The Gangster (2 page)

Murder and High Jinks

New Haven, 1895

Chest-deep in a ditch, an Italian pick and shovel man looked up at a rush of custom-made shoes and broadcloth trousers inches from his face. Rich American students were scooping handfuls from the earth pile and sifting the sandy red soil through their fingers.

The Irish foreman, seated in the shade of an umbrella, shook a fist at him.

“Back to work, you lazy dago!”

The students took no notice. Set loose from geology class for impromptu field study, they were examining the fresh-dug outwash for traces of Triassic rock that glaciers had ground from the highlands above the New Haven valley. They were happy to be out of doors this first warm day of spring, and Italians digging holes in the ground were as ordinary a sight as red-faced Irish foremen in derby hats.

But the Italians’ padrone, the labor contractor the immigrants paid a stiff commission for the day’s work, did notice. The
padrone was an extravagantly clad and perfumed Neopolitan with a sharp eye for profit. He beckoned the laborer who had stopped work to gape at his betters—a young Sicilian who called himself Antonio Branco.

Antonio Branco vaulted effortlessly up onto the grass. His clothes reeked of sweat, and little distinguished him from the others toiling in the ditch. Just another peasant in a dirty cap, a little finer-featured than most, taller, and bigger in the shoulders. And yet, something about this one seemed off. He was too sure of himself, the padrone concluded.

“You make me look bad in front of the foreman.”

“What do you care about a mick?”

“I’m docking half your pay. Get back to work.”

Branco’s face hardened. But when he did nothing but jump back in the ditch and pick up his shovel, the padrone knew he had read his man correctly. Back in Italy, the Carabinieri kept a tight rein on criminals. A fugitive who had escaped to free and easy America, Antonio Branco could not protest being robbed of half his pay.

Five freshmen closed the door, muffling the uproar of pianos, banjos, and horseplay shouts and crashes elsewhere in Vanderbilt Hall. Then they gathered around a tall, rail-thin classmate and listened spellbound to his scheme to visit the girls at Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, forty miles across the state. Tonight.

They knew little about him. He was from Boston, his family
bankers and Harvard men. The fact that he had come down to Yale indicated a rebellious streak. He had a quick grin and a steady gaze, and he seemed to have thought of everything—a map, a Waltham train conductor’s watch, accurate to thirty seconds in a day, and a special employees’ timetable that contained schedules and running directions for every train on the line, both passenger and freight.

“What if the girls won’t see us?” asked Jack, always a doubting Thomas.

“How could they resist Yale men on a special train?” asked Andy.

“A stolen special,” said Ron.

“A
borrowed
special,” Larry corrected him. “It’s not like we’re keeping it. Besides, it’s not a whole train, only a locomotive.”

Doug asked the big question on every mind. “Are you sure you know how to operate a locomotive, Isaac?”

“One way to find out!”

Isaac Bell stuffed his map, watch, and timetable into a satchel that held several pairs of heavy gloves, a bull’s-eye lantern, and a fat copy of Grimshaw’s
Locomotive Catechism.
Doug, Ron, Andy, Jack, and Larry crowded after him when he bounded out the door.

New Haven’s Little Italy had sprung up close to the rail yards. Locomotive whistles and switch engine bells were moaning and
clanging their nightly serenade, and coal smoke sweetened the stench that the rubber factory wafted over the neighborhood, when the padrone stepped out of his favorite restaurant.

Belly full, head singing with wine, he stood a moment, cleaning his teeth with a gold pick. He strolled homeward along Wooster Street, acknowledging people’s deferential
Buona sera, Padrone
with haughty nods. He was almost to his rooming house when he saw Antonio Branco in the shadows of a burned-out lamppost. The Sicilian was sharpening a pencil with a pocket knife.

The padrone laughed. “What does a peasant who can’t read need with a pencil?”

“I learn.”

“Stupidaggine!”

Branco’s eyes glittered left and right. There was a cop. To give him time to pass, he drew an American newspaper from his coat and read a headline aloud: “Water Tunnel Accident. Foreman Killed.”

The padrone snickered. “Read the fine print.”

Branco made a show of tracing the lines with his pencil. He pretended to struggle with long words and skipped the short ones. “Foreman Jake . . . Stratton . . . injured fatal when Bridgeport water tunnel caved. He leaves wife Katherine and children Paul and Abigail. Four Italians also died.”

The cop disappeared around the corner. The earlier crowds had thinned, and the few people hurrying home would mind their own business. Branco drove the pencil through the padrone’s cheek.

