—like a caboose at the end of a speeding train—to a titan who could pay fifty thousand dollars for one death. Branco pictured in his mind jumping from the roof of that caboose to the freight car in front of it, and to the next car, and the next, running over the swaying tops, one to another to another, all the way to the locomotive.
“They came to you,” Branco mused. “Why do they come to an Italian?”
Ghiottone shrugged. Branco answered his own question. The conspirators wanted someone to take the blame, a killer who is completely different from the titan who wanted the victim dead. What better “fall guy” than a crazed Italian immigrant? Or an Italian anarchist.
“What do you say?” asked Ghiottone.
Branco sat silent a long time. He did not touch his glass. At last he said, “I will think.”
“I can’t wait long before I ask another.”
Antonio Branco fixed the saloon keeper with the full force of his deadly gaze. “I don’t believe you will ask another. You will wait while I think about the man you need.”
“Fifty thousand is a fortune,” Ghiottone persisted. “A third or a half as a finder’s fee would still be a fortune.”
Branco stood abruptly.
“What’s wrong?” asked Ghiottone.
“This is no place to discuss such business. Wait ten minutes. Come to the side entrance to my store. Make sure no one sees you.”
Branco made a show of thanking him for the wine and saying good night as he left the crowded saloon.
“Kid Kelly” Ghiottone waited five minutes, then walked across Prince Street and down an alley. Looking about to see that no one was watching, he knocked at the grocery’s side entrance.
Antonio Branco led him through storerooms that smelled of coffee, olive oil, good sausage, and garlic, and down a flight of stairs into a clean, dry cellar. He unlocked a door, said, “No one can hear us,” and led Ghiottone into a room that held an iron cage that looked like the Mulberry Street Police Station lockup from which Ghiottone routinely bailed out fools in exchange for their everlasting loyalty.
“What is this? A jail?”
“If a man won’t repay the cost of getting him to a job in America, he’ll be held until someone pays for him.”
“Ransom?”
“You could call it that. Or you could call it fair trade for his fare.”
“But you hold him prisoner.”
“It rarely comes to that. The sight of these bars alone focuses their mind on repaying their obligation.”
Ghiottoni’s eyes roved over the thick walls and the soundproof ceiling.
Branco said, “But if I must hold him prisoner, no one will hear him yell.”
He exploded into action and clamped Ghiottone’s arm in a grip that startled the saloon keeper with its raw power. Ghiottone cocked a fist, but it was over in a second. Outweighed and outmaneuvered, the saloon keeper was shoved into the cell with a force that slammed him against the back wall. The door clanged shut. Branco locked it and pocketed the key.
“Who asked you to hire a killer?”
Ghiottone looked at him with contempt and spoke with great dignity. “I already told you, Antonio Branco, I can never betray him, as I would never betray you.”
Branco stared.
Ghiottone gripped the bars. “It’s fifty thousand dollars. Pay some gorilla to do the job for five—more than he’ll ever see in his life—and keep the rest for yourself.”
Antonio Branco laughed.
“Why do you laugh?” Ghiottone demanded.
“It is beyond your understanding,” said Branco.
Fifty thousand was truly a fortune. But fifty thousand dollars was nothing compared to the golden opportunity that Ghiottone had unwittingly handed him. This was his chance to vault out of “pandemonium” into a permanent alliance with a titan—escape chaos and join a powerhouse American at the top of the heap.
“I ask you again, who brought this to you?”
Ghiottone crossed his arms. “He has my loyalty.”
Branco walked out of the room. He came back with a basket of bread and sausage.
“What is this?”
“Food. I’ll be back in a few days. I can’t let you starv
“Kind of you,” Ghiottone said sarcastically. He tore off a piece of bread and bit into the sausage. “Too salty.”
“Salt makes good sausage.”
“Wait!”
Branco was swinging the door shut. “I will see you in a few days.”
“Wait!”
“What is it?”
“I need water.”
“I’ll bring you water in a few days.”
