The Gangster

by Clive Cussler

  Wally Kisley hurried after Bell to report on the booby trap he had defused. He thought that the hard-driving young detective looked as if he were hoping he could somehow search out the intentions in every one of the thousand faces before the President arrived.

  “Isaac!”

  Bell cut Kisley off before he could say another word.

  “Look inside that street organ. It’s big enough to hold a bomb, and the auto’s going to pass right in front of it.”

  “On my way . . . Then I got to talk to you.”

  “Take Harry Warren to talk Italian to the organ grinder. If the old guy’s scared we’re stealing his livelihood, it’ll start a riot.”

  Warren engaged the organ grinder in conversation and finally persuaded him to stop cranking for a moment. Kisley looked it over, inside and out. He felt under it and leaned down to inspect the leg that propped up the heavy instrument. When he was satisfied, he nodded his O.K. and stuffed a dollar into the monkey’s hat. Then he hurried back to Bell and paced alongside him while he described the booby trap in the pressure tunnel.

  “How’d you spot it?” Bell’s eyes were flickering like metronomes.

  “I’d seen it before . . . But here’s the funny thing, Isaac. It was sloppy work.”

  Bell looked at him, sharply. “What do you mean?”

  “It could have gone off at any moment. Before the President even got down in the tunnel.”

  “But you told me they were masters of dynamite.”

  “Either these ones weren’t or they got lazy.”

  “Or,” said Bell, “they’re blowing smoke to lull us. Archie found a Springfield rifle in a sniper hide.”

  “Just sitting there?” asked Kisley.

  “In a closet.”

  “I don’t mean to take away from Archie’s investigative talents, but that sounds a little too easy.”

  “Archie thought so, too. He didn’t believe the rifle. You don’t believe the booby trap. I don’t believe either. So far all we see is what Branco wants us to see.”

  Walter Kisley said, “So what does he not want us to see?”

  “I still say he’s going to do it in close. But I still don’t know how.”

  “And here comes Teddy. “

  Isaac Bell had already spotted the White Steamer creeping through the throng. The auto was wide open, its top down, with President Roosevelt clearly visible in the backseat. The chief of his Secret Service corps was driving. Joe Van Dorn was up front with him, riding shotgun.

  Bell broke into a long-legged stride.

  “Slow down,” ordered the President. “They’ve been standing hours in the cold waiting to see me. Let them see me.”

  The chief exchanged wary glances with Van Dorn.

  “Slower, I say!”

  The chief shifted the speed lever to low. The White slacked to a walking pace.

  Van Dorn loosened the firearm in his shoulder holster for the fourth time since they arrived at Cornwall Landing and the President ordered the top lowered. The only good news—other than knowing he had his top detectives in the case—was the height of the Steamer. The auto rode as high off the ground as a stage coach, which meant that criminals and anarchists intending to jump into the open auto had some climbing to do. Otherwise, the attacker held every advantage: surprise; a mob of people to spring from and melt back into; the automobile’s glacial pace; and the victim’s open heart.

  The President was grinning from ear to ear. The car rolled slowly between applauding rows of engineers and contractors’ clerks and machine operators, who poured into the road behind the automobile and followed in the parade the President had demanded. Next were Negro rock drillers, cheering mightily.

  “Honk the horn for them, Joe!” TR shouted. “The Spaniards called our colored regiments ‘Smoked Yankees,’ but the Rough Riders found them to be an excellent breed of Yankees covering our flanks.”

  Van Dorn stomped on the rubber bulb and the White let loose a gay Auuuugha!

  The rock drillers peeled out of their rows and joined the march.

  Ahead waited legions of mustachioed, swarthy Italian laborers in brimmed hats. They were quiet, lining the road six deep on either side. But they smiled like they meant it, and Van Dorn had the funny thought that by the time the celebrity President got through with them, he’d convert them all to the Republican Party.

  When Roosevelt heard their street organ, his grin doubled and redoubled.

