ARMORED COFFINS
15
APRIL 21, 1908
NEW YORK CITY
THE SPY SUMMONED THE GERMAN HANS TO NEW YORK, to a cellar under a Biergarten restaurant at Second Avenue and 50th Street. Barrels of Rhine wine were half submerged in a cold underground stream that flowed through the cellar. The stone walls echoed the musical sound of tumbling water. They sat face-to-face over a round wooden table illuminated by a single lightbulb.
“We plot the future beside a buried remnant of pastoral Manhattan,” the spy remarked, gauging Hans’s response.
The German, who appeared to have put a dent in the Rhine wine supply, seemed moodier than ever. The question was, had Hans’s brain become too congested by wine and remorse to make him useful?
“Mein Freund!” The spy fixed Hans with a commanding gaze. “Will you continue to serve the Fatherland?”
The German straightened visibly. “Of course!”
The spy concealed a relieved smile. Listen closely, and you could still hear Hans’s heels click like a marionette’s. “I believe your many experiences include working in a shipyard?”
“Neptun Schiffswerft und Maschinenfabrik,” Hans answered proudly, obviously flattered that the spy remembered. “In Rostock. A most modern yard.”
“The Americans’ ‘most modern yard’ is in Camden, New Jersey. I think that you should go to Camden. I think you should establish yourself quickly in the city. You can draw on me for whatever you need, be it operating funds, explosives, false identification, forged shipyard passes.”
“To what end, mein Herr?”
“To send a message to the United States Congress. To make them wonder whether their Navy is incompetent.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The Americans are about to launch their first all-big-guns battleship.”
“Michigan. Yes, I read in the papers.”
“With your experience, you know that the successful launch of a 16,000-ton hull from land into water demands balancing three powerful forces: gravity, drag on the slipway, and the upthrust of the stern’s buoyancy. Correct?”
“Yes, mein Herr.”
“For a few fraught seconds as the launch begins—when the final keel and bilge blocks are removed and the tumbler shores fall away—the hull is supported by nothing but the cradle.”
“This is correct.”
“I ask you, could strategically placed sticks of dynamite, exquisitely timed to detonate the instant she starts to slide down the ways, derail her cradle and tumble Michigan onto dry land instead of the river?”
Hans’s eyes lighted with the possibility.
The spy let the German fix his imagination upon the avalanchine crash of a 16,000-ton steel vessel falling on its side. Then he said, “The sight of a five-hundred-foot-long dreadnought hull sprawled on the ground would make a laughingstock of the United States’ ‘New Navy.’ And surely destroy the Navy’s reputation with a Congress already reluctant to appropriate the money to build more ships.”
“Yes, mein Herr.”
“Make it so.”
COMMODORE TOMMY THOMPSON was listening, calculatingly, to Brian “Eyes” O’Shay’s scheme to send his Hip Sing partners to San Francisco, when a boy ran into his 39th Street saloon with a note from Iceman Weeks.
The Commodore read it. “He’s offering to kill the Van Dorn.” “Happen to say how?”
“Probably still thinking it through,” Tommy laughed, and passed the note to Eyes.
In a strange way, he thought, they had picked up their old partnership. Not that Eyes dropped in regular. This was only his third visit since the five thousand dollars. Nor did Eyes want in on the take, which was a big surprise. Just the opposite. Eyes had lent him money to open a new gambling joint under the El Connector on 53rd, which was raking in dough already. Add that to his deal with the Hip Sing, and he was sitting pretty. Besides, when he and Eyes talked, Tommy found he trusted him. Not with his life, Jaysus knew. Not even with his dough. But he trusted Eyes’ good sense, just like when they were kids.
“What do you think?” he asked. “Should we take him up on it?” O’Shay smoothed the tip of his narrow mustache. He hooked his thumb in his vest pocket. Then he sat still as stone, legs stretched out, heels in the sawdust, and when he finally spoke he stared at his feet as if addressing his fine boots. “Weeks is tired of lying low. He wants to come home from wherever he’s hiding, which is probably Brooklyn. But he’s afraid you’ll kill him.”
“He’s afraid I will kill him on your say-so,” Tommy corrected acidly. “And you will say so.”
“I already have,” Eyes O’Shay answered. “Your so-called Iceman—”
“My so-called Iceman!” Commodore Tommy erupted in tones of wrathful indignation.
