The Gangster by Clive Cussler (free novels .txt) 📕

called out. “Where’s Helen Mills? There you are. This is for the Secret Service. Take it to Agent Lynch. Wait a minute. Helen? . . . Excuse me, Luisa, I will be right back.” He led his intern away from the desk, out of earshot. “What’s that bulge?”

“What bulge?”

Bell pointed. “That.”

In her family’s Dupont Circle mansion, Bell had seen Helen wear the latest styles of one-color, single-piece shirtwaist suits. Here, she wore the traditional young office girl’s separate shirtwaist tucked into a trumpet skirt.

“That bulge is me.”

“Not that. That pocket pistol under the pleats. Hand it over.” He opened a big hand and waited for her to put the gun in it. “You know that Van Dorn apprentices are not allowed to carry guns.”

“It’s my father’s.”

“I’ll return it to him next time I’m in Washington.”

She checked the hammer was on an empty chamber and handed Bell the pocket pistol, butt first.

“Just for the record,” said Bell, “interns are not even permitted a nail file.”

“What if I break a fingernail?”

“Rub it on a brick wall.”

“Mr. Bell?”

“What?”

“Are you going to tell me that you never hid a gun when you were an apprentice?”

“I didn’t get caught. Go! Show Lynch . . . And Helen?”

“What is it?”

“See if you can find out something that Lynch really wants.”

“He wants to take me to Coney Island.”

Bell grinned. “Something he wants from us. Some business Van Dorns can do for him. I have a funny feeling about this counterfeiting.”

He returned to Tetrazzini.

“I will escort you personally to San Francisco on the train. When we get to San Francisco, our field office will take good care of you. Mr. Bronson, the detective in charge, is a top-notch man and happens to be a great fan of the opera. I’m told he took to his bed when you left San Francisco.”

“Mille o tante grazie, Isaac. I’m not afraid, but who can say . . . Isaac? Don’t you have a fiancée in San Francisco?”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

As soon as she left, Bell telephoned Enrico Caruso. “Would it be convenient for me to come up and see you?”

Ten minutes later, Caruso welcomed him into his suite. They had met recently in the hotel’s lower lobby bar, where residents knew to find a quiet drink in the afternoon. The tenor was only a few years older than the detective, and they had hit it off when they discovered they both had survived the earthquake uninjured.

Caruso was wearing a woolen dressing gown and had his throat wrapped in three scarves to Tetrazzini’s one. His drawing room housed an eight-foot Mason & Hamlin grand piano and a wheezing machine of tanks and nozzles that emitted clouds of steam to moisten the air. “La Voce!” he said, stroking his throat. “Do feel free to remove your coat.”

Bell did so, gratefully. Panama jungles were cooler and drier than Caruso’s suite.

The singer stubbed out his cigarette and lit a fresh one. “I missed you at my Pagliacci!”

“I was busy getting dynamited.”

“All work and no play . . .”

“Tetrazzini got a Black Hand letter.”

“I know. I told her to go to you.”

“How about you? Did you get a letter?”

“No,” the singer said. “Why do you ask?”

“If they are the same gang that kidnapped Maria Vella and are dynamiting businesses, they might be stepping up, trying to see how high they can make threats pay. Luisa is not as famous as you by a long shot. What if they’re experimenting with her to see how it works? Before they go after a really big fish.”

Caruso beamed. He had a big cheerful face with a high brow and it lit up bright as an electric headlight. “So suddenly I am a fish.”

“A big fish.”

“But of course.”

“A big fish makes a big meal,” said Bell. “They demanded four thousand from Luisa. What would they ask from you. Forty?”

“At least.”

“I will keep you posted. Archie will be standing by if you need help while I’m in San Francisco.”

“San Francisco?” Caruso smiled. “Isn’t your fiancée in San Francisco?”

“As a matter of fact, she is,” said Bell, and Caruso broke into a new song not likely to be heard at the opera:

“’Round your heart a feeling stealing

Comes to drive away regret,

When you know you’re not forgotten

By the girl you can’t forget.

“How will the beauteous Marion feel about you sharing a transcontinental railroad train with a fiery soprano?”

Bell joked back that Luisa’s maid, the formidable Rosa Ferrara, took firm charge of the coloratura’s virtue. But he was thinking that if the threat against Luisa Tetrazzini was a test of the Black Hand’s power, then when she refused to pay, they would go all out to make an example of her. And, he realized with sudden icy clarity, that the timing of the Black Hand letter was no coincidence. They knew she was traveling to San Francisco.

The farther from New York they attacked, the more threatening they would appear to future victims.

Shepherding Tetrazzini and her maid Rosa aboard the 20th Century Limited for the first leg across the continent, Isaac Bell kept a sharp eye on the gangs of immigrant laborers. Grand Central was in tumult—tracks and platforms shifted, steam shovels shaking the ground—as the demolition of the old station proceeded simultaneously with construction of the new terminal. Wally Kisley stood watch at the 20th’s gate, dressed like a drummer in a loud checkerboard suit and pretending to read a newspaper. Mack Fulton was wheeling a handcart of luggage about the platform. Archie Abbott glowered officiously in the blue and gray uniform of a New York Central conductor.

At Chicago’s LaSalle Station, where they arrived on time twenty hours later, Van Dorn operatives from the head office guarded their change of trains. They made it to Union Station and boarded the Overland Limited without threat or incident, though Bell was not happy to see newspaper headlines ballyhooing the singer’s journey across the continent. Dinner that evening was the Overland chef’s version of her famous dish, Turkey Tetrazzini, and, at Omaha, opera fans mobbed the platform and forced their way onto the train,