What was missing?
A telephone rang. The duty officer snapped up the middle one, which someone had marked as foremost with an urgent slash of showgirl’s lip rouge. “Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn! … Yes, sir! He’s here … Yes, sir! I’ll tell him. Good-bye, Mr. Van Dorn.”
The duty officer, cradling the earpiece, said to Isaac Bell, “Mr. Van Dorn says if you don’t leave the office this minute, you’re fired.”
They fled the Knickerbocker.
Archie Abbott, ever the proud tour guide, pointed out the two-story yellow facade of Rector’s Restaurant as they headed up Broadway. He took particular note of a huge statue out front. “See that griffin?”
“Hard to miss.”
“It’s guarding the greatest lobster palace in the whole city!”
LILLIAN HENNESSY LOVED MAKING her entrance at Rector’s. Sweeping past the griffin on the sidewalk, ushered into an enormous green-and-yellow wonderland of crystal and gold brilliantly lit by giant chandeliers, she felt what it must be like to be a great and beloved actress. The best part was the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that let everyone in the restaurant see who was entering the revolving door.
Tonight, people had stared at her beautiful golden gown, gaped at the diamonds nestled about her breasts, and whispered about her astonishingly handsome escort. Or, to use Marion Morgan’s term, her unspeakably handsome escort. Too bad it was only Senator Kincaid, still tirelessly courting her, still hoping to get his hands on her fortune. How much more exciting it would be to walk in here with a man like Isaac Bell, handsome but not pretty, strong but not brutish, rugged but not rough.
“A penny for your thoughts,” said Kincaid.
“I think we should finish our lobsters and get to the show… Oh, hear the band… Anna Held’s coming!”
The restaurant’s band always played a Broadway actress’s new hit when she entered. The song was “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave.”
Lillian sang along in a sweet voice in perfect pitch,In the northeast corner of my face,
and the northeast corner of the self-same place…
There she was, the French actress Anna Held, with her tiny waist shown off by a magnificent green gown much longer than she wore on stage, wreathed in smiles and flashing her eyes.
“Oh, Charles, this is so exciting. I’m glad we came.”
Charles Kincaid smiled at the astonishingly rich girl leaning across the tablecloth and suddenly realized how truly young and innocent she was. He would bet money that she’d learned the tricks she played with her beautiful eyes by studying Held’s every gesture. Very effectively too, he had to admit, as she gave him a well-practiced up-from-under blaze of pale blue.
He said, “I’m so glad you telephoned.”
“The Follies are back,” she answered blithely. “I had to come. Who wants to go to a show alone?”
That pretty much summed up her attitude toward him. He hated that she spurned him. But when he got done with her father, the old man wouldn’t have two bits to leave in his will while he would be rich enough to own Lillian, lock, stock, and barrel. In the meantime, pretending to court her gave him the excuse he needed to spend more time around her father than he would have been permitted in his role of tame senator casting votes on issues dear to the railroad corporations. Let Lillian Hennessy spurn her too old, vaguely comic, gold-digging suitor, a hopeless lover as unremarkable and unnoticed as the furniture. He would own her in the end-not as a wife but an object, like a beautiful piece of sculpture, to be enjoyed when he felt the urge.
“I had to come, too,” Kincaid answered her, silently cursing the Rawlins prizefighters who’d failed to murder Isaac Bell.
This night of all nights, he had to be seen in public. If Bell was not growing suspicious, he would soon. By now, an early sense of something wrong must have begun percolating in the detective’s mind. How long before Bell’s wanted poster jogged the memory of someone who had seen him preparing destruction? The oversize ears in the sketch would not protect him forever.
What better alibis than the Follies of 1907 in Hammerstein’s Jardin de Paris?
Hundreds of people would remember Senator Charles Kincaid dining at Rector’s with the most sought-after heiress in New York. A thousand would see the Hero Engineer arrive at the biggest show on Broadway with an unforgettable girl on his arm-a full mile and half away from a “show” that would outshine even the Follies.
“What are you smiling about, Charles?” Lillian asked him.
