The Spy

1

THE WASHINGTON NAVY YARD SLEPT LIKE AN ANCIENT city guarded by thick walls and a river. Old men stood watch, plodding between electric time detectors to register their rounds of factories, magazines, shops, and barracks. Outside the perimeter rose a hill of darkened workers’ houses. The Capitol Dome and the Washington Monument crowned it, glittering under a full moon like polar ice. A whistle moaned. A train approached, bleeding steam and clanging its bell.

U.S. Marine sentries opened the North Railroad Gate.

No one saw Yamamoto Kenta hiding under the Baltimore and Ohio flatcar that the locomotive pushed into the yard. The flatcar’s wheels groaned under a load of fourteen-inch armor plate from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Brakemen uncoupled the car on a siding, and the engine backed away.

Yamamoto eased to the wooden crossties and stone ballast between the rails. He lay still until he was sure he was alone. Then he followed the tracks into the cluster of three-story brick-and-iron buildings that housed the Gun Factory.

Moonlight lancing down from high windows, and the ruby glow of banked furnaces illuminated an enormous cavern. Traveler cranes hulked in shadows overhead. Colossal fifty-ton dreadnought battleship guns crowded the floor as if a fiery hurricane had leveled a steel forest.

Yamamoto, a middle-aged Japanese with threads of gray in his shiny black hair and a confident, dignified manner, wove a purposeful route through the watchmen’s prescribed paths, examining gun lathes, machines for rifling, and furnaces. He paid special attention to deep wells in the floor, the brick-lined shrinking pits where the guns were assembled by squeezing steel jackets around fifty-foot tubes. His eye was sharp, refined by similar clandestine “tours” of Vickers and Krupp-the British and German naval gun factories-and the Czar of Russia’s ordnance plants at St. Petersburg.

An old-style Yale lock secured the door to the laboratory storeroom that dispensed supplies to the engineers and scientists. Yamamoto picked it open quickly. Inside, he searched cabinets for iodine. He poured six ounces of the shiny blue-black crystals into an envelope. Then he scrawled “crystal iodine, 6 ounces” on a requisition sheet with the initials “ AL ” for the Gun Factory’s legendary chief designer, Arthur Langner.

In a distant wing of the sprawling building, he located the test caisson where armor experts simulated torpedo attacks to measure the awesomely magnified impact of explosions underwater. He rummaged through their magazine. The sea powers locked in the international race to build modern dreadnought battleships were feverishly experimenting with arming torpedoes with TNT, but Yamamoto noted that the Americans were still testing formulations based on guncotton propellants. He stole a silk bag of Cordite MD smokeless powder.

As he opened a janitor’s closet to filch a bottle of ammonia water, he heard a watchman coming. He hid in the closet until the old fellow had shuffled past and disappeared among the guns.

Swift and silent, Yamamoto climbed the stairs.

Arthur Langner’s drawing loft, which was not locked, was the workshop of an eccentric whose genius spanned war and art. Blueprints for stepped-thread breeches and visionary sketches of shells with smashing effects as yet unheard of shared the workspace with a painter’s easel, a library of novels, a bass violin, and a grand piano.

Yamamoto left the Cordite, the iodine, and the ammonia on the piano and spent an hour studying the drafting tables. “Be Japan ’s eyes,” he preached at the Black Ocean Society’s spy school on the rare occasions that duty allowed him home. “Take every opportunity to observe, whether your ultimate mission is deception, sabotage, or murder.”

What he saw frightened him. The 12-inch guns on the factory floor could throw shells seven miles to pierce ten inches of the newest face-hardened side armor. But up here in the drawing loft where new ideas were hatched, the Americans had preliminary sketches for 15-inch guns and even a 16-inch, seventy-foot-long monster that would hurl a ton of high explosives beyond the curve of the Earth. No one knew yet how to aim such a weapon when the distances were too great to gauge range by “spotting” the splashes of near misses. But the bold imagination that Yamamoto saw at work warned him it was only a matter of time before America ’s “New Navy” invented novel concepts for fire control.

Yamamoto stuffed a wad of paper money in the gun designer’s desk-fifty twenty-dollar U.S. gold certificates-considerably more than what one of the arsenal’s skilled workmen earned in a year.

Already the U.S. Navy was third only to England ’s and Germany ’s. Its North Atlantic Fleet-brazenly rechristened the “Great White Fleet”-was showing the flag in a swaggering voyage around the world. But Britain, Germany, Russia, and France were not America ’s enemies. The true mission of the Great White Fleet was to threaten the Empire of Japan with naked steel. America aimed to command the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco to Tokyo.

Japan would not allow it, Yamamoto thought with a prideful smile.

It was only three years since the Russo-Japanese War spawned in blood a new master of the Western Pacific. Mighty Russia had tried to strong-arm Japan. Today the Empire of Japan occupied Port Arthur. And Russia ’s Baltic Fleet lay under three hundred feet of water at the bottom of the Tsushima Strait -thanks in no small part to Japanese spies who had infiltrated the Russian Navy.

As Yamamoto closed the drawer on the money, he had the eerie sensation of being watched. He looked across the desk into the bold gaze of a beautiful woman whose photographic portrait stood in a silver frame. He recognized Langner’s dark-haired daughter and admired how faithfully the photographer had captured her compelling eyes. She had inscribed it in a flowing hand “For Father, the ‘gunner’ who ‘dreads nought’!”

Yamamoto turned his attention to Langner’s bookshelves. Bound volumes of patent applications vied with novels for the space. The applications filed recently had been written on a typewriter. Yamamoto pulled volume after volume, working his way back to the last year that applications were submitted in longhand. He spread one on the designer’s desk, then chose a sheet of paper from a side drawer and a Waterman fountain pen with a gold nib. Referring repeatedly to the sample of handwriting, he forged a brief, incoherent letter. Ending it with the words “Forgive me,” he scrawled Arthur Langner’s signature.

He took the iodine and the ammonia into the gun designer’s washroom. With the butt of his Nambu pocket pistol he crushed the iodine crystals on the marble washstand and brushed the resultant powder into a shaving mug. He wiped the gun clean with the washroom towel, leaving a purplish smear on the cloth. Then he poured ammonia onto the iodine powder, stirring with Langner’s toothbrush until he had a thick paste of nitrogen iodide.

He propped open the lid of the grand piano, reached into the narrow end farthest from the keyboard, and smeared the paste on the closely bunched strings. After it dried, the explosive concoction would become unstable and extremely sensitive to impact. A gentle vibration would set off a loud bang and a flash. Alone, the explosion would damage little beyond the piano. But as a detonator, it would be deadly.

He placed the silk sack on top of the cast-iron frame, immediately above the strings. The sack contained enough Cordite MD smokeless powder to propel a twelve-pound shell two miles.

YAMAMOTO KENTA LEFT the Gun Factory the way he had entered, his eyes still stinging from the ammonia. Suddenly, things went wrong. The North Railroad Gate was blocked by an unexpected burst of late-night activity. Switch engines were huffing gondola cars in and out, attended by a horde of brakemen. He retreated deeper into the arsenal, past the powerhouse, through a maze of roads, buildings, and storage yards. Orienting himself by the powerhouse smokestacks and a pair of experimental radio-antenna towers silhouetted against the moonlit sky, he crossed a park and gardens bordered by handsome brick houses in which slept the families of the commandant and officers of the yard.

The ground rose higher here. To the northwest he glimpsed the Capitol looming over the city. He saw it as yet another symbol of America ’s fearsome might. What other nation could have erected the largest cast-iron dome in the world at the same time they were fighting a bloody Civil War? He was almost to a side gate when a sentry surprised him on a narrow path.

Yamamoto had just enough time to back into a hedgerow.

His capture would disgrace Japan. He was ostensibly in Washington, D.C., to help catalog the recent contribution of the Freer Collection of Asian art to the Smithsonian Institution. The front allowed him to mingle with the Diplomatic Corps and powerful politicians, thanks to their wives who fancied themselves artists and hung on his every word about Japanese art. Genuine experts at the Smithsonian had caught him off base twice already. He had blamed gaps in his hastily learned knowledge on a poor command of English. So far, the experts accepted the excuse. But there would be absolutely no plausible explanation for a Japanese curator of Asian art caught prowling the Washington Navy Yard at night.

The watchman came up the path, boots crunching on gravel. Yamamoto backed in deeper, drawing his pistol as a last resort. A gunshot would rouse Marine guards from their barracks at the main gate. Deeper he pushed, feeling for an opening in the branches that would lead out the other side.

The watchman had no reason to look into the hedgerow as he plodded by. But Yamamoto was still pushing backward against the springy branches, and one snapped. The watchman stopped. He peered in the direction of the sound. In that instant the moon bathed both their faces.

The Japanese spy saw him clearly-a retired sailor, an “old salt,” supplementing his meager pension with a night watchman’s job. His face was leathery, his eyes bleached by years of tropical sunlight, his back stooped. He straightened up at the sight of the slender figure hiding in the hedge. Suddenly galvanized, the pensioner was no longer an old man who should have called for help but was hurled back to his time as a long-limbed, broad-shouldered “blue jacket” in the full tide of life. A strong voice that once carried to the mast tops demanded, “What the devil are you doing in there?”

Yamamoto wormed out the back of the hedge and ran. The watchman pushed into the hedge and got tangled in it and roared like a bull. Yamamoto heard answering shouts in the distance. He changed course and raced along a high wall. It had been raised, he had learned while preparing for his “tour,” after looters invaded when the Potomac River flooded the yard. It was too high to scale.

Boots pounded on gravel. Old men shouted. Electric flashlights flickered. Suddenly he saw salvation, a tree standing near the wall. Digging his india-rubber crepe soles into the bark, he shinnied up the trunk to the lowest branch, climbed two higher, and jumped onto the wall. He heard shouts behind him. The city street below was empty. He jumped down and cushioned a hard landing with flexed knees.

AT BUZZARD POINT, near the foot of 1st Street, Yamamoto boarded an eighteen-foot motorboat powered by a two-horse Pierce “Noiseless.” The pilot steered into the current and down the Potomac River. A shroud of surface mist finally closed around the boat, and Yamamoto exhaled a sigh of relief.

Huddling from the cold in the cubby under the bow, he reflected upon his close call and concluded that his mission had suffered no damage. The garden path where the night watchman had almost caught him was at least a half mile from the Gun Factory. Nor did it matter that the old man had seen his face. Americans were contemptuous of Asians. Few could distinguish between Japanese and Chinese features. Since immigrants from China were far more numerous than those from Japan, the watchman would report an intrusion by a despised Chinese-an opium fiend, he thought with a relieved smile. Or, he chuckled silently, a nefarious white slaver lurking to prey on the commandant’s daughters.

Five miles downriver, he disembarked in Alexandria, Virginia.

He waited for the boat to depart the wooden pier. Then he hurried along the waterfront and entered a dark warehouse that was crammed with obsolete naval gear deep in dust and spiderwebs.

A younger man whom Yamamoto had labeled, scornfully, “The Spy” was waiting for him in a dimly lit back room that served as an office. He was twenty years Yamamoto’s junior and ordinary-looking to the point of being nondescript. His office, too, held the outdated paraphernalia of earlier wars: crossed cutlasses on the walls; a Civil War-era Dahlgren cast-iron, muzzle-loading cannon, which was causing the floor to sag; and an old 24-inch-diameter carbon arc battleship searchlight propped behind his desk. Yamamoto saw his own face mirrored in its dusty eye.

He reported that he had accomplished his mission. Then, while the spy took notes, he related in precise detail everything that he had seen at the Gun Factory. “Much of it,” he said in conclusion, “looks worn out.”

“Hardly a surprise.”

Overworked and underfunded, the Gun Factory had produced everything from ammunition hoists to torpedo tubes to send the Great White Fleet to sea. After the warships sailed, it forwarded train-loads of replacement parts, sights, firing locks, breech plugs, and gun mounts to San Francisco. In another month the fleet would recuperate there from its fourteen-thousand-mile voyage around South America’s Cape Horn and refit at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard to cross the Pacific.

“I would not underestimate them,” Yamamoto retorted gloomily. “Worn-out machines are replaceable.”

“If they have the nerve.”

“From what I saw, they have the nerve. And the imagination. They are merely catching their breath.”

The man behind the desk felt that Yamamoto Kenta was possessed-if not unhinged-by his fear of the American Navy. He had heard this rant before and knew how to change the subject by derailing the Jap with lavish praise.

“I have never doubted your acute powers of observation. But I am awed by the range and breadth of your skills: chemistry, engineering, forgery. In one fell swoop you have impeded the development of American gunnery and sent their Congress a message that the Navy is corrupt.”

He watched Yamamoto preen. Even the most capable operative had his Achilles’ heel. Yamamoto’s was a self-blinding vanity.

“I’ve played this game a long time,” Yamamoto agreed with false modesty.

In fact, thought the man behind the desk, the chemistry for the nitrogen iodide detonator was a simple formula found in The Young Folks Cyclopaedia of Games and Sports. Which was not to take away from Yamamoto’s other skills, nor his broad and deep knowledge of naval warfare.

Having softened him up, he prepared to put the Jap to the test. “Last week aboard the Lusitania,” he said, “I bumped into a British attaché. You know the sort. Thinks of himself as a ‘gentleman spy.’”

He had an astonishing gift for accents, and he mimicked, faultlessly, an English aristocratic drawl. “‘The Japanese,’ this Englishman proclaimed to all in the smoking room, ‘display a natural aptitude for espionage, and a cunning and self-control not found in the West.’”

Yamamoto laughed. “That sounds like Commander Abbington-Westlake of the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Department, Foreign Division, who was spotted last summer painting a watercolor of the Long Island Sound that just happened to contain America’s latest Viper Class submarine. Do you suppose the windbag meant it as a compliment?”

“The French Navy he penetrated so successfully last month would hardly call Abbington-Westlake a windbag. Did you keep the money?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The money you were supposed to put in Arthur Langner’s desk. Did you keep it for yourself?”

The Jap stiffened. “Of course not. I put it in his desk.”

“The Navy’s enemies in Congress must believe that their star designer, their so-called Gunner, was guilty of taking a bribe. That money was vital to our message to the Congress to make them wonder what else is rotten in the Navy. Did you keep the money?”

“I should not be surprised that you would ask such a degrading question of a loyal associate. With the heart of a thief you assume that everyone is a thief.”

“Did you keep the money?” the spy repeated. A physical habit of maintaining utter stillness masked the steely power of his compact frame.

“For the last time, I did not keep the money. Would you feel more secure if I swore on the memory of my old friend-your father?”

“Do it!”

Yamamoto looked him full in the face with undisguised hatred. “I swear on the memory of my old friend, your father.”

“I think I believe you.”

“Your father was a patriot,” Yamamoto replied coldly. “You are a mercenary.”

“You’re on my payroll,” came the even colder retort. “And when you report to your government the valuable information you picked up in the Washington Navy Yard’s Gun Factory-while working for me-your government will pay you again.”

“I do not spy for the money. I spy for the Empire of Japan.”

“And for me.”

“GOOD SUNDAY MORNING TO all who prefer their music minus the sermon,” Arthur Langner greeted his friends at the Gun Factory.

Rumpled in a baggy sack suit, his thick hair tousled and bright eyes inquisitive, the Naval Ordnance Bureau’s star designer grinned like a man who found interest in all he saw and liked the strange bits most of all. The Gunner was a vegetarian, an outspoken agnostic, and devoted to the theories of the unconscious mind put forth by the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud.

He held patents for an invention he named the Electrical Vacuum Cleaning Machine, having hitched his fertile imagination to a heartfelt notion that science-based domestic engineering could free women from the isolation of housework. He also believed that women should have the right to vote, work outside the home, and even practice birth control. Gossips smirked that his beautiful daughter, who ran with the fast set in Washington and New York, would be a prime beneficiary.

“A one-man lunatic fringe,” complained the commandant of the navy yard.

But the chief of Naval Ordnance, having observed Langner’s latest 12-inch/.50 caliber gun shoot up his Sandy Hook Atlantic Test Range, retorted, “Thank God he works for us instead of the enemy.”

His Sunday-morning chamber musicians, a ragtag mix of Gun Factory employees, laughed appreciatively when Langner joked, “Just to assure any eavesdropping blue noses that we’re not complete heathens, let’s start with ‘Amazing Grace.’ In G.”

He sat at his grand piano.

“May we please have an A first, sir?” asked the cellist, an expert in armor-piercing warheads.

Langner lightly tapped middle A, to which note the strings could tune their instruments. He rolled his eyes in mock impatience as they fiddled with their tuning pegs. “Are you gentlemen cooking up one of those new atonal scales?”

“One more A, if you can spare it, Arthur. A little louder?”

Langner tapped middle A harder, again and again. At last the strings were satisfied.

The cellist began the opening notes of “Amazing Grace.”

At the tenth measure, the violins-a torpedo-propulsion man and a burly steamfitter-took up “once was lost.” They played through and began to repeat.

Langner raised his big hands over the keys, stepped on the sustain pedal, and lofted “a wretch like me” on a soaring G chord.

Inside the piano, Yamamoto Kenta’s paste of nitrogen iodide had hardened to a volatile dry crust. When Langner fingered the keys, felt hammers descended on G, B, and D strings, causing them to vibrate. Up and down the scale, six more octaves of G, B, and D strings vibrated sympathetically, jolting the nitrogen iodide.

It exploded with a sharp crack that sent a purple cloud pouring from the case and detonated the sack of Cordite. The Cordite blew the piano into a thousand slivers of wood and wire and ivory that riddled Arthur Langner’s head and chest, killing him instantly.

2

BY 1908, THE VAN DORN DETECTIVE AGENCY MAINTAINED a presence in all American cities of consequence, and its offices reflected the nature of each locality. Headquarters in Chicago had a suite in the palatial Palmer House. Dusty Ogden, Utah, a railroad junction, was served by a rented room decorated with wanted posters. New York’s offices were in the sumptuous Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street. And in Washington, D.C., with its valuable proximity to the Department of Justice-a prime source of business-Van Dorn detectives operated from the second floor of the capital city’s finest hotel, the new Willard on Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks from the White House.

Joseph Van Dorn himself kept an office there, a walnut-paneled den bristling with up-to-date devices for riding herd on the transcontinental outfit he commanded. In addition to the agency’s private telegraph, he had three candlestick telephones capable of long-distance connections as far west as Chicago, a DeVeau Dictaphone, a self-winding stock ticker, and an electric Kellogg Intercommunicating Telephone. A spy hole let him size up clients and informants in the reception room. Corner windows overlooked the Willard’s front and side entrances.

From those windows, a week after Arthur Langner’s tragic death at the Naval Gun Factory, Van Dorn watched apprehensively as two women stepped down from a streetcar, hurried across the bustling sidewalk, and disappeared inside the hotel.

The intercommunicating phone rang.

“Miss Langner is here,” reported the Willard’s house detective, a Van Dorn employee.

“So I see.” He was not looking forward to this visit.

The founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency was a heavily built, bald-headed man in his forties. He had a strong Roman nose, framed by bristling red whiskers, and the affable manner of a lawyer or a businessman who had earned his fortune early and enjoyed it. Hooded eyes masked a ferocious intelligence; the nation’s penitentiaries held many criminals gulled into letting the big gent close enough to clamp on the handcuffs.

Downstairs, the two women riveted male attention as they glided through the Willard’s gilt-and-marble lobby. The younger, a petite girl of eighteen or nineteen, was a stylishly dressed redhead with a vivacious gleam in her eyes. Her companion was a tall, raven-haired beauty, somber in the dark cloth of mourning, her hat adorned with the feathers of black terns, her face partially veiled. The redhead was clutching her elbow as if to give her courage.

Once across the lobby, however, Dorothy Langner took charge, urging her companion to sit on a plush couch at the foot of the stairs.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

“No thank you, Katherine. I’ll be fine from here.”

Dorothy Langner gathered her long skirts and swept up the stairs.

Katherine Dee craned her neck to watch Dorothy pause on the landing, turn back her veil, and press her forehead against a cool, polished marble pillar. Then she straightened up, composed herself, and strode down the hall, out of Katherine’s sight and into the Van Dorn Detective Agency.

Joseph Van Dorn shot a look through the spy hole. The receptionist was a steady man-he would not command a Van Dorn front desk were he not-but he appeared thunderstruck by the beauty presenting her card, and Van Dorn noted grimly that the Wild Bunch could have stampeded in and left with the furniture without the fellow noticing.

“I am Dorothy Langner,” she said in a strong, musical voice. “I have an appointment with Mr. Joseph Van Dorn.”

Van Dorn hurried into the reception room and greeted her solicitously.

“Miss Langner,” he said, the faintest lilt of Irish in his voice softening the harder tones of Chicago. “May I offer my deepest sympathy?”

“Thank you, Mr. Van Dorn. I appreciate your seeing me.”

Van Dorn guided her into his inner sanctum.

Dorothy Langner refused his offer of tea or water and got straight to the point.

“The Navy has let out a story that my father killed himself. I want to hire your detective agency to clear his name.”

Van Dorn had prepared as much as possible for this difficult interview. There was ample reason to doubt her father’s sanity. But his wife-to-be had known Dorothy at Smith College, so he was obliged to hear the poor woman out.

“I am of course at your service, but-”

“The Navy says that he caused the explosion that killed him, but they won’t tell me how they know.”

“I wouldn’t read too much into that,” said Van Dorn. “The Navy is habitually secretive. What does surprise me is they tend usually to look after their own.”

“My father deliberately established the Gun Factory to be more civilian than naval,” Dorothy Langner replied. “It is a businesslike operation.”

“And yet,” Van Dorn ventured cautiously, “as I understand it, civilian factories have recently taken over many of its duties.”

“Certainly not! Fours and 6s, perhaps. But not the dreadnought guns.”

“I wonder whether that shift troubled your father.”

“Father was accustomed to such shifts,” she answered drily, adding with a faint smile, “He would say, ‘The slings and arrows of my misfortunes are the tugs and pulls of Congress and local interests.’ He had a sense of humor, Mr. Van Dorn. He knew how to laugh. Such men don’t kill themselves.”

“Of course,” Van Dorn said gravely.

The Kellogg rang again.

Saved by my Bell, Van Dorn thought to himself. He stepped to the wall where the instrument was mounted, picked up the earpiece, and listened.

“Send him in.”

To Dorothy Langner he said, “I asked Isaac Bell, my best operative, to step down from an important bank robbery case in order to look into the circumstances of your father’s death. He is ready to report.”

The door opened. A man in a white suit entered with an economy of motion unexpected in one so tall. He was well over six feet, leanly built-not more than one hundred seventy-five pounds-and looked to be about thirty years old. The full mustache that covered his upper lip was gold, as was his thick, neatly trimmed hair. His face had the robust appearance of an outdoorsman who was no stranger to sun and wind.

His large hands hung still at his sides. His fingers were long and precisely manicured, although an observer keener than the grieving Dorothy Langner might have noticed that the knuckles of his right hand were red and swollen.

“Miss Langner, may I present chief investigator Isaac Bell?” Isaac Bell assessed the beautiful young woman with a swift, penetrating glance. Mid-twenties, he estimated her age. Intelligent and self-possessed. Desolated by grief yet extraordinarily attractive. She turned to him beseechingly.

Bell’s sharp blue eyes softened in an instant. Now they were tinged violet, his inquiring gaze veiled with tenderness. He took off his broad-brimmed hat in deference to her, saying, “I am so sorry for your loss, Miss Langner,” and swept a drop of blood from his hand with a pure white handkerchief in a motion so graceful as to be invisible.

“Mr. Bell,” she asked. “What have you learned that will clear my father’s name?”

Bell answered in a voice pitched low with sympathy. He was kindly yet direct. “Forgive me, but I must report that your father did indeed sign out a quantity of iodine from the laboratory store.”

“He was an engineer,” she protested. “He was a scientist. He signed for chemicals from the laboratory every day.”

“Powdered iodine was an essential ingredient of the explosive that detonated the smokeless powder in his piano. The other was ammonia water. The porter noticed a bottle missing from his cleaning closet.”

“Anyone could have taken it.”

“Yes, of course. But there are indications that he mixed the chemicals in his private washroom. Stains on a towel, a volatile powder on his toothbrush, residue in his shaving mug.”

“How can you know all this?” she asked, blinking away angry tears. “The Navy won’t let me near his office. They turned away my lawyer. They even barred the police from the Gun Factory.”

“I gained admittance,” said Bell.

A male secretary wearing a vest, bow tie, banded shirtsleeves, and a double-action Colt in a shoulder holster entered urgently. “Beg your pardon, Mr. Van Dorn. The commandant of the Washington Navy Yard is calling on the telephone, and he’s hopping mad.”

“Tell the operator to switch the line to this telephone. Excuse me, Miss Langner… Van Dorn here. Good afternoon, Commandant Dillon. How are you today?… You don’t say?”

Van Dorn listened, casting Miss Langner a reassuring smile.

“… Well, if you’ll forgive me, sir, such a general description could fit half the tall men in Washington… It could even describe a gentleman right here in my office as we speak. But I assure you that he does not look like he’s been at fisticuffs with the United States Marines-unless the Corps turns out a lesser breed of Leatherneck than in my day.”

Isaac Bell put his hand in his pocket.

When Joseph Van Dorn next replied to the caller, it was with a benign chuckle, though if the commandant had seen the chill in his eyes he might have retreated hastily.

“No, sir. I will not ‘produce’ an employee of mine on your sentries’ assertion that they caught a private detective red-handed. Clearly the man in my office was not ‘caught’ as he is standing here in front of me… I will register your complaint with the Navy Secretary when we lunch tomorrow at the Cosmos Club. Please convey my warmest regards to Mrs. Dillon.”

Van Dorn replaced the earpiece on its hook, and said, “Apparently, a tall, yellow-haired gent with a mustache knocked down some navy yard sentries who attempted to detain him.”

Bell displayed a row of even white teeth. “I imagine he’d have surrendered quietly if they hadn’t tried to beat him up.” He turned back to Dorothy Langner, his expression gentler. “Now, Miss Langner. There is something I must show you.”

He produced a photographic print, still damp from the developing process. It was an enlarged photograph of Langner’s suicide note. He had snapped it with a 3A Folding Pocket Kodak camera that his fiancée-a woman in the moving-picture line-had given him. Bell shielded most of the photograph with his hand to spare Miss Langner the deranged raving.

“Is this your father’s handwriting?”

She hesitated, peered closely, then reluctantly nodded. “It looks like his handwriting.”

Bell watched her closely. “You seem unsure.”

“It just looks a little… I don’t know! Yes, it is his handwriting.”

“I understand that your father was working under great strain to speed up production. Colleagues who greatly admired him admit he was being driven hard, perhaps beyond endurance.”

“Nonsense!” she snapped back. “My father wasn’t casting church bells. He ran a gun factory. He demanded speed. And if it were too much for him he would have told me. We’ve been thick as thieves since my mother died.”

“But the tragedy of suicide,” Van Dorn interrupted, “is that the victim can see no other escape from the unbearable. It is the loneliest death.”

“He would not have killed himself in that manner.”

“Why not?” asked Isaac Bell.

Dorothy Langner paused before she answered, noting despite her grief that the tall detective was unusually handsome, with an air of elegance tempered by rugged strength. That combination was a quality she looked for in men but found rarely.

“I bought him that piano so he could take up music again. To relax him. He loved me too much to use my gift as the instrument of his death.”

Isaac Bell watched her compelling silvery blue eyes as she pleaded her case. “Father was too happy in his work to kill himself. Twenty years ago he started out replicating British 4-inch guns. Today his gun factory builds the finest 12s in the world. Imagine learning to build naval guns accurate at twenty thousand yards. Ten miles, Mr. Bell!”

Bell cocked his ear for a change of tone that might express doubt. He watched her face for telltale signs of uncertainty in her lyrical description of the dead man’s work.

“The bigger the gun, the more violent the force it has to tame. There is no room for error. You must bore the tube straight as a ray of light. Its diameter can’t vary a thousandth of an inch. Rifling demands the artistry of Michelangelo; shrinking the jacket, the precision of a watchmaker. My father loved his guns-all the great dreadnought men love their work. A steam-propulsion wizard like Alasdair MacDonald loves his turbines. Ronnie Wheeler up in Newport loves his torpedoes. Farley Kent his faster and faster hulls. It is joyous to be devoted, Mr. Bell. Such men do not kill themselves!”

Joseph Van Dorn intervened again. “I can assure you that Isaac Bell’s investigation has been as thorough as-”

“But,” Bell interrupted. “What if Miss Langner is right?”

His boss looked at him, surprised.

Bell said, “With Mr. Van Dorn’s permission, I will look further.”

Dorothy Langner’s lovely face bloomed with hope. She turned to the founder of the detective agency. Van Dorn spread his hands wide. “Of course. Isaac Bell will get right on it with the full support of the agency.”

Her expression of gratitude sounded more like a challenge. “That is all I can ask, Mr. Bell, Mr. Van Dorn. An informed appraisal of all the facts.” A sudden smile lit her face like a sunbeam, suggesting what a lively, carefree woman she had been before tragedy struck. “Isn’t that the least I can expect of a detective agency whose motto is ‘We never give up. Never!’ ”

“Apparently you’ve investigated us, too,” Bell smiled back.

Van Dorn walked her out to the reception room, repeating his condolences.

Isaac Bell went to the window that faced Pennsylvania Avenue. He watched Dorothy Langner emerge from the hotel with a slender redhead he had noticed earlier in the lobby. In any other company the redhead would be rated beautiful, but beside the gunner’s daughter she was merely pretty.

Van Dorn returned. “What changed your mind, Isaac? How she loved her father?”

“No. How she loved his work.”

He watched them hurry to the stop as a streetcar approached, pick up their long skirts, and climb aboard. Dorothy Langner did not look back. The redhead did, casting an appraising glance up at the Van Dorn windows as if she knew where to look.

Van Dorn was studying the photograph. “I never saw such a clear picture from film. Near as sharp as a proper glass plate.”

“Marion gave me a 3A Kodak. Fits right in my overcoat. You ought to make them standard equipment.”

“Not at seventy-five dollars each,” said the parsimonious Van Dorn. “They can make do with Brownies for a buck. What’s on your mind, Isaac? You look troubled.”

“I’m afraid you had better assign the accounting boys to look into her father’s financial affairs.”

“Why is that?”

“They found a wad of cash in his desk thick enough to choke a cow.”

“A bribe?” Van Dorn exploded. “A bribe? No wonder the Navy’s playing it close to the vest. Langner was a government employee empowered to choose from which foundry to buy steel.” He shook his head in disgust. “Congress hasn’t forgotten the clamor three years ago when the steel trust fixed the price of armor plates. Well, that explains why she had to relax him.”

“It looks,” Isaac Bell admitted, “like a clever man did something stupid, couldn’t face getting caught, and killed himself.”

“I’m surprised you agreed to look further.”

“She is a passionate young lady.”

Van Dorn looked at him curiously. “You are engaged, Isaac.”

Isaac Bell faced his boss with a guileless smile. For a man who was worldly in the many ways he would have to be to be a scourge of criminals, Joe Van Dorn was remarkably prim when it came to affairs of the heart. “The fact that I am in love with Marion Morgan does not render me blind to beauty. Nor am I immune to passion. What I meant, however, is that the strikingly attractive Miss Langner’s belief in her father is immense.”

“Most mothers,” Van Dorn retorted astringently, “and all daughters profess disbelief when their sons or fathers engage in criminal acts.”

“Something about that sample of his handwriting struck her oddly.”

“How’d you happen to find the suicide note?”

“The Navy had no clue how to proceed. So they left everything in place except the body and padlocked the door to keep the cops out.”

“How’d you get in?”

“It was an old Polhem.”

Van Dorn nodded. Bell had a way with locks. “Well, I’m not surprised the Navy had no clue how to proceed. In fact, I imagine they’re paralyzed with fear. They may have President Roosevelt hell-bent on building forty-eight new battleships, but there are plenty in Congress scheming to rein them in.”

Bell said, “I hate to leave John Scully in a lurch, but can you keep me off the Frye Boys case while I look into this?”

“A lurch is where Detective Scully likes to be,” Van Dorn growled.

“The man is too independent for my taste.”

“And yet, a clairvoyant investigator,” Bell defended his colleague. Scully, an operative not famous for reporting in regularly, was trailing a trio of violent bank robbers across the Ohio-Pennsylvania border. They had made a name for themselves by leaving notes written in the blood of their victims: “Fear the Frye Boys.” They had robbed their first bank a year ago in New Jersey, fled west, robbing many more, then laid low for the winter. Now they were rampaging east from Illinois in a string of bloody assaults on small-town banks. As innovative as they were vicious, they employed stolen automobiles to cross state lines, leaving local sheriffs in the dust.

“You will remain in charge of the Frye case, Isaac,” Van Dorn said sternly. “Until Congress gets around to funding some sort of national investigation bureau, the Justice Department will continue to pay us handsomely to capture criminals who cross state lines, and I don’t intend to let a maverick like Scully disappoint them.”

“As you wish, sir,” Bell replied formally. “But you did promise Miss Langner the full support of the agency.”

“All right! I’ll shift a couple of men Scully’s way-briefly. But you’re still in charge, and it should not take you long to confirm the veracity of Langner’s suicide note.”

“Can your friend the Navy Secretary get me a yard pass? I want to powwow with the Marines.”

“What for?” the boss smiled. “A rematch?”

Bell grinned back but sobered quickly.

“If Mr. Langner did not kill himself, someone went to a lot of trouble to murder him and besmirch his reputation. The Marines guard the gates of the navy yard. They must have seen that someone leave the night before.”

3

MORE LIMESTONE!” YELLED CHAD GORDON. GREEDILY watching his newest torrent of molten iron gush like liquid fire from the taphole into its ladle, the Naval Ordnance Bureau metallurgist muttered a triumphant, “Hull 44, here we come!”

“All canvas and no hull” was a charge regularly leveled at Chad Gordon for running risks with three-thousand-degree molten metal that no sane man would.

But no one denied that the brilliant star deserved his own blast furnace in a remote corner of the steel mill in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he experimented eighteen hours a day to create low-carbon pig iron to process into torpedo-resistant armor plate. The company had to assign him two separate crews of workmen, as even poverty-stricken immigrants accustomed to working like dogs could not keep up with Chad Gordon’s pace.

On this snowy March night, his second shift consisted of an American foreman, Bob Hall, and a gang that Hall regarded as the usual bunch of foreigners-four Hungarians and a gloomy German who had replaced a missing Hungarian. As near as Bob Hall could make out from their jabbering, their missing pal had fallen down a well or been run over by a locomotive, take your pick.

The German’s name was Hans. He claimed to have worked at the Krupp Werke in the Ruhr Valley. That was fine with foreman Hall. Hans was strong and seemed to know his business and understood more English than all four Hungarians combined. Besides, Mr. Gordon wouldn’t give a damn if the German had come straight from Hell as long as he worked hard.

Seven hours into the shift, a “hang” of partly solidified metal formed near the top of the furnace. It threatened to block the uptake that vented volatile hot waste gases. Foreman Hall suggested clearing it before it got any bigger. Chad Gordon ordered him brusquely aside. “I said, ‘More limestone.’ ”

The German had been waiting for such an opportunity. Quickly, he climbed the ladders to the top of the furnace where barrows were standing by with fresh stock. Each contained a twelve-hundred-pound load of iron ore, or coke, or the dolomitic limestone with an unusually high content of magnesia that the hard-driving Chad Gordon was counting on to strengthen the metal.

The German grabbed a barrow of dolomitic limestone and rolled the two-wheel cart to the mouth of the furnace.

“Wait for the boil!” the foreman bellowed from down at the base where melted impurities were tumbling from the slag notch. The molten iron and slag in the bottom of the furnace were roaring at a full three thousand degrees Fahrenheit. But the ore and coke on top had barely reached seven hundred.

Hans didn’t seem to hear him as he dumped the limestone into the furnace and hurriedly descended the ladders. “You lunatic,” yelled the foreman. “It’s not hot enough. You blocked the uptake.”

Hans shouldered past the foreman.

“Don’t worry about the hang,” Chad Gordon shouted without bothering to look up. “It’ll drop.”

The foreman knew better. The hang was trapping explosive gases inside the furnace. Hans’s dump had only made it worse. A lot worse. He shouted to the Hungarians, “Get up there and clear the uptake!”

The Hungarians hesitated. Even if they couldn’t fully understand English, they knew the danger of flammable gases accumulating above the batch. Hall’s clenched fist and angry gestures at the ladder sent them scrambling to the top of the furnace with bars and picks. But just as they started to break up the hang it dropped on its own accord in one solid piece. Just like Mr. Gordon had predicted. Except the barrow of limestone heaped on the cool surface had also blocked the uptake. When the hang dropped, the sudden burst of outside air into the furnace combined with the heat below to ignite the trapped waste gases.

They exploded with a roar that lifted the roof off the building and threw it onto a Bessemer converter fifty yards away. The blast blew boots and clothing off the Hungarians and incinerated their bodies. Tons of fiery debris splashed down the sides of the furnace. Like a burning waterfall, it drenched the foreman and Chad Gordon in flames.

The German ran, gagging from the stink of cooked flesh. His eyes were wide with horror at what he had set off and terror that the boiling metal would catch up with him, too. No one took notice of one man running when suddenly every man in the giant mill was running. Workers from the other blast furnaces raced to the scene of death, driving wagons and carts for makeshift ambulances to carry the injured. Even the company thugs guarding the gate ignored Hans as they gaped in the direction from which he ran.

The German looked back. Flames were shooting into the night sky. The buildings around the blast furnace were wrecked. Walls had collapsed, roofs tumbled to the ground, and everywhere he saw fire.

He cursed aloud, astonished by the immensity of the destruction he had wrought.

