“There’s a lady out here to see you and the gent you’re with. Miss Dorothy Langner. Should I let her in?”
“No. Tell her I’ll be out there shortly.” He hung up. “Continue, Ted. What has happened this time?”
“They want me to turn over one of my trucks going into the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”
“Who?”
“This smooth guy named O’Shay. I heard somebody call him Eyes. Must be his nickname. Do you know who I mean?”
“When do they want the truck?”
“Tomorrow. When the New Hampshire is loading food and munitions. She just finished her shakedown, and she’ll be ferrying a Marine Expeditionary Regiment to Panama to keep the Canal Zone election peaceful. My New York outfit got the provisions contract.”
“How big a truck?”
“The biggest.”
“Big enough to carry a couple of torpedoes?”
Whitmark chewed his lip. “Oh, God. Is that what they want it for?”
The door from the reception room opened, and Harry Warren walked in. Bell was turning back to Ted Whitmark when a sudden motion at the door caught his eye and he saw Dorothy Langner in a black sheath dress and black feathered hat slip through it right behind Harry Warren, who said, “Help you, ma’am?”
“I’m looking for Isaac Bell,” she said in her clear, musical voice. “There he is, I see him.” She rushed toward Bell’s desk, reaching into her handbag.
Whitmark jumped to his feet. “Hello, Dorothy. Told you I’d talk to Bell. This’ll square us, won’t it?”
Dorothy Langner searched his face. Then she looked at Bell. “Hello, Isaac. Is there someplace I could talk to Ted for a moment, in private?” Her beautiful silvery eyes were blank, and Bell had the eeriest sensation that she was blind. But she couldn’t be blind, she had just marched in under her own steam.
“I believe that Mr. Van Dorn’s office is empty. I’m sure he won’t mind.”
He guided them into Van Dorn’s office, closed the door, and stood close to it listening. He heard Whitmark repeat, “This will square us, won’t it?”
“Nothing will square us.”
“Dorothy?” asked Ted. “What are you doing?”
The answer was the sharp crack of a gunshot. Bell threw open the door. Ted Whitmark lay on his back, blood pouring from his skull. Dorothy Langner dropped the nickel pistol she was holding onto Whitmark’s chest, and said to Isaac Bell, “He killed my father.”
“Yamamoto Kenta killed your father.”
“Ted didn’t set the bomb, but he’s been passing information about Father’s work on Hull 44.”
“Did Ted tell you that?”
“He tried to get rid of his guilt confessing to me.”
Harry Warren rushed in, gun drawn, and knelt by the body. Then he grabbed Van Dorn’s telephone. “She missed,” he told Bell, and said to the operator, “Get a doctor.”
“How badly is he hurt?” asked Bell.
“She only creased him. It’s his scalp that’s bleeding so much.”
“He won’t die?”
“Not from this. In fact, I think he’s starting to wake up.”
“She didn’t shoot him,” said Bell.
“What?”
“Ted Whitmark tried to kill himself. She grabbed the gun. She saved his life.”
Harry Warren had wise, old eyes. “Tell me why he tried to kill himself, Isaac.”
“He’s a traitor. He just confessed to me that he’s been passing information to the spy.”
Harry Warren looked Bell full in the face, and said, “It appears that Miss Langner saved the louse’s life.”
The Hotel Knickerbocker’s house doctor rushed in with his bag trailed by bellhops lugging a stretcher. “Stand back, everybody. Please stand back.”
Bell led Dorothy to his desk. “Sit down.” He beckoned an apprentice. “Please bring the lady a glass of water.”
“Why did you do that?” Dorothy whispered.
“I would not have if you had succeeded in murdering him. But since you didn’t, I think you’ve been through enough without adding police charges to your misery.”
“Will the police believe it?”
“If Ted goes along with it. And I imagine he will. Now, tell me everything he told you.”
“He lost a lot of money gambling last fall in Washington. Someone in the game offered to lend him money. In exchange, he talked to Yamamoto.” She shook her head in anger and bitterness. “He still doesn’t realize that that man must have set him up to lose.”
