Bell turned to face Antonio Branco, who asked with a mocking smile dancing across his mobile face, “What brings you to Little Italy in longshoreman’s attire?”
“A Black Hand gangster named Charlie Salata.”
“You just missed him,” said Branco. “Heavyset man with his arm in a sling, shoving people like he owns the street.”
“I know what he looks like.”
“He went behind the puppets.”
“I saw,” said Bell. “There are too many people. Too many could get hurt.”
“Your innocent Italians,” said Branco. “I’m beginning to believe that you really mean that.”
“Mean what?”
“That you can turn cafon and contadino into Americans.”
“What are cafon and contadino?”
“Barefoot peasants.”
“We’ve done it before, we’ll do it again. Meantime, what are you going to do for them?”
“I find them work. And I feed them.”
“That’s only a start,” said Isaac Bell. “You’re a man of substance, a prominente. What will you do when criminals prey on them?”
“I am not a cop. I am not even a detective.”
“Why don’t you get behind your White Hand Society?”
“That did not work out so well, did it?”
Bell said, “Do it in a bigger way. Put in more money, put in more effort, use your talents. You’re a big business man; you know how to organize. You might even make it a national society.”
“National?”
“Why not? Every city has its Italian colony.”
“What an interesting idea,” said Antonio Branco. “Good night, Detective Bell.”
“Do you remember the knife you pulled on me in Farmington?”
“I remember the knife I opened to defend myself.”
“Was it a switchblade? Or a flick-knife?”
Branco laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You have the manner of a man born to privilege. Am I correct?”
“Assume you are,” Bell said.
“I laugh because you think an immigrant laborer would dare carry an illegal weapon. Your government called us aliens—still does. A switchblade or a flick-knife would get us beaten up by the police and thrown in jail. It was a pocket knife.”
“I never saw a pocket knife open that fast.”
“It only seemed fast,” said Branco. “You were young and afraid . . . So was I.”
16
A voice in the dark shocked Tommy McBean out of his sleep.
“What?”
“Listen.”
“Who the hell are you?” McBean reached for the gun under the pillow. It wasn’t there. That’s what he got for going to bed drunk in a strange hotel with a woman he never met before. She was gone like his gun. Big surprise. She had played him like a rube.
Boiling mad, ready to kill with his bare hands, if he could only see the guy, he sat up in bed and shouted, “What do you want?”
“We have cow horns.”
“Oh yeah?” Tommy shot back. “You have my dope? Who the hell are you going to sell it to?”
“We have buyer who pay-a top doll-a.”
The guy talked like an Eye-talian. Another damned guinea. More every day. “Who?”
“Top doll-a.”
“Who, damn you?”
“You.”
“Me? What are you talking about?”
“We no steal your heroin.”
“You just said you did.”
“We no steal it. We kidnap it.”
McBean swung his feet to the floor. Cold steel pressed to his forehead. He ignored it and made to stand up. Then he felt a needle prick between his ribs, and the voice in the dark said, “I’m-a four inches from inside your heart.”
McBean sagged back on the bed. “Ransom? You’re holding our dope for ransom?”
“You make-a distributor system. You sell it.”
“You ‘make-a’ war on us.”
The Italian surprised him, saying, “You win-a the war.”
“Better believe it.”
“Not how you think. You make-a Fordham College. You make-a Boston University. Me? Steamer Class for stupid dago.”
“What are you gassin’ about?”
“I have more hungry men than you. Micks move up. Dagos just start. Ten years, you all be college men. Ten years, we own the docks.”
“You’ll never own the docks.”
He laughed. “We make-a side bet. After you pay-a ransom.”
“What if I don’t?”
“We dump drugs in river.”
“Geez . . . O.K. How much?”
“Half value.”
“I gotta talk to my cousin.”
“Ed Hunt said no deal.”
“Ed already said no deal? Then no deal.”
“Hunt died.”
“Ed’s dead?”
“Do we have deal?”
Tommy McBean could not imagine Ed Hunt dead. It was like the river stopped. And now the Wallopers was all on him.
“What killed him?”
“It looked like a heart attack.”
Antonio Branco walked from the waterfront to Little Italy.
They would be bloody years, those ten or so years to take the New York docks. The Irish would not let the theft of their drugs and the killing of Hunt go by without striking back. Chaos loomed and pandemonium would reign.
At Prince Street, he went into Ghiottone’s Café, as he often did. The saloon was going strong despite the hour. Ghiottone himself brought wine. “Welcome, Padrone Branco. Your health . . . May I sit with you a moment?”