The Gangster (24 page)

In the immortal words of Brewster Claypool:
Money is made when the smart money acts on their smart ideas—bless their smart little hearts.

Dead only five days, and already Culp missed him.

The conductor called, “Engineer’s ready when you are, sir.”

“One more,” said Culp.

His man from eastern Pennsylvania was pacing the private train platform. Culp lowered his window. “Send in that bloody lawyer.”

In came the bloody lawyer. He was one of a bunch that had reported to Claypool—sparing Culp the tedium—and he was everything that Culp’s old “partner in crime” had not been: colorless, humorless, and duller than dishwater.

“The Department of Justice is widening the investigation of the Ramapo Water Company.”

Culp’s face darkened. The Ramapo Grab—a dodge he and Claypool had cooked up to take over New York’s water supply—would have milked the city of $5,000,000 a year every year for forty years.

“I thought you had spent a lot of my money encouraging them not to investigate.”

“It would appear that the Progressives want to make an example.”

“Why not make an example of J. P. Morgan? He stuck his big nose in the ship canal limelight. Why don’t they shine it on him?”

The Washington lawyer answered blandly. “I’m afraid, sir, we must accept that it is what it is.”

Lawyers loved that line of talk. “It is what it is” shifted the blame for their incompetence to the client.

“Roosevelt is behind this.”

“It
is
President Roosevelt’s Justice Department. In fact, sir, I would be remiss not to warn you that the impulse to prosecute appears to come straight from the White House.”

“But why me, dammit? Why not Morgan’s canal?”

Brewster Claypool would have mimicked Roosevelt fulminating in a high-pitched falsetto: “Ramapo would levy a two-hundred-million-dollar rich-man tax against the parched citizens of the nation’s greatest city.”

Bloody, bloody hell!

“Did you say something, sir?”

This was much worse than Culp had feared. “I’m leaving Scranton,” he said.

“Shall I ride back to New York with you, Mr. Culp? I can catch a Washington express from there.”

Culp’s conductor rousted the lawyer off his train.

His engineer blew the ahead signal.

His locomotive steamed from the private platform, maneuvered out of the yards onto a cleared track, and began to labor up
the steep grade into the Pocono Mountains. Culp got to work, dictating mental notes into a graphophone. Suddenly, the front vestibule door flew open, admitting the full thunder of the straining locomotive. He looked up. As swarthy a complexioned Italian as ever had sneaked past immigration officials pushed into his car.

“Where the devil did you come from?”

Culp did not wait for the intruder to answer but instead grabbed his pistol from his desk drawer and leveled it at the swarthy man’s head. The only reason not to put a bullet through it was that he might be a stupid track worker who had been somehow swept along when the train left Scranton, in which case sorting it out with the local authorities would end any hope of getting to the Cherry Grove in time for a late supper. But he wasn’t a track worker; he was wearing a rucksack like a hobo.

“Do you understand English?” he roared. “Who the hell are you?”

The man did speak English, in a rolling manner that reminded Culp of Claypool at his most convoluted.

“I am a stranger with an irresistible offer to become well known to you.”

“That’ll be the day. Raise your hands.”

The man raised his hands. Culp saw that he was holding a length of cord that stretched behind him and out the vestibule door. “What’s that string?”

“The trigger.”

“What? Trigger? What trigger?”

“To trigger the detonator.”

“Deton—”

“I should lower my hand,” the intruder interrupted. “I’m stretching the slack. If the train lurches, I might tug it by mistake. If that were to happen, a stick of dynamite would blow up the coupler that holds your private car to your private locomotive.”

“Are you a lunatic? We’ll roll back down into Scranton and both die.”

“Chissà,”
said the man.

“Kiss-a? What the blazes is kiss-a dago for?”

“
Chissà
means ‘who knows’ if I live or die? Or should I say
we
.”

Culp cocked the .45. “You’re dead anyhow, no ‘kiss-a’ about it.”

“If you shoot me, you will die, too.”

“No greasy immigrant is dictating to me.”

Antonio Branco looked calmly down the gun barrel. “I am impressed, Mr. Culp. I was told that you are more interesting than a coddled child of the rich. Strong as stone.”

“Who told you that?”

“Brewster Claypool.”

“
What?
When?”

“When he died.”

Culp turned red with rage. He stood up and extended the pistol with a hand that shook convulsively. “You’re the one who killed Claypool.”

“No, I did not kill him. I tried to save him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A fool I brought to help me acted like a fool.”

“You were there. You killed him.”

“No, I wanted him alive as much as you. I
needed
Claypool. He would be my go-between. Now I have no choice but to entreat you face-to-face. I’ve lost everything. My business ruined. My reputation. The Van Dorns are after me. And now, without Claypool to represent me, I stand alone with your pistol in my face.”

