“Immediately,” said Bell, and hung up.
Archie walked in, still ruddy-faced with Indian war paint. “You look like death, Isaac.”
“Where’s Marion?”
“Upstairs.” Bell had rented a suite for the days she was in New York. “We got rained out again. Are you O.K.? What happened to you?”
“A priest was gunned down in front of my eyes. For talking to me.”
“The spy?”
“Who else? The block was swarming with cops, but he got clean away.”
An apprentice approached the grim-faced detectives warily. “Messenger left this at Reception, Mr. Bell.”
Bell tore it open. On Waldorf-Astoria stationery Erhard Riker had written:
FOUND IT!
PERFECTION FOR THE PERFECT FIANCÉE!!
I’ll be at Solomon Barlowe’s Jewelry Shop around three o’clock with a brilliant emerald, if this finds you in New York.
Best wishes,
Erhard Riker
49
BELL THREW RIKER’S NOTE ON THE DESK.
Archie picked it up and read it. “The ring for fair Marion?”
“It’ll keep.”
“Go.”
“I’m waiting to hear from Baltimore.”
Archie said, “Take an hour. Cool off. I’ll talk to Baltimore if they call before you’re back. Say, why don’t you take Marion with you? All this rain is making her stir-crazy. She’s raving about going to California to shoot movies in the sunshine. Neglecting to explain where she’d find the actors. Go! Let some steam off. You found Collins. You’ve got two hundred men looking for O’Shay. And the Navy and Harbor Squad hunting torpedoes. I’ll cover for you.”
Bell stood up. “Just an hour. Back soon.”
“If she likes it, steal an extra ten minutes to buy her a glass of champagne.”
THEY TOOK THE SUBWAY downtown and walked rain-swept streets to Maiden Lane. Barlowe’s shop cast a warm glow into the dreary afternoon. “Are you sure you want to do this?” Marion asked as they neared the door.
“What do you mean?”
“Once you slip a ring on a girl’s finger, it’s pretty hard to get out of it.”
They were holding hands. Bell pulled her close. Her eyes were bright with laughter. Rain and mist gilded the wisps of hair that escaped her hat. “Houdini couldn’t get out of this one,” he said, and kissed her on the mouth. “Not that he’d want to.”
They entered the shop.
Erhard Riker and Solomon Barlowe were bent over the counter, each with a jeweler’s loupe screwed in his eye. Riker looked up, smiling. He extended his hand to Bell, and said to Marion, “I am afraid that you taxed your fiancé’s powers of observation. Try as he might-and I assure you he tried mightily-he was hard put to convey the fullness of your beauty.”
Marion said, “You tax my power of speech. Thank you.”
Riker bowed over Marion’s hand, kissed it, and stepped back, smoothing his mustache and slipping his thumb into his vest pocket. Barlowe whispered to Bell, “It is most unusual, sir, for a gentleman to show the ring to his fiancée before he has purchased it.”
“Miss Morgan is a most unusual fiancée.”
Something ticked against the window. On the sidewalk, ignoring the rain, laughing young men in black derbies were batting a badminton shuttlecock with their hands.
“You should call a constable before they break the glass,” said Riker.
Solomon Barlowe shrugged. “College boys. This summer, they’ll meet girls. Next spring, they’ll be buying engagement rings.”
“Here is the making of yours, Miss Morgan,” said Riker. He drew a slim leather case from his pocket, opened it, and removed a folded sheet of white paper. Opening the paper, he let slide onto a demonstration panel of white velvet an emerald-flawless, fiery, and filled with life.
The jeweler Solomon Barlowe gasped.
Isaac Bell thought it shimmered like a green flame.
Marion Morgan said, “It is certainly very bright.”
“Mr. Barlowe proposes setting it in a simple Art Nouveau ring,” said Erhard Riker.
“I have prepared some sketches,” said Barlowe.
Isaac Bell watched Marion study the emerald. He said, “I have the impression you do not love it.”
“My dear, I will wear anything you like.”
“But you would prefer something else.”
