The Spy

15

THE SPY SUMMONED THE GERMAN HANS TO NEW YORK, to a cellar under a Biergarten restaurant at Second Avenue and 50th Street. Barrels of Rhine wine were half submerged in a cold underground stream that flowed through the cellar. The stone walls echoed the musical sound of tumbling water. They sat face-to-face over a round wooden table illuminated by a single lightbulb.

“We plot the future beside a buried remnant of pastoral Manhattan,” the spy remarked, gauging Hans’s response.

The German, who appeared to have put a dent in the Rhine wine supply, seemed moodier than ever. The question was, had Hans’s brain become too congested by wine and remorse to make him useful?

“Mein Freund!” The spy fixed Hans with a commanding gaze. “Will you continue to serve the Fatherland?”

The German straightened visibly. “Of course!”

The spy concealed a relieved smile. Listen closely, and you could still hear Hans’s heels click like a marionette’s. “I believe your many experiences include working in a shipyard?”

“Neptun Schiffswerft und Maschinenfabrik,” Hans answered proudly, obviously flattered that the spy remembered. “In Rostock. A most modern yard.”

“The Americans’ ‘most modern yard’ is in Camden, New Jersey. I think that you should go to Camden. I think you should establish yourself quickly in the city. You can draw on me for whatever you need, be it operating funds, explosives, false identification, forged shipyard passes.”

“To what end, mein Herr?”

“To send a message to the United States Congress. To make them wonder whether their Navy is incompetent.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The Americans are about to launch their first all-big-guns battleship.”

“Michigan. Yes, I read in the papers.”

“With your experience, you know that the successful launch of a 16,000-ton hull from land into water demands balancing three powerful forces: gravity, drag on the slipway, and the upthrust of the stern’s buoyancy. Correct?”

“Yes, mein Herr.”

“For a few fraught seconds as the launch begins-when the final keel and bilge blocks are removed and the tumbler shores fall away-the hull is supported by nothing but the cradle.”

“This is correct.”

“I ask you, could strategically placed sticks of dynamite, exquisitely timed to detonate the instant she starts to slide down the ways, derail her cradle and tumble Michigan onto dry land instead of the river?”

Hans’s eyes lighted with the possibility.

The spy let the German fix his imagination upon the avalanchine crash of a 16,000-ton steel vessel falling on its side. Then he said, “The sight of a five-hundred-foot-long dreadnought hull sprawled on the ground would make a laughingstock of the United States’ ‘New Navy.’ And surely destroy the Navy’s reputation with a Congress already reluctant to appropriate the money to build more ships.”

“Yes, mein Herr.”

“Make it so.”

COMMODORE TOMMY THOMPSON was listening, calculatingly, to Brian “Eyes” O’Shay’s scheme to send his Hip Sing partners to San Francisco, when a boy ran into his 39th Street saloon with a note from Iceman Weeks.

The Commodore read it. “He’s offering to kill the Van Dorn.” “Happen to say how?”

“Probably still thinking it through,” Tommy laughed, and passed the note to Eyes.

In a strange way, he thought, they had picked up their old partnership. Not that Eyes dropped in regular. This was only his third visit since the five thousand dollars. Nor did Eyes want in on the take, which was a big surprise. Just the opposite. Eyes had lent him money to open a new gambling joint under the El Connector on 53rd, which was raking in dough already. Add that to his deal with the Hip Sing, and he was sitting pretty. Besides, when he and Eyes talked, Tommy found he trusted him. Not with his life, Jaysus knew. Not even with his dough. But he trusted Eyes’ good sense, just like when they were kids.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Should we take him up on it?” O’Shay smoothed the tip of his narrow mustache. He hooked his thumb in his vest pocket. Then he sat still as stone, legs stretched out, heels in the sawdust, and when he finally spoke he stared at his feet as if addressing his fine boots. “Weeks is tired of lying low. He wants to come home from wherever he’s hiding, which is probably Brooklyn. But he’s afraid you’ll kill him.”

“He’s afraid I will kill him on your say-so,” Tommy corrected acidly. “And you will say so.”

“I already have,” Eyes O’Shay answered. “Your so-called Iceman-”

“My so-called Iceman!” Commodore Tommy erupted in tones of wrathful indignation.

“Your so-called Iceman, who you sent to Camden when I paid you five thousand dollars, allowed the only credible witness in that dance hall-a Van Dorn Agency detective, for the love of Mary-to witness him committing murder. When the Van Dorns catch up with him-and we know they will-or the cops nail him for some other transgression, the Van Dorns will ask, ‘Who’d you do murder for?’ And Weeks will answer, ‘Tommy Thompson and his old pal Eyes O’Shay, who we thought was dead but ain’t.’ ”

O’Shay looked up from his boots, expression noncommittal, and added, “Frankly, if I didn’t insist, you’d be screwy not to kill him on your own. You’ve got more to fear than I do. I can disappear, just like I done before. You’re stuck here. Everyone knows where to find the Commodore-on 39th in Commodore Tommy’s Saloon-and pretty soon the word will get around on your new joint on 53rd. Don’t forget, Van Dorns aren’t like cops. You can’t pay Van Dorns to look any other way than at you. Down a gun barrel.”

“So what do you think about Weeks offering to kill the witness?”

Eyes O’Shay pretended to ponder the question.

“I think Weeks is brave. Sensible. Practical. Maybe he has something up his sleeve. If not, then he’s firmly possessed by delusions of grandeur.”

The Gopher Gang boss blinked. “What does that mean?”

“ ‘Delusions of grandeur’? It means Weeks will have to get damned lucky to pull it off. But if he does kill the Van Dorn, your troubles are over.”

“The Iceman is tough,” Tommy said hopefully. “And he’s smart.”

O’Shay shrugged. “With a little luck, who knows?”

“With a little luck, the Van Dorn will kill him, and that it’ll be it for witnesses.”

“Either way, how can you lose? Tell him to give it a whirl.”

Thompson scrawled a cryptic reply on the back of Weeks’s note and shouted for the kid. “Get in here, you little bastard! Take this to wherever that scumbucket is hiding.”

Brian O’Shay marveled at the sheer depths of Tommy’s stupidity. If Weeks did manage to kill the Van Dorn-who was not just any Van Dorn but the famously deadly Chief Investigator Isaac Bell-Iceman Weeks would be the Hero of Hell’s Kitchen, which would make him a prime candidate to take over the Gophers. How surprised Tommy would be by Weeks’s shiv in his ribs.

Tommy’s brand of stupidity reminded O’Shay of the Russian Navy in the Russo-Jap war. Clueless as the Baltic Fleet, when old-fashioned warships and ancient thinking bumped into the modern Japanese Navy. Ahoy, bottom of the Tsushima Strait, here we come!

“Now, could we get back to the business at hand, Tommy-the journey of your Chinamen to San Francisco?”

“They’re not exactly my Chinamen. They’re Hip Sing.”

“Find out how much money they will require to make them your Chinamen.”

“What makes you think they want to go to San Francisco?” Tommy asked. The Gopher Gang boss could not figure out what O’Shay was up to.

“They’re Chinamen,” O’Shay answered. “They’ll do anything for money.”

“You mind me asking how much you can afford?”

“I can afford anything. But if you ever ask me for more than something is worth, I will regard it as an act of war.”

Commodore Tommy changed the subject. “I wonder what the Iceman has up his sleeve.”

DEADLY SNAKE HERE;

SERUM USEFUL IN INSANITY

POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL

AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES

Lachesis Muta Called “the Sudden Death”

by the Natives of Brazil

The wind plucked the sheet of newspaper out of the Washington Park grandstand just as Brooklyn came to bat in the eighth inning. Iceman Weeks watched it float across the infield, past Wiltse on the mound, past Seymour in center, straight toward where he was holed up-cuffless and collarless in drab flannel, disguised as a sorry-looking plumber’s helper-on the grass behind centerfield, where he wasn’t likely to run into any fans from New York.

If the Iceman were capable of loving anything, it was baseball. But he couldn’t risk being spotted in New York at tomorrow’s home opener at the Polo Grounds, so he was making do in the wilds of Brooklyn where no one knew him. His favorite Giants were lambasting the sorry Superbas. The Giants were hitting hard, and the cold wind blowing cinders, hats, and newspapers had no effect on Hooks Wiltse’s throwing arm. His left-handed twisters had dazzled the Brooklyn batters throughout the game, and by the bottom of the eighth New York was ahead 4 to 1.

Weeks’s ice-blue eyes locked on the juicy headline as the newspaper blew overhead.

POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL

AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES

He leaped off the grass and caught the paper in both hands.

Ball game forgotten, he read avidly, tracing each word with a dirty fingernail. The fact that Weeks could read at all put him miles ahead of most of the Gopher Gang. New York’s daily newspapers were packed with opportunities. The society pages reported when rich men left town for Newport or Europe, leaving their mansions empty. The shipping news gave notice about cargo to be plundered from the docks and Eleventh Avenue sidings. Theater reviews were a guide to pickpockets, obituaries a promise of empty apartments.

He read every word of the snake story, galvanized by hope, then started over. His luck had turned. The snake would recoup his losses from the worst hand ever dealt: Van Dorn detective Isaac Bell turning up in Camden the night they killed the Scotsman.

A lance-headed viper from Brazil, the most deadly of all known reptiles, will be exhibited tomorrow tonight before the Academy of Pathological Science at its monthly meeting at the Hotel Cumberland in 54th Street and Broadway.

The paper said that the sawbones were interested in the snake because a serum made from the lance-head’s deadly venom was used to treat nervous and brain diseases.

The Iceman knew the Cumberland.

It was a twelve-story, first-class hotel billed in the ads as “Headquarters for College Men.” That and the $2.50-a-night room fee ought to keep out the riffraff. But Weeks was pretty sure he could dress like a college man, thanks to his second advantage over ordinary gangsters. He was half real American. Unlike the full-blooded Micks in the Gophers, only his mother was Irish. The time he had met his father, the Old Man had told him that the Weekses were Englishmen who had landed here before the Mayflower. Wearing the right duds, why couldn’t he march into the lobby of the Hotel Cumberland like he belonged?

He figured that the Cumberland house dicks could be got around by twisting the arm of a bellboy to run interference for him. Weeks had one in mind, Jimmy Clark, who had a sideline distributing cocaine for a pharmacist on 49th, which had become a riskier business since the new law said that dust had to be prescribed by a doctor.

A human lives only one or two minutes after the poison enters the system. The viper’s venom seems to paralyze the action of the heart, and the victim stiffens and turns black.

He already had a setup. It wasn’t like he’d been hiding out doing nothing. Soon as he had learned where Isaac Bell slept when he was in town, he had finagled a laundress he knew into a job at the Yale Club of New York City, betting she could sneak him into the detective’s room.

Jenny Sullivan was fresh off the boat from Ireland and deep in hock for her fare. Weeks had bought her debt, intending to put her to work on the sheets instead of ironing them. But after Camden, he had persuaded people who had reason to do him a big favor to wangle Jenny a job at Bell’s club. That was when he wrote Commodore Tommy, offering to kill the detective. But he hadn’t yet managed to screw up the courage to hide under Bell’s bed with a pistol and tangle with him man-to-man.

Weeks was tough enough to have gouged Bell’s.380 slug out of his own shoulder with a boning knife rather than let some drunken doctor or midwife tip off Tommy Thompson as to his whereabouts. Tough enough to pour grain alcohol into the wound to stop infection. But he had already seen Bell in action. Bell was tougher-bigger, faster, and better armed-and only a mug got in a fight he could not win.

Better to match Bell with “the Sudden Death.”

The paper said that the curator of the Bronx Zoo reptile house would deliver the animal in a box made of thick glass.

“ ‘He can’t get out,’ ” the curator promised the Pathology Society doctors who were invited -to view the reptile.

Weeks reckoned that with a bullet hole in his shoulder, a box made of thick glass big enough to hold a four-foot-long poisonous snake would be too heavy for him to carry alone. And if he dropped it trying to carry it under one arm and the glass broke, look out! A bum shoulder would be the least of his problems. He needed help. But the boys he could trust to lend a hand were both dead-shot by the blazing-fast Van Dorn dick.

If he tried to recruit anyone to carry the glass box, the word would flash to Tommy Thompson that Iceman Weeks was back in town. Might as well tie his own hands behind his back and jump in the river. Save Tommy the trouble. Because you didn’t have to be a brain to figure out that Eyes O’Shay would order the Commodore to kill the man who’d been spotted by a Van Dorn dick while doing the killing Eyes had paid for. Weeks could swear until he was blue in the face that he would never squeal. O’Shay and Tommy would kill him anyway. Just to be on the safe side.

At least Tommy had written back that he approved of him killing Isaac Bell. Of course he didn’t offer to help. And it went without saying that if Tommy and Eyes saw a chance to kill him first, they wouldn’t wait for him to take a crack at Bell.

Wiltse bunted in the ninth and Bridwell doubled. When the inning ended New York had two more runs, Brooklyn did not, and Weeks was leading the rush for the Fifth Avenue Elevated with a fair notion of how to transport the snake to the Yale Club.

He needed a suit of “college man” clothes, a steamer trunk, a pane of glass, a bellboy with a luggage cart, and directions to the fuse box.

16

WHO IS THAT OFFICER?” ISAAC BELL DEMANDED OF THE Protection Services operative assigned to guard Farley Kent’s drawing loft in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“I don’t know, Mr. Bell.”

“How did he get in here?”

“He knew the password.”

Van Dorn Protection Services had issued passwords for each of the Hull 44 dreadnought men it was guarding. After getting past the Marines guarding the gates, a visitor still had to prove he was expected by the individual he claimed to be visiting.

“Where is Mr. Kent?”

“They’re all in the test chamber working on that cage-mast model,” the Protection Services operative answered, pointing across the drawing loft at a closed door that led to the laboratory. “Is there something wrong, Mr. Bell?”

“Three things,” Bell answered tersely. “Farley Kent is not here, so he does not seem to have expected that officer to visit. The officer has been studying Kent’s drawing board since I walked in. And in case you haven’t noticed, he is wearing the uniform of the Czar’s Navy.”

“Them blue uniforms look all the same,” the operative replied, reminding Bell that few PS boys possessed the brains and moxie to climb the ladder to full-fledged Van Dorn detective. “Besides, he’s carrying them rolled-up drawings like they all do. You want I should question him, Mr. Bell?”

“I’ll do it. Next time someone walks in unexpected, assume he’s trouble until you learn otherwise.”

Bell strode across the big loft past rows of drawing boards that were usually occupied by the naval architects testing the cage mast. The man in the Russian officer’s uniform was so engrossed in Farley Kent’s drawing that he gave a startled jump and dropped the rolls he had tucked under his arm when Bell said, “Good morning, sir.”

“Oh! I do not hear approach,” he said in a heavy Russian accent, scrambling to pick them up.

“May I have your name, please?”

“I am Second Lieutenant Vladimir Ivanovich Yourkevitch of His Majesty Czar Nicolas’s Imperial Russian Navy. And to whom do I have the honor-”

“Have you an appointment here, Lieutenant Yourkevitch?” The Russian, who looked barely old enough to shave, bowed his head. “Sadly, no. I am hoping to meet with Mr. Farley Kent.”

“Does Mr. Kent know you?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Then how did you get in here?”

Yourkevitch smiled, disarmingly. “With entitled demeanor, impeccable uniform, and crisp salute.”

Isaac Bell did not smile back. “That might get you past the Marines guarding the gate. But where did you get the password to go to Kent’s drawing loft?”

“In bar outside gates, I meet Marine officer. He tells me password.”

Bell beckoned the Protection Services operative.

“Lieutenant Yourkevitch will sit on that stool, away from this drawing board, until I return.” To Lieutenant Yourkevitch he said, “This gentleman is fully capable of knocking you to the floor. Do as he tells you.”

Then Bell crossed the loft and pushed open the door to the test chamber.

A dozen of Kent’s staff were circled around a ten-foot-tall model of an experimental battleship cage mast. The young naval architects held wire snips, micrometers, slide rules, notepaper, and tape measures. The round, freestanding structure, which stood on a dolly, was made of stiff wires that spiraled from base to top in a counterclockwise twist and were braced at intervals by horizontal rings. It represented, in miniature, a one-hundred-twenty-foot-high mast made of lightweight tubing and was correct in every detail down to the mesh platforms within some of the rings, electric leads and voice pipes running from the spotters’ top to the fire director’s tower, and tiny ladders angling up the interior.

Two of Kent’s architects held ropes attached to opposite sides of the round base. A tape measure strung between the walls passed next to the top. An architect on a stepladder watched the tape closely. Farley Kent said, “Portside salvo. Fire!”

The architect on the left side jerked his rope, and the man watching the tape called out how much the tower had swayed. “Six inches!” was recorded.

“At twelve-to-one, that’s six feet!” said Kent. “The spotters on top better hold on tight when the ship fires her main turrets. On the other hand, a tripod mast will weigh one hundred tons, while our cage of redundant members will weight less than twenty-a huge savings. O.K., let’s measure how she sways after being hit by several shells.” Wielding a wire snips, he severed at random two of the spiraled uprights and one of the rings.

“Ready!”

“Wait!” An architect sprang up the ladder and propped a sailor doll with red cheeks and a straw hat in the spotting top.

The test chamber rang with laughter, Kent’s the loudest of all. “Starboard salvo. Fire!”

The rope was jerked, the top of the mast swayed sharply, and the doll flew across the room.

Bell caught it. “Mr. Kent, may I see you a moment?”

“What’s the matter?” asked Kent as he snipped another vertical wire and his assistants watched carefully to see the effect on the mast.

“We may have caught our first spy,” Bell said in a low voice. “Could you come with me, please?”

Lieutenant Yourkevitch jumped from the stool before the Van Dorn Protection Services operative could stop him and grabbed Kent’s hand. “Is honor to meet, is great honor.”

“Who are you?”

“Yourkevitch. From St. Petersburg.”

“Naval Staff Headquarters?”

“Of course, sir. Baltic Shipyard.”

Kent asked, “Is it true that Russia is building five battleships bigger than HMS Dreadnought?”

Yourkevitch shrugged. “There is hope for super-dreadnoughts, but Duma perhaps say no. Too expensive.”

“What are you doing here?”

“The idea is that I meet legend Farley Kent.”

“You came all the way here just to meet me?”

“To show. See?” Yourkevitch unrolled his plans and spread them over Kent’s table. “What do you think? Improvement of form for body of ship?”

While Farley Kent studied Yourkevitch’s drawings, Bell took the Russian officer aside, and said, “Describe the Marine officer who gave you the password.”

“Was medium-sized man in dark suit. Old like you, maybe thirty. Very neat, very trim. Mustache like pencil. Very… what is word-precise!”

“Dark suit. No uniform?”

“In mufti.”

“Then how did you know he was a Marine officer?”

“He told me.”

Isaac Bell’s stern expression grew dark. He spoke coldly. “When and where are you supposed to report back to him?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You must have agreed to report to him what you saw here.”

“No. I do not know him. How would I find him?”

“Lieutenant Yourkevitch, I am having difficulty believing your story. And I don’t suppose it will do your career in the Czar’s Navy any good if I turn you over to the United States Navy as a spy.”

“A spy?” Yourkevitch blurted. “No.”

“Stop playing games with me and tell me how you learned the password.”

“Spy?” repeated the Russian. “I am not spy.”

Before Bell could reply, Farley Kent spoke up. “He doesn’t need to spy on us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we should spy on him.”

“What are you talking about, Mr. Kent?”

“Lieutenant Yourkevitch’s ‘improvement of form for body of ship’ is a hell of a lot better than it looks.” He gestured at various elements of the finely wrought drawing. “At first glance it appears bulky amidships, fat even, and weirdly skinny fore and aft. You could say it resembles a cow. In fact, it is brilliant. It will allow a dreadnought to toughen its torpedo defense around machinery and magazines, and increase armament and coal capacity even as it attains greater speed for less fuel.”

He shook Yourkevitch’s hand. “Brilliant, sir. I would steal it, but I would never get it approved by the dinosaurs on the Board of Construction. It is twenty years ahead of its time.”

“Thank you, sir, thank you. From Farley Kent, it is great honor.”

“And I’ll tell you something else,” said Kent, “though I suspect you’ve already thought of it yourself. Your hull would make a magnificent passenger liner-a North Atlantic greyhound that will run rings around Lusitania and Mauritania.”

“One day,” Yourkevitch smiled. “When there is no war.”

Kent invited Yourkevitch to have lunch with his staff, and the two fell into a discussion of the just-announced building of the White Star liners Olympic and Titanic.

“Eight hundred forty feet!” Kent marveled, to which the Russian replied, “I am thinking idea for one thousand.”

Bell believed that the earnest Russian naval architect had wanted nothing more than the chance to commune with the famous Farley Kent. He did not believe that the self-proclaimed officer who approached Yourkevitch in a Sand Street bar was a Marine.

Why did he give the Russian the password without demanding he report on Kent’s drawings? How had he even known to approach the Russian? The answer was chilling. The spy-the “saboteur of minds,” as Falconer called him-knew whom to target in the dreadnought race.

“THIS FOREIGN-SPY STUFF is new to us,” said Joseph Van Dorn. The boss was puffing agitatedly on a quick after-lunch cigar in the main lounge of the Railroad Club on the twenty-second floor of the Hudson Tunnels Terminal before catching a train to Washington.

“We hunt murderers,” Isaac Bell retorted, his tone grim. “Whatever their motive, they are first and foremost criminals.”

“Still, we’ll be making decisions on horseback.”

Bell said, “I had the research boys draw up a list of foreign diplomats, military attachés, and newspaper reporters who might double as spies for England, Germany, France, Italy, Russia, Japan, and China.”

“The Navy Secretary just sent me a list of foreigners the Navy suspects could be engaged in espionage.”

“I’ll add it to mine,” said Bell. “But I want an expert to look them over and save us wild-goose chases. Don’t you have an old pal still in the Marines who pulls wires at the State Department?”

“That’s putting it mildly. Canning’s the officer who arranges for Marine Corps Expeditionary Regiments to storm ashore at State’s request.”

“He’s our man-tight with our overseas attachés. Soon as he goes through our lists of foreigners with a fine-tooth comb, I recommend that we observe them in Washington, D.C., and New York, and around navy yards and factories building warships.”

“That will require an expensive corps of detectives,” Van Dorn said pointedly.

Bell had his answer ready. “The expense can be written off as an investment in friendships forged in Washington. It can’t hurt to have the government rely upon the Van Dorn Agency as a national outfit with efficient field offices across the continent.”

Van Dorn smiled pleasedly, his red whiskers spreading wide and bright as a brush fire at that happy thought.

“In addition,” Bell pressed, “I recommend that Van Dorn Agency specialists listen in the various immigrant neighborhoods of the cities that have navy yards-German, Irish, Italian, Chinese-for talk of spying, rumors about foreign governments paying for information, and sabotage. The dreadnought race is international.”

Van Dorn considered that with a hollow chuckle. “We could be looking for more than one spy. Told you this is beyond our usual.”

“If not us,” retorted Isaac Bell, “who?”

17

TWICE THAT AFTERNOON ICEMAN WEEKS ADMINISTERED beatings notable for their viciousness and the fact that neither left marks not covered by clothing. He was an expert, exercising skills he had honed since boyhood shaking down peddlers and collecting debts for loan sharks. Compared to longshoreman and carters, a skinny bellboy and a frightened little laundress were pieces of cake. The pain grew worse as the day wore on. As did the fear.

Jimmy Clark, the bellboy at the Cumberland Hotel, received the first seemingly endless flurry of fists in the alley behind the pharmacist where he went to exchange last night’s take for tonight’s cocaine. Weeks emphasized that his problems would be nothing compared to Jimmy’s problems if the bellboy didn’t do exactly what he was told. Any sort of double cross would make this event a happy memory.

Jenny Sullivan, the apprentice laundress at the Yale Club, caught hers in an alley half a block from the Church of the Assumption, where she had gone to pray for relief of her debt.

