The Spy Page 7

  He steered up a steep hill and drove a mile through fallow farm fields that awaited spring planting. The resourceful Scully had procured a milk-can collection truck somewhere, exactly the sort of vehicle that would not look out of place on New Jersey’s farm roads. Bell eased quietly alongside it so the Locomobile could not be seen from the road. Then he heaved his golf bag off the passenger seat and carried it to the hillcrest where the Van Dorn detective lay flat on brown grass.

  The laconic loner was a short, round man with a moon face who could pass for a trusted colleague of preachers, shopkeepers, safe-crackers, or murderers. Thirty pounds of fat disguised slabs of rock-hard muscle, and his diffident smile concealed a mind quicker than a bear trap. He was training field glasses on a house down the hill. Smoke rose from the kitchen chimney. A big Marmon touring car was parked outside, a powerful machine covered in mud and dust.

  “What’s in the bag?” Scully greeted Bell.

  “Couple of five irons,” Bell grinned, removing a pair of humpback twelve-gauge Browning Auto-5 shotguns. “How many in the house?”

  “All three.”

  “Anyone living there?”

  “No smoke before they drove up.”

  Bell nodded, satisfied that no innocents would be caught in a cross fire. Scully passed him the field glasses. He studied the house and the automobile. “Is that the Marmon they stole in Ohio?”

  “Could be another. They’re partial to Marmons.”

  “How’d you get a line on them?”

  “Played your hunch about their first job. Their real name is Williard, and if me and you was half as smart as we think we are, we’d have tumbled to it a month ago.”

  “Can’t argue with that,” Bell admitted. “Why don’t we start things off by putting their auto out of action.”

  “We’ll never hit it from here with these scatter guns.”

  Bell pulled from the golf bag an ancient.50 caliber Sharps buffalo gun. John Scully’s eyes gleamed like ball bearings. “Where’d you get the cannon?”

  “Our Knickerbocker house dick separated it from a Pawnee Bill Wild West Show cowboy who got drunk in Times Square.” Bell levered open the breech, loaded a black-powder cartridge, and aimed the heavy rifle at the Marmon.

  “Try not to set it on fire,” Scully cautioned. “It’s full of their loot.”

  “I’ll just make it hard to start.”

  “Hold it, what’s that coming?”

  A six-cylinder K Ford was bouncing up the lane that lead to the farmhouse. It had a searchlight mounted on the radiator.

  “Hell’s bells,” said Scully. “That’s Cousin Constable.”

  Two men with sheriff stars on their coats climbed out of the Ford carrying baskets. Scully studied them through the glasses. “Bringing them supper. Two more makes five.”

  “Got room in your milk truck?”

  “If we stack ’em close.”

  “What do you say we give them time to get distracted filling their bellies?”

  “It’s a plan,” said Scully, continuing to observe the house.

  Bell watched the lane to the house and turned around repeatedly to be sure that no more relatives came up the back road he had taken.

  He was wondering where Dorothy Langner got the money to buy her father a piano when Bell remembered that she had given it to him only recently.

  Scully got uncharacteristically talkative. “You know, Isaac,” he said, gesturing toward the farmhouse below and the two automobiles, “for jobs like this wouldn’t it be nice if somebody invented a machine gun light enough to tote around with you?”

  “A ‘sub’ machine gun?”

  “Exactly. A submachine gun. But how would you lug all that water to cool the barrel?”

  “You wouldn’t have to if it fired pistol ammunition.”

  Scully nodded thoughtfully. “A drum magazine would keep it compact.”

  “Shall we start the show?” Bell asked, hefting the Sharps. Both detectives glanced at the woods near the house where the Frye Boys would run when Bell disabled their autos.

  “Let me flank ’em first,” said Scully. Putting words to action, he waddled down the hill, looking, Bell thought, like a bricklayer hurrying to work. He waved when he was in place.

  Bell braced his elbows on the crest, thumbed the hammer to full cock, and sighted the Sharps on the Marmon’s motor cowling. He gently squeezed the trigger. The heavy slug rocked the Marmon on its tires. The rifle’s report echoed like artillery, and a cloud of black smoke spewed from the muzzle and tumbled down the hill. Bell reloaded and fired again. Again the Marmon jumped, and a front tire went flat. He turned his attention to the police car.

