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

be treated as such. She loved money, so money she would have.

Branco shoved a rolled hundred-dollar bill through the grille. “Of course you get paid. You earned it. It took some doing to wake him up.”

“You know something?” she whispered. She turned to face the grille. “I think I’d rather do it with them when I know I’m the one that’s going to do them after—instead of just setting them up.”

“It takes all kinds.”

“And you know—”

“Enough confession,” Branco interrupted before she got wound up in a talking spree.

Though she had never seen his face, Branco had known of her since she was an ordinary streetwalker the night of her first murder—a customer who brutalized her. Her cool deliberation had so impressed him that he ordered Charlie Salata to rescue her from the cops. Francesca was a survivor who could turn on a nickel and give you the change. The instant he interrupted her, she went straight back to business.

“What’s my next job?”

Branco passed another fortune through the grille. “Confess here on schedule. You’ll know it soon.”

“I get antsy sitting around.”

“Put your impatience into preparation.” He pushed more money through the grid. “Buy clothes to drink tea at the Knickerbocker Hotel. A suitable outfit to get past the house dicks. You must look like you belong there.”

“That’s easy.”

“For you it is. You are an unusual woman.”

Branco returned to his store through the tunnels under the graveyard and the tenements.

He filled a pitcher with clean, cold water and brought it and a glass to the underground room where he had locked Ghiottone.

20

“Kid Kelly” Ghiottone heard a flood. A street main had burst, some hundreds-year-old pipe laid by the Dutchmen who used to run the city, rusting, rotting, thinner and thinner, and suddenly exploding from the pressure. Water was everywhere, spouting out of the cobblestones, flooding basements. He would drown, locked in the cell, deep in Branco’s cellar. But before he drowned, he would drink.

“Wake up, my friend.”

He woke to the same smell he had fallen asleep to—mouldering sausage and the stink of his own sweat and despair. There was no broken main, no flood. Not a drop of water. He was dreaming. But he heard water. Opening his eyes and looking about blearily, he saw Branco standing outside the cell again. He was pouring water from a pitcher into a glass. Again.

“It is time to drink.”

Ghiottone tried to say “Please.” His mouth and throat were dry as sand. His tongue was stiff, and he could barely make a noise, only a croak, like a consumptive old drunk crawling in the gutter.

“Who asked you to hire a killer?”

Ghiottone tried again to speak. His tongue filled his mouth. No sound could escape. It was buried in dust. Branco put the pitcher and the glass down on the floor. Ghiottone stared through the bars at the glass. He saw a drop hanging from the lip of the pitcher. The drop looked enormous. Branco handed him a pencil and a piece of paper.

“Write his name.”

Ghiottone could not remember how many of Branco’s pencils he had broken, nor how many sheets of paper he had ripped. He grabbed the pencil and paper and watched, astonished, as the pencil moved across the paper, scribbling, “He will not know any more than me.”

“One thing at a time,” said Branco. “His name. Then water.”

Ghiottone wrote “Adam Quiller.”

Antonio Branco read it. Adam Quiller, a fat, little middle-aged Irishman he’d seen scuttling about the district carrying messages from the alderman. Quiller did Ghiottone favors in exchange for the saloon keeper delivering Italian votes on Election Day.

“Of course. I could have guessed and saved us both such trouble. But I had to know. Here, my friend. Drink!”

He opened the bars and offered the glass.

“Kid Kelly” Ghiottone lifted it in both hands and threw back his head. The water splashed on his lips and ran down his chin. What entered his mouth and spilled down his throat was cold and delicious. He tipped the glass higher for the last drop.

Antonio Branco watched the saloon keeper’s elbows rise until they were parallel with his shoulders. The movement caused his vest to slide above the waistband of his trousers. His shirt stretched tight over his ribs.

“Have another.”

He took the glass and poured it full again. “Tell me,” he said, still holding the glass, “how would the killer be told the target?”

Ghiottone, thoroughly beaten, could not meet his eye. He tried to speak and found he could whisper. “When you give me the killer’s name, I pass it up to—”

“To Adam Quiller.”

Ghiottone nodded.

Branco frowned. “Then the target is passed all the way back down the chain? That sounds slow, cumbersome, and not private enough. I don’t believe you are telling me all the truth.”

“I am, padrone. They didn’t say how, but it would not come down the chain. They have some other way of telling him the target.”

“And the money? The fifty thousand? How does that come?”

Ghiottone straightened up. “Through me. They will send me the money when the job is done. My job is to give it to you.”

Branco handed him the glass, saying, “That makes you a very valuable man.”

Ghiottone lifted it in both hands and threw back his head. This time, most of the water entered his mouth. He swallowed, reveling in the coldness of it, and tipped the glass to finish it.

Branco stuffed the body in a sugar barrel and nailed it shut and went to his stable, where he woke up an old Sicilian groom and ordered him to hitch up a garbage cart and dump the barrel in the river. Then he went hunting for Adam Quiller.

21

Late in the afternoon, when the Van Dorn detective bull pen filled with operatives preparing for the night by perusing the day’s newspapers and exchanging information, Isaac Bell sat alone, opening and closing a pocket knife, reviewing notes in