“How did you hook up with the Gopher Gang?”
“The spy bribed the Hip Sing to allow us to approach Commodore Tommy Thompson in their name, pretending we were tong.”
Bell handed Louis Loh a snowy white handkerchief. “Wave this.” He led Loh down the mast. When they reached the barge, apoplectic Test Range officers raced up in a boat. “How did you—”
“Thought you’d never stop shooting. We were getting hungry up there.”
“I DON’T BELIEVE for a moment that Commodore Tommy is the spy,” Isaac Bell told Joseph Van Dorn. “But I’m willing to bet Tommy’s got a good idea who he is.”
“He better,” said Van Dorn. “Raiding his territory is costing a carload of money for the cops and some very expensive favors to keep Tammany Hall from protesting.” The tall detective and his broadchested boss were overseeing preparations for the raid from inside a Marmon parked across from Commodore Tommy’s Saloon on West 39th Street.
“But the railroads will love us,” said Bell, and the boss conceded that several rail tycoons had already thanked him personally for cutting back the worst depredations of the Gopher Gang. “Looking at the bright side, after this the spy’s ring will be a lot smaller.”
“I’m not counting on that,” said Isaac Bell, mindful of learning about the explosion at the Newport Torpedo Factory while on the train to San Francisco.
A dozen railroad cops led the attack, battering down the saloon door, breaking up the furniture, smashing bottles, and staving in beer kegs. Shots rang within. Harry Warren’s boys, standing by with handcuffs, marched a dozen Gophers into a Police Department paddy wagon.
“Tommy’s holed up in the cellar with a bullet hole in his arm,” Harry reported to Bell and Van Dorn. “He’s all alone. He may listen to reason.”
Bell went first, down wooden steps into a damp cellar. Tommy Thompson was slumped in a chair like a mountain brought low by an earthquake. He had a pistol in his hand. He opened his eyes, looked up blearily at Bell’s weapon pointed at his head, and let his pistol fall to the earthen floor.
“I’m Isaac Bell.”
“What’s wrong with the Van Dorns?” Tommy was indignant. “It’s always been live and let live. Pay the cops, stay out of each other’s business. We got a whole system at work here, and a bunch of private dicks screw it up.”
“Is that why you put one of my boys in the hospital?” Bell asked coldly.
“That wasn’t my idea!” Tommy protested.
“Wasn’t your idea?” Bell retorted. “Who ramrods the Gophers?”
“It weren’t my idea,” Tommy repeated sullenly.
“You’re asking me to believe that the famous Commodore Tommy Thompson, who’s killed off every rival to command the toughest gang in New York, takes orders from someone else?”
Resentment boiled behind Tommy’s tough façade. Bell played on it, laughing, “Maybe you are telling the truth. Maybe you are just a saloonkeeper.”
“Goddammit!” Tommy Thompson erupted. He tried to get out of the chair. The tall detective restrained him with a warning gesture. “Commodore Tommy don’t take orders from no one.”
Bell called out, and Harry Warren and two of his men trooped down the stairs. “Tommy says it wasn’t his idea to beat up little Eddie Tobin. Some fellow made him do it.”
“Some fellow?” Harry echoed scornfully. “Did this ‘some fellow’ who ordered you to beat up a Van Dorn happen to be the same fellow who ordered you to send Louis Loh and Harold Wing to blow up the magazine at Mare Island?”
“He didn’t order me. He paid me. There’s a difference.”
“Who?” Bell demanded.
“Bastard, left me to stick around and face the music.”
“Who?”
“Goddamned Eyes O’Shay. That’s who.”
“Eyes O’Shay?” Harry Warren echoed incredulously. “You take us for jackasses? Eyes O’Shay is dead fifteen years.”
“No he ain’t.”
“Harry,” Bell snapped. “Who is Eyes O’Shay?”
“Gopher kid, years ago. Vicious piece of work. A comer, ’til he disappeared.”
“I heard talk he was back,” muttered one of Harry’s detectives. “I didn’t believe it.”
“I still don’t.”
“I do,” said Isaac Bell. “The spy’s been acting like a gangster all along.”