Weeks left her vomiting with pain. But so important was her role in his plan that when Weeks stopped hitting the girl, he promised that if she did as he ordered her entire debt was canceled, paid in full. As she dragged her aching body to work, her pain and her fear were unexpectedly mingled with hope. All she had to do was stand lookout at the club’s service door at a late hour when no one was around and steal a key to unlock a third-floor bedroom.

18

ISAAC BELL AND MARION MORGAN MET FOR DINNER AT Rector’s. The lobster palace was as famous for its mirrored green-and-gold interior, its lavish linens and silver, its revolving door-the first in New York-and its glittering patrons as it was for its crustaceans. Situated on Broadway, it was two blocks from Bell’s office in the Knickerbocker. He waited out front under a gigantic statue of a gryphon ablaze in electric lights and greeted Marion with a kiss on her lips.

“I’m sorry I’m late. I had to change clothes.”

“I was, too. I just got done with Van Dorn.”

“I have to at least try to compete with the Broadway actresses who eat here.”

“When they see you in that getup,” Bell assured her, “they will run back to their dressing rooms and blow their brains out.”

They pushed around the revolving door into a brilliant room that held a hundred tables. Charles Rector gestured frantically to the orchestra as he rushed to greet Marion.

The musicians broke into “A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight,” the title of Marion’s first two-reeler about a detective’s girlfriend who stopped the villain from burning down a town. At the sound of the music, every woman flashing diamonds and every gent dressed to the nines looked up to see Marion. Bell smiled as an appreciative buzz rippled across the restaurant.

“Miss Morgan,” Rector cried, seizing her hands in his. “When last you honored Rector’s you were making newsreels. Now everyone is talking about your moving picture.”

“Thank you, Mr. Rector. I thought the musical accompaniment was reserved for beautiful actresses.”

“Beautiful actresses are a dime a dozen on Broadway. A beautiful moving picture director is as rare as oysters in August.”

“This is Mr. Bell, my fiancé.”

The restaurateur squeezed Bell’s hand and pumped heartily. “My congratulations, sir. I can’t imagine meeting a more fortunate gentleman on the Great White Way. Would you like a quiet table, Miss Morgan, or one where the world may see you?”

“Quiet,” Marion answered firmly, and when they were seated and the Mumm was ordered she said to Bell, “I am astonished he remembered me.”

“Perhaps he read yesterday’s New York Times,” Bell smiled. She was so pleased by her reception, and there was lovely high color in her face.

“The Times? What do you mean?”

“They sent a fashion reporter to the Easter Parade last Sunday.” He unfolded a clipping from his wallet and read aloud:

“ ‘One young woman, who strolled after tea from Times Square to the Fifth Avenue parade, caused a sensation. She wore lavender satin and a black, plume-laden hat, the size of which caused men to step aside to give her room to pass. This dazzling creature walked as far as the Hotel St. Regis, and then departed toward the north in a red Locomobile motorcar.’

“And speaking of red, your ears are.”

“I am mortified! They make it sound as if I were sashaying up Fifth Avenue seeking attention. Every woman there was dressed up for Easter. I only wore that hat because Mademoiselle Duvall and Christina bet me ten dollars I didn’t have the nerve.”

“The reporter got it all wrong. You were attracting attention. Had you been seeking it, you would not have skedaddled in that red Locomobile but would have sashayed up and down the avenue until dark.”

Marion reached across the table. “Did you see this strange article on the other side?”

Bell turned it over. “Lachesis muta? Oh, yes. He’s a doozy of a snake. Dripping deadly venom and mean as a hanging judge. You know, the Cumberland Hotel is only ten blocks up Broadway. I’ll bet I can talk my way into a Pathology Society meeting with a pretty girl on my arm, if you want to go see him.”

Marion shuddered.

When the champagne arrived, Bell raised his glass to her. “I’m afraid I can’t say it better than Mr. Rector. Thank you for making me the most fortunate gent on the Great White Way.”

“Oh, Isaac, it’s so good to see you.”

They sipped the Mumm and discussed the menu. Marion ordered Egyptian quail, declaring she had never heard of such a bird, and Bell ordered a lobster. They would start with oysters, “Lynnhavens from Maryland,” their waiter assured them, “big ones sent up special for Mr. Diamond Jim Brady. If I may recommend, Mr. Bell, Mr. Brady usually follows his lobsters with some ducks and a steak.”

Bell demurred.

Marion took his hand across the table. “Tell me about your work. Will it keep you in New York?”

“We’ve landed a spy case,” Bell answered in a low voice no one else could hear over the stir of laughter and music. “It’s tangled up in the international dreadnought race.”

Marion, accustomed to him revealing case details to her to hone his own thoughts, replied in the same level tone. “Rather different than bank robbers.”

“I told Joe Van Dorn: international or not, if they kill people they are first and foremost murderers. At any rate, Joe will fort up in Washington, and he’s given me the New York office and carte blanche to dispatch operatives around the country.”

“I presume it has to do with the naval gun designer whose piano blew up.”

“It’s looking more and more that it was not a suicide but a diabolical murder deliberately staged to appear to be suicide. And in such a bizarre way as to discredit the poor man and the entire gun system he developed. Of course, the hint of bribery taints everything he touched.”

Bell told her his doubts about Langner’s suicide note, and his conviction that the Washington Navy Yard prowler seen by old John Eddison had indeed been Japanese. He told her how the deaths of the armor expert and the fire-control expert had been originally presumed to be accidents.

Marion asked, “Did anyone see a Japanese man in the Bethlehem Iron Works?”

“The men I sent out there report that someone was seen running off. But he was a big fellow. Over six feet. Pale. Fair-haired. And thought to be German.”

“Why German?”

“Apparently as he ran for it he was heard to mutter, ‘Gott im Himmel!’”

Marion cocked an exquisitely skeptical eyebrow.

“I know,” said Bell. “It’s thin stuff.”

“Was either a pale, fair-haired German or a Japanese seen with Grover Lakewood, who fell off the cliff?”

“The Westchester County coroner told my man that no witness saw Lakewood crash to the ground. Lakewood had told friends he was spending the weekend practicing rock climbing, and his fatal head injuries were consistent with a climbing accident. Poor devil fell a hundred feet. They buried him in a closed coffin.”

“Was he climbing alone?”

“An old lady said she saw him shortly before the accident with a pretty girl.”

“Neither German nor Japanese?” Marion asked with a smile.

“A redhead,” Bell smiled back. “Presumably Irish.”

“Why Irish?”

Bell shook his head. “Her features reminded the old lady of her Irish maid. Again, thin stuff.”

“Three different suspects,” Marion observed. “Three different nationalities… Of course, what could be more international than the dreadnought race?”

“Captain Falconer is inclined to blame Japan.”

“And you?”

“There is no question that the Japanese are practiced at spying. I learned that, before the Russo-Japanese War, they thoroughly infiltrated the Russian Far East Fleet with spies who pretended to be Manchurian servants and laborers. When the fighting started, the Japanese knew more about Russian Navy tactics than the Russians did. But I’m keeping an open mind. It really could be any one of them.”

“A tall, handsome detective once told me that skepticism was his most valuable asset,” Marion agreed.

“It’s a big case that keeps getting bigger. And because the dreadnought program is so large and widespread, the scope of the case-the links-might have gone unnoticed quite a while longer if it weren’t for Langner’s daughter insisting that her father didn’t kill himself. Even then, if she hadn’t managed to get to Joe Van Dorn through her old school chum, then I would not have personally witnessed poor Alasdair’s murder. His death would have been written off as a saloon brawl, and who knows how many more they might have killed before anyone got wise.”

Bell shook his head. “Enough talk. Here come the oysters, and we’ve both got early starts tomorrow.”

“Look at the size of these!” Marion tipped an enormous oyster off its shell into her mouth, let it slide down her throat, and asked with a smile, “Is Miss Langner as beautiful as they say?”

“Who says?”

“Mademoiselle Duvall met her in Washington. Apparently there isn’t a man on the East Coast over nineteen who hasn’t fallen for her.”

“She is beautiful,” said Bell. “With the most extraordinary eyes. And I imagine were she not grieving she probably would be even lovelier.”

“Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for her, too.”

“My falling days are over,” Bell grinned.

“Do you miss them?”

“If love was gravity, I would be in free fall. What was Mademoiselle Duvall doing in Washington?”

“Seducing an Assistant Secretary of the Navy into hiring her to shoot movies of the Great White Fleet steaming through the Golden Gate into San Francisco. At least, that’s how she got the job filming the fleet’s departure from Hampton Roads last winter, so I assume she’s using the same tactics. Why do you ask?”

“This is strictly between us,” Bell replied seriously. “But Mademoiselle Duvall has had a long affair with a French Navy captain.”

“Oh, of course! Sometimes when she’s being very eye-battingly mysterious she’ll hint about ‘Mon Capitaine.’”

“Mon Capitaine happens to specialize in dreadnought research-which is to say, the Frenchman is a spy, and she is likely working for him.”

“A spy? She’s such a flibbertigibbet.”

“The Navy Secretary gave Joe Van Dorn a list of twenty foreigners who’ve been poking around Washington and New York on behalf of France, England, Germany, Italy, and Russia. Most look like flibbertigibbets, but we’ve got to investigate each of them.”

“No Japanese?”

“Plenty. Two from their embassy-a naval officer and a military attaché. And a tea importer who lives in San Francisco.”

“But what could Mademoiselle Duvall possibly film for the French Navy that the rest of us can’t?”

“Filming could be her excuse to get close to American Navy officers who might talk too much to an attractive woman. What did you mean, ‘the rest of us.’ Are you filming the Fleet, too?”

“Preston Whiteway just got in touch.”

Bell’s eyes narrowed slightly. The wealthy Whiteway had inherited several California newspapers. He had expanded them into a powerful chain of the yellowest yellow journalism type, and a movie newsreel company that Marion had started up for him before she came east to make moving pictures.

“Preston asked me to shoot the Fleet arriving in San Francisco for Picture World.”

“Preston’s newspapers are predicting war with Japan within the week.”

“He’ll print anything to sell a newspaper.”

“Is this a one-time job?”

“I would not be working for him as an employee, you can be sure, but as a highly paid contractor. I could squeeze it in between the movies I’m shooting here. What do you think?”

“I have to hand it to Whiteway. He is certainly persistent.”

“I don’t think he sees me that way anymore-Why are you l aughing?”

“I believe he is still male and in possession of his eyesight.”

“I mean that Preston knows that I am not available.”

“By now that should have sunk in,” Bell agreed. “If memory serves, the last time he was in our company you threatened to shoot him. When do you leave?”

“Not before the first of May.”

“Good. They’re launching the Michigan next week. Captain Falconer will throw a big party. I was hoping you could come with me.”

“I’d love to.”

“It’s my chance to observe the foreign flibbertigibbets in a room full of Americans who might talk too much. You’ll provide cover and a second pair of eyes and ears.”

“What do you suppose ladies wear to a battleship launching?”

“How about that hat men step aside for?” Bell grinned. “Or you can ask Mademoiselle Duvall. Even money, she’ll be there, too.”

“I don’t like that she knows you’re a detective. It could put you in danger if she really is a spy.”

TEN BLOCKS UP BROADWAY, things were going like clockwork for Iceman Weeks.

First, he managed to make it the four blocks from the subway to the Cumberland Hotel without being spotted by anybody who’d squeal to Tommy Thompson. Crossing Broadway, he passed right under the noses of Daley and Boyle-Central Office pickpocket detectives who were hurrying down to their regular station at the Metropolitan Opera-and they didn’t even notice him in the sack suit he’d found airing on a Brooklyn fire escape.

Then in the lobby, the Cumberland’s house detectives were distracted while changing shifts. Neither dick gave Weeks’s duds a second glance. Even if his boots did not compare to the polished shoes on the college men, the Academy of Pathological Science doctors rushing to their meeting weren’t watching his feet.

Jimmy Clark, dressed up like an organ-grinder’s monkey in his purple bell-hopper uniform, looked right through him, doing a good job of acting like they had not had a “conversation” earlier in the day.

“Boy!”

Jimmy hurried over, ducking his head to conceal the fear and hatred in his eyes. “Yes, sir.”

Weeks handed him a luggage ticket for the battered old steamer truck he had had delivered earlier to the hotel and tipped him a nickel. “Put my trunk on your cart and wait for me by the side door of the Academy meeting. I have a steamship to catch and I don’t want to disturb the members when I leave early.”

Jimmy Clark said, “Yes sir.”

Weeks was luckier than he knew. Between out-of-town guests swaggering out for a night on the Great White Way and Pathological Academy doctors pouring in to view the lance-headed viper, the hotel lobby was too busy for anyone to take note of a queer accent. While dressed like a college man, Weeks still spoke like a lifelong citizen of Hell’s Kitchen, and anyone who listened would have heard, “Dun wanna destoib de members wen I leave oily.”

The other piece of good luck-and this one he knew about-was that the hotel fuse box in the cellar was at the bottom of the same stairs that led to the side door of the lobby-level ballroom where the doctors were meeting the snake. Weeks put his hat on the chair nearest the door to reserve it and milled around a little so he didn’t have to talk to anyone before the meeting started. When it did, he took his seat and caught a last glimpse of the sticker-plastered steamer trunk on Jimmy’s cart as the door closed.

He listened impatiently as the speaker gassed on about welcoming the members and dispensing with reading the minutes. Then the head doctor talked about how they would milk the snake’s deadly poison and turn it into a serum to cure lunatics. And the good thing about this particular species of snake was that it had a lot more venom that most. Christ knew how many loonies it would cure, but for Isaac Bell it meant that even if the snake missed its first shot it’d hit him again fully loaded.

The zookeepers came in with the snake. The room got real quiet.

The glass box, Weeks saw, would fit in the trunk. That was a relief. He had had no way of knowing for sure until now. Two men were carrying it, and they placed it on a table up front.

Even from halfway across the ballroom, the snake looked wicked. It was moving, coiling and uncoiling, its surprisingly thick, diamond-patterned body gleaming in the lights. It seemed to flow, moving around the box like one long, powerful muscle, flicking a forked tongue and investigating the seams where the glass sides met the glass top. It took particular interest in where the hinges attached, and Weeks figured that a little air got in there, and the snake could sense movement. The doctors were muttering, but no one seemed that inclined to have a closer look.

“Do not worry, gentlemen,” called the medico running the show. “The glass is strong.” He dismissed the men who had carried it. Iceman Weeks was glad to see them go because they might make more trouble than the doctors. “And thank you, sir,” he said to the curator, who left, too. Better and better, thought Weeks. Just me and the snake and a bunch of sissies. He looked to the door. Jimmy Clark had opened it a crack. Weeks nodded. Now.

It did not take long. Just as the first row rose and tentatively approached the glass box, the lights went out, and the room was suddenly pitch-black. Fifty men shouted at once. Weeks sprang to the door, wrenched it open, and felt in the dark for the trunk. He heard Jimmy pounding up the steps, trusting the banisters to guide him. Weeks opened the streamer trunk, felt for the pane of glass, tucked it under his arm, and pushed back into the ballroom where the shouts were getting loud.

“Keep your heads!”

“Don’t lose your nerve!”

A couple of quick thinkers lit matches, which cast weird, jumpy shadows.

Weeks hadn’t a moment to lose. He rushed up the side of the ballroom, hugging the wall, and then cut across the front. When he was six feet from the snake, he shouted at the top of lungs, “Look out! Jaysus, don’t drop it!,” and smashed the window glass on the wooden floor.

Shouts turned to screams, followed immediately by the pounding of hundreds of feet. Before Weeks could yell, “He’s loose. He’s out. Run! Run! Run!,” many panicky voices did it for him.

Jimmy Clark deserved a place in Heaven for how quickly he wheeled up the trunk.

“Careful,” muttered Weeks. “Let’s not drop it.”

Feeling in the dark, they lifted the glass box into the trunk, shut the lid, got it back on the cart, and wheeled it out the side door of the ballroom. They were almost to the alley when the lights came on.

“House dick!” Clark hissed a warning.

“Keep going,” Weeks said coolly. “I’ll deal with the dick.”

“Hey! Where you going with that?”

Dressed like a college man, Weeks blocked the way so Jimmy could roll his cart out the door, and answered, “Out of here, before I miss my steamer.”

The house dick heard, “Outta her, ’fer I miss me steamer,” and drew his pistol.

By then Weeks had his fingers firmly inside his brass knuckles. He brought the bigger man down with a lightning-fast, bone-smashing blow between the eyes. He caught the pistol as it dropped, pocketed it, and found Jimmy in the alley. The bellboy looked scared stiff.

“Don’t go rattly on me, now,” Weeks warned him. “We still got to get across town.”

19

THERE APPEARED TO BE A COMMOTION UP BROADWAY when Isaac Bell and Marion Morgan stepped out of Rector’s. They heard clanging fire bells and police whistles and saw crowds of people milling in every direction and decided the best way to Marion’s ferry was to take the subway.

Uptown in twenty minutes, they walked to the pier holding hands. Bell escorted her aboard the boat and lingered on the gangway. The whistle blew.

“Thank you for dinner, darling. It was lovely to see you.”

“Shall I come across with you?”

“I have to get up so early. So do you. Give me a kiss.”

After a while, a deckhand bawled, “Break it up, lovebirds. All ashore that’s goin’ ashore.”

Bell stepped off, and called as the water widened between the boat and dock, “They say it may shower on Friday.”

“I’ll do a rain dance.”

He rode the subway downtown and stopped at the Knickerbocker to check in with the Van Dorn night watch, who asked, “Did you hear about the snake?”

“Lachesis muta.”

“He escaped.”

“From the Cumberland?”

“They think he made it down to the sewer.”

“Bite anybody?”

“Not yet,” said the nightman.

“How’d he get loose?”

“I’ve heard fourteen versions of that since I came on tonight. The best one is they dropped his box. It was made of glass.” He shook his head and laughed, “Only in New York.”

“Anything I should know before morning?”

The nightman handed him a stack of messages.

On top was a cablegram from Bell’s best friend, Detective Archie Abbott, who, in return for an extended European-honeymoon leave, was making contacts in London, Paris, and Berlin to establish Van Dorn field offices overseas. Socially prominent and married to America’s wealthiest heiress, the blue-blooded Archibald Angell Abbott IV was welcome in every embassy and country estate in Europe. Bell had already cabled him with instructions to use that unique access to get an inside perspective on the dreadnought race. Now Archie was coming home. Did Bell prefer he take the British Lusitania or the German Kaiser Wilhem der Grosse?

“Rolling Billy,” Bell cabled back, using the popular name for the grand but lubberly German liner. Archie and his beautiful bride would spend their Atlantic crossing in the first-class lounges, charming high-ranking officers, diplomats, and industrialists into speaking freely on the subjects of war, espionage, and the naval race. Neither the stiffest Prussian officer nor the worldliest Kaiser’s courtier would stand a chance when Lillian started batting her eyes. While Archie, a confirmed bachelor until he had fallen head over heels for Lillian, was no slouch in the wife-beguiling business.

John Scully had left an enigmatic note: “The PS boys are babysitting Kent. I got a mind to nose around Chinatown.” Bell tossed it in the wastebasket. In other words, he’d hear from the detective when Scully felt like it.

Reports from the Van Dorn agents in Westchester and Bethlehem offered no new news about the climbing accident and the steel mill explosion. Neither had gotten a line on their possible suspects, the “Irish” girl or the “German” mill worker. But the agent in Bethlehem warned against jumping to conclusions. It seemed that no one who knew Chad Gordon was surprised by the accident. The victim was an impatient, hard-driving man, casual about the safety rules and known to take terrible risks.

There was disturbing news from Newport, Rhode Island. The Protection Services agent assigned to Wheeler at the Naval Torpedo Station reported chasing off, but failing to capture, two men who tried to break into the torpedo expert’s cottage. Bell ordered up extra PS boys, fearing it had not been an ordinary burglary attempt. He also wired Captain Falconer recommending that Wheeler be instructed to sleep in the well-guarded torpedo station barracks instead of his own place.

The middle telephone, the one marked with a chorus girl’s rouge, rang, and the nightman snapped it up. “Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn!… As a matter of fact, he’s right here.” The nightman passed Bell the telephone, mouthing: Long-distance from Washington.

Bell pressed the earpiece to his ear and leaned into the mouthpiece. “You’re working late.”

“Setting an example,” Van Dorn growled. “Anything I should know before I turn in?”

“Archie’s coming home.”

“About time. Longest honeymoon I ever heard of.”

Bell filled him in on the rest. Then he asked, “How did you make out with your pal at the State Department?”

“That’s why I’m telephoning,” Van Dorn said. “Canning crossed off most of our list’s foreigners and added a couple he’s got suspicions about. One that catches my eye is some kind of visiting art curator at the Smithsonian Institution. Named Yamamoto Kenta. Japanese. Just like Falconer says. Might be worth getting a line on him.”

“Have you got someone down there you can send to the Smithsonian?”

Van Dorn said he did, and they rang off.

Bell stifled a yawn as he shrugged into his coat. It was well past midnight.

“Watch your step passing sewers,” said the nightman.

“I imagine by now Mr. Snake is swimming in the Hudson River.”

THE MEN’S CLUBS ON West 44th Street shared the block between Sixth and Fifth avenues with stables and parking garages, and Isaac Bell was too busy sidestepping manure and dodging town cars to worry about snakes. But when he arrived at the limestone-and-brick, eleven-story Yale Club of New York City, he found the entrance blocked by three ruddy-faced, middle-aged men, considerably worse for wear from a night on the town, swaying arm in arm on the front steps.

Clad in blazers and Class of ’83 reunion scarves, the Old Blues were singing “Bright College Years” at the top of their lungs. Isaac Bell lent a sleepy baritone to the chorus and tried to get around them.

“We’re taller than the Harvard Club,” they cried, gesticulating derisively at a squat clubhouse across the street.

“Come up to the roof with us!”

“We’ll hurl bouquets down upon the Crimsons.”

The doorman came out and cleared a path for the tall detective. “Out-of-town members,” he marveled.

“Thanks for the escort, Matthew. Never would have made it inside without you.”

“Good night, Mr. Bell.”

There was more Yalesian song coming from the Grill Room in back, though not as loud as the revelers out front. Bell took the stairs instead of the elevator. The grand, two-story lounge was typically empty this late at night. He lived on the third floor, which contained twelve spartan bachelor rooms, six on each side of the hall, with the bathroom at the end. A steamer trunk sat in the hall, partly blocking his door.

Apparently a member had just got off the ship from Europe.

Yawning sleepily, Bell reached to push the trunk out of his way as he stepped around it. He was surprised it felt light-already empty. The staff usually cleared trunks the instant they were unpacked. He gave it a closer, second look. It was a battered old trunk, with faded labels from the Hotel Ritz in Barcelona and Brown’s of London and the Cunard liner Servia. He could not recall the last time he had seen that name; the ship had probably been out of service since the turn of the century. Among the faded luggage check labels, a bright new one caught his eye. The Cumberland Hotel, New York.

Funny coincidence, last-known residence of Mr. Snake. He wondered why a member of the Yale Club of New York would stay at the Cumberland before moving to the private but austere bachelor quarters. Most likely a decision to stay long-term in New York, as the rates were considerably lower at the club, even counting the cost of dues.

He unlocked his door and took a step into his room. An odd odor tweaked his nostrils. It was so faint, it was almost indiscernible. He paused, his hand already outstretched, feeling for the wall switch to turn on the overhead light. He tried to identify the gamy aroma. Almost like a sweaty pigskin fencing suit. But his was around the corner on 45th Street, hanging in his locker with his foils and saber at the Fencers Club.

The light from the hall spilled over this shoulder. Something on the bed glinted.

Isaac Bell was suddenly wide awake. He bounded sideways into the room so at not to present a silhouette in the open door. Flattened against the wall with all his senses on high alert, he whipped his Browning pistol from his shoulder holster and hit the light switch.

On the narrow bed was a box made of glass, so heavy that it pressed deep into the chenille spread. It was cube-shaped, about twenty-four inches on each side. Even the lid was glass. It was open. It dangled from sprung hinges as if whoever had opened it had hastily dropped the heavy slab, which had bent the metal hinges, and run for his life.