THE NEXT MORNING, changed from his workman’s clothing into a somber black suit and exhausted from a sleepless night of brooding on how many had died, Hans stepped off a train at Washington, D.C.’s National Mall Station. He scanned the newsstands for headlines about the accident. There were none. Steelmaking was dangerous business. Workmen were killed daily. Only local newspapers in the mill towns bothered listing the dead-and often then only the foremen for their English-speaking readers.

He took a ferry to Alexandria, Virginia, and hurried along the waterfront to the warehouse district. The spy who had sent him to the steel mill was waiting in his curious den of obsolete weapons.

He listened intently to Hans’s report. He asked probing questions about the elements that Chad Gordon had introduced into his iron. Knowledgeable and insightful, he drew from Hans details that the German had barely noticed at the time.

The spy was lavish in his praise and paid in cash what he had promised.

“It is not for the money,” said the German, stuffing it in his pocket.

“Of course not.”

“It is because when war comes the Americans will side with Britain.”

“That is beyond any doubt. The democracies despise Germany.”

“But I do not like the killing,” Hans protested. Staring morbidly into the lens of the old battleship searchlight behind the spy’s desk, he saw his face reflected like a decaying skull.

The spy surprised Hans by answering in northern-accented German. Hans had assumed that the man was American, so perfect was his English. Instead, he spoke like a compatriot. “You had no choice, mein Freund. Chad Gordon’s armor plate would have given enemy ships an unfair advantage. Soon the Americans will launch dreadnoughts. Would you have their dreadnoughts sink German ships? Kill German sailors? Shell German ports?”

“You are right, mein Herr,” Hans answered. “Of course.”

The spy smiled as if he sympathized with Hans’s humane qualms. But in the seclusion of his own mind he laughed. God bless the simple Germans, he thought. No matter how powerful their industry grew, no matter how strong their Army, no matter how modern their Navy, no matter how loudly their Kaiser boasted “Mein Feld ist die Welt,” they always feared they were the little guy.

That constant dread of being second best made them so easy to lead.

Your field is the world, Herr Kaiser? The hell it is. Your field is full of sheep.

4

IT WAS A CHINAMAN,” SAID MARINE LANCE CORPORAL Black, puffing smoke from a two-dollar cigar.

“If you believe the Gramps Patrol,” puffed Private Little.

“He means the night watchmen.”

Isaac Bell indicated that he understood that the “Gramps Patrol” were the pensioners employed as night watchmen to guard the navy yard inside the gates, while the Marines manned the gates themselves.

He and the husky young leathernecks were seated at a round table in O’Leary’s Saloon on E Street. They had been generous sports about their previous encounter, offering Bell grudging respect for his fighting skills and forgiving black eyes and loosened teeth after only one round of drinks. At Bell’s urging they had polished off a lunch of steaks, potatoes, and apple pie. Now, with whiskey glasses at hand and Bell’s Havanas blueing the air, they were primed to be talkative.

Their commandant had ordered a list of everyone who had passed through the gates the night that Arthur Langner had died, they told him. No names had aroused any suspicion. Bell would get Joe Van Dorn to wangle a peek at that list to confirm the commandant’s judgment.

A night watchman had reported an intruder. The report had apparently not even reached the commandant, rising no higher up the chain of command than the sergeant of the gate guard, who had deemed it nonsense.

Bell asked, “If it were true, what the Gramps Patrol reported, why do you suppose a Chinaman would break into the navy yard?”

“Looking to steal something.”

“Or after the girls.”

“What girls?”

“The officers’ daughters. The ones who live in the yard.”

Private Little looked around to make sure no one was listening. The only patron close enough was curled up on the floor, snoring in the sawdust. “Commandant’s got a couple of lovelies I wouldn’t mind getting to know better.”

“I see,” said Bell, suppressing a smile. The idea of an amorous Chinese infiltrating an American Navy base by scaling a ten-foot wall guarded by Marines at every gate and watchmen inside did not suggest a productive path of investigation. But, he reminded himself, while a detective had always to be skeptical, the wise skeptic dismissed no possibility without first considering it. “Who,” he asked, “was this old night watchman who told you this?”

“He didn’t tell us. He told the sergeant.”

“His name is Eddison,” said Black.

“Big John Eddison,” Little added.

“How old is he?”

“Looks a hundred.”

“Big old man. Nearly as tall you, Mr. Bell.”

“Where would I find him?”

“There’s a rooming house where the salts hang out.”

Bell found Eddison’s rooming house on F Street within a short walk of the navy yard. It had a front porch filled with rocking chairs, empty this cold afternoon. He went in and introduced himself to the landlady, who was laying her long table for supper. She had a thick Southern accent, and a face still pretty despite the lines acquired in years of hard work.

“Mr. Eddison?” she drawled. “He’s a good old man. Never a bit of trouble like certain of his shipmates I could name.”

“Is he in?”

“Mr. Eddison sleeps late, being as how he works at night.”

“Would you mind if I waited?” Bell asked with a smile that flashed his even teeth and lighted his blue eyes.

The landlady brushed a wisp of gray hair from her cheek and smiled back. “I’ll bring you a cup of coffee.”

“Don’t trouble yourself.”

“No trouble, Mr. Bell. You’re in the South now. My mother would spin in her grave if she heard I let a gentleman sit in my parlor without a cup of coffee.”

Fifteen minutes later, Bell was able to say without stretching the truth too far, “This is the finest coffee I have had since my mother took me to a pastry shop in Vienna, Austria, when I was only knee-high to a grasshopper.”

“Well, you know what I’ve a mind to do? I’ll put on a fresh pot and ask Mr. Eddison if he’d like to have a cup with you.”

John Eddison would have been even taller than Bell, the detective saw, had age not bent his back. He had big hands and long arms that must have been powerful in his day, a shock of white hair, pale runny eyes, the enormous nose that old men often grew, and a firm mouth set in sagging jowls.

Bell extended his hand. “I’m Isaac Bell, Van Dorn investigator.”

“You don’t say,” Eddison grinned, and Bell saw that the slow movement of age masked a sprightly manner. “Well, I didn’t do it. Though I might have when I was younger. How can I help you, sonny?”

“I was speaking with Lance Corporal Black and Private Little of the Marine guard, and-”

“You know what we said about the Marines in the Navy?” Eddison interrupted.

“No, sir.”

“A sailor had to accidentally bang his head four times on a low beam to demonstrate that he was qualified to join the Marines.”

Bell laughed. “They told me that you reported you had surprised a prowler in the navy yard.”

“Aye. But he got away. They didn’t believe me.”

“A Chinese?”

“Not a Chinaman.”

“No? I wonder where Black and Little got the idea the prowler was Chinese?”

“I warned you about the Marines,” Eddison chuckled. “You laughed.”

“What sort of man did the prowler look like?”

“Like a Jap.”

“Japanese?”

“I told those fools’ sergeant. Sounds like their sergeant had Chinamen on the brain. But like I said, I don’t think the sergeant believed I saw anyone at all-Chinaman, Jap-he didn’t believe me, period. Thought I was a stupid old man having visions. The sergeant asked me if I was drinking. Hell, I haven’t had a drink in forty years.”

Bell couched his next question carefully. He had met very few Americans who could distinguish Japanese from Chinese. “Did you get a close look at him?”

“Aye.”

“I was under the impression it was dark.”

“The moon shone square in his face.”

“How near were you to him?”

Eddison held up his large, wrinkled hand. “Any closer, I’d have wrapped these fingers around his throat.”

“What was there about him that seemed Japanese?”

“His eyes, his mouth, his nose, his lips, his hair,” the old man fired back.

Again, Bell framed his skepticism cautiously. “Some people say they have trouble telling the two races apart.”

“Some people ain’t been to Japan.”

“And you have?”

Eddison straightened up in his chair. “I sailed into Uraga Harbor with Commodore Matthew Perry when he opened Japan to American trade.”

“That’s sixty years ago!” If this wasn’t an ancient mariner’s tall tale, Eddison was even older than he looked.

“’Fifty-seven. I was a main topman on Perry’s steam frigate Susquehanna. And I pulled an oar in the commodore’s launch. Rowed the Old Man into Yokosuka. We had Japs coming out of our ears.”

Bell smiled. “It does sound as if you are qualified to distinguish Japanese from Chinese.”

“As I said.”

“Could you tell me where you caught the prowler?”

“Almost caught him.”

“Do you recall how far that was from the Gun Factory?”

Eddison shrugged. “Thousand yards.”

“Half a mile,” Bell mused.

“Half a sea mile,” Eddison corrected.

“Even farther.”

“Sonny, I’ll bet you’re speculating if the Jap had something to do with the explosion in Mr. Langner’s design loft.”

“Do you think he did?”

“No way of knowing. Like I say, the Jap I saw was a full thousand yards from the Gun Factory.”

“How big is the navy yard?” Bell asked.

The old sailor stroked his chin and looked into the middle distance. “I’d imagine that between the walls and river, the yard must take up a hundred acres.”

“One hundred acres.” Nearly as big as a northeastern dairy farm.

“Chockful of mills, foundries, parade grounds. Plus,” he added with a meaningful look, “mansions and gardens-where I intercepted him prowling.”

“What do think he was doing there?’

John Eddison smiled. “I don’t think. I know.”

“What do you know he was doing there?”

“He was right close by the officers’ mansions. The commandant’s daughters are comely young ladies. And your Japs, they like the l adies.”

5

THERE WERE DAYS WHEN EVEN A BOY GENIUS LIKE GROVER Lakewood was glad for time off from the laboratory to clear his head of the intricacies of aiming a gun at a moving target from a moving ship. The fire-control expert spent most days and many nights inventing myriad calculations to counter the effects of roll, pitch, yaw, and trajectory curves. It was absolutely fascinating work, made all the more intense by the fact that Lakewood had to devise ways for ordinary minds to apply his calculations in the midst of battle when guns were thundering, seas breaking, and steel splinters howling through the smoke.

In his spare time he toyed with futuristic formulas to tackle the challenges of cross-rolling-where he imagined his ships firing ahead instead of broadside-and tried to take into account the ever-increasing ranges of big guns and the ever-flattening trajectories of high-velocity shells. Sometimes he had to turn himself upside down like a saltshaker to empty his brain.

Rock climbing offered such a break.

A day of rock climbing started with the train ride to Ridgefield, Connecticut, then a drive across the New York state line in a rented Ford auto to Johnson Park in the Westchester estate country, then a two-mile hike to a remote hill called Agar Mountain, all leading to a slow, hard climb up a rock wall to the top of a cliff. The train ride was a chance to just stare out the window for two hours and watch the land change from city to farm. Driving the auto required his full attention to the rutted roads. The hike filled his lungs with fresh air and got his blood going. The climb demanded complete concentration to avoid falling off the cliff and landing a long, long way down on his skull.

This unusually warm weekend for early spring had brought walkers to the park. Striding purposefully in his tweed jacket, knickers, and boots, Lakewood passed an old lady on her “constitutional,” exchanged hearty “Good morning!”s with several hikers, and observed, longingly, a couple holding hands.

Lakewood was quite good-looking, sturdily built, with a ready smile, but working six and seven days a week-often bunking on a cot at the lab-made it hard to meet girls. And for some reason, the nieces and daughters that the older engineers’ wives marched in to meet him were never that appealing. It usually didn’t bother him. He was too busy to be lonely, but now and then when he saw a young couple he thought, One day I’ll get lucky, too.

He hiked deeper into the park until he found himself alone on a narrow path through dense forest. When he saw movement ahead, he was disappointed because he was hoping to have the cliff to himself and concentrate on climbing in peace and quiet.

The person ahead stopped and sat on a fallen log. When he drew closer, he saw it was a girl-and a petite and very pretty girl at that-dressed for climbing in trousers and lace-up boots like his. Red hair spilled from her brimmed hat. As she turned her head abruptly toward him, her hair flashed in the sunlight, bright as a shell burst.

She looked Irish, with paper-white skin, a small, upturned nose, a jaunty smile, and flashing blue eyes, and he suddenly remembered meeting her before… Last summer… What was her name? Let’s see, where had they met… Yes! The “company picnic,” hosted by Captain Lowell Falconer, the Spanish-American War hero to whom Lakewood reported his range-finder developments.

What was her name?

He was close enough to wave and say hello now. She was watching him, with her jaunty smile, and her eyes were lighting up with recognition. Though she looked as puzzled as he felt.

“Fancy meeting you here,” she called, tentatively.

“Hello,” said Lakewood.

“Was last time at the shore?”

“Fire Island,” said Lakewood. “Captain Falconer’s clambake.”

“Of course,” she said, sounding relieved. “I knew I knew you from somewhere.”

Lakewood searched his memory, goading himself: Lakewood! If you can land a 12-inch, five-hundred-pound shell on a dreadnought steaming at sixteen knots from a ship rolling in ten-foot seas, you ought to be able to remember the name of this Gibson Girl lovely who is smiling at you.

“Miss Dee,” he said, snapping his fingers. “Katherine Dee.” And then, because his mother had raised him properly, Lakewood doffed his hat and extended his hand and said, “Grover Lakewood. How very nice to see you again.”

When her smile spread into one of delighted recognition, the sunlight of her brilliant hair seemed to migrate into her eyes. Lakewood thought he had died and gone to Heaven. “What a wonderful coincidence!” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“Climbing,” said Lakewood. “Climbing the rocks.”

She stared in what appeared to be disbelief. “Now, that is a coincidence.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, that’s why I’m here. There’s a cliff up that path that I’m going to climb.” She cocked an eyebrow that was so pale as to be almost invisible. “Did you follow me here?”

“What?” Lakewood flushed and began to stammer. “No, I-”

Katherine Dee laughed. “I’m teasing you. I didn’t mean you followed me. How would you even have known where to find me? No, it’s a perfect coincidence.” Again she cocked her head. “But not really… Do you remember when we talked at the clambake?”

Lakewood nodded. They hadn’t talked as much as he would have liked to. She had seemed to know everybody on the captain’s yacht and had flitted from one person to another, chatting up a storm. But he remembered. “We decided we both liked to be out of doors.”

“Even though I have to wear a hat for the sun because my skin is so pale.”

More pale skin had been visible that summery day. Lakewood remembered round, firm arms bared almost to her shoulders, her shapely neck, her ankles.

“Shall we?” she asked.

“What?”

“Climb the rocks.”

“Yes! Yes. Yes, let’s.”

They started along the path, brushing shoulders where it narrowed. Every time they touched, he felt an electric shock, and he was thoroughly smitten by the time she asked, “Do you still work for the captain?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I seem to recall that you told me something about cannons.”

“They call them guns in the Navy. Not cannons.”

“Really? I didn’t know there was a difference. You said ‘they.’ Aren’t you in the Navy?”

“No, I work in a civilian position. But I report to Captain Falconer.”

“He seemed like a very nice man.”

Lakewood smiled. “ ‘Nice’ is not the first word that comes to mind for Captain Falconer.” Driven, demanding, and daunting came closer to the mark.

“Someone told me he was inspiring.”

“That, he is.”

She said, “I’m trying to remember who said that. He was very handsome, and older than you, I think.”

Lakewood felt a hot stab of jealousy. Katherine Dee was talking about Ron Wheeler, the star of the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport who all the girls fell over. “Most of them are older than me,” he answered, hoping to get off the subject of the handsome Wheeler.

Katherine put him at ease with a heartwarming smile. “Well, whoever he was, I remember that he called you the ‘boy genius.’ ”

Lakewood laughed.

“Why do you laugh? Captain Falconer said it, too, and he was a hero in the Spanish-American War. Are you a Boy Genius?”

“No! I just started young, is all. It’s such a new field. I got in at the beginning.”

“How could guns be new? Guns have been around forever.” Lakewood stopped walking and turned to face her. “That is very interesting. But, no, guns have not been around forever. Not like they are now. Rifled guns can fire tremendous ranges no one ever imagined before. Why, just the other day I was aboard a battleship off Sandy Hook and-”

“You were on a battleship?”

“Oh, sure. I go out on them all the time.”

“Really?”

“On the Atlantic Firing Range. Just last week the gunnery officer said to me, ‘The new dreadnoughts could hit Yonkers from here.’ ”

Katherine’s pretty eyes grew enormous. “Yonkers? I don’t know about that. I mean the last time I sailed into New York on the Lusitania it was a clear day, but I couldn’t see Yonkers from the ocean.”

The Lusitania? thought Lakewood. Not only is she pretty but she’s rich.

“Well, it’s hard to see Yonkers, but at sea you can spot a ship that far. The trick is, hitting it.” They resumed walking, shoulders bumping on the narrow path, as he told her how the invention of smokeless powder allowed the spotters to see farther because the ship was less shrouded in gun smoke.

“The spotters range with the guns. They judge by the splashes of shot whether they’ve fallen short or overshot. You’ve probably read in the newspaper that’s the reason for all big-guns ships-all the guns the same caliber-so firing one in fact aims all.” She seemed much more interested than he would expect of a pretty girl and listened wide-eyed, pausing repeatedly to stop walking and gaze at him as if mesmerized.

Lakewood kept talking.

Nothing secret, he told himself. Nothing about the latest range-finding gyros providing “continuous aim” to “hunt the roll.” Nothing about fire control that she couldn’t read in the papers. He did boast that he got interested in rock climbing while scrambling up a hundred-foot “cage mast” the Navy was developing to spot shell splashes at greater distances. But he did not say that the mast builders were experimenting with coiled lightweight steel tubing to make them immune to shell hits. He did not reveal that cage masts were also intended as platforms for the latest range-finding machines. Nor did he mention the hydraulic engines coupled to the gyro for elevating turret guns. And certainly not a word about Hull 44.

“I’m confused,” she said with a warm smile. “Maybe you can help me understand. A man told me that ocean liners are much bigger than dreadnoughts. He said that Lusitania and Mauritania are 44,000 tons, but the Navy’s Michigan will be only 16,000.”

“Liners are floating hotels,” Lakewood answered, dismissively. “Dreadnoughts are fortresses.”

“But the Lusitania and Mauritania steam faster than dreadnoughts. He called them ‘greyhounds.’ ”

“Well, if you think of Lusitania and Mauritania as greyhounds, imagine a dreadnought as a wolf.”

She laughed. “Now I understand. And your job is to give it teeth.” “My job,” Lakewood corrected proudly, “is to sharpen its teeth.” Again she laughed. And touched his arm. “Then what is Captain Falconer’s job?”

Grover Lakewood considered carefully before he answered. Anyone could read the official truth. Articles were devoted daily to every aspect of the dreadnought race, from the expense to the national glory to gala launchings to flat-footed foreign spies nosing around the Brooklyn Navy Yard claiming to be newspapermen.

“Captain Falconer is the Navy’s Special Inspector of Target Practice. He became a gunnery expert after the battle of Santiago. Even though we sank every Spanish ship in Cuba, our guns scored only two percent hits. Captain Falconer vowed to improve that.”

The steeply sloped face of Agar Mountain loomed ahead. “Oh, look,” said Katherine. “We have it all to ourselves. No one’s here but us.” They stopped at the foot of the cliff. “Wasn’t that crazy man who killed himself blowing up his piano involved with battleships?”

