The Thief (15 page)

I
SAAC BELL SKIDDED TO A STOP, HARDLY BE
lieving his eyes. Coal chutes gaped open along the middle of the hull, fifteen feet above the barges. Beneath each hung staging, wooden platforms suspended by ropes for the trimmers to stand on. On the farthest stage, halfway back along the
Mauretania
’s hull, four hundred feet toward the river—and nearly obscured by shadows and work gangs hoisting buckets from the barges into the chutes—crouched the long-armed, almost simian silhouette of the kidnapper Bell had seen jump from the boat deck the night they sailed from Liverpool.

Bell looked for the fastest route out there. It would take too long to go back through the ship. He had to get across the water. He spotted the enterprising bill posters slathering the
Mauretania
with advertisements from the bobbing perch of their steam launch.

“Bill posters! You men, there! Bill posters!”

They heard him, he saw by the way they ducked their heads, but their only response was to glue faster. Accustomed to being chased off private property, they were trying to slap on as many ads as they could until they had to run from shipowners and pier officials. Before Isaac Bell could get their attention, the man that Professor Beiderbecke had dubbed the
Akrobat
glided down a rope holding a stage. He dropped lightly onto a barge riding high in the water that the trimmers had unloaded. A tug was already approaching, deckhands poised with lines, to back the empty away and make room for a fresh load.

The Acrobat, Bell realized, had timed his drop to coincide with the barge’s removal. Dispensing fat bribes to the boatmen, he would ride the empty barge ashore in the guise of an American trimmer and step onto dry land in a distant coal yard, neatly dodging the customs agents and immigration officials guarding the
Mauretania
’s pier.

Bell cupped his hands.
“Fifty dollars for a boat ride
.”

The bill posters’ eyes swiveled at him like searchlights.

Bell yanked his wallet from his coat and waved the money.

A poster that proclaimed

DREAMLAND THEATER

9 West 9th Street

NEW “MOVIES” EVERY DAY

was abandoned in a flash.

One man used his brush like a barge pole to shove off the
Mauretania
as if the ship were on fire while the other seized the helm and shoved the steam quadrant full ahead. The launch shot toward the pier. Bell jumped eight feet to the deck, nearly capsizing the narrow craft, and pointed at the tug hipped alongside the empty coal barge. “Follow that barge.”

“Gimme the dough!” cried the man with the brush.

Bell smacked it into his hand.

“On the jump!”

The steam engine chugged. The propeller spun, and the sharp-bowed little boat turned around and gathered way alongside the
Mauretania.
They passed the last of the open coal chutes, where Bell had first spotted the Acrobat, and pulled into the wake of the tugboat propelling the empty barge.

Bell heard a sharp two-finger whistle, an urgent warning.

The Acrobat was signaling someone on the ship.

Bell turned to see who his accomplice was.

He saw a blur of movement in one of the chutes and glimpsed a chunk of coal with sharp, gleaming facets fly at his head. He ducked, turning his face, but it came too fast—no man could throw so hard, it had to have been hurled from a sling. Turning saved his face, but nothing could stop the jagged shard from smashing his hat into the water and slicing his skull.

Isaac Bell heard a hollow explosion like a firecracker dropped in a barrel. A sharp pain shot down his spine. He felt his knees buckle, and he sensed that he was tumbling. He heard the bill poster who was steering the launch shout, “Catch him!” He saw the brush extended for him to grab hold. But the hand he reached with was too heavy to lift.

Bell gathered all his strength for a massive last-ditch effort. He raised his leaden hand higher. He felt the brush in his fingers, and he grasped it as tightly as he could. The bristles slipped through his fingers, and there was nothing the tall detective could do to stop himself from falling backwards into the water.

I
SAAC
B
ELL FELL FLAT ON HIS BACK AND
sank like a stone.

The slack tide on which the
Mauretania
had landed had begun to ebb, and cold river water was swirling through the slip. The deeper he sank, the harder the current pushed him. He felt it sluice him across the slip, and he slammed hard into something solid—one of the piles on which sat the pier. The current pinned him against it. Then something grabbed his foot. It was soft but insistent, and it pulled him farther down. Mud? he wondered, vaguely. He had sunk to the bottom of the slip, and the mud wanted to hold him there as if it were alive and hungry.

Something started pounding. Then his face was suddenly cold as if someone had thrown a champagne bucket of ice water in his face. Not “someone.” Marion. It was Marion throwing ice water in his face. “Wake up, Isaac. Wake up! Wake up! Please wake up!”