“It’s very beautiful. But since you ask, I would prefer a softer green-rich yet quiet, like the loden green of Mr. Riker’s coat. Is there such a gem, Mr. Riker?”
“There is a blue-gray shade of tourmaline found in Brazil. It is very rare. And extremely difficult to cut.”
Marion grinned at Bell. “It would be less expensive to buy me a nice loden coat like Mr. Riker’s…” Her voice trailed off. She was about to ask, Isaac, what’s the matter? Instead, she moved instinctively closer to him.
Bell was staring at Riker’s coat. “A rich green coat,” he said softly. “An old man in a rich green coat with rings on his fingers.” He fixed a cold gaze on Riker’s gem-studded cane.
“I’ve always admired that cane of yours, Herr Riker.”
“It was a gift from my father.”
“May I see it?”
Riker tossed it to Bell. Bell weighed it in his hands, testing its balance and heft. He closed one hand around the gold-and-gem head, twisted it with a flick of his wrists, and drew out a gleaming sword.
Erhard Riker shrugged. “One cannot be too careful in my business.”
Bell held the blade to the light. It was honed so sharply that no light gleamed on the edge. He hefted the cane, the scabbard that had held it. “Heavy. You wouldn’t even need the sword. You could floor a man with this.”
Bell watched Riker eye him warily as if he were wondering whether he had heard Bell correctly or was just taking his measure. Wondering, Do I have to fight? At last Riker spoke. “Two men, if you were faster than you looked.”
“And if the men were drunk.” Bell said, moving swiftly to shield Marion. It was suddenly clear to both men that they were discussing the night that Eyes O’Shay and Billy Collins had tried to rob the senior Mr. Riker.
Riker answered in a conversational voice, although his eyes were focused as hard on Bell’s as Bell’s were on his.
“I awakened,” he said, “in a first-class cabin on the high seas. The old man was tough as nails. But kind to me. Anything I wanted was mine for the asking. The food on that ship was like what I had heard people say that Diamond Jim Brady ate. Beefsteaks, oysters, roast ducks, wine from crystal glasses. I felt like I had arrived in Heaven. Of course, I wondered what did he want back for all that? But all he ever asked was that I go to school and learn to be a gentleman. He sent me to public school in England, and the finest universities in Germany.”
“Why didn’t Mr. Riker leave you in the gutter with Billy Collins?”
“You’ve spoken with Billy? Of course. How is he?”
“Still in the gutter. Why didn’t Riker leave you there?”
“He was grieving for his son who had died of influenza. He wanted another.”
“And you were available.”
“I was garbage. I could barely read. But he saw something in me no one else could see.”
“And you repaid him by becoming a murderer and a spy.”
“I repaid him,” Riker said, his shoulders squared, his head held high.
“You’re proud of being a murderer and a spy?” Isaac Bell asked scornfully.
“You’re a privileged child, Isaac Bell. There are things you can never know. I repaid him. I say it with pride.”
“I say with equal pride that I arrest you for murder, Brian O’Shay.”
Katherine Dee darted through the curtain that screened the back room, slid her arm around Marion’s throat, and pressed her thumb to Marion’s eye.
50
BRIAN TAUGHT ME THIS TRICK FOR MY TWELFTH BIRTHDAY. He even gave me my own gouge. It’s made of pure gold, see?” T
he sharpened metal fit her thumb like a claw.
“Stay perfectly still,” Bell told Marion. “Do not struggle. Mr. O’Shay has the upper hand.”
“Obey your fiancé,” said Katherine Dee.
Eyes O’Shay said, “To answer your question, Bell, one of the ways I repaid the old man’s kindness was by rescuing Katherine as he had rescued me. Katherine is educated, accomplished, and free. No one can hurt her.”
“Educated, accomplished, free, and lethal,” said Bell.
With her other hand Katherine drew a pistol.
“Another birthday present?”
“Give Brian his sword, Mr. Bell, before your fiancée is blinded and I shoot you.”
