Such was the situation at midnight when Lanagan and I dropped out of the reporters’ room. The arrest of Tosci--that we had been “scooped” on--had been made shortly after midnight the night before. A sullen “hunch” on Lanagan’s part that the crime was in no way reminiscent of the methods of the Camorra, as he understood those methods from a mass of inquiry and first-hand reading, had led us away from the police headquarters just a few moments before Tosci had been slipped up the back elevator and placed in detinue. The man regularly assigned to the night police detail at the Hall of Justice, a new man on the “beat,” had missed the arrest, working against seasoned men on the _Times_ and the _Herald_ with their inside sources of prison information. However, we were supposed to be doing the “heavy” work on the story, so the burden of the “trimming” fell upon us.
Lanagan was morose. He had nothing more to say as we walked down Kearney street and turned up Broadway. I thought he was going to Cæsar’s--the original Cæsar’s with the two tables and the marvellous cuisine that pioneered the way for the glaring café chantant of to-day’s slumming parties,--but he walked rapidly past Cæsar’s and on to turn in at Bresci’s, a short distance up the slope of Telegraph Hill. It was a dirty little place, one of the corner “wine joints” sprinkled thickly in out of the way pockets of the congested Latin quarter. At Bresci’s, in addition to the bar, there was a little eating place at the rear, separated from the bar by dingy curtains. One room further back held a piano, where on occasion one might hear his ash man, or the flower vendor from Third and Market streets, or a waiter off duty from the downtown cafés, volume forth the Prologue or swing faultlessly through the Toreador’s song.
“Just got a tip that they are trying to hook mine host Bresci into the thing as a Camorra leader,” was all that Lanagan said.
We sat at one of the tables while Lanagan pulled the faded curtains almost together. Madam Bresci, she of the famed sauté mêlé, was indisposed, so the daughter, Bina, would serve us, if agreeable? Perfectly so, said Lanagan, rather with a note of satisfaction it struck me, though when I glanced at his face in some surprise, for he was a man who was ordinarily unmoved of women, it was expressionless.