The Gangster by Clive Cussler
He gave Bell the broad wink of a know-it-all barfly. “Feller told me the company knew they’d hit water along this stretch, but kept it quiet. If you get my meaning . . .”
“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Bell. “I’m new here. If they knew they were going to hit water, why did they keep it quiet?”
“The way it works; they bid low to get the job, but they’ll make it back with extras. They gotta grout the water-bearing seams. And that don’t come cheap. Before they grout, they’ll need more pumps, and pipes to divert the water. Might even have to build a reinforced concrete bulkhead to fill the entire heading to keep from flooding.”
“You mean they get their cake and eat it, too.”
“That’s what the feller told me. Smart man . . .” The foreman’s voice trailed off, and he frowned. The water was running harder. Some of the other muckers who had laughed at the Nervous Nellie moments ago were looking anxious.
“Calm down, you dumb guineas. Calm down. Back to work. Calm down. No worry.”
But the laborers continued casting anxious looks at the face of the heading, where the seam gushed, and at water rising over the muck car tracks.
“Il fiume!”
Others repeated the cry. “Il fiume!”
“There’s no ‘fu-may,’ dammit,” yelled the foreman. “It’s just rock water.”
A laborer, who was older than the others, pointed with a trembling finger at the cleft in the stone where the water gushed.
“Mano Nero.”
“Black Hand?” The foreman seized a young laborer he used as a translator. “What the hell’s he talking about?”
“Mano Nero. Sabotage.”
“That’s nuts! Tell them it’s nuts.”
The translator tried, but they shouted him down. “They say someone didn’t pay.”
“Pay what?” asked Isaac Bell. It sounded like word of the Black Hand letter had trickled down to the workmen.
“The dollars we’re supposed to give from our pay,” said the translator.
“It’s a Black Hand shakedown,” said the foreman. “They make ’em fork over a buck on payday.”
The lights flickered.
Every laborer in the mucking gang dropped their picks and shovels and fled down the tunnel. They ran in headlong confusion toward the shaft, splashing through the ankle-deep water, tripping on the muck car tracks, shoving and trampling each other in their panic. The foreman charged after them, bellowing to no avail.
Isaac Bell followed at his own pace. There would be a long wait for the hoist to come down the shaft and load all the men. Nor could he believe that the Hudson River had breeched a thousand feet of stone.
But when he got to the surface, rumor was rampaging through the labor camp, infecting not only the panicked Italian laborers but the Irish and German engineers, machine operators, foremen, and Board of Water Supply Police, and the Negro rock drillers and mule drivers. The Black Hand had sabotaged the siphon. The Hudson River had broken into the tunnel. Even the engineers, who should know better, were scratching their heads. Was the tunnel lost?
None of it was true, and it would be cleared up. The rock water would be pumped down, the cleft seam grouted, and the digging would continue. But, at the moment, newspaper scouts were wiring New York. On Manhattan and Brooklyn streets fifty miles away, newsboys would soon be hawking the baseless story.
“Extra! Extra!”
BLACK HAND SHUTS DOWN AQUEDUCT
WATER FAMINE THREATENS CITY
Bell cornered the pressure tunnel contractor who had welcomed the Van Dorn protection. He was a hearty, bluff, serious man with no nonsense about him. Like many of the contractors, he personally supervised his job. Was it true, Bell asked, that the likelihood of encountering water-bearing seams had been predicted?
“Between you, me, and the lamppost, diamond drill borings ahead indicated we’d run into water. Not so much it would stop excavation of the siphon tunnel, but enough to have to deal with. We knew we’d have to grout off the seam.”
“How many people knew?”
“Just a handful, and all in the ‘family’—engineers, me, fellows operating the diamond drill.”
“Could any of them have told the Black Hand?”
“I don’t follow you, Detective.”
“I showed you the letter,” Bell said. “I’m asking whether the Black Hand caught a lucky break that you hit water right after they threatened the tunnel? Or did the Black Hand know you would hit water and timed their threat to coincide with it?”
“The Black Hand extorts Italian labor, not American engineers. You can bet no one told them directly. But all it would take is one guinea a little smarter than the rest, cocking his ears for the inside word.”
Bell said, “In other words, the Black Hand rode free.”
“Truth will come out soon enough. The tunnel is doing fine.”
But Antonio Branco’s damage was done, thought Bell. The Black Hand looked powerful; the aqueduct looked vulnerable. He was hurrying from the contractor’s shack when a long-distance telephone call came in from an anxious Joseph Van Dorn, who had just returned to New York.
“Were any of our boys drowned in the flood?”
“There is no flood.”
“The newspapers say the Hudson River flooded the tunnel.”
“Utterly untrue,” said Bell. “Unfortunately, the Black Hand will take credit for sabotage.”
“They just did. We got another letter.”
“Was it addressed to Marion?”
“Like the last. He crows about the flood and threatens worse if the city doesn’t pay.”
Isaac Bell said, “We have to hit them before they attack.”
“Agreed,” said Van Dorn. “What do you propose?”
“Catch Branco with Culp.”