Bell felt the hairs rise on the back of his neck.

He shot a swift look around the small room. The dresser top was empty but for a box of his cuff links. On the night table was a reading lamp, a Pocket Guide to New York, Mahan’s The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, and Burgoyne’s Submarine Navigation. The door to the closet was closed and the small safe in the corner where he stored his weapons locked. Still pressing his back to the wall, Bell peered again at the glass box itself. The interior was mostly obscured by reflections on the glass. Slowly, he moved his head to view it from different angles.

The box was empty.

Bell stood still as a hunter. There was only one place the snake could be hiding and that was under the bed in the dark space hidden by the overhanging bedspread. Suddenly he saw movement. A long, forked tongue flickered from under the bedspread, testing the air for motion at which to strike. Tight against the wall, moving in minute increments, Bell eased toward the door to get out of the room and lock the reptile inside. Chloroform poured under the door would put it out of action.

But before he had moved half a foot the viper’s tongue began flickering faster as if it were about to make its move. He braced to hurl himself out the door in one jump. Just as he was about to spring, he heard the elevator door open. The Old Blues tumbled into the hall bellowing:

“Where’er upon life’s sea we sail:

For God, for Country and-”

Isaac Bell knew he had no choice. If he shouted for the alums to run, the old boys weren’t sober enough to understand even if they heard him. At the same time, his warning would either spook the creature into striking him or send it slithering out the door, straight at them.

He reached to the side with the barrel of his pistol and used it to swing the door shut. The air it stirred aroused the lance-head. In a sudden blur of motion, it shifted position under the bed and flew at his leg.

Bell had never moved so fast. He kicked out at the pointed head blazing toward him. The snake smashed against his ankle with an astonishingly muscular impact, staining his trouser cuff with a splash of yellow venom. Only his own animal reflexes and the fact that his boot covered his ankle saved Bell’s life. In the space of a breath, the animal spun itself into a tight coil and struck again. By then Bell was airborne. Diving for the bed, he grabbed the pillow and threw it at the snake. The snake struck, spraying the pillow yellow and leaving two deep holes in the cloth. Bell ripped the spread off the bed, twirled it like a toreador, and flung it over the snake to trap it in the cloth.

The snake slithered out from under, coiled again, and tracked Bell with malevolent eyes. Bell raised his pistol, aimed carefully at its head, and fired. The snake attacked at the same instant the gun roared, striking so swiftly that Bell’s bullet missed and smashed the dresser mirror. As glass flew, the snake’s needle-sharp fangs struck Bell in the chest, directly over his heart.

20

BELL DROPPED HIS GUN AND CLOSED HIS HAND AROUND the snake’s neck.

The animal was shockingly strong. Every inch of its four-foot length writhed with spasmodic, sinewy power as it squirmed to break his grip and strike him again. Its fangs were cocked inside its arrow-shaped head. Yellow venom dripped from its wide-open jaws. Bell imagined that he could see in its eyes a gleam of triumph, as if the serpent were sure that its deadly poison had already won the battle and that its prey would die in minutes. Gasping for breath, Bell reached with his free hand for the knife in his boot. “Sorry to disappoint you, Mr. Snake. But you made the mistake of sinking your fangs into my shoulder holster.”

An Old Blue threw open the door. “Who’s shooting guns in here?”

At the sight of the headless snake still twitching in Bell’s fist, he turned white and pressed both hands to his mouth.

Bell pointed commandingly with his bloody knife. “If you are going to be sick, the facilities are down the hall.”

Matthew the doorman stuck his head in the room. “Are you-”

“Where did that steamer trunk come from?” demanded Bell.

“I don’t know. It must have arrived before I came on.”

“Get the manager!”

The club manager arrived minutes later in his nightclothes. His eyes widened at the sight of the broken mirror, the headless snake twitching on the floor, its head resting on the dresser, and Isaac Bell wiping his knife with a ruined pillowcase.

“Assemble your staff,” Bell told him. “Either Lachesis muta here was not blackballed by the Membership Committee, or one of your people helped him into my room.”

ICEMAN WEEKS WAS HOOFING IT across town, having watched from a stable until Isaac Bell entered the Yale Club and waited to make sure he didn’t come out again. At Eighth Avenue he turned up several blocks, walked under the connector line that linked the Ninth Avenue and Sixth Avenue Els, and knocked on an unmarked door to a house just inside 53rd Street where Tommy Thompson had opened a gambling hall on the second floor. The Gopher guarding the door said, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Tell Tommy I got good news for him.”

“Tell him yourself. He’s on the third floor.”

“Figured he’d be.”

Weeks climbed the stairs, passed the gambling hall, guarded by another guy who looked surprised to see him, and headed for the third floor. One of the steps sagged a little under his foot, and he guessed it was rigged to dim the electric light in Tommy’s room above the gambling hall to warn him someone was coming.

Weeks waited, bouncing from leg to leg, while they sized him up through the peephole. Tommy himself opened the door. “I guess you did it,” he said. “Or you wouldn’t be here.”

“Are we square now?”

“Come on in. Have a drink.”

Tommy was drinking Scotch highballs. Weeks was so excited that the booze went straight to his head. “Wanna hear how I did it?”

“Sure. Just wait ’til we’re done here. Shut that light.”

Tommy’s bouncer pushed the switch, plunging the room into near darkness. He hinged open a trapdoor, and Weeks saw that they had cut a square hole in the floor down through the ceiling below and filled it with a smoky pane of glass. “Latest thing,” chuckled Tommy. “One-way mirror. We see down. All they see in the ceiling is their own mugs.”

Weeks peered down at the gambling floor where six men were seated around a high-stakes poker table. One of them Weeks recognized as the best card mechanic in New York. Another, Willy the Roper, specialized in rounding up players to be fleeced. “Who’s the mark?”

“The swell in the red necktie.”

“Rich?”

“Eyes O’Shay says that necktie means he’s a Harvard.”

“What’s his line?”

“Selling food to the Navy.”

Selling food to the Navy sounded to Iceman Weeks like a way to get rich. The Navy business was booming. That Commodore Tommy was engaged in separating so exalted a dude from his money by rigging a high-stakes poker game sounded like Tommy had moved up several notches from robbing freight cars. “What are you taking this Harvard for?” he asked casually.

“Eyes said to take him for all he’s got and lend him dough to lose more.”

“Sounds like Eyes wants to have something on him.”

“Won’t be hard. Ted Whitmark is a gambling fool.”

“What do you get out of it?” Weeks asked, pouring himself another highball.

“Part of our arrangement,” Tommy answered. “Eyes has been mighty generous. If he wants Mr. Whitmark to lose his dough at poker and get in hock to lose some more, it’s a pleasure to help him.”

As Weeks poured his third drink, it occurred to him that Commodore Tommy Thompson was normally more tight-lipped. He wondered what made him so talkative all of a sudden. Jaysus! Was Tommy inviting him to share in the Gophers?

“Want to hear how I did Bell?”

Tommy shut the trapdoor and gestured for his bouncer to turn on the light. “You see that over there on the table? You see what that is?”

“It’s a telephone,” Weeks answered. It looked brand-new, all shiny, the candlestick type you saw in the best joints. “You’re getting up-to-date, Tommy. Didn’t know you had it in ya.”

Tommy Thompson grabbed Weeks by his lapels, effortlessly picked the smaller man off the floor, and threw him hard against the wall. Weeks found himself on the carpet, his head ringing, his brain squirming. “What?”

Tommy kicked him in the face. “You didn’t kill Bell!” he roared. “That telephone tells me that right now Bell is grilling everybody who works in that club.”

“What?”

“The telephone says the Van Dorn’s alive. You didn’t kill him.”

Iceman Weeks pulled the pistol that he had taken from the Cumberland Hotel house dick. Tommy’s bouncer stepped on his hand and took it away from him.

THE MANAGER OF THE YALE CLUB woke the staff and gathered them in the big kitchen on the top floor. They knew Isaac Bell as a regular who remembered their names and was generous when the club’s no-tipping rule was waived at Christmas. All of them, manager, housekeeper, barman, chambermaids, porters, and front-desk clerk, clearly wanted to be of help when Bell asked, “Where did the trunk outside my door on the third floor come from?”

No one could answer. It had not been there when the day shift ended at six. A night-shift waiter had noticed it when passing by with room service at eight. The freight-elevator operator had not seen it, but he admitted taking a long dinner between six and eight. Then Matthew, who had stayed at the front door after Bell interviewed him privately, suddenly appeared, saying, “The new laundress? Mr. Bell. I found her across the street, weeping.”

Bell turned to the housekeeper. “Mrs. Pierce, who is the laundress?”

“The new girl, Jenny Sullivan. She doesn’t live in the house yet.”

“Matthew, could you bring her in?”

Jenny Sullivan was small and dark and trembling with fear. Bell said, “Sit down, miss.”

She stood rigid by the chair. “I didn’t mean no harm.”

“Don’t be afraid, you’ve-” He reached to comfort her with a gentle hand on her arm. Jenny screamed in pain and shrank back.

“What?” Bell said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to hurt-Mrs. Pierce, could you look after Jenny?”

The kindly housekeeper led the girl away, speaking to her softly.

“I think everyone can go back to bed,” said Bell. “Good night. Thank you for your help.”

When Mrs. Pierce returned, she had tears in her eyes. “The girl is beaten black-and-blue from her shoulders to her knees.”

“Did she say who did it?”

“A man named Weeks.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Pierce. Get her to a hospital-not in the district where she lives but the best in the city. I will pay all expenses. Stint on nothing. Here’s money for immediate needs.” Bell pressed it in the housekeeper’s hand and hurried to his room.

Swiftly, methodically, he cleaned his Browning and replaced the spent shell. Wondering again whether a heavier gun would have stopped Weeks before he could stab Alasdair MacDonald, he took a Colt.45 automatic from his safe. He checked the loads in his derringer and put on his hat. He stuffed the Colt and spare ammunition for both guns in his coat pockets and went down the stairs three at a time.

Matthew recoiled from the expression on his face. “Are you all right, Mr. Bell?”

“Not that you would frequent the joint, Matthew, but do you know the address of Commodore Tommy’s Saloon?”

“I believe it is way far across West 39th, almost to the river. But if I ever did ‘frequent the joint,’ ” he added bluntly, “I would not go alone.”

21

ISAAC BELL CHARGED OUT OF THE YALE CLUB. MEN WHO saw him coming moved aside. He crossed Sixth Avenue and Seventh, ignoring the blare of auto horns, and turned downtown on Eighth Avenue. On the nearly deserted sidewalk Bell increased his pace and yet he could not outpace the thundering anger in his head. At West 39th Street he broke into a run.

A police officer in his path, a big man patrolling with a twenty-six-inch nightstick and revolver, looked him over and quietly crossed the street. At Ninth Avenue groups of men and a few women, mostly older, shabbily dressed, with the despairing features of the homeless, had gathered on the streetcar tracks under the El. They were staring up into the dark structure of fan-top columns that supported the overhead train tracks. Bell shouldered through them. Then he stopped short. A man in a sack suit was hanging by his neck from a rope tied to a transverse girder.

An express train on the middle track thundered overhead. As it clattered away and silence descended, someone muttered, “Looks like the Gophers wanted the Iceman should die slow.”

Bell saw what he meant. They hadn’t bound the dead man’s hands. His fingers had caught under the noose as if he were still tugging at his throat. His eyes were bulging and his mouth was locked in a terrible grimace. But even wearing the mask of death, he was beyond any doubt the man who had killed Alasdair MacDonald in Camden.

A drunk snickered, “Maybe the Iceman committed suicide.”

“Yeah,” answered his companion sarcastically. “And maybe the Pope is dropping by Commodore Tommy’s for a beer.”

They laughed. A toothless old woman turned on them. “Would you mock the dead?”

“He deserves what he got. Evil mug.”

An old man in a slouch hat growled, “No Gopher ever killed another because he was evil, ya silly bastards. They killed the Iceman because he was getting too big for his britches.”

Isaac Bell shoved past and continued west.

Both were wrong. The Gophers had killed Weeks to break the chain of evidence that connected his boss to the murder in Camden. It was justice of a sort, rough justice. But it hadn’t been done for justice, only self-protection. What link was left between Alasdair’s killing and the spy who ordered it?

He could feel the cold breath of the river now, and he heard ship horns and the piping of tugs. With Weeks dead, he was no closer to the spy who plotted to kill the minds that imagined Hull 44.

He quickened his pace, then stopped abruptly under a signboard above the first floor of a crumbling red brick tenement so old that it had no fire escapes. Faded white letters on a gray field read “Commodore Tommy’s Saloon.”

The building looked more like a fort than a saloon. Dim light shone through the barred windows. He heard voices inside. But when he tried the front door, it was locked. Bell jerked the.45 out of his coat, fired four shots in a circle around the knob, and kicked the door open.

He went through it fast, slewed sideways into a dimly lit barroom, and slammed his back hard against the wall. A dozen Gophers scattered, upending tables and crouching behind them.

“I’ll shoot the first man with a gun,” said Isaac Bell.

They gaped, staring at him. Eyes flickered at the door, back at him, again at the door. Exchanging surprised glances, the Gopher gangsters registered that Bell was alone and rose menacingly to their feet.

Bell switched the.45 to his left hand and pulled his Browning with his right.

“Everyone’s hands where I can see them. Now!”

At the sight of the enraged detective standing against the wall with two guns sweeping the barroom, most dropped weapons and displayed empty hands. Bell aimed at two who didn’t. “Now!” he repeated. “Or I’ll clean out the place.”

Up came an ancient horse pistol, barrel yawning. Bell shot it out of the gangster’s hand. The man cried out in pain and astonishment. The other was swinging a heavy coach gun at him, a wide-gauge, double-barreled sawed-off that could cut him in half. Bell threw himself sideways as he triggered the Browning again. Buckshot screeched through the air he had vacated. An errant slug burned a furrow across his left arm with a mule-kick impact that nearly knocked the.45 out of his fist. He rolled across the floor and sprang up, guns ready, but the gangster who had fired the coach gun was sprawled on his back, clutching his shoulder.

“Which one of you skunks is Tommy Thompson?”

“He ain’t here, mister.”

Bell had a vague idea that the same rage twisting his face into the expression that cowed them might also be keeping him from thinking straight. He didn’t care.

“Where is he?” he shouted.

“At one of his new joints.”

“Where?”

Far beneath the surface of Isaac Bell’s conscience, a voice cautioned that he would get himself killed like this. But Bell’s fighting voice, always nearest the surface, retorted that no one in the dimly lit barroom could kill him. In a flash, he assessed the contradiction: the fighter saw something the worrier did not. This was too easy. Twelve Gophers, and only two had pulled weapons. By rights, the rest of the gang should still be slinging lead at him. Instead, they were gaping openmouthed and wide-eyed.

“Where?”

“Don’t know, mister.”

“One of the new joints.”

Fear and confusion in the gangsters’ tones made Bell look more closely. Now he noticed that the weapons they had dropped were brass knuckles, saps, and knives. No guns. Then it dawned on him. These were mostly old men, missing teeth, hunched, scarred-the weary down-and-out slum dwellers of Hell’s Kitchen where forty was old, fifty ancient.

New joints. That was it. Commodore Tommy Thompson had moved up and left them behind. These sorry devils had been abandoned by their boss and scared out of their wits by an enraged detective blasting open the door and gunning down the only two with the go left in them to fight.

Bell felt a cool calm settle over his mind, and with it an electric clarity.

Change was sweeping the Hell’s Kitchen Gophers, and he had a strong hunch what was causing it. The old men saw the softening in his face. One piped, “Could we put our hands down, mister?”

The tall detective was still too angry to smile, but he came close. “No,” he said. “Leave them where I can see them.”

A taxi horn blared in the street.

Bell shot a glance out the door. The taxi was sliding to a halt. Five grim-faced Van Dorn veterans and an up-and-coming young fellow spilled out bearing firearms. They were trailed at a distance by a squad of New York cops on foot. Harry Warren, the gang specialist, was leading the Van Dorns. He had a sawed-off pressed against his leg and a revolver tucked in his waistband. Passing the youngster a wad of cash, he gestured for him to deal with the cops, and assessed the front of Commodore Tommy’s with an eye to storming it.

Bell stepped out of the saloon. “Evening, boys.”

“Isaac! You O.K.?”

“Tip-top. What are you doing here?”

“Your Yale Club doorman telephoned the Knickerbocker. Sounded real worried, said that you needed a hand.”

“Old Matthew’s like a mother hen.”

“What the hell are you doing here?”

“Just out for a stroll.”

“Stroll?” They looked up and down the dark and grimy street. “Stroll?” They stared at Isaac Bell. “And I suppose a mosquito drilled that hole in your coat sleeve?” one detective remarked.

“Same one that shot the lock off this door?” asked another.

“And made those Gophers inside hold their hands in the air?” said a third.

Harry Warren beckoned the kid who had just returned. “Eddie, go tell the cops they should send an ambulance.”

Isaac Bell grinned. “Might as well call it a night, boys. Thanks for coming out. Harry, if you’d walk me home, I have questions for you.”

Harry handed his shotgun to the boys, shoved his revolver in his coat pocket, and passed Bell a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.”

Bell stuffed it up his sleeve.

They walked to Ninth Avenue. The cops had cordoned off the area under the El where Weeks was hanging. Firemen were holding ladders for morgue attendants who were trying to cut the body loose.

“So much for connecting the Iceman to Tommy and your foreign spy,” said Harry.

“This connection is precisely what I want to talk to you about,” said Isaac Bell. “It looks to me like Tommy Thompson is moving up in the world.”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, I hear talk in the neighborhoods that the Gophers are throwing their weight around.”

“I want you to find out who his new friends are. Five’ll get you ten, they will be the connection.”

“You could be onto something. I’ll get right to it. Oh, here, they passed me this as we were leaving.” Harry fished in his pockets. “Wire came in for you from the Philadelphia office.”

They had reached the corner of 42nd Street. Bell stopped under a streetlamp to read the wire.

“Bad news?”

“They got a line on a German sneaking around Camden.”

“Wasn’t that a German who did the Bethlehem job?”

“Possibly.”

“What’s in Camden?”

“They’re launching the battleship Michigan.”

22

THE SPY SUMMONED HIS GERMAN AGENT WITH A CRYPTIC note left at his Camden rooming house. They met in Philadelphia in a watchman’s shack on a barge tied to the west bank of the Delaware directly across the busy river from the shipyard. Through an ever-moving scrim of tugboats, lighters, ships, ferries, and coal smoke they could see the stern of the Michigan thrusting her propellers out the back of the shed that covered her ways. The river was only a half mile wide, and they could hear the steady drumbeat of carpenters pounding wooden wedges.

The ship workers had built a gigantic wooden cradle big enough to carry the 16,000-ton ship down greased rails from her building place on land to her home in the water. Now they were raising the cradle up to her by driving wedges under it. When the wedges pressed the cradle tightly against the hull, they would continue hammering them until the cradle lifted the ship off her building blocks.

The German was glum.

The spy said, “Listen. What do you hear?”

“They’re hammering the wedges.”

The spy had earlier passed close by in a steam launch to observe the scene under the hull, which was painted with a dull red undercoat. The “hammers” were actually rams, long poles tipped with heavy heads.

“The wedges are thin,” he said. “How much does each blow raise the cradle?”

“You’d need a micrometer to measure.”

“How many wedges?”

“Gott in Himmel, who knows. Hundreds.”

“A thousand?”

“Could be.”

“Could any one wedge raise the cradle under the ship?”

“Impossible.”

“Could any one wedge lift the cradle and the ship off her blocks.”

“Impossible.”

“Every German must do his part, Hans. If one fails, we all fail.”

Hans stared at him with a strange look of detachment. “I am not a simpleton, mein Herr. I understand the principle. It is not the doing that troubles me, but the consequences.”

The spy said, “I know you’re not a simpleton. I am merely trying to help.”

“Thank you, mein Herr.”

“Do the detectives frighten you?” he asked, even though he doubted they did.

“No. I can avoid them until the last moment. The pass you had made for me will throw them off. By the time any realize what I am up to, it will be too late to stop me.”

“Do you fear that you will not escape with your life?”

“I would be amazed if I did. Fortunately, I have settled that question in my own mind. That is not what troubles me.”

“Then we are back to the same basic question, Hans. Would you have American warships sink German warships?”

“Maybe it is the waiting that is killing me. No matter where I go I hear them hitting the wedges. Like the ticking clock. Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticking for innocent men who don’t know yet that they will die. It’s driving me crazy-What is this?”

The spy was pushing money into his hand. He tried to jerk back. “I don’t want money.”

The spy seized his wrist in an astonishingly powerful grip. “Recreation. Find a girl. She’ll make the night go faster.” He stood up abruptly.

“Are you leaving?” Suddenly Hans did look afraid-afraid to be alone with his conscience.

“I’ll be nearby. I’ll be watching.” The spy smiled reassuringly and slapped him on the shoulder.

“Go find that girl. Enjoy the night. It will be morning before you know it.”

23

WAITERS SPORTING RED, WHITE, AND BLUE BOW TIES spread watercress sandwiches and iced wine in the dignitaries’ pavilion. Bartenders, who had been issued similarly patriotic garters for their sleeves, rolled kegs of beer and carts of hard-boiled eggs into the ship workers’ tents on the riverbank. A warm breeze drifted through the enormous shed that covered the shipway, sunlight filtered down from glass panels in the roof, and it appeared that half the population of Camden, New Jersey, had turned out to celebrate launching the battleship Michigan, whose 16,000 tons were balanced at the high end of a track of greased rails that slanted into the river.

The shed still resounded with steel banging on wood, but the pace of the hammering had slowed. The wedges had lifted the battleship off nearly all her building blocks. But for a last few under her keel and bilges, she rested on the cradle she would ride down the ways.

The ceremonial launching platform surrounding the ship’s steel bow was draped with red, white, and blue bunting. A champagne bottle, wrapped in crocheted mesh to keep glass from flying and beribboned in the colors of the flag, waited in a bowl of roses.

The battleship’s sponsor, the pretty, dark-haired girl who would christen her, stood by in a striped flannel walking dress and a wide-brimmed Merry Widow hat heaped with silk peonies. She was ignoring the fevered instructions of an Assistant Secretary of the Navy-her father-who was warning her not to hold back at the crucial moment but to “Whack her with all you’ve got the instant the ship starts to move or it’ll be too late.”

Her gaze was fixed on a tall, golden-haired detective in a white suit, whose restless eyes were looking everywhere but at her.

Isaac Bell had not slept in a bed since he arrived in Camden two days ago. He had originally intended to come down with Marion the night before the ceremony and dine in Philadelphia. But that was before the Philadelphia office had sent the urgent wire to New York. Disquieting rumors had begun to drift in concerning a mysterious German bent on disrupting the launch. Detectives assigned to the German immigrant community heard of a recent arrival who claimed to be from Bremen but spoke with a Rostock accent. He kept asking about finding work at New York Ship but had never applied to the company. Several hands had unaccountably lost the gate badges that identified them as employees.

This morning at dawn, Angelo Del Rossi, the frock-coated proprietor of the King Street dance hall where Alasdair MacDonald had been murdered, sought Bell out. He reported that a woman had come to him, distraught and frightened. A German who met the description of the man from Rostock-tall and fair, with troubled eyes-had confessed to the woman, who in turn had confessed to Del Rossi.

“She’s a part-time working girl, Isaac, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ve heard of such arrangements,” Bell assured him. “What exactly did she say?”

“This German she was with suddenly blurted out something to the effect that the innocent should not die. She asked what he meant. They had been drinking. He fell silent, then blurted some more, as drinkers will, saying that the cause was just, but the methods wrong. Again she asked what he meant. And he broke down and began to weep, and said-and this she claimed to quote exactly-‘The dreadnought will fall, but men will die.’ ”

“Do you believe her?”

