A Promise of Ruin

by Cuyler Overholt

  I held my breath, searching the depths of his eyes. For the first time in a long time, I could see no hesitation or stubborn self-denial there. “Does this mean—”

  “Yeah, it does,” he said gruffly, and took me into his arms.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I was sure my lips must be swollen and my eyes too bright when we entered the dining room several minutes later, but I didn’t give a whit. I’d waited far too long for Simon’s kisses to have any regrets. I had to say, it had been worth the wait.

  Billie had reserved our usual table near the front window. Simon pulled my chair out with unusual alacrity and then sat down across from me, his own eyes shining with a new, almost predatory attentiveness as he watched me smooth my hair and dab my lips with my napkin. I felt a shiver of exquisite apprehension. I wasn’t sure just what I had unleashed, but I was looking forward to finding out.

  Billie arrived with two steaming bowls of oyster chowder and placed them before us. The chowder was flecked with bacon and green onions and smelled divine. “This looks wonderful.” I bent over to inhale the aroma, my senses all still heightened from their recent engagement. Before I could lift my spoon to my mouth, the saloon door opened, and Patrick and Kitty blew in on a cloud of street dust.

  “Hey, Billie, is Simon here?” Patrick called.

  Billie pointed to us with his chin.

  They hurried over, pulling up two chairs to the side of the table.

  “Have you seen the paper?” Kitty asked, waving a copy of the Sunday edition.

  “Haven’t had a chance,” Simon said.

  I shook my head as well, only now remembering, through the haze of my sensory overload, Petrosino’s cryptic comment of the day before.

  She held the paper up so we could read the headline:

  CAPTAIN HURLEY IDENTIFIED AS SPIDER BOMBER;

  Captain of Twenty-Ninth Precinct Extorting from Those He Swore to Protect.

  My mouth dropped open.

  “Hurley? He was setting off the bombs?” Simon asked.

  “That’s your captain, isn’t it, Patrick?” I asked.

  “Here, I’ll read it to you,” Kitty said. Clearing her throat, she began, “‘Little Pietro Spinelli had a terrible tale to tell when he walked into Commissioner Bingham’s office two weeks ago. His father was leaving the family flat to go to his bakery that morning, Pietro recounted, when he spied a policeman lighting a stick of dynamite in the tenement entry, the friction match still in his hand. His father had recently received a Black Hand letter, the boy explained, but had chosen to ignore it. Mr. Spinelli hurried down to stamp out the fuse and then turned on the intruder, who shot him in the heart and ran from the premises. Little Pietro, who had been sent to bring in the milk by his mother, watched his father’s murder from the stairwell.’”

  “Poor little fella,” Kitty said lowering the paper. “Seeing his own father murdered. Did you ever?” Returning to the article, she continued, “‘Little Pietro was wise for his years. He had seen the police uniform on his father’s assailant and suspected that all was not as it should be. But he had also heard his father speak well of Commissioner Bingham. Against the wishes of his mother, who feared further violence, Pietro took the threat letter from his dead father’s pocket and carried it to police headquarters, where he demanded to see the great man who had vowed to wipe out corruption and extortion in the city.’”

  “So Hurley was the policeman in the entry?” I asked.

  Patrick shook his head. “It was Eugene Fox, Hurley’s collector.”

  “Wait a minute now,” Kitty went on, raising her voice. “This is the good part: ‘General Bingham immediately launched a top-secret investigation, putting his best secret service man on the case.’” She put down the paper and beamed up at us. “His best secret service man,” she repeated, elbowing Patrick in the ribs. “That’s Patrick!”

  Simon swiveled toward Patrick. “Secret service?”

  “Not so secret anymore, I guess,” Patrick said wryly.

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last fall, when Bingham transferred the captains to new precincts, he put together a secret squad to shadow the most corrupt ones and report back only to him. Deputy Commissioner Hanson recommended me for the job because I’d tipped him off on some shady dealings involving my former captain.”

  “And you were assigned to shadow Hurley,” Simon concluded.

  Patrick nodded. “Hurley was one of the dirtiest captains in the city before his transfer. Turns out Bingham was right to keep an eye on him. Harlem is no Tenderloin, and it took Hurley a while to get the lay of the land, but by the end of the winter he had all of the local pool hall operators on his pay list, making regular protection payments to his collector. He was having trouble, though, getting the pushcart vendors and other small fry to pay the usual premium for their licenses, both because he didn’t speak their language, and because they were already paying tribute to various small Black Hand operators in the neighborhood. Then in June, the DA raided the Harlem pool halls, putting almost all of them out of business.”

  “Thereby cutting off Hurley’s main source of revenue,” Simon said.

  “Exactly. Now, as you may remember, the first Spider letter appeared in late May, about a week before the pool hall raids. The target was an Italian banker, who brought the letter to Captain Hurley and asked for police protection.”

  I straightened on my seat, listening intently. That must have been the banker Mrs. Fabroni told me about, whom she’d threatened on Felisa’s behalf.

  “The captain posted an officer in front of the bank, but a few days later, someone managed to plant a timed nitroglycerine bomb in the foyer anyway, which went off an hour after closing time. After that, there were one or two Spider bombings every week.”

