The rain was thinning and the city lights were bright. As soon as she got to her hotel, she would telephone Isaac at the Yale Club. Respectable hotels like the Astor frowned upon unmarried women receiving gentleman visitors. But there wasn’t a house dick in the country who would not turn a blind eye to a Van Dorn operative. Professional courtesy, Isaac would smile.
The ferry tooted its whistle. She felt the propellers shudder beneath her feet. As they pulled away from the New Jersey shore, she saw the sails of an old-fashioned schooner silhouetted by a brightly lighted pier.
IT HAD TAKEN FOUR men a full ten minutes to lift the heavy automatic machine gun atop the boxcar. And as Isaac Bell had predicted, the railroad police manning the water-cooled, tripod-mounted, belt-fed Vickers on top of the dynamite train stayed wide awake. But Eddie Edwards, the forty-year-old Van Dorn investigator with a startling shock of prematurely white hair, kept climbing up the boxcar’s ladder to check on them anyway.
Their weapon was equally reliable, adapted from the Maxim gun which had proved itself mowing down African armies. One of the rail bulls was a transplanted Englishman who told tales of slaughtering “natives” with a Maxim in the previous decade’s colonial wars. Edwards had instructed him to leave the natives of Jersey City alone. Unless they tried something. The old gangs there weren’t as tough as they had been when Edwards had led the Van Dorn fight to clear the rail yards, but they were still ornery.
Standing on top of the railcar, turning slowly on his heel and surveying the machine gun’s field of fire, which now encompassed a full circle, Edwards was reminded of the old days guarding bullion shipments. Of course the Lava Bed Gang’s weapons in those days were mostly lead pipes, brass knuckles, and the occasional sawed-off shotgun. He watched a brightly lit ferry leaving Communipaw Terminal. He turned back toward the gate, blocked by three coal tenders and manned by cinder dicks with rifles, and saw that the freight yards looked as calm as a freight yard ever looked. Switch engines were scuttling about making up trains. But in each cab rode an armed detective. He looked back at the river. The rain was lifting. He could see the lights of New York City clearly now.
“Is that schooner going to run into that steam lighter?”
“No. They were close, but they’re moving apart. See? He’s sailing off, and the lighter’s turning this way.”
“I see,” said Edwards, his jaw tightening. “Where the hell is he going?”
“Coming our way.”
Edwards watched, liking the situation less and less.
“How far is that red buoy?” he asked.
“The red light? I’d say a quarter mile.”
“If he passes that buoy, give him four rounds ahead of his bow.”
“You mean that?” the rail cop asked dubiously.
“Dammit, yes, I mean it. Get set to fire.”
“He’s passing it, Mr. Edwards.”
“Shoot! Now!”
The water-cooled Vickers made an oddly muffled pop-pop-pop-pop noise. Where the bullets hit was too far off in the dark to see. The steam lighter kept coming straight at the powder pier.
“Give him ten rounds across the roof of his wheelhouse.”
“That’ll be a wake-up call,” said the Englishman. “Those slugs sound like thunder overhead.”
“Just make sure you’re clear behind him. I don’t want to rake some poor tugboat.”
“Clear.”
“Fire! Now! Don’t wait!”
The canvas cartridge belt twitched. Ten rounds spit from the barrel. A wisp of steam rose from the water cooler.
The boat kept coming.
Eddie Edwards wet his lips. God knew who was on it. A drunk? A frightened boy at the helm while his captain slept? A terrified old man who had no clue where the shooting was coming from?
“Get up there in the light. Wave them off... Not you! You stay on the gun.”
The belt feeder and the water bearer jumped up and down on the roof of the boxcar, frantically waving their arms. The boat kept coming.
“Get out of the way!” Edwards told them. “Shoot the wheelhouse.” He grabbed the belt and began feeding as the gun opened up in a continuous roar.
Two hundred rounds spewed from its barrel, crossed a quarter mile of water, and tore through the steam lighter’s wheelhouse, scattering wood and glass. Two rounds smashed the top spoke of the helm. Another cut the rope looped around the helm and it was suddenly free to turn. But water passing over the rudder held it steady on course to the powder pier. Then the frame of the wheelhouse collapsed. The roof fell on the helm, pushing the spokes down, turning the wheel and the rudder to which it was attached.
