The Thief ib-5 Read online

  Isaac Bell was liking the situation less and less. He was fully armed, but that would do no good, as gunfire would be lethal to countless innocents. He saw a couple of cops patrolling the waiting room and a few more scattered on the lower level, but not enough to thwart a concentrated attack, if that’s what the Gophers were planning.

  Archie hurried into the vestibule, leading the PS man, who had handcuffed himself to a disconsolate-looking Lawrence Block. “Harry Warren’s on his way.”

  “Hang on to Clyde,” Bell whispered. “Don’t let him ashore.”

  “Where you going?”

  “I’m going to find out why the Gophers are staring at Clyde like they want to eat him for lunch.”

  Bell turned to Clyde Lynds. “Stay here with Archie. Do not leave the ship until I come back for you.”

  “What’s up?”

  Bell shoved past the seamen at the embarkation port and jumped for the top of the Second Class gangway, which the longshoremen were pivoting toward the ship. It was five feet short of being secured to the hull, and it swayed wildly under his weight. Bell ran down it and into the waiting room.

  “Hold on there!” shouted a Cunard official.

  Isaac Bell brushed past him and headed straight for Blinky Armstrong, who had pocketed his opera glasses and was glowering up at Clyde Lynds and smacking a meaty fist into a stony palm. The tall detective was twenty feet away from the gangster, his progress slowed by thickening crowds, when suddenly a woman screamed. The sound parting her lips was as much a shout as a scream, a feral noise that spoke more hate than fear.

  Two gangsters were fighting, rolling around on the asphalt, kicking and gouging and smashing each other with blackjacks. Blood flew. Two more piled on, and ordinary people ran screaming from the vicious tangle. Only when a flying wedge of gangsters tore through the crowd, hurling men, women, and children from their path, and swinging fists and lengths of lead pipe, did Isaac Bell realize that the newcomers were not more Gophers but attackers from a rival gang.

  The melee spread like wildfire. Fifteen men pummeled one another. A tall cop charged, swinging his nightstick. Strong and agile, he floored three gangsters like bowling pins. A fallen man’s boot snagged his ankle, and the tall cop went down in the tangle and disappeared as if swallowed whole.

  Knives flashed, eliciting angry shouts and screams of pain.

  Then a shot rang out, stunningly loud.

  Wild-eyed gangsters ran to their women cheering on the sidelines, snatched their revolvers, and raked the pier with gunfire. Bullets banged on corrugated-iron doors and shattered glass. Citizens nearby flattened themselves on the asphalt, and Bell saw the way suddenly clear as if a swaying field of wheat had been mowed by a giant McCormick reaper. He saw Blinky Armstrong and two of his Gophers sprint toward the West Street portal, trampling cowering citizens and knocking down those too terrified to move.

  Isaac Bell tore after them.

  Halfway to West Street, they ducked into a stairwell.

  Bell followed, pounding down steel steps that led to the baggage deck below. The Gophers were racing alongside the Mauretania toward the rows of doors that led off the pier onto West Street. Before they could get out the doors, squads of cops arrived on the run, reserves from nearby station houses, and the Gophers and the rivals who had attacked them were suddenly in a mad rush to avoid arrest.

  Instead of trying to escape directly toward West Street, where they could melt into the neighborhoods, they turned back toward the water to get rid of their weapons. Revolvers, pocket pistols, and sleeve guns clanged against Mauretania’s black hull and splashed into the slip.

  Isaac Bell cut the corner of the dogleg the gangsters had turned to the slip and caught up with them. He was close enough to see the seams in Armstrong’s coat and was just about to launch a diving tackle at the big man’s ankles when he passed the Mauretania’s bow and could suddenly see two hundred feet across the slip to the next pier. Lighters were moored there to shuttle sheets, towels, napkins, and tablecloths to the city’s laundries. Chandlers’ boats waited to deliver fresh supplies. Tugboats maneuvered coal barges with shovel-wielding trimmers to replenish Mauretania’s bunkers.