A STREAK OF GOD
42
JUNE 1, 1908
NEW YORK
ISAAC BELL ASKED, “WHY DID THEY CALL HIM EYES?”
“If you got in a fight with him, he’d gouge your eye out,” said Tommy Thompson. “He fit a copper pick over his thumbnail. Now it’s made of stainless steel.”
“I imagine,” said Bell, “he didn’t get in many fights.”
“Not once word got around,” Tommy agreed.
“Other than that, what is he like?”
Tommy Thompson said, “If I’m going sit here yapping, I want a drink.”
Bell nodded. The Van Dorns produced an array of hip flasks. Tommy took long pulls from a couple and wiped his mouth with his bloody sleeve. “Other than gouging eyes, what’s Brian O’Shay like? He’s like he always was. A guy who can see around a corner.”
“Would you call him a natural leader?”
“A what?”
“A leader. Like you. You run your own gang. Is he that kind of a man?”
“All I know is he’s thinking all the time. Always ahead of you. Eyes could see inside of people.”
“If you’re telling us the truth, Tommy, that O’Shay is not dead, where is he?”
The gang leader swore he did not know.
“What name does he go by?”
“He didn’t say.”
“What does he look like?”
“He looks like anybody. Clerk in a store, guy owns a bank, bartender. I hardly recognized him. Duded up like a Fifth Avenue swell.”
“Big man?”
“No. A little guy.”
“Compared to you, Tommy, most guys are little. How tall is he?”
“Five-eight. Built like a fireplug. Strongest little guy I ever saw.” Bell continued conversationally, “He didn’t need the gouge to win a fight, did he?”
“No,” said Tommy, taking another slug of whiskey. “He just liked doing it.”
“Surely after he reappeared out of nowhere and paid you all that money, you had him followed.”
“I sent Paddy the Rat after him. Little bastard came back short one eye.”
Bell looked at one of the detectives, who was nodding agreement. “Yeah, I seen Paddy wearing a patch.”
“Disappeared, just like when we was kids. Vanished into thin air that time, too. Never thought we’d see him again. Thought he got thrown in the river.”
“By whom?” asked Bell.
The gang leader shrugged.
Harry Warren said, “A lot of people thought you were the one who threw him in the river, Tommy.”
“Yeah, well a lot of people thought wrong. I used to think Billy Collins done it. ’Til Eyes came back.”
Bell glanced at Harry Warren.
“Dope addict,” Harry said. “Haven’t heard his name in years. Billy Collins ran with Eyes and Tommy. They made quite the trio. Remember, Tommy? Rolling drunks, robbing pushcarts, selling dope, beatin’ up anybody got in their way. O’Shay was the worst, worse than the Commodore here, even worse than Billy Collins. Tommy was sweetness and light compared to those two. The last anybody expected was Tommy taking over the Gophers. Except you got lucky, Tommy, didn’t you? Eyes disappeared, and Billy got the habit.”
Isaac Bell asked, “Tommy, why did you think Billy Collins threw Eyes in the river?”
“Because the last night I ever saw Eyes, they was drinking together.”
“And today you have no idea where O’Shay is?”
“Just like always. He vanished into thin air.”
“Where is Billy Collins?”
The wounded gang leader shrugged, winced, and took
another pull on a flask. “Where do hop fiends go? Under a rock. In a sewer.”
43
TEN MILES OFF FIRE ISLAND, A BARRIER BEACH BETWEEN Long Island and the Atlantic Ocean, fifty miles from New York, three vessels converged. The light of day started to slip over the western horizon, and stars took shape in the east. Atlantic Ocean swells were bunching up on the shallow continental shelf. Neither captain of the larger vessels—a 4,000-ton steam freighter with a tall funnel and two king posts, and an oceangoing tugboat hipped up to a three-track railcar barge—was pleased with the prospect of getting close enough to transfer cargo in such choppy seas, particularly with the wind shifting fitfully from sea to shore. When they saw that the third vessel, a broad-beamed little catboat powered only by sail, was steered by a petite redheaded girl, they began snarling at their helmsmen.