THE SECOND ACT OF the Follies started off big and got bigger. The “Ju-Jitsu Waltz,” featuring Prince Tokio “straight from Japan,” was followed by a comic song “I Think I Oughtn’t Auto Any More”:
... happened to be smoking when I got beneath her car,
gasoline was leaking and fell on my cigar,
blew that chorus girl so high I thought she was a star...
When the song was over, a solitary snare drum began to rattle. A single chorus girl in a blue blouse, a short white skirt, and red tights marched across the empty stage. A second snare drum joined in. A second chorus girl fell in with the first. Then another drum and another girl. Then six drums were rattling and six chorus girls marching to and fro. Then another and another. Bass drums took up the beat with a thumping that shook the seats. Suddenly, all fifty of the most beautiful chorus girls on Broadway broke off their dance on stage, snatched up fifty drums from stacks beside the wings, ran down the stairs on either side, and stormed the aisles pounding their drums and kicking their red-clad legs.
“Aren’t you glad we came?” shouted Abbott.
Bell looked up. A flash through the skylight caught his eye, as if the theater were training lights down from the roof in addition to those already blazing on the stage. It looked as if the night sky were on fire. He felt a harsh thump shake the building and thought for a moment it was the rolling shock wave of an earthquake. Then he heard a thunderous explosion.
26
THE FOLLIES ORCHESTRA STOPPED PLAYING ABRUPTLY. AN eerie silence gripped the theater. Then debris clattered on the tin roof like a thousand snare drums. Glass flew out of the skylight, and everyone in the theater—audience, stagehands, and chorus girls—began screaming.
Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott moved as one, up the aisle, through the canvas rain curtains and across the roof to the outside staircase. They saw a red glow in the southwest sky in the direction of Jersey City.
“The powder pier,” said Bell with a sinking heart. “We better get over there.”
“Look,” said Archie as they started down the stairs. “Broken windows everywhere.”
Every building on the block had lost a window. Forty-fourth Street was littered with broken glass. They turned their backs on the crowds surging in panic on Broadway and ran west on Forty-fourth toward the river. They crossed Eighth Avenue, then Ninth, and ran through the slums of Hell’s Kitchen, dodging the residents spilling out of saloons and tenements. Everyone was shouting “What happened?”
The Van Dorn detectives raced across Tenth Avenue, over the New York Central Railroad tracks, across Eleventh, dodging fire engines and panicked horses. The closer they got to the water, the more broken windows they saw. A cop tried to stop them from running onto the piers. They showed their badges and brushed past him.
“Fireboat!” Bell shouted.
Bristling with fire monitors and belching smoke, a New York City fireboat was pulling away from Pier 84. Bell ran after it, jumped. Abbott landed beside him.
“Van Dorn,” they told the startled deckhand. “We have to get to Jersey City.”
“Wrong boat. We’re dispatched downtown to spray the piers.”
The reason for the fireboat’s orders was soon apparent. Across the river, flames were shooting into the sky from the Jersey City piers. With the end of the rain, the wind had shifted west, and it wa
s blowing sparks across the river onto Manhattan’s piers. So instead of helping fight the fire in Jersey City, the fireboat was wetting down Manhattan’s piers to keep the sparks from igniting their roofs and wooden ships moored alongside.
“He’s a mastermind,” said Bell. “I’ve got to hand him that.”
“A Napoleon of crime,” Archie agreed. “As if Conan Doyle sicced Professor Moriarty on us instead of Sherlock Holmes.”
Bell spotted a New York Police Department Marine Division launch at the Twenty-third Street Lackawanna Ferry Terminal. “Drop us there!”
The New York cops agreed to run them across the river. They passed damaged boats with sails in tatters or smokestacks toppled by the blast. Some were adrift. On others, crewmen were jury-rigging repairs sufficient to get them to shore. A Jersey Central Railroad ferry limped toward Manhattan, its windows shattered and its superstructure blackened.
“There’s Eddie Edwards!”