“How do you intend to do that?”
“Raid Raven’s Eyrie.”
34
Twelve brawny, athletic Van Dorn detectives studied the illustrated map of Raven’s Eyrie that Isaac Bell chalked on the bull pen blackboard. He had left his undercover men at Storm King when Van Dorn authorized hauling in reinforcements from Philadelphia, Boston, and Baltimore. They listened, commented, and queried while Bell pointed out features of the estate the raiders would hit upon.
“Main house. Gymnasium, including guest quarters and Culp’s trophy room. Stable. Auto garage. Boathouse. Wall—two miles around and, at a minimum, eight foot high, enclosing one hundred sixty acres. Front gate and gatehouse. Service gate. Workers’ barracks.”
“How do you happen to know your way around, Isaac?”
“I got myself invited and stayed for dinner. The front gatehouse is impregnable. Steep approach and a gate that could stop locomotives. Culp even has rifle slits in the tower. The service gate’s not much easier. But there’s a high spot in the wall, here—out of sight of the service gate tower—where fit younger detectives can scramble over with grappling hooks, then drop rope ladders for the fellows who belly up to free lunches. We’ll cut telephone wires, and the private telegraph, as we go over. They’re a few yards farther along the wall.”
“Why don’t we cut the electricity while we’re at it? Put ’em in the dark.”
“Culp has his own power plant. It’s here.”
“You drew it like a church.”
“The power plant looks like a church. The steeple masks the smokestack. Now we’ve confirmed that Mrs. Culp is here in New York in their mansion on 50th Street, which makes things easier.”
“Screaming wives,” said a grizzled veteran from the Boston field office, “take all the fun out of busting down a door.”
“Worse than kids,” said another.
“There are no kids. But there are plenty of staff. Mrs. Culp has taken her majordomo with her, but there is everything else, from footmen, to cooks, to housemaid
“How about bodyguards?”
“Culp keeps a couple prizefighters in the gymnasium. They’ve got a room downstairs. So we’ll need a couple of boys to get them into manacles.”
“O.K. to shoot ’em in the leg if they resist?”
“Use your judgment.”
“Where do we take Culp and Branco?”
“Culp’s a big wheel in the Hudson Valley, so Mr. Van Dorn strongly suggests we avoid the local constabulary. We’ll have a boat here”—Bell pointed at the boathouse pier—“to run us across the river. Then hightail it to a New York Central special standing by at Cold Spring and straight to Grand Central. NYPD Captain Mike Coligney will come aboard at Yonkers and make the arrests the second we cross the city line.”
“What charge?”
“Harboring a fugitive for Culp. With more to come.”
“How about trying to kill the President?”
“If we can pin it on him,” said Bell. “The primary goal is to knock Culp out of commission so he can’t kill him.”
“What do we charge Branco with?”
“We’ll start with the murder of Brewster Claypool. That should give the DA time to establish a Black Hand case. Same goal, though: Take him out of action before he can do more damage.”
“How solid is the Claypool murder charge? Keeping in mind what the Italians do to witnesses.”
“Solid,” said Bell. “I’m the witness.”
“I have an idea,” said J. B. Culp.
The magnate was on his feet, looming over his desk in the trophy room, fists planted on the rosewood. Antonio Branco was pacing restlessly among the life-size kills. Culp waited for him to ask what his idea was, but the self-contained Italian never rose to the bait.
Culp tried again to engage him. “We kill two birds with one stone . . . Can you guess how, Branco?”
Branco stopped beside a suit of armor and ran his fingers across the chain mail. “We kill Roosevelt,” he said, “when he makes his speech at the aqueduct.”
Culp did not conceal his admiration. Branco was as sharp as Brew Claypool, as cynical, and as efficient. Lee’s and Barry’s corpses had disappeared as if they had never existed, along with their possessions and every sign they had ever occupied the rooms under the gym. The difference between Claypool and Branco was that Branco also had teeth, razor-sharp teeth.
“Good guess,” said Culp.
“Easy guess,” said Branco. “What better proof that the city can’t manage its water system than to drown the President in the aqueduct?”
“Drown? Is that how you’re going to do it?”
Branco said, “I promised not to saddle you with things you shouldn’t know,” and walked between the elephant tusks that framed the fortress door.
“Where are you going?”
“As I promised, you will not be saddled,” said Branco and walked out.
Culp lumbered after him. “Hold on, Branco. I want to know when you’re coming back.”
“Later.”
Branco followed a winding path through a forest of ancient fir trees and down the slope between the outside entrance to his rooms and the estate wall. Near the wall, he slid through a low break in a rock outcropping that opened into a small cave under the wall.
Only an experienced pick and shovel man would recognize the cave as a man-made construction of hidden mortar and uncut stone artfully laid to look like natural rubble cast off by a glacier. It had been built sixty years ago by Culp’s grandfather, a “station master” on the Underground Railroad, helping escaped slaves flee to Canada.
“Why?” Branco had asked, mystified. He had studied the family; none were known to be what Americans called do-gooders.
