The Spy

  Huddling from the cold in the cubby under the bow, he reflected upon his close call and concluded that his mission had suffered no damage. The garden path where the night watchman had almost caught him was at least a half mile from the Gun Factory. Nor did it matter that the old man had seen his face. Americans were contemptuous of Asians. Few could distinguish between Japanese and Chinese features. Since immigrants from China were far more numerous than those from Japan, the watchman would report an intrusion by a despised Chinese—an opium fiend, he thought with a relieved smile. Or, he chuckled silently, a nefarious white slaver lurking to prey on the commandant’s daughters.

  Five miles downriver, he disembarked in Alexandria, Virginia.

  He waited for the boat to depart the wooden pier. Then he hurried along the waterfront and entered a dark warehouse that was crammed with obsolete naval gear deep in dust and spiderwebs.

  A younger man whom Yamamoto had labeled, scornfully, “The Spy” was waiting for him in a dimly lit back room that served as an office. He was twenty years Yamamoto’s junior and ordinary-looking to the point of being nondescript. His office, too, held the outdated paraphernalia of earlier wars: crossed cutlasses on the walls; a Civil War-era Dahlgren cast-iron, muzzle-loading cannon, which was causing the floor to sag; and an old 24-inch-diameter carbon arc battleship searchlight propped behind his desk. Yamamoto saw his own face mirrored in its dusty eye.

  He reported that he had accomplished his mission. Then, while the spy took notes, he related in precise detail everything that he had seen at the Gun Factory. “Much of it,” he said in conclusion, “looks worn out.”

  “Hardly a surprise.”

  Overworked and underfunded, the Gun Factory had produced everything from ammunition hoists to torpedo tubes to send the Great White Fleet to sea. After the warships sailed, it forwarded train-loads of replacement parts, sights, firing locks, breech plugs, and gun mounts to San Francisco. In another month the fleet would recuperate there from its fourteen-thousand-mile voyage around South America’s Cape Horn and refit at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard to cross the Pacific.

  “I would not underestimate them,” Yamamoto retorted gloomily. “Worn-out machines are replaceable.”

  “If they have the nerve.”

  “From what I saw, they have the nerve. And the imagination. They are merely catching their breath.”

  The man behind the desk felt that Yamamoto Kenta was possessed—if not unhinged—by his fear of the American Navy. He had heard this rant before and knew how to change the subject by derailing the Jap with lavish praise.

  “I have never doubted your acute powers of observation. But I am awed by the range and breadth of your skills: chemistry, engineering, forgery. In one fell swoop you have impeded the development of American gunnery and sent their Congress a message that the Navy is corrupt.”

  He watched Yamamoto preen. Even the most capable operative had his Achilles’ heel. Yamamoto’s was a self-blinding vanity.

  “I’ve played this game a long time,” Yamamoto agreed with false modesty.

  In fact, thought the man behind the desk, the chemistry for the nitrogen iodide detonator was a simple formula found in The Young Folks Cyclopaedia of Games and Sports. Which was not to take away from Yamamoto’s other skills, nor his broad and deep knowledge of naval warfare.

  Having softened him up, he prepared to put the Jap to the test. “Last week aboard the Lusitania,” he said, “I bumped into a British attaché. You know the sort. Thinks of himself as a ‘gentleman spy.’”

  He had an astonishing gift for accents, and he mimicked, faultlessly, an English aristocratic drawl. “‘The Japanese,’ this Englishman proclaimed to all in the smoking room, ‘display a natural aptitude for espionage, and a cunning and self-control not found in the West.’”

  Yamamoto laughed. “That sounds like Commander Abbington-Westlake of the Admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Department, Foreign Division, who was spotted last summer painting a watercolor of the Long Island Sound that just happened to contain America’s latest Viper Class submarine. Do you suppose the windbag meant it as a compliment?”

  “The French Navy he penetrated so successfully last month would hardly call Abbington-Westlake a windbag. Did you keep the money?”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The money you were supposed to put in Arthur Langner’s desk. Did you keep it for yourself?”

  The Jap stiffened. “Of course not. I put it in his desk.”

