The Spy (41 page)

Some in front backed up, slipping between the men behind them, but others replaced them. The new front row edged closer, exchanging glances, seeking a leader. Face unyielding as granite, eyes cold, Bell looked from man to man, watching their eyes.

It would only take one to get brave.

“Who’s first? How about you fellows in front?”

“Get him!” yelled a tall man in the second row.

Bell fired the Browning. The man screamed and fell to his knees, clapping both hands to a bloody ear.

N
INETY-NINE,” SAID ISAAC BELL.

The mob backed away, mumbling sullenly.

A trolley glided up, clanging its bell to chase men off the tracks. Bell dragged Louis Loh onto it.

“You can’t get on here,” the operator protested. “That Jap’s all wet!”

Bell shoved the wide mouth of the double-barreled derringer in the trolley driver’s face. “No stops. Straight through to Benicia Terminal.”

Speeding past waiting passengers at the many stops along the way, they pulled up to the Southern Pacific Ferry Slip in ten minutes. Across the mile-wide strait at Port Costa, Bell saw the
Solano,
the largest railway ferryboat in the world, loading a locomotive and a consist of eastbound Overland Limited Pullmans. He dragged Loh to the stationmaster’s office, identified himself, purchased stateroom tickets to cross the continent, and sent telegrams. The ferry crossed in nine minutes, tied up, and locked to the tracks. The locomotive pulled the front half of the train onto the apron. A switch engine pushed the rear four cars off the boat. In ten minutes the train was whole again and steaming out of Benicia Terminal.

Bell found his stateroom and handcuffed Louis to the plumbing. As the transcontinental train sped up the Sacramento River Valley, Louis Loh finally spoke. “Where are you taking me?”

“Louis, to which tong do you belong?”

“I am not tong.”

“Why were you trying to make it look like the Japanese blew up the magazine?”

“I will not talk to you.”

“Of course you will. You will tell me everything I want to know about what you were trying to do, why, and who gave you your orders.”

“You do not understand a man like me. I will not talk. Even if you torture me.”

“ ‘That ain’t my style,’ ” Bell quoted from a popular poem.

“ ‘ “Strike One,” the umpire said,’ ” Louis Loh shot back smugly, “I read your ‘Casey at the Bat.’ ”

“You’ve told me something already,” Bell replied. “You just don’t know it.”

“What?”

The tall detective fell silent. In fact, Louis Loh had confirmed his suspicion that he was more complicated than a run-of-the-mill tong gangster. He did not believe that the Chinese was the spy himself, but there was more to Loh than today’s attempt at Mare Island had revealed.

“You give me a great advantage,” said Loh.

“How is that?”

“By admitting you are not man enough to torture me.”

“Is that the Hip Sing definition of a man?”

“What is Hip Sing?”

“You will tell me.”

“When the tables are turned,” said Louis Loh, “when you are my prisoner, I will torture you.”

Bell stretched out on the bed and closed his eyes. His head hurt, and sheep were still turning somersaults.

“I will use a chopper, at first,” Loh began. “A cleaver. Razor-sharp. I will start with your nose . . .” Louis Loh continued to recite lurid descriptions of the horrors he would inflict on Bell until Bell began to snore.

The detective opened his eyes when the train stopped in Sacramento. There was a knock at the stateroom door. Bell admitted two burly Protection Services agents from the Sacramento office. “Take him to the baggage car, manacle him hand and foot. One of you stays with him at all times. The other sleeps. I’ve got a Pullman berth for you. You will never let him out of your sight. You will not distract yourself talking to the train crew. If there is a cut or a bruise on him, you will answer to me. I will look in on you regularly. We will be particularly vigilant whenever the train stops.”

“All the way to New York?”

“We have to change trains at Chicago.”

“Do you think his friends will try to bust him out?”

Bell watched Loh for a reaction and saw none. “Did you bring shotguns?”

“Autoloads, like you said. And one for you, too.”

“Let them try. All right, Louis. Off you go. Hope you enjoy being luggage for the next five days.”

“You will never make me talk.”

“We’ll find a way,” Bell promised.

LUXURY TRAIN TICKETS, a suit of “wealthy English writer” tweed, a gold pocket watch, expensive luggage, and a hundred dollars were all it had cost the spy to hire the defrocked J. L. Skelton to masquerade as Arnold Bennett. So reported Horace Bronson, the head of the San Francisco office, in a wire waiting for Isaac Bell in Ogden. But although threats of a long prison term had frightened him into talking freely, Skelton had no idea why he had been hired to pretend to escort so-called missionary students.

“He swore on a stack of Bibles,” Bronson noted wryly, “that he did not know why he was then paid another hundred dollars to revert to clergy status and hold a service in the Mare Island chapel. And he denied any knowledge of why Harold Wing and Louis Loh tried to make it look like the Japanese blew up the Mare Island magazine to cripple ships of the Great White Fleet.” Horace Bronson believed him. So did Isaac Bell. The spy was an expert at making others do his dirty work. Like Arthur Langner’s big guns, he stayed miles away from the explosion.

The source of the pass that Loh had used to get his wagon aboard the ferry into the navy yard would have been a clue. But the paper itself had burned up in the explosion, along with the wagon and the truck. Even the mule was no help. It had been stolen in Vaca the day before. The guards, who had admitted hundreds of trucks and wagons, could not pinpoint any helpful information about the passes or the wagon load of strawberries they had allowed on the island.

