The horse began kicking its stall.
“Easy,” Zolner called soothingly. “We’re almost ready.”
The animal calmed down immediately.
“How do you do that?” marveled Antipov, who had never fought on horseback.
“He knows I like him,” said Zolner. “He would never believe what we have planned for him. Would you?” he asked, approaching the animal with an apple.
Yuri, the least sentimental of men, asked, “Couldn’t we unhitch him?”
“The Financial District is crawling with police. The streets and sidewalks are jam-packed at lunch hour. We’ll be lucky to get away on foot, much less leading a horse. All right, are you ready?”
“I’ve been ready for days!”
“I am talking to the horse.”
Zolner opened the stall, said, “Come along,” and hitched the animal to the wagon.
They dressed in workmen’s shirts, trousers, boots, and flat caps, all smudged with coal dust, and rubbed dust on their hands and faces. Zolner climbed up on the driver’s bench and took the reins. Antipov slid open the stable door.
A man who looked like a plainclothes police officer stepped in from the sidewalk. He looked around with quick, hard eyes, took in the horse, Zolner seated in the wagon, and Yuri Antipov frozen with surprise. He opened his coat, revealing a gleaming badge pinned inside the lapel, and a fleeting glimpse of a heavy automatic pistol.
“Have either of you gents seen Charlie ‘Trucks’ O’Neal?”
• • •
ZOLNER SPOKE first in Russian, saying to Yuri, “I will distract him for you,” and in heavily accented English, “Ve not know such person.”
“Big guy, six-two, broken nose, black hair.”
“Ve not know such person.”
“That’s funny. ’Cause I hear he rents this stable. And here are you guys with a horse and a wagon, which are staples of the stable business, if you know what I mean.”
“Are you policeman?”
The man stared a moment, appeared to make up his mind, and suddenly sounded more friendly. “Don’t worry, gents, I’m not a cop. Van Dorn private detective. Harry Warren’s my name. I don’t mean to keep you guys from going about your business. Though I’m not sure who’s going to buy your coal in the middle of the summer.”
He opened his coat again, took out a wallet, and flashed a ten-dollar bill. “Are you sure you haven’t seen him?”
Marat Zolner reached for the money and stuffed it in his pocket. “Man who rent stable . . . desk there.” He pointed at the office door.
“Thanks. You gents go on. I’ll wait for him in there.”
Harry Warren was halfway to the office door when Antipov started after him, dagger drawn.
“Was that Russian you were speaking?” asked the detective, turning suddenly and drawing his pistol with blinding speed. He fired once, into the stable floor, an inch from Antipov’s shoe. The Comintern officer skidded to a stop.
Harry Warren glanced at the distant door to the street. No one had been passing by, no one was peering in for the source of the gunshot, which was good. He needed time with these two without the cops.
He said to Zolner, “Translate to your pal to drop his knife before I shoot him. And you keep your hands where I can see them.”
Zolner spoke. Antipov let the dagger fall from his hand.
Warren did not know what he had stumbled into while looking for Trucks O’Neal, but it looked promising. Particularly with the Russian connections Isaac Bell kept turning up. He addressed Zolner in a deliberately conversational tone while watching closely for the man’s reaction. “The reason I ask about Russian is we keep running into a Russian connection to this case we’re trying to solve about who tried to kill our boss. Could be coincidence, though, if it is, your pal’s attempt to stick a knife in my back will require some explaining.”
Marat Zolner and Yuri Antipov stood still as bronze statues. Not even their eyes moved, not even to track the sudden motion of Trucks O’Neal entering silently from the covered alley and clutching a full bottle of counterfeit Glen Urquhart Genuine by the neck.
Harry Warren sensed the rush and whirled. The bottle aimed at the back of his head smashed against his temple, fracturing the thin bone and rupturing the artery under it.
• • •
MARAT ZOLNER shut the stable door. Antipov and Trucks O’Neal slung the detective’s body into the wagon beside the dynamite and covered it with more coal.