  “The Navy’s enemies in Congress must believe that their star designer, their so-called Gunner, was guilty of taking a bribe. That money was vital to our message to the Congress to make them wonder what else is rotten in the Navy. Did you keep the money?”

  “I should not be surprised that you would ask such a degrading question of a loyal associate. With the heart of a thief you assume that everyone is a thief.”

  “Did you keep the money?” the spy repeated. A physical habit of maintaining utter stillness masked the steely power of his compact frame.

  “For the last time, I did not keep the money. Would you feel more secure if I swore on the memory of my old friend—your father?”

  “Do it!”

  Yamamoto looked him full in the face with undisguised hatred. “I swear on the memory of my old friend, your father.”

  “I think I believe you.”

  “Your father was a patriot,” Yamamoto replied coldly. “You are a mercenary.”

  “You’re on my payroll,” came the even colder retort. “And when you report to your government the valuable information you picked up in the Washington Navy Yard’s Gun Factory—while working for me—your government will pay you again.”

  “I do not spy for the money. I spy for the Empire of Japan.”

  “And for me.”

  “GOOD SUNDAY MORNING TO all who prefer their music minus the sermon,” Arthur Langner greeted his friends at the Gun Factory.

  Rumpled in a baggy sack suit, his thick hair tousled and bright eyes inquisitive, the Naval Ordnance Bureau’s star designer grinned like a man who found interest in all he saw and liked the strange bits most of all. The Gunner was a vegetarian, an outspoken agnostic, and devoted to the theories of the unconscious mind put forth by the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud.

  He held patents for an invention he named the Electrical Vacuum Cleaning Machine, having hitched his fertile imagination to a heartfelt notion that science-based domestic engineering could free women from the isolation of housework. He also believed that women should have the right to vote, work outside the home, and even practice birth control. Gossips smirked that his beautiful daughter, who ran with the fast set in Washington and New York, would be a prime beneficiary.

  “A one-man lunatic fringe,” complained the commandant of the navy yard.

  But the chief of Naval Ordnance, having observed Langner’s latest 12-inch/.50 caliber gun shoot up his Sandy Hook Atlantic Test Range, retorted, “Thank God he works for us instead of the enemy.”

  His Sunday-morning chamber musicians, a ragtag mix of Gun Factory employees, laughed appreciatively when Langner joked, “Just to assure any eavesdropping blue noses that we’re not complete heathens, let’s start with ‘Amazing Grace.’ In G.”

  He sat at his grand piano.

  “May we please have an A first, sir?” asked the cellist, an expert in armor-piercing warheads.

  Langner lightly tapped middle A, to which note the strings could tune their instruments. He rolled his eyes in mock impatience as they fiddled with their tuning pegs. “Are you gentlemen cooking up one of those new atonal scales?”

  “One more A, if you can spare it, Arthur. A little louder?”

  Langner tapped middle A harder, again and again. At last the strings were satisfied.

  The cellist began the opening notes of “Amazing Grace.”

  At the tenth measure, the violins—a torpedo-propulsion man and a burly steamfitter—took up “once was lost.” They played through and began to
repeat.

  Langner raised his big hands over the keys, stepped on the sustain pedal, and lofted “a wretch like me” on a soaring G chord.

  Inside the piano, Yamamoto Kenta’s paste of nitrogen iodide had hardened to a volatile dry crust. When Langner fingered the keys, felt hammers descended on G, B, and D strings, causing them to vibrate. Up and down the scale, six more octaves of G, B, and D strings vibrated sympathetically, jolting the nitrogen iodide.

  It exploded with a sharp crack that sent a purple cloud pouring from the case and detonated the sack of Cordite. The Cordite blew the piano into a thousand slivers of wood and wire and ivory that riddled Arthur Langner’s head and chest, killing him instantly.

  2

  BY 1908, THE VAN DORN DETECTIVE AGENCY MAINTAINED a presence in all American cities of consequence, and its offices reflected the nature of each locality. Headquarters in Chicago had a suite in the palatial Palmer House. Dusty Ogden, Utah, a railroad junction, was served by a rented room decorated with wanted posters. New York’s offices were in the sumptuous Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street. And in Washington, D.C., with its valuable proximity to the Department of Justice—a prime source of business—Van Dorn detectives operated from the second floor of the capital city’s finest hotel, the new Willard on Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks from the White House.

