The Wrecker

21

ISAAC BELL AND ARCHIE ABBOTT CLIMBED ON TOP OF A BOXCAR filled with dynamite to survey the intercontinental freight terminal that carpeted Jersey City’s Communipaw District. This was the end of the line for every railroad from the West and the South. Freight cars that had traveled two and three thousand miles across America stopped at the New Jersey piers one mile short of their destination, their way blocked by a stretch of water known to mariners as the North River and called by everyone else the Hudson.

The boxcar stood on the powder pier, a single-tracked wharf reserved for unloading explosives. But they were close enough to see the main terminal that thrust into the Hudson River on six-hundred-foot finger piers. Four freight trains were strung out on each pier waiting to be rolled onto sturdy wooden barges and floated across the river. They carried every commodity consumed by the city: cement, lumber, steel, sulfur, wheat, corn, coal, kerosene, and refrigerated fruits, vegetables, beef, and pork.

A mile across the water, Manhattan Island rose out of the smoky harbor, bristling with church steeples and ships’ masts. Above the steeples and masts soared the mighty towers of the Brooklyn Bridge and dozens of skyscrapers, many newly finished since Bell’s last visit only a year earlier. The twenty-two-story Flatiron Building had been surpassed by the Times Building, and both were dwarfed by a six-hundred-foot steel frame being built for the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s new headquarters.

“Only in New York,” boasted Archie Abbott.

Abbott was as proud as a Chamber of Commerce promoter, but he knew the city inside out, which made him Bell’s invaluable guide.

“Look at that boat flying the flag of the Southern Pacific Railroad even though she is three thousand miles from home plate. Everyone has to come to New York. We have become the center of the world.”

“You’ve become a target,” said Bell. “The Wrecker got you in his sights the instant Osgood Hennessy sealed his deal to take control of the Jersey Central, which gained him access to the city.”

The harbor vessel that had sparked Abbott’s civic pride was a long, low-in-the-water steam lighter, a materials and work vessel considerably bigger than a tugboat. She belonged to the newly formed Eastern Marine Division of the Southern Pacific Railroad and flew her colors more boldly than the local work vessels plying the Port of New York. A brand-new vermilion flag snapped in the breeze, and four red rings, bright as sealing wax, circled her soot-smeared smokestack.

Even her old name, Oxford, had been painted over. Lillian I now circled her cruiser stern. Hennessy had renamed every lighter and tugboat in the Eastern Marine Division fleet, Lillian I through Lillian XII, and had ordered SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD painted on their transoms and wheelhouses in bright-white letters.

“Just in case,” Archie remarked, “the Wrecker doesn’t know he’s here.”

“He knows,” Bell said grimly.

His restlessly probing blue eyes were dark with concern. New York City was the Holy Land, as Harper’s Weekly had put it, to which all railroaders longed make a pilgrimage. Osgood Hennessy had achieved that goal, and Isaac Bell knew in his heart that the Wrecker’s taunting note on the magazine’s cartoon of the railroad president was no bluff. The murderous saboteur was bent on a public attack. The next battle would be fought here.

Stone-faced, Bell watched one of the countless tugboats shunting a rail barge, or car float, past the pier. Deckhands cut the barge loose, and it continued under its own momentum to glide smoothly and accurately as a billiard ball in for a gentle landing. In the short time it took longshoremen to secure the barge’s lines, the tug had seized another barge filled with a dozen freight cars and shoved it into the strong current, urging it toward Manhattan. Similar maneuvers were being repeated everywhere Bell looked, like the moving parts in a colossal, well-oiled machine. But despite every precaution he had taken, the rail yards, the piers, and the car floats looked to him like the Wrecker’s playground.

He had put a score of Van Dorn operatives in charge of the terminal. Superintendent Jethro Watt had furnished one hundred handpicked Southern Pacific special railway police, and for a week nothing had moved in or out that they did not approve. No cargo went unchecked. Dynamite trains especially were searched car by car, box by box. They had discovered an astonishingly casual approach to the handling of high explosives in Jersey City, which was the largest city in the state and as densely peopled as Manhattan and Brooklyn across the harbor.

Under Bell’s regime, armed guards boarded the dynamite trains miles before even entering the yards. After allowing the trains to enter, the guards oversaw every step of the off-loading, as boxcars bearing twenty-five tons of dynamite dispensed their deadly cargo into steam lighters and barges and into smaller two-ton loads for wagons drawn by draft horses. Van Dorn detectives intercepted all but that which would be immediately shipped out to contractors.

Still, Bell knew that the Wrecker would find no shortage of high explosives. Dynamite was in such demand that trainloads arrived on the powder pier day and night. New Yorkers were blowing up the city’s bedrock of mica schist to dig subways and cellars in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. New Jerseyites were blasting traprock from hilltops to make concrete. Quarrymen were carving building stone out of the Hudson River cliffs, from New Jersey’s Palisades all the way up to West Point. Railroad builders were blasting approaches to the Hudson tunnels being bored under the river.

“When the rail tunnels connecting New Jersey and New York are finished next year,” Archie bragged, “Osgood Hennessy can park his special eight blocks from Times Square.”

