The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

“No. He could not know precisely the moment we were going to break down his door. He just got lucky with us charging in, just like we got lucky not getting killed . . . And if you guys don’t let go of my elbows I’ll break your arms! I’m fine . . . Why did he blow it up?”

“To hide evidence.”

“What evidence? I already had him dead to rights at the Singer Building. He planned this ahead of time. He was ready to run when he had to.”

Bell traced, again, the long line of destruction, the mound of rubble that had been Branco’s store, to the taller heap of the tenements, down to the graveyard, and past the uprooted bones. The church itself was unscathed. Even its stained glass windows were intact. He still thought it remarkable how far the gas traveled.

“I want to know who owned those tenements . . . Keep greasing Health Department palms. Slip some of our boys onto their pick and shovel crews. Get a close look at everything they dig out. And call me the instant I can inspect what’s left of Branco’s cellar.”

“Enrico,” said Isaac Bell when he lured Caruso to the Knickerbocker’s cellar bar for a glass of champagne, “you’re Italian.”

“Guilty,” smiled the opera singer. “But, first, I am Neopolitan.”

“Let me ask you something. What drives a Sicilian?”

“A hundred invasions. Countless tyrants. They’ve triumphed by their wits for three thousand years. Why do you ask?”

“I’m reckoning how Antonio Branco thinks.”

“Sicilians think for themselves—only themselves.”

“When I asked Tetrazzini on our way to San Francisco, she called them ‘bumpkins from down south.’ Primitive peasants.”

“Never!” Caruso roared, laughing. “Tetrazzini’s from Florence, she can’t help herself. Sicilians are the direct opposite of primitive. They are sophisticated. Strategic. Clear of eye, and unabashedly extravagant. They see, they understand, they act—all in a heartbeat. In other words—”

“Never underestimate them,” said Bell.

“There isn’t a law written they don’t despise.”

“Good,” said Bell. “Thank you.”

“‘Good’?”

“Now I know what he’ll try next.”

“What?” asked Caruso.

“Some unsuspecting bigwig is about to get a Black Hand letter. And it will be a Black Hand letter to end all Black Hand letters.”

Archie hurried into the bar. Peering through the gloom of Caruso’s cigarette smoke, he spotted Bell, and whispered urgently, “Research says Branco owns the shell company that controls the shell company that owns the tenements next door to his grocery.”

32

The Health Department laborers excavating the Branco’s Grocery wreckage went home at night, leaving only a watchman in charge now that the bodies of all the missing had been removed. Wally Kisley and Harry Warren bribed him. They stood guard at the burned-out stairs that had descended from Branco’s kitchen to the cellar.

Isaac Bell climbed down a ladder with an up-to-date tungsten filament flashlight powered by improved long-lasting, carbon-zinc dry cell batteries. He played its beam over a tangle of charred timbers and broken masonry and was surprised to discover a back section had somehow withstood the collapse of the building’s upper tier.

The flashlight revealed the walls of a room that was still intact. It was a remarkable sight in the otherwise chaotic ruin. The mystery was solved when Bell saw a square of vertical iron bars that had supported the ceiling. The bars formed what looked like a prison cell. Then he saw a hinged door and lock and realized that it was indeed a jail cell or holding pen. Installed by labor padrone Branco to enforce contracts? Or by gangster Branco to show rivals who was boss?

He found another open space of about the same dimensions beyond a mound of debris. It had no bars, but the walls were solid steel, and the door, which was open, was massive, a full eight inches thick. A walk-in safe.

Bell stepped inside.

The cash boxes were empty. He saw no ash in them; the money hadn’t burned but had left in Branco’s pockets. Bell thought it curious that the gangster had fled well-heeled yet risked arrest by taking the time to defraud banker LaCava and the wine broker. A reminder that Branco was the coolest of customers.

The safe’s walls were pockmarked. Twisted metal and charred wood littered the floor. Exploding ammunition had destroyed Branco’s cache of shotguns and revolvers. Those explosions, or the original gas explosion, had buckled and shifted the back wall of the safe. It hung at a drunken angle, and when Bell looked closely, he saw another set of hinges. A door—an odd thing to find in what should be an impregnable wall.

His light began to fade. “New and improved” aside, it was still only a flashlight and couldn’t last for long. He switched it off, to conserve the D cells, and felt the hinges with his hands. There was definitely a door at the back of the safe.