The Gangster

The thick-necked Sicilian stationed just inside the front door blocked the tenement hall. A blackjack flew at his face. He sidestepped it, straight into the path of a fist in his gut that doubled him over in silent anguish. The blackjack — a leather sack of lead shot — smacked the bone behind his ear, and he dropped to the floor.

At the top of four flights of dark, narrow stairs, another Sicilian guarded the ladder to the roof. He pawed a pistol from his belt. A blade flickered. He froze in openmouthed pain and astonishment, gaping at the throwing knife that split his hand. The blackjack finished the job before he could yell.

The kidnapper on the roof heard the ladder creak. He was already flinging open the pigeon coop door when the blackjack flew with the speed and power of a strikeout pitcher’s best ball and smashed into the back of his head. Strong and hard as a wild boar, he shrugged off the blow, pushed into the coop, and grabbed the little girl. His stiletto glittered. He shoved the needle tip against her throat. “I kill.”

The tall, golden-haired man stood stock-still with empty hands. Terrified, all Maria could think was that he had a thick mustache that she had not seen when he glided out of the saloon. It was trimmed as wonderfully as if he had just stepped from the barbershop.

He spoke her name in a deep baritone voice.

Then he said, “Close your eyes very tight.”

She trusted him and squeezed them shut. She heard the man who was crushing her shout again, “I kill.” She felt the knife sting her skin. A gun boomed. Hot liquid splashed her face. The kidnapper fell away. She was scooped inside a strong arm and carried out of the pigeon coop.

“You were very brave to keep your eyes closed, little lady. You can open them now.” She could feel the man’s heart pounding, thundering, as if he had run very far or had been as frightened as she. “You can open them,” he repeated softly. “Everything’s O.K.”

They were standing on the open roof. He was wiping her face with a handkerchief, and the pigeons were soaring into a sky that would never, ever be as blue as his eyes.

“Who are you?”

“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn Detective Agency.”

2

“Greatest engineering feat in history. Any idea what it’s going to cost, Branco?”

“I read in-a newspaper one hundred million doll-a, Mr. Davidson.”

Davidson, the Contractors’ Protective Association superintendent of labor camps, laughed. “The Water Supply Board’ll spend one hundred seventy-five million, before it’s done. Twenty million more than the Panama Canal.”

A cold wind and a crisp sky promised an early winter in the Catskill Mountains. But the morning sun was strong, and the city men stood with coats open, side by side, on a scaffold atop the first stage of a gigantic dam high above a creek. Laborers swarmed the site, but roaring steam shovels and power hoists guaranteed that no one would overhear their private bargains.

The superintendent stuck his thumbs in his vest. “Wholesome water for seven million people.” He puffed his chest and belly and beamed in the direction of far-off New York City as if he were tunneling a hundred miles of Catskill Aqueduct with his own hands. “Catskills water will shoot out a tap in a fifth floor kitchen — just by gravity.”

“A mighty enterprise,” said Branco.

“We gotta build it before the water famine. Immigrants are packing the city, drinking dry the Croton.”

The valley behind them was a swirling dust bowl, mile after mile of flattened farms and villages, churches, barns, houses, and uprooted trees that when dammed and filled would become the Ashokan Reservoir, the biggest in the world. Below, Esopus Creek rushed through eight-foot conduits, allowed to run free until the dam was finished. Ahead lay the route of the Catskill Aqueduct — one hundred miles of tunnels bigger around than train tunnels — that they would bury in trenches, drive under rivers, and blast through mountains.

“Twice as long as the great aqueducts of the Roman Empire.”

Antonio Branco had mastered English as a child. But he could pretend to be imperfect when it served him. “Big-a hole in ground,” he answered in the vaudeville-comic Italian accent the American expected from a stupid immigrant to be fleeced.

He had already paid a hefty bribe for the privilege of traveling up here to meet the superintendent. Having paid, again, in dignity, he pictured slitting the cloth half an inch above the man’s watch chain. Glide in, glide out. The body falls sixty feet and is tumbled in rapids, too mangled for a country undertaker to notice a microscopic puncture. Heart attack.

But not this morning. The stakes were high, the opportunity not to be wasted. Slaves had built Rome’s aqueducts. New Yorkers used steam shovels, dynamite, and compressed air — and thousands of Italian laborers. Thousands of bellies to feed.

“You gotta understand, Branco, you bid too late. The contracts to provision the company stores were already awarded.”

“I hear there was difficulty, last minute.”