He awakened and suddenly knew a lot. The pounding was his own heart. The ice water was an invigorating tongue of cold river current. The mud indicated he was thirty-five feet beneath the surface. He had to breathe air or he would die. He kicked the mud and pulled himself up the slippery piling. The water grew warmer, the current less strong. He kicked harder and rose faster. Instinct told him to place one hand on his head to protect it, and a moment after he did he bumped up against an underwater crossbeam that braced two pilings. He was out of air. His heart thundered. Lights stormed in front of his eyes. He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He opened his mouth and inhaled, and suddenly sunlight was blazing in his face.

“Isaac!”

He spit water and gulped air, coughed, gulped more air, and swam toward the shouting. They were yelling about a ladder. He found it fixed to a pile and pulled himself onto it. He held on a while, ignoring the shouting, breathing, collecting himself.

I
SAAC
B
ELL CLIMBED OUT OF
the river in a foul mood. The Acrobat had gotten clean away. His head ached. Blood was stinging his eyes. And he’d lost his hat and his favorite derringer.

“You O.K., Isaac?”

It was Harry Warren—head of the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s New York gang squad—a studiedly nondescript-looking fellow who wore a loose-fitting dark suit with plenty of pockets for sidearms and a black derby with a reinforced crown. Harry’s face, normally as expressionless as the lid of an ashcan, was clenched with worry, a look repeated on the scarred countenances of his hard-bitten detectives, who were watching over Harry’s shoulder as Isaac Bell gathered his feet under him and rose, swaying.

Harry handed Bell a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.”

Bell said, “Find out who was mixing it up with the Gophers.”

“What?”

Bell mopped the blood off his face and wadded the cloth against the source, a ragged furrow parting his hair. “I want to know what the devil was going on. We didn’t just
happen
to land in a gang war. The Gophers were waiting for someone on the ship. I want to know who and why. And I want to know why those other boys came along at that moment. On the jump!”

Warren and his boys trooped off. Bell went looking for dry clothes.

E
ARLY THE NEXT MORNING,
in Archie Abbott’s library, Marion read aloud to Isaac Bell the
New York Times
account of yesterday’s shootout on Pier 54. Steered by Cunard Line publicists charged with maintaining the steamship company’s reputation for safety, and threatened, Bell presumed, by red-faced police and docks commissioners, the newspaper blamed the gunfire on “disgruntled Italian longshoremen.”

Bell laughed, which made his head hurt.

“‘The Italians all escaped in the confusion,’” Marion concluded her reading. “‘Arrests are imminent,’ vowed the commissioners.”

Archie’s butler appeared and said, “A Mr. Harry Warren to see you at the kitchen door, sir.”

“Bring him in,” said Marion.

“I tried, Mrs. Bell. He won’t come past the kitchen.”

The cook poured Harry coffee and made herself scarce.

Harry stared in some amazement at Bell, who was attired in his customary white linen suit and had combed his thick golden hair to hide a row of surgical stitches. “If you wasn’t white as your duds, no one would know you was recently brained and partly drowned.”

“He looks better than he is,” said Marion. “The doctor said he ought to be in bed.”

“I’m fine,” said Bell.

Harry Warren and Marion Bell traded glances of concern. “You know, boss, Mrs. Bell is right to be worried. So’s the doc. Knocks on the noggin rate respect.”

“Thank you, Harry,” said Marion. “Could you help me walk him upstairs?”

“What have you found?” Bell demanded.

“The Gophers didn’t believe there was a fire on the
Mauretania
.”

“What business was it of theirs? It so happens there
was
a fire. I saw it with my own eyes. It burned up everything in the forward baggage room, including the smuggled film stock that ignited it.”

“That’s what the Gophers didn’t believe.”

Bell looked at Marion. The penny dropped. “You mean the
Gophers
were smuggling the film stock?”

“They put up the dough for the shipment. When they heard about the fire, they decided that the guy they paid to smuggle it into New York was welshing on the deal, selling the stock to another buyer for more dough.”

“Where did they get that idea?”

“They’re Gophers! They get ideas like that. They figure that what they would do to somebody, somebody would do to them. Like the Golden Rule. Backwards. So they met the ship to deal with the guy who they thought welshed.”

“Who is he?”

“Clyde Lynds.”

Bell exchanged a second glance with Marion and shook his head in disgust, setting off new jolts of pain. “I was afraid you were going to say that. Clyde smelled the film going bad and knew exactly what it was because it was his stock.”