The Spy (31 page)

“That’s precisely the kind of byzantine talk I heard on the ship,” said Archie. “You have an evil mind.”

“I’ve been hanging around the wrong crowd lately.”

“I thought it was that Yale education,” said Archie, a Princeton man.

“Courting the United States to be their ally, England and Germany could each secretly be maneuvering to make their enemy look like our enemy.”

“What about the Japanese?”

“Captain Falconer claims that anything that loosens the European footholds in the Pacific will embolden the Japanese. They’ll stay out of it as long as they can and then side with the winner. Frankly, he seems possessed by a fear of the Japanese. He saw them up close in the Russo-Japanese War, so he thinks he knows them better than most. He insists they’re brilliant spies. Anyway, to answer your question, we’ve had a Jap under surveillance for a week. Unfortunately, he gave us the slip.”

Archie shook his head in mock dismay. “I go away for one little honeymoon, and the detective business goes to hell. Where do you suppose he is?”

“Last seen on the railroad ferry into New York. We’re combing the city. He’s the best part of the case. I need him badly.”

“GOT THE REPORT on Riker and Riker,” Grady Forrer reported when Bell got back to headquarters. “On your desk.”

Erhard Riker was the son of the founder of Riker & Riker, importers of precious gems and precious metals for the New York and Newark jewelry industries. The younger Riker had expanded the company since taking over seven years ago when his father was killed in Boer War cross fire in South Africa. He shuttled regularly between the United States and Europe on luxury transatlantic ocean liners, favoring the German
Wilhelm der Grosse
and the British
Lusitania,
unlike his father who had patronized older, more staid steamships like the Cunard Line
Umbria
and North German Lloyd’s
Havel
. One fact caught Bell’s eye: Riker & Riker maintained its own private protection service both for guarding jewelry shipments and escorting Riker personally when he himself was carrying valuables.

Bell sought out the head of Research. “Are private guard services common in the gem line?”

“Seem to be with the Europeans,” said Grady Forrer, “traveling the way they have to.”

“What sort does he hire?”

“Pretty-boy bruisers. The sort you can dress up in fancy duds.”

A receptionist stuck his head in the door. “Telephone call for you, Mr. Bell. Won’t say who he is. English accent.”

Bell recognized the plummy drawl of Commander Abbington-Westlake.

“Shall we have another cocktail, old chap? Perhaps even drink it this time.”

“What for?”

“I have a very interesting surprise for you.”

P
OLICE! POLICE! DON’T NONE OF YOUSE MOVE!”

The door from the opera house balcony through which John Scully had entered the Hip Sing opium den crashed open with a loud bang and knocked the heavyset Chinaman guarding it into the wall. The first man through was a helmeted sergeant broad as a draft horse.

The Chinese gambling at the fan-tan table were accustomed to police raids. They moved the quickest. Cards, chips, and paper money went flying in the air as they bolted through a curtain that covered a hidden door. The Hip Sing bouncers scooped the money off the faro table and ran. The white players at the faro wheel ran, too, but when they pawed at other curtains they found blank walls. Girls screamed. Opium smokers looked up.

The redheaded madame ran to Scully’s couch. “Come with me!”

She pulled Scully through another curtain as the cops stormed in swinging their clubs and shouting threats. Scully saw no door in the near darkness, but when she shoved on the wall a narrow panel swung open. They went through, and she hinged it closed and threw heavy bolts shut at the top and bottom. “Quickly!”

She led him down a steep and narrow stairway barely wide enough for the detective to squeeze his bulk through. At each landing was another narrow door, which she opened, closed, and bolted behind them.

“Where are we going?” asked Scully.

“The tunnel.”

She unlocked a door with a key. Here was the tunnel, low-ceiled, narrow, and damp. It stretched into darkness. She took a battery light from a hole in the wall and by its flashing beam led them underground for what felt to Scully to be a distance of two city blocks. By the twists and turns and breaks in the walls, he surmised it was actually a right-of-way constructed through a series of connected cellars.

She unlocked another door, took his hand again, and led him up two flights of stairs into the conventionally furnished parlor of an apartment with high windows that offered views of the Chatham Square El station flooded in sunlight.

Scully had been in the dark so long, he found it hard to believe that daylight still existed.

“Thanks for the rescue, ma’am.”

“My name is Katy. Sit down. Relax.”

“Jasper,” said Scully. “Jasper Smith.”

Katy threw down her bag, reached up, and began removing hatpins.

Scully watched avidly. She was even prettier in the daylight. “You know,” he laughed. “If I carried a knife as long as your hatpins, the police would arrest me as a dangerous character.”

She gave him a cute pout. “A girl can’t wear her chapeau all crooked.”

“It doesn’t seem to matter if a girl wears a cartwheel or a little ding-dong affair, she always nails it down with hatpins long as her arm. I see you are a fellow Republican.”

“Where’d you get that idea?”