“You killed Claypool.”

“No, I did not kill him,” Branco repeated. “He was my only hope.”

“I don’t understand . . . Lower your hands!”

Branco lowered his hands but stepped forward so the cord stayed taut. “Don’t you know who I am?”

“I don’t care who you are.”

“The gas explosion.”

“What gas explosion?”

“On Prince Street. It destroyed tenements. You must have read it in the paper.”

“Why would I read about explosions in Italian colony tenements?”

“To know what happened to Isaac Bell.”

The man had caught him flat-footed.

J. B. Culp could not hide his surprise. “Bell? Is that what put Bell in the hospital? What is Bell’s condition?”

“Tu sogni accarezzévole.”

“What’s that dago for?”

“Sweet dreams.”

Culp laughed. “O.K. So you lost everything. What do you want from me? Money?”

“I have plenty of money.” Still holding the string, he shrugged the rucksack off his shoulder and lobbed it onto Culp’s desk. “Look inside.”

Culp unbuckled the flap. The canvas bulged with banded stacks of fifty- and hundred-dollar notes. “Looks like you robbed a bank.”

“I lost only my ‘public’ business. I have my private business.”

“What’s your private business?”

“Mano Nero.”

“Black Hand? . . . In other words, you used to hide your gangster business behind a legitimate business and now you are nothing but a gangster.”

“I am much more than a gangster.”

“How do you reckon that?”

“I am a gangster with a friend in high places.”

“Not me, sport.” Culp tossed the rucksack at the man’s feet. “Get off my train.”

“A friend so high that he is higher than the President.”

Culp had been enjoying crossing swords with the intruder, despite the very real threat of a dynamited coupler. But the conversation had taken a vicious twist. The man was acting as if he had him over a worse barrel than crashing down the mountain at eighty miles per hour.

“Where,” he asked, “did you get that idea?”

“Claypool offered me the job.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about. What job?”

“Killing Roosevelt.”

“Are you crazy? Claypool would never say such a thing.”

“He had no choice,” the gangster answered coldly.

The moon hovered inside a silver halo. Full and perfectly round.

It was beautiful and distant.

Cold rain sprinkled his lips, then a silken brush of warmth.

Suddenly, the sun filled the sky. It had a halo like the moon, but its halo was golden.

Isaac Bell opened his eyes. The sun was smiling inches from his face. His heart swelled, and he whispered, “Hello, Marion, weren’t you in San Francisco?”

Marion Morgan blinked tears away. “I cannot believe you are actually smiling.”

“I always smile at beautiful women.”

Bell looked around, gradually aware that he was in a bed that smelled of strong soap. A kaleidoscope was whirling in slow motion. Through it, he saw grave doctors, in modern white coats, and a nurse, glowering at Marion, the only non-medico in the room. He said, “Something tells me we won’t be enjoying the night in a hotel.”

“Probably not tonight.”

“We’ll see about that.” Bell moved his hands and feet, and stretched his arms and legs, and turned his head to face the
doctors. “As far as I can feel, my brain is in working order, and I still have the same number of limbs I was originally issued. Can you tell me why I’m in your hospital?”

“This is the first you’ve sat up and spoken in eight days.”

Bell felt the room shift a little bit, as if the bed was set on a creaky turntable. “I’d been feeling the need for a rest. Looks like I got it.”

“Do you remember anything that happened before you lost consciousness? Any detail, no matter how small? Any—”

“The floor sank under me and the roof caved in.”

“Do you remember why?”

“Are the boys O.K.?”

“Your squad dug you out.”

Bell looked at Marion. She nodded. “They’re all O.K.”

The doctor said, “Do you remember why it happened?”

“Because Antonio Branco pulled another fast one—about the fastest fast one I’ve ever run into.” He turned to Marion. “Did the boys catch him?”

“He got away from Detective Edwards last week in the Jersey City yards.”

“A week? He could steal rides anywhere in the country in a week.”

“Or charter a special,” said Marion. “Detective Edwards told me Branco swindled a banker and a wine broker out of fifty thousand before he left.”

The bed shifted again. Bell had a feeling it would do this for a while, in fits and starts. The doctors were staring at him like a monkey in a bell jar.

“Events,” Bell told them, “are coming back in a rush. I want
you to move me to a quiet, semi-dark room where I can talk them out with my fiancée, Miss Morgan.”

Marion leaned closer and whispered in his ear. “Are you really all right?”

Bell whispered back, “See if you can get them to send up a cold bird and a bottle of bubbly . . .
Wait!
”

“What is it, Isaac?”

