The Wrecker ib-2 Read online

  “Turn her around, we’re going east.”

  “Where to?”

  “After the Overland Limited.”

  “You’ll never catch her.”

  “If I don‘t, you’ll be hearing from Mr. Hennessy. Get on that telegraph and clear the tracks.”

  The Overland Limited had a fifty-minute head start, but Bell’s locomotive had the advantage of hauling only the weight of her own coal and water while the Limited’s engine was towing eight Pullmans and baggage, dining, and observation cars. Hundred-dollar tips to the fireman and engineer didn’t hurt her speed either. They climbed through the night, encountering snow in the Medicine Bow Mountains, a harbinger of the winter that Osgood Hennessy’s railroad builders were striving to beat even as the Wrecker sowed death and destruction to stop them.

  They left the snow behind as they descended into the Laramie Valley, stormed through it and the town, stopping only for water, and climbed again. They finally caught up with the Overland Limited east of Laramie at Buford Station, where the rising sun was illuminating the pink granite on the crest of Sherman Hill. The Limited was sidetracked on the water siding, her fireman wrestling the spigot down from the tall wooden tank and jerking the chain that caused the water to flow into the locomotive’s tender.

  “Do you have sufficient water to make it to Cheyenne without stopping?” Bell asked his fireman.

  “I believe so, Mr. Bell.”

  “Pass him!” Bell told the engineer. “Take me straight to the Cheyenne Depot. Fast as you can.”

  From Buford Station to Cheyenne, the road descended two thousand feet in thirty miles. With nothing on the eastbound track in front of Bell’s special, they headed for Cheyenne at ninety miles an hour.

  19

  THE WRECKER HAD AWAKENED THE INSTANT THE TRAIN HAD stopped. He parted the shade a crack and saw the sun shining on pink Sherman granite, which the railroad quarried for track ballast. They would be in Cheyenne for breakfast. He closed his eyes, glad for another hour of sleep.

  A locomotive thundered past the sidetracked Limited.

  The Wrecker opened his eyes. He rang for the porter.

  “George,” he said to Jonathan. “Why have we stopped?”

  “Stopped for water, suh.”

  “Why did a train overtake us?”

  “Don’t know, suh.”

  “We are the Limited.”

  “Yes, suh.”

  “What train would be faster than this one, damn you?”

  The porter flinched. Senator Kincaid’s face was suddenly wracked with rage, his eyes hot, his mouth twisted with hate. Jonathan was terrified. The Senator could order him fired in a breath. They’d throw him off the train at the next stop. Or right here on top of the Rocky Mountains. “It weren’t no train passing us, suh. It was just a locomotive all by hisself.”

  “A single locomotive?”

  “Yes, suh! Just him and his tender.”

  “So it must have been a chartered special.”

  “Must have been, suh. Just like you say, suh. Going lickety-split, suh.”

  The Wrecker lay back on the bed, clasped his hands behind his head, and thought hard.

  “Will there be anything else, suh?” Jonathan asked warily.

  “Coffee.”

  BELL’S CHARTERED LOCOMOTIVE RACED through Cheyenne’s stock-yards and into Union Depot shortly after nine in the morning. He ran directly to the Inter-Ocean Hotel, the best among the three-story establishments he could see from the station. The house detective took one look at the tall man in ripped and torn evening clothes and blood-soaked shirt and crossed the lobby at a dead run to intercept him.

  “You can’t come in here looking like that.”

  “Bell. Van Dorn Agency. Take me to the tailor. And round up a haberdasher, a shoe-shine boy, and a barber.”

  “Right this way, sir … Shall I get you a doctor, too?”

  “No time.”

  The Overland Limited glided into Union Depot forty minutes later.

  Isaac Bell was waiting on the platform at the middle of the train, looking far better than he felt. His entire body ached and his ribs hurt with every breath. But he was groomed, shaved, and dressed as well as he had been at the poker game the night before, in crisp black evening clothes, snow-white shirt, silk bow tie and cummerbund, and boots shined like mirrors.

  A smile played across his swollen lips. Someone on this train was in for a big surprise. The question was would the Wrecker be so shocked that he gave himself away?