  Oblivious to the tumult on the pier — or capitalizing on the distraction of fleeing gangsters and pursuing cops — two bill posters steered a little steam launch under the flare of Mauretania’s bow, took up long-handled brushes, and began to plaster advertisements on the express liner’s hull as if she were a billboard.

  THE ELECTRIC THEATER

  323 West 14th Street

  Finest

  MOVING PICTURE PALACE

  in

  New York City

  “NEW SHOWS DAILY”

  Twenty more cops stormed in the West Street doors.

  The Gophers jinked abruptly to the right.

  Isaac Bell veered after them.

  The Gopher ahead of Armstrong leaped from the pier toward the landward edge of the slip, missed his footing, and fell into the water. Armstrong jumped next, made it, and ran past Mauretania’s bow. Bell leaped the same watery corner and landed running full tilt. He put on a burst of speed to dive for Armstrong. But just as he was about to launch himself in the air, he sensed as much as saw in the corner of his eye an eerie flicker of a familiar grim silhouette moving down the side of the ship with sure-footed grace.

  15

  Isaac Bell skidded to a stop, hardly believing his eyes. Coal chutes gaped open along the middle of the hull, fifteen feet above the barges. Beneath each hung staging, wooden platforms suspended by ropes for the trimmers to stand on. On the farthest stage, halfway back along the Mauretania’s hull, four hundred feet toward the river — and nearly obscured by shadows and work gangs hoisting buckets from the barges into the chutes — crouched the long-armed, almost simian silhouette of the kidnapper Bell had seen jump from the boat deck the night they sailed from Liverpool.

  Bell looked for the fastest route out there. It would take too long to go back through the ship. He had to get across the water. He spotted the enterprising bill posters slathering the Mauretania with advertisements from the bobbing perch of their steam launch.

  “Bill posters! You men, there! Bill posters!”

  They heard him, he saw by the way they ducked their heads, but their only response was to glue faster. Accustomed to being chased off private property, they were trying to slap on as many ads as they could until they had to run from shipowners and pier officials. Before Isaac Bell could get their attention, the man that Professor Beiderbecke had dubbed the Akrobat glided down a rope holding a stage. He dropped lightly onto a barge riding high in the water that the trimmers had unloaded. A tug was already approaching, deckhands poised with lines, to back the empty away and make room for a fresh load.

  The Acrobat, Bell realized, had timed his drop to coincide with the barge’s removal. Dispensing fat bribes to the boatmen, he would ride the empty barge ashore in the guise of an American trimmer and step onto dry land in a distant coal yard, neatly dodging the customs agents and immigration officials guarding the Mauretania’s pier.

  Bell cupped his hands. “Fifty dollars for a boat ride.”

  The bill posters’ eyes swiveled at him like searchlights.

  Bell yanked his wallet from his coat and waved the money.

  A poster that proclaimed

  DREAMLAND THEATER

  9 West 9th Street

  NEW “MOVIES” EVERY DAY

  was abandoned in a flash.

  One man used his brush like a barge pole to shove off the Mauretania as if the ship were on fire while the other seized the helm and shoved the steam quadrant full ahead. The launch shot toward the pier. Bell jumped eight feet to the deck, nearly capsizing the narrow craft, and pointed at the tug hipped alongside the empty coal barge. “Follow that barge.”

  “Gimme the dough!” cried the man with the brush.

  Bell smacked it into his hand.

  “On the jump!”

  The steam engine chugged. The
propeller spun, and the sharp-bowed little boat turned around and gathered way alongside the Mauretania. They passed the last of the open coal chutes, where Bell had first spotted the Acrobat, and pulled into the wake of the tugboat propelling the empty barge.

  Bell heard a sharp two-finger whistle, an urgent warning.

  The Acrobat was signaling someone on the ship.

  Bell turned to see who his accomplice was.

  He saw a blur of movement in one of the chutes and glimpsed a chunk of coal with sharp, gleaming facets fly at his head. He ducked, turning his face, but it came too fast — no man could throw so hard, it had to have been hurled from a sling. Turning saved his face, but nothing could stop the jagged shard from smashing his hat into the water and slicing his skull.