“She had nothing to gain coming to me, except a clear conscience. She knows men who work in the yard. She doesn’t want them to be hurt. She was brave enough to confide in me.”

“I must speak with her,” said Bell.

“She won’t talk to you. She doesn’t see any difference between private detectives and cops, and she doesn’t like cops.”

Bell pulled a gold piece from inside his belt and handed it to the saloonkeeper. “No cop ever paid her twenty dollars to talk. Give this to her. Tell her I admire her bravery and that I will do nothing to endanger her.” He turned his gaze sharply on Del Rossi. “You do believe me, Angelo. Do you not?”

“Why do you think I came to you?” said Del Rossi. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Is it enough money?”

“More than she clears in a week.”

Bell tossed him more gold. “Here’s another week. This is vitally important, Angelo. Thank you.”

Her name was Rose. She had offered no last name when Del Rossi arranged for them to meet in the back of his dance hall, and Bell asked for none. Bold and self-possessed, she repeated everything she had told Del Rossi. Bell kept her talking, probing gently, and she finally added that the German’s parting words, as he staggered from the private booth they had rented in a waterfront bar, were, “It will be done.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“I should think so.”

“How would you like to become a temporary employee of the Van Dorn Detective Agency?”

NOW SHE WAS CRUISING the shipyard in a summery white dress and a flowered hat, pretending to be the kid sister of two burly Van Dorn operatives disguised as celebrating steamfitters. A dozen more detectives were prowling the shipyard checking and rechecking the identities of all who were working near the Michigan, particularly the carpenters driving the wedges directly under the hull. These men were required to carry special red passes issued by Van Dorn-instead of New York Ship-in case spies had infiltrated the offices of the shipbuilding firm.

The runners who reported to Bell on the platform were chosen for their youthful appearance. Bell had ordered them to be attired like innocuous college boys, in boaters, summer suits, rounded collars, and neckties, so as not to unnecessarily frighten the throng that had come out to greet the new ship.

He had argued strongly for a postponement, but there was no question of calling the ceremony off. Too much was riding on the launch, Captain Falconer had explained, and every party involved would protest. New York Ship was proud to put Michigan in the water just ahead of Cramp’s Shipyard’s South Carolina, which was only weeks behind. The Navy wanted the hull immediately afloat to finish fitting her out. And no one in his cabinet dared inform President Roosevelt of any delay.

The ceremony was scheduled to start exactly at eleven. Captain Falconer had warned Bell that they would launch on time. In less than an hour the dreadnought would either slide uneventfully down the ways or the German saboteur would attack, wreaking a terrible toll on the innocent.

A Marine brass band started playing a Sousa medley, and the launching stand got crowded with hundreds of special guests invited to stand close enough to actually see the champagne bottle crack on the bow. Bell spotted the Secretary of the Interior, three senators, the governor of Michigan, and several members of President Roosevelt’s vigorous “Tennis Cabinet.”

The top bosses of New York Ship trooped up the steps in close company with Admiral Capps, the chief naval constructor. Capps seemed less interested in talking to shipbuilders than to Lady Fiona Abbington-Westlake, the wife of the British Naval Attaché, a beautiful woman with a shiny mane of chestnut hair. Isaac Bell observed her discreetly. The Van Dorn researchers assigned to the Hull 44 spy case had reported that Lady Fiona spent beyond her husband’s means. Worse, she was paying blackmail to a Frenchman named Raymond Colbert. No one knew what Colbert had on her, or whether it involved her husband’s purloining of French naval secrets.

The German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was represented by a saber-scarred military attaché, Lieutenant Julian Von Stroem, recently returned from German East Africa, who was married to an American friend of Dorothy Langner. Suddenly Dorothy herself parted the crowd in her dark mourning clothes. The bright-eyed redheaded girl he had noticed at the Willard Hotel was at her elbow. Katherine Dee, Research had reported, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who had moved back to Ireland after making his fortune building Catholic schools in Baltimore. Orphaned soon after, Katherine had been convent-educated in Switzerland.

The handsome Ted Whitmark trailed behind them, shaking hands and slapping backs and declaring in a voice that carried to the glass roof, “Michigan is going to be one of Uncle Sam’s best fighting units.” While Whitmark occasionally played the fool in his private life, gambling and drinking, at least before he met Dorothy, Research had made it clear that he was extremely adept at the business of snagging government contracts.

Typical of the incestuous relationships in the crowd of industrialists, politicians, and diplomats that swirled around the “New Navy,” he and Dorothy Langner had met at a clambake hosted by Captain Falconer. As Grady Forrer of Van Dorn Research had remarked cynically, “The easy part was discovering who’s in bed with whom; the hard part is calculating why, seeing as how ‘why’ can run the gamut from profit to promotion to espionage to just plain raising hell.”

Bell saw a small smile part Dorothy’s lips. He glanced in the direction she was looking and saw the naval architect Farley Kent nod back. Then Kent threw an arm around his guest-Lieutenant Yourkevitch, the Czar’s dreadnought architect-and plunged into the crowd as if to get out of the path of Ted and Dorothy. Oblivious, Ted seized an elderly admiral’s hand and bellowed, “Great day for the Navy, sir. Great day for the Navy.”

Dorothy’s eyes wheeled Bell’s way and locked with his. Bell returned her gaze appraisingly. He had not seen her since the day he had called on her in Washington, though he had, at Van Dorn’s urging, reported to her by long-distance telephone that there was strong reason to hope that her father’s name would soon be cleared. She had thanked him warmly and said that she hoped she would see him in Camden at the luncheon that would follow the launching. It occurred to Bell that neither Ted Whitmark nor Farley Kent would be pleased by the look she was giving him now.

A warm breath whispered in his ear. “That’s quite a smile for a lady dressed in mourning black.”

Marion Morgan glided behind him and made a beeline for Captain Falconer. He looked heroically splendid in his full-dress white uniform, she thought, or splendidly heroic, his handsome head erect in a high-standing collar, medals arrayed across his broad chest, sword at his trim waist.

“GOOD MORNING, MISS MORGAN,” Lowell Falconer greeted Marion Morgan heartily. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

She and Isaac had dined aboard Falconer’s yacht the night before. When Bell promised him that Arthur Langner would be completely vindicated of accepting bribes, her pride in her fiancé had spoken legions for her love. Still, Falconer admitted ruefully, he had not been disappointed when Bell had to excuse himself early to oversee another inspection of the ways beneath the ship. After the detective left, their conversation had flowed seamlessly from dreadnought design to moving pictures to naval warfare to the paintings of Henry Reutendahl to Washington politics and Falconer’s career. He realized in retrospect that he had told her more about himself than he had intended to.

The Hero of Santiago knew himself well enough to acknowledge that he had fallen half in love with her. But he was completely unaware that the beautiful Miss Morgan was using him for cover as she tracked the head-bowing, hat-tipping passage through the crowd of an elegantly dressed Japanese.

“Why,” she asked Falconer, filling time, “is the shipbuilder called New York Ship when it’s in Camden, New Jersey?”

“That confuses everyone,” Falconer explained with his warmest smile and a devilish glint in his eye. “Originally, Mr. Morse intended to build his yard on Staten Island, but Camden offered better rail facilities and access to Philadelphia’s experienced shipyard workers. Why are you smiling that way, Miss Morgan?”

She said, “The way you’re looking at me, it’s a good thing that Isaac is nearby and armed.”

“Well, he ought to be,” Falconer retorted gruffly. “Anyway, Camden, New Jersey, has the most modern shipyard in the world. When it comes to building dreadnoughts, it is second only to our most important facility at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

“And why is that, Captain?” Her quarry was drawing near.

“They embrace a thoroughly modern system. Major parts are prefabricated. Overhead cranes move them around the yard as easily as you’d assemble the ingredients to bake a cake. These sheds cover the ways so bad weather doesn’t delay production.”

“They remind me of the glass studios we use to film indoors, though ours are much smaller.”

“Fittings that used to be mounted after launch are applied in the comfort of those covered ways. She’ll be launched with her guns already in place.”

“Fascinating.” The man she was watching had stopped to peer through a break in the scaffolding that revealed the ship’s long armor belt. “Captain Falconer? How many men will crew the Michigan?”

“Fifty officers. Eight hundred fifty enlisted.”

She uttered a thought so grim that it shadowed her face. “That is a terrible number of sailors in one small space if the worst happens and the ship sinks.”

“Modern warships are armored coffins,” Falconer answered far more bluntly than he would with a civilian, but their conversations last night had established an easy trust between them and left him in no doubt of her superior intelligence. “I saw Russians drown by the thousands fighting the Japs in the Tsushima Strait. Battleships went down in minutes. All but the spotters in the fighting tops and a few men on the bridge were trapped belowdecks.”

“Can I assume that our goal is to build warships that will sink slowly and give men time to get off?”

“The goal for battleships is to keep fighting. That means protecting men, machinery, and guns within a citadel of armor while keeping the ship afloat. The sailors who win stay alive.”

“So today is a happy day, launching such a modern ship.”

Captain Falconer glowered at Marion under his heavy eyebrows. “Between you and me, miss, thanks to Congress limiting her to 16,000 tons, Michigan has eight feet less freeboard aft then the old Connecticut. She’ll be wetter than a whale, and if she ever makes eighteen knots in heavy seas, I’ll eat my hat.”

“Obsolete before she is even launched?”

“Doomed to escort slow conveys. But if she ever tangles with a real dreadnought, it better be in calm waters. Hell!” he snorted. “We should anchor her in San Francisco Bay to greet the Japanese.”

A petite girl wearing a very expensive hat secured to her red hair with Taft-for-President “Possum Billy” hatpins stepped up. “Excuse me, Captain Falconer. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I had a wonderful time at a picnic on your yacht.”

Falconer seized the hand that she had offered tentatively. “I remember you indeed, Miss Dee,” he grinned. “Had the sun not shone on our clambake, your smile would have made up for it. Marion, this young lady is Miss Katherine Dee. Katherine, say hello to my very good friend Marion Morgan.”

Katherine Dee’s big blue eyes got bigger. “Are you the moving-picture director?” she asked breathlessly.

“Yes, I am.”

“I love Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight! I’ve seen it four times already.”

“Well, thank you very much.”

“Do you ever act in your movies?”

Marion laughed. “Good Lord, no!”

“Why not?” Captain Falconer interrupted. “You’re a good-looking woman.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Marion said, casting a quick smile at Katherine Dee. “But good looks don’t necessary show up on film. The camera has its own standards. It prefers certain kinds of features.” Like Katherine Dee’s, she thought to herself. For some magical reason the lens and the light tended to favor Katherine’s type, with her petite figure, large head, and big eyes.

Almost as if she could read her mind, Katherine said, “Oh, I wish I could see a movie being made.”

Marion Morgan took a closer look at the girl. She seemed physically strong for one so petite. Strangely so. In fact, behind Katherine’s breathless, little-girl manner, Marion sensed something slightly peculiar. But didn’t the camera also often transform peculiarities into characteristics that charmed the movie audience? She was tempted to confirm whether this girl indeed had qualities the camera would love, and an invitation was on the tip of her tongue. But there was something about her that made Marion uncomfortable.

Beside her, Marion felt Lowell Falconer plumping up again as he did whenever he saw a pretty girl. The woman approaching was the tall brunette who had been making eyes at Isaac earlier.

Lowell stepped forward and extended his hand.

Marion thought that Dorothy Langner was even more striking than the descriptions she had heard. She thought of a term uttered by her long-widowed father now that he was finally stepping out in late middle age: “A looker.”

“Dorothy, I am so glad you came,” said Falconer. “Your father would be very proud to see you here.”

“I’m proud to see his guns. Already mounted. This is a splendid shipyard. You remember Ted Whitmark?”

“Of course,” said Falconer, shaking Whitmark’s hand. “I imagine you’ll be a busy fellow when the fleet replenishes at San Francisco. Dorothy, may I present Miss Marion Morgan?”

Marion was aware of being carefully measured as they traded hellos.

“And of course you know Katherine,” Falconer concluded the introductions.

“We came up together on the train,” said Whitmark. “I hired a private car.”

Marion said, “Excuse me, Captain Falconer, I see a gentleman Isaac asked me to meet. Nice to meet you, Miss Langner, Mr. Whitmark, Miss Dee.”

THE POUNDING OF THE WEDGES suddenly stopped. The ship was fully on her cradle. Isaac Bell headed to the stairs for a final look below.

Dorothy Langner intercepted him at the top of the stairs. “Mr. Bell, I was hoping to see you.”

She extended her gloved hand, and Bell it took it politely. “How are you, Miss Langner?”

“Much better since our conversation. Vindicating my father won’t bring him back, but it is a comfort, and I am very grateful to you.”

“I am hoping that soon we will have definitive proof, but, as I said, I personally have no doubt that your father was murdered, and we will bring his killer to justice.”

“Whom do you suspect?”

“No one I am prepared to discuss. Mr. Van Dorn will keep you appraised.”

“Isaac-may I call you Isaac?”

“All right, if you want.”

“There is something I told you once. I would like to make it clear.”

“If it’s about Mr. Whitmark,” Bell smiled, “be aware he’s headed this way.”

“I will repeat,” she said quietly. “I am not rushing into anything. And he is leaving for San Francisco.”

It struck Bell that a key difference between Marion and Dorothy was how they regarded men. Dorothy wondered whether she could add one to her list of conquests. Whereas Marion Morgan had no doubt she could conquer and therefore was not inclined to bother. It showed in their smiles. Marion’s smile was as engaging as an embrace. Dorothy’s was a dare. But Bell could not ignore her desperate fragility, despite her bold manner. It was almost as if she were putting herself forth and asking to be saved from the loss of her father. And he did not believe that Ted Whitmark was the man to do that.

“Bell, isn’t it?” Whitmark called loudly as he bustled up.

“Isaac Bell.”

He saw tugboats gathering in the river to take charge of the hull when she hit the water. “Excuse me. I’m expected on the ways.”

YAMAMOTO KENTA HAD STUDIED photographs of American warship launchings to choose his costume. He could not disguise that he was Japanese. But the less alien his clothes, the farther he could roam the shipyard and the closer he could approach the distinguished guests. Observing his fellow travelers on the train up from Washington, he was proud to see that he had dressed perfectly for the occasion in a pale blue-and-white seersucker suit and a pea green four-in-hand necktie matched by the color of his straw boater’s hatband.

At the shipyard in Camden, he doffed the boater repeatedly in polite acknowledgment of ladies, important personages, and older gentlemen. The first person he had run into upon arriving at the remarkably up-to-date Camden shipyard was Captain Lowell Falconer, the Hero of Santiago. They had spoken late last fall at the unveiling of a bronze tablet to commemorate Commodore Thomas Tingey, the first commandant of the Washington Navy Yard. Yamamoto had given Falconer the impression that he had retired from the Japanese Navy holding the rank of lieutenant before returning to his first love, Japanese art. Captain Falconer had given him a cursory tour of the arsenal with the notable exception of the Gun Factory.

This morning, when Yamamoto congratulated Falconer on the imminent launch of America’s first dreadnought, Falconer had replied with a wry “almost dreadnought” on the assumption-from one sea dog to another-that a former officer of the Japanese Navy would recognize her shortcomings.

Yamamoto touched his brim once again, this time for a tall, striking blond woman.

Unlike the other American ladies who streamed past with chilly nods for “that puny Asiatic,” as he had heard one murmur to her daughter, she surprised him with a warm smile and the observation that the weather had turned lovely for the launching.

“And for the blooming of the flowers,” said the Japanese spy, who was actually comfortable with American woman, having secretly romanced several high-ranking Washington wives who had convinced themselves that a visiting curator of Asian art must be soulfully artistic as well as exotically Asiatic. At his flirtatious remark, he could expect her to either stalk off or move closer.

He was deeply flattered when she chose the latter.

Her eyes were a startling sea-coral green.

Her manner was forthright. “Neither of us is dressed as a naval officer,” she said. “What brings you here?”

“It is my day off from where I am working at the Smithsonian Institution,” Yamamoto replied. He saw no bulge of a wedding ring under her cotton glove. Probably the daughter of an important official. “A colleague in the Art Department give me his ticket and a letter of introduction that makes me sound far more important than I am. And you?”

“Art? Are you an artist?”

“Merely a curator. A large collection was given to the Institution. They asked me to catalog a small portion of it-a very small portion,” he added with a self-deprecating smile.

“Do you mean the Freer Collection?”

“Yes! You know of it?”

“My father took me to Mr. Freer’s home in Detroit when I was a little girl.”

Yamamoto was not surprised that she had visited the fabulously wealthy manufacturer of railway cars. The social set that swirled around the American’s New Navy included the privileged, the well-connected, and the newly rich. This young lady appeared to be of the former. Certainly, her ease of manner and sense of style set her off from the oft-shrill nouveaux. “What,” he asked her, “do you recall from that visit?”

Her engaging green eyes seemed to explode with light. “What stays in my heart are the colors in Ashiyuki Utamaro’s woodcuts.”

“The theatrical pieces?”

“Yes! The colors were so vivid yet so subtly united. They made his scrolls seem even more remarkable.”

“His scrolls?”

“The simple black on white of his calligraphy was so… so-what is the word-clear, as if to imply that color was actually unessential.”

“But Ashiyuki Utamaro made no scrolls.”

Her smile faded. “Do I misrecall?” She gave a little laugh, an uncomfortable sound that alerted Yamamoto Kenta that all was not well here. “I was only ten years old,” she said hurriedly. “But I’m certain I remember-no, I guess I’m wrong. Aren’t I the silly one. I’m terribly embarrassed. I must look like a complete ninny to you.”

“Not at all,” Yamamoto replied smoothly while glancing about surreptitiously to see who on the crowded platform was watching them. Nobody he could see. His mind was racing. Had she tried to trick him into revealing gaps in his hastily acquired knowledge of art? Or had she made a genuine mistake? Thank the gods that he had known that Ashiyuki Utamaro had presided over a large printshop and had not been the monastic sort of artist who toiled alone with a few brushes, ink, and rice paper.

She was looking about as if desperate for an excuse to break away. “I’m afraid I must go,” she said. “I’m meeting a friend.”

Yamamoto tipped his boater. But she surprised him again. Instead of immediately fleeing, she extended her long, slender cotton-gloved hand, and said, “We’ve not been introduced. I enjoyed talking with you. I am Marion Morgan.”

Yamamoto bowed, thoroughly confused by her openness. Perhaps he was paranoid. “Yamamoto Kenta,” he said, shaking her hand. “At your service, Miss Morgan. If you ever visit the Smithsonian, please ask for me.”

“Oh, I will,” she said, and strolled away.

The puzzled Japanese spy watched Marion Morgan sail sleek as a cruiser through a billowing sea of flowered hats. Her course converged with that of a woman in a scarlet hat heaped with silk roses. Their brims angled left and right, forming an arch under which they touched cheeks.

Yamamoto felt his jaw go slack. He recognized the woman who greeted Marion Morgan as the mistress of a treacherous French Navy captain who would sell his own mother for a peek at the plans of a hydraulic gyro engine. He felt a strong urge to remove his boater and scratch his head. Was it coincidence that Marion Morgan knew Dominique Duvall? Or was the beautiful American spying for the perfidious French?

Before he could ponder further, he had to doff his boater to a beautiful lady dressed head to toe in black.

“May I offer my condolences?” he asked Dorothy Langner, whom he had met at the unveiling of the bronze tablet at the Washington Navy Yard shortly before he murdered her father.

A MASTER CARPENTER in blue-striped overalls served as Isaac Bell’s guide when he made his final inspection under the hull. They walked its length twice, up one side and down the other.

The last of the wooden shores bracing the ship had been removed, as had the poppets-the long timbers holding her bow and her stern. Where there had been a dense forest of lumber was a clear view alongside the cradle from front to back. All that remained leaning against the ship were temporary tumbler shores-heavy timbers designed to fall away as she began to slide down the flat rails, which were thickly greased with yellow tallow.

Nearly every keel block supporting the vessel had been removed. The final blocks were assembled from four triangles bolted into single wooden cubes. Carpenters disassembled them by unscrewing the bolts that held them together. As the triangles fell apart, the battleship settled harder on the cradle. Swiftly, they unbolted the bilge blocks, the last holding her, and now Michigan’s full weight came on the cradle with an audible sighing of minutely shifting plates and rivets.

“All that’s holding her now are the triggers,” the carpenter told Bell. “Yank them, and off she goes.”

“Do you see anything amiss?” the detective asked.

The carpenter stuck his thumbs in his overalls and peered around with a sharp eye. Foremen were herding workmen off the ways and out of the shed. With the hammering of the wedges finally stopped it was eerily quiet. Bell heard the tugs hooting signals on the river and the murmur of the expectant throng above him on the platform.

“Everything looks right as rain, Mr. Bell.”

“Are you sure?”

“All they’ve got to do now is bust that bottle.”

“Who is that man with the wedge ram?” Bell pointed at a man who abruptly appeared carrying a long pole over his shoulder.

“That is a mighty brave fellow getting paid extra to poke the trigger if it jams.”

“Do you know him?”

“Bill Strong. My wife’s brother’s nephew by marriage.”

A steam whistle blew a long, sonorous blast. “We ought to get out of here, Mr. Bell. There’ll be tons of junk falling off her when she moves. If it happens to brain us, folks will say she’s an unlucky ship-‘launched in blood.’ ”

They retreated toward the stairs that led up to the platform. As they parted at the juncture where the carpenter would join his mates on the riverbank and Bell would continue up to the christening, the tall detective took one last look at the ways, the cradle, and the dull red hull. At the bottom of the ways, where the rails dipped into the water, massive iron chains were heaped in horseshoe loops. Attached to the ship by drag cables, the chains would help slow her as she slid into the water.

“What is that man doing with the wheelbarrow?”

“Bringing more tallow to grease the ways.”

“Do you know him?”

“Can’t say that I do. But here comes one of your men checking him now.”

Bell watched the Van Dorn intercept him. The man with the wheelbarrow showed the bright red pass required to work under the ship. Just as the detective stepped aside, motioning for the man to continue, someone whistled, and the detective ran in that direction. The man lifted the handles of his barrow and wheeled it toward the rails.

“A regular patriot,” said the carpenter.

“What do you mean?”

“Wearing that red, white, and blue bow tie. A regular Uncle Sam, he is. See you later, Mr. Bell. Stop by the workmen’s tent. I’ll buy you a beer.” He hurried off, chuckling, “I’m thinking of getting me one of those bow ties for Independence Day. The waiters was wearing them at the boss’s tent.”

Bell lingered, studying the man pushing the wheelbarrow toward the back of the ship. A tall man, thin, pale, hair hidden under his cap. He was the only man on the ways except for Bill Strong, who crouched with his ram hundreds of feet away at the bow. Coincidence that he wore a waiter’s bow tie? Did he get past the gates pretending to be a waiter until the ways were cleared and it was time to make his move unhindered? His pass had convinced the detective, though. Even at this distance Bell had seen it was the proper color.

He began hastily shoveling globs of tallow out of the barrow onto the flat rail. So hastily, Bell noticed, that it looked more like he was emptying the barrow rather than spreading the grease.

Isaac Bell plunged down the stairs. He ran the length of the ship at a dead run, drawing his Browning.

“Elevate!” he shouted. “Hands in the air.”

The man whirled around. His eyes were big. He looked frightened. “Drop the shovel. Put your hands in the air.”

“What is wrong? I showed my red pass.” His accent was German.

“Drop the shovel!”

He was gripping it so tightly that tendons stood like ropes on the backs of his hands.

A hoarse cheer erupted overhead. The German looked up. The ship was trembling. Suddenly it moved. Bell looked up, too, sensing a rush from above. In the corner of his eye he glimpsed a timber thick as railroad crosstie detach from the hull and tumble toward him. He leaped back. It crashed in the space in which he had been standing, knocking his broad-brimmed hat off his head and brushing his shoulder with the force of a runaway horse.

Before Bell could recover his balance, the German swung the shovel with the gritted-teeth determination of a long-ball hitter determined to turn a soft pitch into a home run.

