‘So if it’s not a professional killing, what is your explanation?’ Meade demanded, slightly aggressively.
‘I don’t have one,’ Blackstone admitted.
‘Well, there you are, then,’ Meade said, as if he had conclusively won the argument. ‘We go with what we have.’
But it didn’t work that way, Blackstone thought.
Three more witnesses confirmed that O’Brien had entered the bar alone — and left alone — and two of them were willing to agree that the inspector had looked either excited or nervous.
But it was with the fifth witness that they really hit pay dirt.
His name was Schiller, and he was a baker.
‘I start work very early in the morning,’ he said, ‘and that is why it is my unhappy lot to go home to my bed while all my friends are still here, enjoying their drinking.’
‘So when exactly did you leave?’ Meade asked.
‘I followed the dead man to the door. I was just behind him when he was shot.’
‘You seem very calm about the whole thing,’ Meade said, with a hint of suspicion entering his voice.
‘I am sorry?’
‘You saw a man shot to death in front of you. Most people would still be pretty shaken up by that, even a day later.’
Schiller shrugged. ‘When I was a young man, I was in the Bavarian Army. In ’66, we fought a war to defend south Germany from Prussian aggression.’ He shrugged again. ‘But the Prussians won, and only five years later I fought for them, against the French.’
‘What’s your point?’ Meade asked.
‘I have seen hundreds of men — good men — die in a single day. Last night, only one man died. It was not so much.’
Blackstone nodded, knowing exactly how the man felt.
‘What happened once you were out on the pavement, Mr Schiller?’ the inspector asked.
‘The pavement? What is that?’
‘The sidewalk.’
‘O’Brien. . that was his name, was it not?’
‘Yes.’
‘O’Brien looked up and down the street.’
‘As if he was still expecting that his contact would turn up?’ Meade asked.
The German shook his head. ‘It was more as a soldier would look when he was behind enemy lines — he was checking for danger.’
‘So he must have seen his murderer coming towards him?’
‘Yes, he saw him.’
‘But he didn’t draw his revolver?’
‘No. I think he was going to, but then he saw that the person running towards him was only a junge — a boy.’
‘A boy!’ Meade exclaimed. ‘A damned boy!’
Blackstone gave his new partner a questioning look. He had no idea why the sergeant should have suddenly become excited, though it was unquestionable that he had.
‘What did this boy look like?’ Meade asked.
‘I did not see his face,’ Schiller replied. ‘It was quite dark. Besides, he was wearing a large cap, pulled down over his ears, and had a cloth of some kind covering the lower half of his face.’
‘What happened next?’
‘The boy stopped running, and took a gun out of his pocket. He fired three times and O’Brien fell to the ground,’ Schiller said, almost clinically. ‘Then the boy turned, and ran off down the street.’
‘Was he making what, when we were in the army, we would have called an “orderly retreat”?’ Blackstone asked.
‘No,’ Schiller said. ‘He was running blindly. He was very young, and cannot have killed many men. I think perhaps this was his first.’
‘The killer was a member of a gang,’ Meade said firmly once Schiller the baker had gone. ‘It’s most likely that he belongs to the Five Points Gang, though he could have been one of the Eastman crew.’
‘What makes you so sure that he was a member of a gang?’ Blackstone asked.
‘His age. This killing has all the signs of being an initiation rite — which gives us the answer to the question you were posing earlier!’
‘What question?’
‘You wondered why the killer shot Patrick O’Brien right outside a beer hall, when it would have been safer to wait until he got the inspector somewhere more secluded, didn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, initiation rites aren’t supposed to be safe — they’re supposed to be a test of the potential gang member’s nerve. This is just the sort of thing that Paul Kelly — who runs the Five Points Gang — would have come up with.’
‘Kelly,’ Blackstone repeated. ‘Is he an Irishman?’
Meade shook his head. ‘He’s an Italian, and so are most of the members of his gang. His real name’s Vaccareli, and he’s a truly vicious bastard.’
Why was Alex Meade looking so cheerful, when this new line of thinking would seem to blow his previous theory completely out of the water? Blackstone wondered.
‘So if we accept that it was an initiation rite, we must also accept that it had nothing to do with politics or corruption at all,’ he said.
‘You couldn’t be wronger about that,’ Meade told him. ‘You see, Sam, the Five Points Gang — which, as far as we know, has around six hundred members — works for the Tammany Hall political machine.’
‘In what way?’
‘In the same way that everybody else who works for Tammany does, to a greater or lesser extent. It helps to fix elections.’
‘How?’
‘In all kinds of ways. It intimidates Republican voters into supporting a straight Democratic ticket. It helps to falsify voter registration lists. It stuffs the ballot boxes with fake papers. Jesus Christ, Sam, in some wards there are more voters than there are actual inhabitants. In some wards, people who’ve been dead for ten years or more still manage to get down to the polling station to cast their votes. And that’s all down to groups of thugs like the Five Points Gang.’
‘And what does the gang itself get out of it?’ Blackstone asked. ‘Money?’
‘Oh, sure, it gets paid well enough for its dirty work,’ Meade said. ‘But more importantly, it earns itself friends in high places. And those friends are more than willing to give it the protection it needs.’
‘Protection?’ Blackstone repeated. ‘Who could an armed gang, which you say has over six hundred members, possibly need protection from?’
‘From the police!’ Meade said, as if the answer were obvious. ‘See, in between elections, the gang’s involved in prostitution, gambling, robbery, extortion — all kinds of criminal activities. We know exactly what they’re doing. But we also know that if we try to interfere, we’ll soon be out of a job. Do you see what I’m getting at, Sam?’
Blackstone nodded. ‘Wheels within wheels,’ he said.
‘Wheels within wheels,’ Meade agreed. ‘Say there are cops in Mulberry Street who can feel Inspector O’Brien breathing down their necks and are worried that any day now he’s going to arrest them. What do they do about it?’
‘They go to Tammany Hall and ask for help?’ Blackstone guessed.
‘Exactly! They go to Tammany Hall and ask for help,’ Meade agreed. ‘And somebody in Tammany will help them. Why?’
‘Because he knows that if the cops go down, the chances are they’ll be taking him with them?’
‘Spot on! So this guy from Tammany contacts Paul Kelly and his Five Points Gang, and says he wants a job doing. And it’s done — just like that! And the real beauty of it — at least from their point of view — is that the killer is three removes from the dirty cops who Patrick O’Brien was actually investigating.’
‘If that is what happened, it makes our job almost impossible,’ Blackstone said darkly. ‘Because even if we do manage to track the killer down, it’s going to be very difficult to connect him to the people who ordered the murder, since it was all done by proxy.’