The Black Hand by Arthur B. Reeve
"The Black Hand," by Arthur B. Reeve, is a detective story featuring Professor Craig Kennedy and his associate Walter Jameson, who are drawn into a kidnapping and extortion case targeting Enrico Gennaro, a celebrated Italian tenor. The story opens at Luigi's, a small Italian restaurant in lower Manhattan, where Kennedy and Jameson are approached in secret by Luigi, the proprietor, who asks Kennedy to help a friend. That friend turns out to be Gennaro, who is dining privately upstairs in a state of considerable distress. His five-year-old daughter Adelina has been kidnapped by criminals operating under the name of the Black Hand, and he has received a threatening letter demanding ten thousand dollars in ransom. The letter instructs him to appear alone at a wine shop called Albano's at midnight on Saturday, carrying the money hidden inside a copy of an Italian-language newspaper, and to follow a precise set of coded exchanges with a contact identified by a red flower on his coat. Gennaro has deliberately kept the police out of the matter, fearing that any official interference will result in his daughter being harmed or killed. He shows Kennedy a second piece of evidence: a laboratory analysis confirming that the milk supply at his father-in-law's house, the banker Cesare, had been poisoned with ricin, a deadly substance derived from castor beans. The household narrowly escaped a mass poisoning. The following morning, Kennedy and Jameson discover that Cesare's bank has been destroyed by a dynamite bomb, and Cesare himself has been wounded. These escalating attacks suggest that the criminals are targeting both Gennaro and Cesare, who heads an organization called the White Hand, dedicated to combating Black Hand extortion among Italian immigrants. Kennedy devises a technical solution to the problem. Posing as telephone repairmen, he and Jameson string concealed wires across rooftops and into the back room of Albano's wine shop, where the ransom exchange is to take place. Kennedy fixes a small device to the gas-lamp reflector in the back room, connecting it via the rooftop wires to a receiving apparatus set up in the back of Vincenzo's drugstore, owned by a cousin of Luigi, located nearby. This apparatus is a dictograph, described as similar to equipment used by United States Secret Service agents, capable of transmitting every sound from the wine shop's back room. Kennedy also wires a second switch that will allow him to project sound back into the room. Kennedy then visits the Italian Bureau at police headquarters and meets with Lieutenant Giuseppe, who reveals that the likely mastermind behind the kidnapping is Francesco Paoli, a former Camorrista wanted in Italy for the murder of an elderly music teacher who had been Gennaro's first instructor. Paoli has a distinctive scar on his cheek and is known to have been in contact with Black Hand networks in New York. Kennedy arranges for a squad of plainclothes officers to hide in a vacant shop across from Vincenzo's and for a taxicab with additional officers to stand ready at headquarters, awaiting a telephone signal. On the night of the exchange, Kennedy, Jameson, and Luigi gather at Vincenzo's and listen through the dictograph as Gennaro enters Albano's, completes the coded exchange, and receives the address where Adelina has been left: a back yard at a house on Prince Street. At Kennedy's direction, Jameson relays the address to the waiting police car by telephone. Kennedy then uses the second switch to call a warning directly into Albano's back room, signaling Gennaro to flee and alerting the hidden officers to close in. A struggle and gunfight follow in the darkened street. Paoli attempts to frame Gennaro himself as the criminal, but Kennedy intervenes and identifies Paoli as the true kidnapper. The police seize Paoli, who is found to be carrying the ransom money, and raid Albano's establishment, capturing the gang. Meanwhile, the taxicab dispatched to Prince Street returns with Adelina, unharmed, and she is reunited with her father. The story concludes with the Paoli gang in custody and Gennaro preparing to take his daughter home to her mother.
By Arthur B. Reeve · First published 1912 · Genre: Crime Fiction, Detective Fiction, Mystery