The Wrecker

27

“REQUEST DENIED!” VAN DORN SHOT BACK.

“It is not a request, sir,” Isaac Bell said coldly. “It is my intention. I will hunt the Wrecker on my own, if it takes the rest of my life. While I promise you I will not impede the Van Dorn investigation led by a better-qualified investigator.”

A small smile parted Van Dorn’s red whiskers. “Better-qualified? Perhaps you’ve been too busy to read the morning papers.”

He seized Bell’s hand and practically crushed it in his powerful grip. “We’ve won a round at last, Isaac. Well done!”

“Won a round? What are you talking about, sir? People killed on the ferry. Half the windows in Manhattan blown out. These piers a shambles. All due to the sabotage of a Southern Pacific Railroad vessel that I was hired to protect.”

“A partial victory, I’ll admit. But a victory nonetheless. You stopped the Wrecker from blowing the powder train, which was his target. He would have killed hundreds had you allowed him to. Look here.” Van Dorn opened the newspaper. Three headlines of immense type covered the front page.

EXPLOSION DAMAGE EQUAL OF MAY 1904 PIER FIRE

WORSE Loss OF LIFE ON FERRY, 3 DEAD,

COUNTLESS INJURED

COULD HAVE BEEN FAR WORSE,

SAYS FIRE COMMISSIONER

“And look at this one! Even better …”

THE WRECKER RAGED.

Manhattan’s streets were strewn with broken glass. From the railway ferry, he saw black smoke still billowing over the Jersey shore. The harbor was littered with damaged ships and barges. And the dynamite explosion was all the talk in saloons and chophouses on both sides of the river. It even invaded the plush sanctuary of the observation-lounge car as the Chicago-bound Pennsylvania Special steamed from its battered Jersey City Terminal.

But, maddeningly, every newsboy in the city was shouting the headlines on the extra editions and every newsstand was plastered with the lies:

SABOTEURS FOILED

RAILWAY POLICE AND VAN DORN AGENTS

SAVED DYNAMITE TRAIN

MAYOR CREDITS SOUND SOUTHERN PACIFIC MANAGEMENT

If Isaac Bell were on this train, he would choke him to death with his bare hands. Or run him through. That moment would come, he reminded himself. He had lost only a battle, not the war. The war was his to win, Bell’s to lose. And that deserved a celebration!

Imperiously, he beckoned a steward.

“George!”

“Yes, Senator, suh.”

“Champagne!”

A steward rushed him a bottle of Renaudin Bollinger in an ice bucket.

“Not that swill! The company knows goddamned well I will only drink Mumm.”

The steward bowed low.

“I’m terribly sorry, Senator. But as Renaudin Bollinger was the favorite champagne of Queen Victoria, and now of King Edward, we hoped it would make a worthy substitute.”

“Substitute? What the devil are you talking about? Bring me Mumm champagne or I’ll have your job!”

“But, sir, the Pennsylvania Railroad’s entire store of Mumm was destroyed in the explosion.”

“A VICTORY AT LAST,” repeated Joseph Van Dorn. “And if you’re right that the Wrecker is trying to discredit the Southern Pacific Railroad, then he cannot be happy with these results. ‘Sound Southern Pacific Management’ indeed. Exactly the opposite of what he had hoped to achieve with this attack.”

“It doesn’t feel like a victory to me,” said Isaac Bell.

“Savor it, Isaac. Then get busy finding out how he set this up.”

“The Wrecker isn’t done.”

“This attack,” Van Dorn said sternly, “wasn’t planned overnight. There’ll be clues in his method as to what he is scheming next.”

A search of the section of the schooner’s stern that had been hurled onto the railroad float revealed the body of a man the Marine Division police knew well. “A water rat named Weitzman” was how a grizzled patrol-launch captain put it. “Hung out with that schooner’s captain, a son of a crocodile named Yatkowski. Smuggler when he wasn’t up to something worse. From Yonkers.”

The Yonkers police searched the old river city to no avail. But the next morning, the captain’s remains drifted ashore at Weehawken. By then, Van Dorn operatives had traced ownership of the schooner to a lumber dealer who was related to Yatkowski by marriage. The dealer admitted to no crimes, however, claiming that he had sold the ship to his brother-in-law the previous year. Asked whether the captain had ever used her to smuggle fugitives across the river, the dealer replied that when it came to his brother-in-law, anything was possible.