  Before the train stopped rolling, Bell stepped aboard the Pullman just ahead of the dining car, pulled himself painfully up the steps, crossed to the dining car, and sauntered in. Forcing himself to stand and walk normally for the benefit of all watching, he asked the steward for a table in the middle, which allowed him to see who entered from either end.

  Last night’s thousand-dollar tip in the observation car had not gone unnoticed by the train crew. He was seated immediately and brought hot coffee, steaming breakfast rolls, and a warm recommendation to order the freshly caught Wyoming cutthroat trout.

  Bell had watched every man’s face as he had come into the dining car to gauge reactions to his presence. Several, noting his evening attire, remarked with a clubby smile, “Long night?” The Chicago meatpacker gave him a friendly wave, as did the well-dressed drummer he had spoken with in the washroom.

  Judge Congdon wandered in, and said, “Forgive me if I don’t join you, Mr. Bell. With the obvious exception of a young lady’s company, I prefer my own in the morning.”

  Kenny Bloom staggered into the diner with a hangover clouding his eyes and sat beside Bell.

  “Good morning,” said Bell.

  “What the hell is good about it … Say, what happened to your face?”

  “Cut myself shaving.”

  “George! George! Coffee over here before a man dies.”

  Bruce Payne, the oil lawyer, hurried up to their table, talking a blue streak about what he had read in the Cheyenne newspapers. Kenny Bloom covered his eyes. Jack Thomas sat down at the last empty chair, and said, “That’s a heck of a shiner.”

  “Cut myself shaving.”

  “There’s the Senator! Hell, we don’t have room for him. George! George! Rustle up another chair for Senator Kincaid. A man who loses as much money as he did shouldn’t have to eat alone.”

  Bell watched Kincaid approach slowly, nodding to acquaintances as he passed through the dining car. Suddenly, he recoiled, his expression startled. The well-dressed drummer had leaped up from his breakfast, reaching out to shake hands. Kincaid gave the salesman a cold stare, brushed past, and proceeded to Bell’s table.

  “Good morning, gentlemen. Feeling satisfied, Mr. Bell?”

  “Satisfied about what, Senator?”

  “About what? About winning nearly a million dollars last night. A fair piece of which was mine.”

  “That’s what I was doing last night,” said Bell, still watching the doors. “I was trying to remember. I knew it was something that caught my attention.”

  “It looks like something caught your attention full in the face. What happened? Did you fall off a moving train?”

  “Close shave,” said Isaac Bell, still watching the doors. But though he lingered over breakfast until the last table was cleared, he saw no one react as if his presence were a shock. He was not particularly surprised and only mildly disappointed. It had been a long shot. But even if he hadn’t spooked the Wrecker into revealing his identity, from now on the Wrecker would be watching a bit anxiously over his shoulder. Who said a Van Dorn detective couldn’t fly?

  20

  WONG LEE, OF JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY, WAS A TINY MAN WITH a lopsided face and a blinded eye. Twenty years ago, an Irish hod carrier, thick-armed from lugging bricks, knocked Wong’s hat to the sidewalk, and when Wong asked why he had insulted him, the hod carrier and two companions beat Wong so badly that his friends didn’t recognize him when they came to the hospital. He had been twenty-eight years
old when he was attacked and full of hope, improving his English and working in a laundry to save enough money to bring his wife to America from their village in Kowloon.

  Now he was nearly fifty. At one point, he had saved enough to buy his own laundry across the Hudson River on Manhattan Island in New York City in hopes of earning her passage faster. His good English drew customers until the Panic of 1893 had put a sudden end to that dream, and Wong Lee’s Fine Hand Wash Laundering joined the tens of thousands of businesses that were bankrupt in the nineties. When prosperity finally returned, the long hard years had left Wong too weary to start a new business. Though ever hopeful, he now was saving money by sleeping on the floor of the laundry where he worked in Jersey City. Much of that money went to get a certificate of residence, which was a new provision included in the Chinese Exclusion Act when it was renewed in 1902. It seems that he had neglected to defend himself from assault charges, the lawyer explained, filed all those years ago while he was still in the hospital. So bribes would have to be paid. Or so the lawyer claimed.

