The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

“It’s not good enough.”

“It is costing money and earning none.”

Leone said, “If there is trouble, Salata and Ferri will blame me.”

“My patience is not endless, Ernesto Leone.”

Leone scuttled from the church.

Roberto Ferri, a smuggler, confessed next. “My men caught wind of a heroin shipment. The Irish.”

“How big?”

“Very big, I am told. From Mexico.”

“Which Irish?”

“West Side Wallopers. Hunt and McBean.”

“Well done, Roberto!” Hunt and McBean were up and coming “graduates” of the Gopher Gang.

Ferri said, “I hear there is a market for cocaine on the aqueduct job. The Negroes use it. But no market for heroin . . . If you know anyone on the aqueduct, maybe we could trade heroin for cocaine.”

“You just get your hands on it. I’ll worry about the market.”

“You know someone to sell it to?”

“Good-bye, Ferri.”

Ferri lit his customary candle on his way out of the church.

Antonio Branco waited in the priest’s side of the confessional, his fingers busy as a clockwork as he practiced opening and closing his pocket knife. His knee had stiffened up, cramped in the booth. After Ferri left, he limped to the poor box and stuffed fifty dollars into it, “confessional rent” for the priests he had tamed. A flight of stone steps led down to the catacomb. Before he hit the bottom step, he had worked out the kink.

A low-ceilinged passage ran between the mortuary vaults under the church. He used a key to enter the crypt at the end. He locked the heavy door behind him, squeezed between stacks of caskets, unlocked a door hidden in the back, and stepped through a massive masonry foundation wall into a damp tunnel. The tunnel led under the church’s graveyard a

nd through another door into the musty basement of a tenement. Repeatedly unlocking and relocking doors, he crossed under three similar buildings, cellar to cellar to cellar. The last door was concealed in the back of a walk-in safe, heaped with cash and weapons. Closing it behind him, he exited the safe into a clean, dry cellar, passed by a room with an empty iron cell that looked like a police lockup but for the soundproof walls and ceiling, unlocked a final oak door, and climbed the stairs into the kitchen in the back of his grocery.

“Where’s Gold Head?”

“I don’t see him.”

The detective’s spot at the Kips Bay bar was empty.

“Where’s the coal dicks?”

Their wagon was gone. So was Red-haired’s pushcart of old clothes.

“Who’s that?” A drunk was sprawled beside the Kips Bay stoop.

Charlie Salata crossed the street and kicked him in the ribs. The drunk groaned and threw up, just missing Salata’s shoes. Salata jumped back, and looked up and down the street for the twentieth time. Where in hell were the Van Dorns? Elizabeth between Houston and Prince was the most crowded block in the city. Five thousand people lived in the tenements and today it looked like most were on the sidewalk.

“No Van Dorns? Let’s do it.”

But still Salata hesitated. It felt like a setup.

“False money,” Helen Mills reported to Isaac Bell.

The tall detective was combing black shoe polish through his hair in the back of a horse-drawn silver-vault van parked at Washington Square nine blocks from Elizabeth Street. Helen had helped him and Archie on the Assassin case last year, and Bell regarded both her and her father as friends. Raised as an Army child, she had a refined sense of rank and protocol and had concluded she would address him as “Mr. Bell” on the job.