The Gangster (Isaac Bell #9)(65)

“I met a widow.”

“How old a widow?”

“Twenty-two . . . She married young.”

“Do you like her?”

“I’m besotted.”

“That’s a dangerous condition, Archie.”

“Call it infatuated.”

Marion laughed. “That’s worse.”

Archie looked at her, quite seriously. “It’s never happened to me before.”

Though younger than Archie, Marion felt that he was opening up to her like a big sister and she answered bluntly, “Besotted and infatuated imply a strong dose of foolishness.”

“I know that.”

“What’s her name?”

“Francesca.”

“Beautiful name.”

“It fits her. She is intoxicatingly beautiful.”

“Besotting, infatuating, and intoxicating? Francesca better look out for the Anti-Saloon League.”

“She doesn’t drink. Won’t touch a drop. I’ve become a teetotaler around her.” He grinned. “Drunk on love, instead.”

Marion said, “Speaking from my own experience of meeting Isaac, I can only say one word: Congratulations! I look forward to meeting Francesca.”

“Oh, you’ll love her. She’s really interesting. She can talk a blue streak about anything.”

Helen Mills met them at the Jersey City Terminal. On the ferry, she explained that Mr. Van Dorn had arranged for the Knickerbocker to move Marion into a suite with two bedrooms, the second for Helen.

“I hope you don’t mind a roommate.”

“It will be like being back at school.”

Archie escorted them to the hotel and rushed off to see Francesca.



At the end of the long shift, the hard-rock gang packed their round of bore holes with dynamite. They moved the short distance to the shaft, took cover, and shot the explosives with electric detonators. With a muffled rumble, the granite they had drilled all day was blown from the face and the siphon tunnel was put through another couple of yards. They boarded the shaft hoist cage for a lift to the surface, too tired, as one man put it, “even for drinking.”

Isaac Bell stayed below to watch the mucking crew.

Before the smoke had cleared, the muckers raced with picks and shovels to the heading and started loading the dynamited rock into cars hauled by an electric locomotive. All but their hard-driving Irish foreman were Italian laborers. Any one of them could be Antonio Branco’s saboteur. Or each could be exactly what he looked like: a hardworking immigrant shoveling his guts out for a dollar seventy-five a day.

The muckers were just finishing clearing rock when water suddenly gushed into the heading. A water-bearing seam had opened, disturbed, perhaps, by the last shift’s blast.

“Il fiume!” cried a laborer.

The others laughed, and the Irishman explained to Bell. “Ignorant wop thinks the river’s busting through the roof.”

“Why are they laughing at him?”

“They’re not as dumb as him. They know there’s nine hundred feet of shale and a hundred feet of solid granite between the roof and the river. It ain’t river water. It’s just water that was in the rocks. How much you think it’s running? Hundred gallons a minute?”

He gave Bell the broad wink of a know-it-all barfly. “Feller told me the company knew they’d hit water along this stretch, but kept it quiet. If you get my meaning . . .”

“I’m afraid I don’t,” said Bell. “I’m new here. If they knew they were going to hit water, why did they keep it quiet?”

“The way it works; they bid low to get the job, but they’ll make it back with extras. They gotta grout the water-bearing seams. And that don’t come cheap. Before they grout, they’ll need more pumps, and pipes to divert the water. Might even have to build a reinforced concrete bulkhead to fill the entire heading to keep from flooding.”

“You mean they get their cake and eat it, too.”

“That’s what the feller told me. Smart man . . .” The foreman’s voice trailed off, and he frowned. The water was running harder. Some of the other muckers who had laughed at the Nervous Nellie moments ago were looking anxious.

“Calm down, you dumb guineas. Calm down. Back to work. Calm down. No worry.”

But the laborers continued casting anxious looks at the face of the heading, where the seam gushed, and at water rising over the muck car tracks.

“Il fiume!”

Others repeated the cry. “Il fiume!”

“There’s no ‘fu-may,’ dammit,” yelled the foreman. “It’s just rock water.”

A laborer, who was older than the others, pointed with a trembling finger at the cleft in the stone where the water gushed.

“Mano Nero.”

“Black Hand?” The foreman seized a young laborer he used as a translator. “What the hell’s he talking about?”

“Mano Nero. Sabotage.”

“That’s nuts! Tell them it’s nuts.”

The translator tried, but they shouted him down. “They say someone didn’t pay.”

“Pay what?” asked Isaac Bell. It sounded like word of the Black Hand letter had trickled down to the workmen.

“The dollars we’re supposed to give from our pay,” said the translator.