  Then that past February, with winter still lingering, a stranger approached Wong when he was alone in his employer’s laundry. He was a white American, so muffled against the river wind that only his eyes showed above the collar of his inverness coat and below the brim of his fedora.

  “Wong Lee,” he said. “Our mutual friend, Peter Boa, sends greetings.”

  Wong Lee hadn’t see Peter Boa in twenty-five years, not since they’d worked together as immigrant dynamiters blowing cuts in the mountains for the Central Pacific Railroad. Young and daring and hopeful of returning to their villages rich men, they’d scrambled down cliff faces setting charges, competing to blast the most foot-holds for the trains.

  Wong said that he was happy to hear that Boa was alive and well. When last Wong had seen him, in the Sierra Nevada, Peter had lost a hand to a sooner-than-expected explosion. Gangrene was creeping up his arm, and he had been too sick to flee California from the mobs attacking Chinese immigrants.

  “Peter Boa told me to look you up in Jersey City. He said you could help me, as he was unable.”

  “By your clothes,” Wong observed, “I can see that you are too rich to need help from a poor man.”

  “Rich indeed,” said the stranger, sliding a wad of banknotes across the wooden counter. “An advance,” he called it, “until I return,” adding, “Rich enough to pay you whatever you need.”

  “What do you need?” Wong countered.

  “Peter Boa told me that you had a special gift for demolition. He said that you used one stick of dynamite when most men needed five. They called you Dragon Wong. And when you protested that only emperors could be dragons, they proclaimed you Emperor of Dynamite.”

  Flattered, Wong Lee knew it was true. He had had an intuitive understanding of dynamite back when no one knew that much about the new explosive. He still had the gift. He had kept up with all the modern advances in demolition, including how electricity made explosives safer and more powerful, in the unlikely hope that one day quarries and construction contractors would deign to hire the Chinese they used to hire but now shunned.

  Wong immediately used the money to buy a half interest in his boss’s business. But one month later, that past March, a Panic swept Wall Street again. Jersey City factories closed, as did factories all over the nation. The trains had less freight to carry, so the car floats had fewer boxcars to ferry across the river. Jobs grew scarce on the piers, and fewer people could afford to have their clothing laundered. All spring and summer, the Panic deepened. By autumn, Wong had little hope of ever seeing his wife again.

  Now it was November, bitterly cold today, with another winter looming.

  And the stranger came back to Jersey City, muffled against the Hudson wind.

  He reminded Wong that accepting an advance was a promise to deliver.

  Wong reminded the stranger that he had promised to pay whatever he needed.

  “Five thousand dollars when the job is done. Will that do you?”

  “Very good, sir.” Then, feeling unusually bold because the stranger truly needed him, Wong asked, “Are you an anarchist?”

  “Why do you ask?” the stranger asked coldly.

  “Anarchists like dynamite,” Wong answered.

  “So do labor strikers,” the stranger answered patiently, proving that he truly needed Wong Lee and only Wong Lee. “You know the expression ‘the proletariat’s artillery’?”

  “But you do not wear workman’s clothes.”

  The Wrecker studied the Chinaman’s battered face for a long minute, as if memorizing every scar.

  Even though the laundry counter separated them, Wong suddenly felt they were standing too close.

  “I don’t care,” he tried to explain. “Just curious,” he added nervously.

  “Ask me again,” said the stranger, “and I will remove your other eye.”

  Wong Lee backed up a step. The stranger asked a question, watching Wong’s battered face as if testing his skills.

  “What will you need to make the biggest bang possible out of twenty-five tons?”

  “Twenty-five tons of dynamite? Twenty-five tons is a lot of dynamite.”

  “A full boxcar load. What will you need to make the biggest explosion?”

  Wong told him precisely what he needed, and the stranger said, “You will have it.”

  On the ferry back to Manhattan Island, Charles Kincaid stood out on the open deck, still muffled against the cold wind that scattered the coal smoke normally hanging over the harbor. He could not help but smile.

  Striker or anarchist?