  Joseph Van Dorn himself kept an office there, a walnut-paneled den bristling with up-to-date devices for riding herd on the transcontinental outfit he commanded. In addition to the agency’s private telegraph, he had three candlestick telephones capable of long-distance connections as far west as Chicago, a DeVeau Dictaphone, a self-winding stock ticker, and an electric Kellogg Intercommunicating Telephone. A spy hole let him size up clients and informants in the reception room. Corner windows overlooked the Willard’s front and side entrances.

  From those windows, a week after Arthur Langner’s tragic death at the Naval Gun Factory, Van Dorn watched apprehensively as two women stepped down from a streetcar, hurried across the bustling sidewalk, and disappeared inside the hotel.

  The intercommunicating phone rang.

  “Miss Langner is here,” reported the Willard’s house detective, a Van Dorn employee.

  “So I see.” He was not looking forward to this visit.

  The founder of the Van Dorn Detective Agency was a heavily built, bald-headed man in his forties. He had a strong Roman nose, framed by bristling red whiskers, and the affable manner of a lawyer or a businessman who had earned his fortune early and enjoyed it. Hooded eyes masked a ferocious intelligence; the nation’s penitentiaries held many criminals gulled into letting the big gent close enough to clamp on the handcuffs.

  Downstairs, the two women riveted male attention as they glided through the Willard’s gilt-and-marble lobby. The younger, a petite girl of eighteen or nineteen, was a stylishly dressed redhead with a vivacious gleam in her eyes. Her companion was a tall, raven-haired beauty, somber in the dark cloth of mourning, her hat adorned with the feathers of black terns, her face partially veiled. The redhead was clutching her elbow as if to give her courage.

  Once across the lobby, however, Dorothy Langner took charge, urging her companion to sit on a plush couch at the foot of the stairs.

  “Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

  “No thank you, Katherine. I’ll be fine from here.”

  Dorothy Langner gathered her long skirts and swept up the stairs.

  Katherine Dee craned her neck to watch Dorothy pause on the landing, turn back her veil, and press her forehead against a cool, polished marble pillar. Then she straightened up, composed herself, and strode down the hall, out of Katherine’s sight and into the Van Dorn Detective Agency.

  Joseph Van Dorn shot a look through the spy hole. The receptionist was a steady man—he would not command a Van Dorn front desk were he not—but he appeared thunderstruck by the beauty presenting her card, and Van Dorn noted grimly that the Wild Bunch could have stampeded in and left with the furniture without the fellow noticing.

  “I am Dorothy Langner,” she said in a strong, musical voice. “I have an appointment with Mr. Joseph Van Dorn.”

  Van Dorn hurried into the reception room and greeted her solicitously.

  “Miss Langner,” he said, the faintest lilt of Irish in his voice softening the harder tones of Chicago. “May I offer my deepest sympathy?”

  “Thank you, Mr. Van Dorn. I appreciate your seeing me.”

  Van Dorn guided her into his inner sanctum.

  Dorothy Langner refused his offer of tea or water and got straight to the point.

  “The Navy has let out a story that my father killed himself. I want to hire your detective agency to clear his name.”

  Van Dorn had prepared as much as possible for this difficult interview. There was ample reason to doubt her father’s sanity. But his wife-to-be had known Dorothy at Smith College, so he was obliged to hear the poor woman out.

  “I am of course at your service, but—”

  “The Navy says that he caused the explosion that killed him, but they won’t tell me how they know.”

  “I wouldn’t read too much into that,” said Van Dorn. “The Navy is habitually secretive. What does surprise me is they tend usually to look after their own.”

  “My father deliberately established the Gun Factory to be more civilian than naval,” Dorothy Langner replied. “It is a businesslike operation.”

  “And yet,” Van Dorn ventured cautiously, “as I understand it, civilian factories have recently taken over many of its duties.”

  “Certainly not! Fours and 6s, perhaps. But not the dreadnought guns.”

  “I wonder whether that shift troubled your father.”