As Bell had surmised in Ogden, the Wrecker was changing tactics. Instead of relying on zealous radicals, he was proving adept at hiring cold-blooded criminals to do his dirty work for cash.

“Did either of these men ever use explosives in their crimes?” he asked the launch captain.

“Looks like this was the first time,” the water cop replied with a grim chuckle, “and they weren’t all that good at it. Seeing as how they blew themselves to smithereens.”

“BEAUTIFUL GIRL TO SEE you, Mr. Bell.”

Bell did not look up from his desk in the Van Dorn offices at the Knickerbocker Hotel. Three candlestick telephones were ringing constantly. Messengers were racing in and out. Operatives were standing by to make their reports and awaiting new orders.

“I’m busy. Pass her on to Archie.”

“Archie’s at the morgue.”

“Then send her away.”

It was forty hours since the explosion had shaken the Port of New York. Experts from the railroad-backed Bureau of Explosives combing through the wreckage had discovered a dry cell battery that led them to conclude that the dynamite had been skillfully detonated using electricity. But Bell still hadn’t a clue as to whether the dead schooner crew had set off the dynamite or had expert help. He was wondering if the Wrecker himself had wired it to explode. Had he been on the schooner? Was he dead? Or was he preparing his next attack?

“I’d see this one if I were you,” the front-desk man persisted.

“I’ve seen her. She’s beautiful. She’s rich. I don’t have time.”

“But she’s got a gang of fellows with a moving-picture camera.”

“What?” Bell glanced through the door. “Marion!”

Bell pushed through the door, picked her up in his arms, and kissed her on the mouth. His fiancee was wearing a hat anchored with a scarf that covered the side of her face, and Bell noticed that she had combed her straw-blond hair, which she ordinarily wore piled high upon her head, so that it draped one cheek.

“What are you doing here?”

“Attempting to take pictures of the hero, if you’ll put me down. Come outside in the light.”

“Hero? I’m the hero of the glassmakers’ union.” He pressed his lips to her ear, and added in a whisper, “And the only place I’m putting you down is on a bed.”

“Not before we take pictures of the famous detective who saved New York.”

“Showing my face in nickelodeons won’t help me sneak up on criminals.”

“We’ll take your picture from behind, just the back of your head, very mysterious. Come quickly or we’ll lose the light.”

They trooped down the Knickerbocker’s grand stair, trailed by Bell’s assistants muttering reports and whispering questions, and Marion’s cameraman and assistants carrying a compact Lumiere camera, a wooden tripod, and accessory cases. Outside on the sidewalk, workmen were replacing windows in the Knickerbocker.

“Put him there!” said the cameraman pointing to a shaft of sunlight illuminating a patch of sidewalk.

“Here,” said Marion. “So we see the broken glass behind him.”

“Yes, ma‘am.”

She gripped Bell’s shoulders.

“Turn this way.”

“I feel like a package being delivered.”

“You are-a wonderful package called ‘The Detective in the White Suit.’ Now, point at the broken window …”

Bell heard gears and flywheels whirring behind him, a mechanism clicking like a sewing machine, and a flapping of film.

“What are your questions?” he called over his shoulder.

“I know you’re busy. I’ve already written your answers for the title cards.”

“What did I say?”

“The Van Dorn Detective Agency will pursue the criminal who attacked New York City to the ends of the earth. We will never give up. Never!”

“Couldn’t have put it better myself.”

“Now, wait a moment while we attach the telescopic lens … O.K., point at that crane lifting the window … Thank you. That was wonderful.”

As Bell turned to face her smile, a gust of wind lifted her hair, and he suddenly realized that she had arranged her hair, hat, and scarf to conceal a bandage.

“What happened to your face?”

“Flying glass. I was on the ferry when the bomb exploded.”

“What?”

“It’s nothing.”

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Of course. There won’t even be much of a scar. And, if there is, I can wear my hair on that side.”

Bell was stunned and almost paralyzed with rage. The Wrecker had come within inches of killing her. At that moment of almost losing control, a Van Dorn operative ran from the hotel, waving to get Bell’s attention.

“Isaac! Archie telephoned from the Manhattan morgue. He thinks we’ve got something.”

