The Spy (16 page)

If the Iceman were capable of loving anything, it was baseball. But he couldn’t risk being spotted in New York at tomorrow’s home opener at the Polo Grounds, so he was making do in the wilds of Brooklyn where no one knew him. His favorite Giants were lambasting the sorry Superbas. The Giants were hitting hard, and the cold wind blowing cinders, hats, and newspapers had no effect on Hooks Wiltse’s throwing arm. His left-handed twisters had dazzled the Brooklyn batters throughout the game, and by the bottom of the eighth New York was ahead 4 to 1.

Weeks’s ice-blue eyes locked on the juicy headline as the newspaper blew overhead.

POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL
AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES

 

 

 

 

He leaped off the grass and caught the paper in both hands.

Ball game forgotten, he read avidly, tracing each word with a dirty fingernail. The fact that Weeks could read at all put him miles ahead of most of the Gopher Gang. New York’s daily newspapers were packed with opportunities. The society pages reported when rich men left town for Newport or Europe, leaving their mansions empty. The shipping news gave notice about cargo to be plundered from the docks and Eleventh Avenue sidings. Theater reviews were a guide to pickpockets, obituaries a promise of empty apartments.

He read every word of the snake story, galvanized by hope, then started over. His luck had turned. The snake would recoup his losses from the worst hand ever dealt: Van Dorn detective Isaac Bell turning up in Camden the night they killed the Scotsman.

The paper said that the sawbones were interested in the snake because a serum made from the lance-head’s deadly venom was used to treat nervous and brain diseases.

The Iceman knew the Cumberland.

It was a twelve-story, first-class hotel billed in the ads as “Headquarters for College Men.” That and the $2.50-a-night room fee ought to keep out the riffraff. But Weeks was pretty sure he could dress like a college man, thanks to his second advantage over ordinary gangsters. He was half real American. Unlike the full-blooded Micks in the Gophers, only his mother was Irish. The time he had met his father, the Old Man had told him that the Weekses were Englishmen who had landed here before the
Mayflower.
Wearing the right duds, why couldn’t he march into the lobby of the Hotel Cumberland like he belonged?

He figured that the Cumberland house dicks could be got around by twisting the arm of a bellboy to run interference for him. Weeks had one in mind, Jimmy Clark, who had a sideline distributing cocaine for a pharmacist on 49th, which had become a riskier business since the new law said that dust had to be prescribed by a doctor.

He already had a setup. It wasn’t like he’d been hiding out doing nothing. Soon as he had learned where Isaac Bell slept when he was in town, he had finagled a laundress he knew into a job at the Yale Club of New York City, betting she could sneak him into the detective’s room.

Jenny Sullivan was fresh off the boat from Ireland and deep in hock for her fare. Weeks had bought her debt, intending to put her to work on the sheets instead of ironing them. But after Camden, he had persuaded people who had reason to do him a big favor to wangle Jenny a job at Bell’s club. That was when he wrote Commodore Tommy, offering to kill the detective. But he hadn’t yet managed to screw up the courage to hide under Bell’s bed with a pistol and tangle with him man-to-man.

Weeks was tough enough to have gouged Bell’s .380 slug out of his own shoulder with a boning knife rather than let some drunken doctor or midwife tip off Tommy Thompson as to his whereabouts. Tough enough to pour grain alcohol into the wound to stop infection. But he had already seen Bell in action. Bell was tougher—bigger, faster, and better armed—and only a mug got in a fight he could not win.

Better to match Bell with “the Sudden Death.”

The paper said that the curator of the Bronx Zoo reptile house would deliver the animal in a box made of thick glass.

“ ‘He can’t get out,’ ” the curator promised the Pathology Society doctors who were invited -to view the reptile.

Weeks reckoned that with a bullet hole in his shoulder, a box made of thick glass big enough to hold a four-foot-long poisonous snake would be too heavy for him to carry alone. And if he dropped it trying to carry it under one arm and the glass broke, look out! A bum shoulder would be the least of his problems. He needed help. But the boys he could trust to lend a hand were both dead—shot by the blazing-fast Van Dorn dick.

