The Spy (38 page)

“Yes, sir, Misser Bell.”

“If anyone else on the train gives you trouble, just come to me.”

“Please don’t tell Mr. Bennett. He wouldn’t understand.”

“Why not?”

“He is kind man. He has no idea how cruel people are.”

“Put it in your suitcase, and I won’t tell him a thing.”

Louis seized Bell’s hand in both of his. “Thank you, sir. Thank you for understanding.”

Bell’s face was a mask. “Go put it in your suitcase,” he repeated. The Chinese man hurried down the corridor and through the vestibule to the next car, where Bennett had his adjoining staterooms. Louis turned and waved another grateful thank-you. Bell nodded back as if thinking, What a pious young fellow.

In truth, he was speculating that the boyish-looking missionary students could be tong gangsters. And if that were so, he had to marvel at John Scully’s clairvoyance.

No other detective in the Van Dorn Agency could wander alone into Chinatown and two weeks later connect a pair of tong gangsters to the Hull 44 spy ring. He was tempted to clamp cuffs on Louis Loh and Harold Wing and lock them in the baggage car. Except he doubted that Louis and Harold were ringleaders if gangsters at all—and if they were henchmen, he could trail them to their boss.

That the spy recruited tong Chinese was typical of his international reach. It was hard to imagine someone like Abbington-Westlake even thinking about it. That the spy had tricked a famous English novelist into providing cover for his operatives indicated an imagination as intricate as it was diabolical.

“BET’S TO YOU, WHITMARK. In or out?”

Ted Whitmark knew full well that he should never stay in a hand of seven-card stud trying to fill an inside straight. The odds were ridiculous. He needed a four. There were only four fours in the deck, one heart, one diamond, one spade, one club. And the four of clubs had already been dealt to a hand across the table, and that man had bet when it fell, suggesting another four hidden in his hole cards. Four fours in a deck, one clearly missing, another likely. The odds were less than ridiculous, they were impossible.

But he had dropped a ton of money into the pot already and he had a feeling his luck was about to change. It had to. His losing streak had started weeks ago in New York, and it was tearing him down. He had lost more on the train to San Francisco, and since he had arrived he had lost nearly every night. One four gone. One or even two likely gone. Sometimes you had to take the bull by the horns and be brave.

“Bet’s to you, Whitmark. In or out?”

No more “Mr.” Whitmark, Ted noticed. Mr. had gone by the boards when he borrowed his third five thousand early in the evening. Sometimes you had to be brave.

“In.”

“It’s eight thousand.”

Whitmark shoved his chips in the pot. “Here’s three. And here’s my marker.”

“You sure?”

“Deal the cards.”

The man dealing looked across the table not at Ted Whitmark but at the scarred-face owner of the Barbary Coast casino who had been approving the loans. The owner frowned. For a moment, Whitmark felt saved. He could not call if he didn’t have the money. He would fold. He could go back to his hotel, sleep, and tomorrow work out a schedule to pay his losses from money the Navy would owe him after he delivered the goods to the Great White Fleet. Or Great White “Eat,” as one of his rivals had noted approvingly. Fourteen thousand sailors ate a lot of food.

The casino owner nodded.

“Deal the cards.”

The guy with the four caught another four. Whitmark got a nine of clubs, about as ugly a card as he had ever seen. Somebody bet. Somebody called. The fours raised the pot. Ted Whitmark folded.

“You mind showing me your last card after the hand?” he asked of the man to his left.

When it was over and three fours across the table had won, the man to Ted’s left, who had received the card Ted would have if he had stayed in, said, “It was a four. Bet you would have liked that,” he called across the table to the trip fours. You would have had
four
fours.”

“I would have liked it, too,” said Ted, and he stumbled to the bar. Before he could raise a glass, the man who owned the casino walked up and said, “I have a message for you from Tommy Thompson in New York.”

Ted shrank from the man’s cold gaze. “Don’t worry,” he mumbled. “I’ll pay you first, soon as I can.”

“Tommy says to pay me. I bought your marker.”

“On top of what I owe you? You’re taking a hell of chance.”

“You’ll pay. One way or another.”

“I make a lot of money. I’ll get it to you, soon.”

“It’s not money I need, Mr. Whitmark. I need a little help, and you’re the man to give it to me.”

“IF ME AND YOU
was half as smart as we think we are we’d have tumbled to it a month ago!”
John Scully’s words thundered through a dream about the Frye Boys.

Isaac Bell shot awake from his first full night’s sleep since he had left New York. The berth was tilted forward, and he did not have to look out his stateroom window to know that they had crested the Sierra Nevada and were beginning the descent to the Sacramento Valley. Five hours to San Francisco. He got up and dressed quickly.

Had he missed a bet?

“Days ago,” he muttered to himself.

He had not once questioned the novelist Arnold Bennett’s role as Harold’s and Louis’s protector. What if the opposite had occurred? What if the writer was also a British spy? Like Abbington-Westlake, hiding behind a scrim of upper-crust, above-it-all mannerisms and a witty tongue?

