The Thief

by Clive Cussler

  “Molls,” said Archie, focusing on a cluster of extravagantly coiffed women in towering hats and elaborate dresses.

  “Not a good sign.”

  The Police Department had been cracking down on firearms lately. Faced with arrest if caught in possession, the gangsters had taken to stashing their pistols in their girlfriends’ hats and bustles.

  “Loaded for bear. Who do you suppose they came to meet?”

  Bell took back the field glasses. The gangsters were glowering at the back of the ship, where the Second Class passengers would go ashore. In a sight that would be comic if it didn’t mean someone was going to get badly hurt, a burly Gopher raked the Second Class embarkation port with dainty mother-of-pearl opera glasses he had stolen from somewhere.

  “Archie, do you recognize the thug with the opera glasses?”

  Archie, whose pride in New York extended even to the superior ferocity of its street gangs, took a look. “Might be Blinky Armstrong.”

  “Is he a boss?”

  “Not yet, that I’ve heard.”

  “It looks like he’s running that crew. Soon as the switchboard’s hooked up, telephone the office. Tell Harry Warren to bring his gang squad.”

  “Why?”

  “I have an unpleasant feeling.”

  The Mauretania’s private-branch telephone system switchboard would plug into the New York City exchanges the moment the ship docked. The Van Dorn New York field office was in the Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street, and while the streets would be clogged with traffic, the magic carpet of the Ninth Avenue Elevated Express could speed Detective Harry Warren and his gang specialists downtown in a flash.

  “Harry’ll know if it’s Blinky.”

  With the tugboats almost overwhelmed by her tonnage and the wind, it was fully half an hour before they had Mauretania enough inside the slip for her seamen to throw lightweight messenger lines. Longshoremen used them to drag her heavy hawsers ashore.

  At last, the bugle blew to announce they were fast to the pier. Engines stopped.

  The First Class gangway was hoisted from the cavernous waiting room. First ashore, stiffly ignoring each other, were Lord Strone and Karl Schultz. The Chimney Baron was greeted by a brace of pretty girls, granddaughters, Bell guessed, by the joyful way they took his hands and spirited him, laughing, through the crowds and out the doors to West Street. Strone stepped off alone and discreetly followed a young man, whom Bell supposed was from the British consulate, to the stairs to the lower deck, where the steam yacht Ringer out of Greenwich—which had trailed the ship from Quarantine—would whisk him to his American estate in Connecticut.

  Explosions of photographers’ flashlights at the foot of the gangway told Bell that the newspaper reporters had caught sight of Marion and Lillian disembarking, and he could imagine from experience the shouted queries. Had Miss Morgan come back to New York to take new moving pictures? Was it true Miss Morgan had been married to an insurance executive? Had the ceremony actually been performed by the captain of the Mauretania? What did Mrs. Abbott think of the new fashions in London? Was there truth to the rumors that her father had secretly amassed a controlling interest in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe?

  The Second Class gangway would rise as soon as First Class had cleared the ship. Third Class, Marion had told Bell, was doomed to spend the night aboard. Two names on the passenger list couldn’t be found. Miscounts were not uncommon, but everyone in Third Class—immigrants and citizens alike, including the moving picture people—would be held on the ship for officials to tally again. Isaac Bell had to wonder whether those missing had been the Acrobat’s accomplices. The chief officer bamboozled that night in the smoking room was probably wondering, too.

  “O.K., Archie. Go telephone Harry Warren. I’ll get Clyde. You grab Block and our PS boy. When things settle down, we’ll go off together from Second Class.”

  Bell hurried back toward Second Class. He found Clyde Lynds in the embarkation vestibule and tipped the seamen Captain Turner had assigned to guard him. “I’ll take it from here, gents, thanks.”

  Clyde, grip in hand, was anxiously studying the crowds.

  “See anyone down there you know?” Bell asked, watching for his reaction.

  “I doubt it,” Clyde answered, even as his eye locked on the knot of Gophers staring back in his direction. “Been quite a while since I was in town.”

  “In the theater, you said?”

  “My last stepfather, minus one, was a stage manager.”

  “At what theater?”

