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 By those standards, the Great White Fleet is hopelessly out-of-date.”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 dreadnoughts.”
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.”
“But speed you say is also vital. What about you in Steam Engineering?” Bell asked. “They say you’re a wizard with turbines. Wouldn’t Alasdair MacDonald’s loss be as devastating to the dreadnought program?”
MacDonald laughed. “I’m indestructible.”
Another fistfight broke out across the dance hall.
“Excuse me, Isaac,” said MacDonald, and he waded cheerfully into it.
Bell shouldered after him. The flashily dressed gangsters he’d seen when he came in were hovering around the impromptu ring of cheering men. MacDonald was trading punches with a young heavyweight who had the arms of a blacksmith and admirable footwork. The Scotsman appeared slower than the younger man. But Bell saw that Alasdair MacDonald was allowing his opponent to land punches as a way of gauging what he had. So subtle was he that none of the blows scored any damage. Suddenly Alasdair seemed to have learned all he needed to. Suddenly he was fast and deadly, throwing combinations. Bell had to admit they outclassed the best he had thrown when he boxed for Yale, and he recalled with a grateful smile Joe Van Dorn steering him into “graduate study” in Chicago’s saloons.
The blacksmith was weaving. MacDonald finished him off with an upper cut that was no harder than it had to be to do the job, then helped him to his feet, slapped his back, and bellowed for all to hear, “You did good, laddie. I just got lucky . . . Isaac, did you note this fellow’s footwork? Don’t you think he’s got a future in the ring?”
“He’d have floored Gentleman Jim Corbett in his prime.”
The blacksmith accepted the compliment with a glassy-eyed grin.
MacDonald, whose own eyes were still restlessly scanning the crowd, noticed the gangsters coming purposefully his way. “Oh, here’s another contender—two more. No rest for the weary. All right, lads, you’re runts, but there’s two of ya. Come and get it.”
They weren’t quite runts, although MacDonald outweighed them handily, but they moved with assurance and held their hands well. And when they attacked, it was clearly not the first time they had teamed up. Talented street fighters, Bell assessed them, tough slum kids who had fought their way into the upper ranks of a gang. Full-fledged gangsters now, out for a night of mayhem. Bell moved closer in case things got out of hand.
Hurling filthy curses at Alasdair MacDonald, they attacked him simultaneously from both sides. There was a viciousness to the concerted assault that seemed to anger the Scotsman. Face flushed, he feinted a retreat, which drew them forward into a powerful left jab and a devastating right. One gangster staggered backward, blood spurting from his nose. The other crumpled up, holding his ear.
Bell saw steel flash behind Alasdair MacDonald.
11
I
SAAC BELL WHISKED HIS OVER-UNDER , TWO-SHOT derringer out of his hat in a blur of motion and fired at the third gangster, who was lunging at Alasdair MacDonald’s back with a knife. The range was close, nearly point-blank. The heavy .44 slug stopped him in his tracks, and the blade fell from his hand. But even as the roar of gunfire sent patrons stampeding for cover, the dandy with the bloody nose was thrusting another knife at the Scotsman’s belly.
MacDonald gaped, as if astonished that a friendly brawl would turn deadly.
Isaac Bell realized that he was witnessing a premeditated attempt at murder. A fleeing spectator blocked his vision. Bell slammed him out of his way and fired again. Above MacDonald’s bloody nose, the knife wielder grew a red hole between the eyes. His knife fell inches short of Alasdair MacDonald’s belt.
Bell’s derringer was empty.
The remaining killer, the one floored, rose behind MacDonald with a fluid ease that showed him neither hurt nor slowed by the blow he had taken to his ear. A long-bladed knife flipped open in his hand. Bell was already pulling his Browning No. 2 semiautomatic from under his coat. The killer thrust his knife at MacDonald’s back. Tucking the pistol to his body to shield it from the running men, Bell fired. He knew that he would have stopped the killer dead with a shot to the brain. But someone crashed into him just as he pulled the trigger.
He did not miss by much. The shot pierced the dandy’s right shoulder. But the Browning’s pinpoint accuracy was gained at the cost of stopping power, and the killer was left-handed. Although the .380 caliber slug staggered him, momentum was on the killer’s side, and he managed to sink his blade into Alasdair MacDonald’s broad back.
MacDonald still looked astonished. His eyes met Bell’s even as the detective caught him in his arms. “They tried to kill me,” he marveled.
Bell eased the suddenly dead weight to the sawdust and knelt over him. “Get a doctor,” Bell shouted. “Get an ambulance.”
“Laddie!”
“Don’t talk,” said Bell.
Blood was spreading rapidly, so fast that the sawdust floated on it instead of absorbing it.
“Give me your hand, Isaac.”
Bell took the huge splayed hand in his.
“Please give me your hand.”
“I’ve got you, Alasdair—
Get a doctor!
”
Angelo Del Rossi knelt beside them. “Doc’s coming. He’s a good one. You’ll be O.K., Professor. Won’t he, Bell?”
“Of course,” Bell lied.
MacDonald gripped Bell’s hand convulsively and whispered something Bell could not hear. He leaned closer. “What did you say, Alasdair?”
“Listen.”
“I can’t hear you.”
But the big Scotsman said nothing. Bell whispered into his ear, “They came after you, Alasdair. Why?”
MacDonald opened his eyes. They grew wide with sudden recognition, and he whispered, “Hull 44.”
“What?”
MacDonald closed his eyes as if falling asleep.
“I’m a doctor. Get out of my way.”
Bell moved aside. The doctor, youthful, brisk, and apparently competent, counted MacDonald’s pulse. “Heartbeat like a station clock. I have an ambulance on the way. Some of you men help me carry him.”
“I’ll do it,” said Bell.
“He weighs two hundred pounds.”
“Get out of my way.”
Isaac Bell cradled the fallen boxer in his arms, stood to his feet, and carried MacDonald out the door to the sidewalk, where Bell held him while they waited for the ambulance. Camden cops were holding back the crowds. A police detective demanded Bell’s name.
“Isaac Bell. Van Dorn operative.”
“Nice shooting in there, Mr. Bell.”
“Did you recognize the dead men?”
“Never saw ’em before.”
“Out-of-town? Philadelphia?”
“They had New York train tickets in their pockets. Care to tell me how you got mixed up in this?”
“I’ll tell you everything I can—which isn’t much—as soon as I get this fellow to the hospital.”
“I’ll be waiting for you at headquarters. Tell the desk sergeant you want to see Barney George.”
A motor ambulance mounted on the new Model T chassis pulled up in front of the dance hall. As Bell laid MacDonald inside, the boxer clutched his hand again. Bell climbed in with him, beside the doctor, and rode to the hospital. While a surgeon worked on the Scot in the operating room, Bell telephoned New York with orders to warn John Scully, who was watching hull designer Farley Kent, and to dispatch operatives to the Naval Torpedo Station at Newport to guard the life of Ron Wheeler.
Three men central to the American dreadnaught program had died, and a fourth was at death’s door. But if he had not witnessed the attack on Alasdair MacDonald, it would have been reported as a likely event in a saloon brawler’s life instead of attempted murder. There was already a possibility that Langner had been murdered. What if the Bethlehem foundry explosion MacDonald had told him about wasn’t an accident? Was the Westchester climbing accident murder, too?
Bell sat by the man’s bed all night and into the morning. Suddenly, at noon, Alasdair MacDonald filled his mighty chest with a shuddering breath and let it slowly sigh away. Bell shouted for the doctor. But he knew it was hopeless. Saddened, and deeply angry, Bell went to the Camden Police headquarters and reported to Detective George his part in failing to stop the attack.