The Gangster

The safe’s walls were pockmarked. Twisted metal and charred wood littered the floor. Exploding ammunition had destroyed Branco’s cache of shotguns and revolvers. Those explosions, or the original gas explosion, had buckled and shifted the back wall of the safe. It hung at a drunken angle, and when Bell looked closely, he saw another set of hinges. A door — an odd thing to find in what should be an impregnable wall.

His light began to fade. “New and improved” aside, it was still only a flashlight and couldn’t last for long. He switched it off, to conserve the D cells, and felt the hinges with his hands. There was definitely a door at the back of the safe.

Bell gripped the edge with both hands and pulled it inward. Then he switched the light on again and peered behind it. All he could see was thickly packed debris, brick, wood, and plaster. Just as he doused the flashlight again to conserve the last of its power, he glimpsed a roughhewn stone wall rimming both sides of the door and he realized he was looking into what had been an entrance cut into the basement of the tenement building behind Antonio Branco’s grocery.

* * *

“Now we know,” Isaac Bell told Kisley and Warren, who were waiting at the top of the ladder, “how the gas traveled so far before it exploded. And also why Branco blew it up. It hid some kind of underground passage that ran from his place, beneath those tenements, and into the graveyard.”

“What’s in the graveyard?”

“Give the watchman more money and borrow three shovels.”

The Van Dorns picked their way across the fallen tenements, following narrow, twisting corridors burrowed by the Health Department, and emerged through a final shattered foundation. The graveyard was lit dimly by a few tenement kitchens that overlooked it and a stained glass clerestory at the back of the church.

Bell led the way over the rough earth that the explosion had plowed. The bones he had seen from the Prince Street roof had been gathered into an orderly row of coffins. The odor of fresh-sawn pine boards mingled with the pungent soil. The church and the surrounding tenements blocked street noise, and it was so quiet he could hear the whir of sewing machines in the apartments overhead.

Where the plowed ground met the grass, he said, “We’ll start here.”

Two feet down, their shovels rang on brick.

They moved back, off the grass, onto the raw earth, and dug some more.

“My shovel hit air!” said Wally Kisley. An instant later, he yelped out loud and disappeared. The ground had opened up. Bell leaped into the hole after him and landed on top of him in the dark.

“You O.K., Wally?” The explosives expert was getting too old for tumbling.

“Tip-top, when you get off me.”

Harry Warren landed beside them. “What have we here?”

Bell switched on his flashlight. “It’s another tunnel.”

* * *

They followed it for twenty feet in the direction of the church and came to a door set in a massive masonry foundation. Bell, who had a way with locks, jimmied it open. His flashlight died. Kisley and Warren lit matches. They were in a crypt, stacked with caskets.

The crypt had another door, opposite the one they had entered. Bell jimmied it open and they found themselves in a narrow, low-ceilinged passage between mortuary vaults. A bare electric light bulb hung from the ceiling at the far end, illuminating a flight of stone steps.

Bell whispered, “Wally, you cover me here. Harry, go back out, around the corner, and watch the front of the church.”

Bell mounted the steps.

He cracked open a door at the top and peered into the church. Despite the late hour, there was a scattering of worshippers kneeling in the pews. The front door was closed to the cold. The altar and choir seats were empty. Candles flickered in an alcove on the other side of the pews. There, an old woman in a head scarf waited her turn at a confessional booth, and nothing looked different than Bell would expect in an ordinary church in a city neighborhood.

He stepped back from the door and turned to start down the steps. Then he saw what looked like a cupboard door: a narrow slab of hinged wood. It was not locked. He turned sideways to fit his shoulders through the opening and stepped up into a cramped space that had a bench and grillwork that admitted light. He sat on the bench and looked through the grille into a similar booth. It had an open door through which he could see a black velvet rope that blocked the entrance from the pews.

Bell had already figured out that he was sitting inside a confessional booth. But it took a moment to orient himself. This was not the confessional where the old woman waited in the alcove across the pews but another in a corresponding alcove on his side. He sat there a few moments, pondering what it meant. The door to his side was closed. He was in the booth where the priest listened. Suddenly, a man scurried into the alcove and stepped over the rope.