  Wide-eyed constables boiled out of the house waving pistols. The bank robbers stayed inside. Rifle barrels poked from the window. A hail of lever-action Winchester fire stormed at the black-powder smoke billowing from Isaac Bell’s Sharps.

  Bell ignored the lead howling past his head, methodically reloaded the single-shot Sharps, and shot the Ford’s motor cowling. Steam spurted from the hot radiator. Now their quarry was on foot.

  All three bank robbers darted from the house, rifles blazing.

  Bell reloaded and fired, reloaded and fired. A long gun went flying, and the man staggered, clutching his arm. Another turned and ran toward the woods. Rapid fire bellowed from Scully’s twelve-gauge autoload and caused him to change his mind. He skidded to a stop, looked around frantically, and flung his weapon down and threw his hands in the air. The constables, gripping pistols, froze. Bell stood up, aiming the Sharps through the black smoke. Scully sauntered from the woods, pointing his shotgun.

  “Mine’s a twelve-gauge autoload,” Scully called conversationally. “Fellow up the hill’s got a Sharps rifle. About time you boys got smart.”

  The constables dropped their pistols. The third Frye boy levered a fresh cartridge into his Winchester’s chamber and took deliberate aim. Bell found him in his sights, but Scully fired first, tipping the barrel of his shotgun high to increase the range. The slugs spread wide at that distance. Most tore past the bank robber. Two that did not peppered his shoulder.

  NEITHER SHOT MAN WAS mortally wounded. Bell made sure that they would not bleed to death and handcuffed them with the others in Scully’s milk truck. They started downhill, Scully driving the truck, Bell in his Locomobile bringing up the rear. Just as they reached the Cranbury Turnpike, Mike and Eddie, the Van Dorns assigned to help Scully, appeared in an Oldsmobile, and the caravan headed for Trenton to turn the bank robbers and the crooked cops over to the State’s Attorney.

  Two hours later, nearing Trenton, Bell saw a road sign that jogged his photographic memory. The sign was a stack of town and road names lettered on white arrows that pointed south: the Hamilton Turnpike, the Bordentown Road, the Burlington Pike, and the West-field Turnpike to Camden.

  Arthur Langner had written appointments on a wall calendar. Two days before he died he had met with Alasdair MacDonald, the turbine-propulsion specialist who had been contracted by the Navy’s Steam Engineering Bureau. MacDonald’s factory was in Camden.

  Her father loved his guns, Dorothy Langner had pleaded. As Farley Kent loved his hulls. And Alasdair MacDonald his turbines. A wizard, she had called MacDonald, meaning he was her father’s equal. Bell wondered what else the two men had in common.

  He squeezed the Locomobile’s horn bulb. The Oldsmobile and milk truck skidded to a dusty halt. “There’s a fellow I ought to see in Camden,” Bell told Scully.

  “Need a hand?”

  “Yes! Soon as you turn this bunch in, could you get to the Brooklyn Navy Yard? There’s a naval architect in the drawing loft named Farley Kent. See if he’s on the up-and-up.”

  Bell turned the Locomobile south.

  “ON CAMDEN’S SUPPLIES, THE WORLD RELIES,”

  a billboard greeted Isaac Bell as he entered the industrial city, which occupied the eastern shore of the Delaware River across from Philadelphia. He passed factories that made everything from cigars
to patent drugs to linoleum and terra-cotta and soup. But it was the shipyard that dominated. The incongruously named New York Shipbuilding Company lined the Delaware and Newton Creek with modern covered ways and gigantic gantries thrusting at the smoky sky. Across the river sprawled Cramp Ship Builders and the Philadelphia Navy Yard.

  Evening was falling before Bell found the MacDonald Marine Steam Turbine Company inland from the riverfront in a warren of smaller factories that supplied the shipyard with specialty items. He parked the Locomobile at the gates and asked to see Alasdair MacDonald. MacDonald was not in. A friendly clerk said, “You’ll find the Professor down in Gloucester City-just a few blocks from here.”

  “Why do you call him the Professor?”

  “Because he’s so smart. He was apprenticed to the inventor of the naval turbine, Charles Parsons, who revolutionized high-speed ship propulsion. By the time the Professor emigrated to America, he knew more about turbines than Parsons himself.”

  “Where in Gloucester City?”

