The Spy Read online

  The spy said, “I know you’re not a simpleton. I am merely trying to help.”

  “Thank you, mein Herr.”

  “Do the detectives frighten you?” he asked, even though he doubted they did.

  “No. I can avoid them until the last moment. The pass you had made for me will throw them off. By the time any realize what I am up to, it will be too late to stop me.”

  “Do you fear that you will not escape with your life?”

  “I would be amazed if I did. Fortunately, I have settled that question in my own mind. That is not what troubles me.”

  “Then we are back to the same basic question, Hans. Would you have American warships sink German warships?”

  “Maybe it is the waiting that is killing me. No matter where I go I hear them hitting the wedges. Like the ticking clock. Ticktock. Ticktock. Ticking for innocent men who don’t know yet that they will die. It’s driving me crazy-What is this?”

  The spy was pushing money into his hand. He tried to jerk back. “I don’t want money.”

  The spy seized his wrist in an astonishingly powerful grip. “Recreation. Find a girl. She’ll make the night go faster.” He stood up abruptly.

  “Are you leaving?” Suddenly Hans did look afraid-afraid to be alone with his conscience.

  “I’ll be nearby. I’ll be watching.” The spy smiled reassuringly and slapped him on the shoulder.

  “Go find that girl. Enjoy the night. It will be morning before you know it.”

  23

  WAITERS SPORTING RED, WHITE, AND BLUE BOW TIES spread watercress sandwiches and iced wine in the dignitaries’ pavilion. Bartenders, who had been issued similarly patriotic garters for their sleeves, rolled kegs of beer and carts of hard-boiled eggs into the ship workers’ tents on the riverbank. A warm breeze drifted through the enormous shed that covered the shipway, sunlight filtered down from glass panels in the roof, and it appeared that half the population of Camden, New Jersey, had turned out to celebrate launching the battleship Michigan, whose 16,000 tons were balanced at the high end of a track of greased rails that slanted into the river.

  The shed still resounded with steel banging on wood, but the pace of the hammering had slowed. The wedges had lifted the battleship off nearly all her building blocks. But for a last few under her keel and bilges, she rested on the cradle she would ride down the ways.

  The ceremonial launching platform surrounding the ship’s steel bow was draped with red, white, and blue bunting. A champagne bottle, wrapped in crocheted mesh to keep glass from flying and beribboned in the colors of the flag, waited in a bowl of roses.

  The battleship’s sponsor, the pretty, dark-haired girl who would christen her, stood by in a striped flannel walking dress and a wide-brimmed Merry Widow hat heaped with silk peonies. She was ignoring the fevered instructions of an Assistant Secretary of the Navy-her father-who was warning her not to hold back at the crucial moment but to “Whack her with all you’ve got the instant the ship starts to move or it’ll be too late.”

  Her gaze was fixed on a tall, golden-haired detective in a white suit, whose restless eyes were looking everywhere but at her.

  Isaac Bell had not slept in a bed since he arrived in Camden two days ago. He had originally intended to come down with Marion the night before the ceremony and dine in Philadelphia. But that was before the Philadelphia office had sent the urgent wire to New York. Disquieting rumors had begun to drift in concerning a mysterious German bent on disrupting the launch. Detectives assigned to the German immigrant community heard of a recent arrival who claimed to be from Bremen but spoke with a Rostock accent. He kept asking about finding work at New York Ship but had never applied to the company. Several hands had unaccountably lost the gate badges that identified them as employees.

  This morning at dawn, Angelo Del Rossi, the frock-coated proprietor of the King Street dance hall where Alasdair MacDonald had been murdered, sought Bell out. He reported that a woman had come to him, distraught and frightened. A German who met the description of the man from Rostock-tall and fair, with troubled eyes-had confessed to the woman, who in turn had confessed to Del Rossi.

  “She’s a part-time working girl, Isaac, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ve heard of such arrangements,” Bell assured him. “What exactly did she say?”