“I’m looking forward to the entertainment.”
23
PIRACY WAS RARE ON THE HUDSON RIVER IN THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century. When Captain Whit Petrie saw a raked bow loom out of the rain, his only reaction was to blow Lillian I‘s whistle to warn the other boat not to get too close. The sonorous blast of steam woke McColleen, the railroad dick who was snoozing on the bench in the back of the wheelhouse as Lillian I churned north past Yonkers, fighting an ebb tide and a powerful river current.
“What’s that?”
“Vessel under sail … Damned fool must be deaf.”
The looming bow was still bearing down on him, close enough to reveal that the sails silhouetted against the dark sky were schooner-rigged. Whit Petrie lowered a wheelhouse window to see better and heard the thump of her auxiliary gasoline engine driving hard. He yanked his whistle pull again and put the wheel over to veer away before they collided. The other boat veered with him.
“What the hell?”
By now, McColleen was on his feet, all business, yanking a revolver from his coat.
A shotgun bellowed, blowing out the windows and blinding McColleen with flying glass. The railway dick fell back, crying out in pain and clutching his face and firing blindly. Captain Petrie drew on bred-in-the-bone Jersey City street-fighter instincts. He whirled his wheel hard over to ram the attacker.
It was the right tactic. The heavily laden steam lighter would be certain to cut the wooden schooner in half. But Lillian I‘s worn rudder linkage, long neglected by the New Jersey Central Railroad and now the Southern Pacific, failed under the wrenching maneuver. Steering gear carried away, rudder gone, the dynamite boat stalled partway into the sharp turn and wallowed helplessly. The schooner slammed alongside, and a gang of men stormed aboard, howling like banshees and firing guns at anyone who moved.
THE JARDIN DE PARIS was a makeshift theater on the roof of Hammerstein’s Olympia. This cold, rainy night, canvas curtains were lowered to keep out the wind but did little to muffle the noise of the gasoline buses on Broadway below. But no one holding a ticket looked anything but happy to be there.
Tables and chairs were arranged on a flat floor more like a dance hall than an auditorium. But the management had added elaborate boxes to attract what Archie Abbott called “a better class of audience.” The boxes were newly built on a sweeping horseshoe-shaped platform on top of a pagoda that spanned the elevator entrance. Florenz Ziegfeld, the producer of the Follies, had given the Van Dorn detectives the best of those seats. They offered a clear, close view of the stage and a sweeping panorama of the rest of the boxes, which were filling with men wearing white tie and tails and women in gowns fit for a ball.
Scanning the arriving audience, Bell suddenly locked eyes with Lillian Hennessy as she took a seat across the way. She looked more beautiful than ever in a gold gown and with her blond hair piled high upon her head. He smiled at her, and her face lit up with genuine pleasure, forgiving him apparently for wrecking her Packard automobile. In fact, he reflected worriedly, she was smiling at him like a girl on the brink of total infatuation-which was the last thing either of them needed.
“Look at that girl!” blurted Abbott.
“Archie, if you lean out any farther, you’ll fall into the cheap seats.”
“Worth it if she’ll weep over my body-you’ll tell her how I died. Wait a minute, she’s smiling at you.”
“Her name is Lillian,” said Bell. “That Southern Pacific steam lighter you were gawking at thi
s afternoon is named after her. As is everything that floats that’s owned by the railroad. She’s old Hennessy’s daughter.”
“Rich, too? God in heaven. Who’s the stuffed shirt with her? He looks familiar.”
“Senator Charles Kincaid.”
“Oh yes. The Hero Engineer.”
Bell returned Kincaid’s nod coolly. He was not surprised that Kincaid’s check for poker losses had still not arrived at the Yale Club. Men who dealt from the bottom of the deck tended not to pay their debts when they thought they could get away with it.
“The Senator certainly got lucky.”
“I don’t think so,” said Bell. “She’s too rich and independent to fall for his line.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She told me.”
“Why would she confide in you, Isaac?”
“She was polishing off her third bottle of Mumm.”