  In fact, he was neither, despite the fear-mongering “evidence” he had taken pains to leave behind. Radical talk, rabble-rousing posters, diabolical foreigners, the Yellow Peril that Wong Lee’s body would soon furnish, even the name Wrecker, were all smoke in his enemies’ eyes. He was no radical. He was no destroyer. He was a builder.

  His smile broadened even as his eyes grew colder.

  He had nothing against the “favored few.” Before he was finished, he would be first among them, the most favored of all.

  21

  ISAAC BELL AND ARCHIE ABBOTT CLIMBED ON TOP OF A BOXCAR filled with dynamite to survey the intercontinental freight terminal that carpeted Jersey City’s Communipaw District. This was the end of the line for every railroad from the West and the South. Freight cars that had traveled two and three thousand miles across America stopped at the New Jersey piers one mile short of their destination, their way blocked by a stretch of water known to mariners as the North River and called by everyone else the Hudson.

  The boxcar stood on the powder pier, a single-tracked wharf reserved for unloading explosives. But they were close enough to see the main terminal that thrust into the Hudson River on six-hundred-foot finger piers. Four freight trains were strung out on each pier waiting to be rolled onto sturdy wooden barges and floated across the river. They carried every commodity consumed by the city: cement, lumber, steel, sulfur, wheat, corn, coal, kerosene, and refrigerated fruits, vegetables, beef, and pork.

  A mile across the water, Manhattan Island rose out of the smoky harbor, bristling with church steeples and ships’ masts. Above the steeples and masts soared the mighty towers of the Brooklyn Bridge and dozens of skyscrapers, many newly finished since Bell’s last visit only a year earlier. The twenty-two-story Flatiron Building had been surpassed by the Times Building, and both were dwarfed by a six-hundred-foot steel frame being built for the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s new headquarters.

  “Only in New York,” boasted Archie Abbott.

  Abbott was as proud as a Chamber of Commerce promoter, but he knew the city inside out, which made him Bell’s invaluable guide.

  “Look at that boat flying the flag of the Southern Pacific Railroad even though she is three thousand miles from home plate. Everyone has to come to New York. We have become the center of the world.”

  “You’ve become a target,” said Bell. “The
Wrecker got you in his sights the instant Osgood Hennessy sealed his deal to take control of the Jersey Central, which gained him access to the city.”

  The harbor vessel that had sparked Abbott’s civic pride was a long, low-in-the-water steam lighter, a materials and work vessel considerably bigger than a tugboat. She belonged to the newly formed Eastern Marine Division of the Southern Pacific Railroad and flew her colors more boldly than the local work vessels plying the Port of New York. A brand-new vermilion flag snapped in the breeze, and four red rings, bright as sealing wax, circled her soot-smeared smokestack.

  Even her old name, Oxford, had been painted over. Lillian I now circled her cruiser stern. Hennessy had renamed every lighter and tugboat in the Eastern Marine Division fleet, Lillian I through Lillian XII, and had ordered SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD painted on their transoms and wheelhouses in bright-white letters.

  “Just in case,” Archie remarked, “the Wrecker doesn’t know he’s here.”

  “He knows,” Bell said grimly.

  His restlessly probing blue eyes were dark with concern. New York City was the Holy Land, as Harper’s Weekly had put it, to which all railroaders longed make a pilgrimage. Osgood Hennessy had achieved that goal, and Isaac Bell knew in his heart that the Wrecker’s taunting note on the magazine’s cartoon of the railroad president was no bluff. The murderous saboteur was bent on a public attack. The next battle would be fought here.

  Stone-faced, Bell watched one of the countless tugboats shunting a rail barge, or car float, past the pier. Deckhands cut the barge loose, and it continued under its own momentum to glide smoothly and accurately as a billiard ball in for a gentle landing. In the short time it took longshoremen to secure the barge’s lines, the tug had seized another barge filled with a dozen freight cars and shoved it into the strong current, urging it toward Manhattan. Similar maneuvers were being repeated everywhere Bell looked, like the moving parts in a colossal, well-oiled machine. But despite every precaution he had taken, the rail yards, the piers, and the car floats looked to him like the Wrecker’s playground.