Isaac Bell landed gracefully as a gull, strode to the scissor gate, and engaged the deckhands in conversation.

Yamamoto ran up the stairs. He showed his train ticket to enter the first-class gentleman’s lounge, headed for the men’s room, entered a stall, and closed the door. He turned his tan coat inside out, revealing its black lining. His hatband was formed by multiple layers of tightly wound silk. He unwound it into a long scarf, bent the brims of his Panama downward, and tied it on his head with the scarf. The final touch was packed in his valise. Then all he had to do was wait when the ferry docked until all the men had left the first-class cabin. He had just opened his valise when beneath his feet the rumble of the screws abruptly stopped.

Forward momentum slowed so quickly, he had to brace against the wall. The whistle gave three short blasts. The screws rumbled anew, shaking the deck. And to Yamamoto’s horror and disbelief, the giant ferry backed out of the river and into the terminal slip from which it had just emerged.

THE LOUDEST OF THE HUNDREDS of the Pennsylvania Railroad ferry passengers inconvenienced was a United States senator. He roared like an angry lion at the ferry captain, “What in blue blazes is going on here? I’ve been traveling all day from Washington and I’m late for a meeting in New York.”

No one dared asked a senator traveling without his wife whom he was meeting at midnight. Even the ferry captain, a veteran North River waterman, was not brave enough to explain that a Van Dorn detective dressed like a deckhand had barged into his wheelhouse and drawn from his wallet a railroad pass unlike any he had ever seen. The document required all employees to accord him privileges of the line that exceeded even that of a senator who voted religiously in favor of legislation the railroads approved. Handwritten and signed and sealed by the president of the line, and witnessed by a federal judge, it superseded all dispatchers. Its only limits were common sense and the rules of safety.

“What did you do to get that pass?” the captain had asked as he hurriedly signaled the engine room Stop Engines.

“The president returned a favor,” had said the detective. “And I always tell the president how kindly I am treated by his employees.”

So the captain told the legislator, “A mechanical breakdown, Senator.”

“How the devil long are we going to wait here?”

“Everyone is disembarking for the next boat, sir. Let me carry your bag.” The captain seized the senator’s valise and led him to the main deck and down the gangway, where cold-faced detectives observed every passenger trooping off.

Isaac Bell stood behind the other Van Dorns, watching over their heads each and every face. The manner that Yamamoto had chosen to get away-jumping aboard at the last instant-made it clear that the shadows had slipped up, and the Japanese spy knew he was being followed. Now it was a chase.

Three hundred eighty passengers, men, women, and sleepy children, shuffled past. Thank the Lord, thought Bell, it was the middle of the night. The boats carried thousands at rush hour.

“That’s the last of them.”

“O.K. Now we check every nook and cranny on the boat. He’s hiding somewhere.”

A SMALL, elderly woman in a long black dress, a warm shawl, and a straw bonnet tied to her head with a dark scarf boarded a streetcar outside the Jersey City Exchange Place Terminal. It was a slow, stop-and-start ride to the city of Hoboken. The trolley looped around the square at Ferry and River streets, and now her journey moved swiftly as she descended to the first completed of the McAdoo tubes. For a nickel, she boarded an eight-car electric train so new it smelled of paint.

It whisked her under the Hudson River. Ten minutes after boarding, she left the tube train at the first station in New York. The conductors operating the air-powered doors exchanged a glance. The neighborhood at Christopher and Greenwich streets above the beautifully lighted vaulted ceilings of the tube line was nowhere near as pleasant as the subterranean station, particularly at such a late hour. Before they could call a warning, the woman hurried past a pretty florist’s shop at the foot of the stairs-closed, with lights still shining on the flowers-and disappeared.

At street level she found a dark square of grimy cobblestones. Warehouses loomed over formerly genteel residences long since partitioned into rooming houses. She drew the attention of a thug who followed her, drawing close as she neared an alley. She whirled suddenly, pressed a small pistol to his forehead, and said in a soft male voice with a slight accent the thug had never heard before, “I can pay you handsomely to guide me to a clean room where I can spend the night. Or I can pull the trigger. I will let you choose.”

29

I HAVE A JOB FOR HARRY WING AND LOUIS LOH,” SAID Eyes O’Shay.

“Who?” asked Tommy Thompson, who was beginning to think that he was seeing more of Eyes than he wanted to.

“Your Hip Sing highbinders,” Eyes said impatiently. “The high-class tong Chinamen you made a hookup with the same day I came back from the dead. Stop playing stupid with me. We’ve discussed this before.”

“They ain’t mine, I told you. I just made a deal with ’em to open some joints.”

“I have a job for them.”

“What do you need me for?”

“I do not want to meet them. I want you to deal with them for me. Do you understand?”

“You don’t want them to see your mug.”

“Or hear about me. Not one word, Tommy. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a blind man.”

Tommy Thompson had had just about enough. He leaned back in his chair, tipping it up on the two back legs, and said coldly, “I’m thinking it’s time to pick up a gun and blow your brains out, O’Shay.”

Brian O’Shay was on his feet in a flash. He kicked one of the chair legs, splintering it. The gang boss crashed to the floor. At the sounds, which shook the building, Tommy’s bouncers charged into the room. They pulled up short. O’Shay had the boss in a headlock, down on one knee, pointing Tommy’s face toward the ceiling, with his gouge scraping his left eye.

“Deal with your floor managers.”

“Get out of here,” Tommy said in a strangled voice.

The bouncers backed out of the room. O’Shay let him go abruptly, dropping the bigger man on his back and rising to brush sawdust from his trousers. “Here’s what I want,” he said conversationally. “I want you to send Harry Wing and Louis Loh to San Francisco.”

“What’s in San Francisco?” Tommy asked sullenly, climbing to his feet and pulling a bottle from his desk.

“The Mare Island Naval Shipyard.”

“What the hell is that?”

“It’s a navy yard. Like the Brooklyn Navy Yard. It’s where the Great White Fleet ships will re-provision and get their bottoms painted before they sail for Honolulu and Auckland and Japan.”

“Eyes, what the hell are you into now?”

“There’s an ammunition magazine in the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. I want Harry Wing and Louis Loh to blow it up.”

“Blow up a navy yard?” Thompson dropped his bottle and jumped to his feet. “Are you crazy?”

“No.”

Tommy looked around frantically as if cops suddenly had ears pressed to his well-guarded walls. “What are you telling me this for?”

“Because when the Mare Island magazine blows up, you stand to make more dough than you ever saw in your life.”

“How much?”

Eyes told him, and Commodore Tommy sat down, smiling.

VAN DORN DETECTIVE JOHN SCULLY continued scouting Chinatown in a variety of disguises. He was a street peddler one day, a ragpicker the next, a drunk sleeping outdoors as a soldier in the “army of the park benches,” and an official of the city health department, which raised sufficient bribes to keep down expenses. He kept picking up hints about the Gopher Gang moving downtown. Streetwalkers talked wistfully about a high-class gambling hall and opium den that was really choosy about the girls they hired. But a Hip Sing boss’s girlfriend personally ran the joint, and she treated you on the level.