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

was going on a raid. I had to break a date. I said I’d be away overnight, up the river.”

“Archie . . .” Bell felt his head swimming. Culp was in the clear. Culp protected Branco.

“I just didn’t think.”

“Did you tell her we were after Culp?”

“No! . . . Well, I mean, not really.”

“What the devil does ‘not really’ mean?” Bell exploded. “You either told her it was Culp or you didn’t.”

“I said it was Culp’s house. I didn’t say we were after Culp. It could have been anyone on the estate. I was sure that was the impression I left. Until—”

“Until Culp had the Sheriff and the Army Guard ambush us . . . What the devil were you thinking, Archie? . . . Sounds like you weren’t thinking.”

“Not clearly. What do you want me to do, Isaac? Should I resign?”

Isaac Bell looked him in the face. Not only were they the closest friends but Bell felt responsible for him because he had talked Archie into joining the Van Dorns. He said, “I have to think about it. And I have to talk to Mr. Van Dorn, of course.”

“He’ll fire me in a second.”

“He’s the Boss. I have no choice.”

“I should save him the trouble and quit.”

Archie should resign, thought Bell. He knew the Boss well enough to know that Van Dorn was in no mood to forgive. But he was getting the glimmer of an idea how he might turn the tables on Branco.

“You know, Archie, you’re still not thinking clearly.”

“What do you mean?”

“Pray this doesn’t get in the papers. Because if it does and your Francesca reads it, she will put two and two together and realize that the boss she ‘confessed’ to in that church is Branco. And she will also know that when Branco reads it, he will know that she knows. Branco went to great lengths to ensure that the criminals who carried out his orders could never implicate him, much less testify against him.”

“What are you saying?”

“How long will he let Francesca live?”

“I have to get to her first,” said Archie.

“We have to get to her first. She’ll know a lot about Branco’s crimes and, with any luck, what he plans next.”

“Wait a minute, Isaac. What does Branco care if Francesca exposes him? He’s exposed already.”

“When we catch him, he will stand trial, defended by the best lawyers money can buy. The prosecutor will need every break he can get. He will trade years off Francesca’s prison sentence for her testimony.”

“Prison?”

“Archie, you weren’t the first job she did for him. Just the easiest.”

36

“Where does Francesca live?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know? How could you not know where a woman you were seeing lives?”

“She never let me take her home. She was very proper.”

“‘Proper’?” Isaac Bell echoed sharply. As good as this plan was, he was still angry enough to throw Archie Abbott off the speeding train.

“Ladylike. I mean . . . modest . . . Well, you know what I mean.”

“Where would you meet up?”

“The Waldorf-Astoria.”

“How’d you manage that?” Bell asked. Archie was a socially prominent New Yorker, welcome in any Blue Book drawing room, but the Abbotts had lost their money in the Panic of ’93 and he had to live on his detective salary.

“Francesca’s quite well-off, and her husband had business at the hotel, so she has a good arrangement with the management.”

“You said you don’t know where she lives. Now you’re saying she lives at the Waldorf?”

“No, no, no. She just books us a room.”

“When were you supposed to see her next?”

“Tomorrow afternoon, actually.”

“Will she show up?”

“I have no idea.”

“I think she will,” said Bell.

“How do you know?”

“She will be curious about what you’ll tell her next.”

Again, Abbott hung his head. “How long are you going to rub salt in the wound?”

“Until I am absolutely sure that I can override a powerful impulse to knock your block off.”

Archie was late.

Francesca Kennedy had already luxuriated with a hot soak in the porcelain tub. Now, wrapped in a Turkish robe, she curled up in an armchair and let her eyes feast on the beautiful hotel room. It had a fine bureau with an etched-glass mirror, a marquetry headboard that matched the bureau, and French wallpaper. She peeked through the drapes; it was snowing again. Warm and cosy, she settled in with the afternoon newspaper.

Standing in the rocky cavern 1,100 feet under the bed of the Hudson River a week after he returns from Panama, President Theodore Roosevelt will press a key and electrically fire the blast to “hole through” the Hudson River Siphon Tunnel of the Catskill Aqueduct . . .

Footsteps were muffled in the Waldorf’s carpeted halls, and she lowered the paper repeatedly to glance at the crack under the door, waiting for Archie’s shadow to fall across the sill.

“Are you an opera singer, sir?”

Antonio Branco gave the elevator runner a dazzling smile. “If I-a to sing-a, you will-a run holding ears. No, young fellow, I only look-a like one.”

Americans scorned and despised Italian immigrants, but they were amused by well-off Italians who dressed with style. A cream-colored cape, a matching wide-brimmed Borsalino, an ivory walking stick, and a waxed mustache did the job. His masquerade wouldn’t fool a Van Dorn detective, or anyone who had met him face-to-face, but it drew salutes from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel doormen and bows from house detectives. Across the lobby and into the gilded elevator, he was questioned only by the starstruck boy running it.

“Floor, sir?”

“Sesto! That means floor seeze. Pronto!”

Francesca had worked her way to the back pages, where features were tongue-in-cheek.

A far-flung correspondent reports that our country cousins upstate in rural Orange County awakened twice this week to outlandish rumors. First, as our readers in New York and Brooklyn learned, too, the Catskill Aqueduct tunnel under the Hudson River—the so-called Siphon, or Moodna-Hudson-Breakneck Pressure Tunnel and Gauging Chamber, as the waterworks engineers dub it—was breeched by the river, flooding the tunnel and destroying all hopes of completing the aqueduct ahead of the next water famine. Happily,