The Wrecker

23

PIRACY WAS RARE ON THE HUDSON RIVER IN THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century. When Captain Whit Petrie saw a raked bow loom out of the rain, his only reaction was to blow Lillian I‘s whistle to warn the other boat not to get too close. The sonorous blast of steam woke McColleen, the railroad dick who was snoozing on the bench in the back of the wheelhouse as Lillian I churned north past Yonkers, fighting an ebb tide and a powerful river current.

“What’s that?”

“Vessel under sail … Damned fool must be deaf.”

The looming bow was still bearing down on him, close enough to reveal that the sails silhouetted against the dark sky were schooner-rigged. Whit Petrie lowered a wheelhouse window to see better and heard the thump of her auxiliary gasoline engine driving hard. He yanked his whistle pull again and put the wheel over to veer away before they collided. The other boat veered with him.

“What the hell?”

By now, McColleen was on his feet, all business, yanking a revolver from his coat.

A shotgun bellowed, blowing out the windows and blinding McColleen with flying glass. The railway dick fell back, crying out in pain and clutching his face and firing blindly. Captain Petrie drew on bred-in-the-bone Jersey City street-fighter instincts. He whirled his wheel hard over to ram the attacker.

It was the right tactic. The heavily laden steam lighter would be certain to cut the wooden schooner in half. But Lillian I‘s worn rudder linkage, long neglected by the New Jersey Central Railroad and now the Southern Pacific, failed under the wrenching maneuver. Steering gear carried away, rudder gone, the dynamite boat stalled partway into the sharp turn and wallowed helplessly. The schooner slammed alongside, and a gang of men stormed aboard, howling like banshees and firing guns at anyone who moved.

THE JARDIN DE PARIS was a makeshift theater on the roof of Hammerstein’s Olympia. This cold, rainy night, canvas curtains were lowered to keep out the wind but did little to muffle the noise of the gasoline buses on Broadway below. But no one holding a ticket looked anything but happy to be there.

Tables and chairs were arranged on a flat floor more like a dance hall than an auditorium. But the management had added elaborate boxes to attract what Archie Abbott called “a better class of audience.” The boxes were newly built on a sweeping horseshoe-shaped platform on top of a pagoda that spanned the elevator entrance. Florenz Ziegfeld, the producer of the Follies, had given the Van Dorn detectives the best of those seats. They offered a clear, close view of the stage and a sweeping panorama of the rest of the boxes, which were filling with men wearing white tie and tails and women in gowns fit for a ball.

Scanning the arriving audience, Bell suddenly locked eyes with Lillian Hennessy as she took a seat across the way. She looked more beautiful than ever in a gold gown and with her blond hair piled high upon her head. He smiled at her, and her face lit up with genuine pleasure, forgiving him apparently for wrecking her Packard automobile. In fact, he reflected worriedly, she was smiling at him like a girl on the brink of total infatuation-which was the last thing either of them needed.

“Look at that girl!” blurted Abbott.

“Archie, if you lean out any farther, you’ll fall into the cheap seats.”

“Worth it if she’ll weep over my body-you’ll tell her how I died. Wait a minute, she’s smiling at you.”

“Her name is Lillian,” said Bell. “That Southern Pacific steam lighter you were gawking at this afternoon is named after her. As is everything that floats that’s owned by the railroad. She’s old Hennessy’s daughter.”

“Rich, too? God in heaven. Who’s the stuffed shirt with her? He looks familiar.”

“Senator Charles Kincaid.”

“Oh yes. The Hero Engineer.”

Bell returned Kincaid’s nod coolly. He was not surprised that Kincaid’s check for poker losses had still not arrived at the Yale Club. Men who dealt from the bottom of the deck tended not to pay their debts when they thought they could get away with it.

“The Senator certainly got lucky.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bell. “She’s too rich and independent to fall for his line.”

“What makes you say that?”

“She told me.”

“Why would she confide in you, Isaac?”

“She was polishing off her third bottle of Mumm.”

“So you got lucky.”

“I got lucky with Marion, and I’m going to stay lucky with Marion.”

“Love,” Archie mock mourned in a doleful voice as the houselights began to dim, “stalks us like death and taxes.”

A grand dowager, wrapped in yards of silk, behatted in feathers, and dripping diamonds, leaned from the next box to rap Abbott’s shoulder imperiously with her lorgnette.

“Quiet down, young man. The show is starting… Oh, Archie, it’s you. How is your mother?”

“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Vanderbilt. I’ll tell her you asked.”

