A voice whispered in Bell’s ear.
“It’s like church in here.”
47
ISAAC BELL MOVED ONLY HIS EYES.
By the flickering firelight, he saw a long, bony face with a vacant smile. The man was dressed in rags. His hands were empty, his eyes were puffy as if he had just woken, and Bell surmised that he had been nearby all along sleeping soundlessly. Now he was staring with wondering eyes up at the steel skeleton of the viaduct, and Bell saw what he meant by church. The interlocking girders, the dark sky speckled with stars, and the bonfire light conspired to form the image of a medieval cathedral lit by candles.
“Hello, Billy.”
“Huh?”
“You are Billy Collins?”
“Yeah. How’d you know?”
“You used to run with Eyes O’Shay.”
“Yeah… Poor Eyes… How’d you know?”
“Tommy told me.”
“Fat bastard. You a friend of his?”
“No.”
“Me neither.”
Though he was about Bell’s age, Billy Collins looked ancient. His hair was gray, his nose was dripping, and now his puffy eyes began leaking tears.
“You Tommy’s friend?” he asked again angrily.
“What did Tommy do to Eyes?” Bell asked.
“Tommy do to Eyes? Are you kidding? That fat bastard? Couldn’t do Eyes on his best day. You a friend of Tommy?”
“No. What happened to Eyes?”
“I don’t know.”
“They said you were with him.”
“Yeah. So?”
“So what happened?”
Billy closed his eyes, and murmured, “One of these days, I’m going to get back to doing trains.”
“What do you mean, Billy?” Bell asked.
“There’s good money doing trains, you get the right freight. Good money. I used to be rich doing trains. Then they got my little girl, and all of a sudden I couldn’t do ’ em anymore.” He looked at Bell, the firelight making his eyes look as mad as the tone of his voice. “Got jobs once. You know that?”
“No, I didn’t know that, Billy. What sort of jobs?”
“Got jobs. Sceneshifter in a theater. Once I was a stableman. I even worked as a dummy boy.”
“What is a dummy boy?” Bell asked.
“Railroad signalman. Eleventh Avenue. I rode a horse ahead of the train. It’s the law in New York. You can’t run a train on Eleventh Avenue without a guy on a horse. Only time the law ever gave me a job. I didn’t stick it.”
He started coughing. Consumption, Bell thought. The man is dying.
“Are you hungry, Billy?”
“Naw. I don’t get hungry.”
“Try this.” Bell handed him a sandwich. Billy Collins sniffed, held it near his mouth, and said, “You a friend of Tommy?”
“What did Tommy do to Eyes?”
“Nothing. Told you. Tommy couldn’t do Eyes. Nobody could do Eyes. Except that old man.”
“Old man?”
“Hard old man.”
“You mean his father?”
“Father? Eyes didn’t have no father. The old man. He’s what got us. Got us good.”
“What old man?”
“On Clarkson.”
“Clarkson Street?” Bell asked. “Downtown?”
“The Umbria was sailing for Liverpool.”
The Cunard liner. One of the old ones. “When?”
“That night.”
“When Eyes disappeared?”
“When we was kids,” Billy answered dreamily. He lay back and gazed up at the frame for the viaduct.
“The Umbria?” Bell prompted. “The steamship? The Cunard liner?”
“We seen this old man. He was rushing to Pier 40 like he’s late. Not even looking where he was going. We couldn’t believe our luck. We was down on Clarkson Street looking for drunk sailors to roll. Instead, here comes a rich old man in a rich green coat and sparkling rings on his fingers who could pay one hundred fifty dollars for his steamship ticket. It was dark and pouring down rain, not a soul on Clarkson. Eyes clipped on his thumb gouge in case he gave us trouble. We pounced like cats on our rich rat. Brian went to tear his rings from his fingers. I figured to find a wallet bulging with money in his fancy coat…”
“What happened?”
“He pulled a sword out of his cane.”
