Barker 05 - Black Hand Read Online Free Page A

—an exhibition, perhaps, or the arrival of a foreign dignitary. But no man is omniscient. It is impossible to stuff one’s brain with thousands of facts, adding a hundred or more daily, and expect it to automatically produce all possible connections. My employer’s reliance upon such a method, as far as I’m concerned, is a recipe for an attack of brain fever. A brain is a human organ, not a machine.
    Barker pulled the paper with the black hand from his pocket and glanced at it again while I looked over his shoulder. The writing was in English: You are a swine gorging at the trough , it read. Now you must give way so that others may get to the husks. If not, it shall go ill with you. This is your only warning .
    “I imagine this came from Clerkenwell,” he noted, tapping the letter.
    “The Italian quarter,” I replied. We were suddenly interrupted when Inspector Poole came in the front entrance and spotted us.
    “How is he?” the C.I.D. man asked, putting a foot up on one of the empty chairs.
    “We don’t know yet.”
    “Your clerk said he was stabbed in the street somewhere and must have staggered to your door. I find it hard to believe a man can be stabbed in broad daylight a street away from Scotland Yard.”
    “I slipped in the blood going into Craig’s Court,” I said, bristling. “That was real enough.”
    “Stabbed twice, your clerk told me,” he went on, ignoring me as Anderson had. “I suppose someone crept up and stabbed him from behind, then when he turned, they got him a second time in the stomach.”
    Poole acted out the motions, and being cursed with a vivid imagination, I clothed them with accompanying images.
    Barker shook his head. “No, we have a pattern here. Serafini was murdered with two shots, one to the front and one to the back. His wife was probably killed in the same manner. Etienne is a savateur, a seasoned fighter. Being stabbed in the back would not stop him from defending himself. I think it more likely he was stabbed simultaneously in a surprise attack. It was why he said ‘front and back’ to us. He was defending his reputation as well as warning us to expect such an attack ourselves.”
    “Hold on. You’re going too fast,” said Poole, who was scribbling in his notebook.
    “You need lessons in Pitman’s shorthand,” I recommended, but all I received for my solicitous advice was a rude stare.
    “You think Gigliotti is mixed up in this?” Poole went on.
    “Not yet, but he knows about the Serafinis.”
    “Oh, that’s just what we need,” Poole said. “An Italian gang war. At least they only kill one another.”
    “Terence,” my employer pointed out, as if he were a child, “the fact that we are here now proves they’ve gone beyond killing one another. Bledsoe was a member of the gentry.”
    “Blast. I suppose you’re right, but they’re all Latins, hot-blooded.”
    “Gigliotti called the Sicilians a plague,” Barker said. “I’m afraid I concur with that assessment. Right now, the English gangs content themselves with sticks and coshes, but what if the Sicilian gangs arrive with daggers? All the English lads will want them in order to survive. Daggers will be smuggled across the Channel from the Continent, and soon every criminal in London will have one. Violent crimes and robberies at knifepoint shall rise. But the Sicilians will want to have the upper hand, so they’ll begin smuggling in pistols and carbines. The violence escalates, you see.”
    “Meanwhile,” Poole noted, “London’s Finest are still patrolling the streets with truncheons and whistles. I’ll have to convince my superiors such is the case, if what you say is true.”
    “Ask them how they’ll feel about the Thames being choked with barrels like the one this morning,” Barker said.
    “I don’t know as the Yard can do a lot, however, until the Sicilians visibly break the law,” Poole went on. “We can’t arrest them for simply coming into the country or for