Bell stared at his old friend. “By any chance were they the ones armed with TNT?”
“Wheeler is certain that those with TNT warheads are the ones missing.”
“Do you agree?”
“He had serial numbers. We found them on the remains of the cowlings. Found them all except those four—they’d been set aside for a torpedo boat to fire on the Test Range. It would have been too much of a coincidence if they’d been the only ones blown completely to smithereens.”
“And you’re sure the explosion wasn’t an accident?”
“I talked to the Navy—found an Annapolis man I knew at prep school. Our specialist confirmed. Riley from Boston, you know him. There is no doubt.”
“They are the Holy Grail of torpedoes,” Bell said, grimly. “Fast, long-range, silent propulsion married to immensely more powerful warheads.”
“The spy got the best. The only good news is that Wheeler can make more of them. The English are livid. They won’t sell us any more, but I learned that Ron Wheeler and his boys already started making unauthorized copies for the Navy. In the meantime, the spy got himself the latest British propulsion armed with the latest American warheads—priceless secrets to sell to the highest bidder.”
“Or deadly weapons to attack.”
“Attack? How would he fire them?” asked Archie. “Even a spy as cunning as this one can’t get his hands on a battleship.”
Isaac Bell said, “I would not put it past him to acquire a small torpedo boat.”
The old friends locked gazes. The laughter fled Archie’s green eyes. Bell’s blue turned dark as stone. He and Joseph Van Dorn had already blanketed Captain Falconer’s key engineers with protection. And Van Dorn operatives had infiltrated the Brooklyn Navy Yard workforce. But they both knew that neither the arrest of the Chinese spy nor that of the head of the Gopher Gang would stop Eyes O’Shay. The spy would easily rebuild his fluid organization. And with the Great White Fleet beyond his reach at sea, he would resume his attacks on future American battleships.
“We better talk to Mr. Van Dorn.”
“What are you going to tell him?”
“We need manpower to track down those torpedoes. He’s got to convince the Navy, Coast Guard, and the police Harbor Squads in every city with a battleship yard—Camden, Philadelphia; Quincy, Fore River, Massachusetts; Bath Iron Works, Maine; Brooklyn—that the threat is deadly. Then I’m going repeat what I’ve been telling him all along. This is, first and foremost, a murder case. It will take old-fashioned detective work to hang Eyes O’Shay. We’ll start with Billy Collins.”
ISAAC BELL LEFT the Hotel Knickerbocker by the kitchen door. He dipped his fingers in a vat of used beef fat waiting to be picked up by the rendering plant and rubbed it into his hair. In the alley, down-on-their-luck men were waiting on the breadline. He astonished one, who despaired of raising a nickel to flop indoors on this chilly night that threatened rain, by offering five dollars for his battered slouch hat. Offered the same amount, a man almost as tall as the detective parted eagerly with his ragged coat.
Bell palmed a rusty revolver with three slugs in it and shifted it from his trousers into the coat. He pulled the hat low over his brow, worked his golden hair under it, and buttoned the coat to his chin. Then he shoved his hands in his pockets, bowed his head, and stepped out of the alley onto Broadway. A cop told him to move along.
For the fifth time in five days, he wandered Hell’s Kitchen.
He was learning its rhythms, where and when the slum blocks were busy, the streets rumbling with wagons and trucks, the sidewalks crowded, as men streamed into saloons, women into churches, and children roamed, ignoring mothers shouting from tenement windows. He had previously wandered from Ninth Avenue to the river and from the Pennsylvania Railroad Station construction site at 33rd to the 60th Street rail yards. But he hadn’t found the “hop fiend,” Billy Collins, who might lead him to Eyes O’Shay.
So today Isaac Bell was taking a different tack.
As part of his disguise, he limped, left foot dragging slightly, scuffing the shine off his boots as he crossed curbs and streetcar tracks. A coal truck backing to a cellar chute blocked the sidewalk. Bell trailed his fingers along its sooty side and stroked his mustache. He repeated the exercise when he passed an ash can, still warm, and ran his fingers through the hair that escaped from the slouch hat. He inspected his reflection in a window. His eyes glittered too brightly in a worn face. He cast his gaze downward, plucked a clump of straw out of the gutter, and rubbed it to his sleeves until it appeared that he had slept in his coat. They never look a dirty man in the face, Scully taught the apprentices.