  “All over. Downtown. Fourteenth Street. Then for a while on Broadway. The Hammerstein.”

  “Did you live in that neighborhood?” Bell asked. Blinky Armstrong was aiming his opera glasses exactly where he and Clyde were standing.

  “Around the corner on Forty-sixth Street.”

  “Isn’t that near Hell’s Kitchen?”

  Clyde laughed, nervously. “Fortunately, not too near.”

  But near enough, thought Bell, that a gang of Gophers just might have gathered to welcome you home. Had the kid somehow offended them? Or had the Krieg Trust perhaps hired Gophers to grab him as he left the boat? From the little Bell could see through the waiting room windows, it appeared that the Gophers’ numbers had swelled. He counted a dozen gangsters converging on the back of the ship. They shoved through the crowd surrounding the foot of the Second Class gangway, which was ascending.

  Isaac Bell was liking the situation less and less. He was fully armed, but that would do no good, as gunfire would be lethal to countless innocents. He saw a couple of cops patrolling the waiting room and a few more scattered on the lower level, but not enough to thwart a concentrated attack, if that’s what the Gophers were planning.

  Archie hurried into the vestibule, leading the PS man, who had handcuffed himself to a disconsolate-looking Lawrence Block. “Harry Warren’s on his way.”

  “Hang on to Clyde,” Bell whispered. “Don’t let him ashore.”

  “Where you going?”

  “I’m going to find out why the Gophers are staring at Clyde like they want to eat him for lunch.”

  Bell turned to Clyde Lynds. “Stay here with Archie. Do not leave the ship until I come back for you.”

  “What’s up?”

  Bell shoved past the seamen at the embarkation port and jumped for the top of the Second Class gangway, which the longshoremen were pivoting toward the ship. It was five feet short of being secured to the hull, and it swayed wildly under his weight. Bell ran down it and into the waiting room.

  “Hold on there!” shouted a Cunard official.

  Isaac Bell brushed past him and headed straight for Blinky Armstrong, who had pocketed his opera glasses and was glowering up at Clyde Lynds and smacking a meaty fist into a stony palm. The tall detective was twenty feet away from the gangster, his progress slowed by thickening crowds, when suddenly a woman screamed. The sound parting her lips was as much a shout as a scream, a feral noise that spoke more hate than fear.

  Two gangsters were fighting, rolling around on the asphalt, kicking and gouging and smashing each other with blackjacks. Blood flew. Two more piled on, and ordinary people ran screaming from the vicious tangle. Only when a flying wedge of gangsters tore through the crowd, hurling men, women, and children from their path, and swinging fists and lengths of lead pipe, did Isaac Bell realize that the newcomers were not more Gophers but attackers from a rival gang.

  The melee spread like wildfire. Fifteen men pummeled one another. A tall cop charged, swinging his nightstick. Strong and agile, he floored three gangsters like bowling pins. A fallen man’s boot snagged his ankle, and the tall cop went down in the tangle and disappeared as if swallowed whole.

  Knives flashed, eliciting angry shouts and screams of pain.

  Then a shot rang out, stunningly loud.

  Wild-eyed gangsters ran to their women cheering on the sidelines, snatched their revolvers, and raked the pier with gunfire. Bullets banged on corrugated-iron doors and shattered
glass. Citizens nearby flattened themselves on the asphalt, and Bell saw the way suddenly clear as if a swaying field of wheat had been mowed by a giant McCormick reaper. He saw Blinky Armstrong and two of his Gophers sprint toward the West Street portal, trampling cowering citizens and knocking down those too terrified to move.

  Isaac Bell tore after them.

  Halfway to West Street, they ducked into a stairwell.

  Bell followed, pounding down steel steps that led to the baggage deck below. The Gophers were racing alongside the Mauretania toward the rows of doors that led off the pier onto West Street. Before they could get out the doors, squads of cops arrived on the run, reserves from nearby station houses, and the Gophers and the rivals who had attacked them were suddenly in a mad rush to avoid arrest.

  Instead of trying to escape directly toward West Street, where they could melt into the neighborhoods, they turned back toward the water to get rid of their weapons. Revolvers, pocket pistols, and sleeve guns clanged against Mauretania’s black hull and splashed into the slip.