“He told me it was bad luck,” said Bell. “Go on.”
“The same thing happened this spring in New York and then out in San Francisco. Now it’s happened again. This time, he finally realized the enormity of what he was doing. Or so he claimed. I think he was trying to get me to come back. I told him we were through. He found out about someone I’ve been seeing.”
“Farley Kent.”
“Of course you know,” she said wearily. “Van Dorns never give up. When Ted found out about Farley, I think he realized that nothing in his entire life had any truth to it. He got religion. He was probably hoping I’d be waiting when he got out of jail. Or weeping when they hung him for treason.”
“Shooting him must have disabused him of that notion,” Bell observed.
She smiled. “I’m not sure how I feel right now about not killing him. I meant to. I can’t believe I missed. I was so close.”
“In my experience,” said Bell, “people who miss a sure shot wanted to miss. Murder does not come easily to most.”
“I wish I had killed him.”
“You would hang for it.”
“I wouldn’t care.”
“Where would that leave Farley Kent?”
“Farley would-” she started to say but stopped abruptly.
Bell smiled gently. “You were about to say that Farley would understand, but you realize that is not so.”
She hung her head. “Farley would be devastated.”
“I’ve seen Farley at work. He strikes me as your sort of man. He loves his work. Do you love him?”
“Yes, I do.”
“May I have a man escort you to the Brooklyn Navy Yard?” She stood up. “Thank you. I know the way.”
Bell walked her to the door. “You made this case, Dorothy, when you vowed to clear your father’s name. No one has done more to save his and Farley’s work on Hull 44. Thanks to you, we discovered the spy, and you can rest assured we will get him.”
“Did Ted tell you anything that helps?”
Bell answered carefully, “He believes that he did. Tell me, how did Ted happen to find out about Farley Kent?”
“A letter from a busybody signed ‘A friend.’ Why are you smiling, Isaac?”
“The spy is getting desperate,” was all Bell would say, but he had a powerful feeling that O’Shay had tricked Ted Whitmark into passing him false information. The spy wanted Bell to believe that he would attack from the land when in fact he intended to attack, somehow, from the water.
Dorothy kissed his cheek and hurried down the grand stairway.
“Mr. Bell,” said the front-desk man, “Knickerbocker house dick calling for you.”
51
GOT SOME UNSAVORY TYPES AT THE FRONT DOOR,” THE Hotel Knickerbocker’s house detective reported. “Claim they want to talk to you, Mr. Bell.”
“What are their names?”
“There’s a hairy oldster says he doesn’t have a name, and I’m inclined to believe him. The young ones call themselves Jimmy Richards and Marv Gordon.”
“Send ’em up.”
“They don’t look right for the lobby, if you know what I mean.”
“Understood. But they’re little Eddie Tobin’s cousins, so they’re coming in the front door. Tell the manager I authorized it. You walk with them so they don’t frighten the ladies.”
“O.K., Mr. Bell,” the house dick answered dubiously.
The Staten Island scowmen Richards and Gordon intr
oduced their older companion, who had lanky gray hair and the squint lines from a lifetime on the water, as “Uncle Donny Darbee, who sailed us over.”
“What’s up, boys?”
“You still looking for torpedoes?”
“Where did you hear that?”
“The Navy and the Coast Guard and the Harbor Squad are swarming like mosquitoes,” said Richards.
“Searching every pier in the port,” said Gordon.
“Making it hard to do business,” muttered Uncle Donny.
“Have you seen the torpedoes?” Bell asked.
“Nope.”
“What do you know about them?”
“Nothing,” said Richards.
“Except you’re looking for them,” said Gordon.
“Nothing at all? Then what did you come to see me about?”
“We was wondering if you was interested in the Holland.”
“What Holland?”
“Biggest Holland we ever saw.”
“A Holland submarine?”
“YUP,” CHORUSED the Staten Island scowmen.
“Where?”
“Kill Van Kull.”
“Over on the Bayonne side.”
“Hold on, boys. If you’ve seen a submarine out in the open, it must belong to the Navy.”
