Step on A Crack

damn Normandie,” somebody said.

  Well, perhaps not just like, I thought. He was referring to the French luxury liner that had sunk a few slips north of this one while being converted to a troop ship early in the war. A fire broke out in the Grand Saloon, and the fireboats pumped so much water into the ship that it capsized. It was rumored at the time to be German sabotage, but in fact the Normandie arson had been ordered by the mob bosses as part of a daft scheme to get Lucky Luciano out of Dannemora, in exchange for Mafia muscle to police the New York harborfront while the war was on.

  In the event, none of the men on the pier chalked today’s sinking up to simple misadventure. Nor did I. And it was significant that the prevailing wisdom leaned toward sabotage or involvement by gangsters.

  I spotted Frankie the Lie hovering on the periphery, and made my way over. You could see from the look on his face there were a thousand pounds of cocoa at the bottom of the Hudson.

  “Not the best night’s work,” I murmured.

  He shook his head, sadly.

  “I trust you didn’t front Gyp the money,” I said.

  “No, but I had customers already lined up,” he told me. “I mislike going back on a promised delivery.”

  “There’ll be other cargoes for Gyp to steer your way.”

  He looked at me queerly. “You don’t know the whole of it, do you?” he asked. Then he raised his chin toward the foundered freighter, as if to say, Look again.

  And then I caught on. Gyp O’Fearna had been the night crew boss, and he’d drowned in the freighter’s hold. I turned away from Frankie, and there behind me, not twenty feet back, was Dermot, the boy from Belfast, watching us with his languid smile and hooded eyes.

  I stalked over to him. “What do you know of this?” I demanded. I was stifling no small fury of my own, but I had the wit to keep my voice down.

  Dermot was startled by my vehemence. “Nothing,” he said.

  “What are you doing here?”

  He hesitated. “I thought it best that I kept an eye on you for a time,” he said, and I took it for the truth.

  “You know a man named O’Fearna?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said, “but him I’ve seen before.” He cut his eyes at Frankie the Lie. “Quinn, the man you were talking to.”

  “In the company of Bunny D’Oench?”

  Dermot nodded.

  “Frankie works the black market,” I told him. “He’d likely prove useful as a money man, or to carry the odd message.”

  “This kind of job requires a division of labor.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “The cargo was important enough for the Army to secure it,” Dermot said, nodding toward the MP’s.

  “It was a military consignment,” I said.

  “Munitions?”

  “Why would you ask?”

  “The ruptured bow plates, below the waterline. They’ve buckled from the inside out, which suggests an explosive rise of pressure in the hold.”

  “You’d have experience,” I paused, “with this kind of job.”

  “I know how to sink a ship,” he said.

  So would Gyp O’Fearna, I figured, but he’d know better than to drown himself doing it.

  “If not ordnance, what? Diesel fuel’s inert, but you’d get evaporation with aviation gasoline.”

  I told him what I remembered from the manifest.

  He didn’t ask how I’d come by it. “Bauxite, to produce aluminum,” he said. “Manganese dioxide’s an alloying agent used for hardening bronze or steel.”

  I’d never have taken him for a chemist, Dermot, but he knew guns, and I should have realized he’d know incendiaries.

  “Lithium chloride, now,” he mused, thoughtfully. “Lithium by itself doesn’t occur in nature. It’s an alkali, recovered from brine. Very high heat transfer quality. Much the same chemical properties as sodium, which is to say that pure refined lithium reacts violently to immersion in water.”

  “And might the Army choose to conceal its nature by listing it on the cargo manifest as something less volatile?”

  “It can’t be exposed to the air,” Dermot said. “It would be transported in sealed containers. You’d have to open them up and uncover the contents.”

  “And conveniently forget to tell Gyp O’Fearna that when he opened the sea-cocks to flood the hold, the metal would burn, or boil, in contact with water.”

  “It gives off a sort of crimson light, I’m told,” he said. “White-hot, it might stick to the skin, sulphurous, like jellied naphtha, what your boys used against the Japs in the Pacific.”

  I had a sudden unbidden picture of what it might have been like in the semi-darkened cargo hold, the water coming in around the men’s ankles, and then the abrupt, phosphorescent heat.

  “Best not to dwell on it,” Dermot advised me.