  Isaac Bell heard a hollow explosion like a firecracker dropped in a barrel. A sharp pain shot down his spine. He felt his knees buckle, and he sensed that he was tumbling. He heard the bill poster who was steering the launch shout, “Catch him!” He saw the brush extended for him to grab hold. But the hand he reached with was too heavy to lift.

  Bell gathered all his strength for a massive last-ditch effort. He raised his leaden hand higher. He felt the brush in his fingers, and he grasped it as tightly as he could. The bristles slipped through his fingers, and there was nothing the tall detective could do to stop himself from falling backwards into the water.

  16

  Isaac Bell fell flat on his back and sank like a stone.

  The slack tide on which the Mauretania had landed had begun to ebb, and cold river water was swirling through the slip. The deeper he sank, the harder the current pushed him. He felt it sluice him across the slip, and he slammed hard into something solid — one of the piles on which sat the pier. The current pinned him against it. Then something grabbed his foot. It was soft but insistent, and it pulled him farther down. Mud? he wondered, vaguely. He had sunk to the bottom of the slip, and the mud wanted to hold him there as if it were alive and hungry.

  Something started pounding. Then his face was suddenly cold as if someone had thrown a champagne bucket of ice water in his face. Not “someone.” Marion. It was Marion throwing ice water in his face. “Wake up, Isaac. Wake up! Wake up! Please wake up!”

  He awakened and suddenly knew a lot. The pounding was his own heart. The ice water was an invigorating tongue of cold river current. The mud indicated he was thirty-five feet beneath the surface. He had to breathe air or he would die. He kicked the mud and pulled himself up the slippery piling. The water grew warmer, the current less strong. He kicked harder and rose faster. Instinct told him to place one hand on his head to protect it, and a moment after he did he bumped up against an underwater crossbeam that braced two pilings. He was out of air. His heart thundered. Lights stormed in front of his eyes. He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He opened his mouth and inhaled, and suddenly sunlight was blazing in his face.

  “Isaac!”

  He spit water and gulped air, coughed, gulped more air, and swam toward the shouting. They were yelling about a ladder. He found it fixed to a pile and pulled himself onto it. He held on a while, ignoring the shouting, breathing, collecting himself.

  * * *

  Isaac Bell climbed out of the river in a foul mood. The Acrobat had gotten clean away. His head ached. Blood was stinging his eyes. And he’d lost his hat and his favorite derringer.

  “You O.K., Isaac?”

  It was Harry Warren — head of the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s New York gang squad — a studiedly nondescript-looking fellow who wore a loose-fitting dark suit with plenty of pockets for sidearms and a black derby with a reinforced crown. Harry’s face, normally as expressionless as the lid of an ashcan, was clenched with worry, a look repeated on the scarred countenances of his hard-bitten detectives, who were watching over Harry’s shoulder as Isaac Bell gathered his feet under him and rose, swaying.

  Harry handed Bell a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.”

  Bell said, “Find out who was mixing it up with the Gophers.”

  “What?”

  Bell mopped the blood off his face and wadded the cloth against the source, a ragged furrow parting his hair. “I want to know what the devil was going on. We didn’t just happen to land in a gang war. The Gophers were waiting for someone on the ship. I want to know who and why. And I want to know why those other boys came along at that moment. On the jump!”

  Warren and his boys trooped off. Bell went looking for dry clothes.

  * * *

  Early the next morning, in Archie Abbott’s library, Marion read aloud to Isaac Bell the New York Times account of yesterday’s shootout on Pier 54. Steered by Cunard Line publicists charged with maintaining the steamship company’s reputation for safety, and threatened, Bell presumed, by red-faced police and docks commissioners, the newspaper blamed the gunfire on “disgruntled Italian longshoremen.”

  Bell laughed, which made his head hurt.

  “‘The Italians all escaped in the confusion,’” Marion concluded her reading. “‘Arrests are imminent,’ vowed the commissioners.”

  Archie’s butler appeared and said, “A Mr. Harry Warren to see you at the kitchen door, sir.”