Scully reached for the ten-inch steel pin she was removing and held it to the light. The decorative bronze head depicted a possum holding a golf club. “ ‘Billy Possum.’ That’s what we call William Howard Taft.”

“They’re trying to make a possum like a teddy bear. But everyone knows that Taft is no Roosevelt.”

She stuck all four pins in a sofa cushion and tossed her hat beside them. Then she struck a pose, with her strong hands on her slim hips. “Opium is the one pleasure I can’t offer you here. Would you settle for a Scotch highball?”

“Among other things,” Scully grinned back.

He watched her mix Scotch and water in tall glasses. Then he clinked his to hers, took a sip, and leaned closer to kiss her on the mouth. She stepped back. “Let me get comfortable. I’ve been in these clothes all day.”

Scully searched the room quickly, thoroughly, and silently. He was looking for a rent bill or gas bill that would show whose apartment it was. He had to stop when the El clattered by because he couldn’t hear her coming back from the bedroom. It passed, and he looked some more.

“Say, how you doing in there?” he called.

“Hold your horses.”

Scully looked some more. Nothing. Drawers and cabinets were bare as a hotel room. He cast a look down the hall, and opened her purse. Just as he heard the door open, he hit the jackpot. Two railroad tickets for tomorrow’s three-thirty p.m. 20th Century Limited—the eighteen-hour excess-fare flyer to Chicago—with connections through to San Francisco. Tickets for Katy and whom? The boss? The Hip Sing boyfriend?

WHEN SHE FOUND the little thirteen-ounce .25 holstered in the small of his back, she wanted to know what it was doing there.

“Got robbed once carrying the payroll for my clerks. It ain’t gonna happen again.”

She seemed to believe him. At least it didn’t get in the way of the proceedings. Not until he saw her add the knockout drops to his second highball.

Scully felt suddenly old and blue.

She was so very good at it. She had the patience to wait to dress the second drink so he’d be less likely to taste the bitter chloral hydrate flavor. She hid the vial expertly between the crease of her palm and the fleshy part of her thumb. She crossed her legs as she did it, with a distracting flash of snow-white thighs. Her only failing was her youth. He was too old to be buncoed by a kid.

“Bottoms up,” she smiled.

“Bottoms up,” Scully whispered back. “You know, I never met a girl quite like you.” Gazing soulfully into her pretty blue eyes, he reached blindly for his glass and knocked it off the table.

ISAAC BELL GOT to the Knickerbocker’s cellar bar ten minutes early. Midafternoon on a sunny day, it was largely empty, and he saw right away that Abbington-Westlake had not yet arrived. There was one man at the bar, two couples at tables, and a single slight figure seated on the banquette behind the small table where he had sat with the English Naval Attaché in the darkest corner of the room. Immaculately dressed in an old-fashioned frock coat, high-standing collar, and four-in-hand tie, he beckoned, half rising and bowing his head.

Bell approached, wondering if he could believe his eyes.

“Yamamoto Kenta, I presume?”

M
R. BELL, ARE YOU FAMILIAR WITH THE NAMBU TYPE B?”

“Low-quality, 7-millimeter semiautomatic pistol,” Bell answered tersely. “Most Japanese officers buy themselves a Browning.”

“I’m a sentimental patriot,” said Yamamoto. “And it
is
remarkably effective at a range of one small tabletop. Keep your hands where I can see them.”

Bell sat down, laid his big hands on the table, one palm down, one up, and scrutinized a face that gave away nothing.

“How far do you think you will get if you shoot me in a crowded hotel?”

“Considering how far I have gotten from a dozen professional detectives for the past two weeks, pursuit by ordinary citizens drinking in a hotel bar holds few terrors for me. But surely you can guess that I did not lure you here to shoot you, which I could have done late last night as you walked home from this hotel to your club on 44th Street.”

Bell returned a grim smile. “My congratulations to the Black Ocean Society for teaching their spies the art of invisibility.”

“I accept the compliment,” Yamamoto smiled back. “In the name of the Empire of Japan.”

“Why does a patriot of the Empire of Japan become the instrument of an English spy’s revenge?”

“Don’t be put out with Abbington-Westlake. You hurt his pride, which is a dangerous thing to do to an Englishman.”

“Next time I see him, I won’t hurt his pride.”

Yamamoto smiled again. “That is between you and him. Let us remember that you and I are not enemies.”

“You murdered Arthur Langner in the Gun Factory,” Bell shot back coldly. “That makes us enemies.”

“I did not kill Arthur Langner. Someone else did. An overzealous subordinate. I’ve taken appropriate measures with him.”

Bell nodded. He saw no profit in challenging that cold-eyed lie until he learned Yamamoto’s intention. “If you didn’t murder Langner and we are not enemies, why are you pointing a gun under the table at my belly?”

“To hold your attention while I explain what is going on and what I can do to help you.”

“Why would you want to help me?”

“Because you can help me.”