THE CORONER’S PHYSICIAN IN the Borough of Manhattan commanded a salary of thirty-six hundred dollars a year, which allowed him to enjoy the luxuries of middle-class life. These included summers abroad. Recently, he had installed a modern photographic-identification device that he had discovered in Paris.

A camera hung overhead beneath a large skylight. Its lens was aimed at the floor, where marks had been painted indicating height in feet and inches. A dead body lay on the floor, brightly illuminated by the skylight. Bell saw it was a man, though the face had been obliterated by fire and blunt force. His clothes were wet. From the mark where they had placed his feet to the mark at the top of his head, he measured five feet three inches.

“It’s only a Chinaman,” said the coroner’s physician. “At least, I think it’s a Chinaman, judging by his hands, feet, skin tone. But they said you wanted to see every drowned body.”

“I found this in his pocket,” said Abbott, holding up a pencil-sized cylinder with wires extending from it like two short legs.

“Mercury-fulminate detonator,” said Bell. “Where was the man found?”

“Floating past the Battery.”

“Could he have drifted across the river from Jersey City to the tip of Manhattan?”

“The currents are unpredictable,” said the coroner’s physician. “Between ocean tide and river flux, bodies go every which way, depending upon ebb and flow. Do you think he set off the explosion?”

“He looks like he was near it,” Abbott said noncommitally with an inquiring glance at Bell.

“Thank you for calling us, Doctor,” said Bell, and walked out.

Abbott caught up with him on the sidewalk.

“How did the Wrecker recruit a Chinese to his cause?”

Bell said, “We can’t know that until we find out who the man was.”

“That’s going to be hard without a face.”

“We must find out who he was. What are the principal sources of employment for Chinese in New York?”

“The Chinese work mostly at cigarmaking, running grocery stores, and hand-wash laundries, of course.”

“This man’s fingers and palms were heavily callused,” said Bell, “which makes it likely he was a laundryman working with a hot, heavy iron.”

“That’s a lot of laundries,” said Archie. “One in every block of the working districts.”

“Start in Jersey City. The schooner was tied up there. And that’s where the Southern Pacific lighter loaded her dynamite.”

SUDDENLY, THINGS MOVED QUICKLY. One of Jethro Watt’s railroad detectives recalled allowing a Chinese with a huge sack of laundry on a pier. “Said he was heading for the Julia Reidhead, a steel barque unloading bones.”

The Julia Reidhead was still moored at the pier, her masts shattered by the explosion. No, said her captain. He had not had his laundry done ashore. He had a wife on board who did it herself. Then the harbormaster’s log revealed that Yatkowski’s wooden schooner had been tied near the Julia that afternoon.

The Van Dorn detectives found missionary students who were studying Chinese at a seminary in Chelsea. They hired the students to translate for them and then intensified the search for the laundry that had employed the dead man. Archie Abbott returned to the Knickerbocker Hotel triumphant.

“His name was Wong Lee. People who knew him said he used to work for the railroad. In the West.”

“Dynamiting cuts in the mountains,” said Bell. “Of course. That’s where he learned his trade.”

“Probably came here twenty, twenty-five years ago,” said Abbott. “A lot of the Chinese fled California to escape mob attacks.”

“Did his employer confirm this just to make him sound good? To make the white detective go away?”

“Wong Lee wasn’t really an employee. At least, not anymore. He bought a half interest from his boss.”

“So the Wrecker paid him well.” Bell said.

“Very well. Up front, no less, and enough to buy himself a business. Have to admire his enterprise. How many workingmen would resist the temptation to spend it on wine and women? … Isaac, why are you staring at me?”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When did Wong Lee buy a half interest in his laundry?”

“Last February.”

“February? Where did he get the money?”

“The Wrecker, of course. When he hired him. Where else would a poor Chinese laundryman get that much money?”

“You’re sure it was February?”

“Absolutely. The boss told me it was right after the Chinese New Year. That fits the Wrecker’s pattern, doesn’t it? Plans far ahead.”

Isaac Bell could barely contain his excitement.

“Wong Lee bought his share of the laundry last February. But Osgood Hennessy concluded his secret deal only this November. How did the Wrecker know back in February that the Southern Pacific Railroad was going to gain entry to New York in November?”