The Gangster

From the many trains that the switch engines were making up, he picked out a fast freight headed by a powerful camelback 2-6-0 locomotive. It consisted of flatcars carrying mining machines, empty coal hoppers, and reefers of fresh beef from the Jersey City slaughterhouses. Branco judged by the number of cars, some thirty that the busy switch engines had already shunted to it, that it would soon be highballing for Pennsylvania’s anthracite coalfields — first stop, Bethlehem Junction.

He edged toward the ladder, only to be distracted by a passenger train that emerged from the Communipaw Terminal and snaked slowly through the yards, its windows a warm russet glow in the bitter cold. The hour and the 4-4-2 locomotive towing twin baggage cars, four Pullmans, and a club car, said it was probably the crack Harrisburg flyer, “Queen of the Valley.” Branco imagined the passengers settling into deep armchairs with cocktails in hand and every expectation of sleeping in their own beds by midnight. Motion of a different kind jolted him out of his reverie.

A man on foot was striding the crossties of a siding that curved beside the tower.

Switch yard brakeman? Rail cop? Hobo? Ignoring the locomotives steaming around him, he was coming Branco’s way as purposefully as a lion stalking prey through a herd of elephants. No hobo walked like that; no brakeman, either. He had to be a rail cop or, worse, an alert Van Dorn who had spotted the empty switch tower for a fugitive’s spy house.

A switch engine headlamp swept the siding. The beam blazed on a shock of white hair, and Antonio Branco recognized Isaac Bell’s Black Hand Squad detective Eddie Edwards, his face aflame with vengeance. Branco rolled off the roof, slid down the ladder, and sprinted after the Queen of the Valley.

The flyer was picking up speed even as it lumbered through countless switches that were shunting it from rail to rail out of the yard and toward the main line. He heard the detective give chase, boots ringing, running after him full tilt like a man who knew as well as Branco the treacherous footing of tracks, crossties, gravel, and ankle-snatching gaps beside switch rails.

Running as hard as he could, Branco pulled ahead of the lead baggage car, jumped for a handrail, and hauled himself onto the platform between the front of the car and the locomotive’s tender. A brakeman was hiding there in the dark, his lantern unlit, lying in wait for hobos. He swung the lantern, threatening to brain Branco with it, and shouted, “Get off!”

When caught, a hobo was expected to jump off as ordered: Go try to steal a ride on some other brakeman’s train. To resist was to bring down the wrath of the entire crew. But Branco was trapped. The Van Dorn detective was right behind him and catching up fast.

“Get off!”

The brakeman swung his lantern. Branco grabbed it, pulled hard, and used the man’s momentum to yank him across the platform and off the blind.

* * *

The brakeman flew out of the dark, straight at Eddie Edwards in a blur of pinwheeling limbs. Edwards was not surprised. Brakemen often rode hobo patrol on baggage car platforms, rousting tramps, until their train was out of the yard, and Antonio Branco had proven repeatedly he was no ordinary tramp.

The detective dodged a boot and ducked under a heavy lantern that passed so close to his skull that it knocked his hat off. The train was accelerating, the engineer unaware of the drama behind him. Edwards put on a desperate burst of speed. He pounded alongside the blind. At his feet, a switch appeared out of nowhere. He cleared the yawning slot by a miracle and swung onto the blind, one hand on a grip, the other clenched in a fist for Branco.

The platform was empty.

He looked up. Branco had climbed onto the roof.

Grabbing ironwork, Edwards jumped onto a hand-brake wheel, muscled his way up between the front of the baggage car and the tender, and hauled himself onto the sloping end of the roof.

The roof was empty.

He whirled his head, thinking Branco was on the tender about to smash him with a lump of coal. But the tender was empty, too. He looked down at the empty blind. Where had the gangster gone? Only one place. Off the train. He must have jumped out the other side of the blind, back into a yard full of rail cops and angry detectives.

* * *

Antonio Branco climbed a slope out of the Jersey Central rail yards into a neighborhood condemned by the ever-expanding railroad and raced across town through dark streets of boarded-up tenements. Of the four lines he had seen leaving the city, there was one to the north of the Queen of the Valley’s Harrisburg line. It was the Scranton line — the line he had wanted all along but did not want the Van Dorns to know he was riding. When he reached it — down an embankment and over a fence — he looked for the train he had chosen earlier.