Bell flicked the sword haft at O’Shay. As he expected, the spy was too sharp to fall for that trick. O’Shay caught it coolly without his eyes leaving Bell’s. But when he started to sheathe it, he glanced down to make sure the tip went into the sheath instead of piercing his hand. Bell was waiting for that split second of distraction. He kicked with lightning speed.
The sharp toe of his boot struck Katherine Dee’s ulnar nerve, which was drawn tightly over her flexed elbow. She cried out in startled pain and could not prevent her hand from opening convulsively. Her thumb splayed away from Marion’s eye.
But the gouge remained attached.
Marion tried to pull away from the smaller woman. Katherine whipped the gouge back at her face. Bell had his derringer in his hand by then and was squeezing the trigger. O’Shay screamed a piercing “No!” and smashed his cane down on Bell’s arm. The gunshot was deafening in the confined space. Solomon Barlowe dove to the floor. Marion cried out, and Bell thought he had shot her. But it was Katherine Dee who fell.
O’Shay grabbed the girl under one powerful arm and flung the door open. Bell lunged for them. He tripped over Solomon Barlowe. By the time he had hurled himself through the door, he saw O’Shay pushing Katherine into a Packard driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Gunmen in black derbies stepped from behind the car and from doorways, aiming pistols.
“Marion, get down!” Bell roared. The pretty-boy bruisers of Riker & Riker’s private protection agency unleashed a scathing hail of gunfire. Wild ricochets smashed glass and blasted stone dust from the walls and diamonds from the window display. Pedestrians dropped to the sidewalk. Bell fired back as fast as he could pull the trigger. He heard the Packard roar away. He fired again, emptying his Browning. The big car screeched around a corner and crashed into something. But when the lead stopped flying and he galloped after it, the Packard was smoldering against a lamppost, and O’Shay, Katherine Dee, and their gunmen had gotten away. Bell ran back into the jewelry shop, his heart in his throat. Solomon Barlowe was groaning and holding his leg. Marion was on the floor behind the counter, eyes wide open.
Alive!
He knelt beside her. “Are you hit?”
She ran a hand over her face. Her skin was dead white. “I don’t think so,” she said in a small voice.
“Are you all right?”
“Where are they?”
“Got away. Don’t worry. They won’t get far.”
She was clenching something in her tightly closed fist, which she now pressed to her chest.
“What is that?”
Slowly, painfully, she forced her fingers to open. Nestled in her palm was the emerald, green and mysterious as the eye of a cat.
“I thought you didn’t like it,” Bell said.
Marion’s beautiful eyes roved across the broken glass and the walls pocked with bullet holes. “I’m not even scratched. Neither are you. It’s our lucky charm.”
“THE ENTIRE NEWARK fine-jewelry industry is in shock,” said Morris Weintraub, the stocky, white-haired patrician owner of Newark, New Jersey’s largest belt-buckle factory. “I’ve been buying gemstones from Riker and Riker since the Civil War. Back when there was only one Riker.”
“Did you know that Erhard Riker was adopted?”
“You don’t say? No, I didn’t.” Weintraub gazed across a sea of workbenches where jewelers labored in pure north light streaming through tall windows A speculative smile played on his lips, and he stroked his chin. “That explains a lot.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bell.
“He was such a nice man.”
“The father?”
“No! His father was a cold bastard.”
Bell exchanged incredulous glances with Archie Abbott.
The factory owner noticed. “I am a Jew,” he explained. “I know when a man dislikes me because I am a Jew. The father hid his hatred in order to conduct business, but hatred seeps out. He could not hide it completely. The son did not hate me. He was not so European as the old man.”
Bell and Archie exchanged another look. Weintraub said, “I mean, he acted like a good man. He was a gentleman in business and kindly in person. He is one of the very few people I buy from who I would invite into my own home. Not a man who would shoot up a jewelry shop on Maiden Lane. Not a bigot like his father.”
Archie said, “So I suppose you were not that upset when his father was killed in South Africa.”
“Nor was I surprised.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Archie, and Issac Bell said sharply, “What do you mean by that?”
“I used to joke to my wife, ‘Herr Riker is a German agent.’ ”
“What made you say that?”
