The Gangster

In a surprise, Branco smiled as if abandoning forever every thought of any unhappiness. “We’ll be blown to bits, everything except our honor.” He shrugged, and, still smiling, added, “We are invisible men in this country. We are poor. We have nothing but honor.”

“Italians won’t be poor forever,” said Giuseppe Vella. “Already I am not poor. David is not poor. You are not poor.”

“But at the Central Federated Union meeting last night, when they debated whether to support excavators striking the subway jobs, the Electrical Workers unionist shouted that Italian pick and shovel men were unskilled scum of the earth.”

“I was there, too,” said Vella. “A typesetter shouted back that his ancestors started here with a pick and shovel, and if the electrician was looking down on his ancestors, he better put up his fists.”

Branco smiled. “But we are still invisible… On the other hand”—an even bigger smile lit his mobile face—“invisible men aren’t noticed, until it’s too late.”

“Too late for what?”

“Too late to stop them.”

5

Van Dorn detective Harry Warren, dressed like the workmen drinking in the Kips Bay Saloon in shabby coats and flat caps, planted a worn boot on the brass rail, ordered a beer, and muttered to the tall guy next to him, “How’d you talk the Boss into a Black Hand Squad?”

“I didn’t,” said Isaac Bell without shifting his gaze from the mirror behind the bar, which reflected the view through the saloon’s window of the Banco LaCava storefront across the street. He had tricked out his workman’s costume with an electrician’s cylindrical leather tool case slung over his shoulder. In it were extra manacles for bomb planters who surrendered and a sawed-off shotgun for those who didn’t.

“A bunch of Italian business men did it for me. Marched in with a bag of money to hire the agency for protection, and Mr. Van Dorn decided it was about time.”

Warren asked, “Would they happen to call themselves the White Hand Society?”

No one knew the streets of New York better than Harry Warren. He had probably heard of the new outfit ten minutes after its founding. Which meant, Bell was painfully aware, so had the Black Hand.

“Giuseppe Vella launched it. He’s been getting Black Hand letters. David LaCava joined him. And some of their well-heeled friends. Banking, property, construction, a wine importer, and a wholesaler grocer.”

“Branco?”

“Antonio.”

“What did you think of him?”

“He wasn’t there. But Vella told me he put up the seed money that got the others into it. The Boss authorizes up to ten men — if you count apprentices.”

“How many speak Italian?”

“Just you, Harry.”

The Van Dorn New York City street gang expert had changed his name from Salvatore Guaragna, following the example of New York Italian gangsters like Five Points Gang chief “Paul Kelly,” who took Irish names. He said, “I got an apprentice candidate who’s Italian. Little Eddie Tobin’s father found him living on a hay barge. Orphan. The Tobins took him in. Richie Cirillo. Sharp kid.”

“Glad to have him,” said Bell.

“Who’s the rest of your lineup?”

“Weber and Fields are parked down the street on a coal wagon.” Middle-aged Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton were the agency comedians. Nicknamed after the vaudevillians Weber and Fields, Kisley was Van Dorn’s explosives expert, Fulton a walking encyclopedia of safecrackers and their modi operandi.

Harry Warren grinned. “Helluva disguise. I couldn’t figure out if they were guarding the bank or fixing to rob it. Who else?”

“I’ve got Eddie Edwards coming in from Kansas City.”

“Valuable man. Though I’m not sure what a rail yard specialist can do on Elizabeth Street.”

“Archie Abbott is selling used clothes from that pushcart next to the bank.”

“You’re kidding!” Archibald Angell Abbott IV was the only Van Dorn listed in the New York Social Register. Warren wandered casually toward the free lunch, shot a glance out the window at a different angle, and came back with a sausage wrapped in a slice of bread. “I didn’t make him.”

“He didn’t want you to.”

“I’ve also got Wish Clarke and—”

“Forget Wish,” Harry interrupted. “Mr. Van Dorn is one step from firing him.”

“I know. We’ll see how he’s doing.” Aloysius Clarke, the sharpest detective in the agency — and the partner from whom Isaac Bell had learned the most — was a drinking man, and it was beginning to get the better of him.

“Who else?”

“Your Eddie Tobin.”

Harry nodded gloomily. Another apprentice. The Boss wasn’t exactly going all out.

“And Helen Mills.”

“The college girl?” Mills was a Bryn Mawr coed whom Bell had offered a summer job with the prospect of becoming a full-fledged apprentice when she graduated.

“Helen’s plenty sharp.”

“Is it true what the boys say? She decked Archie last year down in Washington?”

“Archie started it.”