  Billie came over with four cups of coffee on a tray. He smiled at Patrick. “A little bird told me congratulations are in order.”

  Patrick grimaced. “News travels fast.”

  Billie lowered the cups onto the table.

  “How about putting a little flavor in that?” Patrick asked him.

  “It’s Sunday,” Simon drawled. “The bar’s closed.”

  “I think you’ll find the flavor to your liking,” Billie told Patrick with a wink.

  Patrick took a sip and sighed with contentment. “Now there’s a barkeep who knows his business.”

  I took a tentative sip of my own coffee and nearly choked on the whiskey burn.

  “Go on, Pat,” Kitty urged, her eyes alight. “Tell them how you figured out Hurley was the bomber.”

  “Well, like I said, the first Spider bomb was made of nitroglycerine. But all the other Spider bombs—which, you’ll remember, went off after Hurley’s pool hall revenue dried up—were dynamite. Which got me thinking.”

  “Wait till you hear this,” Kitty said, wriggling in her seat.

  He smiled at her, running his fingers lightly up her arm. Turning back to us, he continued, “Back in early June, just after the first Spider bombing, a load of dynamite was left at a construction site on 106th Street in violation of regulations. I was one of the reserves called in to bring it to the station house for safekeeping, until the Bureau of Combustibles could pick it up. On a hunch, I checked the storage room records and compared the number of cases on the original receipt to the number we handed over to the bureau a few days later. I discovered that a case of dynamite and a box of percussion caps had gone missing.

  “Now, that was interesting, but it didn’t necessarily point to Hurley. It’s not all that unusual for things to go missing from storage—a lost coat turned in by some Good Samaritan that no one’s claimed, or a stolen teapot held for evidence and never picked up, that sort of thing. I had no way to tell if the dynamite that was missing was the same used in the bombings. Until little Pietro brought the commissioner that unexploded stick.”

>   He took another swig of his coffee, then continued, “The commissioner had already sent the Spinelli dynamite on to Petrosino, so I gave the detective a call to ask if I could take a look at it, to see if it was the same color, size, and make as the explosives we’d been holding in the station house. We couldn’t be seen together, of course, so we arranged a handoff.”

  “That’s what was in the bag he gave you!” I blurted out.

  He turned to me, cocking an eyebrow.

  “I saw you on the street that day, paying the boy to pick up the satchel from the old Italian man. Only now, I know the man was really Petrosino, because he was wearing the same disguise at the café yesterday.”

  He nodded slowly, his lips pursed. “You must have wondered what we were up to.”

  I could feel my cheeks heating up. “I’m afraid I did become suspicious.”

  “I suppose anyone would have, under the circumstances.”

  “Not Simon. He told me you were the one person on the force whose integrity I needn’t question.”

  “Did he now?” He turned to Simon. “That’s quite a reputation to live up to.”

  “Just keep doing what you have been,” Simon said with a grin, “and you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

  “Anyway,” Patrick continued, “the dynamite matched. And Petrosino, it turned out, had made some discoveries of his own. The finger impressions on the later Spider letters all matched each other, but they didn’t match the impressions on the first letter to the bank president.”

  “Which further suggested that Captain Hurley had commandeered the Spider name,” Simon said.

  Patrick nodded. “We both found it interesting that all the Spider letters used the exact same wording, except for the recipients’ names and the amount they demanded. Hurley doesn’t speak a word of Italian, so if he was impersonating an Italian extortionist he would have had to copy the original Spider letter word for word. Two days ago, I borrowed a few things from the captain’s office and sent them to the lab. His fingerprints matched the ones on the later letters.”

  A collective sigh escaped us as we pondered the captain’s perfidy.

  “But…wouldn’t Hurley’s victims guess the death threats weren’t really coming from the Spider if his collector was an Irishman?” Kitty asked after a moment.

  “Good question,” Patrick said, brushing a wayward strand of hair from her cheek. As Kitty responded with an uncharacteristic blush, it occurred to me that her feelings for Patrick went much deeper than she’d let on.

  “Hurley got lucky there,” he said. “The original threat letter, which Hurley must have gotten someone to translate, instructed the banker to leave his money in a tin behind a statue in the devotional area at Saint Cecilia’s Church. The Saint Cecilia congregation is split pretty evenly between Italian and Irish, so Hurley could just keep using the same drop-off location, with Fox slipping into the church to pick up a tin whenever he wanted without attracting notice.”

  “But what about the explosives?” I asked. “How could he carry sticks of dynamite around without being seen?”

  “I didn’t figure that out until last night,” Patrick admitted, “after Fox was arrested and I was returning his equipment to the supply room. His night baton felt lighter than it should have, so I gave it a closer look. I discovered it had been hollowed out, like a flask baton, only deeper. Deep enough to hold two eight-inch sticks of dynamite. He must have carried the dynamite on his nightly rounds, setting them off in the early morning before his victims were up and about.”

  “Only Spinelli, being a baker, would get up earlier than most,” I mused. “Which Fox must have failed to take into account.”

  We all sat in silence for another moment, absorbing his extraordinary tale.

