“You must believe me.”

Bell said, “I feel a certain affection for you, Louis. You held off shooting me until I jumped from the train.”

Louis Loh stared at the battleship. “I was not sparing your life. I didn’t have the guts to pull the trigger.”

“I’m tempted to let you down, Louis. But you haven’t told me all you know. I don’t believe that everything came in the mail.”

Louis Loh cast another fearful gaze at the white battleship and broke down completely. “It was Commodore Tommy Thompson who told us to attack the magazine at Mare Island.”

“How did you hook up with the Gopher Gang?”

“The spy bribed the Hip Sing to allow us to approach Commodore Tommy Thompson in their name, pretending we were tong.”

Bell handed Louis Loh a snowy white handkerchief. “Wave this.” He led Loh down the mast. When they reached the barge, apoplectic Test Range officers raced up in a boat. “How did you-”

“Thought you’d never stop shooting. We were getting hungry up there.”

“I DON’T BELIEVE for a moment that Commodore Tommy is the spy,” Isaac Bell told Joseph Van Dorn. “But I’m willing to bet Tommy’s got a good idea who he is.”

“He better,” said Van Dorn. “Raiding his territory is costing a carload of money for the cops and some very expensive favors to keep Tammany Hall from protesting.” The tall detective and his broadchested boss were overseeing preparations for the raid from inside a Marmon parked across from Commodore Tommy’s Saloon on West 39th Street.

“But the railroads will love us,” said Bell, and the boss conceded that several rail tycoons had already thanked him personally for cutting back the worst depredations of the Gopher Gang. “Looking at the bright side, after this the spy’s ring will be a lot smaller.”

“I’m not counting on that,” said Isaac Bell, mindful of learning about the explosion at the Newport Torpedo Factory while on the train to San Francisco.

A dozen railroad cops led the attack, battering down the saloon door, breaking up the furniture, smashing bottles, and staving in beer kegs. Shots rang within. Harry Warren’s boys, standing by with handcuffs, marched a dozen Gophers into a Police Department paddy wagon.

“Tommy’s holed up in the cellar with a bullet hole in his arm,” Harry reported to Bell and Van Dorn. “He’s all alone. He may listen to reason.”

Bell went first, down wooden steps into a damp cellar. Tommy Thompson was slumped in a chair like a mountain brought low by an earthquake. He had a pistol in his hand. He opened his eyes, looked up blearily at Bell’s weapon pointed at his head, and let his pistol fall to the earthen floor.

“I’m Isaac Bell.”

“What’s wrong with the Van Dorns?” Tommy was indignant. “It’s always been live and let live. Pay the cops, stay out of each other’s business. We got a whole system at work here, and a bunch of private dicks screw it up.”

“Is that why you put one of my boys in the hospital?” Bell asked coldly.

“That wasn’t my idea!” Tommy protested.

“Wasn’t your idea?” Bell retorted. “Who ramrods the Gophers?”

“It weren’t my idea,” Tommy repeated sullenly.

“You’re asking me to believe that the famous Commodore Tommy Thompson, who’s killed off every rival to command the toughest gang in New York, takes orders from someone else?”

Resentment boiled behind Tommy’s tough façade. Bell played on it, laughing, “Maybe you are telling the truth. Maybe you are just a saloonkeeper.”

“Goddammit!” Tommy Thompson erupted. He tried to get out of the chair. The tall detective restrained him with a warning gesture. “Commodore Tommy don’t take orders from no one.”

Bell called out, and Harry Warren and two of his men trooped down the stairs. “Tommy says it wasn’t his idea to beat up little Eddie Tobin. Some fellow made him do it.”

“Some fellow?” Harry echoed scornfully. “Did this ‘some fellow’ who ordered you to beat up a Van Dorn happen to be the same fellow who ordered you to send Louis Loh and Harold Wing to blow up the magazine at Mare Island?”

“He didn’t order me. He paid me. There’s a difference.”

“Who?” Bell demanded.

“Bastard, left me to stick around and face the music.”

“Who?”

“Goddamned Eyes O’Shay. That’s who.”

“Eyes O’Shay?” Harry Warren echoed incredulously. “You take us for jackasses? Eyes O’Shay is dead fifteen years.”

“No he ain’t.”

“Harry,” Bell snapped. “Who is Eyes O’Shay?”

“Gopher kid, years ago. Vicious piece of work. A comer, ’til he disappeared.”

“I heard talk he was back,” muttered one of Harry’s detectives. “I didn’t believe it.”

“I still don’t.”

“I do,” said Isaac Bell. “The spy’s been acting like a gangster all along.”

A STREAK OF GOD

42

ISAAC BELL ASKED, “WHY DID THEY CALL HIM EYES?”

“If you got in a fight with him, he’d gouge your eye out,” said Tommy Thompson. “He fit a copper pick over his thumbnail. Now it’s made of stainless steel.”

“I imagine,” said Bell, “he didn’t get in many fights.”

“Not once word got around,” Tommy agreed.

“Other than that, what is he like?”

Tommy Thompson said, “If I’m going sit here yapping, I want a drink.”

Bell nodded. The Van Dorns produced an array of hip flasks. Tommy took long pulls from a couple and wiped his mouth with his bloody sleeve. “Other than gouging eyes, what’s Brian O’Shay like? He’s like he always was. A guy who can see around a corner.”

“Would you call him a natural leader?”

“A what?”

“A leader. Like you. You run your own gang. Is he that kind of a man?”

“All I know is he’s thinking all the time. Always ahead of you. Eyes could see inside of people.”

“If you’re telling us the truth, Tommy, that O’Shay is not dead, where is he?”

The gang leader swore he did not know.

“What name does he go by?”

“He didn’t say.”

“What does he look like?”

“He looks like anybody. Clerk in a store, guy owns a bank, bartender. I hardly recognized him. Duded up like a Fifth Avenue swell.”

“Big man?”

“No. A little guy.”

“Compared to you, Tommy, most guys are little. How tall is he?”

“Five-eight. Built like a fireplug. Strongest little guy I ever saw.” Bell continued conversationally, “He didn’t need the gouge to win a fight, did he?”

“No,” said Tommy, taking another slug of whiskey. “He just liked doing it.”

“Surely after he reappeared out of nowhere and paid you all that money, you had him followed.”

“I sent Paddy the Rat after him. Little bastard came back short one eye.”

Bell looked at one of the detectives, who was nodding agreement. “Yeah, I seen Paddy wearing a patch.”

“Disappeared, just like when we was kids. Vanished into thin air that time, too. Never thought we’d see him again. Thought he got thrown in the river.”

“By whom?” asked Bell.

The gang leader shrugged.

Harry Warren said, “A lot of people thought you were the one who threw him in the river, Tommy.”

“Yeah, well a lot of people thought wrong. I used to think Billy Collins done it. ’Til Eyes came back.”

Bell glanced at Harry Warren.

“Dope addict,” Harry said. “Haven’t heard his name in years. Billy Collins ran with Eyes and Tommy. They made quite the trio. Remember, Tommy? Rolling drunks, robbing pushcarts, selling dope, beatin’ up anybody got in their way. O’Shay was the worst, worse than the Commodore here, even worse than Billy Collins. Tommy was sweetness and light compared to those two. The last anybody expected was Tommy taking over the Gophers. Except you got lucky, Tommy, didn’t you? Eyes disappeared, and Billy got the habit.”