Billy Collins turned his gaze on Bell, his eyes wide with wonder. “A sword. We were so drunk, we couldn’t hardly get out of our own way. The old man swings his sword. I dodged it. He floored me with the cane. Tough old man, knew his business. Set me up. I dodged right into his cane. Heard a noise like dynamite going off inside my head. Then I was gone.”
Billy Collins sniffed the sandwich again and stared at it.
“Then what happened?” asked Bell.
“I woke up in the gutter, soaking wet and freezing cold.”
“What about Eyes?”
“Brian O’Shay was gone, and I never seen him again.”
“Did the old man kill Eyes O’Shay?”
“I didn’t see no blood.”
“Could the rain have washed the blood away?”
Collins begins to weep. “Vanished into thin air. Just like my little girl. Except she wasn’t hurting nobody. But Eyes and me, we sure as hell was trying.”
“What if I told you Eyes came back?”
“I rather you told me my little girl came back.”
“From where?”
“I don’t know. Tiny little thing.”
“Your child?”
“Child? I got no child… Eyes came back, I heard.”
“Yes, he did. Tommy saw him.”
“Didn’t come to see me… But who the hell would?” He closed his eyes and began to snore. The sandwich fell from his fingers.
“Billy.” Isaac Bell shook him awake. “Who was the old man?”
“Rich old guy in a green coat.” He slipped toward sleep again.
“Billy!”
“Leave me be.”
“Who was your little girl?”
Billy Collins screwed his eyes shut. “No one knows. No one remembers. Except the priest.”
“Which priest?”
“Father Jack.”
“What church?”
“St. Michael’s.”
AFTER BELL LEFT HIM, Billy Collins dreamed that a dog clamped its jaws around his foot. He kicked it with his other foot. The dog grew a second head and bit down on that foot, too. He awoke in terror. A figure was hunched over his feet, working at his laces. A goddamned hobo who wouldn’t have dared touch him in the old days was trying to steal his shoes.
“Hey!”
The hobo tugged harder. Billy sat up and tried to punch him in the head. The hobo dropped his shoe, picked up a broken board, and hit him. Billy saw stars. Stunned, he was vaguely aware that the guy was winding up with the board to hit him again. He knew the guy would hit him hard, but he couldn’t move.
Steel flashed. A knife materialized out of nowhere. The hobo screamed and fell back, holding his face. The knife flashed again. Another scream, and the hobo scrambled away on all fours, clambered to his feet, and ran for his life. Billy sank back. Hell of a dream. Everything was strange. Now he smelled perfume. It made him smile. He opened his eyes. A woman was kneeling over him, her hair brushing his face. Like an angel. It seemed he had died.
She leaned very close, so close he could feel her warm breath, and whispered, “What did you tell the detective, Billy?”
48
THE LADY OF THE HOUSE IS NOT A FORTUNE-TELLER,” Eyes O’Shay assured the anxious captain of his Holland submarine torpedo boat.
Hunt Hatch was not assured. “There’s signs all over the house advertising that Madame Nettie tells fortunes. She’ll have customers in and out all hours of the day and night. You’ve put us in a parlous situation keeping us here, O’Shay. I won’t stand for it.”
“The fortune-telling is a blind. She doesn’t tell fortunes.”
“What’s it a blind for?”
“A counterfeit ring.”
“Counterfeiters. Are you crazy, man?”
“They’re the last people in Bayonne who would complain to the cops. That’s why I put you here. And the woman who cooks your meals escaped from state prison. She won’t tell anyone either. Besides, they can’t see your boat from the houses. It’s screened by the barge.”
A mowed lawn spread from the counterfeiters’ frame house at the foot of Lord Street to the Kill Van Kull. The Kill was a narrow, deep-water channel between Staten Island and Bayonne. The barge was moored on the bank.