“Your so-called Iceman, who you sent to Camden when I paid you five thousand dollars, allowed the only credible witness in that dance hall—a Van Dorn Agency detective, for the love of Mary—to witness him committing murder. When the Van Dorns catch up with him—and we know they will—or the cops nail him for some other transgression, the Van Dorns will ask, ‘Who’d you do murder for?’ And Weeks will answer, ‘Tommy Thompson and his old pal Eyes O’Shay, who we thought was dead but ain’t.’ ”
O’Shay looked up from his boots, expression noncommittal, and added, “Frankly, if I didn’t insist, you’d be screwy not to kill him on your own. You’ve got more to fear than I do. I can disappear, just like I done before. You’re stuck here. Everyone knows where to find the Commodore—on 39th in Commodore Tommy’s Saloon—and pretty soon the word will get around on your new joint on 53rd. Don’t forget, Van Dorns aren’t like cops. You can’t pay Van Dorns to look any other way than at you. Down a gun barrel.”
“So what do you think about Weeks offering to kill the witness?”
Eyes O’Shay pretended to ponder the question.
“I think Weeks is brave. Sensible. Practical. Maybe he has something up his sleeve. If not, then he’s firmly possessed by delusions of grandeur.”
The Gopher Gang boss blinked. “What does that mean?”
“ ‘Delusions of grandeur’? It means Weeks will have to get damned lucky to pull it off. But if he does kill the Van Dorn, your troubles are over.”
“The Iceman is tough,” Tommy said hopefully. “And he’s smart.”
O’Shay shrugged. “With a little luck, who knows?”
“With a little luck, the Van Dorn will kill him, and that it’ll be it for witnesses.”
“Either way, how can you lose? Tell him to give it a whirl.”
Thompson scrawled a cryptic reply on the back of Weeks’s note and shouted for the kid. “Get in here, you little bastard! Take this to wherever that scumbucket is hiding.”
Brian O’Shay marveled at the sheer depths of Tommy’s stupidity. If Weeks did manage to kill the Van Dorn—who was not just any Van Dorn but the famously deadly Chief Investigator Isaac Bell—Iceman Weeks would be the Hero of Hell’s Kitchen, which would make him a prime candidate to take over the Gophers. How surprised Tommy would be by Weeks’s shiv in his ribs.
Tommy’s brand of stupidity reminded O’Shay of the Russian Navy in the Russo-Jap war. Clueless as the Baltic Fleet, when old-fashioned warships and ancient thinking bumped into the modern Japanese Navy. Ahoy, bottom of the Tsushima Strait, here we come!
“Now, could we get back to the business at hand, Tommy—the journey of your Chinamen to San Francisco?”
“They’re not exactly my Chinamen. They’re Hip Sing.”
“Find out how much money they will require to make them your Chinamen.”
“What makes you think they want to go to San Francisco?” Tommy asked. The Gopher Gang boss could not figure out what O’Shay was up to.
“They’re Chinamen,” O’Shay answered. “They’ll do anything for money.”
“You mind me asking how much you can afford?”
“I can afford anything. But if you ever ask me for more than something is worth, I
will regard it as an act of war.”
Commodore Tommy changed the subject. “I wonder what the Iceman has up his sleeve.”
DEADLY SNAKE HERE;
SERUM USEFUL IN INSANITY
POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL
AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES
Lachesis Muta Called “the Sudden Death”
by the Natives of Brazil
The wind plucked the sheet of newspaper out of the Washington Park grandstand just as Brooklyn came to bat in the eighth inning. Iceman Weeks watched it float across the infield, past Wiltse on the mound, past Seymour in center, straight toward where he was holed up—cuffless and collarless in drab flannel, disguised as a sorry-looking plumber’s helper—on the grass behind centerfield, where he wasn’t likely to run into any fans from New York.
If the Iceman were capable of loving anything, it was baseball. But he couldn’t risk being spotted in New York at tomorrow’s home opener at the Polo Grounds, so he was making do in the wilds of Brooklyn where no one knew him. His favorite Giants were lambasting the sorry Superbas. The Giants were hitting hard, and the cold wind blowing cinders, hats, and newspapers had no effect on Hooks Wiltse’s throwing arm. His left-handed twisters had dazzled the Brooklyn batters throughout the game, and by the bottom of the eighth New York was ahead 4 to 1.
