The Gangster (36 page)

“Get up there! He’s on his way.”

They scrambled out of the ditch and raced to the road. Head still bowed, hat brim shadowing his face, eyes fixed on his boots, and slouching to disguise his height, Antonio Branco struggled to keep up, limping like an old man.

The foreman urged them into line, then swaggered into the road and cupped his hands to his mouth.

“Listen, all a youse,” he bawled, beckoning the young laborer he used to translate orders on the job. “Tell ’em, when the President comes by, take off your hats and cheer real loud.”

The translator rendered the order into Italian.

“If, God forbid, the President was to take it in his head to stop
and talk to you, hold your hat over your heart and nod your head and give him a big smile.”

The translator repeated that.

“When he speechifies, tell ’em watch me. When I clap, they clap hands like it’s an Eye-talian opera.”

The Irishman pantomimed applause.

“And the second after the President goes down the shaft, I want to see a stampede of guineas running back to work.”

Antonio Branco wedged his way toward the front of the crowd on a path surreptitiously cleared by Black Hand gorillas. They were dressed convincingly as laborers, but the legitimate pick and shovel men instinctively steered clear of them. Branco stationed himself in the second row, where the crowd was thickest, just behind the organ grinder.

The organ grinder reached inside the instrument and shifted the barrel sideways to change the tune. Then he resumed turning the crank that made the barrel move the keys and the bellows blow air in the pipes. His monkey, costumed for the occasion like a Roosevelt Rough Rider in a polka-dot bandanna and blue shirt, went back to work catching pennies in a miniature slouch hat.

The immigrants lining the road exchanged puzzled looks. Instead of the familiar romantic strains of “Celeste Aida” or a rollicking tarantella, the street organ piped out a lively American march.

Only laborers who had been in America long enough to have worked digging the New York Interborough Rapid Transit
subway back in ’04, recognized a Republican campaign song bellowed by Roosevelt voters.

“Il Presidente!”
they explained to later arrivals.
“Il Presidente canto.”

The translator shouted the title of the song.

“‘You’re all right, Teddy!’”

Isaac Bell strode up and down the road leading to the siphon tunnel shaft.

They had built a reviewing stand near the shaft house and hung it with bunting that flapped cheerfully in the bitter wind. The stand was packed with contractors and city officials in overcoats and top hats. Luisa Tetrazzini and Enrico Caruso huddled there, both barely visible wrapped in woolen mufflers. Italy’s elegant white-haired Consul General for New York City sat between the opera stars, beaming like he had won the Lottery.

Wally Kisley hurried after Bell to report on the booby trap he had defused. He thought that the hard-driving young detective looked as if he were hoping he could somehow search out the intentions in every one of the thousand faces before the President arrived.

“Isaac!”

Bell cut Kisley off before he could say another word.

“Look inside that street organ. It’s big enough to hold a bomb, and the auto’s going to pass right in front of it.”

“On my way . . . Then I got to talk to you.”

“Take Harry Warren to talk Italian to the organ grinder. If the old guy’s scared we’re stealing his livelihood, it’ll start a riot.”

Warren engaged the organ grinder in conversation and finally persuaded him to stop cranking for a moment. Kisley looked it over, inside and out. He felt under it and leaned down to inspect the leg that propped up the heavy instrument. When he was satisfied, he nodded his O.K. and stuffed a dollar into the monkey’s hat. Then he hurried back to Bell and paced alongside him while he described the booby trap in the pressure tunnel.

“How’d you spot it?” Bell’s eyes were flickering like metronomes.

“I’d seen it before . . . But here’s the funny thing, Isaac. It was sloppy work.”

Bell looked at him, sharply. “What do you mean?”

“It could have gone off at any moment. Before the President even got down in the tunnel.”

“But you told me they were masters of dynamite.”

“Either these ones weren’t or they got lazy.”

“Or,” said Bell, “they’re blowing smoke to lull us. Archie found a Springfield rifle in a sniper hide.”

“Just sitting there?” asked Kisley.

“In a closet.”

“I don’t mean to take away from Archie’s investigative talents, but that sounds a little too easy.”

“Archie thought so, too. He didn’t believe the rifle. You don’t believe the booby trap. I don’t believe either. So far all we see is what Branco wants us to see.”

Walter Kisley said, “So what does he
not
want us to see?”

“I still say he’s going to do it in close. But I still don’t know how.”

“And here comes Teddy. “

Isaac Bell had already spotted the White Steamer creeping through the throng. The auto was wide open, its top down, with President Roosevelt clearly visible in the backseat. The chief of his Secret Service corps was driving. Joe Van Dorn was up front with him, riding shotgun.

Bell broke into a long-legged stride.

“Slow down,” ordered the President. “They’ve been standing hours in the cold waiting to see me. Let them see me.”

The chief exchanged wary glances with Van Dorn.

“Slower, I say!”

The chief shifted the speed lever to low. The White slacked to a walking pace.

Van Dorn loosened the firearm in his shoulder holster for the fourth time since they arrived at Cornwall Landing and the President ordered the top lowered. The only good news—other than knowing he had his top detectives in the case—was the height of the Steamer. The auto rode as high off the ground as a stage coach, which meant that criminals and anarchists intending to jump into the open auto had some climbing to do. Otherwise, the
attacker held every advantage: surprise; a mob of people to spring from and melt back into; the automobile’s glacial pace; and the victim’s open heart.