The Holland was under the barge. Its turret was accessible through an inside well. It was less than four miles from New York’s Upper Bay, and from there a clear five-mile run to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Hunt Hatch was not appeased. “Even if they can’t, the Kill is swarming with oyster catchers. I see them in their scows. They come right up to the barge.”
“They’re Staten Islanders,” O’Shay answered patiently. “They’re not looking for you. They’re looking to steal something.”
He gestured at the hills a thousand feet across the narrow strait. “Staten Island became part of New York City ten years ago. But the Staten Island scowmen haven’t heard the news. They’re the same coal pirates, smugglers, and thieves they’ve always been. I promise you, they don’t talk to the cops either.”
“I say we attack now and get it over with.”
“We attack,” O’Shay said quietly, “the moment I say we attack.”
“I am not risking life and freedom to get caught on your whims. I am captain of the ship, and I say we attack now before someone stumbles upon where we’ve hid the bloody thing.”
O’Shay stepped closer. He raised a hand as if to strike the captain. Hatch quickly lifted both hands, one to block the blow, one to counterpunch. He exposed his belly. By then O’Shay was flicking open a Butterflymesser with his other hand. He slid the long knife under Hatch’s sternum, plunged it to the hilt, jerked the razor-sharp blade down with all his might, and stepped back quickly before the intestines spilling out could stain his clothes.
The captain clutched at them, gasping with horror. His knees buckled. He fell on the rug. “But who will run the Holland?” he whispered.
“I’ve just promoted your first mate.”
“THIS IS THE NEWEST church building I have ever been in,” Isaac Bell told Father Jack Mulrooney.
The Church of St. Michael smelled of paint, shellac, and cement. The windows gleamed and the stones were fresh, unblemished by soot.
“We’ve just moved in,” said Father Jack. “The parishioners are pinching themselves wondering can it be true. In actual fact, the only way that the Pennsylvania Railroad Company could remove us from 31st Street to build the terminal yards without bringing the wrath of God-not to mention Tammany Hall and His Grace the Cardinal-down on their heads was to build us a brand-new church, rectory, convent, and school.”
Bell said, “I am a private detective, Father, with the Van Dorn Agency. I would like to ask you some questions about people who used to live in your parish.”
“If you want to talk, you must walk. I have my rounds, and you will see that our people live in less bright places than their new church. Come along.” He set off with a surprisingly springy step for a man his age, turned a corner, and plunged into a neighborhood that felt miles, not yards, from his brand-new church.
“You’ve served here long, Father?”
“Since the Draft Riots.”
“That’s forty-five years ago.”
“Some things have changed in the district, most have not. We are still poor.”
The priest entered a tenement with an elaborate carved stone portal and started up a steep flight of rickety stairs. He was breathing hard by the third floor. At the sixth, he paused to catch his breath, and when the wheezing stopped he knocked on a door, and called, “Good morning! It is Father Jack.”
A girl with a baby in her arms opened the door. “Thank you for coming, Father.”
“And how is your mother?”
“Not good, Father, not good at all.”
He left Bell in the front room. A single window that looked onto a yard crisscrossed with clotheslines in the shade admitted the stench of a privy six stories below. Bell folded a wad of dollar bills in his hand and slipped it to the girl as they left.
At the bottom of the stairs, Father Jack caught his breath again. “Who are you inquiring about?”
“Brian O’Shay and Billy Collins.”
“Brian’s long gone from here.”
“Fifteen years, I’ve been told.”
“If God ever blessed this district, it was the day O’Shay disappeared. I would never say such a thing lightly, but Brian O’Shay was Satan’s right-hand man.”
“I’ve heard he’s back.”
“I’ve heard rumors,” the priest said bleakly, and he led Bell back into the street.
“I saw Billy Collins last night.”
Father Jack stopped and looked at the tall detective with sudden respect. “Did you really? Down in the hole?”
“You know he’s there?”
“Billy has, shall we say, hit bottom. Where else would he go?”
“Who is his little girl?”
“His little girl?”
“He kept referring to his little girl. But he claimed he had no children.”