“Please do. And Archie? I could not help but overhear. The gentleman with you is correct. The young lady has little regard for that loathsome legislator. And, I must say, she could handily repair your family’s tattered fortunes.”

“Mother would be delighted,” Abbott agreed, adding in a mutter for only Bell to hear, “As Mother regards the Vanderbilts as uncultivated ‘new money,’ you can imagine her horror were I to bring home the daughter of a ‘shirtsleeve railroader.”’

“You should be so lucky,” said Bell.

“I know. But Mother’s made it clear, no one below an Astor.”

Bell shot a look across the boxes at Lillian, and a brilliant scheme leaped full blown into his mind. A scheme to derail Miss Lillian’s growing infatuation with him and simultaneously get poor Archie’s mother off Archie’s back. But it would require the restraint of a diplomat and the light touch of a jeweler. So all he said was, “Pipe down! The show is starting.”

IN THE MIDDLE OF the Hudson River, a mile west of Broadway, the pirated Southern Pacific steam lighter Lillian I dashed downstream. The outflowing tide doubled the speed of the current, making up for the time they had lost repairing her steering gear. She steamed in company with the wooden sailing schooner that had captured her. The wind was southeast, thick with rain. The schooner’s sails were close-hauled, her gasoline engine churning its hardest to keep up with Lillian I.

The schooner’s captain, the smuggler from Yonkers, felt a twinge of sentiment for the old girl who was about to be blown to smithereens. A minor twinge, Yatkowski thought, smiling, having been paid twice the value of the schooner to drown the steam lighter’s crew in the river and stand by to rescue the Chinaman when they sent her on her last voyage. The boss paying the bills had made it clear: look out for the Chinaman until the job was done. Bring him back in one piece. The boss had use for the explosives expert.

THE ANNA HELD GIRLS, acclaimed by the producer to be “the most beautiful women ever gathered in one theater,” were dancing up a storm, in short white dresses, wide hats, and red sashes, as they sang “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave.”

“Some of those women are imported straight from Paris,” Abbott whispered.

“I don’t see Anna Held,” Bell muttered back, familiar as any man in the nation under the age of ninety with the French actress’s expressive eyes, eighteen-inch waist, and resultantly curvaceous hips. Her skin, it was claimed, was conditioned by daily baths in milk. Bell glanced across at Lillian Hennessy, who was watching with rapt attention, and he suddenly realized that her tutor, Mrs. Comden, was shaped very much like Anna Held. Did President Hennessy pour her milk baths?

Abbott applauded loudly, and the audience followed suit. “For some reason, known best to Mr. Ziegfeld,” he told Bell over the roar, “Anna Held is not one of the Anna Held Girls. Even though she’s his common-law wife.”

“I doubt the entire Van Dorn Detective Agency can get him out of that fix.”

The Follies of 1907 raced on. Burlesque comedians argued about a bar bill in German accents like Weber and Fields and a suddenly sobered Bell fixed on Mack and Wally. When Annabelle Whitford came on stage in a black bathing costume as the Gibson Bathing Girl, Abbott nudged Bell and whispered, “Remember the nickelodeon when we were kids? She did the butterfly dance.”

Bell was listening with half attention, pondering the Wrecker’s plan. Where would he attack now that they had all bases covered? And what, Bell wondered, had he himself missed? The grim answer was that whatever he missed, the Wrecker would see.

The orchestra had struck up a raucous “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and Abbott nudged Bell again.

“Look. They put our client in the act.”

The burlesque comedians were posing in front of a painted backdrop of a Southern Pacific locomotive steaming up behind them as if about to run them over. Even paying half attention, it was clear that the comedian in colonial dress cavorting on a hobby horse was supposed to be Paul Revere. His costar in engineer’s striped cap and overalls represented Southern Pacific Railroad president Osgood Hennessy.

Paul Revere galloped up, waving a telegram.

“Telegram from the United States Senate, President Hennessy.”

“Hand it over, Paul Revere!” Hennessy snatched it from the horseman and read aloud, “‘Please, sir, telegraph instructions. You forgot to tell us how to vote.”’

“What are your instructions to the senators, President Hennessy?”

“The railroad is coming. The railroad is coming.”

“How should they vote?”

“One if by land.”

“Shine one lantern in the steeple if the railroad comes by land?”

“Bribes, dummkopf! Not lanterns. Bribes!”

“How many bribes by sea?”

“Two if by-”

Isaac Bell leaped from his seat.