The Gangster

Claypool waved languidly to a raven-haired beauty in no danger of violating the dress code. She hurried to him with a crystal Old Fashioned glass and a bottle of Bushmills. “Just a splash, my dear. I must be on my way.”

“Aren’t you coming upstairs?”

“Not tonight, I’m afraid. I would be too distracted to be amusing.”

He took his drink into the small library off the main room, settled into an armchair, and prayed that Culp would join him.

Claypool was “Culp’s man,” and he had heard enough to know that he had just received his marching orders. Truth be told, he had seen this coming since Roosevelt was elected in ’04. Culp was afraid. In fact, he was terrified, which made him very dangerous.

President Roosevelt was breathing down his neck. It wasn’t only that TR was leading the Progressive reform attack against monopolies, oil and railroad trusts, and stock manipulation — all sources of Culp’s booming fortune — but down in the Isthmus of Panama, Teddy was “making the dirt fly,” digging the ship canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And he had vowed, as only Teddy could — loudly and publicly — to prosecute business men who profited illegally from his canal.

Which, of course, Culp had — having financed a revolution to secure the route from friendly natives, rigged the Panama Canal Treaty to keep the canal out of the hands of those same natives, stolen millions from investors, and maneuvered Congress into paying millions more for canal rights that lined the pockets of Culp and his friends.

Claypool’s lawyers and lobbyists were working round the clock to disarm the canal time bomb. But if the President ever discovered that J. B. Culp had also masterminded the notorious Ramapo Grab — a private water company swindle that had almost won out over then-Governor Roosevelt’s Catskill Aqueduct project — Teddy would not rest until Culp was in prison.

So Claypool was not surprised that J. B. Culp wanted the President of the United States removed from office. Culp needed the President removed from office. Unfortunately, impeachment was not possible. TR might exasperate and TR might unsettle, but even voters who didn’t love him were at least fascinated, and two-thirds of the Senate was not was about to rile them by kicking out the President they had elected fair and square.

All of which meant that J. B. Culp wanted the President dead. As Culp’s behind-the-scenes fixer, it was Brewster Claypool’s job to find someone to kill him, while separating them from the crime by layer upon layer of isolation.

Unless he could talk Culp out of it.

Claypool nursed the whiskey until the glass was bone-dry, and he had almost given up hope when, at last, Culp lumbered in and loomed over his chair. He was a big man who used his bulk to intimidate.

“What are you waiting for?”

“An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?”

“My mind is made up. The man must go.”

Claypool rose to his feet. “May I point out that he’s not just a man. He is the President of the United States.”

“I don’t care if he’s the King of England. Or the bloody Pope. Or the Almighty Himself. He will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.”

“Is there no other way?”

Culp repeated, “Theodore Roosevelt will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.”

9

“Look out, Mr. Bell!” the Van Dorn front desk man telephoned Isaac Bell in the detective bull pen. “Opera singer coming at you! I had to release the electric lock before she broke down the door.”

Coloratura soprano Luisa Tetrazzini, the “Florentine Nightingale,” burst into the bull pen and embraced Bell. Despite the Knickerbocker’s steam heat, she was bundled in a coat, and her throat was swathed in an immensely long red scarf that trailed behind her. Her eyes were wild.

“Isaac!” she cried in a voice trained to carry to the back of a five-hundred-seat house. “Where is Joseph?” Knickerbocker permanent residents like her and Caruso, several theater impresarios, and the Van Dorns, shared a sort of small-town neighborliness. People dropped in to visit, lingered in hallways, and addressed each other by first name.

She was thirty-five years old, a shapely, Rubenesque dark-haired beauty with an expressive face, a love of drama, and a will of iron. She had made her American debut last year in San Francisco, before the earthquake. Caruso himself praised her voice and her acting. “Not yet a star,” he had told Bell when Bell described hearing her sing in San Francisco. “But soon! Mark my words. The world will kiss her feet.”

“Joseph,” Bell answered, “is in Washington.”

“But I am desperate. Look what they do.” She thrust a letter at him. “Open!”

Bell recognized the paper. He unfolded it and saw what he expected, the now-familiar skull and dagger and the black hand. Mano Nera was stepping up in the world, first the helpless, then the well-off, now the famous.