The Gangster

“Good-bye, Ferri.”

* * *

Ferri lit his customary candle on his way out of the church.

Antonio Branco waited in the priest’s side of the confessional, his fingers busy as a clockwork as he practiced opening and closing his pocket knife. His knee had stiffened up, cramped in the booth. After Ferri left, he limped to the poor box and stuffed fifty dollars into it, “confessional rent” for the priests he had tamed. A flight of stone steps led down to the catacomb. Before he hit the bottom step, he had worked out the kink.

A low-ceilinged passage ran between the mortuary vaults under the church. He used a key to enter the crypt at the end. He locked the heavy door behind him, squeezed between stacks of caskets, unlocked a door hidden in the back, and stepped through a massive masonry foundation wall into a damp tunnel. The tunnel led under the church’s graveyard and through another door into the musty basement of a tenement. Repeatedly unlocking and relocking doors, he crossed under three similar buildings, cellar to cellar to cellar. The last door was concealed in the back of a walk-in safe, heaped with cash and weapons. Closing it behind him, he exited the safe into a clean, dry cellar, passed by a room with an empty iron cell that looked like a police lockup but for the soundproof walls and ceiling, unlocked a final oak door, and climbed the stairs into the kitchen in the back of his grocery.

* * *

“Where’s Gold Head?”

“I don’t see him.”

The detective’s spot at the Kips Bay bar was empty.

“Where’s the coal dicks?”

Their wagon was gone. So was Red-haired’s pushcart of old clothes.

“Who’s that?” A drunk was sprawled beside the Kips Bay stoop.

Charlie Salata crossed the street and kicked him in the ribs. The drunk groaned and threw up, just missing Salata’s shoes. Salata jumped back, and looked up and down the street for the twentieth time. Where in hell were the Van Dorns? Elizabeth between Houston and Prince was the most crowded block in the city. Five thousand people lived in the tenements and today it looked like most were on the sidewalk.

“No Van Dorns? Let’s do it.”

But still Salata hesitated. It felt like a setup.

* * *

“False money,” Helen Mills reported to Isaac Bell.

The tall detective was combing black shoe polish through his hair in the back of a horse-drawn silver-vault van parked at Washington Square nine blocks from Elizabeth Street. Helen had helped him and Archie on the Assassin case last year, and Bell regarded both her and her father as friends. Raised as an Army child, she had a refined sense of rank and protocol and had concluded she would address him as “Mr. Bell” on the job.

“Counterfeiters passing the queer?”

Her eyes were bright with excitement, which Bell did not want to damp down even as he explained why it was unlikely. “Good job, Helen. If the extortionists are also counterfeiters, we’ll have stumbled upon something rather unusual.”

“Unusual?”

“There are certain kinds of crimes that don’t usually mix. The criminal who would attempt to print money is not usually the sort who would threaten violence.”

“Never?”

“I’m not saying never, which is why I want you to follow up on this very interesting lead. The Secret Service investigates counterfeiting. It takes a lot of doing to get them to talk to private detectives, but they might make an exception for you. Go find Agent Lynch. Chris Lynch. He’s their man in New York. Show him the paper. Tell him what you learned on Printer’s Row.”

To Bell’s surprise, Helen bridled.

“What’s wrong?”

She sounded indignant. “Am I supposed to bat my eyes at Lynch?”

“Bat them if you want to. Feel out the situation and act accordingly.”

“Because I must tell you, Mr. Bell, the printers think being a detective makes me fast. Two asked me to lunch, and one old geezer tried to take me to Atlantic City for the weekend.”

“I’ve not run into that problem,” said Isaac Bell. “But here’s a suggestion. Instead of batting your eyes at Lynch, try dropping your father’s name. The Secret Service might be inclined to talk to the daughter of a brigadier general.”

“Isaa — Mr. Bell, I know I’m only an intern, but I was hoping you’d put me to work in the street on this Banco LaCava job.”

“If you make that stationery nail a Black Hand extortionist, I will personally promote you to full-fledged apprentice.”

“Even before I graduate?”

Bell hesitated, imagining grim-visaged Brigadier G. Tannenbaum Mills turning purple. “I suspect your father will express strong views on the subject of leaving college before you complete your degree.”

* * *

Charlie Salata made his boys prowl Elizabeth Street for an hour.

“They’re here,” he kept saying, anxiously scanning the street, sidewalks, wagons, pushcarts, windows, rooftops, and fire escapes. “I can’t see ’em, but I feel ’em. Like I can smell ’em — what’s that kid doing?”

“Pasting playbills.”