“It’s hid. Under a car float.”
“Uncle Donny found it last night when the cops was chasing him.”
“Been watching that barge for days,” said Uncle Donny Darbee. Isaac Bell questioned them sharply.
Harbor cops hunting coal pirates had noticed Uncle Donny and his two friends following a coal barge in an oyster scow. Uncle Donny had declined to let the police board it for inspection. Pistol shots were exchanged. The cops had boarded anyway. Uncle Donny and his friends had jumped into the Kill and swam for shore.
Darbee’s friends were caught, but the old man swam for a car float that he had been eyeing for several days because the barge was tied up all by itself, unattended, and was carrying a pair of freight cars that might contain cargo. Tiring in the cold water as he hid in the shadow of the overhanging prow, the old man had begun to sink only to step on something solid where it was too deep to stand. When the cops gave up, Jimmy and Marv, who had been watching from the Staten Island side, had rescued their Dutch uncle in another oyster boat. Then they took a closer look at the barge. Under it, they saw the outline of a submarine.
“Bigger than the Navy Holland. Same boat, but it looks like they added on a chunk at each end.”
“Uncle Donny knows the Holland,” Jimmy Richards explained. “He took us off Brooklyn to watch the Navy tests. When was that?”
“In 1903. She made fifteen knots with her conning turret out of the water. And six submerged.”
Bell reached for the telephone. “So you have good reason to believe that you saw a submarine.”
“Want to come see it?” asked Marv Gordon.
“Yes.”
“Told you he would,” said Uncle Donny.
Isaac Bell telephoned the New York Police Harbor Squad, rounded up Archie Abbott and Harry Warren, and grabbed a golf bag. The Ninth Avenue Elevated express whisked the Van Dorns and the scowmen to the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan in ten minutes. A forty-foot Harbor Squad launch had its steam up at Pier A.
“Don’t touch anything,” the captain warned the Staten Islanders as they trooped warily aboard. He did not want to tow Donald Darbee’s scow, which was moored nearby, but Bell insisted and slipped him twenty dollars “for your crew.”
“Never thought I’d be on one of these,” muttered old Darbee as they churned away from the pier.
A water cop muttered back, “Except in handcuffs.”
Bell said to Archie and Harry, “If there’s no submarine in the Kill Van Kull, we’re going to end up in a cross fire.”
“You really think we’re going to find one, Isaac?”
“I believe they think they saw a submarine. And a submarine would make those torpedoes a much deadlier affair than a surface torpedo boat. Nonetheless, I will believe a submarine when I see one.”
The Harbor Squad launch plowed across the Upper Bay, threading a swift course through ferries, tugs, barges, and oceangoing schooners and steamers. A thunderous whistle announced the New York arrival of an Atlantic liner passing through the Verrazano Narrows. Tugboats meeting her piped replies. A steady stream of car floats carried freight trains between New Jersey, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the East River.
The police boat steered into the crooked channel of water between Staten Island and New Jersey known as the Kill Van Kull. Bell estimated it was a thousand feet wide, about the same as the narrow arm of the Carquinez Strait where he had captured Louis Loh swimming from Mare Island. To his left rose the hills of Staten Island. The city of Bayonne spread to his right. Docks, warehouses, boatyards, and residences lined the banks. Four miles down the waterway, Richards and Gordon said, “There she is!”
The car float stood by itself, tied to the shore beside the flat green back lawn of a large frame house in a district of similar dwellings. It was an old New Jersey Central barge of the three-track type, short and wide, with a boxcar on the nearside tracks and a tall gondola on the inside. The middle track appeared to be empty, though the men on the police launch could not see the space between the two cars.
“What submarine?” asked the Harbor Squad captain.
“Under it,” growled Donald Darbee. “They cut a well in the middle of the barge for the conning turret.”
“You saw that?”
“No. But how else could they get in and out?”
The launch captain glowered at Isaac Bell. “Mr. Bell, I predict that my boss is going to be talking to your boss, and neither of us is going to be very happy about it.”