“How did you hear about that?” asked Lakewood. The Navy had kept the tragedy out of the papers, admitting only that there had been an explosion at the Gun Factory.

“Everyone in Washington was talking about it,” said Katherine.

“Is that where you live?”

“I was visiting a friend. Did you know the man?”

“Yes, he was a fine man,” answered Lakewood, staring up the rocks, surveying a route. “In fact, he was on the captain’s yacht for the clambake.”

“I don’t believe I met him.”

“It was a darned sad thing… Terrible loss.”

Katherine Dee turned out to be a strong climber. Lakewood could barely keep up. He was new to the sport, and noticed that her fingers were so strong that she would raise her entire weight by the grip of one hand. When she did, she was able to swing her body to reach high for the next grip.

“You climb like a monkey.”

“That’s not a very nice compliment.” She pretended to pout as she waited for him to catch up with her. “Who wants to look like a monkey?”

Lakewood figured he better save his breath. When they were eighty feet off the ground and the tops of the trees looked like feathers far below, she suddenly pulled farther ahead of him.

“Say, where’d you learn to climb like that?”

“The nuns at my convent school took us climbing on the Matterhorn.”

At that moment, Grover Lakewood’s hands were spread wide, gripping crevices to either side, as he felt for his next toehold. Katherine Dee had reached a position fifteen feet directly above him. She smiled.

“Oh, Mr. Lakewood?”

He craned his neck to see her. It looked like she was holding a giant turtle in her strong white hands. Except it couldn’t be a turtle this early in the year. It was a large rock.

“Careful with that,” he called.

Too late.

It slipped from her hands. No it didn’t! She opened her hands.

6

LANGNER’S SUICIDE NOTE KEPT TICKLING THE BACK OF Isaac Bell’s mind.

He used his pass from the Navy Secretary to reenter the Gun Factory, opened the Polhem padlock on the design-loft door again, and searched Langner’s desk. A stack of special hand-laid stock that Langner apparently reserved for important correspondence matched the paper on which the suicide note was written. Beside it was a Waterman fountain pen.

Bell pocketed the pen, and stopped at the chemist’s laboratory where Van Dorn maintained an account. Then he took a streetcar up Capitol Hill to Lincoln Park, a neighborhood that was flourishing as Washingtonians moved up the Hill from the congested swampy areas around the Potomac River, which turned foul in the summer heat.

Bell found the Langner home directly across the street from the park. It was a two-story brick row house with green shutters and a wrought-iron fence around a small front yard. The Van Dorn auditor investigating Arthur Langner’s financial affairs had uncovered no evidence of a private income. Langner would have had to purchase this new house on his Gun Factory salary, which, the auditor had noted, equaled that of top managers in private industry.

The house looked newly built-as did all but a handful of old wooden structures on the side streets-and boasted tall windows. The brickwork was typically ornate, flaring skyward to an elaborate dentated cornice. But inside, Bell noted in a glance, the house was anything but typical. It was decorated in a spare, modern manner, with built-in cabinets and bookshelves, electric lamps, and ceiling fans. The furniture was up-to-date, too, and very expensive-airy yet strong pieces made by the Glaswegian Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Where, Bell had to ask, did Langner get the money to pay for Mackintosh furniture?

Dorothy was no longer dressed in black but in a silvery gray color that complemented her eyes and her raven hair. A man trailed her into the foyer. She introduced him as “My friend Ted Whitmark.”

Bell pegged Whitmark as a hail-fellow-well-met salesman sort. He looked the picture of success, with a bright smile on his handsome face, an expensive suit of clothes, and a crimson necktie speckled with Harvard College’s insignia.

“More than a friend, I’d say,” Whitmark boomed as he shook Bell’s hand with a hearty grip. “Closer to a fiancé, if you get my drift,” he added, tightening his grip emphatically.

“Congratulations,” said Bell, squeezing back.

Whitmark let go with an easy smile, and joked, “That’s some shake. What do you do in your spare time, shoe horses?”

“Would you excuse us for a moment, Mr. Whitmark?” Bell asked. “Miss Langner, Mr. Van Dorn asked me to have a word with you.”

“We have no secrets here,” said Whitmark. “At least, none that are any business of a detective.”

“That’s all right, Ted,” said Dorothy, laying a hand on his arm and giving him a kind smile. “There’s gin in the kitchen. Why not mix us cocktails while Mr. Bell reports?”

Ted Whitmark didn’t like it but he had no choice but to exit, which he did with a grave “Don’t be keeping her too long, Bell. The poor girl is still recovering from the shock of her father’s death.”

“This will just take a minute,” Bell assured him.

Dorothy slid the pocket doors shut. “Thank you. Ted gets flatteringly jealous.”

“I imagine,” said Bell, “he has many good qualities to have captured your hand.”

She looked Bell straight in the face. “I am not rushing into anything,” she informed him in what the tall detective could not help but interpret as a blunt and flattering statement of interest from a very appealing woman.

“What line is Ted in?” Bell asked, diplomatically changing the subject.

“Ted sells foodstuffs to the Navy. In fact, he’s leaving soon for San Francisco to get ready to provision the Great White Fleet when it arrives. Are you married, Mr. Bell?”

“I am engaged.”

An unreadable smile danced across her beautiful lips. “Pity.”

“To be perfectly honest,” said Bell, “it is not a pity. I am a very lucky man.”

“Perfect honesty is a fine quality in a man. Are you visiting today for more important reasons than to not flirt with me?”

Bell took out the fountain pen. “Do you recognize this?”

Her face clouded. “Of course. That’s my father’s pen. I gave it to him for his birthday.”

Bell handed it to her. “You may as well hold on to it, then. I took it from his desk.”

“Why?”

“To confirm that he had used it to write his letter.”

“The so-called suicide letter? Anyone could have written that.”

“Not quite anyone. Either your father or a skillful forger.”

“You know my position on that. It is not possible that he killed himself.”

“I will keep looking.”

“What about the paper the letter was written on?”

“It was his.”

“I see… And the ink!” she said, suddenly eager. “How do we know it was written with the same ink as in his pen? Perhaps it wasn’t this pen. I bought it in a stationer’s shop. The Waterman Company must sell thousands.”

“I’ve have already given samples of the ink in this pen and on the letter to a chemistry laboratory to ascertain whether the ink is different.”

“Thank you,” she said, her face falling. “It’s not likely, is it?”

“I’m afraid not, Dorothy.”

“But if it is his ink, it still doesn’t prove he wrote that letter.”

“Not beyond all doubt,” Bell agreed. “But I must tell you frankly that while each of these facts must be investigated, they are not likely to give us a definitive answer.”

“What will?” she asked. She seemed suddenly bewildered. Tears glinted in her eyes.

Isaac Bell was touched by her suffering and confusion. He took her hands in his. “Whatever it is, if it exists, we will find it.”

“The Van Dorns never give up?” she asked with a brave smile.

“Never,” Bell promised, although in his heart he had less and less hope that he could lay her pain to rest.

She clung to his hands. When she finally let them go, she stepped closer and kissed his cheek. “Thank you. That’s all I can ask.”

“I’ll keep in touch,” said Bell.

“Would you stay for a cocktail?”

“I’m afraid I can’t, thank you. I’m expected in New York.” As she walked him to the door, Bell glanced into the dining room and remarked, “That is a splendid table. Is it a Mackintosh?” “It sure is,” she answered proudly. “Father used to say if buying a piece of art that he could not afford meant eating beans for supper, he would eat beans for supper.”

Bell had to wonder if Langner had gotten tired of beans and accepted a bribe from a steel mill. As he stepped through the gate he looked back. Dorothy was standing on the step, looking for all the world, he thought, like a fairy princess locked in a tower.

THE B & O RAILROAD’S ROYAL LIMITED was the fastest and most luxurious train from Washington to New York. As night darkened the lead crystal windows, Isaac Bell used the quiet journey to review the hunt for the Frye Boys. The state line-jumping bank robbers that Van Dorn detectives had been tracking through Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio had vanished somewhere in eastern Pennsylvania. As had Detective John Scully.

Dinner aboard the Royal, the equal of Delmonico’s or the new Plaza Hotel, was served in a mahogany-paneled dining car. Bell had Maryland rockfish and a half bottle of Mumm, and reflected upon how much Dorothy Langner reminded him of his fiancée. Clearly, were she not grieving for her father, Dorothy would be a quick-witted, interesting woman, much like Marion Morgan. The women had similar backgrounds: each lost her mother young and had been educated more than most women thanks to doting fathers who were accomplished men and wanted their daughters to exercise their talents fully.

Physically, Marion and Dorothy could not be more different. Dorothy’s hair was a glossy black mane, Marion’s a gleaming straw blond; Dorothy’s eyes were a compelling blue-gray, Marion’s an arresting coral-sea green. Both were tall, slim, and lithe. And both, he thought with a smile, could stop traffic by merely stepping into the street.

Bell checked his gold pocket watch as the Royal pulled into its Jersey City terminal. Nine o’clock. Too late to visit Marion at her hotel in Fort Lee if she was shooting pictures tomorrow. The laugh was on him. Marion was directing a two-reel moving picture about imaginary bank robbers while he was chasing real ones. But a movie drama, he had already learned from observing her at work, took as much planning and detail work as the real thing. And for that, a girl needed her sleep.

He scanned the newsstands and the papers that boys were hawking when he got off the train. Headlines dueled for attention. Half proclaimed a fantastic variety of Japanese threats to the Great White Fleet if-as was rumored-President Roosevelt ordered it close to the Japanese Islands. Half blamed the murder of a New York school-teacher on Chinese white slavers. But it was the weather banners Bell was searching, hoping for a bad forecast.

“Excellent!” he exclaimed aloud. The Weather Bureau predicted clouds and rain.

Marion would not have to rise at dawn to catch every available ray of sunlight.

He hurried from the terminal. The sixteen-mile trolley ride to Fort Lee would take at least an hour, but there might be a better way. The Jersey City Police were experimenting with a motor patrol like New York’s across the river and, as he expected, one of their six-cylinder Ford autos was sitting in front of the terminal manned by a sergeant and patrolman formerly of the Mounted Division.

“Van Dorn,” Bell addressed the sergeant, who looked a little lost without his horse. “It’s worth twenty dollars to get me to Cella’s Park Hotel in Fort Lee.”

Ten would have done it. For twenty, the sergeant cranked the siren.

THE RAIN STARTED as the racing police Ford crested the Palisades. Flinging mud, it tore down Fort Lee’s Main Street, skidded along the trolley tracks, and whisked past a movie studio whose glass walls glittered in its feeble headlamps. Outside the village, they pulled up to Cella’s, a large white two-story frame building set in a picnic grounds.

Bell bounded across the front porch with a big grin on his face. The dining room, which turned into a bar at night, was still open and doing a roaring business as the actors, directors, and cameramen conceded that without sunlight to film by, tomorrow was a lost day. A gang of pitch-perfect singers was grouped around the piano harmonizing,

“You can go as far as you like with me

In my merry Oldsmobile.”

He spotted Marion at a corner table, and his heart nearly stopped. She was laughing, deep in conversation with two other women directors whom Bell had met before: Christina Bialobrzesky, who claimed to be a Polish countess but whose accent sounded to Bell’s ear like New Orleans, and the dark-haired, dark-eyed Mademoiselle Duvall of Pathé Frères.

Marion looked up. She saw him standing in the doorway and jumped to her feet with a radiant smile. Bell rushed across the room. She met him halfway, and he picked her up in his arms and kissed her.

“What a wonderful surprise!” she exclaimed. She was still in her working clothes-shirtwaist, long skirt, and a snug jacket. Her blond hair was heaped up in back, out of her way, exposing her long, graceful neck.

“You look lovely.”

“Liar! I look like I’ve been up since five in the morning.”

“You know I never lie. You look terrific.”

“Well, so do you. And then some… Have you eaten?”

“Dinner on the train.”

“Come. Join us. Or would you rather we sit alone?”

“I’ll say hello first.”

The hotel proprietor approached, beaming with fond memories of Bell’s last visit and rubbing his hands. “Champagne, again, Mr. Bell?”

“Of course.”

“For the table?”

“For the room!”

“Isaac!” said Marion. “There are fifty people in here.”

“Nothing in my grandfather Isaiah’s will says I can’t spend a portion of his five million dollars on a toast to the beauty of Miss Marion Morgan. Besides, they say that Grandfather had an eye for the ladies.”

“So five million was not all you inherited.”

“And when they get drunk, they won’t notice us slipping upstairs to your room.”

She led him by the hand. Christina and Mademoiselle Duvall were also still in their work clothes, though the flamboyant Frenchwoman wore her usual riding pants. She kissed Bell’s cheeks and called him “Eee-zahk.”

“This week we all three are each shooting about bank row-bears, Eee-zahk. You must give me inspector tips.”

“She wants more than tips,” Marion whispered with a grin.

“Are bank row-bears not the symbol of Americain freedom?” Mademoiselle Duvall demanded.

Bell returned a grim smile. “Bank robbers are symbols of death and terror. The trio I’m chasing at the moment routinely shoot everyone in the building.”

“Because they fear to be recognized,” said the French director. “My bank row-bears will shoot no one because they will be of the poor and known by the poor.”

Christina rolled her eyes. “Like Row-ben Hoods?” she asked acerbically.

“Just so the audience knows who’s who,” Marion suggested, “you better make them wear masks.”

“A mask can only mask a stranger,” said Mademoiselle Duvall.

“Were I to don a mask”-she demonstrated with her scarf, drawing the silk across her Gallic nose and sensual mouth so that only her eyes were visible-“Eee-zahk will still recognize me by my gaze.”

“That’s because you’re making eyes at him,” laughed Marion.

Isaac Bell’s expression changed abruptly.

“Is not my fault! Eee-Zahk is too handsome to contain myself. For that, I would have to pull the wool over my eyes.”

Now they noticed his features harden. He appeared remote and cold. Mademoiselle Duvall reached out and touched his arm. “Chéri,” she apologized. “You are too serious. Forgive my behavior if I was inapproprié.”

“Not at all,” Bell said, patting her hand distractedly as he gripped Marion’s tightly under the table. “But you have given me a strange idea. Something to think about.”

“No more thinking tonight,” said Marion.

Bell stood up. “Excuse me. I have to send a wire.”

The hotel had a telephone that he used to call the New York office and dictate a wire to be sent to John Scully care of every Van Dorn post in the region where the detective had last been heard from.

NAME CHANGED FRYES HEADED HOME NEAR

FIRST JOB IN NEW JERSEY

Marion was smiling in the lobby next to the stairs. “I said good night for you.”

7

GET DOWN TO GREENWICH VILLAGE AND BRING BACK Dr. Cruson,” Isaac Bell ordered an apprentice when he rushed into Van Dorn’s Knickerbocker office early the next morning. “You are authorized to take a taxi both ways. On the jump!”

Dr. Daniel Cruson was a handwriting expert.

The apprentice raced off.

Bell read his telegrams. The laboratory in Washington confirmed that the ink on Arthur Langner’s note was the same ink in Langner’s pen. He was not surprised.

A wire from Pennsylvania demonstrated the shortcomings of John Scully’s lone-wolf approach to detecting. The operatives who Joe Van Dorn had assigned to assist Scully while Bell investigated the Arthur Langner death had sent:

CAN’T FIND SCULLY.

STILL LOOKING.

RETURN C/O WESTERN UNION SCRANTON AND

PHILADELPHIA.

Bell growled a mild oath under his breath. They had split up to increase their chances of finding Scully. Ifthey didn’t find him by noon, it would fall to him to inform the boss that the detectives assigned to help Scully track the Frye Boys were instead tracking Scully.

Bell called for the research operative he had brought into the case. Grady Forrer was a grizzly bear of man with an immense chest and belly. He looked like a fellow you would want on your side in a barroom brawl. But his greatest strengths were a ferocious determination to track down the minutest details and a prodigious memory.

“Have you found out where home was for these hydrophobic skunks?” Bell asked. “Where did they grow up?”

The research man shook his head. “I’ve been beating my brains out, Isaac. Can’t find any set of three Frye brothers anywhere in New Jersey. Tried cousins. No go.”

Bell said, “I have an idea about that. What if they changed their name at the time of their first unauthorized withdrawal? That original robbery was in the middle of the state, if I recall. East Brunswick Farmers’ Mutual Savings.”

“Hick-town bank about halfway to Princeton.”

“We always ascribed their gunning down the teller and the customer to viciousness. But what if those three were stupid enough to rob the nearest bank to home?”

Grady Forrer stood up straighter.

“What if they murdered witnesses because they were recognized-even while wearing masks. Maybe the witnesses knew them as local boys. Little Johnny down the road grew up and got a gun. Remember their first note in blood? ‘Fear the Frye Boys.’ ”

“So maybe they weren’t so stupid, after all,” marveled the research man. “From then on everyone called them the ‘Frye Boys.’ ”

“Just like they wanted us to. Find a family near that East Brunswick bank with three brothers or cousins who suddenly disappeared. Even two brothers and a next-door neighbor.”

Bell wired the operatives sent to help Scully, and Scully himself, instructing them to head for East Brunswick.

Merci, Mademoiselle Duvall!

And who else has been steering my thoughts?

Which brought him straight back to his photograph of Arthur Langner’s suicide note. He laid it next to the snapshot he had taken yesterday morning of one of Langner’s handwritten patent applications. He pored over them with a magnifying glass, searching for inconsistencies that might suggest forgery. He could see none. But he was not an expert, which was why he had summoned the handwriting expert from Greenwich Village.

Dr. Daniel Cruson preferred the high-sounding title “graphologist.” His white beard and bushy eyebrows fit a man who spouted lofty theories about the European “talking cure” of Drs. Freud and Jung. He was also prone to statements like “The complex robs the ego of light and nourishment,” which was why Bell avoided him when he could. But Cruson possessed a fine eye for forgery. So fine that Bell suspected that “Dr. Graphology” made ends meet by cobbling up the occasional bank check.

Cruson inspected the photograph of the suicide note with a magnifying glass, then screwed a jeweler’s loupe into his eye and repeated the process. At last he sat back in his chair, shaking his head.

Bell asked, “Do you see inconsistencies in that handwriting that might suggest it was penned by a forger?”

Cruson said, “You are a detective, sir.”

“You know I am,” Bell said curtly to head off a windy discourse.

“You are familiar with the work of Sir William Herschel?”

“Fingerprint identification.”

“But Sir William also believed that handwriting exposes character.”

“I am less interested in character than forgery.”

Cruson did not hear. “From this mere sample, I can tell that the man who wrote this note was eccentric, highly artistic, and very dramatic, too. Given to the grand gesture. Deeply sensitive with powerful feelings that could be overwhelming.”

“In other words,” Bell interrupted, bleakly conceding he would have to report the worst to Dorothy Langner, “the emotional sort likely to commit suicide.”

“So tragic to take his own life so young.”

“Langner wasn’t young.”