The train pulled into Sacramento. Bell bolted to the telegraph office and sent a wire to New York. Was Bennett the one who recruited the tong hatchet men and dressed them up as divinity students? Talk about hiding in plain sight. For all he knew, Bell realized, Arnold Bennett was the spy himself, the leader of the ring.

KATHERINE DEE cursed aloud.

Like a sailor, she laughed, giddy on little sleep and lots of dust. Cursing like a sailor. Wind and spray were playing hell with the cocaine she was sniffing from an ivory vial to stay awake on the final night of her voyage from Newport. She could not see the coast, but the thunder of the surf told her she had she veered too close.

She had sailed the heavily laden catboat down the southern coast of Long Island, timing her passage from Montauk Point to enter Fire Island Inlet at first light. She steered, unseen except by some fishermen, through the opening in the barrier beach. Once inside, out of the ocean swells, she followed a channel marked with stakes and watched for her landmark on the Long Island shore five miles across the bay. When she spotted it, she crossed the choppy waters of the Great South Bay steering for a white mansion with a red roof. Stakes marked the mouth of a newly dredged creek bulkheaded with creosoted wood.

The catboat glided up the glassy creek.

The boathouse was clad in new cedar shingles. The roof was tall, the opening high enough to accommodate the low mast. Katherine Dee lowered her sail and let the boat drift. She had timed it just right. It stopped close enough for her to toss a looped line around a piling. Pulling on the line, directing her strength with economy, she eased the heavily laden boat stern first into the shadows under the roof.

A man appeared through the back door that opened to the land.

“Where’s Jake?”

“He tried to kiss me,” she answered in a distant voice.

“Yeah?” he said, as if to say, You’re a girl, what do expect alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean? “So where is he?”

She looked him full in the face. “A shark jumped into the boat and ate him.”

He considered the way her smile stiffened her mouth, the iceberg grimness in her eyes, and the people she knew, and decided that Jake had gotten what he deserved, and he was not at all interested in how it had happened. He held up a wicker basket. “I brought you supper.”

“Thank you.”

“I brought enough for two. Not knowing that—”

“Good. I’m starving.”

She ate alone. Then she spread her sleeping bag on the canvas cushioning her cargo and slept secure in the thought that Brian O’Shay would be proud of her. The explosion at the torpedo factory had masked the theft of four experimental electric torpedoes that had been imported from England for research. Armed with TNT by the brilliant Ron Wheeler, they were ten times more powerful than the English had made them. And no one at the Newport Naval Torpedo Station realized that they had not been blown to smithereens.

T
HERE YOU ARE, BELL! JOLLY GOOD, WE DIDN’T MISS saying good-bye.”

Bell was surprised when he reboarded the train as it pulled out of Sacramento on the last ninety-mile leg to San Francisco that Arnold Bennett and the Chinese, who were ticketed through to San Francisco, had their bags packed and in the corridor.

“I thought you were going to San Francisco.”

“Changed our mind, inspired by all these orchards and berry fields.” The train was passing through strawberry fields crowded with fruit pickers in straw hats. “We’re hopping off early at Suisun City. Decided to catch a train to Napa Junction. An old school chum of mine is farming up St. Helena way—started a vineyard, actually, stomping grapes and all that. We’ll recover bucolically from the rigors of our travels—splendid as they were—before pressing on to San Francisco. I’ve a mind to cobble up an article for
Harper’s
on the subject while the boys enjoy some fresh air in the country before carrying the Word of God home to China.”

Bell thought fast, envisioning the long, sprawling bays of San Francisco enclosed from the Pacific Ocean by the San Francisco Peninsula and the Marin Peninsula. From Suisun City, the main line continued southwest seventeen miles to the Benicia Ferry that carried the train across the narrow Carquinez Strait to Port Costa. Then the final thirty-mile run beside San Pablo Bay to Oakland Mole, where a passenger ferry crossed San Francisco Bay to the city.

Twenty miles north of the city, up San Francisco Bay and across San Pablo Bay, was the Mare Island Naval Shipyard. It was the U.S. Navy’s Brooklyn Navy Yard of America’s West Coast, with a long history of building, repairing, and refitting warships and submarines. Napa Junction, connected to Suisan City by a local branch line to the west, was only five miles north of the shipyard.

Bennett and the Chinese would be a short train or electric trolley ride from Mare Island, where the Great White Fleet would put in from its voyage to refit, replenish food and water, and load fresh ammunition from the magazines.

“Isn’t that a coincidence?” said Isaac Bell.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m taking that very same train.”

“Where are your bags?”

“I travel light.”

The Overland Limited pulled into Suisun City ten minutes late. The train to Napa Junction was blowing its whistle. Bell snatched a handful of wires waiting for him at the telegraph office and hurried to board. It was a two-coach local, with a gaily striped awning sheltering its back platform. There were a half dozen passengers in the rear car, Arnold Bennett in their midst and starting to tell a story. He interrupted himself to indicate an empty seat. “Come let us talk you into tromping grapes with us at St. Helena.”