Two days later, when the train was highballing across Illinois, Bell brought Louis Loh a newspaper from Chicago. The tong gangster lay on a fold-down cot in the dark, windowless baggage car with a wrist and ankle handcuffed to the metal frame. The PS operative guarding him was dozing on a stool. “Get yourself some coffee,” Bell ordered, and when they were alone he showed Louis the newspaper. “Hot off the press. News from Tokyo.”

“What do I care about Tokyo?”

“The Emperor of Japan has
invited
America’s Great White Fleet to make an official visit when it crosses the Pacific.”

The bland mask that Louis Loh habitually wore on his face slipped a hair. Bell detected a minute slumping of his shoulders that broadcast an inner collapse of hope that his failed attack had still somehow provoked a clash between Japan and the United States.

Bell was puzzled. Why did Louis care so? He had already been caught. He was facing prison, if not the hangman, and had lost the money he would have been paid for success. What did he care? Unless he had done it for reasons other than money.

“We can assume, Louis, that His Imperial Majesty would
not
have invited the fleet if you had managed to blow up the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in his name.”

“What do I care about the Emperor of Japan?”

“That is my question. Why would a Chinese tong hatchet man try to inflame U.S.-Japanese antagonism?”

“Go to hell.”

“And for whom? Who did you do it for, Louis?”

Louis Loh smiled mockingly. “Save your breath. Torture me. Nothing will make me talk.”

“We’ll find a way,” Bell promised. “In New York.”

Heavily armed Chicago Van Dorns backed up by railroad police transferred Louis Loh from the Overland Limited across LaSalle Station to the 20th Century Limited. No one tried to snatch Louis or kill him, which Bell had half expected. He decided to leave him in the care of Protection Services until the 20th Century got to New York. And Bell continued to stay out of Louis’s sight at Grand Central, where another squad of Van Dorns put Louis in a truck and drove him to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Lowell Falconer was on hand to smooth the way for Louis Loh to spend his first night in a Navy brig.

Bell waited for the captain on his turbine yacht.
Dyname
was moored to a navy yard pier, between Hull 44’s ways and a huge wooden barge attended by a seagoing tugboat. On the barge, engineers were erecting a cage mast. It was a full-scale rendition of the twelve-to-one scale model that Bell had seen in Farley Kent’s design loft.

High overhead, Hull 44’s stern filled the blue sky. Hull plating was creeping higher up her frame, and she more and more was taking the shape of a ship. If she became half the fighting ship Falconer had envisioned and Alasdair MacDonald and Arthur Langner had labored to make swift and deadly, Bell thought, then this view of the back of her was one the enemy would never see until their own ships were adrift and on fire.

Falconer came aboard after he got the prisoner settled. He reported that Louis’s last words as they clanged the door shut were, “Tell Isaac Bell I will not talk.”

“He’ll talk.”

“I would not count on that,” Falconer cautioned. “When I was in the Far East, Japs and Chinese virtually eviscerated captured spies. Not a peep.”

The Van Dorn detective and the Navy captain stood on the foredeck as
Dyname
backed into the East River, her nine propellers spinning with a smoothness that Bell still found eerie.

“There is something more to Louis Loh,” he mused. “I can’t yet put my finger on what makes him different.”

“Strikes me as being fairly low down the totem pole.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bell. “He conducts himself with pride, like a man who has a mission.”

“IT’S AN UP-AND-DOWN WORLD for the New York gangs,” said Harry Warren, and the handful of Van Dorn detectives who kept track of them nodded solemnly. “One day they’re high-and-mighty, next they’re in the gutter.”

The back room of the Knickerbocker headquarters was gray with cigar and cigarette smoke. A bottle of whiskey Isaac Bell had bought was making the rounds.

“Who is in the gutter currently?” he asked.

“The Hudson Dusters, the Marginals, and the Pearl Buttons. The Eastmans are in trouble, what with Monk Eastman at Sing Sing, and making it worse for themselves by continuing to feud with the Five Pointers.”

“They had a wonderful shoot-out under the Third Avenue El the other night,” remarked a detective. “No one killed, unfortunately.”

“In Chinatown,” Harry continued, “the Hip Sing are clawing ahead of the On Leongs. On the West Side, Tommy Thompson’s Gophers are riding high. Or
were.
The sons of bitches have their hands full since you sicced the railroad police on ’em for ambushing little Eddie Tobin.”

This was met by enthusiastic nods, and a remark in grudging admiration, “Those western cinder dicks are about the worst bastards I ever seen.”

“They’ve got the Gophers so discombobulated that the Hip Sing tong opened a new opium den right in the middle of Gopher Gang territory.”

“Not so fast,” Harry Warren cautioned. “I saw Gophers in a Hip Sing joint downtown. Where Scully was, Isaac? I got a feeling that something was up between the Hip Sing and Gophers. Maybe Scully did, too.”

A few muttered agreement. They’d heard rumors.

“But none of you can tell me anything about Louis Loh?”

“That don’t mean much, Isaac. Chinatown criminals are just plain more secretive.”

“And better organized. Not to mention smarter.”

“And hooked up to Chinatowns throughout the United States and Asia.”

“The international connection is intriguing, this being a spy case,” Bell admitted. “Except for one big thing. Why send two men from New York all the way across the continent when they could have used local San Francisco Chinatown men who knew the territory?”