The Gangster (Isaac Bell 9)

“We hoped he was buried in it,” growled Eddie Edwards. “But someone saw him on the street headed this way.”

LaCava turned paper white as the blood drained from his face. “Basta!”

Harry Warren gripped the banker’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“I didn’t know. Everybody said it was an accident.”

“‘Everybody’ was wrong. He blew it up, along with three buildings next door and half the graveyard.”

“I just lent him twenty thousand dollars . . . But I have these! Don’t you see? Collateral. You are mistaken. He is Antonio Branco. He has the Catskill Aqueduct contract.”

“Honest as the Lottery?”

“But these bills of lading—”

The Van Dorn snatched them out of his hand.

Clad like a rich merchant, in a blue topcoat, a red scarf, and a derby hat, Antonio Branco tallied wine barrels on a Hudson River freight pier at 22nd Street. Stevedores were rolling them up the gangway onto a coaster about to sail for Philadelphia. The ship’s captain stood beside Branco and they counted the barrels together. When the last were stowed in the hold, the captain gave Branco bills of lading attesting that the fifty-thousand-dollar cargo was aboard his ship.

Branco hurried two blocks to a wine broker who had already agreed to buy the bills of lading at a discount. Then he took the ferry across the river to Jersey City and walked to a laundry that served the working class neighborhood. The proprietor, a tiny old Chinaman with a misshapen face and a blinded eye, sorted through paper-wrapped packages of clothes never picked up and sold him a pair of rugged trousers, a short coat, and a warm watch cap that wouldn’t blow off in the wind.

A thoroughly disgusted Harry Warren stared long and hard at the empty slip from where a coaster had departed an hour earlier. Eddie Edwards stomped out of the pier house, looking equally fed up.

“First the ice-blooded scum takes LaCava for twenty grand cash. Then he sashays across town, big as life, and leaves the pier here with fifty grand in bills of lading, according to the clerk in the pier house, for the same wine that he can turn to another quick thirty thousand cash—bills of lading being damned-near legal tender.”

“On the lam with enough money to charter a private train.”

“Or an ocean liner.”

The detectives exchanged another black look, knowing that neither had exaggerated the value of Branco’s haul. Fifty thousand dollars would buy a country estate, with servants, gardeners, gamekeepers, and a chauffeur to drive the lucky owner home from the railroad station.

“Now what?”

“Jersey City.”

“What’s there?”

“Fellow in there sent a boy after him. One of the bills had fallen off the pile. The kid spotted him on the ferry too late. It was pulling out of the slip.”

Branco changed clothes in the Jersey Central Communipaw Terminal men’s room and left those he had been wearing by a church, where some tramp would run off with them soon enough. He bought a surplus Spanish-American War rucksack to carry his cash and field glasses and ditched his fancy leather satchel. He gorged on a huge meal in a cheap lunchroom and rented a room in a ten-cent lodging house. He studied freight and passenger train schedules. Finally closing his eyes for the first time since he had killed Brewster Claypool, he slept soundly until dark. He ate again—forcing himself to cram his belly while he could—then followed his ears toward the clamor of steam pistons, switch engine bells, and locomotive whistles rising from the New Jersey Central train yards.

It was a cold, dark night, with a cutting wind under an overcast sky. Row upon row of parked trains sprawled under a swirling scrim of smoke and steam. Countless sidings merged from the freight car float piers and passenger terminal that rimmed the Hudson River into four separate sets of main lines leaving the city.

Branco tried to choose his train from a street that overlooked one of the lines. But there were hundreds of lines, and thousands of freight cars—an ocean of lanterns, sidelights, and headlamps—screened by electric and telegraph wires and poles. He noticed a disused switching tower in the middle of the dimly lit chaos that would give him a better perspective.

An empty lot behind a fence sloped down to the tracks. Skirting yard lights, dodging headlamps, watching for rail bulls, he climbed between cars at their couplings and worked his way across a score of sidings to the dark tower. A fixed ladder led to its roof, where he swept the yard with his field glasses.

Van Dorns were watching.

He spotted one slipping money to the regular yard bulls—recruiting man hunters. The detective gave himself away with an appearance that was a mighty cut above the regular rail cops and an expression of cold rage, mourning his precious Isaac Bell.

Branco was not surprised. Any detective worth his salt carried the same railroad maps in his mind as he did and knew that for a man running to distant jurisdictions, Jersey City was the place to start. Scores of rail lines fanned south and west to Philadelphia, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco—each city home to a teeming Italian settlement.

The Van Dorns also knew that he couldn’t risk riding as a paying passenger scrutinized by ticket clerks, platform guards, porters, and conductors. Trapped aboard a speeding flyer, no matter how fast, he could never beat a telegraph bulletin to the next station. So they would search all the places he would try to steal a ride: on the reinforcing rods underneath a car; or on top, clinging to a roof; or sheltered from the cold inside an unlocked boxcar; or riding “blind” platforms in front of baggage cars.

From the many trains that the switch engines were making up, he picked out a fast freight headed by a powerful camelback 2-6-0 locomotive. It consisted of flatcars carrying mining machines, empty coal hoppers, and reefers of fresh beef from the Jersey City slaughterhouses. Branco judged by the number of cars, some thirty that the busy switch engines had already shunted to it, that it would soon be highballing for Pennsylvania’s anthracite coalfields—first stop, Bethlehem Junction.

He edged toward the ladder, only to be distracted by a passenger train that emerged from the Communipaw Terminal and snaked slowly through the yards, its windows a warm russet glow in the bitter cold. The hour and the 4-4-2 locomotive towing twin baggage cars, four Pullmans, and a club car, said it was probably the crack Harrisburg flyer, “Queen of the Valley.” Branco imagined the passengers settling into deep armchairs with cocktails in hand and every expectation of sleeping in their own beds by midnight. Motion of a different kind jolted him out of his reverie.