Then the floor collapsed under his feet and the ceiling tumbled down on his head.
BOOK III
Storm King
26
The streets were crawling with cops and Van Dorns.
Antonio Branco stepped from a tenement doorway, hurried twenty feet to Banco LaCava, and tapped his signet ring on the glass. David LaCava looked up from the gold he was stacking in his show window. Branco watched his expression and got ready to run. LaCava saw Branco. He gaped, shocked. Then relief spread across his face and he ran to unlock the door.
“You’re alive!”
Branco pushed through and closed it behind him.
“They said you were missing in the explosion.”
Branco made a joke to lull the banker. “Almost as bad. I was upstate in the Catskills.” Then he turned fittingly grave. “I came back on the night boat. I only heard of the explosion this morning when we docked.”
“How bad is it?”
“I couldn’t see. The cops and firemen and sewer and building departments are squabbling over who commands the recovery. Fortunately, none of my people were in my building. But they say some poor souls are trapped in the tenements.”
“There’s a rumor Isaac Bell was in the building.”
“I heard that, too—God knows what he was doing there. Here! Take these.” He thrust a wad of paper into LaCava’s hands.
“What is this?”
“Receipts and bills of lading for a pier house full of wine I stored on West 21st Street. You can see my situation. All my store stock is lost. I need to borrow cash to fill orders for the aqueduct.”
“Is Prince Street insured?”
“It will take time to get the money and I need to buy new stock now. Total these up; you’ll see the wine’s worth fifty thousand. Can you advance me thirty?”
“I wish I could, my friend. I don’t have that much on hand. My depositors are only trickling back.”
“Whatever you can lend me right now . . . Immediately.”
Ten minutes after the grocer left with a satchel of cash, grim-faced detectives from the Van Dorn Black Hand Squad burst into the bank.
“Have you seen Antonio Branco?”
David LaCava said, “You just missed him. May I ask, is there any word on Mr. Bell?”
“No. Where did Branco go?”
“To buy stock. He has orders he must fill for the aqueduct.”
Harry Warren and Eddie Edwards stared at the banker.
“Aqueduct?” Warren echoed.
“What are you talking about, Mr. LaCava? Branco’s not filling orders; he’s on the run.”
“What do you mean?” asked LaCava.
“The thieving murderer blew up his own store,” said Warren.
“We hoped he was buried in it,” growled Eddie Edwards. “But someone saw him on the street headed this way.”
LaCava turned paper white as the blood drained from his face. “Basta!”
Harry Warren gripped the banker’s shoulder. “What’s wrong?”
“I didn’t know. Everybody said it was an accident.”
“‘Everybody’ was wrong. He blew it up, along with three buildings next door and half the graveyard.”
“I just lent him twenty thousand dollars . . . But I have these! Don’t you see? Collateral. You are mistaken. He is Antonio Branco. He has the Catskill Aqueduct contract.”
“Honest as the Lottery?”
“But these bills of lading—”
The Van Dorn snatched them out of his hand.
Clad like a rich merchant, in a blue topcoat, a red scarf, and a derby hat, Antonio Branco tallied wine barrels on a Hudson River freight pier at 22nd Street. Stevedores were rolling them up the gangway onto a coaster about to sail for Philadelphia. The ship’s captain stood beside Branco and they counted the barrels together. When the last were stowed in the hold, the captain gave Branco bills of lading attesting that the fifty-thousand-dollar cargo was aboard his ship.
Branco hurried two blocks to a wine broker who had already agreed to buy the bills of lading at a discount. Then he took the ferry across the river to Jersey City and walked to a laundry that served the working class neighborhood. The proprietor, a tiny old Chinaman with a misshapen face and a blinded eye, sorted through paper-wrapped packages of clothes never picked up and sold him a pair of rugged trousers, a short coat, and a warm watch cap that wouldn’t blow off in the wind.
A thoroughly disgusted Harry Warren stared long and hard at the empty slip from where a coaster had departed an hour earlier. Eddie Edwards stomped out of the pier house, looking equally fed up.
“First the ice-blooded scum takes LaCava for twenty grand cash. Then he sashays across town, big as life, and leaves the pier here with fifty grand in bills of lading, according to the clerk in the pier house, for the same wine that he can turn to another quick thirty thousand cash—bills of lading being damned-near legal tender.”
“On the lam with enough money to charter a private train.”
“Or an ocean liner.”
The detectives exchanged another black look, knowing that neither had exaggerated the value of Branco’s haul. Fifty thousand dollars would buy a country estate, with servants, gardeners, gamekeepers, and a chauffeur to drive the lucky owner home from the railroad station.
“Now what?”
“Jersey City.”
“What’s there?”
“Fellow in there sent a boy after him. One of the bills had fallen off the pile. The kid spotted him on the ferry too late. It was pulling out of the slip.”
Branco changed clothes in the Jersey Central Communipaw Terminal men’s room and left those he had been wearing by a church, where some tramp would run off with them soon enough. He bought a surplus Spanish-American War rucksack to carry his cash and field glasses and ditched his fancy leather satchel. He gorged on a huge meal in a cheap lunchroom and rented a room in a ten-cent lodging house. He studied freight and passenger train schedules. Finally closing his eyes for the first time