If he tried to recruit anyone to carry the glass box, the word would flash to Tommy Thompson that Iceman Weeks was back in town. Might as well tie his own hands behind his back and jump in the river. Save Tommy the trouble. Because you didn’t have to be a brain to figure out that Eyes O’Shay would order the Commodore to kill the man who’d been spotted by a Van Dorn dick while doing the killing Eyes had paid for. Weeks could swear until he was blue in the face that he would never squeal. O’Shay and Tommy would kill him anyway. Just to be on the safe side.

At least Tommy had written back that he approved of him killing Isaac Bell. Of course he didn’t offer to help. And it went without saying that if Tommy and Eyes saw a chance to kill him first, they wouldn’t wait for him to take a crack at Bell.

Wiltse bunted in the ninth and Bridwell doubled. When the inning ended New York had two more runs, Brooklyn did not, and Weeks was leading the rush for the Fifth Avenue Elevated with a fair notion of how to transport the snake to the Yale Club.

He needed a suit of “college man” clothes, a steamer trunk, a pane of glass, a bellboy with a luggage cart, and directions to the fuse box.

W
HO IS THAT OFFICER?” ISAAC BELL DEMANDED OF THE Protection Services operative assigned to guard Farley Kent’s drawing loft in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

“I don’t know, Mr. Bell.”

“How did he get in here?”

“He knew the password.”

Van Dorn Protection Services had issued passwords for each of the Hull 44 dreadnought men it was guarding. After getting past the Marines guarding the gates, a visitor still had to prove he was expected by the individual he claimed to be visiting.

“Where is Mr. Kent?”

“They’re all in the test chamber working on that cage-mast model,” the Protection Services operative answered, pointing across the drawing loft at a closed door that led to the laboratory. “Is there something wrong, Mr. Bell?”

“Three things,” Bell answered tersely. “Farley Kent is not here, so he does not seem to have expected that officer to visit. The officer has been studying Kent’s drawing board since I walked in. And in case you haven’t noticed, he is wearing the uniform of the Czar’s Navy.”

“Them blue uniforms look all the same,” the operative replied, reminding Bell that few PS boys possessed the brains and moxie to climb the ladder to full-fledged Van Dorn detective. “Besides, he’s carrying them rolled-up drawings like they all do. You want I should question him, Mr. Bell?”

“I’ll do it. Next time someone walks in unexpected, assume he’s trouble until you learn otherwise.”

Bell strode across the big loft past rows of drawing boards that were usually occupied by the naval architects testing the cage mast. The man in the Russian officer’s uniform was so engrossed in Farley Kent’s drawing that he gave a startled jump and dropped the rolls he had tucked under his arm when Bell said, “Good morning, sir.”

“Oh! I do not hear approach,” he said in a heavy Russian accent, scrambling to pick them up.

“May I have your name, please?”

“I am Second Lieutenant Vladimir Ivanovich Yourkevitch of His Majesty Czar Nicolas’s Imperial Russian Navy. And to whom do I have the honor—”

“Have you an appointment here, Lieutenant Yourkevitch?” The Russian, who looked barely old enough to shave, bowed his head. “Sadly, no. I am hoping to meet with Mr. Farley Kent.”

“Does Mr. Kent know you?”

“Not yet, sir.”

“Then how did you get in here?”

Yourkevitch smiled, disarmingly. “With entitled demeanor, impeccable uniform, and crisp salute.”

Isaac Bell did not smile back. “That might get you past the Marines guarding the gate. But where did you get the password to go to Kent’s drawing loft?”

“In bar outside gates, I meet Marine officer. He tells me password.”

Bell beckoned the Protection Services operative.

“Lieutenant Yourkevitch will sit on that stool, away from this drawing board, until I return.” To Lieutenant Yourkevitch he said, “This gentleman is fully capable of knocking you to the floor. Do as he tells you.”

Then Bell crossed the loft and pushed open the door to the test chamber.