24

THE LAUNCHING PLATFORM HAD BEGUN TO SHAKE WITHOUT warning.

The crowd fell silent.

It suddenly felt as if after three years of building, growing heavier every day as tons of steel were bolted and riveted to tons of steel, the battleship Michigan refused to wait a moment longer. No one had touched the electric button that would activate the rams that would release the triggers. But she had moved anyway. An inch. Then another.

“Now!” the Assistant Secretary of the Navy cried shrilly to his daughter.

The girl, more alert than he, was already swinging the bottle.

Glass smashed. Champagne bubbled through the crocheted mesh, and the girl sang out in golden tones, “I christen thee Michigan!”

The hundreds of onlookers on the launching platform cheered. Thousands more on the shore, too far away to see the bottle break or the slow movement of the hull, were alerted by the voices of those on the platform and cheered, too. Tugboats and steamers tooted in the river. On the train tracks behind the shed, a locomotive engineer tied down his whistle. And slowly, very slowly, the battleship began to pick up speed.

UNDER THE SHIP, the German’s shovel smashed Bell’s gun out of his hand and caromed off his shoulder. Bell was already thrown off balance by the falling timber. The shovel sent him pinwheeling.

The German jumped back to the wheelbarrow and plunged his hands into its gelatinous cargo, confirming what Bell had seen from the stairs. He had been shoveling tallow onto the ways not only to appear to be innocently performing his job but to expose what he had hidden under the tallow. With a glad cry he pulled out a tightly banded pack of dynamite sticks.

Bell leaped to his feet. He saw no fuse to detonate the explosive, no powdered string to light, which meant that the German must have rigged a percussion cap to detonate on contact when the saboteur smashed it against the cradle. The German’s face was churning into a mask of insane triumph as he ran at the cradle holding the dynamite aloft, and Isaac Bell recognized the cold-eyed fearlessness of a fanatic willing to die to set off his bomb.

With every shore and block removed, Michigan was balanced precariously as she started down the ways. An explosion would derail the cradle and spill the 16,000-ton battleship on its side, crushing the launching platform and sweeping hundreds to their deaths.

Bell tackled the German. He brought the man down. But the madness that propelled the German to fearlessly face death gave him the strength to wrest free from the detective. The slowly sliding ship still had not left the shed nor reached the water’s edge. The German stood up and ran full tilt at its cradle.

Bell had no idea where his Browning had fallen. His hat had disappeared and with it his derringer. He pulled his knife from his boot, propped erect on one knee, and threw it with a smooth overhand motion. The razor-sharp steel pieced the back of the German’s neck. He stopped in his tracks and reached back as if to swat a fly. Grievously wounded, he buckled at the knees. Yet he staggered toward the ship, raising his bomb. But Isaac Bell’s knife had cost him more than a few precious seconds. By stopping for an instant, he remained directly in the downward path of another falling timber. It hit the German squarely, crushing his head.

The dynamite fell from his upstretched hand. Isaac Bell was already diving for it. He caught it in both hands before the percussion cap hit the ground and drew it gently to his chest as the long red hull hurtled past.

The ground shook. The drag chains thundered. Smoke poured from the cradle. Michigan accelerated out of the shed into the sunlit water, trailing the acrid scent of burning tallow fired by friction and billowing the river into clouds of spray that the sunshine pierced with rainbows.

WHILE EVERY EYE IN CAMDEN locked on the floating ship, Isaac Bell seized the dead German and stuffed him in the wheelbarrow. The detective who had checked the saboteur’s pass came running up, trailed by others. Bell said, “Get this man in the back door of the morgue before anyone sees him. Shipbuilders are superstitious. We don’t want to spoil their party.”

While they covered the body with scrap wood, Bell found his gun and put his hat on his head. A detective handed him his knife, which he sheathed in his boot. “I’m supposed to take my girl to the luncheon. How do I look?”

“Like somebody ironed your suit with a shovel.”

They took out handkerchiefs and brushed his coat and trousers. “You ever consider wearing a darker outfit for days like this?”

Marion took one look when Bell entered the pavilion and asked in a low voice, “Are you all right?”

“Tip-top.”

“You missed the launching.”

“Not entirely,” said Bell. “How did you get along with Yamamoto Kenta?”

“Mr. Yamamoto,” said Marion Morgan, “is a phony.”

25

I LAID A TRAP, AND HE WALKED RIGHT INTO IT-ISAAC! HE did not know about Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls.”

“You’ve got me there. What are Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls?”

“Ashiyuki Utamaro was a famous Japanese woodblock printmaker during the later Edo period. Woodblock artists operate large, complex shops where employees and acolytes do much of the work, tracing, carving, and inking after the master draws the image. They don’t do calligraphy scrolls.”

“Why does it matter that Mr. Yamamoto didn’t know about something that doesn’t exist?”

“Because Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls do exist. But they were made secretly, so only real scholars know about them.”

“And you! No wonder you won the first law degree ever granted a woman at Stanford University.”

“I wouldn’t know either except my father occasionally bought a Japanese scroll, and I remembered a strange story he told me. I wired him in San Francisco for the details. He wired back a very expensive telegram.

“Ashiyuki Utamaro was at the height of his printmaking career when he got in trouble with the Emperor apparently for making eyes or more at the Emperor’s favorite geisha. Only the fact that the Emperor loved Ashiyuki Utamaro’s woodcuts saved his life.

“Instead of chopping his head off, or whatever they do to Japanese Lotharios, he banished him to the northernmost cape of the northernmost island of Japan-Hokkaido. For an artist who needed his workshop and staff, it was worse than prison. Then his mistress smuggled in paper, ink, and a brush. And until he died, alone in his tiny little hut, he drew calligraphy scrolls. But no one could admit they existed. His mistress and everyone who helped her visit him would have been executed. They could not be displayed. They could not be sold. Somehow the prints ended up with a dealer in San Francisco, who sold one to my father.”

“Forgive me my skepticism, but it does sound like an art dealer’s story,” said Bell.

“Except it is true. Yamamoto Kenta does not know about the Exile Scrolls. Therefore he is no scholar and no curator of Japanese art.”

“Which makes him a spy,” Bell said grimly. “And a murderer. Well done, my darling. We’ll hang him with this.”

THE SPEECHES THAT ACCOMPANIED the luncheon’s toasts were mercifully brief, and the rousing one delivered by Captain Lowell Falconer, Special Inspector of Target Practice, was, in the words of Ted Whitmark, “a real stem-winder.”

With crackling language and powerful gestures, the Hero of Santiago praised Camden’s modern yard, lionized the ship workers, thanked the Congress, commended the chief constructor, and acclaimed the naval architect.

During one of the explosions of applause, Bell whispered to Marion, “The only thing he hasn’t praised is the Michigan.”

Marion whispered back, “You should have heard what he said privately about the Michigan. He compared her to a whale. And I don’t believe he meant it as a compliment.”

“He did mention that it is barely half the size of Hull 44.” With a courtly bow in Dorothy’s direction, Falconer wound his toast up with a stirring testimonial to Arthur Langner. “The hero who built Michigan’s guns. Finest 12s in the world today. And a harbinger of even better to come. Every man jack in the Navy will miss him.”

Bell glanced at Dorothy. Her face was alight with joy that even a maverick officer like Falconer had said for all to hear that her father was a hero.

“May Arthur Langner rest in peace,” Captain Falconer concluded, “knowing that his nation sleeps in peace secured by his mighty guns.”

The last bit of business was the presentation by the chairman of New York Ship of a jeweled pendant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy’s quick-moving daughter, who had cracked the champagne over Michigan’s bow before the ship got away. Heading for the podium, the savvy industrialist shook hands warmly with a man in an elegant European frock coat, who handed him the pendant. And before he draped it around the young lady’s neck, he used the occasion to plug the booming jewelry industry in Camden’s sister city of Newark.

ANTICIPATING THE CRUSH heading home to New York, Bell had bribed Camden detective Barney George to arrange for a police launch to run him and Marion across the river to Philadelphia, where a police car sped them to the Broad Street Station. They boarded the New York express and settled into the lounge car with a bottle of champagne to celebrate the safe launching, the thwarting of a saboteur, and the imminent capture of a Japanese spy.

Bell knew that he had been too visible today to take a chance trailing Yamamoto back to Washington. Instead, he put the Japanese under close surveillance by the best shadows Van Dorn could field on short notice, and they were very good indeed.

“What do you think of Falconer?” Bell asked Marion.

“Lowell is a fascinating man,” she answered, adding enigmatically, “He’s torn by what he wants, what he fears, and what he sees.”

“That’s mysterious. What does he want?”

“Dreadnoughts.”

“Obviously. What does he fear?”

“Japan.”

“No surprises there. What does he see?”

“The future. The torpedoes and submarines that will put his dreadnoughts out of business.”

“For a man torn, he’s mighty sure of himself.”

“He’s not that sure. He talked a blue streak about his dreadnoughts. Then suddenly his whole face changed, and he said, ‘There came a time in the age of chivalry when armor had grown so heavy that knights had to be hoisted onto their horses with cranes. Just about then, along came the crossbow, shooting bolts that pierced armor. An ignorant peasant could be taught how to kill a knight in a single afternoon. And that,’ he said-patting my knee for emphasis-‘in our time could be the torpedo or the submarine.’ ”

“Did he happen to mention the airplane flights at Kitty Hawk?”

“Oh, yes. He’s been following them closely. The Navy sees their potential for scouting. I asked what if instead of a passenger the airplane carried a torpedo? Lowell turned pale.”

“There was nothing pale about his speech. Did you see those senators beaming?”

“I met your Miss Langner.”

Bell returned her suddenly intense gaze. “What did you think of her?”

“She’s set her cap for you.”

“I applaud her good taste in men. What else did you think of her?”

“I think she’s fragile under all that beauty and in need of rescue.”

“That’s Ted Whitmark’s job. If he’s up to it.”

TWO CARS AHEAD on the same Pennsylvania Railroad express, the spy, too, headed for New York. What some would call revenge he regarded as a necessary counterattack. Until today the Van Dorn Detective Agency had been more irritant than threat. Until today he had been content to monitor it. But today’s defeat of a well-laid plan to destroy the Michigan meant that it had to be dealt with. Nothing could be allowed to derail his attack on the Great White Fleet.

When the train arrived in Jersey City, he followed Bell and his fiancée out of the Exchange Place Terminal and watched them drive off in the red Locomobile that a garage attendant had waiting for them with the motor running. He went back inside the terminal, hurried to the ferry house, rode the Pennsylvania Railroad’s St. Louis across the river to Cortlandt Street, walked a few steps to Greenwich, and boarded the Ninth Avenue El. He got off in Hell’s Kitchen and went to Commodore Tommy’s Saloon, where Tommy tended to hang out instead of his fancy new joints uptown.

“Brian O’Shay!” The gang boss greeted him effusively. “Highball?”

“What leads have you got on the Van Dorns?”

“That louse Harry Warren and his boys are nosing around like I told you they would.”

“It’s time you broke some heads.”

“Wait a minute. Things are going great. Who needs a war with the Van Dorns?”

“Great?” O’Shay asked sarcastically. “How great? Like waiting around for the railroads to run you off Eleventh Avenue?”

“I seen that coming,” Tommy retorted, hooking his thumbs in his vest and looking proud as a shopkeeper. “That’s why I hooked up with the Hip Sing.”

Brian O’Shay hid a smile. Who did Tommy Thompson think had sent him the Hip Sing?

“I don’t recall the Hip Sing being famous for loving detectives. How long will your Chinamen put up with Van Dorns acting like they own your territory?”

“Why you got to do this, Brian?”

“I’m sending a message.”

“Send a telegram,” Tommy shot back. He laughed. “Say, that’s funny, ‘Send a telegram.’ I like that.”

O’Shay took his eye gouge from his vest pocket. Tommy’s laughter died in his mouth.

“The purpose of a message, Tommy, is to make the other man think about what you can do to him.” O’Shay held the gouge to the light, watched it glint on the sharp edges, and slipped it over his thumb. He glanced at Tommy. The gang boss looked away.

“Thinking what you can do, it makes him wonder. Wondering slows him down. The power of wondering, Tommy-make him wonder and you’ll come out on top.”

“All right, all right. We’ll bust some heads, but I’m not killing any detectives. I don’t want no war.”

“Who else do they have poking around other than Harry Warren’s boys?”

“The Hip Sing spotted a new Van Dorn poking around Chinatown.”

“New? What do you mean, new. Young?”

“No, no, he’s no kid. Out-of-town hard case.”

“New to New York? Why would they bring an out-of-town guy into the city? Doesn’t make sense.”

“He’s a pal of that son of a bitch Bell.”

“How do you know that?”

“One of the boys saw them working together at the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He’s not from New York. It looks like Bell brought him in special.”

“He’s the one. Tommy, I want him watched real close.”

“What for?”

“I’m going to send Bell a message. Give him something to wonder about.”

“I’ll not have my Gophers kill any Van Dorns,” Tommy repeated stubbornly.

“You let Weeks take a shot at Bell,” O’Shay pointed out.

“The Iceman was different. The Van Dorns would have seen it was personal between Weeks and Bell.”

Brian “Eyes” O’Shay regarded Tommy Thompson with scorn. “Don’t worry-I’ll leave a note on the body saying, ‘Don’t blame Tommy Thompson.’ ”

“Aw, come on, Brian.”

“I’m asking you to watch him.”

Tommy Thompson took another swig from his glass. He glanced at O’Shay’s thumb gouge and quickly looked away. “I don’t suppose,” he said petulantly, “I get any say in this.”

“Follow him. But don’t tip your hand.”

“All right. If that’s what you want, that’s what you get. I’ll use the best shadows I got. Kids and cops. No one notices kids and cops. They’re always there, like empty beer barrels on the sidewalk.”

“And tell your cops and kids to keep an eye on Bell, too.”

JOHN SCULLY CRUISED UP the Bowery and into the narrow, twisting streets of Chinatown. Staring at the men’s long pigtails and gawking up at the overhead tangle of fire escapes and clotheslines and signs for Chinese restaurants and teahouses, he was disguised as a “blue jay”-an out-of-town hayseed who was wandering the big city for a good time. He had just appeared to find it in the arms of a skinny streetwalker who had also ventured over from the Bowery when a pair of corner loafers visiting from that same neighborhood flashed a rusty knife and a blackjack and demanded his money.

Scully turned out his pockets. A roll of cash fell to the pavement. They snatched it and ran, never knowing how lucky they were that the ice-blooded detective had not felt sufficiently threatened to spoil his disguise by opening fire with the Browning Vest Pocket tucked in the small of his back.

The woman who had observed the robbery said, “Don’t expect nothin’ from me with your empty pockets.”

Scully tugged open some stitches of his coat lining and pulled out an envelope. Peering into it, he said, “Looky here. Enough left to make both our nights.”

She brightened at the sight of the dough.

“What do say we get something to drink first?” said Scully, offering a kindness to which she was unaccustomed.

After they were settled in a booth in the back of Mike Callahan’s, a dive around the corner on Chatham Square, with a round of whiskey in her and another on the way, he asked casually, “Say, do you suppose those fellers was Gophers?”

“What? What the hell are go-phers?”

“The men who robbed me. Gophers? Like gangsters.”

“Go-phers? Oh, Goofers!” She laughed. “Mother of Mary, where did you come from?”

“Well, were they?”

“Could be,” she said. “They’ve been drifting down from Hell’s Kitchen for a couple of months now.”

Scully had heard rumors of this strange news from others. “What do you mean, a couple of months? Is that unusual?”

“Used to be the Five Pointers would bust their heads. Or they’d be chopped by the Hip Sing. Now they’re walking around like they own the place.”

“What is Hip Sing?” Scully asked innocently.

26

ISAAC,” JOSEPH VAN DORN PROTESTED EXASPERATEDLY. “You’ve got Japs and Germans darned-near red-handed, the French spying on the Great White Fleet, and a Russian practically living in Farley Kent’s design loft. Why are you launching a frontal attack on the British Empire? From where I sit, they appear to be the only innocents in this whole tangled spiderweb.”

“Apparently innocent,” Isaac Bell retorted.

With Washington, D.C., Van Dorn Detective Agency operatives shadowing Yamamoto Kenta to determine the extent of the Japanese spy’s organization and Harry Warren’s boys trawling Hell’s Kitchen to get a line on the upward-bound Commodore Tommy Thompson’s new connections, Bell decided it was time to confront the Royal Navy.

“The British didn’t build the most powerful Navy in the world without keeping a close eye on their rivals. Based on Abbington-Westlake’s successes against the French, I’m willing to bet that they’re probably pretty good it.”

“But you’ve got the Jap dead to rights. Have you considered picking up Yamamoto right now?”

“Before he gets away or does more damage? Of course! But then how do we determine who else he’s tied up with?”

“Partners?”

“Maybe partners. Maybe underlings. Maybe a boss.” Bell shook his head. “It’s what we don’t know that concerns me. Assume that Yamamoto is the spy we think he is. How did he persuade that German to attack the Michigan? How did he get him or some other German to attack at Bethlehem Steel? We know, according to the Smithsonian, that he was in Washington the day that poor kid fell off the cliff. Who did Yamamoto get to push him? Who did he send to Newport that almost got Wheeler in his cottage?”

“I presume Wheeler is sleeping safe in the torpedo barracks now?”

“Reluctantly. And his girlfriends are hopping mad. The list goes on and on, Joe. We have to find the connections. How did Yamamoto tie up with a gangster like Weeks in Hell’s Kitchen?”

“Borrowed him from Commodore Tommy Thompson.”

“If so, how did a Japanese spy team up with the boss of the Gophers? We don’t know.”

“Apparently you knew enough to shoot up his saloon,” Van Dorn observed.

“I was provoked,” Bell replied blandly. “But you see my point. Who else do we not even know about yet?”

“I see it. I don’t like it. But I see it.” Van Dorn shook his big head, stroked his red whiskers, and rubbed his Roman nose. Finally, the founder of the agency granted his chief investigator a small smile. “So now you want to brace the British Empire?”

“Not their whole empire,” Bell grinned back. “I’m starting with the Royal Navy.”

“What are you looking for?”

“A leg up.”

Joseph Van Dorn’s hooded eyes gleamed with sudden interest. “Leverage?”

“Yamamoto and his mob may call themselves spies, Joe. But they act like criminals. And we know how to nail criminals.”

“All right. Get to it!”

Isaac Bell went directly to the Brooklyn Bridge and joined Scudder Smith on the pedestrian walkway. It was a bright, sunny morning. Smith had chosen for his watch the comparative darkness of the shade of the bridge’s Manhattan pier. Smith was one of the best Van Dorn shadows in New York. A former newspaperman, fired-depending upon who told the story-either for writing the truth or overembroidering it, or for being drunk before noon, he was intimate with every district in the city. He passed Bell his field glasses.

“They’ve been walking back and forth across the bridge pretending to be tourist snapshot fiends. But somehow their Brownies are always pointed down at the navy yard. And I don’t think those are real Brownies inside those Brownie boxes but something with a special lens. The large, round fellow is Abbington-Westlake. The terrific-looking woman is his wife, Lady Fiona.”

“I’ve seen her. Who’s the little guy?”

“Peter Sutherland, retired British Army major. Claims he’s traveling to Canada to look over the oil fields.”

The strangely cold spring had persisted into May, and the chilly wind blew hard high over the East River. All three wore topcoats. The woman’s had a sable collar that matched her hat, which she was anchoring with one hand against the gusts.

“Looking the oil fields over for what?”

“Last night at dinner Sutherland said, ‘Oil is the coming fuel for water transportation.’ Abbington-Westlake being Naval Attaché, you can bet water transportation means dreadnoughts.”

“How’d you happen to overhear it?”

“They thought I was the waiter.”

“I’ll take over before they order more pheasant.”

“Want the glasses?”

“No, I’m going to make my move.”

Scudder Smith vanished among the pedestrians crossing to Manhattan.

Bell headed for the make-believe tourists.

Nearing the middle of the span, he gained a clear view of the Brooklyn Navy Yard immediately north of the bridge. He could see all the shipways, even a section of the northernmost that cradled the beginnings of Hull 44. All were open to the weather, markedly different from the closed sheds at New York Ship in Camden. Cantilevered bridge cranes trundled along elevated rails that allowed them to hover directly over the ships under construction. Switch engines moved freight cars laden with steel plate around the yard.

Away from the building area, horse-drawn wagons and auto trucks were delivering daily rations to the warships moored in slips beside the river. Long strings of sailors in white were carrying sacks up gangways. Bell saw a dry dock nearly eight hundred feet long and over a hundred wide. In the middle of the bay was an artificial island containing docks and ways and slips. A ferry shuttled between it and the mainland, and fishing boats and steam lighters moved slowly up and down a crowded channel that ran between the artificial island and a market on the shore.

The trio was still snapping photographs as Bell bore down on them. Emerging suddenly from the stream of Brooklyn-bound pedestrians, he flourished his 3A Folding Pocket Kodak and called out a friendly, “Say, would you like me to snap all three of you together?”

“No need, old boy,” Abbington-Westlake replied in plummy aristocratic tones. “Besides, how would we get the film?”

Bell snapped their picture anyway. “Should I use one of your cameras? You have a lot of them,” Bell said affably.

Suspicion hardened Fiona Abbington-Westlake’s attractive features. “I say!” she exclaimed in an accent that managed to sound clipped and drawled at the same time. “I’ve seen you before, somewhere. Quite recently, as a matter of fact. Never forget a face.”

“And in a similar setting,” Isaac Bell replied. “Last week at New York Ship in Camden, New Jersey.”

Lady Fiona and her husband exchanged glances. The major grew watchful.

Bell said, “And today we ‘observe’ the New York Navy Yard in Brooklyn. These reversed names must be confusing to tourists.” He raised his camera again. “Let’s see if I can get all of you in the picture with the navy yard right behind you-the way you were snapping it.”

It was Abbington-Westlake’s turn to blurt, “I say!,” and he did arrogantly. “Who the devil do you think you are? Move along, sir. Move along!”

Bell threw a hard look at “retired major” Sutherland. “Drilling for oil in Brooklyn?”

Sutherland allowed himself the abashed smile of a man who’d been caught. But not Abbington-Westlake. The Naval Attaché charged past his companions and blustered at Isaac Bell, “You’ll move along if you know what’s good for you. Or I’ll call a constable.”

Bell answered quietly. “A constable is the last person you want to see you here at this moment, Commander. Meet me in the basement bar of the Knickerbocker at six o’clock. Take the entrance from the subway.”

Flummoxed by Bell’s use of his rank, Abbington-Westlake transformed himself from arrogant aristocratic naval officer to a type that Bell had known at college-the young man eager to act old and stuffy before his time. “I’m afraid I don’t use the subway, old chap. Rather a plebeian form of transport, don’t you think?”

“The subway entrance will let you meet me for a cocktail without the upper crust noticing, ‘old chap.’ Six o’clock sharp. Leave your wife and Sutherland. Come alone.”

“And if I don’t appear?” Abbington-Westlake huffed.

“I’ll come looking for you at the British Embassy.”

The Naval Attaché turned white. Research had assured Bell that he would, because Great Britain’s Foreign Office, Military Intelligence, and Naval Intelligence were all highly mistrustful of one another. “Hold on, sir!” he whispered. “The game just isn’t played that way. One doesn’t blunder into one’s adversary’s embassy shouting secrets.”

“I didn’t know there were rules.”

“Gentlemen’s rules,” Abbington-Westlake replied with a studied friendly wink. “You know the drill. Do what we please. But set a good example for the servants and don’t frighten the horses.”

Isaac Bell handed him his card. “I don’t follow spy rules. I’m a private detective.”

“A detective?” Abbington-Westlake echoed disdainfully.

“We have our own rules. We collar criminals and turn them in to the police.”

“What the devil do-”

“On rare occasion we give criminals a break-but only when they help us collar criminals much, much worse than they are. Six o’clock. And don’t forget to bring me something.”

“What?”

“A spy worse than you are,” Isaac Bell smiled coldly. “Much worse.”

