The Gangster (34 page)

“We’re running out of time. Roosevelt’s going to be here in two days.”

Branco tugged his watch chain. “Two days and six hours.”

“Well, dammit, you’ll just have to give the job to your ‘gorillas.’”

“No.”

“Why not? They’re killers, aren’t they? All your talk about ‘un-plaguing’ me. Strikebreaking, getting rid of reformers, making enemies disappear?”

“Gorillas are not the tool for this job.”

“Why not?”

“They would bungle it.”

“Then you’ll have to kill him yourself.”

Branco shrugged his broad shoulders as if monumentally unconcerned. “I suspected it would come to this.”

Culp shook his head in disgust. “You sound mighty cool about it. How will you do it?”

“I’ve planned for it.”

“You’ll only get one chance. If you muddle it, you’ll force Roosevelt to hide, and we’ll never get a second shot at him.”

“I planned for it.”

“Do you mean you planned to pull the trigger all along?”

“I never planned to pull a trigger” was Branco’s enigmatic
reply, and Culp knew him well enough by now to know he had heard all that Branco would spill on the subject. Instead, he said, “Did you get the Italian Consul General invited to the President’s speech?”

Culp nodded. “Why do you want him there?”

“He will provide a distraction.”

“You don’t know yet how you’re going to do the job.”

“I have ideas,” said Branco.

Marion Morgan and Helen Mills’ report on the Underground Railroad entrance to Raven’s Eyrie emphasized the strong pro-slavery sentiments in the pre–Civil War Hudson Valley. So while the Black Hand Squad watched gates and boat landings, and undercover operatives kept an eye on the siphon tunnel, Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott climbed down from the top of Storm King Mountain. In theory, the Abolitionists’ passage for fugitive slaves would have been more safely hidden in the uphill side of the estate wall rather than in view of the busy river.

Slipping and sliding on a thin coat of ice-crusted snow, the Van Dorns descended within yards of the wall, then scrambled alongside, just above it, clinging from tree to tree on the steep wooded slope. Culp’s estate workers had kept a mown path clear of brush, but the stones were laced with ancient vines of grape and bittersweet that in summertime would have blocked any hope of spotting a break in the eighty-year-old masonry. Now that the leaves had fallen, they had a marginal chance of spotting a long-abandoned opening put back in use by Antonio Branco.

“Cunningly
concealed
,” Archie noted. “Seeing as how the neighbors would have loved to turn in Grandpa and his Quaker. Not to mention collecting the bounty on the poor slaves.”

Isaac Bell was optimistic. “Nice thing about a wall—if we can’t see in, they can’t see us poking around outside.” He was right. The two-mile wall lacked the regularly spaced turrets of a true fortress. And while the main gatehouse overlooked some of the front section—and the service entrance tower and some of the south side—neither was close enough to observe the back side.

“Are you forgetting that Mr. Van Dorn said don’t set foot on Culp’s estate?”

“As I recall,” said Bell, less worried about getting fired and more about the President being murdered, “Mr. Van Dorn said, in effect, no Van Dorn detective is to scale the Raven’s Eyrie wall again without his express permission. He didn’t say I couldn’t go through it. Or under it. Or lay a trap inside it to ambush Branco.”

“We’ve still got to find it.”

“We have two days,” said Bell.

But his optimism proved futile. They probed the full half mile of the uphill wall before darkness closed in but found nothing. “The Culps could have cemented it shut after the Civil War,” said Archie. “Or maybe the ladies turned up another quaint old Hudson Valley legend.”

In Wallabout Basin, across the East River from Manhattan, battleship USS
Connecticut
raised steam for a maiden voyage unique in the history of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Shipbuilders and sailors swarmed over her guns, searchlights, superstructure, and decks, harassed by frantic officers exhorting them to paint, polish, and holystone faster. Put in commission only two months ago, and scheduled to head south for her shakedown cruise,
Connecticut
suddenly had new orders: Convey the Commander-in-Chief forty-five miles up the Hudson River.

To the great relief of her officers, icebreakers were clearing the channel only as far as West Point. So many things could go wrong on a brand-new ship that the sooner the Navy men landed President Roosevelt at the Military Academy pier, the fewer chances of a humiliating disaster. With luck, she would steam back to Brooklyn deemed worthier than her archrival USS
Louisiana
to be flagship of an American cruise around the world—while TR toured the Catskill Aqueduct by train and auto, shaking a thousand hands.

The south wall of Raven’s Eyrie, which was closest to the main
mansion, was divided midway by the service gate tower, which overlooked long sections in both directions. The Van Dorns who peered through a spy hole in the hogshead barrel had reported seeing no gatekeeper watching at night. But Bell was taking no chances. He and Archie Abbott made a thorough search of the sections in sight of the tower before dawn. They pressed farther along the wall in daylight but found no hidden passage and no indication that one had ever existed.

The Raven’s Eyrie north wall was almost as remote as the hillside wall the Van Dorns had first searched, though here and there they could glimpse the rooftops and chimneys of a neighboring estate house. Someone watching with good field glasses might notice two men creeping through the trees along Culp’s wall. But it seemed unlikely they would pick up the telephone to warn Culp when he and Archie could easily be stone masons making repairs or the estate foresters clearing brush. They traversed the full half mile of wall and again saw no relic of the Underground Railroad. All that remained unobserved was the long wall that faced the river, but they had lost the light.

