The Gangster (12 page)

“Ernesto!” said Charlie Salata. “Where you running off to?”

Ernesto Leone’s heart sank. Salata had two gorillas with him and they blocked any hope of escape.

“I’m not running. I’m going home. You know I got a room in this house.”

“Invite me in.”

The four men climbed a flight of stairs. The counterfeiter unlocked his door. The gorillas stayed in the hall. Leone lighted a sputtering gas jet. The broad-shouldered Salata filled the room. Last time he was here, he stole some expensive paper. This time, it seemed to Leone, that he was sucking out the air.

“Listen, Charlie. I told the Boss the money wasn’t ready. He wouldn’t listen.”

“Don’t blame the Boss.”

“I’m not blaming him. I’m just saying . . . Oh, come on, Charlie. We knew each other since we was kids. You go your way, I go mine, but we’re not enemies.”

Salata slid his fingers inside a terrible set of brass knuckles. A blade jutted from the metal rings. Leone stared at the weapon. Maimed or stabbed? How would Salata do him up?

Salata raised his fist very slowly and pressed the knuckles to Leone’s cheek. Leone could see the blade in the corner of his eye. Salata said, “I got a man in jail. Thousand dollars bail.”

“I’ll get the bail.” Where? He could only wonder.

“What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“What else you going to do to make it up?”

“I’ll do what I can. What do you want? I’m getting better paper. You want part of the new stuff?”

“That was the last time I ever pass false money.”

“Then what?”

“Me and Ferri got something started.”

“Ferri?” echoed Leone. Roberto Ferri was a smuggler. “Since when do you hang with Ferri?”

“Since the Boss said to . . . You come on this business, make it up to us.”

“What can I do for your business?”

“My guy took a fall. I want you to take a fall.”

“For what? I’m just a counterfeiter.”

“You’re a lousy counterfeiter. But you’re still
prominente
. Guys know you’re not
cafon
. If this thing goes wrong, you’ll take the blame.”

“The cops won’t buy that. They know I’m only a counterfeiter.”

Salata pivoted his hand. The knuckles turned away from Leone’s cheek. The blade lined up with his eye. “Not for cops.”

“Van Dorns?”

Salata laughed. “You’ll wish it was Van Dorns.”

Harry Warren was waiting for Isaac Bell on the platform at Grand Central with news of another Secret Service arrest.

“Agent Lynch is having a banner week. Secret Service just pinched a guy passing the same queer upstate.”

“Salata’s?”

“Nope. A Ferri guy.”

“Who’s Ferri?”

“Runs a bunch of smugglers.”

Bell led the way out of the chaotic terminal, dodging work gangs and skirting gaping holes in the concourse floor. “Why’s a smuggler taking chances passing the queer?”

“Odd keeps piling up,” said Warren. “Like I said about Charlie Salata’s boy pinched in Pennsylvania.”

“Same paper?”

“Same queer, same paper.”

“What are the odds that Salata’s turned counterfeiter?”

“Same odds as a grizzly bear hosting a church supper. Anyhow, Agent Lynch told Helen the stuff was lame. The paper. No surprise they got caught. But the engraving was top-notch. Lynch thinks it was done by a guy named Ernesto Leone. Learned his trade in Italy and has trained a bunch of apprentices here.”

“Helen got a lot out of Lynch.”

“She’d given Lynch a description of Leone shopping on Printer’s Row, so I guess Lynch figured he owed her.”

“Did Lynch happen to tell Helen what the prisoners admit to?”

“That smitten he ain’t. Helen asked. He sent her packing.”

“Permanently?”

“’Fraid so. I don’t think we’ll get any more out of the Secret Service.”

The long-legged Bell set a fast pace across town to the office. Harry Warren trotted to keep up.

“You ever hear of this Ferri teaming with Salata?” Bell asked.

“Nope.”

Bell said, “I never heard of an outfit of all-rounders. Birds of a feather is more the rule, but these guys are combining
extortion, bombing, counterfeiting, smuggling, kidnapping. Crimes of brute force and crimes of quick wit. Is it an alliance of gangs—a ‘cartel’ of criminals? Or is a single mastermind forcing a variety of gangsters to do his bidding?”

