Bell switched the.45 to his left hand and pulled his Browning with his right.
“Everyone’s hands where I can see them. Now!”
At the sight of the enraged detective standing against the wall with two guns sweeping the barroom, most dropped weapons and displayed empty hands. Bell aimed at two who didn’t. “Now!” he repeated. “Or I’ll clean out the place.”
Up came an ancient horse pistol, barrel yawning. Bell shot it out of the gangster’s hand. The man cried out in pain and astonishment. The other was swinging a heavy coach gun at him, a wide-gauge, double-barreled sawed-off that could cut him in half. Bell threw himself sideways as he triggered the Browning again. Buckshot screeched through the air he had vacated. An errant slug burned a furrow across his left arm with a mule-kick impact that nearly knocked the.45 out of his fist. He rolled across the floor and sprang up, guns ready, but the gangster who had fired the coach gun was sprawled on his back, clutching his shoulder.
“Which one of you skunks is Tommy Thompson?”
“He ain’t here, mister.”
Bell had a vague idea that the same rage twisting his face into the expression that cowed them might also be keeping him from thinking straight. He didn’t care.
“Where is he?” he shouted.
“At one of his new joints.”
“Where?”
Far beneath the surface of Isaac Bell’s conscience, a voice cautioned that he would get himself killed like this. But Bell’s fighting voice, always nearest the surface, retorted that no one in the dimly lit barroom could kill him. In a flash, he assessed the contradiction: the fighter saw something the worrier did not. This was too easy. Twelve Gophers, and only two had pulled weapons. By rights, the rest of the gang should still be slinging lead at him. Instead, they were gaping openmouthed and wide-eyed.
“Where?”
“Don’t know, mister.”
“One of the new joints.”
Fear and confusion in the gangsters’ tones made Bell look more closely. Now he noticed that the weapons they had dropped were brass knuckles, saps, and knives. No guns. Then it dawned on him. These were mostly old men, missing teeth, hunched, scarred-the weary down-and-out slum dwellers of Hell’s Kitchen where forty was old, fifty ancient.
New joints. That was it. Commodore Tommy Thompson had moved up and left them behind. These sorry devils had been abandoned by their boss and scared out of their wits by an enraged detective blasting open the door and gunning down the only two with the go left in them to fight.
Bell felt a cool calm settle over his mind, and with it an electric clarity.
Change was sweeping the Hell’s Kitchen Gophers, and he had a strong hunch what was causing it. The old men saw the softening in his face. One piped, “Could we put our hands down, mister?”
The tall detective was still too angry to smile, but he came close. “No,” he said. “Leave them where I can see them.”
A taxi horn blared in the street.
Bell shot a glance out the door. The taxi was sliding to a halt. Five grim-faced Van Dorn veterans and an up-and-coming young fellow spilled out bearing firearms. They were trailed at a distance by a squad of New York cops on foot. Harry Warren, the gang specialist, was leading the Van Dorns. He had a sawed-off pressed against his leg and a revolver tucked in his waistband. Passing the youngster a wad of cash, he gestured for him to deal with the cops, and assessed the front of Commodore Tommy’s with an eye to storming it.
Bell stepped out of the saloon. “Evening, boys.”
“Isaac! You O.K.?”
“Tip-top. What are you doing here?”
“Your Yale Club doorman telephoned the Knickerbocker. Sounded real worried, said that you needed a hand.”
“Old Matthew’s like a mother hen.”
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“Just out for a stroll.”
“Stroll?” They looked up and down the dark and grimy street. “Stroll?” They stared at Isaac Bell. “And I suppose a mosquito drilled that hole in your coat sleeve?” one detective remarked.
“Same one that shot the lock off this door?” asked another.
“And made those Gophers inside hold their hands in the air?” said a third.
Harry Warren beckoned the kid who had just returned. “Eddie, go tell the cops they should send an ambulance.”
Isaac Bell grinned. “Might as well call it a night, boys. Thanks for coming out. Harry, if you’d walk me home, I have questions for you.”
Harry handed his shotgun to the boys, shoved his revolver in his coat pocket, and passed Bell a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.”
Bell stuffed it up his sleeve.
They walked to Ninth Avenue. The cops had cordoned off the area under the El where Weeks was hanging. Firemen were holding ladders for morgue attendants who were trying to cut the body loose.
“So much for connecting the Iceman to Tommy and your foreign spy,” said Harry.
“This connection is precisely what I want to talk to you about,” said Isaac Bell. “It looks to me like Tommy Thompson is moving up in the world.”
Harry nodded. “Yeah, I hear talk in the neighborhoods that the Gophers are throwing their weight around.”
“I want you to find out who his new friends are. Five’ll get you ten, they will be the connection.”
“You could be onto something. I’ll get right to it. Oh, here, they passed me this as we were leaving.” Harry fished in his pockets. “Wire came in for you from the Philadelphia office.”
They had reached the corner of 42nd Street. Bell stopped under a streetlamp to read the wire.
“Bad news?”
“They got a line on a German sneaking around Camden.”
“Wasn’t that a German who did the Bethlehem job?”
“Possibly.”
“What’s in Camden?”
“They’re launching the battleship Michigan.”
22
THE SPY SUMMONED HIS GERMAN AGENT WITH A CRYPTIC note left at his Camden rooming house. They met in Philadelphia in a watchman’s shack on a barge tied to the west bank of the Delaware directly across the busy river from the shipyard. Through an ever-moving scrim of tugboats, lighters, ships, ferries, and coal smoke they could see the stern of the Michigan thrusting her propellers out the back of the shed that covered her ways. The river was only a half mile wide, and they could hear the steady drumbeat of carpenters pounding wooden wedges.
The ship workers had built a gigantic wooden cradle big enough to carry the 16,000-ton ship down greased rails from her building place on land to her home in the water. Now they were raising the cradle up to her by driving wedges under it. When the wedges pressed the cradle tightly against the hull, they would continue hammering them until the cradle lifted the ship off her building blocks.
The German was glum.
The spy said, “Listen. What do you hear?”
“They’re hammering the wedges.”
The spy had earlier passed close by in a steam launch to observe the scene under the hull, which was painted with a dull red undercoat. The “hammers” were actually rams, long poles tipped with heavy heads.
“The wedges are thin,” he said. “How much does each blow raise the cradle?”
“You’d need a micrometer to measure.”
“How many wedges?”
“Gott in Himmel, who knows. Hundreds.”
“A thousand?”
“Could be.”
“Could any one wedge raise the cradle under the ship?”
“Impossible.”
“Could any one wedge lift the cradle and the ship off her blocks.”
“Impossible.”
“Every German must do his part, Hans. If one fails, we all fail.”
Hans stared at him with a strange look of detachment. “I am not a simpleton, mein Herr. I understand the principle. It is not the doing that troubles me, but the consequences.”
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.