The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

“Barefoot peasants.”

“We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again. Meantime, what are you going to do for them?”

“I find them work. And I feed them.”

“That’s only a start,” said Isaac Bell. “You’re a man of substance, a prominente. What will you do when criminals prey on them?”

“I am not a cop. I am not even a detective.”

“Why don’t you get behind your White Hand Society?”

“That did not work out so well, did it?”

Bell said, “Do it in a bigger way. Put in more money, put in more effort, use your talents. You’re a big business man; you know how to organize. You might even make it a national society.”

“National?”

“Why not? Every city has its Italian colony.”

“What an interesting idea,” said Antonio Branco. “Good night, Detective Bell.”

“Do you remember the knife you pulled on me in Farmington?”

“I remember the knife I opened to defend myself.”

“Was it a switchblade? Or a flick-knife?”

Branco laughed.

“What’s so funny?”

“You have the manner of a man born to privilege. Am I correct?”

“Assume you are,” Bell said.

“I laugh because you think an immigrant laborer would dare carry an illegal weapon. Your government called us aliens—still does. A switchblade or a flick-knife would get

us beaten up by the police and thrown in jail. It was a pocket knife.”

“I never saw a pocket knife open that fast.”

“It only seemed fast,” said Branco. “You were young and afraid . . . So was I.”

16

A voice in the dark shocked Tommy McBean out of his sleep.

“What?”

“Listen.”

“Who the hell are you?” McBean reached for the gun under the pillow. It wasn’t there. That’s what he got for going to bed drunk in a strange hotel with a woman he never met before. She was gone like his gun. Big surprise. She had played him like a rube.

Boiling mad, ready to kill with his bare hands, if he could only see the guy, he sat up in bed and shouted, “What do you want?”

“We have cow horns.”

“Oh yeah?” Tommy shot back. “You have my dope? Who the hell are you going to sell it to?”