Edwards’s white hair had been singed black, and his eyes were gleaming in a face of soot, but he was otherwise unhurt.
“Thank God you telephoned, Isaac. We got the gun in place in time to stop the bastards.”
“Stop them? What are you talking about?”
“They didn’t blow the powder pier.” He pointed through the thick smoke. “The dynamite train is O.K.”
Bell peered through the smoke and saw the string of cars. The five that been sitting there when he left Jersey City last evening to take the night off at the Follies were still there.
“What did they blow up? We felt it in Manhattan. It broke every window in the city.”
“Themselves. Thanks to the Vickers.”
Eddie described how they had driven off the Southern Pacific steam lighter with machine-gun fire.
“She turned around and took off after a schooner. We saw them in company earlier. I would guess that the schooner probably took their crew off. After the murdering scum locked the helm and aimed her at the pier.”
“Did your gunfire detonate the dynamite?”
“I don’t think so. We shot her wheelhouse to pieces, but she didn’t explode. She bore off, turned a full hundred eighty degrees, and steamed away. Must have been three, four minutes before the dynamite exploded. One of the boys on the Vickers thought he saw her hit the schooner. And we all saw her sails in the flash.”
“It’s almost impossible to detonate dynamite by impact,” Bell mused. “They must have devised a trigger of some sort ... How do you see it, Eddie? How did they get their hands on the Southern Pacific steam lighter?”
“The way I see it,” said Edwards, “they ambushed the lighter upriver, shot McColleen, and threw the crew overboard.”
“We must find their bodies,” Bell ordered in a voice heavy with sorrow. “Archie, tell the cops on both sides of the river. Jersey City, Hoboken, Weehawken, New York, Brooklyn, Staten Island. The Van Dorn Agency wants every body that washes up. I will pay for decent burials for our man and the innocent crew of the lighter. We must identify the criminals who were working for the Wrecker.”
Dawn broke on a scene of devastation that stretched to both sides of the harbor. Where six Communipaw piers had pushed into the river now there were only five. The sixth had burned to the water-line. All that remained of it were blackened pilings and a heap of ruined boxcars poking out of the tide. Every window on the river side of the Jersey Central passenger terminal was broken, and half its roof was blown off. A ferry that had been moored there listed drunkenly, struck by an out-of control tugboat that had holed her hull and was still pressed into her like a nursing lamb. The masts of ships beside the piers were splintered, tin roofs and the corrugated sides of pier shacks were scattered, the sides of boxcars split open with cargo spilling out. Bandaged railroad workers, injured by flying glass and falling debris, were poking through the ruins of the rail yards, and the frightened residents of the nearby slums could be seen trudging away with their possessions on their backs.
The most incongruous sight Bell saw in the dull morning light was that of the stern of a wooden sailing schooner that had been blown out of the water and landed on a triple-tracked car float. From across the Hudson, there were reports of thousands of broken windows in lower Manhattan and the streets littered with glass.
Abbott nudged Bell.
“Here comes the boss.”
A trim New York Police launch with a low cabin and a short stack was approaching. Joseph Van Dorn stood on the foredeck in a topcoat with a newspaper tucked under his arm.
Bell walked directly to him.
“It is time for me to submit my resignation.”
27
“REQUEST DENIED!” VAN DORN SHOT BACK.
“It is not a request, sir,” Isaac Bell said coldly. “It is my intention. I will hunt the Wrecker on my own, if it takes the rest of my life. While I promise you I will not impede the Van Dorn investigation led by a better-qualified investigator.”
A small smile parted Van Dorn’s red whiskers. “Better-qualified? Perhaps you’ve been too busy to read the morning papers.”
He seized Bell’s hand and practically crushed it in his powerful grip. “We’ve won a round at last, Isaac. Well done!”
“Won a round? What are you talking about, sir? People killed on the ferry. Half the windows in Manhattan blown out. These piers a shambles. All due to the sabotage of a Southern Pacific Railroad vessel that I was hired to protect.”
“A partial victory, I’ll admit. But a victory nonetheless. You stopped the Wrecker from blowing the powder train, which was his target. He would have killed hundreds had you allowed him to. Look here.” Van Dorn opened the newspaper. Three headlines of immense type covered the front page.