BOOK II
Pull
17
Isaac Bell paced the New York field office bull pen, driven by a strong feeling that he had misinterpreted the Cherry Grove conversation. The words were clear; he had no doubt the brothel owner had heard most, if not all, with his ear pressed to an air vent.
What are you waiting for?
An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?
My mind is made up. The man must go.
But Bell could swear that he had missed what they meant. Though he knew his notes by heart, he read them again.
Would you please sit down?
My mind is made up. The man must go.
He paced among file cases. Then paused at a varnished wooden case that held the field office’s Commercial Graphophone—a machine for recording dictation.
A telephone rang. He reached over the duty officer’s shoulder and snatched it off the desk. “It’s Isaac, Mr. Van Dorn. How are you making out in Washington?”
“That depends entirely on how you’re making out in New York.”
Bell reported on the heroin holdup and the waterfront shoot-out. “Salata got away, Leone’s dead. The only thing we know for sure is the Black Hand is out of the counterfeiting business.”
“I am still waiting for the go-ahead to warn the President.”
“I have nothing solid yet,” said Bell.
Van Dorn hung up. Bell resumed pacing.
He stopped to regard a wall calendar, a promotional gift from the Commercial Graphophone salesman. 1906 was winding down fast, but what caught his eye was the advertisement that ballyhooed, “Tell it to the Graphophone.”
Bell wound up the spring motor and read his notes aloud into the mica diaphragm.
“What are you waiting for?
“An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?
“My mind is made up. The man must go.”
He shifted the recording cylinder to the stenographer’s transcribing machine, which had hearing tubes instead of a concert horn, and fit the tubes to his ears. His own voice reading the words sounded like a stranger in another room. Or two strangers downstairs in the library.
What are you waiting for?
An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?
My mind is made up. The man must go.
Isaac Bell heard what he had missed.
He headed to Research.
Grady Forrer started apologizing. “Sorry, Isaac. Slow going on the fixers. The tycoons use different men for different tasks. Twenty, at least, among them.”
“Forget that, I’ve narrowed it down to one-in-seven.” He slapped his list on Forrer’s desk. “The fixer who will hire the killer to murder the President is one of the men in the library.”
“Impossible. These men hold seats on the Stock Exchange and controlling interests in railroads, mines, banks, and industries. They’re as close as we’ll get to gods.”
“One of them only runs errands for the gods.”
“It’s not a conversation, not even a discussion. They’re not equal partners. The first speaker is the boss, the second an employee. I don’t care if he shouted or whispered. What are you waiting for? He is the boss. The fixer is not a tycoon, even though he’s in the tycoons’ club . . . I feel like an idiot, it took me so long.”
“O.K.” Forrer nodded. “I get it. I feel like an idiot, too. So how do we separate servants from gods?”
Bell said, “Start with where they live.”
The Social Register turned up addresses for four—Arnold, Claypool, Culp, and Nichols. Cross-checking telephone directory numbers with company records revealed New York City addresses for the other three. The newspaper society pages turned up the names and locations of the country estates for six of the men. The same six had Newport summer residences. In both cases—country homes and seaside cottages—the one exception was Brewster Claypool.
“He’s from the South,” said Bell. “Attended law school in Virginia. Maybe he’s got a plantation down there.”
There were Claypools in Virginia, including Brewster’s brothers, but Claypool himself owned no plantation.
“Not even a town house in New York. He lives in the Waldorf Hotel.”
“Perhaps,” said Forrer, “Claypool prefers the simple life.”
“A bachelor’s life,” countered Bell. He himself lived at the Yale Club when in New York, in what Marion called his monastic cell.
“What if he lives in a hotel because he isn’t as rich as the others?”
Research came up with Claypool’s connections to boards of directors in steel, telegraph, and streetcars, but mostly as an adviser. He was, in essence, a Wall Street lawyer who worked as a lobbyist. Like a stage manager, Claypool stayed behind the scenes and avoided the limelight, which fit the definition of a fixer at the highest level.
Interestingly, Research came up with no pictures of Claypool, none of the engravings of prominent men found in the Sunday supplements, and no up-to-date photographs. He was definitely an offstage operator.