“Given time, with psychological analysis, he could have investigated the sources of his sorrow and learned to control his self-destructive impulses.”

“Langner was not young,” Bell repeated.

“He was very young.”

“He was sixty years old.”

“Impossible! Look at this hand. See the bold and easy flow. An older man’s writing cramps-the letters get smaller and trail off as the hands stiffen with age. This is beyond any doubt the handwriting of a man in his twenties.”

“Twenties?” echoed Bell, suddenly electrified.

“No older than thirty, I guarantee you.”

Bell had a photographic memory. Instantly he returned in his mind’s eye to Arthur Langner’s office. He saw the bookshelves lined with bound volumes of Langner’s patent applications. He had had to open several to find a sample for his camera. Those filed before 1885 were handwritten. The more recent were typed.

“Arthur Langner played the piano. His fingers would have been more supple than those of the average man his age.”

Cruson shrugged. “I am neither musician nor physiologist.”

“But if his fingers were not more supple, then this could be a forgery.”

Cruson huffed, “Surely you didn’t summon me here to analyze the personality of a forger. The more skillful the forgery, the less it would tell me about his personality.”

“I did not summon you here to analyze his personality but to confirm whether this is a forgery. Now you are telling me that the forger made a mistake. He copied Langner’s hand from an early sample of his handwriting. Thank you, Dr. Cruson. You’ve opened a new possibility in this case. Unless his piano playing made his handwriting like that of a young man, this is a forgery, and Arthur Langner was murdered.”

A Van Dorn secretary burst in waving a sheet of yellow paper. “Scully!”

The telegram from loner John Scully that he thrust into Isaac Bell’s hand was typically terse.

GOT YOUR WIRE. HAD SAME THOUGHT.

SO-CALLED FRYES SURROUNDED WEST OF EAST

BRUNSWICK.

LOCAL CONSTABULARY THEIR COUSINS.

CARE TO LEND A HAND?

“ ‘Surrounded’?” asked Bell. “Did Mike and Eddie catch up with him?”

“No, sir. All by himself, like usual.”

It looked like Scully had found the Fryes’ real names and trailed them home only to discover that the bank robbers were related to a crooked sheriff who would help them escape. In which case even the formidable Scully had bit off more than he could chew.

Bell scanned the rest of the telegram for directions.

WILLIARD FARM.

CRANBURY TURNPIKE TEN MILES WEST OF STONE

CHURCH.

LEFT TURNOFF FLAGGED.

MILK TRUCK ONE MILE.

Middle of nowhere in the Jersey farm country. It would take all day to get there connecting to local trains. “Telephone the Weehawken garage for my auto!”

Bell grabbed a heavy golf bag and raced down the Knickerbocker’s stairs and out to Broadway. He jumped into a taxi and ordered the driver to take him to the pier at the foot of 42nd Street. There he boarded the Weehawken Ferry to New Jersey, where he had parked his red Locomobile.

8

COMMODORE TOMMY’S SALOON ON WEST 39TH STREET hunched like a fortress in the ground floor and cellar of a crumbling brick tenement a quarter mile from the pier where Isaac Bell’s ferry cast off. Its door was narrow, its windows barred. Like a combination Congress, White House, and War Department, it ruled the West Side slum New Yorkers called Hell’s Kitchen. No cop had laid eyes on the inside of it in years.

Commodore Tommy Thompson, the saloon’s bullet-headed, thick-necked proprietor, was boss of the Gopher Gang. He collected tribute from criminals in the drug trade, prostitution and gambling, pickpockets and burglars, passed along a portion to bribe the police, and delivered votes to the Democratic political machine. He also dominated the lucrative business of robbing New York Central freight cars, his nickname testifying to a level of success in his field that rivaled railroad tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt’s in his.

But that business was about to come to a bloody end, Commodore Tommy suspected, as soon as the railroad got around to organizing a private army to run his train robbers out of New York. So he was planning ahead. Which was why, as Isaac Bell’s ferry sped across the Hudson River, Commodore Thompson was shaking hands on a new deal with a couple of “queueless” Chinese-Americanized high-tone Chinamen who had chopped off the long pigtail worn by their immigrant countrymen.

Harry Wing and Louis Loh were hatchet men for the up-and-coming Hip Sing tong. They spoke good English, were duded up in snappy suits, and were, Thompson took for granted, deadly behind the mild expressions on their well-scrubbed pusses. He had recognized kindred spirits the instant they approached him. Like his Gophers, the Hip Sing profited by controlling the vice rackets with muscle, graft, and discipline. And like Tommy’s Gophers, the Hip Sing were driving out rivals and getting stronger.

The deal they had brought him was irresistible: Tommy Thompson’s Gopher Gang would allow the Chinese gangsters to open opium dens on Manhattan’s West Side. For half the take, the Commodore would protect the joint, supply the girls, and pay the cops. Harry Wing and Louis Loh would gain for the Hip Sing tong white middle-class customers with money to spend-the casual “ice cream users” afraid to venture into the back alleys of Chinatown. A square deal, as President Teddy Roosevelt would say. Done squarely, Sophie Tucker would sing.

THE NEWARK, New Jersey, auto patrol tried to catch Isaac Bell in a Packard.

His 1906 gasoline-powered Locomobile race car was painted fire-engine red. He had ordered the color from the factory to give slower drivers a better chance of seeing him in time to get out of the way. But the color, and the Locomobile’s thunderous exhaust, did tend to draw the attention of the police.

Before he reached East Orange he had left the Newark cops in the dust.

In Elizabeth they came after him on a motorcycle. Bell lost sight of the machine long before Roselle. And now the countryside was opening up.

The Locomobile had been built for the speedway and held many records. Attaching fenders and lights for street driving had tamed it not at all. In the hands of a man with nerves of steel, a passion for speed, and the reflexes of a cat, the big sixteen-liter machine cut a fantastic pace on New Jersey’s farm roads and blasted through sleepy towns like a meteor.

Clad boot to chin in a long linen duster, his eyes shielded by goggles, his head bare so he could hear every nuance of the four-cylinder engine’s thunder, Bell worked the shifter, clutch, and horn in relentless tandem, accelerating on straights, sliding through bends, warning farmers, livestock, and slower vehicles that he was coming through. He would have enjoyed himself immensely were he not so worried about John Scully. He had left the lone-wolf detective in a lurch. The fact that Scully had fallen into the lurch on his own meant nothing. As case boss, he was responsible for looking after his people.

He drove with his big hands low on the spoked steering wheel. When he had to slow in towns, it took both hands to lever the massive beast into turns. But when he poured on the speed on the farm roads, she grew beautifully responsive. One hand was enough, as he repeatedly reached out to pump up the fuel pressure and blow the horn. He rarely touched the brakes. There was little point. The men in Bridge-port, Connecticut, who built the Locomobile had supplied a stopping system that relied on squeezing the chain shafts-a halfhearted afterthought amounting to little more than no brakes at all. Isaac Bell didn’t care.

As he roared out of Woodbridge, a one-twenty-horsepower Mercedes GP roadster tried to give him a run for his money. Bell pressed the Locomobile’s accelerator pedal to the floor and kept the road to himself.

9

WHAT’S THIS?” ASKED COMMODORE TOMMY THOMPSON.

“He says he got a proposition fer yer.”

Tommy’s bouncers, two broken-nosed fighters who had murdered his numerous rivals over the years, were standing close on either side of a refined gentleman they had escorted into his backroom office.

In cold silence, Tommy Thompson sized up what appeared to be a genuine Fifth Avenue swell. He was a medium-built man about his own age, thirty. Medium height, expensive gold-headed cane, expensive long black coat with a velvet collar, costly fur hat, kid gloves. Heat was pouring from the coal stove, and the man quietly removed his gloves, revealing a heavy ring studded with jewels, and unbuttoned his coat. Under his coat, the Gopher Gang leader could see a solid-gold watch chain thick enough to hold a brewery horse and a dark blue broadcloth suit of clothes. Tommy could have entertained three chorus girls for a week in Atlantic City for what the swell had paid for his boots.

The swell said not a word. He stood utterly still after removing his gloves and opening his coat, except for when he lifted a hand to smooth the tip of his narrow mustache with his thumb, which he then hooked in his vest pocket.

A cool customer, Commodore Tommy decided. He also decided that if all the cops in New York chipped in they still could not afford to disguise a detective in such an outfit. Even if they could raise the dough, there wasn’t a cop in the city who could paint that born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth expression on his mug. So the gang boss asked, “What do you want?”

“Can I assume,” the swell asked, “that you are indeed the leader of the Gopher Gang?”

Commodore Tommy grew wary, again. The swell was not a complete stranger to Hell’s Kitchen. He had pronounced the gang’s name correctly-as “goofer.” Not like the newspapers spelled it for Fifth Avenue readers. Where had he learned to say goofer?

“I asked you what do you want?”

“I want to pay you five thousand dollars for the services of three murderers.”

Tommy Thompson sat up straight. Five thousand dollars was a hell of a lot money. So much money that he forgot all about goofer and gopher and threw caution to the winds. “Who do you want murdered?”

“A Scotsman named Alasdair MacDonald needs killing in Camden, New Jersey. The murderers must be adept with knives.”

“Oh, must they, now?”

“I have the money with me,” said the swell. “I will pay you first and trust you will deliver.”

Tommy Thompson turned to his bouncers. The bruisers were grinning mirthlessly. The swell had just made a fatal mistake in admitting he had the dough on him.

“Take his five thousand dollars,” Tommy ordered. “Take his watch. Take his ring. Take his gold-headed cane and his coat and his fur hat and his suit and his boots, and throw the son of a bitch in the river.”

They moved as one, surprisingly fast for big men.

The swell’s coat and tailored suit concealed a powerful frame. The stillness of his stance masked blinding speed. In the space of a heartbeat, one bouncer was sprawled on the floor, stunned and bloodied. The other was pleading for mercy in a high-pitched squeal. The swell had clamped his head under one arm, while he pressed his thumb to the bouncer’s eye.

Commodore Tommy gaped in astonished recognition.

Fitted over the swell’s thumbnail gleamed a razor-sharp gouge. The tip pressed the corner of the bouncer’s eye, and it was clear to the pleading gangster-and to Commodore Tommy-that with a flick of his thumb the swell could scoop the man’s eye out of his head like a grape.

“Jaysus, Jaysus, Jaysus,” breathed Tommy. “You’re Brian O’Shay.”

At the sound of that name the bouncer, whose eye was a fraction of an inch from being extracted from its socket, began to weep. The other, still struggling for breath on the floor, gasped, “Can’t be. Eyes O’Shay is dead.”

“If he was,” said Commodore Tommy, “he’s back from it.”

The Gopher Gang leader stared in wonder.

Brian “Eyes” O’Shay had vanished fifteen years ago. No wonder he knew goofer. If Eyes hadn’t vanished, they’d still be battling each other to boss Hell’s Kitchen. Barely out of childhood, O’Shay had mastered the gang weapons-slingshot, lead pipe, brass knuckles, and axheads in his boots-and even gotten his mitts on a police revolver. But O’Shay had been most feared for gouging out rivals’ eyes with a specially fitted copper thumbnail.

“You’ve moved up in the world,” said Tommy, getting over his shock. “That gouge looks like it’s pure silver.”

“Stainless steel,” said O’Shay. “Holds an edge and don’t corrode.”

“So you’re back. And rich enough to pay people to do your killing for you.”

“I won’t offer twice.”

“I’ll take the job.”

Eyes O’Shay moved quickly, raking the bouncer’s cheek even as he released him. The man screamed. His hands flew to his face. He blinked, removed his hands, and stared at the blood. Then he blinked again and smiled with gratitude. Blood was streaming from a slice that traversed cheekbone to jaw, but his eyes were intact.

“Get up!” Commodore Tommy ordered. “Both of ya. Go get the Iceman. Tell him to bring Kelly and Butler.”

They hurried out, leaving Tommy Thompson alone with O’Shay. Tommy said, “This ought to put an end to the rumors that I killed you.”

“You could not on your best day, Tommy.”

The Gopher Gang boss protested the insult and the contempt behind it. “Why you talking like that? We was partners.”

“Sometimes.”

They stood in silence, old rivals taking each other’s measure. “Back,” Tommy muttered. “Jaysus Christ, from where?”

O’Shay did not answer.

Five minutes passed. Ten.

Kelly and Butler sidled into the Commodore’s office, trailed by Iceman Weeks.

Brian O’Shay looked them over.

Typical new-breed Gopher, he thought, smaller, compact men. And wasn’t Progress a wonderful thing? Tommy was a throwback to the old days when bulk and muscle ruled. Now clubs and lead pipe were giving way to firearms. Kelly, Butler, and Weeks were built more like himself but dandified in the latest gangster fashion-tightfitting suits, bright vests, florid ties. Kelly and Butler wore polished yellow shoes with lavender socks. Weeks, the Iceman, stood out in hose of sky blue. He was the cool one who would hang back, let the hotheads take the chances, and then swoop in for the prize. In his dreams, the Commodore would die of something quick, and Iceman Weeks would own the Gophers.

O’Shay took three butterfly knives from his coat and handed one to each. They were German made, exquisitely balanced, quick to open, and sharp as razors. Kelly, Butler, and Weeks hefted them admiringly.

“Leave them in the man when you do the job,” O’Shay ordered with a glance at the Commodore, who seconded the order with a blunt threat. “If I ever sees youse with them again, I’ll break your necks.”

O’Shay opened a bulging wallet and removed three return tickets to Camden, New Jersey. “MacDonald,” he said, “will be hanging out in Del Rossi’s Dance Hall soon after dark. You’ll find it in the Gloucester district.”

“What does he look like?” asked Weeks.

“Like an avalanche,” said O’Shay. “You can’t miss him.”

“Get going!” Commodore Tommy ordered. “Don’t come back ’til he’s dead.”

“When do we get paid?” asked Weeks.

“When he’s dead.”

The killers headed for the railroad ferry.

O’Shay pulled a thick envelope from his overcoat and counted out fifty hundred-dollar bills on Tommy Thompson’s wooden desk. Thompson counted it again and stuffed the money in his trousers.

“Pleasure doing business.”

O’Shay said, “I’ll have use for those tong hatchet men, too.”

Commodore Tommy stared hard. “What tong hatchet men would you be wondering about, Brian O’Shay?”

“Those two highbinders from the Hip Sing.”

“How in Christ’s name did you know about them?”

“Don’t let the fancy duds confuse you, Tommy. I’m still ahead of you and always will be.”

O’Shay turned on his heel and stalked out of the saloon.

Tommy Thompson snapped his fingers. A boy named Paddy the Rat appeared at a side door. He was thin and gray. On the street, he was almost as invisible as the vermin he was named for. “Follow O’Shay. Find out where he hangs and what moniker he goes by.”

Paddy the Rat followed O’Shay east across 39th. The man’s fine coat and fur hat seemed to glow as he cut a path through the shabbily dressed poor who thronged the greasy cobblestones. He crossed Tenth Avenue, crossed Ninth, where he neatly sidestepped a drunk who lurched at him from the shadow of the elevated train tracks. Just past Seventh he stopped in front of an auto-rental garage and peered in the plate-glass window.

Paddy crept close to a team of dray horses. Shielded by their bulk, stroking their bulging chests to keep them calm, he racked his brain. How could he follow O’Shay if he rented an automobile?

O’Shay turned abruptly from the glass and hurried on.

Paddy got uncomfortable as the neighborhood changed. New buildings were going up, tall offices and hotels. The grand Metropolitan Opera House reared up like a palace. If the cops saw him, they would run him in for invading the Quality’s neighborhood. O’Shay was nearing Broadway. Suddenly he disappeared.

Paddy the Rat broke into a desperate gallop. He could not return to Hell’s Kitchen without reporting O’Shay’s address. There! With a sigh of relief he turned into an alley beside a theater under construction. At the end of the alley he saw the tail of the long black coat twirl around a corner. He raced after it and skidded around that corner, straight into a fist that knocked him to the mud.

O’Shay leaned over him. Paddy the Rat saw a glint of steel. A needle burst of pain exploded in his right eye. He knew instantly what O’Shay had done to him and he cried out in despair.

“Open your hand!” said O’Shay.

When he did not, the steel pricked his remaining eye. “You’ll lose this one, too, if you don’t open your hand.”

Paddy the Rat opened his hand. He quivered as he felt O’Shay press something round and terrible into his palm and close his fingers around it almost gently. “Give this to Tommy.”

O’SHAY LEFT THE BOY whimpering in the alley and retraced his steps to 39th Street. He stood in the shadows, still as a statue, until he was sure the little weasel didn’t have a partner watching. Then he continued east under the Sixth Avenue El, checked his back, walked to Fifth Avenue, and turned downtown, still studying reflections in windows.

A mustachioed Irish cop directing traffic shouted at a freight wagon to stop so the well-dressed gentleman could cross 34th Street. Doormen-whose blue-and-gold uniforms would have done an all-big-gun dreadnought’s captain proud-scrambled when they saw him coming.

O’Shay returned their crisp salutes and marched into the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.

10

ISAAC BELL SPOTTED JOHN SCULLY’S RED HANDKERCHIEF tied to a hedge. He swung the Locomobile into the narrow road it marked, eased up on the accelerator pedal for the first time since he left Weehawken, and closed the cutout, which quieted the thunderous exhaust to a hollow mutter.

He steered up a steep hill and drove a mile through fallow farm fields that awaited spring planting. The resourceful Scully had procured a milk-can collection truck somewhere, exactly the sort of vehicle that would not look out of place on New Jersey’s farm roads. Bell eased quietly alongside it so the Locomobile could not be seen from the road. Then he heaved his golf bag off the passenger seat and carried it to the hillcrest where the Van Dorn detective lay flat on brown grass.

The laconic loner was a short, round man with a moon face who could pass for a trusted colleague of preachers, shopkeepers, safe-crackers, or murderers. Thirty pounds of fat disguised slabs of rock-hard muscle, and his diffident smile concealed a mind quicker than a bear trap. He was training field glasses on a house down the hill. Smoke rose from the kitchen chimney. A big Marmon touring car was parked outside, a powerful machine covered in mud and dust.

“What’s in the bag?” Scully greeted Bell.

“Couple of five irons,” Bell grinned, removing a pair of humpback twelve-gauge Browning Auto-5 shotguns. “How many in the house?”

“All three.”

“Anyone living there?”

“No smoke before they drove up.”

Bell nodded, satisfied that no innocents would be caught in a cross fire. Scully passed him the field glasses. He studied the house and the automobile. “Is that the Marmon they stole in Ohio?”

“Could be another. They’re partial to Marmons.”

“How’d you get a line on them?”

“Played your hunch about their first job. Their real name is Williard, and if me and you was half as smart as we think we are, we’d have tumbled to it a month ago.”

“Can’t argue with that,” Bell admitted. “Why don’t we start things off by putting their auto out of action.”

“We’ll never hit it from here with these scatter guns.”

Bell pulled from the golf bag an ancient.50 caliber Sharps buffalo gun. John Scully’s eyes gleamed like ball bearings. “Where’d you get the cannon?”