He turned on his heel and walked back toward Manhattan, certain that Abbington-Westlake would report at six as ordered. Descending the stairs from the Brooklyn Bridge walkway, he failed to take note of a one-eyed slum urchin disguised as a newsboy hawking the afternoon Herald.

BELL GOT AS FAR AS the subway steps when a sixth sense told him he was being watched.

He passed the subway entrance, crossed Broadway, and turned down the thoroughfare, which was jam-packed with delivery trucks and wagons, buses and streetcars. He paused repeatedly, studied reflections in shopwindows, ducked around moving vehicles, and popped in and out of stores. Did Abbington-Westlake have men backing him up, who had taken up his trail? Or the so-called major? He wouldn’t put it past the major. Sutherland looked competent, like a man who’d been in the wars. And it would be wise to remember that the bombastic, vaguely silly demeanor Abbington-Westlake affected should not obscure his espionage successes.

Bell jumped onto a trolley on busy Fulton Street and looked back. No one. He rode the trolley to the river, got off as if heading for the ferry, but suddenly reversed course and boarded the westbound trolley. He disembarked as quickly and swerved into Gold Street. He saw no one. But he still had an intense feeling that he was being stalked.

He entered a crowded oyster house and slipped a dollar to a waiter to let him out the kitchen door into an alley that led him to Platt Street. When he still saw no one following but still sensed it, he plunged deep into the ancient lanes of lower Manhattan-Pearl, Fletcher, Pine, and Nassau.

Try as he might, Bell saw no one following.

He was studying reflections in the showroom window of a manufacturer of assay and diamond scales, having just gone in the front and out the back of the Nassau Café, when he found himself on Maiden Lane-New York’s jewelers’ district. The upper floors of the four- and five-story cast-iron-fronted buildings that darkened the sky were a beehive of gem cutters, importers, jewelers, goldsmiths, and watchmakers. Below the factories and workrooms, retail jewelry shops lined the sidewalk, their windows gleaming like pirate chests.

As Bell cast a sharp eye up and down the narrow street, his stern visage softened and a quizzical smile began to tug at the corners of his mouth. Most of the men crowding the pavement were around his own age, smartly dressed in topcoats and derbies, but with shoulders sloped and faces bewildered as they blundered in and out of the jewelry shops. Bachelors about to propose marriage, Bell surmised, attempting to seal a momentous decision with the purchase of a valuable gem about which they feared they knew nothing.

Bell’s smile got bigger. This was a fine happenstance. Maybe no one had followed him after all. Maybe some “Higher Being” with a sense of humor had foxed his ordinarily trustworthy sixth sense to send him wandering into lower Manhattan for the express purpose of buying his beautiful fiancée an engagement ring.

Isaac Bell’s smile grew less sure as he joined the parade of men pacing the sidewalk and meditating upon the dozens of display windows that glittered with myriad possibilities and infinite choices. Finally, the tall detective took the bull by the horns. He squared his shoulders and strode into the shop that looked the most expensive.

THE CHILD WHO WATCHED Isaac Bell enter the jeweler’s shop-a boy who was clean enough not to be chased out of the jewelry district and had a shoeshine box strapped to his back as a disguise-waited to be sure that the Van Dorn had not ducked inside just to give them the slip again. He was the fourth to have trailed their quarry on his circuitous ramble. Eyeing the shadowy silhouettes of Bell and the jeweler through the window, he signaled another boy and passed him the box. “Take over. I gotta report.”

He ran the few short blocks west into the tenement-and-warehouse district that bounded the North River, darted into the pier-side Hudson Saloon, and made for the free lunch.

“Get outta here!” roared a bartender.

“Commodore!” the shoeshine boy growled back, fearlessly stuffing liverwurst between slabs of stale bread. “Make it quick!”

“Sorry, kid. Didn’t recognize you. This way.” The bartender ushered him into the saloon owner’s private office, which had the only telephone in the neighborhood. The owner watched him warily.

“Get out,” said the boy. “This ain’t none of your business.”

The owner locked his desk and left, shaking his head. There was a time when a Hell’s Kitchen Gopher ventured downtown into this neighborhood, he’d end up hanging from a lamppost. But that time had ended fast.

The boy telephoned Commodore Tommy’s Saloon. They said Tommy wasn’t there, but he’d call him right back. That was strange. The boss was always in his saloon. People said Tommy hadn’t been outdoors in daylight in years. He stepped out to the free lunch for another sandwich, and when he returned the phone was ringing. Commodore Tommy was mad as hell that he’d been kept waiting. When he got done yelling, the boy told him about Isaac Bell’s wander around the city starting from the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge.

“Where is he now?”

“Maiden Lane.”

27

ISAAC BELL RETREATED IN COMPLETE CONFUSION FROM the fourth jewelry store he had entered in an hour. He had time for one or two more before heading uptown to grill Abbington-Westlake at the Knickerbocker.

“Shine, sir? Shoeshine?”

“Not a bad idea.”

He leaned his back against the wall and submitted his left boot to the polish-stained fingers of the skinny kid with the wooden box. His mind was reeling. He had been simultaneously informed that a diamond set in platinum was the “only appropriate stone to make a girl feel properly engaged” and that a large semiprecious gemstone mounted in gold was “considered most fashionable.” Particularly when compared to a small diamond. Although even a small diamond was an “acceptable token of betrothal.”

“Other foot, sir.”

Bell removed his throwing knife, palming it, and let the kid polish his right boot.

“Is it always so busy down here?”

“May and June are the bridal months,” the kid answered without looking from the cloth he was whipping so fast it was a blur.

“How much?” Bell asked when the boy was done and his boots gleamed like mirrors.

“A nickel.”

“Here’s a dollar.”

“I don’t got no change for a buck, mister.”

“Keep it. You did a fine job.”

The kid stared at him. He appeared about to speak.

“What is it?” asked Bell. “You all right, son?”

The boy opened his mouth. He looked around and suddenly grabbed his box and ran, dodging shoppers, and disappeared around the corner. Bell shrugged, and entered another jewelry store, Solomon Barlowe, a smaller establishment on the ground floor of a five-story, Italianate-style cast-iron-clad building. Barlowe sized him up with piercing brown eyes as shrewd as a police magistrate’s.

“I want to buy an engagement ring. I think it should be a diamond.”

“Were you considering a solitaire setting or incluster?”

“Which would you recommend?”

“If expense were an object, of course-”

“Assume it is not,” Bell growled.

“Ah! Well, I can see that you are a man of taste, sir. Let us look at some stones for your approval.” The jeweler unlocked a case and laid a black velvet tray on the counter between them.

Bell whistled amazement. “I’ve seen kids shooting marbles smaller than these.”

“We are fortunate in our supplier, sir. We import our own. Ordinarily, I would have more stock to show you, but the bridal months are upon us, and the choice gems have already been snapped up.”

“In other words, buy now before it’s too late?”

“Only if you need something immediately. Is your wedding impending?”

“I don’t think so,” said Bell. “We’re neither of us children and both rather busy. On the other hand, I would like to nail things down.”

“A large solitaire diamond of a unique hue has a way of doing that, sir. Here, for instance-”

The door opened and a well-dressed gentleman about Bell’s age walked into Barlowe’s shop flourishing a gold-headed cane studded with gems. He looked vaguely familiar, but the detective could not quite place him. It was rare his memory for faces failed, and he suspected it would be a case of seeing someone completely out of context, as if they had last met in a Wyoming saloon or been seated side by side at a Chicago prizefight. He was clearly not a desperate bachelor. There was nothing of the tentative buyer in his demeanor, which was supported by a confident smile.

“Mr. Riker!” Barlowe exclaimed. “What a wonderful surprise.” To Bell he said, “Excuse me, sir. I’ll just be a moment.”

“No, no,” said Riker. “Don’t let me interrupt a sale.”

Barlowe said, “But I was just discussing you with my customer, who is in the market for something special and has a bit of time to look for it.”

He turned to Bell. “This is the very gentleman I mentioned to you, our gem supplier. Mr. Erhard Riker of Riker and Riker. We’re in luck, sir. If Mr. Riker can’t find your stone, it doesn’t exist. He is the foremost supplier of the finest gemstones in the world.”

“Good Lord, Barlowe,” Riker smiled. “Your generosity of spirit will mislead your customer into believing I am a miracle worker instead of a simple merchant.”

Riker spoke with an English accent similar to Abbington-Westlake’s aristocratic drawl, but the color of his coat suggested to Bell that he was German. It was a Chesterfield, with the traditional black velvet collar. An Englishman’s or American’s Chesterfield would be cut of a navy or charcoal gray fabric. Riker’s was a dark green loden cloth.

Riker removed his gloves, slipped his cane into his left hand, and extended his right. “Good day, sir. As you have just heard, I am Erhard Riker.”

“Isaac Bell.”

They shook hands. Riker had a strong, firm grip.

“If you would allow me the honor, I will look for the perfect gem for your fiancée. What color are the lady’s eyes?”

“Coral-sea green.”

“And her hair?”

“Her hair is blond. Pale as straw.”

“By the smile on your face, I have a picture of her beauty.”

“Multiply it by ten.”

Riker bowed in the European manner. “In that event, I will find for you a gem that is almost her equal.”

“Thank you,” said Bell. “You are very kind. Have we met before? Your face is familiar.”

“We have not been introduced before,” replied Riker. “But I, too, recognize you. I believe it was at Camden, New Jersey, early this week.”

“At the Michigan launching! Of course. Now I remember. You gave the shipyard owner the gift he presented to the young lady who sponsored the battleship.”

“I stood in for one of my Newark clients who decorated the pendant with my gemstones.”

“Well, isn’t this a wonderful coincidence?” exclaimed Solomon Barlowe.

“Two coincidences,” Isaac Bell corrected him. “First, Mr. Riker happened along while I was shopping for a special diamond. Second, it turned out we attended the same ship launching in Camden last Monday.”

“As if written in the stars!” Riker laughed. “Or should I say diamonds? For what are diamonds but man-size stars? My hunt begins this instant! Do not hesitate to get in touch, Mr. Bell. In New York I stay at the Waldorf-Astoria. The hotel forwards my mail when I travel.”

“You can find me at the Yale Club,” said Bell, and they exchanged cards.

EVERY VAN DORN, from apprentice to chief investigator, was taught from the first day he went to work that coincidences were presumed guilty until proven innocent. Bell asked Research to look into the gem importers Riker & Riker. Then he turned over his camera, ordered the film to be developed and brought to him immediately, and went down to the hotel’s basement lobby, off of which was snugged a quiet, dimly lit bar.

Abbington-Westlake had arrived ahead of him, a good sign that he had frightened the daylights out of the Naval Attaché with his threat to go to the British Embassy.

Bell decided that he would get more out of him now with a milder approach, and he said, “Thank you for coming.”

He saw immediately it was a mistake. Abbington-Westlake glowered imperiously, and snapped, “I don’t recall being offered a choice in the matter.”

“Your choice of snapshots,” Bell fired back, “would get you arrested if I were a government agent.”

“No one can arrest me. I have diplomatic immunity.”

“Will your diplomatic immunity bail you out of trouble with your superiors in London?”

Abbington-Westlake’s lips shut tightly.

“Of course it won’t,” Bell said. “I’m not a government agent, but I certainly know where to find one. And the last thing you want is for your rivals in the Foreign Office to learn you’ve been caught with your hand in the cookie jar.”

“See here, old boy, let’s not go off half cocked.”

“What did you bring me?”

“I beg your pardon?” Abbington-Westlake stalled.

“Who did you bring me? Give me a name. A foreign spy whom I can have arrested instead of you.”

“Old chap, you have an extremely inflated estimate of my powers. I don’t know anyone to bring you.”

“And you have an extremely inflated estimate of my patience.” Bell glanced around inquiringly. Couples were drinking at the nearly dark tables. Several men stood alone at the bar. Bell said, “Do you see the gentleman on the right? The one wearing the bowler hat?”

“What about him?”

“Secret Service. Shall I ask him to join us?”

The Englishman wet his lips. “All right, Bell. Let me tell you what I can. I warn you it is very little.”

“Start small,” said Bell coldly. “We’ll work from there.”

“All right. All right.” He wet his lips again and glanced around. Bell suspected that he was starting a lie. He let the Englishman speak without interruption. After tangling himself in it, he would be more vulnerable to pressure.

“There is a Frenchman named Colbert,” Abbington-Westlake began. “He trades in arms.”

“Colbert, you say?” God bless the Van Dorn Research boys.

“Raymond Colbert. And while trading arms is hardly a savory enterprise, it is actually a blind for Colbert’s sinister deeds… You are familiar with the Holland submarine?”

Bell nodded. He’d had Falconer fill him in and borrowed a book.

As the Naval Attaché wove his tale, Isaac Bell was struck with admiration-which he concealed-for Abbington-Westlake’s cool nerve. Faced with the threat of exposure, he was turning it into an opportunity to destroy the man who was blackmailing his wife. He rattled on a while about purloined architect drawings and a special gyro to keep the boat on course underwater. Bell let him, until the door opened and a Van Dorn apprentice came in with a large manila envelope. Bell noted approvingly that the kid did not approach until Bell gave him the nod and retreated silently after handing him the envelope.

“As we speak, old boy, Colbert is en route to New York on a Compagnie Générale Transatlantique mail boat. You can nab him the instant she docks at Pier 42. Don’t you see?”

Bell opened the envelope and riffled through the prints.

Abbington-Westlake asked acidly, “Am I boring you, Mr. Bell?”

“Not at all, Commander. I can’t recall a more exciting fiction.”

“Fiction? See here-”

Bell passed a print over their table. “Here is a snapshot of you and the Lady Fiona and the Brooklyn Navy Yard-careful, the paper is a still damp.”

The Englishman sighed, heavily. “You make it abundantly clear that I am at your mercy.”

“Who is Yamamoto Kenta?”

Bell was gambling that, not unlike bank robbers and confidence men, the spies of the international naval race were aware of their rivals and fellow practitioners. He saw it was true. Even in the dim light, Abbington-Westlake’s eyes gleamed as if he suddenly saw a way out of the mess he was in.

“Careful!” Bell warned. “The instant I hear a breath of fiction this photograph goes to that gentleman of the Secret Service, along with copies to the British Embassy and U.S. Naval Intelligence. Do we understand each other?”

“Yes.”

“What do you know of him?”

“Yamamoto Kenta is a highly decorated Japanese spy. He’s been at it for donkey’s ears. And he is number one at the Black Ocean Society, which acts in the Japs’ overseas interests. He was a prime instigator of the Jap infiltration of the Russians’ Asiatic Fleet and a prime reason the Japs now occupy Port Arthur. Since the war, he’s operated in Europe and made an absolute mockery of Britain’s and Germany’s attempts to keep secrets in their ship works. He knows more about Krupp than the Kaiser, and more about HMS Dreadnought than her own captain.”

“What is he doing here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Commander,” Bell said warningly.

“I don’t know. I swear I don’t know. But I will say one thing.”

“It better be interesting.”

“It is interesting,” Abbington-Westlake shot back confidently. “It is very interesting because it makes absolutely no sense that a Japanese spy of Yamamoto’s caliber is operating here in the United States.”

“Why?”

“The Japs don’t want to fight you chaps. Not now. They’re not ready. Even though they know you Americans are not ready. It doesn’t take a naval genius to rate the Great White Fleet as a joke. But they damned well know that their fleet is not ready either and won’t be for many, many years.”

“Then why did Yamamoto come here?”

“I suspect that Yamamoto is playing some sort of double game.” Bell looked at the Englishman. There was a certain puzzlement in his expression that looked absolutely genuine. “How do you mean?”

“Yamamoto is working for someone else.”

“Other than the Black Ocean Society?”

“Precisely.”

“Whom?”

“I haven’t the foggiest. But it’s not for Japan.”

“If you don’t know who he is working for, what makes you think it’s someone other than the Japanese?”

“Because Yamamoto offered to buy information from me.”

“What information?”

“He suspected that I had information concerning the new French dreadnought. Offered a pretty penny for it. Expense was obviously no object.”

“Did you have the information?”

“That’s neither here nor there,” Abbington-Westlake answered opaquely. “The point is, the Japs don’t give a hang about the Frogs, old boy. The French Navy can’t fight in the Pacific. They can barely defend the Bay of Biscay.”

“Then what did he want it for?”

“That is the point. That is what I am telling you. Yamamoto intended to sell it to someone who does care about the French.”

“Who?”

“Who else but the Germans?”

Bell studied the Englishman’s face for a full minute. Then he leaned closer, and said, “Commander, it is now clear to me that behind a façade of amiable bumbling, you are extremely well informed about your fellow spies. In fact, I suspect you know more about them than the ships you’re supposed to be spying on.”

“Welcome to the world of espionage, Mr. Bell,” the Englishman replied cynically. “May I be the first to congratulate you on your very recent arrival.”

“What Germans?” Bell demanded harshly.

“Well, I can’t tell you with any precision, but-”

“You don’t believe for one second that the Germans are paying Yamamoto Kenta to spy for them,” Bell cut in. “Whom do you really suspect?”

Abbington-Westlake shook his head, visibly dismayed. “No one I have heard of-none of the regulars one bumps into… It’s as if the Black Knight galloped out of the ether and threw his gauntlet on King Arthur’s Roundtable.”

“A freelance,” mused Bell.

28

A FREELANCE INDEED, MR. BELL. YOU’VE HIT THE NAIL on the head. But the possibility of a freelance merely raises the larger question.” Abbington-Westlake’s round face brightened with relief that he had so intrigued Bell that the tall detective would let him go. “Whom does the freelance serve?”

“Are freelances commonly used in the spy game?” Bell asked.

“One employs all available resources.”

“Have you ever worked as a freelance?”

Abbington-Westlake smiled disdainfully. “The Royal Navy hires freelances. We don’t work for them.”

“I mean you personally-if you need money.”

“I work for His Majesty’s Navy. I am not a mercenary.” He stood up. “And now, Mr. Bell, if you will excuse me, I believe I have paid you for your photograph in equal coin. Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Bell.

“Good day, sir.”

“Before you go, Commander?”

“What is it?”

“I have been dealing with you in my capacity as a private investigator. As an American, however, let me warn you that if I ever again see or hear of you taking photographs of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, or any other shipyard in my country, I will throw your camera off the bridge and you after it.”

ISAAC BELL HURRIED UPSTAIRS to the Van Dorn office. A big case kept getting bigger and wider. If Abbington-Westlake was telling the truth-and Bell bet he was-then Yamamoto Kenta was not the head of the spy ring attacking Hull 44 but only another of its many agents. Like the German, and the hired killer Weeks, and whoever threw the young fire-control expert off the cliff. Who was the freelance? And whom did he serve?

Bell knew he was at a crossroads. He had to decide whether to arrest Yamamoto and squeeze what information they could out of him or continue following him in the hope that the Japanese spy would lead them higher up the chain of deceit. There was risk in waiting. How long would it take a seasoned professional like Yamamoto to catch the scent of his stalkers and go to ground?

As Bell strode into the back room, the man on the telephones said, “Here he is right now, sir, just walked in,” and handed him the middle one. “The boss.”

“Where?”

“Washington.”

“Yamamoto just hopped the train to New York,” Van Dorn said without preamble. “Coming your way.”

“Alone?”

“Not if you count three of our men in the same car. And others watching every station the Congressional Limited stops at.”

“I’ll watch the railroad ferry. See who he’s come to meet.”

YAMAMOTO KENTA HAD a choice of three different Pennsylvania Railroad ferries to cross the river from the Jersey City Exchange Place Terminal to Manhattan Island. After disembarking from the Congressional Limited into the enormous glass-ceilinged train shed, he could take a boat to 23rd Street, another to Desbrosses Street near Greenwich Village, or one that would land all the way downtown at Cortlandt Street. There was even a boat to Brooklyn, and another went up the East River to the Bronx. The ferry he chose would depend upon the actions of the Van Dorns following him.

He had spotted two detectives in his railcar. And he suspected that an older man dressed as an Anglican priest had shadowed him several days earlier disguised in the uniform of a Washington, D.C., streetcar conductor. He had considered jumping off the train early at Philadelphia and dodging the Van Dorns watching the platform. But with so many alternatives awaiting him in New York, he saw no need to inconvenience himself by breaking the journey early.

It was after midnight, and the crowd rushing from the train shed was thin, providing less cover then he would have liked. Still, the advantage was his. The detectives did not realize that he knew they had been following him for a week. A thin smile played upon his lips. A natural aptitude for spying? Or simply experience. He’d been at the game before many of the shadows trailing him had been born.

As always, he traveled light, carrying only a small valise. The Black Ocean Society had limitless cash reserves; he could buy extra clothing when he need it instead of carrying it when a situation like this one demanded he move quickly. His gabardine raincoat was of a tan hue, so pale as to be almost white. His hat was of a similar distinctive color, a finely woven Panama with a dark band.

At the juncture of the train platform and the arrival hall, he saw the Anglican priest forge ahead and signal a tall man whom Yamamoto had last seen in Camden, New Jersey. Frantic research back in Washington-sparked by his discovery that he was being followed-led him to believe that the Van Dorn was the fabled Isaac Bell. Bell had worn a white suit and broad-brimmed hat at the Michigan launching. Tonight he was attired like a deckhand in a snug sweater, with a knit watch cap covering his striking golden hair. Yamamoto smiled to himself. Two could play that game.

Swept along by the torrent of passengers and trunk-trundling porters, Yamamoto followed the signs from the arrival hall into the ferry house. A row of ferries waited in their slips-magnificent Tuscan red, smoke-belching, two-deck double-ender behemoths big as dreadnoughts and named for great American cities: Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Chicago. Engines ahead, propellers pushing them tight to their piers, they offered the Japanese spy additional choices of which deck to travel on.

Teams of draft horses, iron shoes clattering, were pulling freight wagons aboard the lower vehicles decks, vast open spaces they shared with autos and trucks. Foot passengers could ride beside them, separated by the bulkheads of flanking passenger cabins that ran the length of the boat. The main cabins were above. As a first-class passenger, Yamamoto could enjoy the brief river crossing in a private cabin. There was one cordoned off for gentlemen, another for ladies. Or he could stand in the open air where the salty harbor wind would disperse the smoke and cinders.

He chose a ferry not for its destination but for the fact that its deckhands were already closing its scissor gate, blocking any more passengers from boarding.

“Not so fast, Chinkboy!” a burly deckhand shouted in his face.

Yamamoto already had ten dollars in his hand. The man’s eyes widened at his good fortune, and he reached for it, shouting, “Step lively, sir. Step lively.”

Yamamoto slid past him and moved deeper into the boat, heading for the stairs to the upper deck at a rapid clip.

The whistle blew a sharp tenor note. The deck stopped shuddering as the screws holding her in place stopped turning. Then the enormous boat shook from stem to stern as the screws reversed to drive her out of her slip.

Yamamoto reached the ornamentally carved wooden staircase that swept upward in a graceful curve. For the first time, he looked back, a quick glance over his shoulder. He saw Isaac Bell running full speed to the edge of the slip. At the edge, the detective launched himself in the air in an attempt to broad-jump the rapidly widening gap. The Japanese spy waited to confirm that Bell had fallen in the churning water.

Isaac Bell landed gracefully as a gull, strode to the scissor gate, and engaged the deckhands in conversation.

Yamamoto ran up the stairs. He showed his train ticket to enter the first-class gentleman’s lounge, headed for the men’s room, entered a stall, and closed the door. He turned his tan coat inside out, revealing its black lining. His hatband was formed by multiple layers of tightly wound silk. He unwound it into a long scarf, bent the brims of his Panama downward, and tied it on his head with the scarf. The final touch was packed in his valise. Then all he had to do was wait when the ferry docked until all the men had left the first-class cabin. He had just opened his valise when beneath his feet the rumble of the screws abruptly stopped.

Forward momentum slowed so quickly, he had to brace against the wall. The whistle gave three short blasts. The screws rumbled anew, shaking the deck. And to Yamamoto’s horror and disbelief, the giant ferry backed out of the river and into the terminal slip from which it had just emerged.