  “Do you recognize the tune that organ grinder’s playing?”

  “‘You’re all right, Teddy!’” chorused Van Dorn and the Secret Service chief.

  “Bully!” shouted the President. His fist beat the time on his knee and he broke into song.

  “‘Oh! You are all right, Teddy!

  You’re the kind that we remember;

  Don’t you worry!

  We are with you!

  You are all right, Teddy!

  And we’ll prove it in November.’

  “Stop the auto! I’m going to thank these people personally.”

  44

  The President jumped down from the White Steamer before it stopped rolling.

  Van Dorn and the corps chief flanked him instantly. Too excited to wait to join the end of the parade, the crowd surged at them from both sides.

  “Did you see what that monkey’s wearing?”

  Van Dorn was trying to look in every direction at once. “What was that, sir?”

  “The monkey’s hat!” said Roosevelt. “He’s wearing a Rough Rider’s hat . . . Chief! Fetch that Consul General.”

  “I can’t leave your side, sir.”

  “Hop to it, man. I need a translator.”

  Suddenly, Isaac Bell was there, saying, “I’ll cover.”

  “Of course,” whispered Antonio Branco when Isaac Bell materialized in the space vacated by the Secret Service bodyguard. “Where else would you be?”

  Then the crowd pushing forward blocked his view of the President. At the same time, it blocked Bell’s view of the elderly Sicilian groom cranking the street organ. With every eye fixed on President Roosevelt, it was all the cover Branco needed. He slipped in front of the old man and took the crank in his right hand and the monkey’s chain in his left. Not a note of music was lost, and a gentle tug of the chain made the animal jump on his shoulder, having learned in just a few days that its kindly new master would reward it with a segment of an orange.

  “Step back, both of you,” ordered the President.

  “Mr. President, for your safety—”

  “You’re too tall. You make me look like a coward. These are hardworking men. They won’t hurt me.”

  Roosevelt grasped hands with the nearest laborer. “Hello there. Thank you for building the aqueduct.”

  The laborer whipped off his hat, pressed it to his heart, and smiled.

  “I know you don’t understand a word I just said, but you will when you learn English.” He pumped his hand harder. “The point is, building this aqueduct with the sweat of your brow will benefit all of us.”

  Roosevelt grabbed the next man’s hand. “Hello there. Thank you. You’re doing a bully job.”

  “Bully!” echoed the laborer. “Bully! Bully! Bully!” And Isaac Bell saw that if Roosevelt hadn’t been sure of his welcome, he was now. Beaming like a locomotive headlamp, he grabbed more hands. They were almost to the organ grinder.

  “Where the devil’s that translator?”

  “I see him coming,” said Bell.

  The chief of the Secret Service protection corps was gripping Italy’s Consul General for New York City like a satchel. Both were gasping for breath from their hard run.

  “Mr. President, it is a great honor—”

  “I want you to translate to the organ grinder that I am deeply touched that he played my campaign song and dressed his
monkey in a Rough Rider hat. That takes the kind of clear-eyed gumption that makes a top-notch American . . . Boys,” he shot over his shoulder at Isaac Bell and Van Dorn. “I told you to stand back. You, too, chief. Give these Eye-talians a chance to enjoy themselves.”

  He threw an arm around the Consul General and plowed ahead. “Tell him I had a monkey friend living next door when I was a little boy. I always wanted one, but I had to settle for Uncle Robert’s. Tell him I like monkeys, always have . . . There he is! Hello, monkey.”

  The little animal tugged off its hat and held it out.

  “Bell? Van Dorn? You have any money?”

  In the midst of the tumult, Isaac Bell smelled shoe polish again and this time he knew why. It had nothing to do with an eight-day stupor and everything to do with the memory of smelling an organ grinder’s monkey on Elizabeth Street while he was disguised with black shoe polish in his hair. And he knew now what set off the memory: the zoo smell in Antonio Branco’s room at Raven’s Eyrie.