“Our Knickerbocker house dick separated it from a Pawnee Bill Wild West Show cowboy who got drunk in Times Square.” Bell levered open the breech, loaded a black-powder cartridge, and aimed the heavy rifle at the Marmon.

“Try not to set it on fire,” Scully cautioned. “It’s full of their loot.”

“I’ll just make it hard to start.”

“Hold it, what’s that coming?”

A six-cylinder K Ford was bouncing up the lane that lead to the farmhouse. It had a searchlight mounted on the radiator.

“Hell’s bells,” said Scully. “That’s Cousin Constable.”

Two men with sheriff stars on their coats climbed out of the Ford carrying baskets. Scully studied them through the glasses. “Bringing them supper. Two more makes five.”

“Got room in your milk truck?”

“If we stack ’em close.”

“What do you say we give them time to get distracted filling their bellies?”

“It’s a plan,” said Scully, continuing to observe the house.

Bell watched the lane to the house and turned around repeatedly to be sure that no more relatives came up the back road he had taken.

He was wondering where Dorothy Langner got the money to buy her father a piano when Bell remembered that she had given it to him only recently.

Scully got uncharacteristically talkative. “You know, Isaac,” he said, gesturing toward the farmhouse below and the two automobiles, “for jobs like this wouldn’t it be nice if somebody invented a machine gun light enough to tote around with you?”

“A ‘sub’ machine gun?”

“Exactly. A submachine gun. But how would you lug all that water to cool the barrel?”

“You wouldn’t have to if it fired pistol ammunition.”

Scully nodded thoughtfully. “A drum magazine would keep it compact.”

“Shall we start the show?” Bell asked, hefting the Sharps. Both detectives glanced at the woods near the house where the Frye Boys would run when Bell disabled their autos.

“Let me flank ’em first,” said Scully. Putting words to action, he waddled down the hill, looking, Bell thought, like a bricklayer hurrying to work. He waved when he was in place.

Bell braced his elbows on the crest, thumbed the hammer to full cock, and sighted the Sharps on the Marmon’s motor cowling. He gently squeezed the trigger. The heavy slug rocked the Marmon on its tires. The rifle’s report echoed like artillery, and a cloud of black smoke spewed from the muzzle and tumbled down the hill. Bell reloaded and fired again. Again the Marmon jumped, and a front tire went flat. He turned his attention to the police car.

Wide-eyed constables boiled out of the house waving pistols. The bank robbers stayed inside. Rifle barrels poked from the window. A hail of lever-action Winchester fire stormed at the black-powder smoke billowing from Isaac Bell’s Sharps.

Bell ignored the lead howling past his head, methodically reloaded the single-shot Sharps, and shot the Ford’s motor cowling. Steam spurted from the hot radiator. Now their quarry was on foot.

All three bank robbers darted from the house, rifles blazing.

Bell reloaded and fired, reloaded and fired. A long gun went flying, and the man staggered, clutching his arm. Another turned and ran toward the woods. Rapid fire bellowed from Scully’s twelve-gauge autoload and caused him to change his mind. He skidded to a stop, looked around frantically, and flung his weapon down and threw his hands in the air. The constables, gripping pistols, froze. Bell stood up, aiming the Sharps through the black smoke. Scully sauntered from the woods, pointing his shotgun.

“Mine’s a twelve-gauge autoload,” Scully called conversationally. “Fellow up the hill’s got a Sharps rifle. About time you boys got smart.”

The constables dropped their pistols. The third Frye boy levered a fresh cartridge into his Winchester’s chamber and took deliberate aim. Bell found him in his sights, but Scully fired first, tipping the barrel of his shotgun high to increase the range. The slugs spread wide at that distance. Most tore past the bank robber. Two that did not peppered his shoulder.

NEITHER SHOT MAN WAS mortally wounded. Bell made sure that they would not bleed to death and handcuffed them with the others in Scully’s milk truck. They started downhill, Scully driving the truck, Bell in his Locomobile bringing up the rear. Just as they reached the Cranbury Turnpike, Mike and Eddie, the Van Dorns assigned to help Scully, appeared in an Oldsmobile, and the caravan headed for Trenton to turn the bank robbers and the crooked cops over to the State’s Attorney.

Two hours later, nearing Trenton, Bell saw a road sign that jogged his photographic memory. The sign was a stack of town and road names lettered on white arrows that pointed south: the Hamilton Turnpike, the Bordentown Road, the Burlington Pike, and the West-field Turnpike to Camden.

Arthur Langner had written appointments on a wall calendar. Two days before he died he had met with Alasdair MacDonald, the turbine-propulsion specialist who had been contracted by the Navy’s Steam Engineering Bureau. MacDonald’s factory was in Camden.

Her father loved his guns, Dorothy Langner had pleaded. As Farley Kent loved his hulls. And Alasdair MacDonald his turbines. A wizard, she had called MacDonald, meaning he was her father’s equal. Bell wondered what else the two men had in common.

He squeezed the Locomobile’s horn bulb. The Oldsmobile and milk truck skidded to a dusty halt. “There’s a fellow I ought to see in Camden,” Bell told Scully.

“Need a hand?”

“Yes! Soon as you turn this bunch in, could you get to the Brooklyn Navy Yard? There’s a naval architect in the drawing loft named Farley Kent. See if he’s on the up-and-up.”

Bell turned the Locomobile south.

“ON CAMDEN’S SUPPLIES, THE WORLD RELIES,”

a billboard greeted Isaac Bell as he entered the industrial city, which occupied the eastern shore of the Delaware River across from Philadelphia. He passed factories that made everything from cigars to patent drugs to linoleum and terra-cotta and soup. But it was the shipyard that dominated. The incongruously named New York Shipbuilding Company lined the Delaware and Newton Creek with modern covered ways and gigantic gantries thrusting at the smoky sky. Across the river sprawled Cramp Ship Builders and the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

Evening was falling before Bell found the MacDonald Marine Steam Turbine Company inland from the riverfront in a warren of smaller factories that supplied the shipyard with specialty items. He parked the Locomobile at the gates and asked to see Alasdair MacDonald. MacDonald was not in. A friendly clerk said, “You’ll find the Professor down in Gloucester City-just a few blocks from here.”

“Why do you call him the Professor?”

“Because he’s so smart. He was apprenticed to the inventor of the naval turbine, Charles Parsons, who revolutionized high-speed ship propulsion. By the time the Professor emigrated to America, he knew more about turbines than Parsons himself.”

“Where in Gloucester City?”

“Del Rossi’s Dance Hall-not that he’s dancing. It’s more saloon than dance hall, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ve encountered similar establishments out west,” Bell said drily.

“Cut over to King Street. Can’t miss it.”

Gloucester City was just down the river from Camden, the two cities blending seamlessly. King Street was near the water. Saloons, quick-and-dirties, and boardinghouses hosted workingmen from the shipyards and the bustling river port. Del Rossi’s was as unmissable as MacDonald’s clerk had promised, boasting a false front mocked up to look like a proscenium arch in a Broadway theater.

Inside was bedlam, with the loudest piano Bell had ever heard, women shrieking with laughter, perspiring bartenders knocking the necks off bottles to pour faster, exhausted bouncers, and wall-to-wall sailors and shipyard hands-five hundred men at least-determined to win the race to get drunk. Bell studied the room over a sea of flushed faces under clouds of blue smoke. The only occupants of the saloon not in shirtsleeves were himself, in his white suit, a handsome silver-haired gent in a red frock coat whom he guessed was the proprietor, and a trio of dandified gangsters tricked out in brown derbies, purple shirts, bright waistcoats, and striped ties. Bell couldn’t see their shoes but suspected they were yellow.

He plowed through broad shoulders toward the frock coat.

“Mr. Del Rossi!” he shouted over the din, extending his hand.

“Good evening, sir. Call me Angelo.”

“Isaac.”

They shook hands. Del Rossi’s were soft but bore the long-healed burns and cuts of ship work in his youth.

“Busy night.”

“God bless our ‘New Navy.’ It’s like this every night. New York Ship launches the Michigan next month and just laid the keel for a twenty-eight-knot destroyer. Across the river, the Philadelphia Navy Yard is building a new dry dock, Cramp launches South Carolina come summer, plus they’ve already nailed a contract for six 700-ton destroyers-six, count ’em, six. What can I do for you, sir?”

“I’m looking for a fellow named Alasdair MacDonald.”

Del Rossi frowned. “The Professor? Follow the sound of fists cracking jaws,” he answered with a nod toward the farthest corner from the door.

“Excuse me. I better get over there before someone floors him.”

“That’s not likely,” said Del Rossi. “He was heavyweight champ of the Royal Navy.”

Bell sized MacDonald up as he worked his way across the room, and he took an immediate shine to the big Scotsman. He looked to be in his forties, tall, with an open countenance and muscles that rippled under a shirt soaked with perspiration. He had several boxing scars over his eyebrows-but not a mark on the rest of his face, Bell noticed-and enormous hands with splayed-out knuckles. He cupped a glass in one, a whiskey bottle in the other, and as Bell drew close he filled the glass and stood the bottle on the bar behind him, his eyes fixed on the crowd. It parted suddenly, explosively, and a three-hundred-pound bruiser lumbered at MacDonald with murder in his eye.

MacDonald tracked him with a wry smile, as if they were both in on a good joke. He took a swig from his glass and then, without appearing to rush, closed his empty hand into an enormous fist and landed a punch almost too fast for Bell to see.

The bruiser collapsed to the sawdust-strewn floor. MacDonald looked down at him amiably. He had a thick Scots accent. “Jake, me friend, you are a purrfectly fine laddie ’til the drink riles your noggin.” Of the group around him, he asked, “Would someone see Jake home?”

Jake’s friends carried him out. Bell introduced himself to Alasdair MacDonald, who, he surmised, was drunker than he looked.

“Do I know you, laddie?”

“Isaac Bell,” he repeated. “Dorothy Langner told me that you were a particular friend of her father.”

“That I was. Poor Artie. When they made the Gunner they broke the mold. Have a drink!”

He called for a glass, filled it to the brim, and passed it to Bell with the Scottish toast, “Slanj.”

“Slanj-uh va,” said Bell, and he threw back the fiery liquor in the same manner as MacDonald.

“How is the lass bearing up?”

“Dorothy is clinging to the hope that her father neither killed himself nor took a bribe.”

“I don’t know about killing himself-mountains shade dark glens. But I do know this: the Gunner would have shoved his hand in a punch press before he’d reach for a bribe.”

“Did you work closely together?”

“Let’s just say we admired each other.”

“I imagine you shared similar goals.”

“We both loved dreadnoughts, if that’s what you mean. Love ’em or hate ’em, the dreadnought battleship is the marvel of our age.”

Bell noticed that MacDonald, drunk or not, was dodging his questions artfully. He backtracked, saying, “I imagine you must be following the progress of the Great White Fleet with keen interest.”

Alasdair snorted scoffingly. “Victory at sea goes to ordnance, armor, and speed. You’ve got to shoot farther than the enemy, survive more punishment, and steam faster. By those standards, the Great White Fleet is hopelessly out-of-date.”

He splashed more liquor in Bell’s glass and refilled his own. “ England’s HMS Dreadnought and the German dreadnought copies have longer range, stronger armor, and dazzling speed. Our ‘fleet,’ which is simply the old Atlantic Squadron tarted up, is a flock of pre-dreadnought battleships.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A pre-dreadnought battleship is like a middleweight fighter who learned to box in college. He has no business in the prize ring with heavyweight Jack Johnson.” MacDonald grinned challengingly at Bell, whom he outweighed by forty pounds.

“Unless he did graduate studies on Chicago’s West Side,” Bell challenged him back.

“And put on a few pounds of muscle,” MacDonald acknowledged approvingly.

Impossible as it seemed, the piano suddenly got louder. Someone banged on a drum. The crowd made way for Angelo Del Rossi to mount a low stage opposite the bar. He drew from his frock coat a conductor’s baton.

Waiters and bouncers put down trays and blackjacks and picked up banjos, guitars, and accordions. Waitresses jumped onto the stage and cast off their aprons, revealing skirts so short that police in any city with more than one church would raid the joint. Del Rossi raised his baton. The musicians banged out George M. Cohan’s “Come On Down,” and the ladies danced what appeared to Bell to be an excellent imitation of the Paris cancan.

“You were saying?” he shouted.

“I was?”

“About the dreadnoughts that you and the Gunner…”

“Take the Michigan. When she’s finally commissioned, our newest battleship will have the best gun arrangement in the world-all big guns on superimposed turrets. But tissue-thin armor and rattletrap piston engines doom her to be a semi-dreadnought at best-target practice for German and English dreadnoughts.”

MacDonald drained his glass.

“All the more terrible that the Bureau of Ordnance lost a great gun builder in Artie Langner. The technical bureaus hate change. Artie forced change… Don’t get me started on this, laddie. It’s been an awful month for America’s battleships.”

“Beyond the death of Artie Langner?” Bell prompted.

“The Gunner was only the first to die. One week later we lost Chad Gordon, our top armorer at Bethlehem Iron Works. Horrible accident. Six lads roasted alive-Chad and all his hands. Then last week that damned fool Grover Lakewood fell off the hill. The cleverest fire-control expert in the business. And a hell of a fine young man. What a future he’d have given us-gone in a stupid climbing accident.”

“Hold on!” said Bell. “Are you telling me that three engineers specializing in dreadnought battleships have all died in the last month?”

“Sounds like a jinx, doesn’t it?” MacDonald’s big hand passed over his chest in the sign of the cross. “I would never say our dreadnoughts are jinxed. But for the sake of the United States Navy, I hope to bloody hell Farley Kent and Ron Wheeler aren’t next.”

“Hulls at the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” said Bell. “Torpedoes at Newport.”

MacDonald looked at him sharply. “You get around.”

“Dorothy Langner mentioned Kent and Wheeler. I gathered they were Langner counterparts.”

“Counterparts?” MacDonald laughed. “That’s the joke of the dreadnought race, don’t you see?”

“No I don’t. What do you mean?”

“It’s like a shell game, with a pea under every shell and every pea packed with dynamite. Farley Kent devises watertight compartments to protect his hulls from torpedoes. But up in Newport, Ron Wheeler improves torpedoes-builds a longer-range torpedo that carries heavier explosives, maybe even figures out how to arm it with TNT. So Artie has to-had to-increase gun range so the ship can fight farther off, and Chad Gordon had to cast stronger armor to take the hits. Enough to drive a man to drink…” MacDonald refilled their glasses. “God knows how we’ll get along without those lads.”

“But speed you say is also vital. What about you in Steam Engineering?” Bell asked. “They say you’re a wizard with turbines. Wouldn’t Alasdair MacDonald’s loss be as devastating to the dreadnought program?”

MacDonald laughed. “I’m indestructible.”

Another fistfight broke out across the dance hall.

“Excuse me, Isaac,” said MacDonald, and he waded cheerfully into it.

Bell shouldered after him. The flashily dressed gangsters he’d seen when he came in were hovering around the impromptu ring of cheering men. MacDonald was trading punches with a young heavyweight who had the arms of a blacksmith and admirable footwork. The Scotsman appeared slower than the younger man. But Bell saw that Alasdair MacDonald was allowing his opponent to land punches as a way of gauging what he had. So subtle was he that none of the blows scored any damage. Suddenly Alasdair seemed to have learned all he needed to. Suddenly he was fast and deadly, throwing combinations. Bell had to admit they outclassed the best he had thrown when he boxed for Yale, and he recalled with a grateful smile Joe Van Dorn steering him into “graduate study” in Chicago’s saloons.

The blacksmith was weaving. MacDonald finished him off with an upper cut that was no harder than it had to be to do the job, then helped him to his feet, slapped his back, and bellowed for all to hear, “You did good, laddie. I just got lucky… Isaac, did you note this fellow’s footwork? Don’t you think he’s got a future in the ring?”

“He’d have floored Gentleman Jim Corbett in his prime.”

The blacksmith accepted the compliment with a glassy-eyed grin.

MacDonald, whose own eyes were still restlessly scanning the crowd, noticed the gangsters coming purposefully his way. “Oh, here’s another contender-two more. No rest for the weary. All right, lads, you’re runts, but there’s two of ya. Come and get it.”

They weren’t quite runts, although MacDonald outweighed them handily, but they moved with assurance and held their hands well. And when they attacked, it was clearly not the first time they had teamed up. Talented street fighters, Bell assessed them, tough slum kids who had fought their way into the upper ranks of a gang. Full-fledged gangsters now, out for a night of mayhem. Bell moved closer in case things got out of hand.

Hurling filthy curses at Alasdair MacDonald, they attacked him simultaneously from both sides. There was a viciousness to the concerted assault that seemed to anger the Scotsman. Face flushed, he feinted a retreat, which drew them forward into a powerful left jab and a devastating right. One gangster staggered backward, blood spurting from his nose. The other crumpled up, holding his ear.

Bell saw steel flash behind Alasdair MacDonald.

11

ISAAC BELL WHISKED HIS OVER-UNDER, TWO-SHOT derringer out of his hat in a blur of motion and fired at the third gangster, who was lunging at Alasdair MacDonald’s back with a knife. The range was close, nearly point-blank. The heavy.44 slug stopped him in his tracks, and the blade fell from his hand. But even as the roar of gunfire sent patrons stampeding for cover, the dandy with the bloody nose was thrusting another knife at the Scotsman’s belly.

MacDonald gaped, as if astonished that a friendly brawl would turn deadly.

Isaac Bell realized that he was witnessing a premeditated attempt at murder. A fleeing spectator blocked his vision. Bell slammed him out of his way and fired again. Above MacDonald’s bloody nose, the knife wielder grew a red hole between the eyes. His knife fell inches short of Alasdair MacDonald’s belt.

Bell’s derringer was empty.

The remaining killer, the one floored, rose behind MacDonald with a fluid ease that showed him neither hurt nor slowed by the blow he had taken to his ear. A long-bladed knife flipped open in his hand. Bell was already pulling his Browning No. 2 semiautomatic from under his coat. The killer thrust his knife at MacDonald’s back. Tucking the pistol to his body to shield it from the running men, Bell fired. He knew that he would have stopped the killer dead with a shot to the brain. But someone crashed into him just as he pulled the trigger.

He did not miss by much. The shot pierced the dandy’s right shoulder. But the Browning’s pinpoint accuracy was gained at the cost of stopping power, and the killer was left-handed. Although the.380 caliber slug staggered him, momentum was on the killer’s side, and he managed to sink his blade into Alasdair MacDonald’s broad back.

MacDonald still looked astonished. His eyes met Bell’s even as the detective caught him in his arms. “They tried to kill me,” he marveled.

Bell eased the suddenly dead weight to the sawdust and knelt over him. “Get a doctor,” Bell shouted. “Get an ambulance.”

“Laddie!”

“Don’t talk,” said Bell.

Blood was spreading rapidly, so fast that the sawdust floated on it instead of absorbing it.

“Give me your hand, Isaac.”

Bell took the huge splayed hand in his.

