The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

“This one’s frozen.”

Isaac Bell threw his weight and muscle against the wheel and pulled with all his might. The old engineer clapped hands on it, too, and they fought it together, quarter inch by quarter inch, until the gate wheel finally began to turn with a metallic screech.

“Godforsaken Italians. I warned them again and again not to use too much dynamite. I knew this would happen.”

As soon as they closed the last gate, Isaac Bell raced back to Vella’s excavation.

The streets were littered with the corpses of drowned dogs and chickens. A dead horse was still tied in a wrecked stable. Trolleys had stalled on their tracks, shorted out by the water. The cellars of houses and businesses were flooded. A hillside had washed away and fallen into a brewery, and the people who had lived in the upended shacks were poking in the mud for the remains of their possessions.

An angry crowd was gathering at the excavation site.

Bell shouldered through it and found Giuseppe Vella barricaded in the board shack that housed his field office.

“Russo ran away.”

“Who is Russo?”

“Sante Russo. My foreman. The blaster. He was afraid those people would blame him.” Bell exchanged a quick glance with Archie Abbott, the Van Dorn shadow he had assigned to protect Vella. Abbott had managed to station himself near the door, but he was only one man and the crowd was growing loud.

“But it wasn’t Russo’s fault.”

“How do you know?”

“Russo ran to me a second after the explosion. He said he found extra dynamite in the charge. He disconnected the detonator. But while he was coming to tell me, it exploded. The Black Hand reconnected the wires.”

Policemen pushed through the crowd.

Bell said, “Soon as the cops calm them down, I’ll escort you home.”

The cops pounded on the door. Bell let them in.

They had come for Vella. Accompanying them was an angry official from the city’s Combustibles Department. He revoked Vella’s explosives license for the job on the spot and swore that Vella would be fined thousands by the city. “Not only that, you reckless wop, you’ll lose the bond you had posted in case of damage. Look what you did to the neighborhood! 125th Street is almost washed away and you flooded every cellar from here to 110th!”

Isaac Bell issued quick orders to Archie Abbott before he accompanied Giuseppe Vella downtown. When they got to 13th Street, he confirmed that Harry Warren’s detectives were keeping an eye on the man’s home. Then he went to his room at the Yale Club, where he changed into dry clothes and oiled his firearms. He was retrieving the soaked contents of his pockets and smoothing a damp two-dollar bill, which would dry no worse for wear, when it occurred to him what the high quality paper that the Black Hand letter had been written on reminded him of.

“Mr. Bell,” the hall porter called through his door. “Message from your office.”

Bell slit the envelope and read a one-word sentence written in the Boss’s hand.

“Report.”

Bell got there just as New York Police Department Captain Coligney was leaving Van Dorn’s office. They shook hands hello and Coligney said, “Take care in Washington, Joe. Good seeing you again.”

“Always a pleasure,” said Van Dorn. “I’ll walk you out.”

Back in sixty seconds, he said, “Good man, Coligney. The only captain Bingham didn’t transfer when he took over—presumably recalling that President Roosevelt boomed his career back when he was Police Commissioner.”

Van Dorn threw papers in a satchel and cast it over his shoulder. “A flood, Isaac. Set off by an overcharge explosion of dynamite on the premises of our client Mr. Vella, who hired the Van Dorn Detective Agency to protect him. By any chance could we call it a horribly timed coincidental accident?”

“Sabotage,” said Bell.

“Are you sure?”

“If a Water Department assistant engineer had not failed to show up for work at the main distribution gates, they could have stopped the water almost immediately. Archie Abbott found the poor devil in the hospital, beaten half dead. That makes two ‘horribly timed’ coincidences.”

“Then how do we convince clients that the Van Dorn Detective Agency can protect them from the Black Hand?”

“Same way you had Eddie Edwards drive gangs from the rail yards. Form a special squad and hit ’em hard.”