“Why,” Zolner asked, “are the Van Dorns looking for you?”
“Me?”
“He asked if we had seen you. Why?”
“Say, wait a minute. I didn’t do nothin’ to bring ’em after me.”
“Don’t come back here. We’re done with the stable. We’re done bottling.”
“But there’s eighty thousand bucks of Scotch next door.”
“It’s more like one hundred fifty thousand,” Zolner said quietly.
“Are you blaming me?”
“I’m sending you to Detroit before they catch up with you.”
“I’m not starting over in Detroit.”
Zolner stepped very close and stared down into Trucks’s eyes. “Trucks, I’ve never questioned your loyalty. Remove anything of yours that is incriminating. I’ll have people meet your train. Go! Now!”
O’Neal backed away, spun on his heel, and hurried through the covered alley.
“Kill him,” said Antipov.
“Capitalists first. Open the door.”
Antipov opened the door again.
They sat side by side on the driver’s bench. The horse plodded slowly through the clogged streets of Lower Manhattan, down Broadway to Trinity Church, and turned onto Wall Street. Zolner reined in and set the brake outside No. 23 Wall on the corner of Broad. Left to his own devices, he would have parked the dynamite around the corner at the New York Stock Exchange, the nucleus of the Financial District. But Yuri had chosen the marble headquarters of J. P. Morgan.
He climbed down and adjusted the horse’s feed bag, then knelt by the wagon, pretending to adjust the swingletree while he connected the final detonation wire.
“Cops!”
Yuri Antipov had spotted a policeman coming their way. Marat Zolner climbed back up, sat beside him, and took the reins. The cop pushed closer through the crowd.
Antipov fingered the dagger under his shirt.
“That won’t help this time,” said Zolner. “Wait on the wagon until I’ve dealt with him. I’ll be right back.” He jumped down again.
Yuri Antipov watched Marat Zolner intercept the cop. Would he bribe him? Or blackjack him? Not in front of all these people who thronged the busy intersection. Suddenly, both the cop and Zolner hurried away and melted into the crowd. What had Marat said to him? Antipov was trying to figure out what was going on and what he should do when he heard an alarm clock ring.
19
ISAAC BELL heard the explosion four miles away in the Van Dorns’ St. Regis office. Wildly divergent reports flooded in on the wires and telephones, blaming a dynamite accident on a Jersey City dock, a Lower Manhattan gas main, a subterranean New York Steam Company pipe, then a powder mishap at one of the many Financial District construction sites.
Bell received an urgent call from police headquarters.
“Inspector Condon would appreciate if you’d come down to No. 23 Wall Street.”
The fastest way downtown was on the subway. Bell got as close as he could and ran the rest of the distance from City Hall Station, where they had stopped the trains. He was blocks from Wall Street when he saw windows blown out of buildings. Nearer the explosion, the carnage was horrific. He estimated scores had been killed and hundreds injured. Trucks and taxis were turned upside down, scattered like toys. The dead were huddled on the sidewalk under coats. The street was deep in broken glass. From it, Bell gingerly extracted a cucumber-shaped piece of cast iron with a hole through its length.
He spotted Inspector Condon directing an army
of plainclothes and uniforms from the front steps of the Morgan Building. Its windows were smashed from basement to attic, its marble walls pocked with shrapnel and blackened by coal dust. The mutilated carcass of a dray horse lay on the curb. Only the animal’s head was intact, blinders covering its eyes.
“Thanks for coming, Isaac,” Condon said gravely. He was a youthful-looking, fresh-faced son and grandson of cops and universally believed to be the department’s fastest-rising star. “I’m awful sorry, but I have to show you something.”
He handed Bell a battered piece of gold.
“Van Dorn shield.”
“I’m afraid so, my friend.”
Senior men carried gold. Bell held it to the light. He could just make out the engraved No. 17 and it shook him to the core.
“Harry Warren.”
“Oh, for God’s sake!” Condon inhaled sharply, blinked, and looked away. ”Always the wrong man . . . Any idea what Harry was doing down here?”