  “No, concentrate on method, or means,” I said.

  “Consequences are for the weak,” Dermot agreed, cheerfully.

  And it’s the weak who suffer them, I thought to myself. But of course he meant something altogether different, that a predator acts without misgiving or second thoughts. Outside the loyalties of the pack, the rest of us are simply meat.

  The time had come, I decided, to thin the herd.

  A thirst for social justice is no bad thing, I’d said to Johnny Darling, and I knew there were people of ideals on the Left, men who’d fought in the Lincoln Brigade, men who fought in the war against the Germans and the Japanese, and came home to find little or no change in the social polity. But were they fertile ground for recruitment by the Kremlin? There was a lot of spy talk that year, and in the years that followed. How much of it was guff, or anti-Red hysteria? My concerns were more parochial and less political.

  Bunny D’Oench was a youngish-looking man with a willowy build. On closer inspection, I saw his youthful appearance was an artful self-invention, the fair hair thinning but arranged in a careful comb-over, his neck softening and the definition of his chin beginning to weaken, a slackness of physical tone that studied tailoring could ameliorate but not entirely conceal. At a distance, he might be taken for a ravaged twenty. Face to face, he was twice that. I felt revenged, if only for wondering whether Rose might be flattered by his attentions.

  My first good look at him had come when I got word he was leaving his place of work, at 46th and Lex, just past noon. I’d assigned Bunny’s surveillance to a pair of my policy runners, the boys who picked up betting slips in midtown. They were canny lads, not above fifteen, sharp as piano wire and skinny as skimmed milk. I gave them twenty apiece and packed them off.

  I kept pace with Bunny a few blocks south to Grand Central, where he repaired to the Oyster Bar, and lunched with what I took to be a group of his colleagues. They wore bespoke suits and Sulka ties, and none of them appeared to be of Eastern European origin, or remotely interested in the plight of the common man. Protestants the lot, with good facial bones and the presumption of caste.

  Cocktails beforehand, wine with the meal. Afterwards, he might have been a little the worse for wear. I followed him up to the concourse again, and down into the subway. He headed for the Times Square shuttle.

  Two in the afternoon, or thereabouts. The lower levels were crowded. I lost sight of him for a moment, but then I spotted him standing near the edge of the platform. I made my way forward as the train came clattering in. Somebody screamed. The motorman punched his brakes, the wheels shrieked against the tracks, and the train stopped short with a metallic shudder.

  It didn’t matter, I saw. Bunny D’Oench had fallen on the third rail and been electrocuted. A wisp of smoke rose from his scalp. There was a smell of ozone and scorched hair.

  I hadn’t been close enough to touch him.

  Turning away, I caught a passing glimpse of Dermot.

  Our eyes didn’t meet.

  So, what cheer?

  The strategy, if you can call it that, that the It
alian mob had thought to employ, to tar the dock unions with a Communist brush, so as to camouflage their own corrupt intentions, came back to haunt them. It drew too much unwelcome attention. The hearings that followed put Costello, Adonis, Albert Anastasia and his brother Tony, and even Benny Siegel’s onetime girlfriend Virginia Hill on the witness stand.

  And as to actual Communist subversion, the short answer appears to be that after the Rosenbergs, and the arrival of that poisonous windbag Joe McCarthy on the scene, the Russians no longer recruited well-meaning amateurs with a history of leftie sympathies from among the Party faithful. They fed the Parlor Pinks and fellow travelers to the wolves, and relied on KGB pros with manufactured backgrounds and colorless cover stories.

  Concerning our friend Dermot, he went back to his masters empty-handed, or so it appeared. But perhaps I’d framed the issue to Dermot without quite understanding it, in fine. I’d planted the suspicion Bunny D’Oench couldn’t be trusted to keep his end of the bargain, and Dermot had taken the hint. If the past were any prologue, however, Sinn Fein wouldn’t turn down Moscow’s money or matériel any more than they’d refused it from Hitler. They were cut from the same cloth, the IRA’s bully boys as ruthless and unbending as any commissar.

  But what of Montagues and Capulets?

  Young Tim Hannah had more cunning than I’d given him credit for. His overture to the Morrissey clan had been couched as an alliance between equals, and it was this, not promises of boyish devotion, which had captured Rose. They married, and from all accounts, they were well-matched.