THE LOUDEST OF THE HUNDREDS of the Pennsylvania Railroad ferry passengers inconvenienced was a United States senator. He roared like an angry lion at the ferry captain, “What in blue blazes is going on here? I’ve been traveling all day from Washington and I’m late for a meeting in New York.”

No one dared asked a senator traveling without his wife whom he was meeting at midnight. Even the ferry captain, a veteran North River waterman, was not brave enough to explain that a Van Dorn detective dressed like a deckhand had barged into his wheelhouse and drawn from his wallet a railroad pass unlike any he had ever seen. The document required all employees to accord him privileges of the line that exceeded even that of a senator who voted religiously in favor of legislation the railroads approved. Handwritten and signed and sealed by the president of the line, and witnessed by a federal judge, it superseded all dispatchers. Its only limits were common sense and the rules of safety.

“What did you do to get that pass?” the captain had asked as he hurriedly signaled the engine room Stop Engines.

“The president returned a favor,” had said the detective. “And I always tell the president how kindly I am treated by his employees.”

So the captain told the legislator, “A mechanical breakdown, Senator.”

“How the devil long are we going to wait here?”

“Everyone is disembarking for the next boat, sir. Let me carry your bag.” The captain seized the senator’s valise and led him to the main deck and down the gangway, where cold-faced detectives observed every passenger trooping off.

Isaac Bell stood behind the other Van Dorns, watching over their heads each and every face. The manner that Yamamoto had chosen to get away-jumping aboard at the last instant-made it clear that the shadows had slipped up, and the Japanese spy knew he was being followed. Now it was a chase.

Three hundred eighty passengers, men, women, and sleepy children, shuffled past. Thank the Lord, thought Bell, it was the middle of the night. The boats carried thousands at rush hour.

“That’s the last of them.”

“O.K. Now we check every nook and cranny on the boat. He’s hiding somewhere.”

A SMALL, elderly woman in a long black dress, a warm shawl, and a straw bonnet tied to her head with a dark scarf boarded a streetcar outside the Jersey City Exchange Place Terminal. It was a slow, stop-and-start ride to the city of Hoboken. The trolley looped around the square at Ferry and River streets, and now her journey moved swiftly as she descended to the first completed of the McAdoo tubes. For a nickel, she boarded an eight-car electric train so new it smelled of paint.

It whisked her under the Hudson River. Ten minutes after boarding, she left the tube train at the first station in New York. The conductors operating the air-powered doors exchanged a glance. The neighborhood at Christopher and Greenwich streets above the beautifully lighted vaulted ceilings of the tube line was nowhere near as pleasant as the subterranean station, particularly at such a late hour. Before they could call a warning, the woman hurried past a pretty florist’s shop at the foot of the stairs-closed, with lights still shining on the flowers-and disappeared.

At street level she found a dark square of grimy cobblestones. Warehouses loomed over formerly genteel residences long since partitioned into rooming houses. She drew the attention of a thug who followed her, drawing close as she neared an alley. She whirled suddenly, pressed a small pistol to his forehead, and said in a soft male voice with a slight accent the thug had never heard before, “I can pay you handsomely to guide me to a clean room where I can spend the night. Or I can pull the trigger. I will let you choose.”

29

I HAVE A JOB FOR HARRY WING AND LOUIS LOH,” SAID Eyes O’Shay.

“Who?” asked Tommy Thompson, who was beginning to think that he was seeing more of Eyes than he wanted to.

“Your Hip Sing highbinders,” Eyes said impatiently. “The high-class tong Chinamen you made a hookup with the same day I came back from the dead. Stop playing stupid with me. We’ve discussed this before.”

“They ain’t mine, I told you. I just made a deal with ’em to open some joints.”

“I have a job for them.”

“What do you need me for?”

“I do not want to meet them. I want you to deal with them for me. Do you understand?”

“You don’t want them to see your mug.”

“Or hear about me. Not one word, Tommy. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a blind man.”

Tommy Thompson had had just about enough. He leaned back in his chair, tipping it up on the two back legs, and said coldly, “I’m thinking it’s time to pick up a gun and blow your brains out, O’Shay.”

Brian O’Shay was on his feet in a flash. He kicked one of the chair legs, splintering it. The gang boss crashed to the floor. At the sounds, which shook the building, Tommy’s bouncers charged into the room. They pulled up short. O’Shay had the boss in a headlock, down on one knee, pointing Tommy’s face toward the ceiling, with his gouge scraping his left eye.

“Deal with your floor managers.”

“Get out of here,” Tommy said in a strangled voice.

The bouncers backed out of the room. O’Shay let him go abruptly, dropping the bigger man on his back and rising to brush sawdust from his trousers. “Here’s what I want,” he said conversationally. “I want you to send Harry Wing and Louis Loh to San Francisco.”

“What’s in San Francisco?” Tommy asked sullenly, climbing to his feet and pulling a bottle from his desk.

“The Mare Island Naval Shipyard.”

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s a navy yard. Like the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It’s where the Great White Fleet ships will re-provision and get their bottoms painted before they sail for Honolulu and Auckland and Japan.”

“Eyes, what the hell are you into now?”

“There’s an ammunition magazine in the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I want Harry Wing and Louis Loh to blow it up.”

“Blow up a navy yard?” Thompson dropped his bottle and jumped to his feet. “Are you crazy?”

“No.”

Tommy looked around frantically as if cops suddenly had ears pressed to his well-guarded walls. “What are you telling me this for?”

“Because when the Mare Island magazine blows up, you stand to make more dough than you ever saw in your life.”

“How much?”

Eyes told him, and Commodore Tommy sat down, smiling.

VAN DORN DETECTIVE JOHN SCULLY continued scouting Chinatown in a variety of disguises. He was a street peddler one day, a ragpicker the next, a drunk sleeping outdoors as a soldier in the “army of the park benches,” and an official of the city health department, which raised sufficient bribes to keep down expenses. He kept picking up hints about the Gopher Gang moving downtown. Streetwalkers talked wistfully about a high-class gambling hall and opium den that was really choosy about the girls they hired. But a Hip Sing boss’s girlfriend personally ran the joint, and she treated you on the level.

“Chinese girls?” asked a wide-eyed Scully, provoking laughter from the women he was standing to drinks on Canal Street.

“There’s no China girls in Chinatown.”

“No China girls?”

“They’re not allowed to bring them into the country.”

“Where do they get the girls?”

“Irish girls. Whaddaya think?”

“The Chinaman’s girlfriend is Irish?” Scully asked as if such a combination were beyond his imagination.

One of the women lowered her voice and looked around before she whispered furtively, “I hear she’s a Gopher.”

At that, Scully did not have to pretend a bumpkin’s amazement. It was so unusual as to be either impossible or evidence of a strange and dangerous new alliance between Hell’s Kitchen and Chinatown.

Scully knew he should report even the hint of a tong-Gopher coalition to headquarters. Or at least confide in Isaac Bell. But his gut and his years of experience told him that he was on the edge of a breakthrough that would solve the Hull 44 case. He felt so close to learning the whole story that he decided to let reporting in ride for another day or so.

Had the Gophers offered the girl as a prize to seal the deal? Or had she initiated it? According to Harry Warren, the Gopher women were often worse criminals then the men-smarter by a long shot and more devious. Whatever the connection was, Detective John Scully regarded it as a personal point of honor to stroll into the Knickerbocker with the whole story instead of a measly piece of a rumor.

A few days later he struck pay dirt.

He was back in blue jay costume. A clumsily tailored sack suit hung loosely on his ample frame. His trouser cuffs barely covered the tops of his unfashionable boots. But the expensive new straw boater purchased from Brooks Brothers on Broadway shading his round face and the gold watch chain glistening on the bulge of his vest sent a clear signal that he was a prosperous candidate to be buncoed.

He went inside a Chinese opera house on Doyers Street, which the newspapers had recently dubbed the “Bloody Angle” due to the short, crooked street’s reputation as a battleground for the warring Hip Sing and On Leong tongs. Somewhere on Doyers, he had heard, was the Hip Sing joint that offered beautiful girls, the purest opium, and a roulette wheel spun by a croupier who knew his business.

The detective had seen enough of opium and roulette to steer clear of the roulette. He had nothing against beautiful girls, and for some reason he could never figure out why they often took a shine to him. And when that happened, the opium only made a good thing better.

When he stepped back out on the street after watching the show for a while, a genuine blue jay was gazing up at an American flag on a pole thrust from a third-story dormer of the opera house. “Chinese opera?” he asked Scully. “What’s that like?”

“No opera I ever heard,” answered Scully. “Screeching like they needed their axles oiled. But the costumes and greasepaint are something else. They’ll knock your eyes out.”

“Any girls?”

“Hard to tell.”

The blue jay stuck out his hand. “Tim Holian. Waterbury Brass Works.”

“Jasper Smith. Schenectady Dry Goods,” replied Scully, and then he heard every detective’s nightmare.

“Schenectady? Then you sure as heck know my cousin Ed Kelleher. He’s president of the Rotary in Schenectady.”

“Not since he ran off with my wife’s niece.”

“What? No, there must be some mistake. Ed’s a married man.”

“Just thinking about it makes my blood boil. The poor girl is barely fifteen.”

Holian retreated dazedly toward Mott Street. Scully continued loitering between the opera house entrance and a bow window shielded with wire mesh. It didn’t take long for a roper to discover him.

“Say, brother, looking for a good time?”

Scully looked him over. Middle-aged, with very few teeth and ragged clothes, former Bowery Boy, no longer the violent sort but perfectly willing to deliver him to those who were if the gaze fixed on his watch chain was any clue. “What did you have in mind?”

“Want to meet girls?”

Scully pointed toward Mott Street. “Fellow that was just standing here in a straw hat. He’s looking for girls.”

“What about you? Want to see deranged addicts in an opium den?”

“Shove off.”

The roper took his expression as fair warning and headed after the man from Waterbury. Scully continued to loiter.

But so far, no go. He had not learned a damned thing more since he’d parked himself in front of the opera house. Not a sign of customers coming and going. Maybe it was too early. But these places tended to keep the drapes drawn and the game going round the clock. He hung around for another hour but got no sense that he was getting close. Ropers like the one he’d sent packing would never steer him to such a high-class joint. So he kept giving the ropers the shove while he watched to see arriving customers point the way.

An unusual sight caught his eye. Walking quickly, darting anxious glances behind her at a cop who seemed to be following, was a fair-skinned Irish girl carrying a Chinese baby. She was built as solidly as a bricklayer and had the kind of about-to-wink smile in her eye that Scully appreciated. He tipped his hat and made room on the narrow sidewalk as she hurried past toward Mott. Up close, the baby looked not entirely Chinese, not with that tuft of yellow hair crowning its head.

The cop brushed past Scully and caught up with the woman at the angle in Doyers. He peered suspiciously into her blanket. Scully ambled over, suspecting what would happen.

“I’m going have to take you in,” said the cop.

“What the bloody hell for?” asked the mother.

“It’s for your own protection. Every white woman married to a Chinese has got to show she was not kidnapped and held captive.”

“Kidnapped? I’m not kidnapped. I’m going shopping to bring supper home for my husband.”

“You’ll have to show me your marriage license before I’ll believe that.”

“I don’t carry it around with me, for God’s sake. You know I’m married. You’re just giving me a hard time. Expect me to put money in your hand.”

The cop flushed angrily. “You’re coming in,” he said, and took her by the arm.

John Scully shouldered up to him. “Officer, if we could speak in private?”

“Who are you? Get out of here.”

“Where I come from, money talks,” said Scully, passing the cop the bills he had palmed. The cop turned on his heel and lumbered back toward the Bowery.

“What did you do that for?” She had angry tears in her eyes.

“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” said Scully. “They bother you much?”

“They do it to all of us who marry Chinamen. As if a girl had no say in who she wanted to marry. They hate that a white woman would marry a Chinese, so they say we did it because we’re addicted to opium. What’s wrong with marrying a Chinaman? Mine works hard. Comes home at night. He don’t drink. He don’t beat me. Of course, I’d floor him if he tried. He’s a little fellow.”

“Doesn’t drink?” asked Scully. “Does he smoke opium?”

“He comes home for supper,” she smiled. “I’m his opium.” Scully took a deep breath, looked around guiltily, and whispered, “What if a fellow wanted to try to smoke some just to see what it was like?”

“I’d say he’s playing with fire.”

“Well, let’s say he wanted to take the chance. I’m not from around here. Is there a safe place for a fellow to try it?”

The woman put her hands on her hips and stared him in the face. “I saw you give that cop much too much. Do you have a lot of money?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’ve done very well by myself, but it’s time I cut loose. I really want to try something new.”

“It’s your funeral.”

“Yes, ma’am. That’s how I see it. But I’d pay the extra to go to a place where they won’t knock me on the head.”

“You’re standing right in front of it.” She indicated with a toss of her head the opera house. Scully looked up at the tall windows on the second story.

“In there? I was just in there hearing the opera.”

“There’s a place for high rollers upstairs. You can try your opium. And other things.”

“Right here?” Scully scratched his head and pretended to gawk. His detective work had brought him pretty close. But without her, he’d have been looking all week. Just went to show that good deeds were rewarded.

“You go up to the balcony like you was intending to hear the opera. Climb all the way to the back and you’ll see a little door. You knock on that, and they’ll let you in.”

“Just like that?”

“For Chinese there are only two kinds of people. Strangers outside, family and friends inside.”

“But I’m a stranger.”

“You tell them Sadie sent you and you won’t be a stranger.”

Scully smiled. “So you played with fire?”

“No,” she laughed, and slapped him on the shoulder. “Go on with you. But I know some of the girls.”

Scully bought another ticket, climbed to the balcony, turned his back on the screeches coming from the stage, climbed to the top, and knocked on the door she’d told him about. He heard a peephole slide open and grinned the unsure grin of a man way off his own territory. The door opened a crack, secured by a strong chain.

“What do you want?” asked a thickset Chinese.

Scully glimpsed a hatchet handle protruding from his tunic. “Sadie sent me.”

“Ah.” The guard loosed the chain, opened the door, and said solemnly, “Enter.” He pointed the way up carpeted stairs, and John Scully climbed into air that was dense with sweet-smelling smoke.

At first sight, the Van Dorn detective did not have to feign a country bumpkin’s astonishment at the very large space bathed in golden light. It had a canopy ceiling of red cloth, and every inch of the walls was covered in curtains, hanging carpets, and painted silk panels depicting dragons, mountains, and dancing girls. Furnished with elaborate carved wooden furniture and illuminated by colored lanterns, it looked, Scully thought, like his idea of the throne room of a Peking palace, minus the eunuch guards.

Deadly-looking Hip Sing hatchet men dressed in dark business suits stood watch over the faro wheel, the fan-tan tables, and the pretty girls carrying opium pipes to customers lounging on sofas. The girls, who wore clinging skirts slit high as their knees, were white, though those with dark hair were made up with greasepaint to look Chinese. Like the streetwalkers had told him, genuine Chinese women were scarcer than hens’ teeth in Chinatown.

The customers lolling half conscious in the smoke were a mix of yellow and white men. He saw prosperous-looking Chinese merchants, some in traditional Mandarin jackets, others in sack suits and derbies or boaters. The whites included Fifth Avenue swells and wealthy college boys, the sort who relied on their father’s checkbooks to clear up their gambling debts. Most interesting of all were a couple of pug-ugly gangsters in tight suits and loud ties that Scully would bet a month’s pay were Hell’s Kitchen Gophers.

How long had they all been here? He’d stood outside for hours and hadn’t seen a single one of them enter. Obviously the joint had another entrance from some street other than Doyers. He’d been waiting outside the back door while they went in the front.

A white man sat up on his couch, clapped his derby on his head, and swung his feet unsteadily to the floor. As he stood, their gazes met. Scully almost dropped his teeth. What in hell was Harry Warren doing here?

Both detectives looked away abruptly.

Had Harry, too, heard the same rumors he had ferreted out? No, Scully recalculated. Harry Warren would have been shadowing the Gophers. That’s how he got here. The gang specialist didn’t know about the Hip Sing-Gopher alliance yet. He had just followed a Gopher and ended up inside, failing to put two and two together. Scully was miles ahead of Harry and his so-called experts, he thought proudly. Before he was done he’d beat the New York Van Dorns in their own hometown.

Two girls came his way.

One was a shapely dark Irish lass made up like a Chinese. The other was a petite redhead, a dead-swell looker, with blue eyes so bright they flashed in the dim lantern light. She put Scully in mind of Lillian Russell in her leaner years. Although that could be the effect of her enormous hat, with its upswept brim, or a natural reaction to the intoxicating clouds of pungent smoke, or the heavy coating of paint and powder slathered thick as an actress’s makeup on a face that didn’t need any cosmetics at all.

The redhead dismissed the dark girl with a curt nod.

Scully’s pulse quickened. Young as she was, she acted like she might be the madame of the operation. The Hip Sing boss’s girlfriend he’d been hunting.

“Welcome to our humble establishment,” she said, reminding Scully of a Chinese princess on the vaudeville stage. Except her accent was pure Hell’s Kitchen. “How did you happen to find us?”

“Sadie sent me.”

“Sadie does us great honor. What will be your pleasure, sir?” Scully gaped like a blue jay from the sticks as if overwhelmed by the possibilities. In fact, he was a little overwhelmed. She was talking business like any madame worth the name, but she was gazing into his eyes as if offering herself. And herself, the dazzled Scully had to admit, was quite a cut above the usual fare.

“Your pleasure?”

“I always wanted to try a little opium.”

She looked disappointed. “You could get that from your apothecary. Where are you from?”

“Schenectady.”

“Can’t a man of your means get opium in a pharmacy?”

“Sort of afraid to at home, if you know what I mean.”

“Of course. I understand. Well, opium it will be. Come with me.” She took his hand in hers, which was small, strong, and warm. She led him to a couch half hidden by drapes and helped him get comfortable, with his head propped on soft pillows. One of the painted “Chinese” girls brought a pipe. The redhead said, “Enjoy yourself. I’ll come back later.”

30

THE GOPHERS GOT ONE OF MY BOYS,” HARRY WARREN telephoned Isaac Bell at the Knickerbocker.

“Who?”

“Little Eddie Tobin, the youngster.”

Bell raced to Roosevelt Hospital at 59th and Ninth Avenue.

Harry intercepted him in the hallway. “I put him in a private room. If the boss won’t pay for it, I will.”

“If the boss won’t pay, I will,” said Bell. “How is he?”

“They kicked him in the face with axheads in their boots, cracked his skull with a lead pipe, broke his right arm and both legs.”

“Is he going to make it?”

“The Tobins are Staten Island scowmen-oysters, tugboats, smuggling-so he’s a tough kid. Or was. Hard to say how a man comes out of a beating like that. Near as I can tell there were four of them. He didn’t stand a chance.”

Bell went into the room and stood with clenched fists over the unconscious detective. His entire head was swathed in thick, white bandages seeping blood. A doctor was sliding a stethoscope incrementally across his chest. A nurse stood by in starched linen. “Spare no expense,” Bell said. “I want a nurse with him day and night.”

He rejoined Harry Warren in the hall. “It’s your town, Harry, what are we going to do about this?”

The gang expert hesitated, clearly not happy with the answer he had to deliver. “One on one they don’t mess with Van Dorns. But the Gophers outnumber us by a lot, and if comes to war, they’re fighting on their own territory.”

“It already has come to war,” said Isaac Bell.

“The cops won’t be any help. The way the city works, politicians, builders, the church, the cops, and gangsters divide it up. Long as nobody gets so greedy that the reformers take hold, they’re not going to bother each other over a private detective getting beat up. So we’re on our own. Listen, Isaac, this is odd. It’s not Tommy Thompson’s way to take on trouble he doesn’t have to. Sending a message telling us to back off? You do something like that to a rival gang-the Dusters or the Five Pointers. He knows you don’t do that to the Van Dorns. He’s as much as admitting he’s taking orders from the spy.”

“I want you to send a message back.”

“I can get the word passed to people who will tell him, if that’s what you mean.”

“Tell them that Isaac Bell is wiring his old friend Jethro Watt-Chief of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police-asking him to dispatch two hundred yard bulls to New York to guard the Eleventh Avenue freight sidings.”

“Can you do that?”

“Jethro is always spoiling for a fight, and I know for a fact that the railroads are getting fed up with their freight trains being robbed. Tommy Thompson will think twice before he hits a Van Dorn again. The SP’s cinder dicks may be the dregs but they’re tough as nails, and the only thing they fear is Jethro. Until they get here, none of our boys go alone. Two Van Dorns or more on the job, and careful when they’re off duty.”

“Speaking of alone, I bumped into your pal John Scully.”

“Where? I haven’t heard from him in weeks.”

“I shadowed a Gopher lieutenant into Chinatown. Dead end. He spent the day smoking opium. Scully wandered into the joint tricked out like a tourist.”

“What was Scully doing?”

“Last I saw, lighting a pipe.”

“Tobacco?” Bell asked, doubting it.

“ ’Fraid not.”

Bell looked at Harry Warren. “Well, if you could survive it, Scully will, too.”

THE TRANSATLANTIC STEAMER Kaiser Wilhem der Gross II thrust four tall black funnels and two even taller masts into the smoky sky at the edge of Greenwich Village. Her straight bow towered over tugboats, the pier, and fleets of horse-drawn hansom cabs and motor taxis.

“Right here is fine, Dave,” Isaac Bell said into the speaking tube of a brewster green Packard limousine provided by Archie Abbott’s wife Lillian’s father. The railroad tycoon was unable to meet his beloved daughter’s ship, as he was steaming across the continent on his private train-on the trail, Bell assumed, of an independent railroad to fold into his empire. Bell, who had urgent reason to speak with Archie, had offered to stand in for him.

“Pick me up on Jane Street after you get them loaded.”

He stepped out onto the cobblestones and watched the gangway. Not surprisingly, the newlyweds were first off the ship, guided ashore by solicitous purser’s mates and followed closely by a pack of newspaper reporters, who would have boarded the ship at Sandy Hook to greet New York’s most exciting young couple. More reporters were waiting on the pier. Some had cameras. Others were accompanied by sketch artists.

Bell, who preferred not to see his face on newsstands while investigating in disguise, retreated from the pier and waited on the street of low houses and stables.

Fifteen minutes later the limousine slowed, and he stepped nimbly aboard.

“Sorry about all the hoopla,” the blue-blooded Archibald Angell Abbott IV greeted him, clasping his hand. They had been best friends since boxing for rival colleges. “All New York is dying to see my blushing bride.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Bell, kissing the beauteous young Lillian warmly on the cheek before he settled on the folding seat that faced the couple. “Lillian, you look absolutely radiant.”

“Blame my husband,” she laughed, running her fingers through Archie’s thick red hair.

When they got to the limestone Hennessy mansion on Park Avenue, Bell and Archie talked in the privacy of the library. “She’s radiant,” said Bell. “You look beat.”

Archie raised his glass with a shaking hand. “Revels all night, cathedrals and country-house parties all day, then more revels. One forgets how energetic one was at nineteen.”

“What did you learn on the ship?”

“The Europeans are all looking for a fight,” Archie replied soberly.

“All worried the other guy will throw the first punch. The British are convinced there will be war with Germany. They know that the German Army is immense, and the German military has the Kaiser’s ear. Ear, hell, the Army and the Navy have the Kaiser’s heart and his blessing!

“The Germans are convinced there will be war with England because England will not tolerate an expanding German Empire. The British know that defeating the German Navy would not guarantee victory, whereas the defeat of the British Navy would spell the end to England’s overseas empire. If that weren’t enough, the Germans suspect that Russia will attack them to derail a revolution by distracting their peasants with a war. If that happens, the Germans fear, Britain will side with Russia because France is allied with the Russians. So Germany will force Austria and Turkey onto their side. But none of these idiots understand that their alliances will cause a war like no one’s ever seen.”

“That bleak?”

“Fortunately for us, none of them want the United States as an enemy.”

“Which is why,” Bell said, “I wonder if England and Germany are attempting to make the United States think the other is their enemy.”