A dozen of Kent’s staff were circled around a ten-foot-tall model of an experimental battleship cage mast. The young naval architects held wire snips, micrometers, slide rules, notepaper, and tape measures. The round, freestanding structure, which stood on a dolly, was made of stiff wires that spiraled from base to top in a counterclockwise twist and were braced at intervals by horizontal rings. It represented, in miniature, a one-hundred-twenty-foot-high mast made of lightweight tubing and was correct in every detail down to the mesh platforms within some of the rings, electric leads and voice pipes running from the spotters’ top to the fire director’s tower, and tiny ladders angling up the interior.

Two of Kent’s architects held ropes attached to opposite sides of the round base. A tape measure strung between the walls passed next to the top. An architect on a stepladder watched the tape closely. Farley Kent said, “Portside salvo. Fire!”

The architect on the left side jerked his rope, and the man watching the tape called out how much the tower had swayed. “Six inches!” was recorded.

“At twelve-to-one, that’s six feet!” said Kent. “The spotters on top better hold on tight when the ship fires her main turrets. On the other hand, a tripod mast will weigh one hundred tons, while our cage of redundant members will weight less than twenty—a huge savings. O.K., let’s measure how she sways after being hit by several shells.” Wielding a wire snips, he severed at random two of the spiraled uprights and one of the rings.

“Ready!”

“Wait!” An architect sprang up the ladder and propped a sailor doll with red cheeks and a straw hat in the spotting top.

The test chamber rang with laughter, Kent’s the loudest of all. “Starboard salvo. Fire!”

The rope was jerked, the top of the mast swayed sharply, and the doll flew across the room.

Bell caught it. “Mr. Kent, may I see you a moment?”

“What’s the matter?” asked Kent as he snipped another vertical wire and his assistants watched carefully to see the effect on the mast.

“We may have caught our first spy,” Bell said in a low voice. “Could you come with me, please?”

Lieutenant Yourkevitch jumped from the stool before the Van Dorn Protection Services operative could stop him and grabbed Kent’s hand. “Is honor to meet, is great honor.”

“Who are you?”

“Yourkevitch. From St. Petersburg.”

“Naval Staff Headquarters?”

“Of course, sir. Baltic Shipyard.”

Kent asked, “Is it true that Russia is building five battleships bigger than HMS
Dreadnought
?”

Yourkevitch shrugged. “There is hope for super-dreadnoughts, but Duma perhaps say no. Too expensive.”

“What are you doing here?”

“The idea is that I meet legend Farley Kent.”

“You came all the way here just to meet me?”

“To show. See?” Yourkevitch unrolled his plans and spread them over Kent’s table. “What do you think? Improvement of form for body of ship?”

While Farley Kent studied Yourkevitch’s drawings, Bell took the Russian officer aside, and said, “Describe the Marine officer who gave you the password.”

“Was medium-sized man in dark suit. Old like you, maybe thirty. Very neat, very trim. Mustache like pencil. Very . . . what is word—precise!”

“Dark suit. No uniform?”

“In mufti.”

“Then how did you know he was a Marine officer?”

“He told me.”

Isaac Bell’s stern expression grew dark. He spoke coldly. “When and where are you supposed to report back to him?”

“I don’t understand.”

“You must have agreed to report to him what you saw here.”

“No. I do not know him. How would I find him?”

“Lieutenant Yourkevitch, I am having difficulty believing your story. And I don’t suppose it will do your career in the Czar’s Navy any good if I turn you over to the United States Navy as a spy.”

“A spy?” Yourkevitch blurted. “No.”

“Stop playing games with me and tell me how you learned the password.”

“Spy?” repeated the Russian. “I am not spy.”

Before Bell could reply, Farley Kent spoke up. “He doesn’t need to spy on us.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we should spy on him.”

“What are you talking about, Mr. Kent?”

“Lieutenant Yourkevitch’s ‘improvement of form for body of ship’ is a hell of a lot better than it looks.” He gestured at various elements of the finely wrought drawing. “At first glance it appears bulky amidships, fat even, and weirdly skinny fore and aft. You could say it resembles a cow. In fact, it is brilliant. It will allow a dreadnought to toughen its torpedo defense around machinery and magazines, and increase armament and coal capacity even as it attains greater speed for less fuel.”