“He couldn’t resist boasting to me of his travels. But I noticed over many years that somehow his trips always led him to where Germany was making trouble. In 1870, he just happened to be in Alsace-Lorraine when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. He was on the island of Samoa in ’eighty-one when the United States, England, and Germany instigated their civil war. He was in Zanzibar when Germany stole her so-called East African Protectorate. He was in China when Germany took Tsingtao, and in South Africa when the Kaiser egged on the Boers fighting England.”
“Where,” Archie noted, “he was killed.”
“In an engagement led by General Smuts himself,” said Isaac Bell. “If he wasn’t a German spy, he was a master of coincidence. Thank you, Mr. Weintraub. You have been very helpful.”
On their way back to New York, Bell told Archie, “When I accused O’Shay of repaying the man who adopted him by becoming a murderer and a spy, he answered that rescuing Katherine from Hell’s Kitchen was ‘one’ of the ways he repaid him. He said, ‘I say it with pride.’ I realize now that he was bragging that he followed in his adopted father’s footsteps.”
“If the father who adopted him was a spy, does that mean that Riker-O’Shay spies for Germany? He was born in America. He was adopted by a German father. He attended public school in England and university in Germany. Where are his loyalties?”
“He’s a gangster,” said Bell. “He has no loyalties.”
“Where can he go now that he’s exposed?”
“Anywhere they’ll take him in. But not before he commits a final crime to benefit the nation that will protect a criminal.”
“Using those torpedoes,” said Archie.
“Against what?” wondered Bell.
TED WHITMARK WAS WAITING in the Van Dorn reception room when Bell got back to the Knickerbocker. He was holding his hat on his knees and could not meet Bell’s eye as he asked, “Is there someplace private we can talk, Mr. Bell?”
“Come on in,” Bell said, noting that Whitmark’s Harvard College tie was askew, his shoes scuffed, and his trousers in need of a pressing. He led him to his desk and moved a chair alongside so they could sit close and not be overheard. Whitmark sat, worrying his hands, gnawing his lip.
“How is Dorothy?” Bell asked to put him at ease.
“Well… she’s one of the things I want to talk about. But I’ll get to the main event first, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“You see, I, uh, I play cards. Often…”
“You gamble.”
“Yes. I gamble. And sometimes I gamble too much. I’ll hit a losing streak and,
before I know it, I’m in over my head. All I’m trying to do is win back some of my losses, but sometimes it only gets worse.”
“Are you in a losing streak at the moment?” Bell asked.
“It looks that way. Yes, you could say that.” Again he fell silent.
“Can I assume that Dorothy is upset with this?”
“Well, yes, but that’s the least of it. I’ve been something of a fool. I’ve done several really stupid things. I thought I’d learned my lesson in San Francisco.”
“What happened in San Francisco?”
“I dodged a bullet out there, thanks to you.”
“What do you mean?” Bell asked, suddenly alert to a situation more serious than he had assumed.
“I mean when you stopped that cart from blowing up the Mare Island magazine, you saved my life. There would have been lot of innocent folks killed, and they would have been on my head.”
“Explain,” Bell said tersely.
“I gave them the pass and paperwork to get into the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.”
“Why?”
“I owed so much money. They were going to kill me.”
“Who?”
“Well, Commodore Tommy Thompson at first. Here in New York. Then he sold my debt to a guy who had a casino in the Barbary Coast and I lost more out there and he was going to kill me. He said they’d do it slow. But all I had to do to get out of it was give him one of my wagon passes and my company invoices and show ’em the ropes and everything. I know what you’re thinking, that I allowed a saboteur onto the base, but I didn’t realize that was what they wanted. I thought it was about them landing a big contract. I thought they were doing it for the money.”
“You hoped they were doing it for the money,” Isaac Bell retorted coldly.
Ted Whitmark hung his head. When he finally looked up again, he had tears in his eyes. “That’s what I hoped this time, too. But I’m scared it isn’t, and something tells me this time will be worse.”
The intercommunicating phone on Bell’s desk rang. He snatched it up. “What?”
The Spy Page 33