  Isaac Bell cut the corner of the dogleg the gangsters had turned to the slip and caught up with them. He was close enough to see the seams in Armstrong’s coat and was just about to launch a diving tackle at the big man’s ankles when he passed the Mauretania’s bow and could suddenly see two hundred feet across the slip to the next pier. Lighters were moored there to shuttle sheets, towels, napkins, and tablecloths to the city’s laundries. Chandlers’ boats waited to deliver fresh supplies. Tugboats maneuvered coal barges with shovel-wielding trimmers to replenish Mauretania’s bunkers.

  Oblivious to the tumult on the pier—or capitalizing on the distraction of fleeing gangsters and pursuing cops—two bill posters steered a little steam launch under the flare of Mauretania’s bow, took up long-handled brushes, and began to plaster advertisements on the express liner’s hull as if she were a billboard.

  THE ELECTRIC THEATER

  323 West 14th Street

  Finest

  MOVING PICTURE PALACE

  in

  New York City

  “NEW SHOWS DAILY”

  TWENTY MORE COPS STORMED IN the West Street doors.

  The Gophers jinked abruptly to the right.

  Isaac Bell veered after them.

  The Gopher ahead of Armstrong leaped from the pier toward the landward edge of the slip, missed his footing, and fell into the water. Armstrong jumped next, made it, and ran past Mauretania’s bow. Bell leaped the same watery corner and landed running full tilt. He put on a burst of speed to dive for Armstrong. But just as he was about to launch himself in the air, he sensed as much as saw in the corner of his eye an eerie flicker of a familiar grim silhouette moving down the side of the ship with sure-footed grace.

  ISAAC BELL SKIDDED TO A STOP, HARDLY BElieving his eyes. Coal chutes gaped open along the middle of the hull, fifteen feet above the barges. Beneath each hung staging, wooden platforms suspended by ropes for the trimmers to stand on. On the farthest stage, halfway back along the Mauretania’s hull, four hundred feet toward the river—and nearly obscured by shadows and work gangs hoisting buckets from the barges into the chutes—crouched the long-armed, almost simian silhouette of the kidnapper Bell had seen jump from the boat deck the night they sailed from Liverpool.

  Bell looked for the fastest route out there. It would take too long to go back through the ship. He had to get across the water. He spotted the enterprising bill posters slathering the Mauretania with advertisements from the bobbing perch of their steam launch.

  “Bill posters! You men, there! Bill posters!”

  They heard him, he saw by the way they ducked their heads, but their only response was to glue faster. Accustomed to being chased off private property, they were trying to slap on as many ads as they could until they had to run from shipowners and pier officials. Before Isaac Bell could get their attention, the man that Professor Beiderbecke had dubbed the Akrobat glided down a rope holding a stage. He dropped lightly onto a barge riding high in the water that the trimmers had unloaded. A tug was already approaching, deckhands poised with lines, to back the empty away and make room for a fresh load.

  The Acrobat, Bell realized, had timed his drop to coincide with the barge’s removal. Dispensing fat bribes to the boatmen, he would ride the empty barge ashore in the guise of an American trimmer and step onto dry land in a distant coal yard, neatly dodging the customs agents and immigration officials guarding the Mauretania’s pier.

  Bell cupped his hands. “Fifty dollars for a boat ride.”

  The bill posters’ eyes swiveled at him like searchlights.

  Bell yanked his wallet from his coat and waved the money.

  A poster that proclaimed

  DREAMLAND THEATER

  9 West 9th Street

  NEW “MOVIES” EVERY DAY

  was abandoned in a flash.

  One man used his brush like a barge pole to shove off the Mauretania as if the ship were on fire while the other seized the helm and shoved the steam quadrant full ahead. The launch shot toward the pier. Bell jumped eight feet to the deck, nearly capsizing the narrow craft, and pointed at the tug hipped alongside the empty coal barge. “Follow that barge.”

  “Gimme the dough!” cried the man with the brush.

  Bell smacked it into his hand.

  “On the jump!”

