The Spy (24 page)

It suddenly felt as if after three years of building, growing heavier every day as tons of steel were bolted and riveted to tons of steel, the battleship
Michigan
refused to wait a moment longer. No one had touched the electric button that would activate the rams that would release the triggers. But she had moved anyway. An inch. Then another.

“Now!” the Assistant Secretary of the Navy cried shrilly to his daughter.

The girl, more alert than he, was already swinging the bottle.

Glass smashed. Champagne bubbled through the crocheted mesh, and the girl sang out in golden tones, “I christen thee
Michigan
!”

The hundreds of onlookers on the launching platform cheered. Thousands more on the shore, too far away to see the bottle break or the slow movement of the hull, were alerted by the voices of those on the platform and cheered, too. Tugboats and steamers tooted in the river. On the train tracks behind the shed, a locomotive engineer tied down his whistle. And slowly, very slowly, the battleship began to pick up speed.

UNDER THE SHIP, the German’s shovel smashed Bell’s gun out of his hand and caromed off his shoulder. Bell was already thrown off balance by the falling timber. The shovel sent him pinwheeling.

The German jumped back to the wheelbarrow and plunged his hands into its gelatinous cargo, confirming what Bell had seen from the stairs. He had been shoveling tallow onto the ways not only to appear to be innocently performing his job but to expose what he had hidden under the tallow. With a glad cry he pulled out a tightly banded pack of dynamite sticks.

Bell leaped to his feet. He saw no fuse to detonate the explosive, no powdered string to light, which meant that the German must have rigged a percussion cap to detonate on contact when the saboteur smashed it against the cradle. The German’s face was churning into a mask of insane triumph as he ran at the cradle holding the dynamite aloft, and Isaac Bell recognized the cold-eyed fearlessness of a fanatic willing to die to set off his bomb.

With every shore and block removed,
Michigan
was balanced precariously as she started down the ways. An explosion would derail the cradle and spill the 16,000-ton battleship on its side, crushing the launching platform and sweeping hundreds to their deaths.

Bell tackled the German. He brought the man down. But the madness that propelled the German to fearlessly face death gave him the strength to wrest free from the detective. The slowly sliding ship still had not left the shed nor reached the water’s edge. The German stood up and ran full tilt at its cradle.

Bell had no idea where his Browning had fallen. His hat had disappeared and with it his derringer. He pulled his knife from his boot, propped erect on one knee, and threw it with a smooth overhand motion. The razor-sharp steel pieced the back of the German’s neck. He stopped in his tracks and reached back as if to swat a fly. Grievously wounded, he buckled at the knees. Yet he staggered toward the ship, raising his bomb. But Isaac Bell’s knife had cost him more than a few precious seconds. By stopping for an instant, he remained directly in the downward path of another falling timber. It hit the German squarely, crushing his head.

The dynamite fell from his upstretched hand. Isaac Bell was already diving for it. He caught it in both hands before the percussion cap hit the ground and drew it gently to his chest as the long red hull hurtled past.

The ground shook. The drag chains thundered. Smoke poured from the cradle.
Michigan
accelerated out of the shed into the sunlit water, trailing the acrid scent of burning tallow fired by friction and billowing the river into clouds of spray that the sunshine pierced with rainbows.

WHILE EVERY EYE IN CAMDEN locked on the floating ship, Isaac Bell seized the dead German and stuffed him in the wheelbarrow. The detective who had checked the saboteur’s pass came running up, trailed by others. Bell said, “Get this man in the back door of the morgue before anyone sees him. Shipbuilders are superstitious. We don’t want to spoil their party.”

While they covered the body with scrap wood, Bell found his gun and put his hat on his head. A detective handed him his knife, which he sheathed in his boot. “I’m supposed to take my girl to the luncheon. How do I look?”

“Like somebody ironed your suit with a shovel.”

They took out handkerchiefs and brushed his coat and trousers. “You ever consider wearing a darker outfit for days like this?”

Marion took one look when Bell entered the pavilion and asked in a low voice, “Are you all right?”

“Tip-top.”

“You missed the launching.”

“Not entirely,” said Bell. “How did you get along with Yamamoto Kenta?”

“Mr. Yamamoto,” said Marion Morgan, “is a phony.”

I
LAID A TRAP, AND HE WALKED RIGHT INTO IT—ISAAC! HE did not know about Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls.”

“You’ve got me there. What are Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls?”