“Let’s get closer,” said Bell.
“There isn’t enough water there for a Holland submarine.”
“It’s plenty deep,” Donald Darbee retorted quietly. “The tide scours the bank on this side.”
The helmsman called for Dead Slow, and drew within fifty feet.
The Van Dorns, the scowmen, and the harbor police peered into the murky water. The launch drifted closer to the car float.
“Lot of mud stirred up,” Darbee muttered worriedly.
“Our propeller’s stirring it,” said the captain. “Told you it’s too shallow.” To the helmsman he barked, “Back off before we run aground.”
Darbee said, “There’s thirty feet of water here if there’s an inch.” “Then what’s causing that mud?”
“That’s what I’m wondering.”
“So am I,” said Isaac Bell, peering into the water. Bubbles were rising from the murk and hissing on the surface.
52
BACK AWAY!” ISAAC BELL SHOUTED. “BACK! FULL ASTERN.”
The helmsman and the engineer had quick reflexes. They reversed the engine in an instant. The propeller churned backward. Smoke and steam shot from the short stack. The boat stopped. But before it could gather way in reverse, a gray malevolent form rose swiftly under it.
“Grab ahold!”
Bell saw a pipe emerge just ahead of the launch-the periscope, a tube of angled mirrors, the submarine’s eye. A squat round turret broke the surface, the conning tower, rimmed with handrails. Then a mighty blow from underneath smashed into the bottom of the police launch and pushed its forty-foot hull out of the water. Its keel shattered with a loud crack of splitting wood, and still the police boat rose, lifted by a powerful steel hull that broke the surface like a maddened sperm whale.
The police launch fell onto its side, spilling Van Dorns, cops, and scowmen into the Kill.
Bell jumped onto the steel hull and waded through waist-deep water to the conning tower. He grabbed the handrails that surrounded the hatch on top and reached for a wheel that would open the hatch.
“Look out, Isaac!” Archie Abbott yelled. “He’s going under!”
Ignoring Archie and the water that was suddenly climbing up his c
hest, Bell threw his weight on the wheel. For a second, it wouldn’t budge. Then he thought he felt it move. Salt water rushed over his shoulders, his mouth, his nose, his eyes. Suddenly the submarine was surging ahead. He held the wheel as long as he could, still struggling to open it, but the force of the rushing water ripped it from his hands. The hull raced under him, and he realized, too late, that the propeller driving it was about to cut him to pieces.
He pushed off desperately with both boots and swam with all his strength. The water rushing past the hull sucked him back. He felt the hull sliding under him. Something hit him hard. It threw him aside and drove him deep. A powerful thrust of turbulence tumbled him deeper. Slammed about in the submarine’s propeller wash, he realized that he had been struck by cowling that protected the propeller and, in this instance, protected him, too, from the thrashing blades.
He fought to the surface, saw the conning turret racing up the Kill Van Kull, and swam after it. Behind him, Archie was helping Harry Warren climb onto the muddy bank, Richards and Gordon and the engineer were holding ropes dangling from the barge, and the police captain clung to his overturned launch. “Telephone for help!” the captain yelled, and two cops staggered toward the frame house.
Donald Darbee was climbing onto his oyster scow, which had broken free of the sinking launch.
“Uncle Donny!” Bell shouted over his shoulder as he swam after the submarine. “Pick me up.”
Darbee’s gasoline motor clattered, spewing blue smoke.
The submarine kept submerging. The top of the turret and the periscope tube were all that remained above the surface. The handrails around it, the periscope, and the hatch wheel Bell had tried to open left a wake up the channel, splashing like a mobile f ountain.
Darbee’s scow came alongside, and Bell climbed on, rolling over the low gunnel onto the flat deck. “After him!”
Darbee shoved his throttle forward. The motor got louder, the wooden boat trembled, and the old man muttered, “What do we do with him when we catch him?”
Bell heard gunfire crackling behind him. The cops running to the frame house to telephone for help dove behind shrubs. Pistol fire raked the lawn from every window in the house.
The Spy Page 34