Weeks’s ice-blue eyes locked on the juicy headline as the newspaper blew overhead.
POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL
AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES
He leaped off the grass and caught the paper in both hands.
Ball game forgotten, he read avidly, tracing each word with a dirty fingernail. The fact that Weeks could read at all put him miles ahead of most of the Gopher Gang. New York’s daily newspapers were packed with opportunities. The society pages reported when rich men left town for Newport or Europe, leaving their mansions empty. The shipping news gave notice about cargo to be plundered from the docks and Eleventh Avenue sidings. Theater reviews were a guide to pickpockets, obituaries a promise of empty apartments.
He read every word of the snake story, galvanized by hope, then started over. His luck had turned. The snake would recoup his losses from the worst hand ever dealt: Van Dorn detective Isaac Bell turning up in Camden the night they killed the Scotsman.
A lance-headed viper from Brazil, the most deadly of all known reptiles, will be exhibited tomorrow tonight before the Academy of Pathological Science at its monthly meeting at the Hotel Cumberland in 54th Street and Broadway.
The paper said that the sawbones were interested in the snake because a serum made from the lance-head’s deadly venom was used to treat nervous and brain diseases.
The Iceman knew the Cumberland.
It was a twelve-story, first-class hotel billed in the ads as “Headquarters for College Men.” That and the $2.50-a-night room fee ought to keep out the riffraff. But Weeks was pretty sure he could dress like a college man, thanks to his second advantage over ordinary gangsters. He was half real American. Unlike the full-blooded Micks in the Gophers, only his mother was Irish. The time he had met his father, the Old Man had told him that the Weekses were Englishmen who had landed here before the Mayflower. Wearing the right duds, why couldn’t he march into the lobby of the Hotel Cumberland like he belonged?
He figured that the Cumberland house dicks could be got around by twisting the arm of a bellboy to run interference for him. Weeks had one in mind, Jimmy Clark, who had a sideline distributing cocaine for a pharmacist on 49th, which had become a riskier business since the new law said that dust had to be prescribed by a doctor.
A human lives only one or two minutes after the poison enters the system. The viper’s venom seems to paralyze the action of the heart, and the victim stiffens and turns black.
He already had a setup. It wasn’t like he’d been hiding out doing nothing. Soon as he had learned where Isaac Bell slept when he was in town, he had finagled a laundress he knew into a job at the Yale Club of New York City, betting she could sneak him into the detective’s room.
Jenny Sullivan was fresh off the boat from Ireland and deep in hock for her fare. Weeks had bought her debt, intending to put her to work on the sheets instead of ironing them. But after Camden, he had persuaded people who had reason to do him a big favor to wangle Jenny a job at Bell’s club. That was when he wrote Commodore Tommy, offering to kill the detective. But he hadn’t yet managed to screw up the courage to hide under Bell’s bed with a pistol and tangle with him man-to-man.
Weeks was tough enough to have gouged Bell’s .380 slug out of his own shoulder with a boning knife rather than let some drunken doctor or midwife tip off Tommy Thompson as to his whereabouts. Tough enough to pour grain alcohol into the wound to stop infection. But he had already seen Bell in action. Bell was tougher—bigger, faster, and better armed—and only a mug got in a fight he could not win.
Better to match Bell with “the Sudden Death.”
The paper said that the curator of the Bronx Zoo reptile house would deliver the animal in a box made of thick glass.
“ ‘He can’t get out,’ ” the curator promised the Pathology Society doctors who were invited -to view the reptile.
Weeks reckoned that with a bullet hole in his shoulder, a box made of thick glass big enough to hold a four-foot-long poisonous snake would be too heavy for him to carry alone. And if he dropped it trying to carry it under one arm and the glass broke, look out! A bum shoulder would be the least of his problems. He needed help. But the boys he could trust to lend a hand were both dead—shot by the blazing-fast Van Dorn dick.
