Branco made a show of tracing the lines with his pencil. He pretended to struggle with long words and skipped the short ones. “Foreman Jake . . . Stratton . . . injured fatal when Bridgeport water tunnel caved. He leaves wife Katherine and children Paul and Abigail. Four Italians also died.”
The cop disappeared around the corner. The earlier crowds had thinned, and the few people hurrying home would mind their own business. Branco drove the pencil through the padrone’s cheek.
The padrone’s hands flew to his face, exposing his ribs.
Branco thrust. His pocket knife had a short blade, well under the four inches allowed by law. But the handle from which it hinged was almost as thin as the blade itself. As steel slid between bones, Branco shifted his palm behind the knife and pushed hard. The thin handle forced the blade into the wound and shoved the needle-sharp sliver as deep in the padrone’s heart as a stiletto.
Branco took the padrone’s money purse, his rings, and his toothpick and ran to the trains.
Locomotive 106 sighed and snorted like a sleeping mastiff. It was an American Standard 4-4-0 with four pilot wheels in front and four tall drive wheels as high as Isaac Bell’s shoulder. Looming above the gravel embankment where the college boys huddled, silhouetted against a smoky sky set aglow by city lights, it looked enormous.
Bell had watched every night this week. Every night, it was trundled to the coal pocket and water tank to replenish its tender. Then the railroad workers removed ash from its furnace, banked the fire to raise steam quickly in the morning, and parked it on a siding at the extreme north end of the yard. Tonight, as usual, 106 was pointed in the right direction, north toward the Canal Line, which ran straight to Farmington.
Bell told Doug to run ahead of the engine and throw the switch. Doug was a football player, strong, levelheaded, and quick on his feet, the best candidate to switch the siding tracks to the main line. “Soon as we’re through, open the switch again.”
“Why?”
“So if they notice it missing, they won’t know which way we went.”
“You’d make a fine criminal, Isaac.”
“Beats getting caught. Soon as you open it, run like heck to catch up . . . Andy, you’re lighting the lights . . . O.K., guys. On the jump!”
Bell led the way, loping long-leggedly over rails, crossties, and gravel. The other boys followed, ducking their heads. The railroad police were famously brutal, yet not likely to beat up the sons of American magnates. But if they got caught at this stunt, the Yale Chaplin would have them “rusticated,” which meant kicked out of school and sent home to their parents.
Doug sprinted ahead of the locomotive and crouched with his hands on the switch rod. Andy, whose father had put him to work backstage operating lights in his vaudeville theaters, climbed on the cowcatcher and ignited the acetylene headlamp, which cast a dull glow on the rails. Then he jumped down, ran to the back of the tender, and lighted a red lantern.
Isaac Bell vaulted up the ladder into the cab. He pulled on gloves from his satchel, passed a second pair to Ron, and pointed at the furnace door. “Open that and shovel on some coal.”
Heat blasted out.
“Scatter it so you don’t smother the fire.”
By the orange glare of the furnace, Bell compared the controls to illustrations he had memorized. Then he counted heads. All had crowded into the cab except Doug at the switch.
Bell pushed the Johnson bar forward, released the air brakes, and opened the throttle to feed steam to the cylinders. The steel behemoth shuddered alive in his hands. He remembered just in time to ease off on the throttle so it wouldn’t jump like a jackrabbit.
The guys cheered and slapped him on the back. It was rolling.
“Stop!”
The railroad cop was a mountain of a man with a bull’s-eye lantern on his belt and a yard-long billy club in his fist. He moved with startling speed to pin Antonio Branco against the boxcar he had been climbing under when the cinder dick surprised him. Branco squinted one eye to a slit and shut the other completely against the blinding light.
“How many wop arms do I got to bust before youse get the message?” the cinder dick roared. “No stealing rides. Get out of my yard, and here’s something to remember me by.”
The club flew down at his arm with a force intended to shatter bone.