He kept checking his image in windows, which, as he headed toward the river, got smaller and dirtier. He knelt beside an empty barrel standing in a puddle outside a saloon, pretended to tie his shoe, and continued on, his trousers smelling of stale beer. The deeper into the slum he wandered, the more slowly he walked, the lower he stooped—a weary, aimless man lost in the crowds.
A young tough wearing a tight suit and red derby blocked his path. “What do you got for me, Gramps? Come on! Hand it over.”
Isaac Bell resisted the impulse to floor him, dug deep in his coat, and surrendered a nickel.
The tough shoved past.
“Wait!” Bell called.
“What?” The tough spun around. “What? What do want?”
“Do you know a fellow named Billy Collins?”
The tough hung a blank expression on his face. “Who?” He was a kid, Bell realized, barely into his teens. An infant when Tommy Thompson and Billy Collins were running with Eyes O’Shay.
“Billy Collins. Tall, skinny fellow. Ginger hair. Maybe turning gray.”
“Never heard of him.”
“Skin and bones,” Bell said, repeating what Harry Warren and his boys had speculated the opium and morphine addict would look like after all these years. They knew he was still alive, or had been within the week. “Probably missing teeth.”
“Where you from, Gramps?”
“Chicago.”
“Yeah, well there’s a lot of guys around here got no teeth. You’re next.” He raised a bony fist. “Get out of here! Run, old man. Run.”
Bell said, “Billy Collins used to run with Tommy Thompson and Eyes O’Shay when they were kids.”
The thug backed up a step. “You with the Gophers?”
“I’m just looking for Billy Collins.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not the only one.” He hurried away, calling over his shoulder, “Everybody’s asking about him.”
They should be, Bell thought. Considering what it was costing the agency. In addition to Harry Warren’s boys and Harry’s informants, he had two hundred railroad cops asking the same question every time they slugged it out with Gophers attempting to rob freight cars. Bell kept asking himself, Where does a hop fiend hide? Where does he sleep? Where does he eat? Where does he get his dope? How come no one saw him in a district where everyone knew everyone?
There had been sightings near Collins’s known dens, several by a coal pocket that replenished locomotive tenders in the 38th Street yards, twice around an abandoned caboose at 60th Street. Picked men were watching both. And Bell had a feeling he himself had actually glimpsed Collins through a wind-spun swirl of locomotive smoke—a rail-thin figure had flitted between freight cars, and Bell had run full tilt after him only to find smoke.
Since then, the one man who might know where O’Shay disappeared to fifteen years ago hadn’t shown up at either den. On the plus side, they’d had enough reports to know he was alive, and he was unlikely to leave Hell’s Kitchen.
Eyes O’Shay’s location was another story. Everyone over the age of thirty had heard the name. No one had seen him in fifteen years. Some people had heard he was back. No one admitted to laying eyes on him. But Bell knew a man described by Tommy Thompson as “duded up like a Fifth Avenue swell” could sleep and eat anywhere he chose.
45
TAXICAB, SI
R?” THE WALDORF-ASTORIA’S DOORMAN ASKED of a hotel guest stepping out in a top hat and loden green frock coat.
“I will promenade,” said Eyes O’Shay.
Wielding a jewel-headed walking stick, he strolled up Fifth Avenue, pausing like a tourist to admire mansions and peering into shopwindows. When he was reasonably sure that he wasn’t being followed, he entered St. Patrick’s Cathedral through the great Gothic arch in front. In the nave, he genuflected with the ease of a daily habit, dropped coins in the poor box, and lighted candles. Then he threw back his head and reflected upon the stained glass in the rose window, imitating the proud gaze of a parishioner who had contributed handsomely to the installation fund.