“That’s a dubious claim considering the youth he led. In those years, it was rare I baptized a carroty-topped infant and didn’t wonder if Billy was the father.”
“I wondered if his hair was red. It seemed mostly gray in the dim light.”
“Though I suppose,” Father Jack added with a thin smile, “Billy could claim with a certain degree of truth that he is not aware he had any children. It would have been an unusually brave girl who would have named him the father. Still, I see his point. Whoring and drunk since he was twelve years old, what would he remember?”
“He was adamant he had no children.”
“That would make the little girl his sister.”
“Of course. He weeps for her.”
“I’m sure he does.”
“What happened to her?” Bell asked.
“Wait for me here,” the priest said. “I’ll only be a moment.” He entered a building and came out shortly. As they continued along the block, Father Jack said, “There are wicked men living in this community who live by stealing from poor, ignorant people. They’ll steal their money, and if they have no money they will steal their drink. If they have no drink, they’ll steal their children. Whatever the wicked can sell or use themselves. The child was kidnapped.”
“Billy’s sister?”
“Snatched from the street-no more than five years old-and never seen again. Surely she courses through Billy’s brain when he injects the morphine. Where was he when she was stolen? Where was he ever when the poor babe was needful? He looks back now and loves the idea of that wee child. More than he ever loved the child herself.”
The old priest shook his head in anger and disgust. “When I think of the nights I prayed for that child… and all the children like her.”
Bell waited, sensing a natural ebullience in the old man that would rise to the surface. And it did after a while. His expression brightened.
“In truth, it was Brian O’Shay who cared for that little girl.”
“Eyes O’Shay?”
“He looked after her when Billy and his shiftless parents were drunk.” Father Jack lowered his voice. “They say that O’Shay beat her father to death for sins against the child only the Devil could imagine. She was the only soul Brian O’Shay ever loved. It was a blessing that he never knew what happened to her.”
“Could Brian O’Shay have kidnapped her?”
“Never in this life! Even if he weren’t long gone to Hell.”
“But what if he was not killed when he vanished? What if he came back? Could he have kidnappe
d her?”
“He would never hurt her,” said the priest.
“Evil men do evil, Father. You’ve told me how wicked he was.”
“Even the most wicked man has a streak of God in him.” The priest took Bell’s arm. “If you remember that, you will be a better detective. And a better man. That wee child was Brian O’Shay’s streak of God.”
“Was her name Katherine?”
Father Jack looked at him curiously.
“Why do you say that?”
“I don’t really know. But I’m asking you, was it?”
Father Jack started to answer. A pistol shot cracked from a tenement roof. The priest tumbled to the pavement. A second shot drilled the space Bell had occupied an instant before. He was already rolling across the sidewalk, drawing his Browning, snapping to his knees, raising his weapon to fire.
But all he could see were women and children screaming from their windows that their priest was murdered.
“I WANT A DIRECT telephone connection to the chief of the Baltimore office now!” Isaac Bell shouted as he stalked into Van Dorn headquarters. “Tell him to have his Katherine Dee file on his desk.”
It took an hour for Baltimore to telephone back. “Bell? Sorry I took so long. Raining like hell again, half the city’s flooded. You’ll get yours, it’s another nor’easter.”
“I want to know exactly who Katherine Dee is and I want to know now.”
“Well, as we reported, her father went back to Ireland with a boat-load of dough he made building schools for the diocese and took her with him.”
“I know that already. And when he died, she went to a convent school in Switzerland. What school?”
“Let me go through this while we’re talking. I’ve got it right here in front of me. The boys have brought it up-to-date since we sent our last report to New York… Takes so long back and forth to Dublin… Let’s see here… Well, I’ll be. No, no, no, that can’t be.”
“What?”
“Some damned fool got confused. Says the daughter died, too. That can’t be. We’ve got records of her at the school. Mr. Bell, let me get back to you on this.”
The Spy Page 32