“Damned-near impossible to whip any bunch of crooks into line,” said Warren. “Not to mention different kinds.”

“Cartel or mastermind, they’d be bigger, tougher, and better organized than the small-timers who call themselves Black Hand to scare folks. Makes me wonder what they’ll turn their hands to next.”

“Anything that pays,” said Harry Warren.

Bell said, “Or what they’ll stop
at.”

You are hereby invited to Pink Tea
With Captain Michael Coligney
19th Precinct Station House
West 30th Street
3 p.m.
Sharp

A New York Police Department officer wearing a blue coat with shiny brass buttons and a tall helmet strolled the Tenderloin, twirling a nightstick and knocking on brothel doors with printed invitations for the proprietors.

Nick Sayers, proud owner of the Cherry Grove bordello, showed up early at the station house, ahead of his competitors. They trooped in soon after, looking anxious. Sayers waited with a small smile on his face. Captain Coligney’s Pink Teas routinely culminated in orders to “resort keepers” to shut down their “disorderly houses” within twenty-four hours. But unlike his competitors, Nick Sayers had an ace in the hole, information to sell that even “Honest Mike” would buy.

Someone had tipped off the newspapers, of course, and police
reporters crammed into Coligney’s office, which was already packed with his invited guests, who were dressed to the nines.

“Will this change anything, Captain Coligney?” demanded the man from the
Sun
. “Won’t new owners switch names and open up again?”

The broad-shouldered, handsome Coligney was resplendent in dress uniform and amply prepared to deal with the press. “Shutting down the resorts is better and fairer than hauling poor, unfortunate women into the station house, holding them for the night in jail, and dragging them into court before they’re turned loose.”

Having quelled the press, he turned to his guests.

“Gentlemen, and ladies”—he nodded gallantly to several wealthy proprietresses—“we have tea, sandwiches, and cakes, but before we partake, please be aware that you are hereby enjoined to shut down your disorderly houses in twenty-four hours. I don’t want to see an open door or a light in the window after three o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

Tea was downed, splashed liberally from flasks, sandwiches and sweets consumed, and soon everyone left except the owner of the Cherry Grove.

“Nick,” said Captain Coligney. “Shouldn’t you be off packing your bags?”

“Well, Captain, you would think so, wouldn’t you?”

A note of supreme confidence in Nick’s voice brought the captain up short. “Apparently, you don’t agree, Nick. Care to tell me about it?”

“I would prefer to keep my house open.”

“I would prefer to spend my summers in Newport, but I don’t see it in the cards.”

“I see it in
my
cards,” said Nick. “And I’m going to play them right.”

“An ace in the hole?” Coligney asked with a dangerous glint in his eye. The bejeweled and cologned Nick was a former “fancy man” who had developed a flair for business that turned a string of streetwalkers into the Ritz of the Tenderloin, and Mike Coligney had heard just about enough.

But Nick stood his ground. “
Four
aces.”

Coligney formed a fist. “I’m warning you, boy-o, you’re about to run into a straight flush.”

“Captain Coligney, I’m offering you priceless information in return for being allowed to stay open.”

“Priceless?”

“And vital.”

Coligney pointed at the clock on the wall. “Thirty seconds.”

“A secret club meets in my house. Wall Street men. So secret that even you didn’t know about it.”

“What do they do?”

“Drink, talk, carouse.”

“Sounds like all your patrons. Minus the talking.”

“It’s the talking that you will let me stay open for.”

Coligney saw that Nick was in deadly earnest. The brothel owner truly believed that the cops would make an exception for his house. “O.K., spill it. You’ve got thirty seconds.”

“Their secret club. It’s kind of like a joke, but it’s not a joke. These gentlemen run Wall Street.”

“This club have a name?”

“The Cherry Grove Gentlemen’s Society.”

“Original.”

“But, like I say, it’s a joke. Sort of.”

