The Gangster

Forrer’s face was suddenly aglow with admiration. The long-legged, dark-haired Helen Mills raced into Forrer’s office like a whirlwind. “There you are, Mr. Bell. Hello, Mr. Forrer. Mr. Bell, Mr. Kisley and Mr. Fulton told me to tell you we found Ernesto Leone.”

“Where is he?”

“On the waterfront. 40th Street and Eleventh.”

Bell was already moving through the door. “What’s a counterfeiter doing on the waterfront?”

“Mr. Kisley said he hoped you could figure that out.”

14

Isaac Bell rushed from the Knickerbocker Hotel, caught a crosstown trolley, stepped off when it got hung up in traffic at Tenth Avenue, and hurried down to Eleventh Avenue. Spying a seamen’s shop, he draped his business suit with a secondhand watch coat and removed his derringer from his hat, which he traded for a canvas cap and longshoreman’s loading hook. Three minutes after bursting into the shop, he was dashing down Eleventh Avenue.

Kisley and Fulton met him at 40th Street.

“We got a tip Leone’s been holed up in that rooming house since yesterday. We saw him come down to eat breakfast in that lunchroom, then right back inside. Haven’t seen him since.”

Mack said, “He’s a nervous wreck. He may have made us coming out of breakfast.”

“What’s he doing here?”

“Could be waiting for something to be smuggled off a freighter. Engraving plates from Italy, maybe. There’s a boat in from Naples at Pier 75.”

“There he is!”

Bell saw a thin, dark man edge from the building like a rabbit sniffing the wind.

“I’ll take him. You boys hang back.”

Bell turned away and watched the man’s reflection in a window. Leone hesitated. He looked on the verge of running back into the building. He jerked a watch from his pocket, stared at the time, pocketed the watch, looked around again. Shoulders hunched, he set off briskly toward the river.

The sidewalks were crowded with longshoremen and sailors and streetwalkers. Bell had little trouble staying out of sight as he shadowed him. He followed Leone across 40th Street to where it ended at a basin just above the 37th Street Pennsylvania Railroad Freight Station. The counterfeiter worked his way down the bulkheaded shore back up to 39th Street and suddenly darted to the water’s edge.

Bell saw a boat turn into the slip between the finger piers and arrow toward him. It was a fast steam lighter of the type that delivered provisions to the ships. From the freight pier, two men raced after Leone, their dark features at odds with the neighborhood of fair hair and blue eyes. Leone climbed awkwardly onto the timber apron at the water’s edge. The two men followed him and helped him down to the lighter.

Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton caught up with Bell.

“Those are Charlie Salata gorillas.”

Salata’s gangsters jumped aboard with Leone. The lighter backed into the slip, turned around, and disappeared onto the smoky river.

“Now where’s he going?” said Kisley.

Fulton said, “Out of here before the Irish mob ’em, if they’ve got any sense.”

Bell pointed at the railroad pier. “Go get the dispatcher to telephone the Harbor Squad. Roundsman O’Riordan ought to be at Pier A. Then call the office. Tell ’em to run down Eddie Edwards; he’s working with the New York Central. And warn Harry Warren to watch the Salata hangouts in case they’re headed to Elizabeth Street.”

* * *

A livestock boat with tall, slatted sides nosed out of the coal smoke that shrouded the Hudson River. Tugboats shoved it into a Pennsylvania Railroad freight slip. Beef cattle lowed anxiously as deckhands moored it to the pier.

Ed Hunt and Tommy McBean, cousins who ruled the West Side Wallopers, a waterfront gang that preyed on merchant ships and railroad cars, waited inside a delivery wagon for the cows to unload. Hunt and McBean were taking a shot at big-time drug smuggling. A gang brother who had fled the cops and surfaced in Texas had a scheme to smuggle Mexican heroin in hollowed cow horns. The cousins had fronted the dough. Now all they had to do was wait ’til the cows were under cover to take their horns.

They passed the time writing a Black Hand letter to an Italian shopkeeper who could afford to fork over a thousand bucks if sufficiently frightened. They were New York Irish through and through, but you didn’t have to be Italian to send a Black Hand letter. Spreading paper on a barrelhead, they labored by the light of the van’s roof hatch. McBean illustrated it with skulls, knives, guns, and a black hand. Hunt scrawled the threats. They bantered in vaudevillian Italian accents.

“You pay-a de mon-ee?”

“How mooch-a?”

* * *