It looked like the rendezvous would end before it started. Then the girl took advantage of a shifty gust to bring her craft about so smartly that the steamer’s mate said, “She’s a seaman,” and Eyes O’Shay said to the tugboat captain, “Don’t lose your nerve. We can always throw you overboard and run the boat ourselves.”
He spotted Rafe Engels waving from the steamer’s bridge wing.
Rafe Engels was a gunrunner wanted by the British Special Irish Branch for arming rebels of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and by the Czar’s secret police for supplying Russian revolutionists. O’Shay had first met him on the Wilhelm der Grosse. They had danced carefully around each other, and again on the Lusitania, probing warily at the kindred spirit they each sensed behind the other’s elaborate disguise. There were differences: the gunrunner, always on the rebels’ side, was an idealist, the spy was not. But over the years they had worked out several trades. This exchange of torpedoes for a submarine would be their biggest.
“Where’s the Holland?” O’Shay called across the water.
“Under you!”
O’Shay peered into the waves. The water started bubbling like a boiling pot. Something dark and stealthy took shape under the bubbles. A round turret of armor steel emerged from the white froth. And then, quite suddenly, a glistening hull parted the sea. It was one hundred feet long and menacing as a reef.
A hinged cover opened on top of the turret. A bearded man thrust his head and shoulders into the air, looked around, and climbed out. He was Hunt Hatch, at one time the Holland Company’s chief trials captain, now on the run from Special Irish Branch. His crew followed him out, one after another, until five Republican Brotherhood fighters who had pledged their lives to win Home Rule for Ireland were standing on the deck, blinking in the light and breathing deeply of the air.
“Treat them well,” Engels had demanded as they clasped hands cementing their deal. “They are brave men.”
“Like my own family,” O’Shay had promised.
All had served as Royal Navy submariners. All had ended up in British prisons. All hated England. They dreamed, O’Shay knew, that when the Americans discovered that the submarine and its electric torpedoes were from England, it would appear that England had instigated an attack to cripple American battleship production. They dreamed that when war engulfed Europe, angry Americans would not side with England. Then Germany would defeat England, and Ireland would be free.
A lovely dream, thought the spy. It would serve no one better than Eyes O’Shay.
“There is your submarine torpedo boat,” Engels called from across it. “Where are my Wheeler torpedoes?”
Eyes O’Shay pointed at the sailboat.
Engels bowed. “I see the fair Katherine. Hallooo, my beauty,” he hailed through cupped hands. “I did not recognize you out of your sumptuous gowns. But I see no torpedoes.”
“Under her,” said O’Shay. “Four Wheeler Mark 14s. Two for you. Two for me.”
Engels gestured. The steamer’s seamen swung a cargo boom out from her king post. “Come alongside, Katherine. I’ll take two torpedoes—and maybe you, too, if no one is looking.”
As Katherine effected the difficult maneuver and Engels’s crew snaked the torpedoes out of the catboat, they heard a rumble like distant thunder. O’Shay watched the submarine’s crew coolly assess what the noise really meant and the distance from which it was coming.
“U.S. Navy’s Sandy Hook Test Range,” he called down to them. “Don’t worry. It’s far away.”
“Sixty thousand yards,” Hunt Hatch called back, and a man added, “Ten-inchers, and some 12s.”
O’Shay nodded his satisfaction. The Irish rebels who would crew his submarine knew their business.
It may not have looked like a fair trade, the submarine being six or seven times longer than the torpedoes and capable of independent action. But the Holland, though considerably elongated and modified by the English from its original design, was fully five years old and outstripped by rapid advances in underwater warfare. The Mark 14s were Ron Wheeler’s latest.
Each man had what he wanted. Engels was steaming away with two of the most advanced torpedoes in the world to sell to the highest bidder. And the Holland and the two torpedoes that the tug and barge crews were wrestling out of the sailboat and into the submarine made a deadly combination. The Brooklyn Navy Yard would never know what hit it.