  “This German she was with suddenly blurted out something to the effect that the innocent should not die. She asked what he meant. They had been drinking. He fell silent, then blurted some more, as drinkers will, saying that the cause was just, but the methods wrong. Again she asked what he meant. And he broke down and began to weep, and said-and this she claimed to quote exactly-‘The dreadnought will fall, but men will die.’ ”

  “Do you believe her?”

  “She had nothing to gain coming to me, except a clear conscience. She knows men who work in the yard. She doesn’t want them to be hurt. She was brave enough to confide in me.”

  “I must speak with her,” said Bell.

  “She won’t talk to you. She doesn’t see any difference between private detectives and cops, and she doesn’t like cops.”

  Bell pulled a gold piece from inside his belt and handed it to the saloonkeeper. “No cop ever paid her twenty dollars to talk. Give this to her. Tell her I admire her bravery and that I will do nothing to endanger her.” He turned his gaze sharply on Del Rossi. “You do believe me, Angelo. Do you not?”

  “Why do you think I came to you?” said Del Rossi. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Is it enough money?”

  “More than she clears in a week.”

  Bell tossed him more gold. “Here’s another week. This is vitally important, Angelo. Thank you.”

  Her name was Rose. She had offered no last name when Del Rossi arranged for them to meet in the back of his dance hall, and Bell asked for none. Bold and self-possessed, she repeated everything she had told Del Rossi. Bell kept her talking, probing gently, and she finally added that the German’s parting words, as he staggered from the private booth they had rented in a waterfront bar, were, “It will be done.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “I should think so.”

  “How would you like to become a temporary employee of the Van Dorn Detective Agency?”

  NOW SHE WAS CRUISING the shipyard in a summery white dress and a flowered hat, pretending to be the kid sister of two burly Van Dorn operatives disguised as celebrating steamfitters. A dozen more detectives were prowling the shipyard checking and rechecking the identities of all who were working near the Michigan, particularly the carpenters driving the wedges directly under the hull. These men were required to carry special red passes issued by Van Dorn-instead of New York Ship-in case spies had infiltrated the offices of the shipbuilding firm.

  The runners who reported to Bell on the platform were chosen for their youthful appearance. Bell had ordered them to be attired like innocuous college boys, in boaters, summer suits, rounded collars, and neckties, so as not to unnecessarily frighten the throng that had come out to greet the new ship.

  He had argued strongly for a postponement, but there was no question of calling the ceremony off. Too much was riding on the launch, Captain Falconer had explained, and every party involved would protest. New York Ship was proud to put Michigan in the water just ahead of Cramp’s Shipyard’s South Carolina, which was only weeks behind. The Navy wanted the hull immediately afloat to finish fitting her out. And no one in his cabinet dared inform President Roosevelt of any delay.

  The ceremony was scheduled to start exactly at eleven. Captain Falconer had warned Bell that they would launch on time. In less than an hour the dreadnought would either slide uneventfully down the ways or the German saboteur would attack, wreaking a terrible toll on the innocent.

  A Marine brass band started playing a Sousa medley, and the launching stand got crowded with hundreds of special guests invited to stand close enough to actually see the champagne bottle crack on
the bow. Bell spotted the Secretary of the Interior, three senators, the governor of Michigan, and several members of President Roosevelt’s vigorous “Tennis Cabinet.”

  The top bosses of New York Ship trooped up the steps in close company with Admiral Capps, the chief naval constructor. Capps seemed less interested in talking to shipbuilders than to Lady Fiona Abbington-Westlake, the wife of the British Naval Attaché, a beautiful woman with a shiny mane of chestnut hair. Isaac Bell observed her discreetly. The Van Dorn researchers assigned to the Hull 44 spy case had reported that Lady Fiona spent beyond her husband’s means. Worse, she was paying blackmail to a Frenchman named Raymond Colbert. No one knew what Colbert had on her, or whether it involved her husband’s purloining of French naval secrets.

  The German Emperor, Kaiser Wilhelm II, was represented by a saber-scarred military attaché, Lieutenant Julian Von Stroem, recently returned from German East Africa, who was married to an American friend of Dorothy Langner. Suddenly Dorothy herself parted the crowd in her dark mourning clothes. The bright-eyed redheaded girl he had noticed at the Willard Hotel was at her elbow. Katherine Dee, Research had reported, was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who had moved back to Ireland after making his fortune building Catholic schools in Baltimore. Orphaned soon after, Katherine had been convent-educated in Switzerland.