“Last he told me, he was nosing around Warren Street.”
“Of all the ways to go,” said the cop. “Harry busted into more gang dens than you and I could shake a stick at and here he ends up an innocent bystander.”
“Where’s his body?”
“I don’t know that we’ll ever find it. He must have been right next to the damned thing. His badge landed in the Morgan lobby.”
Bell put it in his pocket. “Does the Bomb Squad have any idea what caused it?”
“Not yet. They found a wagon shaft and this horse with its guts blown out. Could have been some damned fool transporting powder. Some people saw a wagon right there where you see all the burn marks. And there are three or four foundation excavations nearby where the contractors would store dynamite. Fire department has the Bureau of Combustibles checking permits. But considering J. P. Morgan was every Bolshevik’s Bogey Man, I will not be surprised to learn it was a bomb.”
“It was a bomb,” said Bell. “It wasn’t an accident.”
He handed Condon the chunk of iron he had picked up.
“Recognize this?”
“Sash cord slug,” said the inspector, naming the counterweight used to open windows. “Could have blown out of one of these buildings.”
“You don’t find sash slugs in modern skyscrapers. Besides, see how it’s burnt? It could have been in the explosion.”
Condon grew red in the face. “If that’s so, then some cold-blooded radical was deliberately trying to kill or maim as many people as possible.”
“If it was,” Bell spoke with cold fury, “then the Red Scare boys deported the wrong radicals.”
Tragically, the foreigners like Johann Kozlov—not to mention Marion’s movie-folk friends—rounded up and deported in the Red Scare were immensely less dangerous than whoever detonated the bomb.
“Innocents,” he told Inspector Condon, “paid the price.”
His angry gaze fixed on the dead horse.
“Dick? Do you mind if I take a shoe?”
• • •
ISAAC BELL brought Harry Warren’s badge back to the office and dictated a directive: “The Van Dorn Agency will establish its own Bomb Investigations Department and contract to provide better information to the government than the Justice Department is getting from its Bureau of Investigation.”
He put Grady Forrer in charge of hiring the best specialists, made a note to ask Joe Van Dorn who his best contact was at Justice, and instructed Darren McKinney to find the sharpest Washington lobbyist that money could buy.
Next, he assembled the Gang Squad. Grieving detectives circled his desk.
“Does anyone know what Harry was doing on Wall Street?”
“He said he was going to Warren Street, Mr. Bell.”
“That’s what he told me.”
“How did he get down to Wall Street?”
They looked at Ed Tobin who had apprenticed under Harry. Ed said, “He could have spotted Trucks O’Neal on Warren Street and followed him down to Wall Street.”
“And then,” Bell asked, “he had the worst luck in the world walking past that wagon just when it went off?”
“Maybe.”
“I don’t like coincidences,” said Bell. “And I don’t believe there’s a detective in this room who likes them either.”
“No argument there, Mr. Bell.”
Bell said, “Here’s how we find whether Harry Warren followed Trucks O’Neal to Wall Street. Keep searching for Trucks O’Neal. Check morgues and hospitals. If O’Neal’s among the victims, that’ll settle it. But if we find him alive and unhurt, we’ll have proof Harry wasn’t near Trucks when the dynamite went off. Find Trucks O’Neal! Start on Warren Street. Find that stable Harry was looking for. There can’t be that many still in business down there.”
A detective said, “I just got back from there, Mr. Bell. The only stable I found was locked up.”
“Go back. Watch the place. Meanwhile, look at this.”
Bell laid the battered scrap of gold on his deck. “Harry’s badge. Number 17. Cops found it blown through the front door of the Morgan Building.”
Around it he placed a horseshoe with a jagged nail and a patch of rubber stuck to it.
“From the horse that pulled the wagon that blew up . . . Find the farrier who shoed the horse that pulled the wagon that transported the dynamite that killed Harry Warren. The farrier will tell us who owned the wagon.”