Since Isaac Bell nailed Tommy Thompson, he had to assume that every Van Dorn in New York, plus two hundred railway police, and the Devil himself knew how many paid informants, were hunting him, or soon would be. He exited the cathedral out the back, through the boardwalks and scaffolding where brick and stone masons were building the Lady Chapel, and strode onto Madison Avenue.
He headed up Madison, still watching his back, turned onto 55th, and stopped in the St. Regis Hotel. He had a drink in the bar and chatted with the bartender, whom he always tipped lavishly, while he watched the lobby. Then he tipped a bellboy to let him out the service entrance.
Moments later, he walked into the Plaza Hotel. He stopped at the Palm Court in the middle of the ground floor. The people seated around small tables for the elaborate afternoon tea were mothers with children, aunts and nieces, and here and there an older gentleman enthralled by a daughter. The maître d’ bowed low.
“Your usual table, Herr Riker?”
“Thank you.”
Herr Riker’s usual table let him watch the lobby in two directions while screening himself with a jungle of potted palms that would have given Dr. Livingstone and Henry Stanley pause.
“Will your ward be joining you, sir?”
“It is my fond hope,” he replied with a courtly smile. “Tell your waiter that we will have only sweets at our table. None of those little sandwiches. Only cakes and cream.”
“Of course, Herr Riker. As always, Herr Riker.”
Katherine was late, as usual, and he used the time to rehearse for what he knew would be a difficult discussion. He felt as ready as he could be when she stepped off the elevator. Her tea gown was a cloud of blue silk that matched her eyes and complemented her hair.
O’Shay rose as she approached his table, taking her gloved hands in his and saying, “You are the prettiest girl, Miss Dee.”
“Thank you, Herr Riker.”
Katherine Dee smiled and dimpled. But when she sat, she looked him full in the face in her direct way, and said, “You look very serious—ward-and-guardian serious. What are you up to, Brian?”
“Self-annointed ‘good warriors’ who fight ‘good wars’ accuse me with deep disdain of being a mercenary. I take it as a testament to my intelligence. Because for a mercenary the war is over when he says it is over. He retires a victor.”
“I hope you’ve ordered whiskey instead of tea,” she said. O’Shay smiled. “Yes, I know I’m bloviating. I am attempting to tell you that we are in the endgame, dearest.”
“What do you mean?”
“It is time to vanish. We will go out—and lay our future—with a bang they’ll never forget.”
“Where?”
“Where they will treat us like gold.”
“Oh, not Germany!”
“Of course Germany. What democracy would take us in?”
“We could go to Russia?”
“Russia is a powder keg waiting for a match. I am not about to take you out of the frying pan into a revolution.”
“Oh, Brian.”
“We will live like kings. And queens. We will be very rich, and we will marry you to royalty . . . What is it? Why are you crying?”
“I’m not crying,” she said, her blue eyes brimming.
“What is the matter?”
“I don’t want to marry a prince.”
“Would you settle for a Prussian noble with a thousand-year-old castle?”
“Stop it!”
“I have one in mind. He is handsome, remarkably bright, considering his lineage, and surprisingly gentle. His mother could prove tiresome, but there is a stable teeming with Arabian horses and a lovely summer place on the Baltic where a girl could sail to her heart’s content. Even practice for the Olympic yachting event . . . Why are you crying?”
Katherine Dee put both small hands on the table and spoke in a clear, even voice. “I want to marry you.”
“Dear, dear Katherine. That would be like a marrying your own brother.”
“I don’t care. Besides, you’re not my brother. You only act like one.”
“I am your guardian,” he said. “I have pledged that no one will ever hurt you.”
“What do you think you’re doing now?”
“Stop this silliness about marrying me. You know I love you. But not that way.”
Tears hovered on her lashes like diamonds.
He passed her a handkerchief. “Dry your eyes. We have work to do.”
She dabbed, lifting her tears onto the linen. “I thought we were leaving.”
“Leaving with a bang requires work.”
“What am I supposed to do?” she asked sullenly.
“I can’t let Isaac Bell get in my way this time.”
“Why don’t I kill him?”