“Thank the Lord the tunnels are not finished,” said Bell. “If they were, the Wrecker would try to blow them with a Southern Pacific Limited trapped under the river.”

Archie Abbott flaunted the New Yorker’s disdain for districts west of the Hudson in general, and the state of New Jersey in particular, by reminding Isaac Bell that over the years entire sections of Jersey City and nearby Hoboken had been periodically leveled by dynamite accidents, most recently in 1904.

Bell did not need any reminding. The word about the new police presence had gotten around, and tips had poured in from a fearful public. Just yesterday, they had they caught some fool in a wagon carting a half ton of dynamite for the New York and New Jersey Trap Rock Company up Newark Avenue. Failure to dodge a trolley would have resulted in a deadly explosion on the busiest street in Jersey City. The company was protesting mightily about the expense of being forced to take dynamite up the Hackensack River to their Secaucus mine. But the Jersey City fire commissioner, not at all pleased by all the public attention, had stood untypically firm.

“These Jersey harebrains won’t need any help from the Wrecker to blow themselves sky-high one of these days,” Archie Abbott predicted, “purely through negligence.”

“Not on my watch,” said Isaac Bell.

“In fact,” Abbott persisted. “If there were an explosion, how would we know it was the Wrecker and not a Jersey harebrain?”

“We’ll know. If he manages to get around us, it will be the biggest explosion New York has ever seen.”

Accordingly, Bell had stationed railway police on every train and boat and freight wagon owned by the Southern Pacific. He backed them up with Van Dorn operatives and inspectors borrowed from the Bureau of Explosives, newly founded by the railroads to promote safe transportation of dynamite, gunpowder, and TNT.

Every man carried the lumberjack’s sketch. Bell’s hopes for it had been bolstered by a report on the Ogden disaster from Nicolas Alexander, the self-important head of the Denver office, who, despite his flaws, happened to be an able detective. Some had wondered if the Wrecker had sought Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton out deliberately to attack Van Dorn agents. But Alexander had confirmed Bell’s initial conclusion that Wally and Mack had pursued the Wrecker down an alley. Which meant they had recognized him from the sketch. And the by-now-familiar sword-puncture wounds left no doubt the Wrecker had killed them with his own hand.

“My friend,” said Archie, “you’re worrying too much. We have every base covered. We’ve been at it a week. Not a peep out of the Wrecker. The boss is tickled pink.”

Bell knew that Joseph Van Dorn would not be tickled entirely pink until they arrested the Wrecker or shot him dead. But it was true that the powerful Van Dorn presence had already had the wonderful side effect of apprehending various criminals and fugitives. They had arrested a Jersey City gangster masquerading as a Jersey Central railroad detective, a trio of bank robbers, and a corrupt Fire Commission inspector who had taken bribes to overlook the dangerous practice of storing dynamite on steam radiators to keep it from freezing in the winter cold.

The powder pier worried Bell the most, even though it swarmed with railroad police. Isolated as far as possible from the main piers, it was still too close in Bell’s opinion. And as many as six cars at a time were off-loading dynamite onto the lighters that nuzzled around it. Taking no chances, Bell had put in command of the railway police the seasoned Van Dorn agent Eddie Edwards, who knew well the rail yards, the docks, and the local gangs.

WONG LEE WALKED TO the Communipaw piers, his tiny frame bent nearly in half under the weight of a huge laundry sack. A railroad detective loomed over him, demanding where the hell chink boy thought he was going.

“Chop-chop, laundry for captain,” Wong answered in the pidgin English that he knew the detective expected of him.

“What ship?”

Deliberately mispronouncing the /s and rs, he named the Julia Reidhead, a steel three-masted barque carrying bones for fertilizer, and the cop let him pass.

But when he got to the barque where Polish day laborers were unloading the reeking cargo, he plodded past and climbed the gangplank to a battered two-masted schooner in the lumber trade.

“Hey, chink?” shouted the mate. “Where the hell are you going?”

“Captain Yatkowski, chop-chop, clothes.”

“In his cabin.”

The captain was a hard-bitten waterman from Yonkers who smuggled bootleg whiskey, Chinese opium, and fugitives seeking friendlier jurisdictions across the river. Criminals who refused to pay up for passage to safer shores were found facedown in the Lower Bay, and word had gotten around the underworld never to cheat Captain Paul Yatkowski and his mate “Big Ben” Weitzman.

“What do you got, Chinaman?”

Wong Lee put down his sack and gently tugged open the drawstring. Then he felt carefully among the clean shirts and sheets and removed a round cookie tin. He was done speaking pidgin.

“I have everything I need,” he replied. Inside the tin was a rack made of a metal plate drilled with holes into which fit copper capsules so that they could be stored and carried without touching one another. There were thirty holes, each filled with a copper capsule as big around as a pencil and half as long. From the sulfur plug in the top of each extended two insulated “leg wires.” They were No. 6 high-grade mercury-fulminate detonators, the most powerful.