If he tried to recruit anyone to carry the glass box, the word would flash to Tommy Thompson that Iceman Weeks was back in town. Might as well tie his own hands behind his back and jump in the river. Save Tommy the trouble. Because you didn’t have to be a brain to figure out that Eyes O’Shay would order the Commodore to kill the man who’d been spotted by a Van Dorn dick while doing the killing Eyes had paid for. Weeks could swear until he was blue in the face that he would never squeal. O’Shay and Tommy would kill him anyway. Just to be on the safe side.
At least Tommy had written back that he approved of him killing Isaac Bell. Of course he didn’t offer to help. And it went without saying that if Tommy and Eyes saw a chance to kill him first, they wouldn’t wait for him to take a crack at Bell.
Wiltse bunted in the ninth and Bridwell doubled. When the inning ended New York had two more runs, Brooklyn did not, and Weeks was leading the rush for the Fifth Avenue Elevated with a fair notion of how to transport the snake to the Yale Club.
He needed a suit of “college man” clothes, a steamer trunk, a pane of glass, a bellboy with a luggage cart, and directions to the fuse box.
16
WHO IS THAT OFFICER?” ISAAC BELL DEMANDED OF THE Protection Services operative assigned to guard Farley Kent’s drawing loft in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
“I don’t know, Mr. Bell.”
“How did he get in here?”
“He knew the password.”
Van Dorn Protection Services had issued passwords for each of the Hull 44 dreadnought men it was guarding. After getting past the Marines guarding the gates, a visitor still had to prove he was expected by the individual he claimed to be visiting.
“Where is Mr. Kent?”
“They’re all in the test chamber working on that cage-mast model,” the Protection Services operative answered, pointing across the drawing loft at a closed door that led to the laboratory. “Is there something wrong, Mr. Bell?”
“Three things,” Bell answered tersely. “Farley Kent is not here, so he does not seem to have expected that officer to visit. The officer has been studying Kent’s drawing board since I walked in. And in case you haven’t noticed, he is wearing the uniform of the Czar’s Navy.”
“Them blue uniforms look all the same,” the operative replied, reminding Bell that few PS boys possessed the brains and moxie to climb the ladder to full-fledged Van Dorn detect
ive. “Besides, he’s carrying them rolled-up drawings like they all do. You want I should question him, Mr. Bell?”
“I’ll do it. Next time someone walks in unexpected, assume he’s trouble until you learn otherwise.”
Bell strode across the big loft past rows of drawing boards that were usually occupied by the naval architects testing the cage mast. The man in the Russian officer’s uniform was so engrossed in Farley Kent’s drawing that he gave a startled jump and dropped the rolls he had tucked under his arm when Bell said, “Good morning, sir.”
“Oh! I do not hear approach,” he said in a heavy Russian accent, scrambling to pick them up.
“May I have your name, please?”
“I am Second Lieutenant Vladimir Ivanovich Yourkevitch of His Majesty Czar Nicolas’s Imperial Russian Navy. And to whom do I have the honor—”
“Have you an appointment here, Lieutenant Yourkevitch?” The Russian, who looked barely old enough to shave, bowed his head. “Sadly, no. I am hoping to meet with Mr. Farley Kent.”
“Does Mr. Kent know you?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“Then how did you get in here?”
Yourkevitch smiled, disarmingly. “With entitled demeanor, impeccable uniform, and crisp salute.”
Isaac Bell did not smile back. “That might get you past the Marines guarding the gate. But where did you get the password to go to Kent’s drawing loft?”
“In bar outside gates, I meet Marine officer. He tells me password.”
Bell beckoned the Protection Services operative.
“Lieutenant Yourkevitch will sit on that stool, away from this drawing board, until I return.” To Lieutenant Yourkevitch he said, “This gentleman is fully capable of knocking you to the floor. Do as he tells you.”
Then Bell crossed the loft and pushed open the door to the test chamber.
A dozen of Kent’s staff were circled around a ten-foot-tall model of an experimental battleship cage mast. The young naval architects held wire snips, micrometers, slide rules, notepaper, and tape measures. The round, freestanding structure, which stood on a dolly, was made of stiff wires that spiraled from base to top in a counterclockwise twist and were braced at intervals by horizontal rings. It represented, in miniature, a one-hundred-twenty-foot-high mast made of lightweight tubing and was correct in every detail down to the mesh platforms within some of the rings, electric leads and voice pipes running from the spotters’ top to the fire director’s tower, and tiny ladders angling up the interior.
The Spy Page 11