O’Shay nodded thoughtfully. Katherine was lethal, a finely tuned machine unencumbered by remorse or regret. But every machine had its physical limits. “You would only get hurt. Bell is too much like me, a man not easily killed. No, I won’t have you risk trying to kill him. But I do want him distracted.”
“Do you want me to seduce him?” asked Katherine. She flinched from the sudden fury distorting O’Shay’s face.
“Have I ever asked you to do such a thing?”
“No.”
“Would I ever ask you?”
“No.”
“It destroys me that you could say such a thing.”
“I am sorry, Brian. I didn’t think.” She reached for his hand. He pulled away, his normally bland face red, his lips compressed in a hard line, his eyes wintery.
“Brian, I am not exactly a schoolgirl.”
“Whatever seductions you allow yourself are your business,” he said coldly. “I have ensured that you possess the means and manner to indulge yourself as only privileged women can. Society will never tell you what you can do and not do. But I want it clearly understood that I would never use you that way.”
“What way? As a seductress? Or an indulgence?”
“Young lady, you are beginning to annoy me.”
Katherine Dee ignored the very dangerous tone in his voice because she knew he was too careful to break up the furniture in the Palm Court. “Stop calling me that. You’re only ten years older than I am.”
“Twelve. And mine are old years, while I have moved heaven and earth to make yours young years.”
Waiters bustled up. Ward and guardian sat in stony silence until the cakes were spread and tea poured.
“How do you want me to distract him?” When he started talking that way there was nothing to do but go along.
“The fiancée is the key.”
“She is suspicious of me.”
“How do you mean?” O’Shay asked sharply.
“At the Michigan launching, when I tried to get close, she pulled back. She senses something in me that frightens her.”
“Perhaps she is psychical,” said O’Shay, “and reads your mind.” An expression as desolate as it was wise transformed Katherine Dee’s pretty face into a lifeless mask of ancient marble. “She reads my heart.”
46
YOUR FIANCEÉE IS CALLING ON THE TELEPHONE, MR. BELL.”
The tall Van Dorn detective was standing over his desk in the Knickerbocker, impatiently sifting reports for some decent news on the whereabouts of Eyes O?
??Shay or the stolen torpedoes before he hit the streets hunting Billy Collins again.
“This is a nice surprise.”
“I’m across the street at Hammerstein’s Victoria Theatre,” said Marion Morgan.
“Are you all right?” She didn’t sound all right. Her voice was tight with tension.
“Could you stop by when you have a moment?”
“I’ll be right there.”
“They’ll let you in the stage door.”
Bell ran down the Knickerbocker’s grand staircase three steps at a time and set off a blast of horns, bells, and angry shouts as he ran through the moving wall of autos, streetcars, and horse carts that blocked Broadway. Sixty seconds after dropping the telephone, he pounded on the Victoria’s stage door.
“Miss Morgan is waiting for you in the house, Mr. Bell. Through there. Go in quietly, please. They’re rehearsing.”
A high-speed, rhythmic tapping echoed from the stage, and when he flung open the door he was surprised to discover that the source of all the noise was a small boy and a tall girl dancing in shoes with wooden soles. He exhaled in relief when he saw Marion sitting alone, safe and sound, in the eighth row of the partially darkened empty house. She pressed a finger to her lips. Bell glided up the aisle and sat beside her, and she took his hand, and whispered, “Oh, my darling, I’m so glad you’re here.”
“What happened.”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. They’re almost done.”
The orchestra, which had been waiting silently, burst into a crescendo, and the dance was over. The children were instantly surrounded by the director, the stage manager, costumers, and their mother.
“Aren’t they wonderful? I found them on the Orpheum Circuit in San Francisco. The top vaudeville circuit. I’ve persuaded their mother to let them appear in my new movie.”
“What happened to your movie about the bank robbers?”
“The detective’s girlfriend caught them.”
“I suspected she would. What’s wrong? You don’t sound yourself. What happened?”
“I’m not sure. I may be silly, but it seemed sensible to call you. Did you ever meet Katherine Dee?”