“Your thirty seconds is running out.”

“I listen in on ’em,” said Nick.

“How?”

“There’s a vent shaft for air. I can hear upstairs what they say in the library.”

“A vent which just happened to be there?” asked Coligney. “Or you had built so you could eavesdrop?”

“The latter,” Nick admitted with a grin.

“Why?”

“I listen for stock market tips. I mean, these men know everything before it happens. Twice I made a killing. Once with U.S. Steel, once with Pennsylvania Rail—”

Coligney exploded to his feet, both fists balled. “Are you trying to bribe me with stock tips?”

“
No, no, no, no, no!
No, Captain. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m just telling you how I happened to hear it.”

“Hear what?”

Nick took a deep breath and blurted, “They’re going to kill President Roosevelt.”

The police captain rocked back on his heels. Nick looked triumphant that he had captured his attention. Coligney sat back down heavily and planted his elbows on his desk. “What exactly did you hear?”

Nick reported in detail.

“Give me their names.”

“I don’t know their names.”

“They’re your regular customers.”

“I can tell you who was there. But I can’t tell which ones were talking.” Nick explained that he could make out what they were saying but could not distinguish one voice from another, as sounds were distorted by the shaft.

Coligney said, “You must have recognized his manner of speaking.”

“It’s not like there’s only one blowhard in the club, Captain. They’re Wall Street swells, what do you expect? They’re all blowhards.”

Coligney questioned Nick repeatedly. Nick stuck to his story, and eventually the policeman was convinced he did not know who in the “club” had threatened the President.

Coligney wrote down their names. Seven of the richest men on Wall Street.

“O.K.,” said Coligney. “Here’s the deal. You shut down now, like everyone else. You change the name on your deed. You reopen at the weekend.”

Nick nodded. “That way no one knows about this, and it looks like Tammany stepped in and lent me a hand.”

“But if this ends up blarney, you’ll be selling women to blacksmiths in Joisey. Now get outta here.”

Five minutes later, Mike Coligney headed out, too, wearing a greatcoat over his uniform and a civilian’s fedora low over his eyes.

“Back soon,” he told his desk sergeant. “Just going to clear my head.”

“O’Leary’s or the Normandie?” asked the sergeant.

“O’Leary’s.”

But he walked straight by O’Leary’s Saloon. Continuing up Broadway, Coligney passed the Normandie Bar, too, and cut over to Sixth Avenue, thinking hard on what he had learned. “Satan’s Circus” percolated around him as he strode past brick tenements and frame houses, street muggers and stickup artists, dance halls and saloons. Downtown again in the shadow of the El, pondering possibilities and weighing the complications.

The captain had a gut feeling that the plot was real. But as earthshaking as it was, who in blazes could he trust to help him dismantle it? The department was in an uproar. The new Police Commissioner—a friend, ironically, of President Roosevelt—was turning the force on its ear. Worse, Bingham was a stickler for communicating through “proper channels.” Proper channels in this case would be through a politically connected inspector whom Coligney would not trust to solve a candy store theft.

Besides, who knew how long Commissioner Bingham himself would last? Or what disruption he would perpetrate next? For the moment, Coligney was the only precinct captain Bingham hadn’t transferred, but he had fined Coligney eight days’ pay for a technical violation of department rules. What if, in the midst of pursuing Nick’s allegation, he suddenly found himself banished to a sleepy precinct in the Bronx? The grim fact was that the Commissioner, a by-the-book former military man, was not equipped to investigate a plot against the President, much less muster the speed required to save his life.

Coligney stopped in a saloon on 24th Street and placed a call on the owner’s telephone. Then he walked over to Broadway and, when he was sure no one recognized him, popped down the stairs at 23rd and rode the subway train to 42nd Street, where
he slipped quietly into the subway-level lower lobby of the Knickerbocker Hotel.

He entered a small, dark cellar bar off the lobby. At a corner table, backs to the walls, were waiting his old friend Joseph Van Dorn and Van Dorn’s top investigator, Isaac Bell.