“Ashiyuki Utamaro was a famous Japanese woodblock printmaker during the later Edo period. Woodblock artists operate large, complex shops where employees and acolytes do much of the work, tracing, carving, and inking after the master draws the image. They don’t do calligraphy scrolls.”

“Why does it matter that Mr. Yamamoto didn’t know about something that doesn’t exist?”

“Because Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls
do
exist. But they were made secretly, so only real scholars know about them.”

“And you! No wonder you won the first law degree ever granted a woman at Stanford University.”

“I wouldn’t know either except my father occasionally bought a Japanese scroll, and I remembered a strange story he told me. I wired him in San Francisco for the details. He wired back a very expensive telegram.

“Ashiyuki Utamaro was at the height of his printmaking career when he got in trouble with the Emperor apparently for making eyes or more at the Emperor’s favorite geisha. Only the fact that the Emperor loved Ashiyuki Utamaro’s woodcuts saved his life.

“Instead of chopping his head off, or whatever they do to Japanese Lotharios, he banished him to the northernmost cape of the northernmost island of Japan—Hokkaido. For an artist who needed his workshop and staff, it was worse than prison. Then his mistress smuggled in paper, ink, and a brush. And until he died, alone in his tiny little hut, he drew calligraphy scrolls. But no one could admit they existed. His mistress and everyone who helped her visit him would have been executed. They could not be displayed. They could not be sold. Somehow the prints ended up with a dealer in San Francisco, who sold one to my father.”

“Forgive me my skepticism, but it does sound like an art dealer’s story,” said Bell.

“Except it is true. Yamamoto Kenta does not know about the Exile Scrolls. Therefore he is no scholar and no curator of Japanese art.”

“Which makes him a spy,” Bell said grimly. “And a murderer. Well done, my darling. We’ll hang him with this.”

THE SPEECHES THAT ACCOMPANIED the luncheon’s toasts were mercifully brief, and the rousing one delivered by Captain Lowell Falconer, Special Inspector of Target Practice, was, in the words of Ted Whitmark, “a real stem-winder.”

With crackling language and powerful gestures, the Hero of Santiago praised Camden’s modern yard, lionized the ship workers, thanked the Congress, commended the chief constructor, and acclaimed the naval architect.

During one of the explosions of applause, Bell whispered to Marion, “The only thing he hasn’t praised is the
Michigan.
”

Marion whispered back, “You should have heard what he said privately about the
Michigan.
He compared her to a whale. And I don’t believe he meant it as a compliment.”

“He did mention that it is barely half the size of Hull 44.” With a courtly bow in Dorothy’s direction, Falconer wound his toast up with a stirring testimonial to Arthur Langner. “The hero who built
Michigan
’s guns. Finest 12s in the world today. And a harbinger of even better to come. Every man jack in the Navy will miss him.”

Bell glanced at Dorothy. Her face was alight with joy that even a maverick officer like Falconer had said for all to hear that her father was a hero.

“May Arthur Langner rest in peace,” Captain Falconer concluded, “knowing that his nation sleeps in peace secured by his mighty guns.”

The last bit of business was the presentation by the chairman of New York Ship of a jeweled pendant to the Assistant Secretary of the Navy’s quick-moving daughter, who had cracked the champagne over
Michigan’
s bow before the ship got away. Heading for the podium, the savvy industrialist shook hands warmly with a man in an elegant European frock coat, who handed him the pendant. And before he draped it around the young lady’s neck, he used the occasion to plug the booming jewelry industry in Camden’s sister city of Newark.

ANTICIPATING THE CRUSH heading home to New York, Bell had bribed Camden detective Barney George to arrange for a police launch to run him and Marion across the river to Philadelphia, where a police car sped them to the Broad Street Station. They boarded the New York express and settled into the lounge car with a bottle of champagne to celebrate the safe launching, the thwarting of a saboteur, and the imminent capture of a Japanese spy.

Bell knew that he had been too visible today to take a chance trailing Yamamoto back to Washington. Instead, he put the Japanese under close surveillance by the best shadows Van Dorn could field on short notice, and they were very good indeed.

“What do you think of Falconer?” Bell asked Marion.

“Lowell is a fascinating man,” she answered, adding enigmatically, “He’s torn by what he wants, what he fears, and what he sees.”

“That’s mysterious. What does he want?”

“Dreadnoughts.”

“Obviously. What does he fear?”

“Japan.”

“No surprises there. What does he see?”