“He fell for a Quaker woman. She talked him into it.”
“Your grandmother?”
“Not bloody likely.”
Branco emerged outside the wall and hurried through another fir stand. The mule wagon full of barrels was waiting. The elderly Sicilian groom holding the reins obeyed Vito Rizzo’s last orders before his arrest as unquestioningly as, back at Prince Street, he had obeyed Branco’s to dump a sugar barrel in the river. The old man stared straight ahead and pretended he heard no one climb into a barrel behind him until Branco said, “Muoversi!”
Francesca Kennedy’s “confession” two weeks ago in the Prince Street church had been her last. The Boss had ordered a complete change of their routine. From then on, she reported by telephone from a public booth in Grand Central Terminal at three o’clock in the afternoon on odd-numbered days. On even days, she checked a box at the nearby post office. The letters contained instructions and money. The instructions included the number she would tell the telephone operator to give her. But for two weeks, whatever number she asked for rang and rang but was not answered.
This afternoon, three on the dot, he answered. “What sins?”
“Adultery.”
“I didn’t know he was married.”
“He’s not. But I’m supposed to be a widow, so it’s adultery until we marry, because, you see, the Church—”
“What have you learned from him?”
“You picked a good day to answer the phone. I just found out he’s going on a big raid.”
“Raid? What kind of raid?”
“A detective raid.”
“Why would he tell you that?”
“He broke a date. He had to tell me why.”
“Maybe he’s seeing someone else?”
“Not on your life,” she said flatly. “He’s mine.”
“Did he happen to say what he is raiding?”
“Some rich guy’s estate.”
“Where?”
“It’s way up the river.”
The Boss fell silent. The telephone booth had a little window in the paneling. Francesca could see hundreds of people rushing for trains. She had a funny thought. The Boss could be right next to her, right beside her, in another booth. He knew where she was, but she could only guess where he was.
“Did Detective Abbott happen to mention the rich man’s name?”
“Sure.”
“Why sure?”
“I asked him. You told me find out everything the Van Dorns are doing, remember?”
“I am puzzled that a private detective would tell you so much about a case he was working up.”
“I told you, he’s mine.”
“I find it hard to believe he would be that indiscreet, even with you.”
“Listen, he’s got no reason not to trust me. He’s the one who started us. I set it up so he thinks he made the first move at the Knickerbocker. In fact, lately I’ve been wondering—”
“What’s the rich man’s name?”
“Culp.”
Again the Boss fell silent.
“J. B. Culp, the Wall Street guy,” she added, and pressed her cheek to the glass to look down the row of booths. The angle was too shallow. She couldn’t see inside the other booths, only the operator’s stand at the head of the row and the pay clerk at his desk.
Still not a peep out of the Boss.
“It’s funny,” she said. “Everybody reads about J. B. Culp in the papers—the swell’s rich as Rockefeller. But only little old Francesca knows that a whole squad of detectives are going to bust his door like he’s operating a low-down bookie joint.”
“Did Detective Abbott tell you why the Van Dorns are raiding Culp’s estate?”
“No.”
“Did you ask?” the Boss said sharply.
“I nudged around it a little. He clammed up. I figured I better quit while I was ahead of the game.”
“When is the raid?”
Francesca laughed.
“What is funny?”
“When you read about it in the morning paper, don’t forget
“Tonight?”
The grappling hooks whistled, cutting the air. Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott swung their ropes in ever-growing circles, building momentum, then simultaneously let fly at the wall that loomed slightly darker than the cloud-shrouded night sky. The hooks cleared the top, twelve feet above their heads, and clanked against the back side. Bell and Abbott drew in the slack and pulled hard. The iron claws held.
“Cut the wires!”
It went like clockwork. Up the knotted ropes, over thick folds of canvas to cover the broken glass, drop the rope ladders, then down the inside and running along a mowed inspection track that paralleled the wall. There were no lights in the gymnasium, the barracks, or the boathouse. The main house was dark upstairs, but the ground floor was lit up like Christmas.
“Dinner in the dining room,” said Bell.
Bell sent two men to capture the prizefighters and another man down to the river to rendezvous with the boat. Then he and Archie Abbott led squads to the house. Bell took the back door, Archie the front.
“They’re here,” said Branco.
“This should be great fun,” said Culp. “Too bad you can’t observe in person. I’ll fill you in later.”
Branco was not convinced that it was a good idea, much less “great fun.” But they were on Culp’s home turf and it was up to Culp to call the shots. “Vamoose!” Culp told him. “While the going’s good.”
Branco opened a servants’ door hidden in the dining room paneling.
“Branco.”
“What is it?”
“I’m impressed that you came back, knowing the raid was coming. You could have disappeared and left me to it.”
“I need you,” said Branco. “No less, no more, than you need me.” He closed the door. A narrow, twisting staircase went down to the silver vault, which had been originally a slave hidey-hole. Branco unlocked it, let himself inside, and locked it again.
J. B. Culp snatched a heavy pistol from the sideboard, strode to his front door, and flung it open, shouting, “Mr. Bell, you are trespassing.”