Isaac Bell surveyed the destruction from a roof across Prince Street. The Mayor had put the Health Department in charge of removing rubble to search for bodies. Scores of city workers were digging, shifting, and loading their finds into wagons.
“How,” Bell asked, “did the gas penetrate three entire buildings before it exploded?”
The tall detective was flanked by explosives expert Wally Kisley and Gang Squad chief Harry Warren. They hovered at his elbows, braced to grab hold if he fell over. Bell shrugged them off and took a long, hard look.
Branco’s Grocery had occupied two lots, fifty feet of street frontage. Three side-by-side tenements, each twenty-five feet wide, measured another seventy-five feet. The explosion had leveled one hundred twenty-five feet of buildings and fifty feet of graveyard. As Kisley had put it when Bell walked out the hospital’s back door, “One hell of a bang.”
Now, looking down from the rooftop, Kisley did not sound entirely comfortable with his explanation about the scale of destruction. “Thing is, Isaac, they build tenements in rows, several at a time. The walls are made of brick, but they leave man passages so the workmen can move easily between them. When they’re done building, they fill the holes with scrap material and lightly plaster them over. Not much to stop gas from seeping through.”
“How did Branco set it off and escape with his life?”
“Could have left a timing device to spark it off. Could have laid a fuse.”
Bell turned to Harry Warren. “I want you to investigate where and how Branco’s legitimate businesses connected to the underworld.”
“I’ve been looking at that ever since you first brought it up,” said Warren. “I still can’t find a single complaint about fraud or extortion. Branco ran his grocery business clean as a whistle.”
Kisley interrupted. “It’s like he was two entirely different people: a crook, and a choirboy.”
“Then why didn’t the crooked outfits attack him?”
“Only one thing would stop them,” said Warren.
“Fear,” said Bell.
Warren nodded emphatically. “Somehow, lowlifes knew better than to mess about with Branco.”
“But if no one ever saw him with crooks, how did he give orders? He controlled gangs: Black Hand gorillas, drug smugglers, and counterfeiters. For that matter, how does he command them now while he’s on the run?”
“I don’t know, Isaac.”
Another question puzzled Bell.
“Why did he blow up the building?”
“He ambushed us.”
“No. He could not know precisely the moment we were going to break down his door. He just got lucky with us charging in, just like we got lucky not getting killed . . . And if you guys don’t let go of my elbows I’ll break your arms! I’m fine . . . Why did he blow it up?”
“To hide evidence.”
“What evidence? I already had him dead to rights at the Singer Building. He planned this ahead of time. He was ready to run when he had to.”
Bell traced, again, the long line of destruction, the mound of rubble that had been Branco’s store, to the taller heap of the tenements, down to the graveyard, and past the uprooted bones. The church itself was unscathed. Even its stained glass windows were intact. He still thought it remarkable how far the gas traveled.
“I want to know who owned those tenements . . . Keep greasing Health Department palms. Slip some of our boys onto their pick and shovel crews. Get a close look at everything they dig out. And call me the instant I can inspect what’s left of Branco’s cellar.”
“Enrico,” said Isaac Bell when he lured Caruso to the Knickerbocker’s cellar bar for a glass of champagne, “you’re Italian.”
“Guilty,” smiled the opera singer. “But, first, I am Neopolitan.”
“Let me ask you something. What drives a Sicilian?”
“A hundred invasions. Countless tyrants. They’ve triumphed by their wits for three thousand years. Why do you ask?”
“I’m reckoning how Antonio Branco thinks.”
“Sicilians think for themselves—only themselves.”
“When I asked Tetrazzini on our way to San Francisco, she called them ‘bumpkins from down south.’ Primitive peasants.”
“Never!” Caruso roared, laughing. “Tetrazzini’s from Florence, she can’t help herself. Sicilians are the direct opposite of primitive. They are sophisticated. Strategic. Clear of eye, and unabashedly extravagant. They see, they understand, they act—all in a heartbeat. In other words—”
“Never underestimate them,” said Bell.
“There isn’t a law written they don’t despise.”
“Good,” said Bell. “Thank you.”
“‘Good’?”
“Now I know what he’ll try next.”
“What?” asked Caruso.
“Some unsuspecting bigwig is about to get a Black Hand letter. And it will be a Black Hand letter to end all Black Hand letters.”
Archie hurried into the bar. Peering through the gloom of Caruso’s cigarette smoke, he spotted Bell, and whispered urgently, “Research says Branco owns the shell company that controls the shell company that owns the tenements next door to his grocery.”
32
The Health Department laborers excavating the Branco’s Grocery wreckage went home at night, leaving only a watchman in charge now that the bodies of all the missing had been removed. Wally Kisley and Harry Warren bribed him. They stood guard at the burned-out stairs that had descended from Branco’s kitchen to the cellar.
Isaac Bell climbed down a ladder with an up-to-date tungsten filament flashlight powered by improved long-lasting, carbon-zinc dry cell batteries. He played its beam over a tangle of charred timbers and broken masonry and was surprised to discover a back section had somehow withstood the collapse of the building’s upper tier.
The flashlight revealed the walls of a room that was still intact. It was a remarkable sight in the otherwise chaotic ruin. The mystery was solved when Bell saw a square of vertical iron bars that had supported the ceiling. The bars formed what looked like a prison cell. Then he saw a hinged door and lock and realized that it was indeed a jail cell or holding pen. Installed by labor padrone Branco to enforce