“That’s precisely the kind of byzantine talk I heard on the ship,” said Archie. “You have an evil mind.”

“I’ve been hanging around the wrong crowd lately.”

“I thought it was that Yale education,” said Archie, a Princeton man.

“Courting the United States to be their ally, England and Germany could each secretly be maneuvering to make their enemy look like our enemy.”

“What about the Japanese?”

“Captain Falconer claims that anything that loosens the European footholds in the Pacific will embolden the Japanese. They’ll stay out of it as long as they can and then side with the winner. Frankly, he seems possessed by a fear of the Japanese. He saw them up close in the Russo-Japanese War, so he thinks he knows them better than most. He insists they’re brilliant spies. Anyway, to answer your question, we’ve had a Jap under surveillance for a week. Unfortunately, he gave us the slip.”

Archie shook his head in mock dismay. “I go away for one little honeymoon, and the detective business goes to hell. Where do you suppose he is?”

“Last seen on the railroad ferry into New York. We’re combing the city. He’s the best part of the case. I need him badly.”

“GOT THE REPORT on Riker and Riker,” Grady Forrer reported when Bell got back to headquarters. “On your desk.”

Erhard Riker was the son of the founder of Riker & Riker, importers of precious gems and precious metals for the New York and Newark jewelry industries. The younger Riker had expanded the company since taking over seven years ago when his father was killed in Boer War cross fire in South Africa. He shuttled regularly between the United States and Europe on luxury transatlantic ocean liners, favoring the German Wilhelm der Grosse and the British Lusitania, unlike his father who had patronized older, more staid steamships like the Cunard Line Umbria and North German Lloyd’s Havel. One fact caught Bell’s eye: Riker & Riker maintained its own private protection service both for guarding jewelry shipments and escorting Riker personally when he himself was carrying valuables.

Bell sought out the head of Research. “Are private guard services common in the gem line?”

“Seem to be with the Europeans,” said Grady Forrer, “traveling the way they have to.”

“What sort does he hire?”

“Pretty-boy bruisers. The sort you can dress up in fancy duds.”

A receptionist stuck his head in the door. “Telephone call for you, Mr. Bell. Won’t say who he is. English accent.”

Bell recognized the plummy drawl of Commander Abbington-Westlake.

“Shall we have another cocktail, old chap? Perhaps even drink it this time.”

“What for?”

“I have a very interesting surprise for you.”

31

POLICE! POLICE! DON’T NONE OF YOUSE MOVE!”

The door from the opera house balcony through which John Scully had entered the Hip Sing opium den crashed open with a loud bang and knocked the heavyset Chinaman guarding it into the wall. The first man through was a helmeted sergeant broad as a draft horse.

The Chinese gambling at the fan-tan table were accustomed to police raids. They moved the quickest. Cards, chips, and paper money went flying in the air as they bolted through a curtain that covered a hidden door. The Hip Sing bouncers scooped the money off the faro table and ran. The white players at the faro wheel ran, too, but when they pawed at other curtains they found blank walls. Girls screamed. Opium smokers looked up.

The redheaded madame ran to Scully’s couch. “Come with me!”

She pulled Scully through another curtain as the cops stormed in swinging their clubs and shouting threats. Scully saw no door in the near darkness, but when she shoved on the wall a narrow panel swung open. They went through, and she hinged it closed and threw heavy bolts shut at the top and bottom. “Quickly!”

She led him down a steep and narrow stairway barely wide enough for the detective to squeeze his bulk through. At each landing was another narrow door, which she opened, closed, and bolted behind them.

“Where are we going?” asked Scully.

“The tunnel.”

She unlocked a door with a key. Here was the tunnel, low-ceiled, narrow, and damp. It stretched into darkness. She took a battery light from a hole in the wall and by its flashing beam led them underground for what felt to Scully to be a distance of two city blocks. By the twists and turns and breaks in the walls, he surmised it was actually a right-of-way constructed through a series of connected cellars.

She unlocked another door, took his hand again, and led him up two flights of stairs into the conventionally furnished parlor of an apartment with high windows that offered views of the Chatham Square El station flooded in sunlight.

Scully had been in the dark so long, he found it hard to believe that daylight still existed.

“Thanks for the rescue, ma’am.”

“My name is Katy. Sit down. Relax.”

“Jasper,” said Scully. “Jasper Smith.”

Katy threw down her bag, reached up, and began removing hatpins.

Scully watched avidly. She was even prettier in the daylight. “You know,” he laughed. “If I carried a knife as long as your hatpins, the police would arrest me as a dangerous character.”

She gave him a cute pout. “A girl can’t wear her chapeau all crooked.”

“It doesn’t seem to matter if a girl wears a cartwheel or a little ding-dong affair, she always nails it down with hatpins long as her arm. I see you are a fellow Republican.”

“Where’d you get that idea?”

Scully reached for the ten-inch steel pin she was removing and held it to the light. The decorative bronze head depicted a possum holding a golf club. “ ‘Billy Possum.’ That’s what we call William Howard Taft.”

“They’re trying to make a possum like a teddy bear. But everyone knows that Taft is no Roosevelt.”

She stuck all four pins in a sofa cushion and tossed her hat beside them. Then she struck a pose, with her strong hands on her slim hips. “Opium is the one pleasure I can’t offer you here. Would you settle for a Scotch highball?”

“Among other things,” Scully grinned back.

He watched her mix Scotch and water in tall glasses. Then he clinked his to hers, took a sip, and leaned closer to kiss her on the mouth. She stepped back. “Let me get comfortable. I’ve been in these clothes all day.”

Scully searched the room quickly, thoroughly, and silently. He was looking for a rent bill or gas bill that would show whose apartment it was. He had to stop when the El clattered by because he couldn’t hear her coming back from the bedroom. It passed, and he looked some more.

“Say, how you doing in there?” he called.

“Hold your horses.”

Scully looked some more. Nothing. Drawers and cabinets were bare as a hotel room. He cast a look down the hall, and opened her purse. Just as he heard the door open, he hit the jackpot. Two railroad tickets for tomorrow’s three-thirty p.m. 20th Century Limited-the eighteen-hour excess-fare flyer to Chicago-with connections through to San Francisco. Tickets for Katy and whom? The boss? The Hip Sing boyfriend?

WHEN SHE FOUND the little thirteen-ounce.25 holstered in the small of his back, she wanted to know what it was doing there.

“Got robbed once carrying the payroll for my clerks. It ain’t gonna happen again.”

She seemed to believe him. At least it didn’t get in the way of the proceedings. Not until he saw her add the knockout drops to his second highball.

Scully felt suddenly old and blue.

She was so very good at it. She had the patience to wait to dress the second drink so he’d be less likely to taste the bitter chloral hydrate flavor. She hid the vial expertly between the crease of her palm and the fleshy part of her thumb. She crossed her legs as she did it, with a distracting flash of snow-white thighs. Her only failing was her youth. He was too old to be buncoed by a kid.

“Bottoms up,” she smiled.

“Bottoms up,” Scully whispered back. “You know, I never met a girl quite like you.” Gazing soulfully into her pretty blue eyes, he reached blindly for his glass and knocked it off the table.

ISAAC BELL GOT to the Knickerbocker’s cellar bar ten minutes early. Midafternoon on a sunny day, it was largely empty, and he saw right away that Abbington-Westlake had not yet arrived. There was one man at the bar, two couples at tables, and a single slight figure seated on the banquette behind the small table where he had sat with the English Naval Attaché in the darkest corner of the room. Immaculately dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat, high-standing collar, and four-in-hand tie, he beckoned, half rising and bowing his head.

Bell approached, wondering if he could believe his eyes.

“Yamamoto Kenta, I presume?”

32

MR. BELL, ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH THE NAMBU TYPE B?”

“Low-quality, 7-millimeter semiautomatic pistol,” Bell answered tersely. “Most Japanese officers buy themselves a Browning.”

“I’m a sentimental patriot,” said Yamamoto. “And it is remarkably effective at a range of one small tabletop. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Bell sat down, laid his big hands on the table, one palm down, one up, and scrutinized a face that gave away nothing.

“How far do you think you will get if you shoot me in a crowded hotel?”

“Considering how far I have gotten from a dozen professional detectives for the past two weeks, pursuit by ordinary citizens drinking in a hotel bar holds few terrors for me. But surely you can guess that I did not lure you here to shoot you, which I could have done late last night as you walked home from this hotel to your club on 44th Street.”

Bell returned a grim smile. “My congratulations to the Black Ocean Society for teaching their spies the art of invisibility.”

“I accept the compliment,” Yamamoto smiled back. “In the name of the Empire of Japan.”

“Why does a patriot of the Empire of Japan become the instrument of an English spy’s revenge?”

“Don’t be put out with Abbington-Westlake. You hurt his pride, which is a dangerous thing to do to an Englishman.”

“Next time I see him, I won’t hurt his pride.”

Yamamoto smiled again. “That is between you and him. Let us remember that you and I are not enemies.”

“You murdered Arthur Langner in the Gun Factory,” Bell shot back coldly. “That makes us enemies.”

“I did not kill Arthur Langner. Someone else did. An overzealous subordinate. I’ve taken appropriate measures with him.”

Bell nodded. He saw no profit in challenging that cold-eyed lie until he learned Yamamoto’s intention. “If you didn’t murder Langner and we are not enemies, why are you pointing a gun under the table at my belly?”

“To hold your attention while I explain what is going on and what I can do to help you.”

“Why would you want to help me?”

“Because you can help me.”

“You are offering to deal.”

“I am offering to trade.”

“Trade what?”

“The spy who arranged Langner’s murder and the murder of Lakewood, the fire-control expert, and the murder of the turbine expert, MacDonald, and the murder of Gordon, the armorer in Bethlehem, and the attempt to sabotage the launch of the Michigan, which you so ably thwarted.”

“Trade for what?”

“Time for me to disappear.”

Isaac Bell shook his head emphatically. “That makes no sense. You’ve demonstrated that you could disappear already.”

“It is more complicated than simply disappearing. I have my own responsibilities-responsibilities to my country-which have nothing to do with you because we are not enemies. I need to get clean away and leave no tracks to haunt me or embarrass my country.”

Bell thought hard. Yamamoto was confirming what he had suspected-that a spy other than he was the mastermind who had recruited not only the Japanese murderer but the German saboteur and who knew how many others.

Yamamoto spoke urgently. “Discretion is survival. Defeats, and victories, should be observed quietly, after the fact, at a distance.”

To save his own skin-and who knew for what other motives-Yamamoto would betray the mastermind. As the treacherous Abbington-Westlake had put it so cynically at this same table, “Welcome to the world of espionage, Mr. Bell.”

“How can I trust you?”

“I will explain two reasons why you should trust me. First, I have not killed you, and I could have. Agreed?”

“You could have tried.”

“Second, here is my pistol. I am passing it to you under the table. Do what you will.”

He handed Bell the pistol, butt first.

“Is the safety on?” asked Bell.

“It is now that it’s pointed at me,” replied Yamamoto. “Now I will stand up. With your permission.”

Bell nodded.

Yamamoto stood up. Bell said, “I will trust you more after you hand me that second pistol hidden in your side pocket.”

Yamamoto smiled faintly. “Sharp eyes, Mr. Bell. But in order to deliver the goods, I may need it.”

“In that case,” said Bell, “take this one, too.”

“Thank you.”

“Good hunting.”

LATE THAT NIGHT, Yamamoto Kenta confronted the spy in his Alexandria, Virginia, waterfront warehouse. “Your plan to attack the Great White Fleet at Mare Island,” he began in the formal, measured phrases of a diplomat, “is not in the interest of my government.”

It had been raining for two days, and the Potomac River was rising, swelled by the vast watershed that drained thousands of square miles of Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C. The powerful current made the floor tremble. The rain drummed on the ancient roof. Leaks dripped into a helmet turned upside down on the spy’s desk, splashed on the old searchlight behind him and streamed down its lens.

The spy could not hide his astonishment. “How did you find out?”

Yamamoto smiled thinly. “Perhaps it is my ‘natural aptitude for spying, and a cunning and self-control not found in the West.’ His smile froze in a hard line, his lips so tight that the spy could see his teeth outlined against them.

“I will not permit this,” the Japanese continued. “You will drive a wedge between Japan and the United States at precisely the wrong time.”

“The wedge is already in motion,” the spy said mildly.

“What good would come of it?”

“Depends on your point of view. From the German point of view, embroiling Japan and the United States in conflict would open up opportunities in the Pacific. Nor will Great Britain mourn if the U.S. Navy is forced to concentrate its battleships on its West Coast. They might even seize the opportunity to reoccupy the West Indies.”

“It does nothing for Japan.”

“I have German and British friends willing to pay me for their opportunities.”

“You are even worse than I thought.”

The spy laughed. “Don’t you understand? The international dreadnought race presents splendiferous opportunities to a man with the intestinal fortitude to seize them. The rival nations will pay anything to stop each other. I’m a salesman in a seller’s market.”

“You are playing both ends against the middle.”

The spy laughed louder. “You underestimate me, Yamamoto. I am playing every end against the middle. I am building a fortune. What will it cost me to keep you out of my game?”

“I am not a mercenary.”

“Oh, I forgot. You’re a patriot.” Idly, he picked up a thick black towel that had been draped over the arm of his chair. “A gentleman spy with high morals. But a gentleman spy is like a pistol that shoots blanks-good for starting bicycle races, but little else.”

Yamamoto was coldly sure of his position. “I am not a gentleman spy. I am a patriot like your father, who served his Kaiser as I serve my Emperor. Neither of us would sell out our country.”

“Will you leave my poor dead father out of this?” the spy asked wearily.

“Your father would understand why I must stop you.” Yamamoto drew from his coat his Nambu semiautomatic pistol, deftly pulled the cocking knob, and pointed the short barrel at the spy’s head.

The spy looked at him with a thin smile. “Are you serious, Kenta? What are you going to do, turn me in to the U.S. Navy? They may have questions for you, too.”

“I am sure they would. Which is why I’m going to turn you over to the Van Dorn Detective Agency.”

“What for?”

“The Van Dorns will hold you until I am safely out of the country. They will turn you over to the U.S. Navy.”

The spy shut his eyes. “You’re forgetting one thing. I don’t have a country.”

“But I know where you came from, Eyes O’Shay. Mr. Brian ‘Eyes’ O’Shay.”

The spy’s eyes popped open. He stared at the towel that he had been raising to his face. It lay in his hands like an offering.

Yamamoto gloated. “Surprised?”

“I am very surprised,” the spy admitted. “Brian O’Shay has not been my name for a very long time.”

“I told you, I was playing this game before you were born. Put your hands where I can see them or I’ll give the Van Dorns your corpse instead.”

The spy squeezed his eyes shut again. “You frighten me, Kenta. I am merely trying to mop the perspiration from my face.” He dabbed his forehead, then pressed the black towel as tightly as he could to his eyes. Hidden at his feet was a thick electrical cable that connected the public-utility main to a knife switch in the open position. The switch’s hinged metal lever was poised inches above its jaw. He stomped down on the lever’s insulated handle, closing the circuit. A fat blue spark cracked like a pistol shot.

From behind him, the 200,000,000-candlepower searchlight capable of illuminating enemy ships at six miles shot a beam like white fire into Yamamoto’s eyes. It was so bright that the spy could see the bones in his hands through his eyelids, the thick towel, and his skin and flesh. It seared Yamamoto’s retinas, blinding him. The Japanese spy fell backward, screaming.

The spy kicked the switch open again and waited for the light to fade before he dropped the towel and stood up, blinking at the pink circles spinning before his eyes.

“Navy captains tell me that searchlights fend off destroyers better than guns,” he said conversationally. “I can report that they work just as well on traitors.”

From his desk drawer, he took a folded copy of the Washington Post and removed from it a twelve-inch length of lead pipe. He circled the desk and stepped around the fallen chair. He was only a few inches taller than the tiny Yamamoto, who was writhing on the floor. But he was as strong as three men and he moved with the concentrated purpose of a torpedo.

He raised the lead pipe high and slammed it down on Yamamoto’s skull.

One blow was more than enough.

He felt inside Yamamoto’s pockets to make sure he carried identification and found in his wallet a letter of introduction to the Smithsonian Institution from a Japanese museum. Perfect. He rummaged about the warehouse until he found a cork lifesaving jacket. He made sure its canvas was still strong, then he worked Yamamoto’s arms into it and tied it securely.

He dragged the body to the dock side of the warehouse where the building cantilevered over the Potomac. A wooden lever that stood tall as his shoulders released the trap in the floor. It dropped with a loud bang. The body splashed. On a rain-lashed night like this, the river would sweep it miles away.

He was done here. It was time to leave Washington. He circled the dusty warehouse, tipping over kerosene hurricane lamps that he had placed there for his departure. He circled again, lighting matches and tossing them on the spilled kerosene, and when all was blazing bright orange flames he walked out the door and into the rain.

33

BELL WAITED ALL THE NEXT DAY FOR WORD FROM Yamamoto. Every time a telephone rang or a telegraph key clattered, he startled at his desk only to sit back disappointed. Something must have gone wrong. It made no sense that the Japanese spy would betray him. He had appeared voluntarily. He had suggested the trade. As the afternoon wore on, the phones kept ringing and ringing.

Suddenly the agent manning them signaled, and Bell raced across the room.

“Operator just called. Message from Scully.”

“What?”

“All he said was, ‘Grand Central, three-thirty p.m.’ ”

Bell grabbed his hat. Enigmatic even by Scully’s standards, it meant either that Scully turned up something of vital importance or he was in danger. “Keep listening for Yamamoto. I’ll telephone from Grand Central if I can. But soon as Yamamoto reports, send a courier to come looking for me.”

JOHN SCULLY HAD DECIDED it was time to bring in Isaac Bell. Truth be told, he admitted to himself as he hunted the public telephone pay station in Grand Central, it was past time. He couldn’t find the damned thing. The old railroad station was being torn down and replaced by a vast new terminal, and they kept moving the telephones. Where the telephones had been the last time he used them was a gaping pit that offered a view of track levels descending sixty feet into the ground. When he finally found the telephones, losing ten minutes in the process, he told the operator, “Van Dorn Detective Agency. Knickerbocker.” A uniformed attendant showed him into one of the wood-paneled booths.

“Good afternoon,” came the dulcet tones of an operator chosen for her beautiful voice and clear head. “You have reached the Van Dorn Detective Agency. To whom do you wish to speak?”

“Message for Isaac Bell. Tell him Scully said, ‘Grand Central, three-thirty p.m.’ Got that? ‘Grand Central, three-thirty p.m.’ ”

“Yes, Mr. Scully.”

He paid the attendant and hurried toward the track designated for the 20th Century Limited. The terminal was in chaos. Workmen were everywhere, swarming over scaffolds and banging hammers on stone, steel, and marble. Laborers cluttered the hall, wheeling carts and barrows. But at the Limited’s temporary gate, beside which a blackboard said CHICAGO, company employees were respectfully checking tickets, and her famous red carpet was already in place leading out onto the platform. It looked like once a passenger got this close to the fabled Chicago express, his troubles were over.

“Jasper! Jasper Smith!”

Little Miss Knockout Drops from the opera house opium den was rushing toward him in an elegant traveling outfit capped by a broad-brimmed Merry Widow hat. “What a wonderful coincidence. Thank God, I found you!”

“How did you know I was here?”

“I didn’t. I just saw you. Oh, Jasper, I didn’t know if I would ever see you again. You left in such a hurry last night.”

Something was way out of whack. He looked around. Where was her Hip Sing boyfriend? Already on the train? Then he saw cutting through the crowds of hurrying passengers a cigar-delivery cart wheeled by a Chinese. And there were three wagonloads of construction debris hauled by Irish laborers. The cart and wagons were converging on them like wagons circling to fend off the Indians.

“What are you doing here?” he asked her.

“Meeting a train,” she said.

I stood outside that opera house like a sitting duck, thought Scully. Long enough for the Hip Sing to get a line on me.

The Irishmen pulling the wagon were staring at him. Gophers? Or were they watching the pretty girl who was smiling up at him like she meant it?

Or did they tip to me and Harry Warren, recognizing each other inside? The Chinaman wheeling cigars looked his way, expression blank. Tong hatchet man?

The train ticket! She let me find the train ticket. She set me up to be here. Scully reached back for his Vest Pocket pistol. Even the police raid was a phony. Paid the cops to raid so he would run with the girl.

Something whacked him in the head.

A football bounced at his feet, and a big, grinning college boy in coat and tie loped up. “Sorry, sir, we didn’t mean it, just horsing around.”

Saved! Saved by a piece of luck he didn’t deserve.

Six strapping, privileged young men skylarking with a ball as they ran to catch a train had scared off the tong and the Gophers. They trooped over, apologizing and offering to shake his hand, and suddenly he and Katy were surrounded inside a scrum. But only when three of the college boys held his arms and little Katy whipped a ten-inch steel hatpin from the Merry Widow did Scully realize that little Miss Knockout Drops had completely outfoxed him.

ISSAC BELL RUSHED THROUGH the crowded construction site. He spotted a mob of people milling around the gate to the 20th Century Limited. A cop was shouting, “Stand back! Stand back!,” and pleading for a doctor. With an awful feeling he was too late, Bell shoved into the center of the crowd.

The cop tried to stop him.

“Van Dorn!” Bell shouted. “Is that one of my men?”

“Take a look.”

John Scully lay on his back, his eyes staring wide open, his hands folded over his chest.

“Looks like a heart attack,” said the cop. “He yours?”

Bell knelt beside him. “Yes.”

“Sorry, mister. Least he went peaceful. Probably never knew what hit him.”

Isaac Bell spread his hand over Scully’s face and gently closed his eyes. “Sleep tight, my friend.”

A whistle blew. “All aboard!” Conductors shouted. “20th Century Limited to Chicago. Allllllll aboooooard.”

Scully’s hat had fallen under his head. Bell reached for it to cover his face. His hand came away sticky with warm blood.

“Mother of God,” breathed the cop leaning over his shoulder.

Bell turned Scully’s head and saw the shiny brass head of a hatpin sticking out of the soft flesh in the nape of his neck.

“All aboard! All aboard! 20th Century Limited for Chicago. Allllllll aboooooard!”

Bell searched Scully’s pockets. Tucked inside his coat was an envelope with his name on it. Bell stood up and tore it open. Printed in block letters was a note from the killer:

EYE FOR AN EYE, BELL.

YOU EARNED WEEKS SO WE WON’T COUNT HIM.

BUT YOU OWE ME FOR THE GERMAN.

“Mr. Bell! Mr. Bell!” A Van Dorn apprentice raced up, breathless.

“Wire from Mr. Van Dorn.”

Bell read it in a glance.

Yamamoto Kenta had been found floating in the Potomac.

All was lost.

The tall detective knelt beside his friend again and resumed methodically searching his pockets. In Scully’s vest he found a train ticket for the 20th Century Limited with through connections to San Francisco.

“Boarrrrd! All aboa-”

The conductor’s final warning was drowned out by the engineer signaling Ahead with a majestic double blast on his whistle. Isaac Bell stood up, thinking furiously. John Scully must have been following a suspected spy or saboteur who was headed to San Francisco, where the Great White Fleet would replenish before crossing the Pacific Ocean.

He spoke sharply to the Van Dorn apprentice, who was staring with wide-open eyes at the fallen detective. “Look at me, son.”

The boy tore his gaze from Scully.

“There’s a lot to be done, and you’re the only Van Dorn here who can do it. Round up every witness. Those workmen there, those Chinese fellows with the cart, and these folks hanging about. Someone saw something. This officer will help you, won’t you?”

“I’ll do what I can,” said the cop dubiously.

Bell pressed money into his hand. “Hold them here while this young gentleman telephones Van Dorn headquarters for every available agent. On the jump, son! Then straight back here and get to work. Remember, people are glad to talk if you give them the chance.”

The floor shook. The 20th Century Limited was rolling toward Chicago.

Isaac Bell bolted onto the platform, ran the length of the express train’s red carpet, and jumped.