Read Online Blackstone and the New World by Sally Spencer - Free Book Online

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