The Gangster

The Irish foreman patrolling the edge of the ditch stopped and stared. The laborer was older than most. He still had a thick head of hair, but it was grayer than his mustache. He was shoveling fast enough, but the orders today were to report on anything off-base… what, with the President coming.

“Who you?”

The Italian kept shoveling.

“Old guinea! Who you?”

An immigrant who knew a little English nudged the new man and said in Italian, “Give him your number.”

Eyes cast down, Antonio Branco handed over his pay token.

The foreman read the numeral stamped in the brass. “O.K. Get back to work!”

* * *

A thousand feet under the river, Wally Kisley prowled the pressure tunnel looking for where in the high-ceilinged passage hewn through granite he would hide a lethal charge if he were an anarchist or a criminal. The circular roof and sides were remarkably clean and smooth, there being no need to timber the strong rock. But the muck car rails on the floor provided numerous indentations that would hide a stick of dynamite. The contractor’s men had searched hourly, accompanied by a Secret Service operative, but Kisley had been hunting clues of sabotage since they were in short pants and trusted only his own experience. He inspected what remained of the face — the last barrier of natural rock between the western and eastern halves of the boring — where the final charges had been set, awaiting only the ceremonial pressing of an electric detonator by the President.

He knelt suddenly, switched on his flashlight, and froze.

The dynamite was virtually invisible, the stick having been inserted in a hole drilled in a wooden crosstie. The blasting cap, too, was neatly camouflaged and looked like a knot in the chestnut. The trigger was the giveaway. It had been fashioned to look like the head of one of the railroad spikes that held the track to the crosstie. But whereas the heads of the other spikes nearby were shiny, having been only recently pounded into the wood with a steel maul, the one that had caught his eye was rusty.

Down on all fours, resting his cheek on the splintery tie inches from the spike, Kisley saw a space under the head. There was no nail, merely a detached head waiting to be driven into the blasting cap by the weight of the first person who stepped on it. The result would be simple physics. TNT was so stable you could run it over with a wagon and nothing would happen, but a blasting cap would go off if you looked at it cross-eyed. Jarred by the spike-head trigger, the cap would explode with the force to detonate the dynamite.

Kisley laid out his pocket tools to disarm the booby trap. He thought it was a miracle that no one had stumbled on it already.

* * *

Archie Abbott marked four possible sniper hides in the wooded slopes around the siphon shaft house, and Isaac Bell dispatched a man with a shotgun to cover each. Another man was guarding the roof of a redbrick warehouse that overlooked the road.

Abbott followed a hunch he had had all morning about an empty summer boardinghouse. It was a full seven hundred yards from the raised platform where the President would speak — an extremely long shot — but Abbott had had a feeling every time he caught the white clapboard building in the corner of his eye.

The house was as deserted inside as it looked from the outside, with dust cloths thrown over furniture and curtains folded in closets, but he prowled room by room, just to be sure, and even climbed into the attic to look for loopholes. He was making one last pass through the second floor when he noticed a table in a window. It seemed an odd place to put a table. Unless it was a rifle rest.

He found the rifle in the closet.

* * *

Eddie Edwards watched J. B. Culp’s train crew coal and water the tender. The locomotive had steam up. The cook received deliveries from a butcher wagon and a bakery.

“He’s ready to go somewhere,” he reported to Isaac Bell. “I’ve got fellows at the Delaware & Hudson and the New York Central checking whether Culp’s ordered clearance for a special. But I can’t count on them since Culp owns most of the lines around here.”

Bell asked, “Is Culp’s auto still in his garage?”

Edwards nodded. “Harry’s got little Richie up a tree with field glasses.”

* * *

USS Connecticut’s great white hull turned majestically in midstream, hauled around by tugs at her bow and stern, and before she followed her icebreaker back down the Hudson River, the battleship bid the President godspeed with a twenty-one-gun salute. The final retort was still reverberating from the hilltops when a grinning Theodore Roosevelt jumped from the 20-foot gasoline dory that had sped him ashore.

As if propelled through the air by the warship’s thunder, thought Joseph Van Dorn.