“So you got lucky.”
“I got lucky with Marion, and I’m going to stay lucky with Marion.”
“Love,” Archie mock mourned in a doleful voice as the houselights began to dim, “stalks us like death and taxes.”
A grand dowager, wrapped in yards of silk, behatted in feathers, and dripping diamonds, leaned from the next box to rap Abbott’s shoulder imperiously with her lorgnette.
“Quiet down, young man. The show is starting… Oh, Archie, it’s you. How is your mother?”
“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Vanderbilt. I’ll tell her you asked.”
“Please do. And Archie? I could not help but overhear. The gentleman with you is correct. The young lady has little regard for that loathsome legislator. And, I must say, she could handily repair your family’s tattered fortunes.”
“Mother would be delighted,” Abbott agreed, adding in a mutter for only Bell to hear, “As Mother regards the Vanderbilts as uncultivated ‘new money,’ you can imagine her horror were I to bring home the daughter of a ‘shirtsleeve railroader.”’
“You should be so lucky,” said Bell.
“I know. But Mother’s made it clear, no one below an Astor.”
Bell shot a look across the boxes at Lillian, and a brilliant scheme leaped full blown into his mind. A scheme to derail Miss Lillian’s growing infatuation with him and simultaneously get poor Archie’s mother off Archie’s back. But it would require the restraint of a diplomat and the light touch of a jeweler. So all he said was, “Pipe down! The show is starting.”
IN THE MIDDLE OF the Hudson River, a mile west of Broadway, the pirated Southern Pacific steam lighter Lillian I dashed downstream. The outflowing tide doubled the speed of the current, making up for the time they had lost repairing her steering gear. She steamed in company with the wooden sailing schooner that had captured her. The wind was southeast, thick with rain. The schooner’s sails were close-hauled, her gasoline engine churning its hardest to keep up with Lillian I.
The schooner’s captain, the smuggler from Yonkers, felt a twinge of sentiment for the old girl who was about to be blown to smithereens. A minor twinge, Yatkowski thought, smiling, having been paid twice the value of the schooner to drown the steam lighter’s crew in the river and stand by to rescue the Chinaman when they sent her on her last voyage. The boss paying the bills had made it clear: look out for the Chinaman until the job was done. Bring him back in one piece. The boss had use for the explosives expert.
THE ANNA HELD GIRLS, acclaimed by the producer to be “the most beautiful women ever gathered in one theater,” were dancing up a storm, in short white dresses, wide hats, and red sashes, as they sang “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave.”
“Some of those women are imported straight from Paris,” Abbott whispered.
“I don’t see Anna Held,” Bell muttered back, familiar as any man in the nation under the age of ninety with the French actress’s expressive eyes, eighteen-inch waist, and resultantly curvaceous hips. Her skin, it was claimed, was conditioned by daily baths in milk. Bell glanced across at Lillian Hennessy, who was watching with rapt attention, and he suddenly realized that her tutor, Mrs. Comden, was shaped very much like Anna Held. Did President Hennessy pour her milk baths?
Abbott applauded loudly, and the audience followed suit. “For some reason, known best to Mr. Ziegfeld,” he told Bell over the roar, “Anna Held is not one of the Anna Held Girls. Even though she’s his common-law wife.”
“I doubt the entire Van Dorn Detective Agency can get him out of that fix.”
The Follies of 1907 raced on. Burlesque comedians argued about a bar bill in German accents like Weber and Fields and a suddenly sobered Bell fixed on Mack and Wally. When Annabelle Whitford came on stage in a black bathing costume as the Gibson Bathing Girl, Abbott nudged Bell and whispered, “Remember the nickelodeon when we were kids? She did the butterfly dance.”
Bell was listening with half attention, pondering the Wrecker’s plan. Where would he attack now that they had all bases covered? And what, Bell wondered, had he himself missed? The grim answer was that whatever he missed, the Wrecker would see.
The orchestra had struck up a raucous “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and Abbott nudged Bell again.
“Look. They put our client in the act.”