  President Roosevelt dropped Joseph Van Dorn’s coin into the monkey’s hat and reached out to shake the organ grinder’s hand. The bent and grizzled old man sprang to his full height, whipped open a knife, and thrust.

  Isaac Bell stepped in front of Theodore Roosevelt.

  BOOK IV

  The Gangster

  45

  Antonio Branco’s stiletto pierced Isaac Bell’s coat and jacket and vest, ripped through his shirt and stopped with a shrill clink of iron and steel.

  “What?” gasped Antonio Branco.

  “I borrowed your partner’s chain mail,” said Isaac Bell and hit the gangster with all his might.

  Antonio Branco flew backwards into the crowd.

  His arms shot in the air, his knife tumbled from his hand, his eyes glazed. Men pounced on the stunned gangster and wrestled him back on his feet.

  “Well held,” shouted Roosevelt. “Bring the scoundrel here.”

  They yanked him deeper into the crowd.

  Isaac Bell was already plunging in after them, with Van Dorn right behind him.

  The Black Hand formed a protective cordon and ran like a football flying wedge, with the heaviest men in the lead and Branco safe within. Laborers scattered out of their way. Those who tried to stop them were steamrollered to the ground.

  Four more gorillas blocked Bell and Van Dorn in a maneuver as strategic as the flying wedge. The detectives pounded their way out of the slugfest, but by then Antonio Branco and his rescuers were far down the hill, running toward the railroad tracks.

  Bell ran full speed after them. Van Dorn fell behind. He couldn’t keep the younger man’s pace, and Bell shouted over his shoulder that Eddie Edwards was watching Culp’s train. “Cut straight to the yards. I’ll stick with Branco.”

  Branco appeared to have recovered from Bell’s punch. He was running under his own steam now, wing-footing, yet drawing ahead of his Black Hand guard. Suddenly, he veered away from the train yards, crossed the railroad tracks, and ran directly to the river.

  His men stopped, turned around, and fanned out to face Isaac Bell.

  The tall detective pulled his pistol and opened fire, dropped the two closest to him, and charged through the gap in their line. He did not waste ammunition on Branco, who was out of range and running so purposefully that Bell wondered whether J. B. Culp had managed to sneak his Franklin out of the estate right under the Van Dorn noses.

  He reached the track embankment and climbed to the rails. From that slight elevation, he saw Branco had planned an emergency escape even faster than an auto or a train. The ice yacht Daphne waited at the riverbank. At the helm, the bulky figure of J. B. Culp urged him to run faster. Antonio Branco hurtled, slipping and sliding, down the final slope, with Isaac Bell drawing close.

  The gangster fell, slid, rolled to his feet, and vaulted into the car beside Culp.

  Culp flipped the mooring line he had looped around a bankside piling and sheeted in his sail. The tall triangle of canvas shivered. But Daphne did not move. Her iron runners had frozen to the ice.

  Bell put on a burst of speed. He still had his gun in hand.

  Culp scrambled out of the car and kicked the rudder and the right-hand runners, yelling frantically at Branco to free the runner on his side. Bell was less than fifty feet away when they broke loose.

  “Push!” Bell heard Culp shout, and the two men shoved the ice yacht away from the bank. The wind stirred her masthead pennant. Her sail fluttered. One second, Branco and Culp were pushing the ice yacht; the next, they were running for their lives, trying to jump on before she sped away from them.

  Bell was on the verge of trying to stop and plant his feet on the ice to take a desperate shot with the pistol before they got away. But as her sail grabbed the wind and she took off in earnest, he saw the mooring line dragging behind her. He ran harder and dived after it with his hand outstretched.