“Please give me your hand.”

“I’ve got you, Alasdair-Get a doctor! ”

Angelo Del Rossi knelt beside them. “Doc’s coming. He’s a good one. You’ll be O.K., Professor. Won’t he, Bell?”

“Of course,” Bell lied.

MacDonald gripped Bell’s hand convulsively and whispered something Bell could not hear. He leaned closer. “What did you say, Alasdair?”

“Listen.”

“I can’t hear you.”

But the big Scotsman said nothing. Bell whispered into his ear, “They came after you, Alasdair. Why?”

MacDonald opened his eyes. They grew wide with sudden recognition, and he whispered, “Hull 44.”

“What?”

MacDonald closed his eyes as if falling asleep.

“I’m a doctor. Get out of my way.”

Bell moved aside. The doctor, youthful, brisk, and apparently competent, counted MacDonald’s pulse. “Heartbeat like a station clock. I have an ambulance on the way. Some of you men help me carry him.”

“I’ll do it,” said Bell.

“He weighs two hundred pounds.”

“Get out of my way.”

Isaac Bell cradled the fallen boxer in his arms, stood to his feet, and carried MacDonald out the door to the sidewalk, where Bell held him while they waited for the ambulance. Camden cops were holding back the crowds. A police detective demanded Bell’s name.

“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn operative.”

“Nice shooting in there, Mr. Bell.”

“Did you recognize the dead men?”

“Never saw ’em before.”

“Out-of-town? Philadelphia?”

“They had New York train tickets in their pockets. Care to tell me how you got mixed up in this?”

“I’ll tell you everything I can-which isn’t much-as soon as I get this fellow to the hospital.”

“I’ll be waiting for you at headquarters. Tell the desk sergeant you want to see Barney George.”

A motor ambulance mounted on the new Model T chassis pulled up in front of the dance hall. As Bell laid MacDonald inside, the boxer clutched his hand again. Bell climbed in with him, beside the doctor, and rode to the hospital. While a surgeon worked on the Scot in the operating room, Bell telephoned New York with orders to warn John Scully, who was watching hull designer Farley Kent, and to dispatch operatives to the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport to guard the life of Ron Wheeler.

Three men central to the American dreadnaught program had died, and a fourth was at death’s door. But if he had not witnessed the attack on Alasdair MacDonald, it would have been reported as a likely event in a saloon brawler’s life instead of attempted murder. There was already a possibility that Langner had been murdered. What if the Bethlehem foundry explosion MacDonald had told him about wasn’t an accident? Was the Westchester climbing accident murder, too?

Bell sat by the man’s bed all night and into the morning. Suddenly, at noon, Alasdair MacDonald filled his mighty chest with a shuddering breath and let it slowly sigh away. Bell shouted for the doctor. But he knew it was hopeless. Saddened, and deeply angry, Bell went to the Camden Police headquarters and reported to Detective George his part in failing to stop the attack.

“Did you retrieve any of their knives?” Bell asked when he had finished.

“All three.” George showed them to Bell. Alasdair MacDonald’s blood had dried on the blade that killed him. “Strange-looking things, aren’t they?”

Bell picked up one of the two others not stained and examined it. “It’s a Butterflymesser.”

“A who?”

“A German folding knife, modeled on a Balisong butterfly knife. Quite rare outside the Philippine Islands.”

“I’ll say. I’ve never seen one. German, you say?”

Bell showed him the maker’s mark incised on the tang of the blade. “Bontgen and Sabin of Solingen. Question is, where did they get them…?” He looked the Camden detective full in the face. “How much money did you find in the dead men’s pockets?”

Detective George looked aside. Then he made a show of flipping through the pages of his handwritten case notes. “Oh, yeah, here it is-less than ten bucks each.”

Eyes cold, voice grim, Bell said, “I am not interested in recouping what might have gone astray before it was recorded as evidence. But the correct number-the actual amount of cash in their pockets-will indicate whether they were paid to do the killing. That amount, spoken privately between you and me, will be an important clue for my investigation.”

The Camden cop pretended to read his notes again. “One had eight dollars and two bits. The others had seven bucks, a dime, and a nickel.”

Isaac Bell’s bleak gaze dropped to the Butterflymesser he was holding. With a peculiar flick of his wrist, he caused the blade to fly open. It glinted like ice. He appeared to study it, as if wondering what use to put it to. Detective George, though deep in the confines of his own precinct, nervously wet his lips.

Bell said, “A workingman earns about five hundred dollars a year. A year’s pay to kill a man might seem the right amount to an evil person who would commit such an act for money. Therefore, it would help me to know whether those two killers who did not escape were carrying such a large sum.”

Detective George breathed a sigh of relief. “I guarantee you, neither packed such a roll.”

Bell stared at him. Detective George looked happy he had not lied. Finally Bell asked, “Mind if I keep one of these knives?”

“I’ll have to ask you to sign for it-but not the one they killed him with. We’ll need that for the trial if we ever catch the son of a bitch-which ain’t likely if he don’t come back to Camden.”

“He’s coming back,” Isaac Bell vowed. “In chains.”

12

‘GUTS’ DAVE KELLY-THE ONE YOU PUT A HOLE IN HIS head-and ‘Blood Bucket’ Dick Butler took their orders from a brain named Irv Weeks-the ‘Iceman,’ on account of he’s got cold blue eyes like ice, heart and soul to match. Being that Weeks is smarter than Kelly and Butler was by a long shot, and seeing how you described him hanging back waiting for his chance, I’ll lay money it was Weeks who got away.”

“With my bullet in his shoulder.”

“The Iceman is a tough customer. If it didn’t kill him, you can bet he’s hopped a freight train back to New York and paid a midwife to dig it out.”

Harry Warren, Van Dorn’s New York gang specialist, had come down on the train in response to Bell’s telephone call and gone straight to the Camden city morgue, where he identified the murderers Bell had shot as members of the Hell’s Kitchen Gopher Gang. Warren caught up with Bell at the police station. The two Van Dorns conferred in a corner of the detectives’ bull pen.

“Harry, who would send these Bowery Boy hellions all the way to Camden?”

“Tommy Thompson, the ‘Commodore,’ bosses the Gophers.”

“Does he traffic in hired killings?”

“You name it, Tommy does it. But there was nothing to stop these guys from hiring out on their own-so long as they paid Tommy his cut. Did the Camden cops find big money on the bodies? Or should I ask, did they admit to finding big money on the bodies?”

“They claim they didn’t,” Bell replied. “I made it clear that we are after bigger fish than thieving cops, and from the answer I got back I am reasonably certain that the amounts were small. Perhaps they would be paid afterward. Perhaps their boss kept the bulk of it.”

“Both,” said Harry Warren. He thought hard. “But it’s strange, Isaac. These gang boys usually stick close to home. Like I say, Tommy would do anything for dough, but Gophers and the like tend not to venture out of their own neighborhoods. Half of them couldn’t find Brooklyn, much less cross state lines.”

“Find out why they did this time.”

“I’ll try and brace Weeks soon as I learn where he’s recuperating and-”

“Don’t brace him. Send for me.”

“O.K., Isaac. But don’t count on much. No one’s keeping books on a deal like this. For all we know, it could have been personal. Maybe MacDonald poked one too many guys in the snoot.”

“Have you ever heard of a New York gangster using a Butterflymesser?”

“You mean the Philippine flip-open knife?”

Bell showed him the Butterflymesser.

“Yeah, there was a Duster who joined the Army to get away from the cops, ended up fighting in the Filipino insurrection. He brought one back and killed a gambler with it who owed him money. At least, that’s what they said, but I bet it was the cocaine. You know how ‘dust’ makes ’em paranoiac.”

“In other words, the Butterflymesser is not common in New York.”

“That Duster’s was the only one I ever heard of.”

BELL RACED TO NEW YORK.

He hired a driver and mechanic to drive his Locomobile back while he took the train. A police launch, provided by Detective George, who was delighted to help him leave Camden, ran him across the Delaware River to Philadelphia, where he caught a Pennsylvania Railroad express. When he arrived at the Knickerbocker Hotel, light in the afternoon sky still glowed on the green copper roof, but nearer the street the red brick, French renaissance façade was growing dim.

He telephoned Joseph Van Dorn long-distance in Washington.

“Excellent job on the Frye Boys,” Van Dorn greeted him. “I just had lunch with the Attorney General, and he is tickled pink.”

“Thank John Scully. I only held his coat.”

“How much longer to wrap up the Langner suicide?”

“This is bigger than Langner,” Bell retorted, and he told Van Dorn what had transpired.

“Four murders?” Van Dorn asked incredulously.

“One for sure-the one I witnessed. One likely-Langner.”

“Depending upon how much credence you put in that crackpot Cruson.”

“And the other two we have to investigate.”

“All connected by battleships?” Van Dorn asked, still sounding incredulous.

“Every victim worked in the dreadnought program.”

“If they’re all victims, who’s behind it?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t suppose you know why either.”

“Not yet.”

Van Dorn sighed. “What do you need, Isaac?”

“Van Dorn Protection Services to guard Farley and Wheeler.”

“To whom do I bill those services?”

“Put it on the cuff ’til we figure who the client is,” Bell answered drily.

“Very amusing. What else do you need?”

BELL ISSUED INSTRUCTIONS to the crew of operatives Van Dorn put at his call-temporarily, as his call with the boss had made clear. Then he took the subway downtown and a trolley across the Brooklyn Bridge. John Scully met him in a Sand Street lunchroom a stone’s throw from the fortresslike gates of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

The cheap restaurant was starting to fill up as day shifts ended at the yard and surrounding factories, and boilermakers, drop forgers, tank testers, reamers, and patternmakers, machinists, coppersmiths, pipe fitters, and plumbers rushed in for supper.

Scully said, “Near as I can discover, Kent’s on the up-and-up. All he does is work and work some more. Devoted as a missionary. I’m told he hardly ever leaves his drawing table. He’s got a bedroom attached to his drawing loft, where he stays most nights.”

“Where does he stay the rest of the nights?”

“Hotel St. George when a certain lady from Washington comes to town.”

“Who is she?”

“Well, that’s the funny thing. She’s the daughter of your exploding-piano guy.”

“Dorothy Langner?”

“What do you think of that?”

“I think Farley Kent is a lucky man.”

THE BROOKLYN NAVY YARD surrounded a large bay of the East River between the Brooklyn Bridge and the Williamsburg Bridge. Designated a “battleship yard,” and officially named the New York Navy Yard, its factories, foundries, dry docks, and shipways employed six thousand ship workers. Tall brick walls and iron gates enclosed twice the acreage of the Washington Navy Yard. Isaac Bell showed his Navy pass at the Sand Street Gate, which was flanked by statues of eagles.

He found Farley Kent’s drawing loft in a building dwarfed by enormous ship sheds and gantry cranes. Night had blackened the high windows, and the draftsmen worked by electric lamps. Kent was young, barely out of his twenties, and deeply shaken by Alasdair Mac-Donald’s murder. He mourned that MacDonald’s death would cripple America’s development of large-ship turbines. “It will be a long while before the United States Navy will be able to install advanced turbines in our dreadnoughts.”

“What is Hull 44?” Bell asked.

Kent looked away. “Hull 44?”

“Alasdair MacDonald implied that it was important.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“He spoke freely about Arthur Langner and Ron Wheeler and Chad Gordon. And about you, Mr. Kent. Clearly, you five men worked closely. I am sure you know what Hull 44 means.”

“I told you. I do not know what you are talking about.”

Bell regarded him coldly. Kent looked away from his stern face.

“ ‘Hull 44,’ ” the detective said, “were your friend’s dying words. He would have told me what it meant if he had not died. Now it’s up to you.”

“I can’t-I don’t know.”

Bell’s features hardened until they looked like they had been cut from stone. “That powerful man held my hand like a child and tried to tell me why he was murdered. He could not get the words out. You can. Tell me! ”

Kent bolted into the hallway and yelled loudly for the sentries.

Six U.S. Marines escorted Bell out the gates, their sergeant polite but unmoved by Bell’s pass. “I recommend, sir, that you telephone for an appointment with the commandant of the yard.”

Scully was waiting in the lunchroom. “Have yourself some supper. It’s a swell grub station. I’ll watch for Kent.”

“I’ll spell you in fifteen minutes.”

Bell could not remember when he had last eaten. He was just raising a sandwich from his plate when Scully dashed back and motioned him to the door. “Kent broke from the gate like the favorite at the Kentucky Derby. Heading east on Sand. Wearing a tall-crowned black derby and a tan topcoat.”

“I see him.”

“That’s the direction of the Hotel St. George. Looks like the lady’s back in town. I’ll cut over to the St. George on Nassau in case you lose him.” Without waiting for Bell’s response, the independent Scully disappeared around the corner.

Bell followed Kent. He lay back half a block, screened by the crowds pouring in and out of the saloons and eateries, and passengers hopping on and off streetcars. The naval architect’s tall bowler was easy to track in a neighborhood where most men wore cloth caps. His tan coat stood out among dark coats and pea jackets.

Sand Street passed through a district of factories and storehouses on its route between the navy yard and the Brooklyn Bridge. The damp evening chill carried the scents of chocolate, roasting coffee, coal smoke, harbor salt, and the sharp, pungent aroma of electrical shorts sparking from the trolley wires. Bell saw enough saloons and gambling halls to rival San Francisco’s “Barbary Coast.”

Kent surprised him at the enormous Sand Street Station where streetcars, elevated railway trains, and a trolley line under construction converged on the Brooklyn Bridge. Instead of passing under the station and continuing on to the Heights and the Hotel St. George, the naval architect suddenly darted through an opening in the stone wall that supported a ramp to the Brooklyn Bridge and hurried up the stairs. Bell dodged a trolley and tore after him. Hordes of people were streaming down the steps, blocking his view. He pushed his way to the top. There he caught sight of Farley Kent walking toward Manhattan on the wooden promenade in the center of the bridge. So much for a lady at the Hotel St. George.

The wooden walkway was flanked by elevated rail and trolley tracks and crowded with an evening rush of men walking home from work in Manhattan. Trains and streetcars hurtled past. They were packed with humanity, and Bell-who had spent many years tracking criminals on horseback in the open spaces of the West-understood those who preferred to walk in the cold, even assaulted by the constant shriek and rumble of train wheels.

Kent shot a glance over his shoulder. Bell removed his distinctive broad-brimmed white hat and moved side to side to be shielded by the crowds. His quarry hurried against the foot traffic, head down, staring at the boards and ignoring the dramatic panorama of New York’s skyscraper lights and the twinkling carpet of red, green, and white lanterns shown by the tugboats, schooners, steamers, and ferries plying the East River two hundred feet under the bridge.

The stairs on the Manhattan side led down to the City Hall district. The instant Kent hit the pavement he spun on his heel and hurried back toward the river he had just crossed. Bell followed, wondering what Kent was up to as they neared the waterfront. South Street, which passed under the bridge and paralleled the East River, was bordered by a forest of ship masts and bowsprits. Finger piers and warehouses thrust into the stream, forming slips in which moored three-masted sailing ships, tall-funneled steamers, and railroad barges.

Kent turned uptown, away from the Brooklyn Bridge. He hurried for several blocks, walking fast, not bothering to look back. When he reached Catherine Slip, he turned toward the water. Bell saw trading vessels rafted side by side. Deck cranes swung pallets of freight from ship to shore. Longshoremen trundled them into the warehouses. Kent passed the ships and headed for a long and unusually narrow steam yacht, which had not been visible from South Street.

Bell observed from the corner of a warehouse. The narrow yacht, which was fully one hundred feet long, had a sleek knife blade of a steel hull painted white, a tall steering bridge amidships, and a tall smokestack aft. Despite its businesslike appearance, it was luxuriously finished with brass fittings and varnished mahogany. Moored incongruously among the grimy trading vessels, it was, Bell thought, well hidden.

Farley Kent dashed up a gangway. Lighted portholes gleamed from the low cabin. Farley Kent pounded on the door. It opened, spilling light, and he disappeared inside and yanked it shut. Bell followed immediately. He put his hat on his head and crossed the pier with quick, firm strides. A deckhand on one of the trading vessels noticed. Bell gave him a grim stare and a dismissive nod, and the man looked away. Bell confirmed that the yacht’s decks were still empty of sailors, stepped quietly across the gangway, and pressed his back to the bulkhead that formed the cabin.

Removing his hat again, he peered in a porthole cracked open for ventilation.

The cabin was small but luxurious. Brass ship lamps cast a warm glow on mahogany paneling. In a swift glance, Bell took in a sideboard with crystal glasses and decanters secured in racks, a dining table set within a horseshoe banquette with green leather upholstery, and a voice pipe for communicating throughout the vessel. Hanging over the table was a Henry Reuterdahl oil painting of the Great White Fleet.

Kent was shrugging out of his coat. Watching him was a short, stocky, athletic-looking Navy officer with an erect posture, a puffed-out chest, and a captain’s bars on his shoulder boards. Bell could not see his face, but he could hear Kent shout, “Damned detective. He knew exactly what to ask.”

“What did you tell him?” the captain asked calmly.

“Nothing. I had him thrown out of the yard. Impertinent busybody.”

“Did it occur to you that his visit concerned Alasdair MacDonald?”

“I didn’t know what the hell to think. He gave me a case of the rattles.”

The captain seized a bottle from the sideboard and poured a generous glass. As he thrust it at Kent, Bell finally saw his face-a youthful, vigorous face that ten years ago had been splashed reverently on every newspaper and magazine in the nation. His exploits in the Spanish-American War had rivaled those of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders for coolheaded bravery.

“Well, I’ll be…” said Bell, half aloud.

He shoved open the cabin door and strode inside.

Farley Kent jumped. The Navy captain did not, but merely regarded the tall detective with an expectant gaze.

“Welcome aboard, Mr. Bell. When I learned the terrible news from Camden, I hoped you’d find your way here.”

“What is Hull 44?”

“Better to ask why Hull 44,” answered Captain Lowell Falconer, the Hero of Santiago.

He offered a hand that had lost two fingers to shell splinters.

Bell closed it in his. “It is an honor to make your acquaintance, sir.”

Captain Falconer spoke into the voice pipe. “Cast off.”

13

FEET POUNDED ON DECK. A LIEUTENANT APPEARED AT the door, and Falconer engaged him in urgent conversation. “Farley,” he called. “You might as well get back to your loft.” The architect left without a word. Falconer said, “Please wait here, Bell. I won’t be a minute.” He stepped outside with his lieutenant.

Bell had seen the Reuterdahl painting of the Great White Fleet on the cover of Collier’s magazine last January. The fleet lay anchored in the harbor of Rio de Janeiro. A native boat was rowing toward the bright white hull of the anchored flagship Connecticut, waving an advertisement that read:

American Drinks. SQUARE DEAL at JS Guvidor

Smoke and shadow in a dark corner of the sunny harbor scene obscured the sleek gray hull of a German cruiser.