  “Father was accustomed to such shifts,” she answered drily, adding with a faint smile, “He would say, ‘The slings and arrows of my misfortunes are the tugs and pulls of Congress and local interests.’ He had a sense of humor, Mr. Van Dorn. He knew how to laugh. Such men don’t kill themselves.”

  “Of course,” Van Dorn said gravely.

  The Kellogg rang again.

  Saved by my Bell, Van Dorn thought to himself. He stepped to the wall where the instrument was mounted, picked up the earpiece, and listened.

  “Send him in.”

  To Dorothy Langner he said, “I asked Isaac Bell, my best operative, to step down from an important bank robbery case in order to look into the circumstances of your father’s death. He is ready to report.”

  The door opened. A man in a white suit entered with an economy of motion unexpected in one so tall. He was well over six feet, leanly built—not more than one hundred seventy-five pounds—and looked to be about thirty years old. The full mustache that covered his upper lip was gold, as was his thick, neatly trimmed hair. His face had the robust appearance of an outdoorsman who was no stranger to sun and wind.

  His large hands hung still at his sides. His fingers were long and precisely manicured, although an observer keener than the grieving Dorothy Langner might have noticed that the knuckles of his right hand were red and swollen.

  “Miss Langner, may I present chief investigator Isaac Bell?” Isaac Bell assessed the beautiful young woman with a swift, penetrating glance. Mid-twenties, he estimated her age. Intelligent and self-possessed. Desolated by grief yet extraordinarily attractive. She turned to him beseechingly.

  Bell’s sharp blue eyes softened in an instant. Now they were tinged violet, his inquiring gaze veiled with tenderness. He took off his broad-brimmed hat in deference to her, saying, “I am so sorry for your loss, Miss Langner,” and swept a drop of blood from his hand with a pure white handkerchief in a motion so graceful as to be invisible.

  “Mr. Bell,” she asked. “What have you learned that will clear my father’s name?”

  Bell answered in a voice pitched low with sympathy. He was kindly yet direct. “Forgive me, but I must report that your father did indeed sign out a quantity of iodine from the laboratory store.”

  ??
?He was an engineer,” she protested. “He was a scientist. He signed for chemicals from the laboratory every day.”

  “Powdered iodine was an essential ingredient of the explosive that detonated the smokeless powder in his piano. The other was ammonia water. The porter noticed a bottle missing from his cleaning closet.”

  “Anyone could have taken it.”

  “Yes, of course. But there are indications that he mixed the chemicals in his private washroom. Stains on a towel, a volatile powder on his toothbrush, residue in his shaving mug.”

  “How can you know all this?” she asked, blinking away angry tears. “The Navy won’t let me near his office. They turned away my lawyer. They even barred the police from the Gun Factory.”

  “I gained admittance,” said Bell.

  A male secretary wearing a vest, bow tie, banded shirtsleeves, and a double-action Colt in a shoulder holster entered urgently. “Beg your pardon, Mr. Van Dorn. The commandant of the Washington Navy Yard is calling on the telephone, and he’s hopping mad.”

  “Tell the operator to switch the line to this telephone. Excuse me, Miss Langner . . . Van Dorn here. Good afternoon, Commandant Dillon. How are you today? . . . You don’t say?”

  Van Dorn listened, casting Miss Langner a reassuring smile.

  “. . . Well, if you’ll forgive me, sir, such a general description could fit half the tall men in Washington . . . It could even describe a gentleman right here in my office as we speak. But I assure you that he does not look like he’s been at fisticuffs with the United States Marines—unless the Corps turns out a lesser breed of Leatherneck than in my day.”

  Isaac Bell put his hand in his pocket.

  When Joseph Van Dorn next replied to the caller, it was with a benign chuckle, though if the commandant had seen the chill in his eyes he might have retreated hastily.

  “No, sir. I will not ‘produce’ an employee of mine on your sentries’ assertion that they caught a private detective red-handed. Clearly the man in my office was not ‘caught’ as he is standing here in front of me . . . I will register your complaint with the Navy Secretary when we lunch tomorrow at the Cosmos Club. Please convey my warmest regards to Mrs. Dillon.”