44
JIMMY RICHARDS’S AND MARV GORDON’S DUTCH UNCLE, Donald Darbee, sailed them six miles across the Upper Bay in his oyster scow, a flat-bottomed boat with a square bow and a powerful auxiliary gasoline motor he only used when chasing or running from something. Jimmy and Marv knew every watery inch of the Port of New York, but neither of the enormous young men had ever set foot on Manhattan Island despite many a night poking around Manhattan piers for items that had fallen off. Uncle Donny recalled going ashore in 1890 to rescue a fellow Staten Islander from the cops.
As they approached the Battery, a Harbor Squad policeman on a launch tied to Pier A called his roundsman up on deck. “Looks like we’re being invaded.”
Roundsman O’Riordan cast a jaundiced eye on the Staten Island scowmen. “Watch ’em, closely,” he ordered, hoping they were not up to no good. Arresting a gang of muscle-bound oyster tongers would cost broken arms and busted teeth on both sides.
“How do we get to the Roosevelt Hospital at 59th Street?” called the shaggy oldster at the helm.
“If you got a nickel, take the Ninth Avenue El.”
“We got a nickel.”
Jimmy Richards and Marv Gordon paid their nickels and rode to 59th Street, staring at tall buildings and crowds of people they could scarcely believe, many of whom stared back at them. Wandering the huge hospital wards, they finally asked directions from a pretty Irish nurse and found their way to a private room with only one bed. The patient in the bed was completely wrapped in bandages, and they would never have recognized Cousin Eddie Tobin except that hanging on a clothes tree was the snappy suit of clothes that the Van Dorns had staked Eddie when they hired him to apprentice last winter.
A tall, yellow-haired dude, lean as wire rope, was bending over him, holding a glass so Eddie could drink from a straw. When he saw them in the doorway, his eyes turned gray as a nor’easter, and a big hand slid inside his coat where he could keep a pistol, if he was the sort to pack one and he looked like he was.
“May I help you gentlemen?”
Jimmy and Marv instinctively raised their hands. “Is that little Eddie Tobin? We’re his cousins come to visit.”
“Eddie? Do you know these fellows?”
The bandaged head was already craning painfully toward them. It nodded, and they heard little Eddie croak, “Family.”
The blue-gray eyes turned a warmer shade. “Come on in, boys.”
“Fancy digs,” said Jimmy. “We looked in the ward. They sent us up here.”
“Mr. Bell paid for it.”
Isaac Bell offered his hand and shook their horny mitts. “Everyone chipped in. Van Dorns look out for their own. I’m Isaac Bell.”
“Jimmy Richards. This here’s Marv Gordon.”
“I’ll
leave you boys to your visit. Eddie, I’ll see you soon.”
Richards lumbered out after him into the hall. “How’s he doing, Mr. Bell?”
“Better than we hoped. He’s a tough kid. It’s going to take a while, but the docs are saying he’ll come out of it in pretty good shape. But I have to warn you, he won’t win any beauty contests.”
“Who did it? We’ll straighten them out.”
“We’ve already straightened them out,” said Bell. “It’s a Van Dorn fight, and your cousin is a Van Dorn.”
Richards didn’t like it. “None of us was happy when Eddie joined the law.”
Isaac Bell smiled. “The law does not like their appellation given to private detectives.”
“Whatever you say, bub. We appreciate what you’re doing for him. You ever need a church burned down or someone drowned, Eddie knows how to find us.”
ISAAC BELL WAS PORING through the noon reports from the squads hunting for Billy Collins when Archie Abbott telephoned from Grand Central. “Just got off the train. Something is missing from the Newport Torpedo Factory.”
“What?”
“Is the Old Man still in town?”
“Mr. Van Dorn’s in his office.”
“Why don’t you meet me downstairs?”
“Downstairs” meant privacy in the Hotel Knickerbocker’s cellar bar. Ten minutes later, they were hunched over a dark table. Archie beckoned the waiter. “You might want a drink before we report to the boss. I certainly do.”
“What’s missing?”
“Four electric torpedoes imported from England.”
The waiter approached. Bell waved him off.
“I thought everything burned up in the fire.”
“So did the Navy. They loaded all the junk on a barge to dump it offshore. I said to this Wheeler character, ‘Why don’t we count torpedoes? ’ Long story short, we went through the debris with a fine-tooth comb and tallied four missing electrics.”