  The end of the mooring line was jumping like a cobra. He caught it. A foot of rope burned through his hand before he could clamp around it. Then a gust slammed into the sail, and the rope nearly jerked his arm out of his shoulder, and, in the next instant, the big yacht was dragging him over the ice at thirty miles an hour. He flipped onto his back and stuffed his gun in his coat and then held on with both hands. He had hoped the extra weight would slow the yacht, but as long as the wind blew, she was simply too powerful. Now his only hope was to hang on for another quarter mile. The yacht was racing downriver. So long as Culp didn’t change course, it was dragging Bell toward his own ice yacht, which he had tied up near Cornwall Landing.

  The mooring line was less than twenty feet long, and Bell heard Culp laugh. Branco was poised to cut the line. Culp stayed him with a gesture, pointed at a clump of ridged ice, and steered for it.

  “Cheese grater coming up, Bell.”

  Daphne’s runners rang on the ridges and an instant later Bell was dragged over the rough. He held tight as it banged his ribs and knees.

  “Another?”

  One more, thought Bell. He could see his boat now. Almost there, and Culp inadvertently steered closer, intent on aiming for an even higher ridge to shake him off when Daphne slammed over it. Bell let go, freely sliding, swinging his legs in front of him to take the impact with his boots, hit hard, sprang to his feet, and staggered to his boat.

  “He’s coming after us,” said Branco.

  “Let him.”

  Culp slammed his yacht skillfully into a deliberate crash turn. It spun her a hundred eighty degrees and put them on a course up the river, with the west wind abeam, the lightning-quick Daphne’s best point of sail.

  “What went wrong back there?”

  “I don’t know,” said Branco.

  “Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

  Branco was eerily calm and entirely in possession of himself. “I’ve lost a battle, not a war.”

  “What about me?”

  “You’ve lost a dream, not your life.”

  “They will come after me,” said Culp.

  “Nothing can be pinned to you that would nail you.” Branco reached inside his coat, and a stiletto gleamed in his hand. “But if you are afraid and are thinking of selling me out to save yourself, then you will lose your life. Take the pistol out of your coat by the barrel and hand it to me, butt first.”

  Culp was painfully aware that they were only two feet apart in the tiny cockpit and he had one hand encumbered by the tiller. At the speed they were moving, to release the tiller for even one second to try to block the stiletto could cause a catastrophic spinout. “If you kill me, who will outrun Bell?”

  “That will be between Bell and me.” He gestured imperiously with the blade.

  Culp said, “I’ll want it back if Bell gets closer. I’m sure I’m a better shot than you.”

  “I’m sure you are. I never bother with a gun,” said Branco. “Give i
t to me!”

  Culp saw no choice but to relent. Branco shoved it in his coat.

  “Tell me where you are taking me.”

  “Option three, as I promised, is to sail you to the Albany rail yards. I have a special standing by. Or if you don’t think it’s safe, you can steal a ride on a freight train.”

  “How far?”

  “At this rate, we’ll make it in two hours.”

  Antonio Branco glanced over his shoulder. “Bell is closer.”

  “It will be dark soon,” said Culp. “And Isaac Bell does not know this river like I do.”

  Isaac Bell’s ice yacht raced up the Hudson River, vibrating sharply, tearing through patches of fresh snow, flopping hard when the runners banged over ice hummocks, and jumping watery cracks where the tide had lifted the ice. She was heavier than Culp’s boat—built of white ash, instead of aluminum, and carrying lead ballasts Bell had strapped to the outsides of her runner plank to hold her down in the squall winds. Using the extra pounds and her oversize sail to advantage, he veered off course to increase velocity on a favorable beam wind, then glided back on course, with her extra weight sustaining momentum.

  Bell thought it was strange that an experienced racer like Culp wasn’t using the same tactic when he saw him catching up. If the magnate was trying to lure him into pistol range, he would get his wish.

  By the time the speeding yachts had whipped past the lights of Newburgh, Bell had drawn within a hundred yards. He could see Branco and Culp in the cockpit, their faces white blurs as they looked over their shoulders to gauge his progress in the fading light.