“I just realized . . .
Marion, get me out of here!
Wire Joe Van Dorn. I don’t care if he has to spring me at gunpoint . . . I just realized, Branco wouldn’t have shoved a knife in Claypool’s chest if Claypool hadn’t already admitted his boss was Culp.”

Snow pelted the glass at Raven’s Eyrie, where Antonio Branco luxuriated under a fur counterpane in a princely guest room attached to the gymnasium. It was far from the main house. Culp’s wife had moved to their New York mansion for the winter season. The servants who had brought him supper the night they returned from Scranton, and breakfast the morning after, were a pair of bruised and battered prizefighters. Culp said they could be trusted.

“Mr. Culp is waiting for you in the trophy room,” one of them told him after breakfast.

A nailhead-studded, Gothic-arched, medieval fortress door guarded the trophy room, which was as big as a barn—two stories high and windowless—and lighted by electric chandeliers. Mounted heads of elk, moose, and bison loomed from the walls. Life-size elephant, rhino, Cape buffalo, and a nine-foot grizzly
bear crowded the floor. Tiger skins lay as carpet. Doors and alcoves were framed with ivory tusks.

J. B. Culp stood at a giant rosewood desk that was flanked by suits of medieval armor. Mounted on the wall behind him were hunting rifles and sidearms. He indicated a large, comfortable-looking leather armchair that faced his desk. Antonio Branco stayed on his feet.

“Sleep well?”

“I thank you for your hospitality.”

“You didn’t give me any choice.”

“A dead president can’t prosecute you.”

“So you said on my train.”

Branco said, “And the private aqueduct will be yours.”

“The pot sweetener,” Culp said sarcastically. But he was, in fact, deeply intrigued. The blackmailing Italian had a doozy of a scheme to take control of the Catskill Aqueduct—dams, reservoirs, tunnels, and all—that just might work. A second shot at the Ramapo Grab.

“You’ve had the night to think about your opportunity,” said Branco. “What is your answer?”

“The same,” Culp said coldly. “No one dictates terms to me.”

“You can continue your wonderful life,” said Branco. “And I can make it even more wonderful for you. The aqueduct will be only the beginning. I will help you in all your businesses.”

Culp said, “You can count on the fingers of one hand the men in this country richer than I am, and none are as young. I don’t need your help.”

Branco said, “I will eliminate labor problems. I will eliminate your rivals. I will eliminate your enemies. They will disappear as
if you wave a fairy’s wand. A coal strike in Colorado? Sabotage in Pittsburgh? Reformers in San Francisco? Radicals in Los Angeles? Anywhere you are plagued in the nation, I will
un-
plague you.”

“Just out of curiosity, what will all this ‘un-plaguing’ cost me?”

“Half.”

Culp pretended to consider it. “Half of everything you help me make? Not bad.”

“Half of everything.”

“
Everything?
Listen to me, you greasy little dago. I don’t need you to get things I already own.”

“You need me to
continue
enjoying the things you own.”

Culp’s face darkened. “You’re offering to be partners
and
you are blackmailing me.”

“You are correct.”

Culp laughed.

“You laugh at me?” said Branco. “Why? In this arrangement, I take all the risks. The police can’t walk into your mansion with guns blazing. They’ll shoot the ‘greasy dago.’ They will never shoot Mr. John Butler Culp.”

“I’m laughing at your nerve.”

Branco stared at the man lounging behind his desk. Was Culp so insulated, so isolated from the world, that he was ignorant of the danger, the threat, Branco posed? A strange thought struck him: Or was Culp a man above ordinary men?

“Wouldn’t you do exactly the same if our positions were turned upside down?”

“I sure as hell would,” said Culp. “Exactly the same.”

“Malvivente.”

“What’s that dago for?”

“Gangster.”

J. B. Culp beamed. He suddenly felt as free as a hoodlum stepping out on Saturday night, with brilliantined hair, a dime cigar, and a pistol in his pocket. Anything could happen. He thrust out his hand.

“O.K., partner. Shake on it.”

Branco said, “I would very much like to shake your hand. But I can’t.”

“Why not? I thought you wanted a partner.”

“You put us at risk.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Your prizefighters know too much.”

Culp raised his voice. “Lee! Barry! Get in here.”

They entered quickly. Too quickly.

“Were you listening at the door?”

They exchanged looks. Barry tried to bull through it. “Sure we was listening. You’re alone in here with this guy. We gotta make sure you’re O.K.”

John Butler Culp reached back and took a Colt Bisley .32-20 target pistol from the wall of guns. He fired once at Barry. The heavyweight sagged to the floor with a hole the diameter of a cigarette between his eyes.

Lee gaped in disbelief.

Culp fired again.

Then he said to Branco, “Get rid of the bodies, partner.”