The padrone’s hands flew to his face, exposing his ribs.

Branco thrust. His pocket knife had a short blade, well under the four inches allowed by law. But the handle from which it hinged was almost as thin as the blade itself. As steel slid between bones, Branco shifted his palm behind the knife and pushed hard. The thin handle forced the blade into the wound and shoved the needle-sharp sliver as deep in the padrone’s heart as a stiletto.

Branco took the padrone’s money purse, his rings, and his toothpick and ran to the trains.

Locomotive 106 sighed and snorted like a sleeping mastiff. It was an American Standard 4-4-0 with four pilot wheels in front and four tall drive wheels as high as Isaac Bell’s shoulder. Looming above the gravel embankment where the college boys huddled, silhouetted against a smoky sky set aglow by city lights, it looked enormous.

Bell had watched every night this week. Every night, it was trundled to the coal pocket and water tank to replenish its tender. Then the railroad workers removed ash from its furnace, banked the fire to raise steam quickly in the morning, and parked it on a siding at the extreme north end of the yard. Tonight, as usual, 106 was pointed in the right direction, north toward the Canal Line, which ran straight to Farmington.

Bell told Doug to run ahead of the engine and throw the switch. Doug was a football player, strong, levelheaded, and quick on his feet, the best candidate to switch the siding tracks to the main line. “Soon as we’re through, open the switch again.”

“Why?”

“So if they notice it missing, they won’t know which way we went.”

“You’d make a fine criminal, Isaac.”

“Beats getting caught. Soon as you open it, run like heck to catch up . . . Andy, you’re lighting the lights . . . O.K., guys. On the jump!”

Bell led the way, loping long-leggedly over rails, crossties, and gravel. The other boys followed, ducking their heads. The railroad police were famously brutal, yet not likely to beat up the sons of American magnates. But if they got caught at this stunt, the Yale Chaplin would have them “rusticated,” which meant kicked out of school and sent home to their parents.

Doug sprinted ahead of the locomotive and crouched with his hands on the switch rod. Andy, whose father had put him to work backstage operating lights in his vaudeville theaters, climbed on the cowcatcher and ignited the acetylene headlamp, which cast a dull glow on the rails. Then he jumped down, ran to the back of the tender, and lighted a red lantern.

Isaac Bell vaulted up the ladder into the cab. He pulled on gloves from his satchel, passed a second pair to Ron, and pointed at the furnace door. “Open that and shovel on some coal.”

Heat blasted out.

“Scatter it so you don’t smother the fire.”

By the orange glare of the furnace, Bell compared the controls to illustrations he had memorized. Then he counted heads. All had crowded into the cab except Doug at the switch.

Bell pushed the Johnson bar forward, released the air brakes, and opened the throttle to feed steam to the cylinders. The steel
behemoth shuddered alive in his hands. He remembered just in time to ease off on the throttle so it wouldn’t jump like a jackrabbit.

The guys cheered and slapped him on the back. It was rolling.

“Stop!”

The railroad cop was a mountain of a man with a bull’s-eye lantern on his belt and a yard-long billy club in his fist. He moved with startling speed to pin Antonio Branco against the boxcar he had been climbing under when the cinder dick surprised him. Branco squinted one eye to a slit and shut the other completely against the blinding light.

“How many wop arms do I got to bust before youse get the message?” the cinder dick roared. “No stealing rides. Get out of my yard, and here’s something to remember me by.”

The club flew down at his arm with a force intended to shatter bone.

Branco twisted inside the arc of the attack and ducked, saving his arm at the expense of an agonizing blow to his left knee. Doubled over, he pulled his pocket knife, opened the blade with the speed of ceaseless practice, and whipped it high, slashing the rail cop from chin to hairline.

The man screamed as blood poured into his eyes, dropped his club, and clutched his ruined face. Branco stumbled into the dark. His knee burned, as if plunged in molten lead. Battling for every step, he limped toward the empty north end of the yard, away from the lights and the cops that the screams would draw.
He saw an engine moving. Not a switch engine, but a big locomotive with a red signal lantern on the back of its tender. It was rolling toward the main line. It didn’t matter where it was going—Hartford, Springfield, Boston—it was leaving New Haven. Retching with pain, he staggered after it as fast as he could, caught up, and threw himself onto the coupler on the back of the tender. He felt the wheels rumble through a switch, and the locomotive began to pick up speed.