The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

“Lesion.”

A younger doctor weighed in, short on experience, long on science. “The patient’s head is not turned. His eyes are not deflected to either side. If there was a lesion, the patient would look toward it. There is no lesion.”

“Then what?”

“Asphyxia.”

The moon hovered inside a silver halo. Full and perfectly round.

It was beautiful and distant, and then it slipped away.

The dark came back. It settled in heavily again, deep as winter.

27

Antonio Branco’s fast freight to eastern Pennsylvania was sidelined to let the Lackawanna Railroad’s “Phoebe Snow” passenger sleeper overtake. He jumped off the flatcar and climbed under it. Before the Phoebe Snow highballed past, he had found a safer and slightly warmer place on the rods.

He stuck with the train until the Bethlehem Junction yards, where he dodged a yard bull and climbed under a freight to Wilkes-Barre. At Wilkes-Barre, he caught a train to Scranton, riding on the roof, when he saw brakemen checking the rods. He clung to a ventilator and kept a close eye on the tracks ahead of the locomotive so he wouldn’t be lurched off by a sharp curve, jumped when it slowed approaching the yards, found a barn a mile from the tracks, and slept in the hayloft. After dark, he climbed under a Delaware & Hudson coal train that turned slowly northeastward through Carbondale to Cadosia, where the coal hoppers were switched to the southeastwardly bearing New York, Ontario & Western Railway. He rode them at a glacial pace, night and day and night again, through Summitville, Middletown, and Maybrook.

After Meadowbrook, he smelled tidewater.

The first gray light of dawn revealed that the tracks squeezed between steep hills and the Hudson River, deep in mist. Estates appeared on the hillsides, Gothic, Greek Revival, and old American-style mansions set far apart on lawns as big as farms. An enormous summer tourist hotel loomed up unexpectedly, then a three-story icehouse with a wharf to barge the ice harvest to New York, then white boardinghouses, and, quite suddenly, redbrick factories.

He heard the locomotive back off and felt the heavy cars butt couplers. When he glimpsed a huge jetty surrounded by steamers, he flexed his stiff knee to get ready to run. The train slowed for its final stop, the Cornwall Landing coal docks at the foot of Storm King Mountain.

Filthy, hungry, and frozen to the bone, Antonio Branco had traveled five hundred miles in a circle that landed him—without a trace of where he had come from—just fifty miles north of where he had ditched the Van Dorns in Jersey City. No one knew he was there. No one knew where he came from—just another Italian pick and shovel man begging to work on the Catskill Aqueduct for a dollar seventy-five cents a day.

As the coal train entered the yards, the morning sun cleared a hill on the far side of the river and cast yellow light on a huge estate house that reminded Branco of Greek ruins in Sicily. He recognized John Butler Culp’s famous Raven’s Eyrie. He had seen it often from the Hudson River steamboats—long before he learned that Culp was his man.

But what riveted his attention was the sight of Culp’s private train. It was waiting in the Cornwall Landing rail yards—splendid red coaches drawn by an ink-black Atlantic 4-4-2.

The locomotive had steam up.

Culp could leave at a moment’s notice.

Branco had no time to lose.

He jumped from the rods before the train stopped rolling and ran to the aqueduct siphon shaft excavation, which he pinpointed by the sight of Negro men driving mule wagons across raw ground, and a vast cluster of locomotives, wagons, and steam shovels, emblazoned with the names of Irish contractors.

His immigrant laborer disguise worked perfectly. Moments after he was issued a pay number on a brass token, he was approached by a “key”—a Black Hand extortionist who pretended to be a terrified fellow laborer.

“Did you hear?” the key whispered. “The Black Hand says each man has to give a dollar on payday. They kill us if we don’t pay up.”

“Take me to your boss.”

“What boss?”

Branco fixed him with a cold stare. “When your boss learns that you didn’t take me to him, he will kill you.”

Vito Rizzo, the Black Hand gangster dealt a broken nose and a ragged ear by the Van Dorns, had been told at “confession” to establish a labor extortion racket at Cornwall Landing and await orders. He operated out of a board-on-barrels saloon down the road from the siphon shaft.

When his gorillas marched a soot-blackened pick and shovel man into his back room, he addressed the laborer with utter contempt, failing to recognize a richly clad Little Italy prominente he had seen occasionally from a distance.

Antonio Branco handed him a brass token. It looked exactly like the payment number identification check he had been issued at the gate.

“Turn it over.”

A simple asterisk had been punched into the metal.