  The handsome Ted Whitmark trailed behind them, shaking hands and slapping backs and declaring in a voice that carried to the glass roof, “Michigan is going to be one of Uncle Sam’s best fighting units.” While Whitmark occasionally played the fool in his private life, gambling and drinking, at least before he met Dorothy, Research had made it clear that he was extremely adept at the business of snagging government contracts.

  Typical of the incestuous relationships in the crowd of industrialists, politicians, and diplomats that swirled around the “New Navy,” he and Dorothy Langner had met at a clambake hosted by Captain Falconer. As Grady Forrer of Van Dorn Research had remarked cynically, “The easy part was discovering who’s in bed with whom; the hard part is calculating why, seeing as how ‘why’ can run the gamut from profit to promotion to espionage to just plain raising hell.”

  Bell saw a small smile part Dorothy’s lips. He glanced in the direction she was looking and saw the naval architect Farley Kent nod back. Then Kent threw an arm around his guest-Lieutenant Yourkevitch, the Czar’s dreadnought architect-and plunged into the crowd as if to get out of the path of Ted and Dorothy. Oblivious, Ted seized an elderly admiral’s hand and bellowed, “Great day for the Navy, sir. Great day for the Navy.”

  Dorothy’s eyes wheeled Bell’s way and locked with his. Bell returned her gaze appraisingly. He had not seen her since the day he had called on her in Washington, though he had, at Van Dorn’s urging, reported to her by long-distance telephone that there was strong reason to hope that her father’s name would soon be cleared. She had thanked him warmly and said that she hoped she would see him in Camden at the luncheon that would follow the launching. It occurred to Bell that neither Ted Whitmark nor Farley Kent would be pleased by the look she was giving him now.

  A warm breath whispered in his ear. “That’s quite a smile for a lady dressed in mourning black.”

  Marion Morgan glided behind him and made a beeline for Captain Falconer. He looked heroically splendid in his full-dress white uniform, she thought, or splendidly heroic, his handsome head erect in a high-standing collar, medals arrayed across his broad chest, sword at his trim waist.

  “GOOD MORNING, MISS MORGAN,” Lowell Falconer greeted Marion Morgan heartily. “Are you enjoying yourself?”

  She and Isaac had dined aboard Falconer’s yacht the night before. When Bell promised him that Arthur Langner would be completely vindicated of accepting bribes, her pride in her fiancé had spoken legions for her love. Still, Falconer admitted ruefully, he had not been disappointed when Bell had to excuse himself early to oversee another inspection of the ways beneath the ship. After the detective left, their conversation had flowed seamlessly from dreadnought design to moving pictures to naval warfare to the paintings of Henry Reutendahl to Washington politics and Falconer’s career. He realized in retrospect that he had told her more about himself than he had intended to.

  The Hero of Santiago knew himself well enough to acknowledge that he had fallen half in love with her. But he was completely unaware that the beautiful Miss Morgan was using him for cover as she tracked the head-bowing, hat-tipping passage through the crowd of an elegantly dressed Japanese.

  “Why,” she asked Falconer, filling time, “is the shipbuilder called New York Ship when it’s in Camden, New Jersey?”

  “That confuses everyone,” Falconer explained with his warmest smile and a devilish glint in his eye. “Originally, Mr. Morse intended to build his yard on Staten Island, but Camden offered better rail facilities and access to Philadelphia’s experienced shipyard workers. Why are you smiling that way, Miss Morgan?”

  She said, “The way you’re looking at me, it’s a good thing that Isaac is nearby and armed.”

  “Well, he ought to be,” Falconer retorted gruffly. “Anyway, Camden, New Jersey, has the most modern shipyard in the world. When it comes to building dreadnoughts, it is second only to our most important facility at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.”

  “And why is that, Captain?” Her quarry was drawing near.