• • •
“YURI DIED A HERO OF THE REVOLUTION,” Marat Zolner told Fern Hawley.
She was red-eyed and crying inconsolably. “Don’t pretend that you’re not glad that you lost your overseer.”
“Only until Moscow sends the next.”
“They’ll never find another like him.”
That, thought Zolner, is certainly my hope.
And not an empty hope. Ironically, Yuri’s Wall Street bombing would buy him time. With nearly forty dead, four hundred wounded, and photographs of the wreckage in every newspaper in the world, the Comintern had plenty to celebrate. So he was a hero, too, and it would be a while before the apparatchiks got brave enough to challenge him again.
Trucks O’Neal posed an immediate threat. When the Van Dorns caught up with him, the gangster knew too much. There was no doubt they would. Trucks had refused to hide in Detroit, so the only question was how soon. Worse, by now Trucks had had time to realize that he was a threat, which meant he would not let Zolner near enough to kill him. But Trucks was greedy. And greedy men were predictable.
• • •
GRADY FORRER pulled a recent issue of International Horseshoers’ Monthly Magazine from the Van Dorn Research Department’s library stacks and opened it on a desk in front of Apprentice Somers. Next to it he placed the horseshoe that Isaac Bell had brought back from the Wall Street bombing.
“What we have for our search for a particular farrier is a horseshoe and a nail and a scrap of rubber from what was likely a horseshoe pad. Now, this monthly is chockful of interesting articles about the goings-on in the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers of the U.S. and Canada. But what we are interested in are these advertisements for horseshoes, horse nails, and horseshoe pads. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes, sir, Mr. Forrer.”
“Why don’t we start with the horseshoe itself. Describe it to me.”
“It’s worn thin.”
“Do you see the manufacturer’s name or trademark stamped on it?”
Somers turned it over in his hands. “No, sir. No name. No stamp.”
“So how are we going to compare it to these ads? You think on that. I’ll be back.”
When Forrer returned, Somers pointed excitedly at the advertisement for Red Tip horseshoes made by the Neverslip Manufacturing Company of New Brunswick, New Jersey. “Look at this ad, Mr. Forrer. It tells you all about how to make a horseshoe. You could make one yourself after you read this ad.”
“Yes,” said Grady. “But when researching for information about something specific like where was
this horseshoe made, you’ve got to be careful not to get sidetracked. You and I could read every word in every ad in the magazine. But should we? Because while we’re learning to make horseshoes, the criminals who shot Mr. Van Dorn are at target practice, improving their aim to shoot the next detective. Unless we stop them first. Now, why don’t you tackle this nail. I’ll be back.”
When Grady Forrer returned, young Somers had disappeared. An hour passed and he burst excitedly into the newspaper library where Forrer was assembling a report on Detroit’s gang wars.
“Apprentices go to lunch when they’re told to, Master Somers.”
“I didn’t go to lunch. The nail is worn down like the shoe, so there’s no special marks on it. But I noticed something on the shoe so I ran over to Third Avenue and showed it to a carter. See this little wedge? The carter told me the farrier brazes it onto the shoe to lift the back of the hoof if the horse is standing wrong on it.”
Grady turned the shoe over in his huge fingers. “Horse podiatry?”
“Now look at this mark.” Somers peeled the rubber off the wedge and touched a fingernail to a faint mark pressed into the metal.
Forrer snatched up a magnifying glass. “What is this? . . . ‘RDNJ’?”
“NJ could mean New Jersey. So RD might be the farrier’s initials.”
“Sounds like you ought to get over to New Jersey and find RD.”
“How?”
“Remember those advertisements in Horseshoers’ for shoes and nails and pads. Where did they tell the farrier to buy their products?”
“The jobber?”
“Work up a list of New Jersey jobbers for blacksmith supplies.”
• • •
THE BLEARY-EYED Gang Squad detective, who hadn’t slept in the twenty-four hours after the bombing, made a believable-looking derelict as he pretended to snooze in a doorway across Warren Street from the stable he was watching.