  “Bring him in,” said Marion.

  “I tried, Mrs. Bell. He won’t come past the kitchen.”

  The cook poured Harry coffee and made herself scarce.

  Harry stared in some amazement at Bell, who was attired in his customary white linen suit and had combed his thick golden hair to hide a row of surgical stitches. “If you wasn’t white as your duds, no one would know you was recently brained and partly drowned.”

  “He looks better than he is,” said Marion. “The doctor said he ought to be in bed.”

  “I’m fine,” said Bell.

  Harry Warren and Marion Bell traded glances of concern. “You know, boss, Mrs. Bell is right to be worried. So’s the doc. Knocks on the noggin rate respect.”

  “Thank you, Harry,” said Marion. “Could you help me walk him upstairs?”

  “What have you found?” Bell demanded.

  “The Gophers didn’t believe there was a fire on the Mauretania.”

  “What business was it of theirs? It so happens there was a fire. I saw it with my own eyes. It burned up everything in the forward baggage room, including the smuggled film stock that ignited it.”

  “That’s what the Gophers didn’t believe.”

  Bell looked at Marion. The penny dropped. “You mean the Gophers were smuggling the film stock?”

  “They put up the dough for the shipment. When they heard about the fire, they decided that the guy they paid to smuggle it into New York was welshing on the deal, selling the stock to another buyer for more dough.”

  “Where did they get that idea?”

  “They’re Gophers! They get ideas like that. They figure that what they would do to somebody, somebody would do to them. Like the Golden Rule. Backwards. So they met the ship to deal with the guy who they thought welshed.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Clyde Lynds.”

  Bell exchanged a second glance with Marion and shook his head in disgust, setting off new jolts of pain. “I was afraid you were going to say that. Clyde smelled the film going bad and knew exactly what it was because it was his stock.”

  Marion said, “The ‘hero’ who saved the ship is the smuggler who almost sank the ship.”

  “In a nutshell,” Harry Warren agreed. He stood up and put on his derby. “Anyway, when the Yorkville boys showed up, the Gophers jumped to the conclusion that they were taking delivery of the film stock they’d bought out from under them. Fighting ensued.”

  “In a nutshell…”

  “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Who are the Yorkville boys?”

  “From the new German district up in Yorkville. Uptown, on the East Side.”

  “Germans?”

  “Germans are leaving downtown since the General Slocum fire. You know, the excursion-boat fire when all their
poor children were killed. Tore the heart out of the old neighborhood, and they’ve just kind of been retreating north — lock, stock, and breweries.”

  “What’s the gang called?”

  “Marzipan Boys.”

  “Like the candy?”

  “The old gangs mocked ’em with that name. Now they’re proud of it since they’ve been whaling the heck out of everybody. They’re a tough bunch.”

  Harry Warren was halfway out the back door when Bell called, “But why did the Marzipan Boys go to Pier 54?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The film stock did burn in the fire,” Bell said with elaborate patience. “Clyde Lynds didn’t welsh on the deal. The Marzipan Boys didn’t buy it out from underneath the Gophers, therefore they weren’t there to pick up film stock they didn’t even know about. So why did the Yorkville gang meet the Mauretania?”

  Harry Warren’s blank expression got blanker. “Haven’t found out yet.”

  “Find out! Report to me at the office.”

  “Isaac,” said Marion. “The doctor said to stay home today.”

  “O.K.,” said Bell. “I’ll stay home today. Harry, report to me at the office tonight.”

  17

  “Clyde,” said Isaac Bell, “you’re going to have to return Captain Turner’s medal.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Bell?”

  Bell fixed him with an icy stare.

  Clyde Lynds hung his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bell. I am so sorry.”

  Bell asked, “Sorry for what? Spit it out! What?”

  “The film stock. It was mine.”

  “Go on.”

  Clyde said, “We needed the money to escape from Germany. I mean, I wanted so much to succeed with Talking Pictures. But I was scared crazy for our lives. When the Army issued that phony warrant, I knew my goose was cooked.”