  “Del Rossi’s Dance Hall-not that he’s dancing. It’s more saloon than dance hall, if you know what I mean.”

  “I’ve encountered similar establishments out west,” Bell said drily.

  “Cut over to King Street. Can’t miss it.”

  Gloucester City was just down the river from Camden, the two cities blending seamlessly. King Street was near the water. Saloons, quick-and-dirties, and boardinghouses hosted workingmen from the shipyards and the bustling river port. Del Rossi’s was as unmissable as MacDonald’s clerk had promised, boasting a false front mocked up to look like a proscenium arch in a Broadway theater.

  Inside was bedlam, with the loudest piano Bell had ever heard, women shrieking with laughter, perspiring bartenders knocking the necks off bottles to pour faster, exhausted bouncers, and wall-to-wall sailors and shipyard hands-five hundred men at least-determined to win the race to get drunk. Bell studied the room over a sea of flushed faces under clouds of blue smoke. The only occupants of the saloon not in shirtsleeves were himself, in his white suit, a handsome silver-haired gent in a red frock coat whom he guessed was the proprietor, and a trio of dandified gangsters tricked out in brown derbies, purple shirts, bright waistcoats, and striped ties. Bell couldn’t see their shoes but suspected they were yellow.

  He plowed through broad shoulders toward the frock coat.

  “Mr. Del Rossi!” he shouted over the din, extending his hand.

  “Good evening, sir. Call me Angelo.”

  “Isaac.”

  They shook hands. Del Rossi’s were soft but bore the long-healed burns and cuts of ship work in his youth.

  “Busy night.”

  “God bless our ‘New Navy.’ It’s like this every night. New York Ship launches the Michigan next month and just laid the keel for a twenty-eight-knot destroyer. Across the river, the Philadelphia Navy Yard is building a new dry dock, Cramp launches South Carolina come summer, plus they’ve already nailed a contract for six 700-ton destroyers-six, count ’em, six. What can I do for you, sir?”

  “I’m looking for a fellow named Alasdair MacDonald.”

  Del Rossi frowned. “The Professor? Follow the sound of fists cracking jaws,” he answered with a nod toward the farthest corner from the door.

  “Excuse me. I better get over there before someone floors him.”

  “That’s not likely,” said Del Rossi. “He was heavyweight champ of the Royal Navy.”

  Bell sized MacDonald up as he worked his way across the room, and he took an immediate shine to the big Scotsman. He looked to be in his forties, tall, with an open countenance and muscles that rippled under a shirt soaked with perspiration. He had several boxing scars over his eyebrows-but not a mark on the rest of his face, Bell noticed-and enormous hands with splayed-out knuckles. He cupped a glass in one, a whiskey bottle in the other, and as Bell drew close he filled the glass and stood the bottle on the bar behind him, his eyes fixed on the crowd. It parted suddenly, explosively, and a three-hundred-pound bruiser lumbered at MacDonald with murder in his eye.

  MacDonald tracked him with a wry smile, as if they were both in on a good joke. He took a swig from his glass and then, without appearing to rush, closed his empty hand into an enormous fist and landed a punch almost too fast for Bell to see.

  The bruiser collapsed to the sawdust-strewn floor. MacDonald looked down at him amiably. He had a thick Scots accent. “Jake, me friend, you are a purrfectly fine laddie ’til the drink riles your noggin.” Of the group around him, he asked, “Would someone see Jake home?”

  Jake’s friends carried him out. Bell introduced himself to Alasdair MacDonald, who, he surmised, was drunker than he looked.

  “Do I know you, laddie?”

  “Isaac Bell,” he repeated. “Dorothy Langner told me that you were a particular friend of her father.”

  “That I was. Poor Artie. When they made the Gunner they broke the mold. Have a drink!”

  He called for a glass, filled it to the brim, and passed it to Bell with the Scottish toast, “Slanj.”

  “Slanj-uh va,” said Bell, and he threw back the fiery liquor in the same manner as MacDonald.

  “How is the lass bearing up?”

  “Dorothy is clinging to the hope that her father neither killed himself nor took a bribe.”

  “I don’t know about killing himself-mountains shade dark glens. But I do know this: the Gunner would have shoved his hand in a punch press before he’d reach for a bribe.”

  “Did you work closely together?”

