The Gangster (5 page)

The Knickerbocker Hotel was a hit from the day John Jacob Astor IV opened the fifteen-story Beaux Arts building on the corner of 42nd and Broadway. The great Caruso took up permanent residence, three short blocks from the Metropolitan Opera House, as did coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, the “Florentine Nightingale,” who inspired the Knickerbocker’s chef to invent a new macaroni dish,
Pollo Tetrazzini
.

Ahead of both events, months before the official opening, Joseph Van Dorn had moved his private detective agency’s New York field office into a sumptuous second floor suite at the top of the grand staircase. He negotiated a break on the rent by furnishing house detectives. Van Dorn had a theory, played out successfully at his national headquarters in Chicago’s Palmer House and at his Washington, D.C., field office in the New Willard Hotel, that lavish surroundings paid for themselves by persuading his clientele that high fees meant quality work. A rear entrance, accessible by a kitchen alley and back stairs, was available for clients loath to traverse the most popular hotel lobby in the city to discuss private affairs, for informants shopping information, and for investigators in disguise.

Isaac Bell directed Giuseppe Vella to that entrance.

The tall detective greeted the Italian contractor warmly in the reception room. He inquired about Maria and her mother, and refused, again, an offer of a monetary reward beyond the Van Dorn fee, saying, good-naturedly but firmly, “You’ve already paid your bill on time, a sterling quality in a client.”

Bell led the Italian into the working heart of the office, the detectives’ bull pen, which resembled a modern Wall Street operation, with candlestick telephones, voice tubes, clattering typewriters, a commercial graphophone, and a stenographer’s transcribing device. A rapid-fire telegraph key linked the outfit by private wire to Chicago, to field offices across the continent, and to Washington, where the Boss spent much of his time wrangling government contracts.

Bell commandeered an empty desk and a chair for Vella and examined the Black Hand extortion letter. Half-literate threats were illustrated with crude drawings on a sheet of top quality stationery.

Vella said, “It was tied with string around the stone they threw in the window.”

“Do you have the string?”

Vella pulled a strand of butcher’s twine from his pocket.

Bell said, “I’ll look into this, immediately, and discuss it with Mr. Van Dorn.”

“I am afraid for my family.”

“When you telephoned, I sent men to 13th Street to guard your home.”

Bell promised to call on Vella that afternoon at Vella’s current construction site, an excavation for the new Church of the
Annunciation at 128th Street in Harlem. “By the way, if you notice you are being followed, it will only be that detective . . . there.” He directed Vella’s gaze across the bull pen. “Archie Abbott will look out for you.”

The elegantly dressed, redheaded Detective Abbott looked to Vella like a Fifth Avenue dandy until he slid automatic pistols into twin shoulder holsters, stuffed his pockets with extra bullet clips, sheathed a blackjack, and loaded a shotgun shell into his gold-headed walking stick.

Isaac Bell took the Black Hand letter to Joseph Van Dorn’s private office. It was a corner room with an Art Nouveau rosewood desk, comfortable leather armchairs, views of the sidewalks leading to the hotel entrances, and a spy hole for inspecting visitors in the reception room.

Van Dorn was a balding Irishman in his forties, full in the chest and fuller in the belly, with a thick beard of bright red whiskers and the gruffly amiable charm of a wealthy business man who had prospered early in life. Enormously ambitious, he possessed the ability, rare in Bell’s experience, to enjoy his good fortune. He also had a gift for making friends, which worked to the great advantage of his detective agency. His cordial manner concealed a bear-trap-swift brain and a prodigious memory for the faces and habits of criminals, whose existence he took as a personal affront.

“I’m glad for any business,” said Van Dorn. “But why doesn’t Mr. Vella take his troubles to Joe Petrosino’s Italian Squad?”

New York Police Detective Joseph Petrosino, a tough, twenty-year veteran with an arrest and conviction record that was the envy of the department, had recently received the go-ahead from Commissioner Bingham to form a special squad of Italian-speaking investigators to fight crime in the Sicilian, Neopolitan, and Calabrese neighborhoods.

“Maybe Mr. Vella knows there are only fifteen Italians in the entire New York Police Department.”

“Petrosino’s got his work cut out for him,” Van Dorn agreed. “This ‘Black Hand’ plague is getting out of control.” He gestured at a heap of newspaper clippings that Isaac Bell had asked Research to gather for the Boss. “Bombing fruit stands and burning pushcarts, terrorizing poor ignorant immigrants, is the least of it. Now they’re tackling Italian bankers and business men. We’ll never know how many wealthy parents quietly ransomed their children, but I’ll bet enough to make it a booming business.”