Bell told Archie Abbott, “I’m worried he’ll use a sniper. You’re the only outdoorsman on the squad. The rest are city boys. Mark off a five-hundred-yard perimeter of the road to the siphon shaft and search every possible sniper hide. I’ll take the ice yacht tomorrow.”

“We will plan my escape,” said Antonio Branco.

“Miles ahead of you,” said Culp. “My train will have steam
up and be designated a special on the Delaware & Hudson’s main line to Albany. North of Albany, I’ll have the tracks cleared straight across the Canadian border and through Lacolle.”

“Are you sure the tracks will be cleared?”

Puzzlement creased Culp’s face. Who could impede his private train? As if to a child, he explained, “The Delaware & Hudson Railroad
to
Canada owns the Napier Junction Railroad
in
Canada.”

“Yes, but how can you be sure about the Delaware & Hudson?”

“I own the Delaware & Hudson.”

“Will Customs board your train at the border?”

“My man at Lacolle handles Customs.”

Branco nodded. “What is my other option?”

“With no radiator to freeze, my air-cooled Franklin is a superior winter auto. The chauffeur repaired her. I had trunks added for tools and food. And extra tanks of gasoline and oil. She’s ready to roll.”

“What is my third option?”

Culp was getting fed up with Branco grilling him. “Won’t a train or an auto be enough?”

“I can’t count on your train. What if the Van Dorns watch your train? I can’t count on your auto. What if they watch your auto? So if your train and your Franklin become stalking horses to fool the detectives, what is my third option?”

Culp wondered what option Brewster Claypool would have come up with. Then realized that if Claypool were still around, he would be in way over his head. A wintery grin took hold of
Culp’s face, an expression that combined cold calculation, deep satisfaction, and deeper pride.

“Your third option is a beaut.”

Starting at dawn, Isaac Bell pinned his last hope of finding Branco’s secret way in and out of Raven’s Eyrie on the river side of the estate, having found nothing in back or at either end. All he had left to search was the wall that angled up from the boat landing, but the weather was not making it easy.

Squalls rampaged up from the narrows of West Point and down from the mountains. They were tight little storms, with several often in sight. The temperature plummeted moments before one struck, and visibility dropped from many miles to mere feet, warning Isaac Bell to hold on tight. Hard knots of wind-whipped snow banged his sail, threatening to stand the ice yacht up on one runner and dump him out of the car.

The latest squall raced off as suddenly as it hit. The morning sun glared on the snow-dusted hills.

Bell juggled the tiller and field glasses, keeping one eye on an enormous lateen-rigged Poughkeepsie Club boat tearing after him and the other probing the fir trees that spread from inside the wall up the slope toward the gigantic barnlike building that housed Culp’s gymnasium. A thinner group of firs and leafless hardwoods speckled the slope outside the wall.

He cut upwind of the Poughkeepsie boat, challenging it to a race, which gave him cover for a closer look. He noticed a clump of rocks in the woods and swept them with the glasses. Intrigued,
he nudged the tiller to steer too close to the wind. The sails shivered. The ice yacht slowed. The Poughkeepsie boat pulled ahead.

It was hard to tell through the trees, but the rocks appeared to be close to the wall almost as if the wall had been built on top of them. Bell glanced about. As luck would have it, a squall was dancing down the mountain. He waited for it to envelop Culp’s mansion and outbuildings, and when they were curtained by the swirling snow, he steered for the shore.

Isaac Bell ran the ice yacht off the river, crunched the bowsprit into the frozen bank, threw a line around a driftwood log, and jumped off. The wall was set back a hundred yards from the shoreline. When he ran toward it, he discovered that the trees had obscured a rough road that looped down toward the town of Cornwall Landing. It had been traveled recently. Hoofprints, manure, and wagon tracks in the frozen snow.

Bell spotted a line of footprints. Boot marks came and went from the direction of the rock formation he had seen from the boat, blended with the wagon tracks, and disappeared. Two men, maybe three. He knelt down and looked more closely.
One
man. All the tracks had been imprinted by the same soles. One man walking from the wall and back again repeatedly. Here and there, they were deeper, as if he had carried a heavy load on one of the trips from the wall.

Wind shrieked suddenly.

The squall that had enveloped Culp’s buildings had continued down the mountainside and struck like a runaway freight. Snow
and sleet clattered through the trees. Blinding bursts of it filled in the footprints and covered the wagon tracks. Bell moved quickly beside the fading footmarks and traced them through the trees to the wall. It rested, as he had glimpsed earlier, on a rock outcropping.

A branch broke from a tree with a loud crack. The heavy widow-maker scythed down through the snow and crashed to the ground beside him. More cracking noises sent him diving for cover under an overhang in the rocks. Broken branches rained down on the space Bell had vacated. Moments later, the squall raced away, the wind abated, and the sun filtered down through the treetops.

Bell peered among the dark stones that had sheltered him. He lit a match. The orange flame penetrated the dark, and Bell saw that the overhang was the mouth of a cave. He opened his jacket to free up his pistol and crawled inside.