The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

Archie was late.

Francesca Kennedy had already luxuriated with a hot soak in the porcelain tub. Now, wrapped in a Turkish robe, she curled up in an armchair and let her eyes feast on the beautiful hotel room. It had a fine bureau with an etched-glass mirror, a marquetry headboard that matched the bureau, and French wallpaper. She peeked through the drapes; it was snowing again. Warm and cosy, she settled in with the afternoon newspaper.

Standing in the rocky cavern 1,100 feet under the bed of the Hudson River a week after he returns from Panama, President Theodore Roosevelt will press a key and electrically fire the blast to “hole through” the Hudson River Siphon Tunnel of the Catskill Aqueduct . . .

Footsteps were muffled in the Waldorf’s carpeted halls, and she lowered the paper repeatedly to glance at the crack under the door, waiting for Archie’s shadow to fall across the sill.

“Are you an opera singer, sir?”

Antonio Branco gave the elevator runner a dazzling smile. “If I-a to sing-a, you will-a run holding ears. No, young fellow, I only look-a like one.”

Americans scorned and despised Italian immigrants, but they were amused by well-off Italians who dressed with style. A cream-colored cape, a matching wide-brimmed Borsalino, an ivory walking stick, and a waxed mustache did the job. His masquerade wouldn’t fool a Van Dorn detective, or anyone who had met him face-to-face, but it drew salutes from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel doormen and bows from house detectives. Across the lobby and into the gilded elevator, he was questioned only by the starstruck boy running it.

“Floor, sir?”

“Sesto! That means floor seeze. Pronto!”

Francesca had worked her way to the back pages, where features were tongue-in-cheek.

A far-flung correspondent reports that our country cousins upstate in rural Orange County awakened twice this week to outlandish rumors. First, as our readers in New York and Brooklyn learned, too, the Catskill Aqueduct tunnel under the Hudson River—the so-called Siphon, or Moodna-Hudson-Breakneck Pressure Tunnel and Gauging Chamber, as the waterworks engineers dub it—was breeched by the river, flooding the tunnel and destroying all hopes of completing the aqueduct ahead of the next water famine. Happily, this proved not the case. The plumber was summoned. The leak was small and has already been patched.

New rumors flew hot and heavy this morning. One had the Sheriff of Orange County raiding Raven’s Eyrie, the fabled estate of the Culps, whose many generations have accumulated great fortunes in river commerce, railroad enterprises, and Wall Street dexterity. Locked up were a dozen men found there. Speculation as to why the Sheriff raided Raven’s Eyrie prompted new rumors, the most intriguing of which had the Sheriff hot on the heels of Italian immigrant Black Hand fugitive Antonio Branco.

It was unclear why a gangster (formerly purveyor to the city’s Catskill Aqueduct) who is running from the law would choose to go to ground in a plutocrat’s fortified retreat. It was equally unclear who the men arrested were. Hearsay ran the gamut of imaginings, from immigrant laborers, to private detectives, to Tammany contract grabbers.

The Sheriff of Orange County denies the event ever took place and displayed for our correspondent his empty jail.

Mr. J. B. Culp’s offices in Wall Street report that the magnate is currently steaming across the continent on his private train and therefore unavailable to comment.

The Italian Branco left no forwarding address.

Francesca flung off the terry robe and pulled on her clothing. She knew Branco. Not as a gangster, but as a wealthy grocer who had set her up in a small apartment with a stipend that allowed her to get off the streets. He hadn’t visited it in two years—not since, she realized now, she had been summoned to confession with the Boss. She had lived on tenterhooks, wondering when it would stop, but he had kept sending money and kept paying the rent.

She was stuffing her things into her bag when a shadow fell on the sill.

The lovely room was suddenly a trap. An interior door connected to an adjoining room. She gripped the knob with little hope. Locked, of course. She had only rented the one room, not the suite. She backed up to the window and pulled the drapes with even less hope. No fire escape; the Waldorf was a modern building with indoor fire stairs. No balcony, either. Only the pavement of 33rd Street, six stories down. She carried no knife on this job, no razor, no weapon that would warn Archie Abbott that she was trouble.

Antonio Branco opened the door with a key and swept into the room.

Francesca Kennedy backed against the window. “I was just reading about you.”

“I imagined you were.”

Though her mind w

as racing, nearly overwhelmed with fear, she was struck, as always, by how handsome a man he was. There was a sharpness to him she had not seen before, an alertness he had hidden, which made him even more vital. But when his expression hardened, he looked suddenly so familiar that she glanced at her own face in the bureau mirror, then back at his.

37

His eyes were as dead as hers when she did a job.

Branco’s flickered at the window, and she realized instantly how he would do her. Francesca Kennedy wouldn’t be the first young and beautiful suicide to jump to her death from an expensive hotel room. Fell for the wrong man?

He turned around to lock the door and was reaching for the latch, when it flew inward with explosive force, smashing into his face and hurling him across the room. The armchair in which Francesca had been reading stopped his fall and he kept his feet, blood pouring from his nose.

Archie Abbott burst through the door he had kicked open.

The tall, golden-haired Isaac Bell was right behind him.