EXPLOSION DAMAGE EQUAL OF MAY 1904 PIER FIRE
WORSE Loss OF LIFE ON FERRY, 3 DEAD,
COUNTLESS INJURED
COULD HAVE BEEN FAR WORSE,
SAYS FIRE COMMISSIONER
“And look at this one! Even better ...”
THE WRECKER RAGED.
Manhattan’s streets were strewn with broken glass. From the railway ferry, he saw black smoke still billowing over the Jersey shore. The harbor was littered with damaged ships and barges. And the dynamite explosion was all the talk in saloons and chophouses on both sides of the river. It even invaded the plush sanctuary of the observation-lounge car as the Chicago-bound Pennsylvania Special steamed from its battered Jersey City Terminal.
But, maddeningly, every newsboy in the city was shouting the headlines on the extra editions and every newsstand was plastered with the lies:
SABOTEURS FOILED
RAILWAY POLICE AND VAN DORN AGENTS
SAVED DYNAMITE TRAIN
MAYOR CREDITS SOUND SOUTHERN PACIFIC MANAGEMENT
If Isaac Bell were on this train, he would choke him to death with his bare hands. Or run him through. That moment would come, he reminded himself. He had lost only a battle, not the war. The war was his to win, Bell’s to lose. And that deserved a celebration!
Imperiously, he beckoned a steward.
“George!”
“Yes, Senator, suh.”
“Champagne!”
A steward rushed him a bottle of Renaudin Bollinger in an ice bucket.
“Not that swill! The company knows goddamned well I will only drink Mumm.”
The steward bowed low.
“I’m terribly sorry, Senator. But as Renaudin Bollinger was the favorite champagne of Queen Victoria, and now of King Edward, we hoped it would make a worthy substitute.”
“Substitute? What the devil are you talking about? Bring me Mumm champagne or I’ll have your job!”
“But, sir, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s entire store of Mumm was destroyed in the explosion.”
“A VICTORY AT LAST,” repeated Joseph Van Dorn. “And if you’re right that the Wrecker is trying to discredit the Southern Pacific Railroad, then he cannot be happy with these results. ‘Sound Southern Pacific Management’ indeed. Exactly the opposite of what he had hoped to a
chieve with this attack.”
“It doesn’t feel like a victory to me,” said Isaac Bell.
“Savor it, Isaac. Then get busy finding out how he set this up.”
“The Wrecker isn’t done.”
“This attack,” Van Dorn said sternly, “wasn’t planned overnight. There’ll be clues in his method as to what he is scheming next.”
A search of the section of the schooner’s stern that had been hurled onto the railroad float revealed the body of a man the Marine Division police knew well. “A water rat named Weitzman” was how a grizzled patrol-launch captain put it. “Hung out with that schooner’s captain, a son of a crocodile named Yatkowski. Smuggler when he wasn’t up to something worse. From Yonkers.”
The Yonkers police searched the old river city to no avail. But the next morning, the captain’s remains drifted ashore at Weehawken. By then, Van Dorn operatives had traced ownership of the schooner to a lumber dealer who was related to Yatkowski by marriage. The dealer admitted to no crimes, however, claiming that he had sold the ship to his brother-in-law the previous year. Asked whether the captain had ever used her to smuggle fugitives across the river, the dealer replied that when it came to his brother-in-law, anything was possible.
As Bell had surmised in Ogden, the Wrecker was changing tactics. Instead of relying on zealous radicals, he was proving adept at hiring cold-blooded criminals to do his dirty work for cash.
“Did either of these men ever use explosives in their crimes?” he asked the launch captain.
“Looks like this was the first time,” the water cop replied with a grim chuckle, “and they weren’t all that good at it. Seeing as how they blew themselves to smithereens.”
“BEAUTIFUL GIRL TO SEE you, Mr. Bell.”
Bell did not look up from his desk in the Van Dorn offices at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Three candlestick telephones were ringing constantly. Messengers were racing in and out. Operatives were standing by to make their reports and awaiting new orders.
The Wrecker Page 21