  “I’d say this calls for another round,” Simon said. “Billie! More coffee!”

  “Congratulations, Patrick,” I said. “That couldn’t have been easy, working in secret.”

  He gave me a half-hearted smile. “I just wish I could have figured out what they were up to before they killed poor Spinelli in front of his son.”

  I nodded in sympathy, for I knew what it was like to fall short in one’s efforts to help.

  “And what about Genna?” Kitty asked, turning to me with wide eyes. “Getting those white slavers arrested, and saving all those women!” She shook her head in admiration. “You’re a regular heroine!”

  “No thanks to me,” Patrick grunted. He regarded me somberly. “I’m sorry I let those bastards get you in their clutches. I shouldn’t have left you alone out there on the street unprotected. I’ll never forgive myself, if it helps any.”

  He looked so miserable, I tried to cheer him up by saying, “Well, I’m sorry I didn’t put your call box key to better use. If I’d gone to summon help earlier, things might have gone differently.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” he said, a glint of humor returning to his eyes. “I heard you nearly blinded one of those thugs with it. Sounds like a pretty good use to me.” He grinned at Simon. “We should teach that to the new recruits.”

  Billie arrived with fresh cups of coffee and set them before us.

  Simon lifted his cup. “To Patrick, and a job well done.”

  We all raised our cups and took a sip.

  “And to Genevieve,” Kitty said, turning to me.

  “To Genevieve!” Patrick and Simon said in unison, raising their cups alongside hers.

  As I looked around the table at the hard-drinking cop, his street-wise paramour, and my one-time stable hand, all smiling at me with open goodwill and affection, I suddenly had the feeling that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. I smiled back as they tipped their cups and drank to me. Perhaps, I thought, we weren’t so different after all.

  Epilogue

  Teresa stood at the open window at the end of the hallway, watching the crowds on the street below. Garlands of paper lanterns stretched over their heads between the fire escapes, and flags and bunting hung from every window. She could smell the familiar scents of sausage and fried dough drifting up from the vendors’ carts beneath the window, and hear the far-off sounds of a brass band mixing with the shouts and laughter of her countrymen.

  It was the festa of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, which, according to Felisa, was as important here as it was in Italy—perhaps even more so. Italians had been arriving all during the night from far-flung places, many after walking miles on foot, bringing money or jewelry or whatever offerings they could afford for their beloved patron saint. They had stayed with friends and relatives or camped out in the parks, eating and drinking and talking until it was time for one of the hourly early masses, where they would offer thanks for prayers answered during the preceding year and ask for help in the coming one.

  The other women from the flat had left hours ago, along with Antonio and his mother. Teresa had stayed behind, having no wish to take part in the festivities—or to see Antonio, whose efforts to see her she had managed to rebuff so far. She suspected that, as an honorable man, he was feeling some sort of obligation to go through with their marriage, however much she must repulse him. She had no intention of marrying him on such terms. But there was no need for them to speak of it. In another two weeks, she’d be gone from the building and from his life. She was biding her time until then.

  As the morning progressed, however, something had called her out of the tiny flat where she’d confined herself for the past five days, drawing her to the hallway window. It struck her as nothing short of a miracle that the Madonna had journeyed all the way to New York from Campania, just as she had. The knowledge drove a hot poker into the numbness she’d been working so hard to maintain. Now, as she watched people hurrying toward First Avenue to see the procession go past, she felt an irresistible pull to go with them.

  Turning from the window, she crossed to the stairs and descended to the street, merging into the
throng. She stayed to the inside of the sidewalk, hugging the wall, overwhelmed by all the noise and color after her days of seclusion. In addition to food, the pushcarts along the street were offering candles and holy cards and charms to ward off evil spirits. As she drew closer to First Avenue, she saw a woman with a cane buy a wax foot from a stand near the corner, which she knew the woman would offer to the Madonna in church after the procession, in the hope that she might be blessed with a cure. Teresa slowed as she drew abreast of the stand, examining the wax limbs and organs displayed there. There was no single body part that could encompass her own sickness, however, and she quickly turned away again.

  Nor was there any offering big enough to atone for her sins. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the shrine that had been set up at the intersection with the Madonna figurine inside, keeping her eyes straight ahead as she turned right and continued down the avenue. The crowd was so dense here that it was impossible to set her own course. She gave in to the tide, letting it pull her along the sidewalk, only breaking free when she was halfway down the block, where she was able to claim a relatively quiet spot on the curb.

  The music from the band was growing closer now. She squinted down the avenue, trying to glimpse the procession through the scores of people constantly crisscrossing the street. The women beside her were becoming more and more agitated, shouting to their children to come near as their husbands tucked in their shirts and combed back their hair with their fingers. The very air seemed to thrum with anticipation.

  How many times, she wondered, had she waited just like this at a festa in Naples? But thinking of home was a mistake she immediately regretted. Other memories of happier times came tumbling after it, breaking through the wall of forgetfulness she’d tried so hard to erect. Her heart broke as she thought of all she had lost. Before, she had been the daughter of loving parents, a member of a village, the child of a just god. Now, she was nothing but a ghost.