The deck moved under Bell’s feet. The yacht began backing out of her slip into the East River. When she engaged her propellers ahead and wheeled downstream, Bell felt no vibrations, nor even the faintest throbbing of the engines. Captain Falconer stepped back into the cabin, and Bell gave his host a curious glance. “I’ve never been on such a smooth-running steam yacht.”

Falconer grinned proudly. “Turbines,” he said. “Three of them, linked to nine screw propellers.”

He pointed at another painting, one which Bell had not seen from the porthole. It depicted Turbinia, the famous experimental turbine-powered vessel Alasdair MacDonald’s mentor had raced through an international gathering of naval fleets at Spitshead, England, to dramatize turbine speed.

“Charles Parsons left nothing to chance. In the event that something went wrong with Turbinia, he built two turbine racers. This one’s named Dyname. Do you remember your Greek?”

“The result of forces acting together.”

“Very good! Dyname is actually Turbinia’s big sister, a trifle beamier, modeled after the torpedo boats of the nineties. I had her refitted as a yacht and converted her boilers to oil, which opened up a lot of space in the former coal bunkers. Poor Alasdair used her as a test craft and modified the turbines. Thanks to him, even though she’s beamier than Turbinia, she burns less fuel and goes faster.”

“How fast?”

Falconer laid an affectionate hand on Dyname’s varnished mahogany and grinned. “You would not believe me if I told you.”

The tall detective grinned back. “I wouldn’t mind a trick at the helm.”

“Wait ’til we’re out of congested waters. I don’t dare open her up in the harbor.”

The yacht steamed down the East River into the Upper Bay and increased her speed dramatically. “Quite a clip,” said Bell.

Falconer chuckled, “We rein her in until we reach the open sea.”

The lights of Manhattan Island faded astern. A steward appeared bearing covered dishes and spread them on the table. Captain Falconer bid Bell sit across from him.

Bell stood where he was, and asked, “What is Hull 44?”

“Please join me for supper, and while we head to sea I will tell you the secret of why Hull 44.”

Falconer began by echoing Alasdair MacDonald’s lament. “It’s ten years since Germany started building a modern Navy. The same year we captured the Philippine Islands and annexed the Kingdom of Hawaii. Today, the Germans have dreadnought battleships. The British have dreadnought battleships, and the Japanese are building, and buying, dreadnought battleships. So when the U.S. Navy embarks on distant service to defend America’s new territories in the Pacific, we will be outclassed and outgunned by the Germans and the British and the Empire of Japan.”

Brimming with such zeal that he left his beefsteak untouched, Captain Falconer regaled Isaac Bell with the dream behind Hull 44. “The dreadnaught race teaches that change is always preceded by a universal conviction that there is nothing new under the sun. Before the British launched HMS Dreadnaught, two facts about battleships were engraved in stone. They took many years to build and they had to be armed with a great variety of guns to defend themselves. HMS Dreadnaught is an all-big-guns ship, and they built her in a single year, which changed the world forever.

“Hull 44 is my response. America’s response.

“I recruited the best brains in the fighting-ship business. I told them to do their damnedest! Men like Artie Langner, the ‘Gunner,’ and Alasdair, whom you met.”

“And saw die,” Bell interrupted grimly.

“Artists, every one of them. But like all artists, they’re misfits. Bohemians, eccentrics, if not plain loony. Not the sort that get along in the regular Navy. But thanks to my misfit geniuses hatching new ideas and refining old ones, Hull 44 will be a dreadnought battleship like none that sail the seas-an American engineering marvel that will overwhelm the British Dreadnought and the German Nassau and Posen, and the worst Japan can throw at her-Why are you shaking your head, Mr. Bell?”

“That’s too big a deal to keep secret. You’re obviously a wealthy man, but no individual is rich enough to launch his own dreadnought. Where do you get your funds for Hull 44? Surely someone high up must know.”

Captain Falconer answered obliquely. “Eleven years ago I had the privilege of advising an Assistant Secretary of the Navy.”

“Bully!” Bell smiled his understanding. That explained Lowell Falconer’s independence. Today, that Assistant Secretary of the Navy was none other than the nation’s fiercest champion of a strong Navy-President Theodore Roosevelt.

“The President believes that our Navy should be footloose. Let the Army defend ports and harbors-we’ll even build them the guns. But the Navy must fight at sea.”

“From what I’ve seen of the Navy,” said Bell, “first you will have to fight the Navy. And to win that fight you would have to be as clever as Machiavelli.”

“Oh, but I am,” Falconer smiled. “Though I prefer the word ‘devious’ to clever.”

“Are you still a serving officer?”

“I am, officially, Special Inspector of Target Practice.”

“A wonderfully vague title,” Bell remarked.

“I know how to outfox bureaucrats,” Falconer shot back. “I know my way around Congress,” he continued with a cynical smile and raised his maimed hand for Bell to see. “What politician dares deny a war hero?”

Then he explained in detail how he had planted a cadre of l ike-minded younger officers in the key bureaus of Ordnance and Construction. Together, they were angling to overhaul the entire dreadnought-building system.

“Are we as far behind as Alasdair MacDonald claimed?”

“Yes. We launch Michigan next month, but she’s no prize. Delaware, North Dakota, Utah, Florida, Arkansas, and Wyoming, first-class dreadnoughts, are stuck on the drawing boards. But that’s not entirely a bad thing. Advancements in naval warfare pile up so quickly that the later we launch our battleships, the more modern they will be. We’ve already learned the shortcomings of the Great White Fleet, long before it reaches San Francisco. First thing we’ll fix when they sail home is to paint them gray so enemy gunners can’t spot them so easily.

“Paint will be the easy part. Before we can turn our new knowledge into fighting ships, we have to convince the Navy Board of Construction and Congress. The Navy Board of Construction hates change, and Congress hates expense.”

Falconer nodded at the Reuterdahl. “My friend Henry’s got his tail in a crack. The Navy invited him along to paint pictures of the Great White Fleet. They did not expect him to also fire off articles to McClure’s Magazine informing the world of its shortcomings. Henry will be lucky to find his way home on a tramp steamer. But Henry’s right, and I’m right: It’s O.K. to learn by experience. O.K. to learn by failure, even. But it is not O.K. not to improve. That is why I build in secret.”

“You’ve told me why. You’ve not told me what.”

“Don’t be impatient, Mr. Bell.”

“A man was murdered,” Isaac Bell replied grimly. “I am not patient when men are murdered.”

“You just said men.” Captain Falconer stopped bantering and demanded, “Are suggesting that Langner was murdered, too?”

“I rate his murder increasingly likely.”

“What about Grover Lakewood?”

“Van Dorn operatives in Westchester are looking into his death.

And in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, we are investigating the accident that killed Chad Gordon. Now, are you going to tell me about Hull 44?”

“Let’s get topside. You’ll see what I mean.”

Dyname had continued to increase her speed. There was still no trembling from the engines, despite a powerful drone of rushing sea and wind. The steward and a sailor appeared with seaboots and oil-skins. “You’ll want these on, sir. She’s no yacht, once she gets moving. More like a torpedo boat.”

“Torpedo boat, hell,” muttered the sailor. “She’s a submarine.”

Falconer handed Bell a pair of goggles with smoked glass so dark it seemed opaque and looped another pair over his own head.

“What’s this for?”

“You’ll be glad you have them when you need them,” the captain answered enigmatically. “All set? Let’s get up to the bridge while we can.” The seaman and steward wrestled the door open, and they stepped on deck.

The slipstream hit like a punch in the face.

Bell pushed forward on the narrow side deck less than five feet above the rushing water. “She must be doing thirty knots.”

“Still loafing along,” Falconer yelled over the roar. “We’ll get moving once we pass Sandy Hook.”

Bell glanced back. Fire was flickering from the smoke funnel, and the wake was so frothed that it glowed in the dark. They climbed onto the open bridge, where thick slabs of glass screened the helmsman, who was clinging to a small spoked wheel. Captain Falconer shouldered him aside.

Ahead in the dark, an intermittent white light blinked every fifteen seconds.

“Sandy Hook Lightship,” said Captain Falconer. “Last year we’ll see it. They’re moving the light to mark the new Ambrose Channel.”

Dyname bore down on the fifteen-second blinker. In its back glow, Bell glimpsed the white-lettered “Sandy Hook” and “No. 51” on the side of the black vessel as it fell rapidly behind them.

“Hang on!” said Captain Falconer.

He laid the hand with the missing fingers on a tall lever. “Bowden cable connection direct to the turbines. Same as flexible-cable brakes for bicycles. I can increase steam from the helm without ringing the engine room. Like the throttle on your auto.”

“Alasdair’s idea?” asked Bell.

“No, this is mine. You’re about to feel Alasdair’s.”

14

BELL GRIPPED A HANDHOLD AS DYNAME’S BOW LIFTED from the water. The drone of sea and wind grew explosive. Spray battered the glass screen. Captain Falconer switched on a searchlight mounted in front, and the reason for her knife-shaped narrowness was immediately apparent. The light revealed eight-foot seas sweeping under them at fifty knots. A hull of any other shape would have smashed against the water so hard it would wreck itself.

“Did you ever drive anything this fast?” Falconer shouted.

“Only my Locomobile.”

“Care to try her?” Falconer asked casually.

Isaac Bell grabbed the helm.

“Steer around the bigger seas,” Falconer recommended. “If you bury the bow, those nine propellers will drive us straight to the bottom.”

The helm was remarkably responsive, Bell thought, capable of whisking the hundred-foot yacht left and right with a twitch of the spokes. He dodged big seas repeatedly, getting a feel for how she handled. In half an hour they were more than twenty-five miles from land.

Bell saw a flicker of light in the distance. A deep rumbling noise began rolling in the night.

“Are those guns?”

“Twelves,” said Falconer. “See the flash?”

Orange-and-red flames lanced the dark ahead.

“Those higher-pitched sounds are 6s and 8s. We’re inside the Sandy Hook Atlantic Test Range.”

“Inside? While they’re shooting?”

“While the cat’s away the mice will play. The senior captains are circumnavigating the world with the Fleet. My boys are right there, learning their trade.”

Powerful beams of light bristled into the sky.

“Searchlight exercise,” said Falconer. “Battleships hunting destroyers, destroyers hunting battleships.”

Sweeping sky and water, the searchlights suddenly converged on a battleship, previously invisible in the dark, and lit bright as noon a low-slung white hull hurling spray.

“Look! That’s just what I’ve been telling you about. That’s New Hampshire. She wasn’t yet commissioned when the Fleet sailed. Just finished her shakedown. Watch what happens to her foredeck.”

The searchlights showed seas breaking over the battleship’s bow and deluging her forward guns.

“Decks awash in light seas! Guns underwater! Told you paint will be the easy part. We need higher freeboard and flared bows. Our newest capital ship has a ram bow, for God’s sake, like we’re going to war with Phoenicians!”

Bell saw a wave strike her anchor billboard and scatter in blinding clouds.

“Now, watch her on the roll. See that armor belt rising?… Now, watch it disappear as she rolls back and submerges it. If we don’t extend our armor to protect the ships’ undersides when they roll, the enemy will draft small boys to sink them with peashooters.”

A searchlight swung their way, probing the dark like an angry white finger.

“Goggles!”

Bell covered his eyes with the black goggles just in time. An instant later the light that caught Dyname would have blinded him. Through the blackened glass he could see clear as day.

“Searchlights are as powerful as big guns,” Falconer shouted.

“They’ll completely disorient every man on the bridge and blind the spotters.”

“Why are they aiming at us?”

“It’s a game we play. They try to catch me. Good practice. Though once they get your range it’s impossible to shake them loose.”

“Oh, really? Hang on, Captain!”

Bell yanked back on the throttle. Dyname stopped as if she had hit a wall. The searchlight beam soared ahead in the direction they had been steaming. Bell spun the helm with both hands. The light was coming back for him. He nudged the throttle lever as he steered the yacht at a right angle, waited for the propellers to bite, then rammed it forward.

Fire belched from the stack. Dyname took off like an Independence Day rocket, and the searchlight beam skittered away in the wrong direction.

“O.K., Captain. You’ve told me why and you’ve shown me why. But you still haven’t shown me what.”

“I’ll lay a course for the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

A NEW DAY WAS LIGHTING the tops of the Brooklyn Bridge towers as Dyname sliced into the East River. Bell was still at the helm, and he steered under the bridge and bore right, toward the navy yard. From the water he could see numerous ships under construction on the ways and in the dry docks. Falconer pointed to the northernmost way, which was isolated from the others. He called down the voice pipe to the engine room to disengage the propellers. The tide was slack. Dyname drifted on her momentum to the foot of the way, where its rails angled into the water. Above her soared a gigantic skeletal frame partially sheathed in steel plate.

“Hull 44, Mr. Bell.”

Isaac Bell drank in the noble sight. Even with her frames awaiting more armor, there was a majesty to her flaring bow, an eagerness to join the water, and a promise of power as yet unleashed.

“Keep in mind she doesn’t even officially exist yet.”

“How can you hide a six-hundred-foot ship?”

“It resembles a hull that Congress authorized,” Captain Falconer answered with an almost imperceptible wink. “But, in fact, from her keel to the top of her cage mast she will be chockful of brand-new ideas. She will have all the latest in turbines, guns, torpedo protection, fire control. But most important, she is uniquely designed to continue improving by swapping new innovations for old. Hull 44 is far more than one ship. She’s the model for entire classes to be built, and the inspiration for ever-more-innovative, ever-more-powerful super-dreadnoughts.”

Falconer paused dramatically. Then he intoned in a hard, grim voice, “And that is why Hull 44 is targeted by foreign spies.”

Isaac Bell raked Captain Falconer with a cold eye.

“Are you surprised?” he asked curtly.

Isaac Bell had had it with Falconer’s attempts to lead him in circles. As inspiring a sight as the great ship was, and as much as he had relished driving a fifty-knot race yacht he would have better spent the night combing Hell’s Kitchen for the man who murdered Alasdair MacDonald.

Falconer backed off when he heard Bell’s cold retort.

“Of course everyone spies,” the captain admitted. “Every nation with a naval shipyard or a treasury to buy a warship spies. How far ahead are their friends and enemies in guns, armor, and propulsion? What new next invention will make our dreadnought vulnerable? Whose gun is longer range? Whose torpedo goes farther? Whose engines are faster, whose armor stronger?”

“Vital questions,” Bell concurred. “And it is normal-even for nations at peace-to seek the answers.”

“But it is not normal,” Falconer shot back. “And certainly not right for nations at peace to commit sabotage.”

“Hold your horses! Sabotage? There’s no evidence of sabotage in these murders-no destruction, with the possible exception of the foundry accident in Bethlehem.”

“Oh, there is destruction, all right. Terrible destruction. I said sabotage and I meant sabotage.”

“Why would a spy kill when killing is sure to draw attention to his spying?”

“They fooled me, too,” said Captain Falconer. “I feared that Artie Langner had accepted bribes and killed himself out of guilt. Then I thought, What awful luck that poor young Grover Lakewood fell on his head. But when they killed Alasdair MacDonald, I knew it had to be sabotage. And didn’t he, too? Didn’t he whisper, ‘Hull 44’?”

“As I told you,” Bell admitted.

“Don’t you see, Bell? They’re sabotaging Hull 44 by murdering minds. They’re attacking the minds that imagine the vital guts of that warship-guns, armor, propulsion. Look past the steel and armor plate. Hull 44 is no more than the minds of the men still working on it and the minds of those who died. When saboteurs kill our minds, they kill unborn thoughts and new ideas. When they kill our minds, they sabotage our ships.”

“I understand,” Bell nodded thoughtfully. “They sabotage our ships not yet launched.”

“Or even dreamed of!”

“Which enemy do you suspect?”

“The Empire of Japan.”

Bell recalled immediately that old John Eddison had claimed to have seen a Japanese intruder in the Washington Navy Yard. But he asked, “Why the Japanese?”

“I know the Japs,” Falconer answered. “I know them well. I served as an official observer aboard Admiral Togo’s flagship Mikasa when he destroyed the Russian Fleet at the battle of Tsushima-the most decisive naval battle since Nelson beat the French at Trafalgar. His ships were tip-top, his crews trained like machines. I like the Japs, and I certainly admire them. But they are ambitious. Mark my words, we will fight them for the Pacific.”

Bell said, “The murderers who attacked Alasdair MacDonald were armed with Butterflymessers manufactured by Bontgen and Sabin of Solingen, Germany. Isn’t Germany a leading contender in the dreadnaught race?”

“Germany is haunted by the British Navy. They’ll fight tooth and claw for the North Sea, and Britain will never let them near the Atlantic. The Pacific is our ocean. The Japanese want it, too. They are designing ships for distant service across the wide Pacific, just as we are. The day will come when we’ll fight them from California to Tokyo. For all we know, the Japs will attack this summer when the Great White Fleet approaches their islands.”

“I’ve seen the headlines,” Bell said with a wry smile. “In the same newspapers that inflamed the war with Spain.”

“Spain was a cakewalk!” Falconer retorted. “A stumbling relic of the Old World. The Japs are new-like us. They’ve already laid down Satsuma, the biggest dreadnought in the world. They’re building their own Brown-Curtis turbines. They’re buying the latest Holland submarines from Electric Boat.”

“Nonetheless, early in an investigation it pays to keep an open mind. The saboteurs could serve any nation in the dreadnought race.”

“Investigation is not my department, Mr. Bell. All I know is that Hull 44 needs a man with gumption to protect her.”

“Surely the Navy is investigating-”

Falconer interrupted with a sarcastic snort. “The Navy is still investigating reports that the battleship Maine sank in Havana Harbor in 1898.”

“Then the Secret Service-”

“The Secret Service has its hands full protecting the currency and President Roosevelt from fiends like the one who shot McKinley. And the Justice Department will take years to launch any sort of national bureau of investigation. Our ship cannot wait! Dammit, Bell, Hull 44 demands an outfit that’s got steam up and is itching to cast off.”

By now Bell knew that the Special Inspector of Target Practice was manipulative, if not underhanded, and devious by his own admission. But he was a true believer. “As an evangelist,” Bell told him, “the Hero of Santiago would give Billy Sunday a run for his money.”

“Guilty,” Falconer admitted with a practiced smile. “Do you suppose Joe Van Dorn would allow you to take the job?”

Isaac Bell fixed his gaze on the bones of Hull 44 rising on the ways. As he did, a yard whistle started the workday with a deepthroated bellow. Steam cranes chanted full-throttle. Hundreds, then thousands, of men swarmed onto the a-building ship. Within minutes, red-hot rivets were soaring like fireflies between “passer boys” and “holders-on,” and soon she echoed the din of hammers. These sights and sounds thrust Bell’s memory back to Alasdair MacDonald mourning his dead friend, Chad Gordon. “Horrible. Six lads roasted alive-Chad and all the hands working beside him.”

As if a shooting star had swept the last strands of darkness from the morning sky, Isaac Bell saw the mighty dreadnought for what she could be-a lofty vision of living men and a monument to the innocent dead.

“I would be amazed if Joe Van Dorn didn’t order me to take the job. And if he doesn’t, I’ll do it myself.”