The burlesque comedians were posing in front of a painted backdrop of a Southern Pacific locomotive steaming up behind them as if about to run them over. Even paying half attention, it was clear that the comedian in colonial dress cavorting on a hobby horse was supposed to be Paul Revere. His costar in engineer’s striped cap and overalls represented Southern Pacific Railroad president Osgood Hennessy.
Paul Revere galloped up, waving a telegram.
“Telegram from the United States Senate, President Hennessy.”
“Hand it over, Paul Revere!” Hennessy snatched it from the horseman and read aloud, “‘Please, sir, telegraph instructions. You forgot to tell us how to vote.”’
“What are your instructions to the senators, President Hennessy?”
“The railroad is coming. The railroad is coming.”
“How should they vote?”
“One if by land.”
“Shine one lantern in the steeple if the railroad comes by land?”
“Bribes, dummkopf! Not lanterns. Bribes!”
“How many bribes by sea?”
“Two if by-”
Isaac Bell leaped from his seat.
24
IN THE DARK HOLD OF THE STEAM LIGHTER LILLIAN I, WONG Lee was finishing his intricate wiring by the light of an Eveready wooden bicycle lantern powered by three dry cell “D” batteries. Wong Lee was grateful for it, recalling with no nostalgia the old days of connecting dynamite fuses by the light of an open flame. Thank the gods for electricity, which provided light to work by and power to ignite detonators with uncanny precision.
ISAAC BELL EXITED THE Jardin de Paris through the canvas rain curtains and pounded down a steel stairway attached to the outside of the Hammerstein Theater. He landed in an alley and ran to Broadway. It was two blocks to the Knickerbocker Hotel. The sidewalks were jammed with people. He darted into the street, dodging traffic, raced downtown, tore through the lobby of the Knickerbocker, and bounded up the stairs to the Van Dorn Agency, reached under the startled front man’s desk for the secret door-lock switch, and burst into the back room.
“I want Eddie Edwards on the powder pier. Which is the telephone line to Jersey City?”
“Number one, sir. Like you ordered.”
Bell picked up the telephone and clicked repeatedly.
“Get me Eddie Edwards.”
“That you, Isaac? Are you bringing us home a Follies girl?”
“Listen to me, Eddie. Move the Vickers machine gun so you can cover the water as well as the main gate.”
“Can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Those five powder cars block the field of fire. I can cover one or the other, but not the gate and the water both.”
“Then get another machine gun. In case he att
acks from the water.”
“I’m trying to borrow one from the Army, but it ain’t gonna happen tonight. Sorry, Isaac. What if I put a couple of riflemen on the end of the pier?”
“You say the powder cars block the field of fire? Put your machine gun on top of them.”
“On top of them?”
“You heard me. Position your machine gun on top of the dynamite cars so they can swivel the gun in either direction. That way, they can cover the gate and the water. On the jump, Eddie. Do it now!”
Bell cradled the earpiece with great relief. That was what he had forgotten. The water. An attack by boat. He grinned at the other detectives, who had been listening avidly.
“Manning an automatic machine gun on top of a dynamite train ought to be plenty incentive to stay awake,” he said.
He sauntered back to the theater, feeling much less worried, and slipped into his seat just as the curtain came down on the Follies’ first act.
“What was that all about?” Abbott asked.
“If the Wrecker decides to attack from the water, he’s going to run head-on into a Vickers automatic machine gun.”
“Good thinking, Isaac. So now you can relax by introducing me to your friend.”
“Senator Kincaid?” Bell asked innocently. “I wouldn’t call him a friend. We played a little draw, but …”
“You know who I mean, you son of a gun. I am referring to the Southern Pacific Helen of Troy whose gorgeous face launched twelve steamboats.”
“She strikes me as much too intelligent to fall for a Princeton man.”
“She’s getting into the elevator! Come on, Isaac!”
Crowds of people were waiting for the elevators. Bell led Abbott through the canvas rain curtains, down the outside stairway, and into the cavernous lobby on the ground floor that served all three theaters in the building.
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