  “Let’s just say we admired each other.”

  “I imagine you shared similar goals.”

  “We both loved dreadnoughts, if that’s what you mean. Love ’em or hate ’em, the dreadnought battleship is the marvel of our age.”

  Bell noticed that MacDonald, drunk or not, was dodging his questions artfully. He backtracked, saying, “I imagine you must be following the progress of the Great White Fleet with keen interest.”

  Alasdair snorted scoffingly. “Victory at sea goes to ordnance, armor, and speed. You’ve got to shoot farther than the enemy, survive more punishment, and steam faster. By those standards, the Great White Fleet is hopelessly out-of-date.”

  He splashed more liquor in Bell’s glass and refilled his own. “ England’s HMS Dreadnought and the German dreadnought copies have longer range, stronger armor, and dazzling speed. Our ‘fleet,’ which is simply the old Atlantic Squadron tarted up, is a flock of pre-dreadnought battleships.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “A pre-dreadnought battleship is like a middleweight fighter who learned to box in college. He has no business in the prize ring with heavyweight Jack Johnson.” MacDonald grinned challengingly at Bell, whom he outweighed by forty pounds.

  “Unless he did graduate studies on Chicago’s West Side,” Bell challenged him back.

  “And put on a few pounds of muscle,” MacDonald acknowledged approvingly.

  Impossible as it seemed, the piano suddenly got louder. Someone banged on a drum. The crowd made way for Angelo Del Rossi to mount a low stage opposite the bar. He drew from his frock coat a conductor’s baton.

  Waiters and bouncers put down trays and blackjacks and picked up banjos, guitars, and accordions. Waitresses jumped onto the stage and cast off their aprons, revealing skirts so short that police in any city with more than one church would raid the joint. Del Rossi raised his baton. The musicians banged out George M. Cohan’s “Come On Down,” and the ladies danced what appeared to Bell to be an excellent imitation of the Paris cancan.

  “You were saying?” he shouted.

  “I was?”

  “About the dreadnoughts that you and the Gunner…”

  “Take the Michigan. When she’s finally commissioned, our newest battleship will have the best gun arrangement in the world-all big guns on superimposed turrets. But tissue-thin armor and rattletrap piston engines doom her to be a semi-dreadnought at best-target practice for German and English dreadnought
s.”

  MacDonald drained his glass.

  “All the more terrible that the Bureau of Ordnance lost a great gun builder in Artie Langner. The technical bureaus hate change. Artie forced change… Don’t get me started on this, laddie. It’s been an awful month for America’s battleships.”

  “Beyond the death of Artie Langner?” Bell prompted.

  “The Gunner was only the first to die. One week later we lost Chad Gordon, our top armorer at Bethlehem Iron Works. Horrible accident. Six lads roasted alive-Chad and all his hands. Then last week that damned fool Grover Lakewood fell off the hill. The cleverest fire-control expert in the business. And a hell of a fine young man. What a future he’d have given us-gone in a stupid climbing accident.”

  “Hold on!” said Bell. “Are you telling me that three engineers specializing in dreadnought battleships have all died in the last month?”

  “Sounds like a jinx, doesn’t it?” MacDonald’s big hand passed over his chest in the sign of the cross. “I would never say our dreadnoughts are jinxed. But for the sake of the United States Navy, I hope to bloody hell Farley Kent and Ron Wheeler aren’t next.”

  “Hulls at the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” said Bell. “Torpedoes at Newport.”

  MacDonald looked at him sharply. “You get around.”

  “Dorothy Langner mentioned Kent and Wheeler. I gathered they were Langner counterparts.”

  “Counterparts?” MacDonald laughed. “That’s the joke of the dreadnought race, don’t you see?”

  “No I don’t. What do you mean?”

  “It’s like a shell game, with a pea under every shell and every pea packed with dynamite. Farley Kent devises watertight compartments to protect his hulls from torpedoes. But up in Newport, Ron Wheeler improves torpedoes-builds a longer-range torpedo that carries heavier explosives, maybe even figures out how to arm it with TNT. So Artie has to-had to-increase gun range so the ship can fight farther off, and Chad Gordon had to cast stronger armor to take the hits. Enough to drive a man to drink…” MacDonald refilled their glasses. “God knows how we’ll get along without those lads.”