Bell, who always dodged cameras in the interest of investigating incognito, knew full well the threat of the accidental photograph. “Find out where he vacations. Some camera fiend must have snapped him with a Kodak . . . Meantime, if Claypool is our fixer, who does he fix for?”
“Pull is an ancient elixir,” Brewster Claypool drawled in a soft Virginia accent. “Pull sweeps aside obstacles. But this can’t come as news to a Van Dorn detective.”
“Wouldn’t a Wall Street lawyer prefer to go around obstacles?”
Brewster Claypool laughed. He was a little wisp of a man, wearing an exquisitely tailored pearl-gray suit, bench-made English shoes, and a blasé smile that concealed an all-seeing eye and a brain as systematic as a battleship’s centralized fire director.
“Excellent distinction, Detective.”
From the windows of Brewster’s office on the top floor of a building at Cortlandt and Broadway, Bell could see into the steel cagework of the Singer skyscraper under construction. The new building would block Claypool’s view of Trinity Church and the harbor long before it rose to become the tallest building in the world, but, at the moment, the view included a close look at ironworkers creeping like spiders on the raw steel.
Claypool said, “May I ask to what do I owe the pleasure of your presence? Your letter was intriguing, and I was impressed, if not flattered, when you quoted my notion that it is humiliating to confess ignorance of anything in Wall Street. Beyond that, I felt curiosity mingled with admiration, having caught wind of the Van Dorn success in retrieving a kidnapped child from the Black Hand. Extraordinary how your operatives found their way straight into the lion’s den.”
“That is not commonly known,” said Bell.
“I do not make a business of common knowledge,” said Claypool. “But tell me this. Have you noticed a sudden quiet in the Black Hand camp? Little activity other than small-potatoes attacks on hapless pushcarts.”
“Few peeps out of them lately,” Bell agreed, wondering why Claypool was showing off for him by establishing credentials beyond the canyons of Wall Street. “The Salata Gang got its nose bloodied by the Irish, and things have quieted down since.”
For a man who enjoyed boasting, Claypool appeared oddly immune to flattery. Suddenly blunt, he asked, “What can I do f
“The Van Dorn Agency needs a man to provide inside information.”
Claypool looked genuinely puzzled by the offer of employment. “I’m sure that private detectives are better up in gangsters than I. My interest in the underworld is peripheral to my other interests.”
“This is not about gangsters.”
“About what, then?”
Isaac Bell pointed out the window. He traced with his finger the route of a crosstown street that began at the East River and ended at Broadway, hard against Trinity Church’s graveyard.
“Wall Street?” Claypool gave him a broad wink and joked, “Tread cautiously, Detective. President Roosevelt will clap you in irons.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bell. The slick Claypool did not strike him as recklessly bold. That he blithely dropped the name of Roosevelt suggested he was unaware of a plot against the President. If so, Bell’s “fixer hunt” had just hit as dead an end as Wall Street’s graveyard.
“The manipulation of insider information by Wall Street tycoons is among Teddy’s most despised bugaboos . . . But surely you know that.”
Bell said, “You don’t have to be a tycoon to manipulate inside information . . . But surely you know that.”
Still acting vaguely amused, Brewster Claypool geared up his Southern drawl. “Spoken as a private detective who believes he already has inside information—about me.”
“I do have such information,” said Bell. “We’ve learned a lot about you.”
“Why did you look into me?”
“I just told you. The Van Dorn Agency is seeking the services of an inside man. Diligent investigation into your ‘interests’ indicated that we would find that man in you.”
Claypool regarded the tall detective speculatively. “Services rendered by inside men are expensive.”
“But not as expensive as services performed by a tycoon.”
“Don’t rub it in, Detective. You’ve already made it clear that you know I am not a tycoon.”
“But I am among the very few who know that,” said Bell. “Most people, including people who should know better, assume that you are as great a magnate as your associates. They put you in the class of tycoons like Manfred Arnold, William Baldwin, John Butler Culp, Gore Manly, Warren D. Nichols, or even Jeremy Pendergast.”