  “They embrace a thoroughly modern system. Major parts are prefabricated. Overhead cranes move them around the yard as easily as you’d assemble the ingredients to bake a cake. These sheds cover the ways so bad weather doesn’t delay production.”

  “They remind me of the glass studios we use to film indoors, though ours are much smaller.”

  “Fittings that used to be mounted after launch are applied in the comfort of those covered ways. She’ll be launched with her guns already in place.”

  “Fascinating.” The man she was watching had stopped to peer through a break in the scaffolding that revealed the ship’s long armor belt. “Captain Falconer? How many men will crew the Michigan?”

  “Fifty officers. Eight hundred fifty enlisted.”

  She uttered a thought so grim that it shadowed her face. “That is a terrible number of sailors in one small space if the worst happens and the ship sinks.”

  “Modern warships are armored coffins,” Falconer answered far more bluntly than he would with a civilian, but their conversations last night had established an easy trust between them and left him in no doubt of her superior intelligence. “I saw Russians drown by the thousands fighting the Japs in the Tsushima Strait. Battleships went down in minutes. All but the spotters in the fighting tops and a few men on the bridge were trapped belowdecks.”

  “Can I assume that our goal is to build warships that will sink slowly and give men time to get off?”

  “The goal for battleships is to keep fighting. That means protecting men, machinery, and guns within a citadel of armor while keeping the ship afloat. The sailors who win stay alive.”

  “So today is a happy day, launching such a modern ship.”

  Captain Falconer glowered at Marion under his heavy eyebrows. “Between you and me, miss, thanks to Congress limiting her to 16,000 tons, Michigan has eight feet less freeboard aft then the old Connecticut. She’ll be wetter than a whale, and if she ever makes eighteen knots in heavy seas, I’ll eat my hat.”

  “Obsolete before she is even launched?”

  “Doomed to escort slow conveys. But if she ever tangles with a real dreadnought, it better be in calm waters. Hell!” he snorted. “We should anchor her in San Francisco Bay to greet the Japanese.”

  A petite girl wearing a very expensive hat secured to her red hair with Taft-for-President “Possum Billy” hatpins stepped up. “Excuse me, Captain Falconer. I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I had a wonderful time at a picnic on your yacht.”

  Falconer seized the hand that she had offered tentatively. “I remember you indeed, Miss Dee,” he grinned. “Had the sun not shone on our clambak
e, your smile would have made up for it. Marion, this young lady is Miss Katherine Dee. Katherine, say hello to my very good friend Marion Morgan.”

  Katherine Dee’s big blue eyes got bigger. “Are you the moving-picture director?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Yes, I am.”

  “I love Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight! I’ve seen it four times already.”

  “Well, thank you very much.”

  “Do you ever act in your movies?”

  Marion laughed. “Good Lord, no!”

  “Why not?” Captain Falconer interrupted. “You’re a good-looking woman.”

  “Thank you, Captain,” Marion said, casting a quick smile at Katherine Dee. “But good looks don’t necessary show up on film. The camera has its own standards. It prefers certain kinds of features.” Like Katherine Dee’s, she thought to herself. For some magical reason the lens and the light tended to favor Katherine’s type, with her petite figure, large head, and big eyes.

  Almost as if she could read her mind, Katherine said, “Oh, I wish I could see a movie being made.”

  Marion Morgan took a closer look at the girl. She seemed physically strong for one so petite. Strangely so. In fact, behind Katherine’s breathless, little-girl manner, Marion sensed something slightly peculiar. But didn’t the camera also often transform peculiarities into characteristics that charmed the movie audience? She was tempted to confirm whether this girl indeed had qualities the camera would love, and an invitation was on the tip of her tongue. But there was something about her that made Marion uncomfortable.

  Beside her, Marion felt Lowell Falconer plumping up again as he did whenever he saw a pretty girl. The woman approaching was the tall brunette who had been making eyes at Isaac earlier.

  Lowell stepped forward and extended his hand.

  Marion thought that Dorothy Langner was even more striking than the descriptions she had heard. She thought of a term uttered by her long-widowed father now that he was finally stepping out in late middle age: “A looker.”