Secret of the White Rose by Stefanie Pintoff Page A

the third floor. The door to the conference room was closed. I pulled out my pocket watch to check the time. Ten till one. In my haste to get here, I had managed to arrive early.
    The largest part of the third floor was occupied by the Bertillon Room—luckily empty at this moment, so I entered and looked around while I waited. It was named after the European scientist, Alphonse Bertillon, had insisted that criminals looked different from law-abiding citizens. Though most of us no longer believed that the size of a man’s head or the shape of a woman’s ear revealed anything about their propensity for criminal behavior, Bertillon’s standards for measuring and photographing criminals had proven useful as a system for identifying and cataloguing them. Now, as a result of his legacy, criminals were routinely photographed upon their arrest, face front as well as in profile, according to uniform standards.
    We called the photographs “mug shots”—and many of them were displayed on the walls throughout the Bertillon Room. Dubbed the “Rogues’ Gallery,” its pictures featured the city’s most notorious criminals, from Scar Face Bill Stinzensky, who had robbed and tortured his victims with a blade, to Harry Thaw, who had murdered the architect Stanford White just this past May. Of course, Al Drayson, the most notorious of them all, was front and center.
    Five minutes later, I returned to the conference room where this afternoon’s meeting would be held. Two other men now waited outside the door, deferring to a rule that was no less strict because it was unwritten: meetings with the commissioner began exactly on time—never early, never late. I had always supposed it was because of his lame leg, an injury caused by a falling derrick when he was a brigadier general in the army. Now, his arrivals and departures from official meetings were carefully choreographed, for he was a proud man who didn’t care for the world to observe his weakness.
    A man with oil-slicked black hair pulled out his gold pocket watch. “It’s time,” he said with a grim nod. I recognized him as Tom Savino, a serious, hardworking man I’d met when I first started at the Fifth Precinct.
    I took a deep breath and entered with no small amount of trepidation. The commissioner—or the General, as he preferred to be called—was, by all reports, not an easy man under the best of circumstances. And I had the distinction of being the one detective in the room not of his own choosing. Mulvaney had said this opportunity would make or break my career. At this moment, the latter seemed a real possibility.
    General Bingham sat at the head of the massive oak table that spanned the length of the room. He was a distinguished man with sandy gray fringe on the sides of his bald head, a handlebar mustache, and piercing blue eyes behind wire spectacles. Surrounded by his deputies and favored advisors, he appeared almost regal in the wheelchair that might have been his throne.
    “Damn foreigners,” one deputy said. “They’ll destroy this city if we let them.”
    “Which is exactly why we’ve gotta stop ’em,” boomed a man with a loud bass voice and a large gut. I recognized him as Big Bill Hodges—the officer credited with breaking up several gangs, including the notorious Eastman gang.
    “Yeah, but there’s too many of them,” said another man with a high-pitched twang. “If it’s not the filthy Italians throwing dynamite, it’s the Russian Jews.” He made a noise of disgust.
    General Bingham cleared his throat before speaking. “Gentlemen, I tell you: they’re responsible for eighty-five percent of the crime in this city.”
    “We oughta just ship ’em back to where they came from,” Hodges groused.
    I took a seat at the side of the table next to Howard Green, another officer I recognized from previous cases. He caught my gaze, leaned in close, and muttered, “It’s like they don’t know they’re talking about us.”
    Tom Savino,