Bell passed Van Dorn the Black Hand letter.

Van Dorn’s cheeks reddened with anger. “They actually address the little girl! What scum would frighten a child like this?”

“Feel the paper.”

“Top quality. Rag, not pulp.”

“Remind you of anything?”

“Same as the original ransom note, if I recall.”

“Anything else?”

“First class stationery.” He held it to the light. “Wonder where they got it. Why don’t you look into the watermark?”

“I already put Research on it.”

“So now they’re threatening his business.”

“It’s easy to make an ‘accident’ at a construction site.”

“Unless it’s a feint while they take another shot at his daughter.”

“If they do,” said Bell, “they’ll run head-on into Harry Warren’s Gang Squad. Harry’s blanketed 13th Street.”

Van Dorn showed his teeth in a semblance of a smile. “Good . . . But how long can I afford to take Harry’s boys off the gangs? ‘Gophers’ and ‘Wallopers’ are running riot, and the Italians are getting bolder every day.”

“A dedicated Van Dorn Black Hand Squad,” said Bell, “would free your top gang investigators to concentrate on the street gangs.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Van Dorn.

“We would be better fixed to attack the Black Hand.”

“I said I’d think about it.”

Isaac Bell strode uptown from the 125th Street subway station through a neighborhood rapidly urbanizing as new-built sanitariums, apartment blocks, tenements, theaters, schools, and parish houses uprooted Harlem’s barnyards and shanties. He was a block from 128th Street, nearing a jagged hill of rock that Giuseppe Vella was excavating for the Church of the Annunciation, when the ground shook beneath his feet.

He heard a tremendous explosion. The sidewalk rippled. A parish steeple swayed. Panicked nuns ran from the building, and Convent Avenue, which was surfaced with vitrified brick, started to roll like the ocean.

Bell had survived the Great Earthquake in San Francisco
only last spring, awakening suddenly in the middle of the night to see his fiancée’s living room and piano fall into the street. Now, here in Manhattan, he felt his second earthquake in months. A hundred feet of the avenue disintegrated in front of him. Then bricks flew, propelled to the building tops by gigantic jets of water.

It was no earthquake, but a flood.

A river filled Convent Avenue in an instant.

There could be only one source of the raging water. The Croton Reservoir system up north in Westchester supplied New York City’s Central Park Reservoir via underground mains. The explosion in Giuseppe Vella’s excavation—an enormous dynamite “overcharge,” whether by miscalculation or sabotage—had smashed them open. In an instant, the “water famine” predicted by Catskill Aqueduct champions seemed unbelievable.

A liquid wall roared out of Convent Ave and raced down it, tearing at first-story windows and sweeping men, women, and horses around the corners and into the side streets. Its speed was startling, faster than a crack passenger train. One second, Isaac Bell was pulling the driver from a wagon caught in the ice-cold torrent; the next, he himself was picked up and flung into 127th Street. He battled to the surface and swam on a foaming crest that swept away shanties the full block to Amsterdam Avenue.

There the water careened downhill, following the slope of the land south. Bell fought out of the stream and dragged himself upright on a lamppost. Firemen from a nearby station were wading in to pull people out.

Bell shouted, “Where are the water gates?”

“Up Amsterdam at 135th.”

Bell charged up Amsterdam Avenue at a dead run.

A third of a mile north of the water main break, he found a sturdy Romanesque Revival brick and granite castle. The lintel above its iron doors was engraved
WATER DEPARTMENT
. A structure this big had to be the main distributing point for the Westchester reservoirs. He pushed inside. Tons and tons of Croton water were surging up from a deep receiving chamber into four-foot-diameter cast-iron pipes. The pipes were fitted with huge valve wheels to control the outflow to the mains breached seven blocks away by the explosion.

Bell spotted a man struggling with them. He hurtled down a steel ladder and found an exhausted middle-aged engineer desperately trying to close all four valves at once. He was gasping for breath and looked on the verge of a heart attack. “I don’t know what happened to my helper. He’s never late, never misses a day.”

“Show me how to help!”

“I can’t budge the gates alone. It’s a two-man job.”

With the dynamite explosion no accident, thought Bell, but a coordinated Black Hand attack to blame Giuseppe Vella for flooding an entire neighborhood, the extortionists must have left the helper bloodied in an alley.

“This one’s frozen.”

Isaac Bell threw his weight and muscle against the wheel and pulled with all his might. The old engineer clapped hands on it, too, and they fought it together, quarter inch by quarter inch, until the gate wheel finally began to turn with a metallic screech.

“Godforsaken Italians. I warned them again and again not to use too much dynamite. I knew this would happen.”