The President was grinning from ear to ear. The car rolled slowly between applauding rows of engineers and contractors’ clerks and machine operators, who poured into the road behind the automobile and followed in the parade the President had demanded. Next were Negro rock drillers, cheering mightily.

“Honk the horn for them, Joe!” TR shouted. “The Spaniards called our colored regiments ‘Smoked Yankees,’ but the Rough Riders found them to be an excellent breed of Yankees covering our flanks.”

Van Dorn stomped on the rubber bulb and the White let loose a gay
Auuuugha!

The rock drillers peeled out of their rows and joined the march.

Ahead waited legions of mustachioed, swarthy Italian laborers in brimmed hats. They were quiet, lining the road six deep on either side. But they smiled like they meant it, and Van Dorn had the funny thought that by the time the celebrity President got through with them, he’d convert them all to the Republican Party.

When Roosevelt heard their street organ, his grin doubled and redoubled.

“Do you recognize the tune that organ grinder’s playing?”

“‘You’re all right, Teddy!’” chorused Van Dorn and the Secret Service chief.

“Bully!” shouted the President. His fist beat the time on his knee and he broke into song.

“‘Oh! You are all right, Teddy!

You’re the kind that we remember;

Don’t you worry!

We are with you!

You are all right, Teddy!

And we’ll prove it in November.’

“Stop the auto! I’m going to thank these people personally.”

The President jumped down from the White Steamer before it stopped rolling.

Van Dorn and the corps chief flanked him instantly. Too excited to wait to join the end of the parade, the crowd surged at them from both sides.

“Did you see what that monkey’s wearing?”

Van Dorn was trying to look in every direction at once. “What was that, sir?”

“The monkey’s hat!” said Roosevelt. “He’s wearing a Rough Rider’s hat . . . Chief! Fetch that Consul General.”

“I can’t leave your side, sir.”

“Hop to it, man. I need a translator.”

Suddenly, Isaac Bell was there, saying, “I’ll cover.”

“Of course,” whispered Antonio Branco when Isaac Bell materialized in the space vacated by the Secret Service bodyguard. “Where else would you be?”

Then the crowd pushing forward blocked his view of the President. At the same time, it blocked Bell’s view of the elderly Sicilian groom cranking the street organ. With every eye fixed on
President Roosevelt, it was all the cover Branco needed. He slipped in front of the old man and took the crank in his right hand and the monkey’s chain in his left. Not a note of music was lost, and a gentle tug of the chain made the animal jump on his shoulder, having learned in just a few days that its kindly new master would reward it with a segment of an orange.

“Step back, both of you,” ordered the President.

“Mr. President, for your safety—”

“You’re too tall. You make me look like a coward. These are hardworking men. They won’t hurt me.”

Roosevelt grasped hands with the nearest laborer. “Hello there. Thank you for building the aqueduct.”

The laborer whipped off his hat, pressed it to his heart, and smiled.

“I know you don’t understand a word I just said, but you will when you learn English.” He pumped his hand harder. “The point is, building this aqueduct with the sweat of your brow will benefit all of us.”

Roosevelt grabbed the next man’s hand. “Hello there. Thank you. You’re doing a bully job.”

“Bully!”
echoed the laborer.
“Bully! Bully! Bully!”
And Isaac Bell saw that if Roosevelt hadn’t been sure of his welcome, he was now. Beaming like a locomotive headlamp, he grabbed more hands. They were almost to the organ grinder.

“Where the devil’s that translator?”

“I see him coming,” said Bell.

The chief of the Secret Service protection corps was gripping
Italy’s Consul General for New York City like a satchel. Both were gasping for breath from their hard run.

“Mr. President, it is a great honor—”

“I want you to translate to the organ grinder that I am deeply touched that he played my campaign song and dressed his monkey in a Rough Rider hat. That takes the kind of clear-eyed gumption that makes a top-notch American . . . Boys,” he shot over his shoulder at Isaac Bell and Van Dorn. “I told you to stand back. You, too, chief. Give these Eye-talians a chance to enjoy themselves.”

He threw an arm around the Consul General and plowed ahead. “Tell him I had a monkey friend living next door when I was a little boy. I always wanted one, but I had to settle for Uncle Robert’s. Tell him I like monkeys, always have . . . There he is! Hello, monkey.”

The little animal tugged off its hat and held it out.

“Bell? Van Dorn? You have any money?”

In the midst of the tumult, Isaac Bell smelled shoe polish again and this time he knew why. It had nothing to do with an eight-day stupor and everything to do with the memory of smelling an organ grinder’s monkey on Elizabeth Street while he was disguised with black shoe polish in his hair. And he knew now what set off the memory: the zoo smell in Antonio Branco’s room at Raven’s Eyrie.

President Roosevelt dropped Joseph Van Dorn’s coin into the monkey’s hat and reached out to shake the organ grinder’s hand. The bent and grizzled old man sprang to his full height, whipped open a knife, and thrust.

Isaac Bell stepped in front of Theodore Roosevelt.