The Gangster

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.

“It’s a Black Hand shakedown,” said the foreman. “They make ’em fork over a buck on payday.”

The lights flickered.

Every laborer in the mucking gang dropped their picks and shovels and fled down the tunnel. They ran in headlong confusion toward the shaft, splashing through the ankle-deep water, tripping on the muck car tracks, shoving and trampling each other in their panic. The foreman charged after them, bellowing to no avail.

Isaac Bell followed at his own pace. There would be a long wait for the hoist to come down the shaft and load all the men. Nor could he believe that the Hudson River had breeched a thousand feet of stone.

But when he got to the surface, rumor was rampaging through the labor camp, infecting not only the panicked Italian laborers but the Irish and German engineers, machine operators, foremen, and Board of Water Supply Police, and the Negro rock drillers and mule drivers. The Black Hand had sabotaged the siphon. The Hudson River had broken into the tunnel. Even the engineers, who should know better, were scratching their heads. Was the tunnel lost?

None of it was true, and it would be cleared up. The rock water would be pumped down, the cleft seam grouted, and the digging would continue. But, at the moment, newspaper scouts were wiring New York. On Manhattan and Brooklyn streets fifty miles away, newsboys would soon be hawking the baseless story.

“Extra! Extra!”

BLACK HAND SHUTS DOWN AQUEDUCT

WATER FAMINE THREATENS CITY

Bell cornered the pressure tunnel contractor who had welcomed the Van Dorn protection. He was a hearty, bluff, serious man with no nonsense about him. Like many of the contractors, he personally supervised his job. Was it true, Bell asked, that the likelihood of encountering water-bearing seams had been predicted?

“Between you, me, and the lamppost, diamond drill borings ahead indicated we’d run into water. Not so much it would stop excavation of the siphon tunnel, but enough to have to deal with. We knew we’d have to grout off the seam.”

“How many people knew?”

“Just a handful, and all in the ‘family’—engineers, me, fellows operating the diamond drill.”

“Could any of them have told the Black Hand?”

“I don’t follow you, Detective.”

“I showed you the letter,” Bell said. “I’m asking whether the Black Hand caught a lucky break that you hit water right after they threatened the tunnel? Or did the Black Hand know you would hit water and timed their threat to coincide with it?”

“The Black Hand extorts Italian labor, not American engineers. You can bet no one told them directly. But all it would take is one guinea a little smarter than the rest, cocking his ears for the inside word.”

Bell said, “In other words, the Black Hand rode free.”

“Truth will come out soon enough. The tunnel is doing fine.”

But Antonio Branco’s damage was done, thought Bell. The Black Hand looked powerful; the aqueduct looked vulnerable. He was hurrying from the contractor’s shack when a long-distance telephone call came in from an anxious Joseph Van Dorn, who had just returned to New York.

“Were any of our boys drowned in the flood?”

“There is no flood.”