The secret to “Dragon Wong” Lee’s success in his earlier life blowing rock for the western railroads had been a combination of instinct and bravery. Working seven days a week on the cliffs, and being unusually observant, he had come to understand that any one stick of dynamite contained within its greasy wrapping more power than was supposed. It all depended upon how quickly it exploded. He had developed an innate understanding that multiple detonators fired simultaneously sped up the rate of detonation.

The faster a charge exploded, the greater the power, the more Wong could increase its shattering effect. Few civil engineers had understood that thirty years ago when dynamite was relatively new, still fewer illiterate Chinese peasants. Fewest of all had been brave enough, before electrically fired blasting caps reduced the danger, to take the chances that had to be taken when the only means of detonation was an unreliable burning fuse. So the real secret to big bangs was bravery.

“Do you have the electrical batteries?” Wong asked.

“I got ‘em,” said the schooner’s captain.

“And the wires?”

“All here. Now what?”

Wong savored the moment. The captain, a hard, brutal man who would knock his hat off in the street, was awed by Wong’s dark skills.

“Now what?” Wong repeated. “Now I get busy. You sail boat.”

A DOZEN RIFLE-TOTING RAILROAD police guarded a string of six boxcars on the powder pier. Three kept a sharp eye on the gang of day laborers hired to remove from one of the boxcars eight hundred fifty sixty-pound boxes of six-inch sticks that had been manufactured by the Du Pont de Nemours Powder Works in Wilmington, Delaware. Four more watched the Lillian I’s crew stow the dynamite in the lighter’s capacious hold. One, a bank auditor by training, harassed the lighter’s captain by poring repeatedly through his invoices and dispatches.

Lillian I’s master, Captain Whit Petrie, was in a foul mood. He had already missed a rising tide that would have sped his run upriver. Any more delay, he would be butting against the current the entire sixty miles to the traprock quarry at Sutton Point. On top of that, his new Southern Pacific bosses were even cheaper than his old New Jersey Central bosses, and even less inclined to spend money for necessary repairs on his beloved Oxford. Which they had renamed Lillian, against all tradition, when anyone with half a brain knew it was bad luck to change a vessel’s name, tempting the fates, and, even worse, reducing her to a number, Lillian I, as if she were not a finer steam lighter than Lillians II through XII.

“Say, here’s an idea,” said the exasperated captain. “I’ll go home and have supper with the wife. You boys run the boat.”

Not one cop cracked a smile. Only when they were absolutely sure that he was delivering a legitimate cargo of twenty-five tons of dynamite to a legitimate contractor blasting traprock out of the Hudson Valley cliffs-a run up the river, he pointed out repeatedly, that he had been doing for eight years-did they finally let him go.

Not so fast!

Just as they were casting off lines, a tall, grim-faced, yellow-haired dude in an expensive topcoat came marching up the powder pier, accompanied by a sidekick who looked like a Fifth Avenue swell except for the fine white lines of boxing scars creasing his brow. They jumped aboard, light on their feet as acrobats, and the yellow-haired man flashed a Van Dorn detective badge. He said he was Chief Investigator Isaac Bell, and this was Detective Archibald Abbott, and he demanded to see Petrie’s papers. The ice in Bell’s eyes told Petrie not to joke about going home for supper, and he waited patiently while his dispatches were read line by line for the tenth time that afternoon.

It was the sidekick, Abbott, who finally said, in a voice straight out of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, “All right, Cap, shove off. Sorry to hold you up, but we’re not taking any chances.” He beckoned a Southern Pacific Railroad bull with arms like a gorilla. “McColleen, you ride with Captain Petrie. He’s headed for the Upper Hudson Pulverized Slate Company at Sutton Point. He’s got twenty-five tons of dynamite in his hold. Anyone tries to change course, shoot the bastard!”

Then Abbott threw an arm around Isaac Bell’s shoulders and tried to steer him up the gangplank, and speaking in an entirely dif ferent voice that sounded like he truly was a Fifth Avenue swell, said, “That’s it, my friend. You’ve been at it full bore for a straight week. You’ve left good chaps in charge. We’re taking a night off.”

“No,” growled Bell, casting an anxious eye on the five remaining boxcars of the powder train. Dusk was gathering. Three railroad guards were aiming a water-cooled, tripod-mounted, belt-fed Vickers automatic machine gun at the gate that blocked the rails from the main freight yards.

“Mr. Van Dorn’s orders,” said Abbott. “He says if you won’t take the night off, you’re off the case and so am I. He’s not fooling, Isaac. He said he wants clear heads all around. He even bought us tickets to the Follies.”

“I thought it closed.”

“The show’s reopened for a special run while they’re getting it ready to take on tour. My friend the newspaper critic called it, quote, ‘The best melange of mirth, music, and pretty girls that has been seen here in many a year.’ Everyone in town is beating down doors to get tickets. We’ve got ‘em! Come. We’ll get dressed, and have a bite at my club first.”

“First,” Bell said grimly, “I want three fully loaded coal tenders parked, brake wheels locked, on the other side of that gate, in case some brain gets a bright idea to ram it with a locomotive.”