  The steam engine chugged. The propeller spun, and the sharp-bowed little boat turned around and gathered way alongside the Mauretania. They passed the last of the open coal chutes, where Bell had first spotted the Acrobat, and pulled into the wake of the tugboat propelling the empty barge.

  Bell heard a sharp two-finger whistle, an urgent warning.

  The Acrobat was signaling someone on the ship.

  Bell turned to see who his accomplice was.

  He saw a blur of movement in one of the chutes and glimpsed a chunk of coal with sharp, gleaming facets fly at his head. He ducked, turning his face, but it came too fast—no man could throw so hard, it had to have been hurled from a sling. Turning saved his face, but nothing could stop the jagged shard from smashing his hat into the water and slicing his skull.

  Isaac Bell heard a hollow explosion like a firecracker dropped in a barrel. A sharp pain shot down his spine. He felt his knees buckle, and he sensed that he was tumbling. He heard the bill poster who was steering the launch shout, “Catch him!” He saw the brush extended for him to grab hold. But the hand he reached with was too heavy to lift.

  Bell gathered all his strength for a massive last-ditch effort. He raised his leaden hand higher. He felt the brush in his fingers, and he grasped it as tightly as he could. The bristles slipped through his fingers, and there was nothing the tall detective could do to stop himself from falling backwards into the water.

  ISAAC BELL FELL FLAT ON HIS BACK AND sank like a stone.

  The slack tide on which the Mauretania had landed had begun to ebb, and cold river water was swirling through the slip. The deeper he sank, the harder the current pushed him. He felt it sluice him across the slip, and he slammed hard into something solid—one of the piles on which sat the pier. The current pinned him against it. Then something grabbed his foot. It was soft but insistent, and it pulled him farther down. Mud? he wondered, vaguely. He had sunk to the bottom of the slip, and the mud wanted to hold him there as if it were alive and hungry.

  Something started pounding. Then his face was suddenly cold as if someone had thrown a champagne bucket of ice water in his face. Not “someone.” Marion. It was Marion throwing ice water in his face. “Wake up, Isaac. Wake up! Wake up! Please wake up!”

  He awakened and suddenly knew a lot. The pounding was his own heart. The ice water was an invigorating tongue of cold river current. The mud indicated he was thirty-five feet beneath the surface. He had to breathe air or he would die. He kicked the mud and pulled himself up the slippery piling. The water grew warmer, the current less strong. He kicked harder and rose faster. Instinct told him to place one hand on his head to pr
otect it, and a moment after he did he bumped up against an underwater crossbeam that braced two pilings. He was out of air. His heart thundered. Lights stormed in front of his eyes. He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He opened his mouth and inhaled, and suddenly sunlight was blazing in his face.

  “Isaac!”

  He spit water and gulped air, coughed, gulped more air, and swam toward the shouting. They were yelling about a ladder. He found it fixed to a pile and pulled himself onto it. He held on a while, ignoring the shouting, breathing, collecting himself.

  ISAAC BELL CLIMBED OUT OF the river in a foul mood. The Acrobat had gotten clean away. His head ached. Blood was stinging his eyes. And he’d lost his hat and his favorite derringer.

  “You O.K., Isaac?”

  It was Harry Warren—head of the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s New York gang squad—a studiedly nondescript-looking fellow who wore a loose-fitting dark suit with plenty of pockets for sidearms and a black derby with a reinforced crown. Harry’s face, normally as expressionless as the lid of an ashcan, was clenched with worry, a look repeated on the scarred countenances of his hard-bitten detectives, who were watching over Harry’s shoulder as Isaac Bell gathered his feet under him and rose, swaying.

  Harry handed Bell a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.”

  Bell said, “Find out who was mixing it up with the Gophers.”

  “What?”

  Bell mopped the blood off his face and wadded the cloth against the source, a ragged furrow parting his hair. “I want to know what the devil was going on. We didn’t just happen to land in a gang war. The Gophers were waiting for someone on the ship. I want to know who and why. And I want to know why those other boys came along at that moment. On the jump!”

  Warren and his boys trooped off. Bell went looking for dry clothes.