The Wrecker

“These Jersey harebrains won’t need any help from the Wrecker to blow themselves sky-high one of these days,” Archie Abbott predicted, “purely through negligence.”

“Not on my watch,” said Isaac Bell.

“In fact,” Abbott persisted. “If there were an explosion, how would we know it was the Wrecker and not a Jersey harebrain?”

“We’ll know. If he manages to get around us, it will be the biggest explosion New York has ever seen.”

Accordingly, Bell had stationed railway police on every train and boat and freight wagon owned by the Southern Pacific. He backed them up with Van Dorn operatives and inspectors borrowed from the Bureau of Explosives, newly founded by the railroads to promote safe transportation of dynamite, gunpowder, and TNT.

Every man carried the lumberjack’s sketch. Bell’s hopes for it had been bolstered by a report on the Ogden disaster from Nicolas Alexander, the self-important head of the Denver office, who, despite his flaws, happened to be an able detective. Some had wondered if the Wrecker had sought Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton out deliberately to attack Van Dorn agents. But Alexander had confirmed Bell’s initial conclusion that Wally and Mack had pursued the Wrecker down an alley. Which meant they had recognized him from the sketch. And the by-now-familiar sword-puncture wounds left no doubt the Wrecker had killed them with his own hand.

“My friend,” said Archie, “you’re worrying too much. We have every base covered. We’ve been at it a week. Not a peep out of the Wrecker. The boss is tickled pink.”

Bell knew that Joseph Van Dorn would not be tickled entirely pink until they arrested the Wrecker or shot him dead. But it was true that the powerful Van Dorn presence had already had the wonderful side effect of apprehending various criminals and fugitives. They had arrested a Jersey City gangster masquerading as a Jersey Central railroad detective, a trio of bank robbers, and a corrupt Fire Commission inspector who had taken bribes to overlook the dangerous practice of storing dynamite on steam radiators to keep it from freezing in the winter cold.

The powder pier worried Bell the most, even though it swarmed with railroad police. Isolated as far as possible from the main piers, it was still too close in Bell’s opinion. And as many as six cars at a time were off-loading dynamite onto the lighters that nuzzled around it. Taking no chances, Bell had put in command of the railway police the seasoned Van Dorn agent Eddie Edwards, who knew well the rail yards, the docks, and the local gangs.

WONG LEE WALKED TO the Communipaw piers, his tiny frame bent nearly in half under the weight of a huge laundry sack. A railroad detective loomed over him, demanding where the hell chink boy thought he was going.

“Chop-chop, laundry for captain,” Wong answered in the pidgin English that he knew the detective expected of him.

“What ship?”

Deliberately mispronouncing the /s and rs, he named the Julia Reidhead, a steel three-masted barque carrying bones for fertilizer, and the cop let him pass.

But when he got to the barque where Polish day laborers were unloading the reeking cargo, he plodded past and climbed the gangplank to a battered two-masted schooner in the lumber trade.

“Hey, chink?” shouted the mate. “Where the hell are you going?”

“Captain Yatkowski, chop-chop, clothes.”

“In his cabin.”

The captain was a hard-bitten waterman from Yonkers who smuggled bootleg whiskey, Chinese opium, and fugitives seeking friendlier jurisdictions across the river. Criminals who refused to pay up for passage to safer shores were found facedown in the Lower Bay, and word had gotten around the underworld never to cheat Captain Paul Yatkowski and his mate “Big Ben” Weitzman.

“What do you got, Chinaman?”

Wong Lee put down his sack and gently tugged open the drawstring. Then he felt carefully among the clean shirts and sheets and removed a round cookie tin. He was done speaking pidgin.

“I have everything I need,” he replied. Inside the tin was a rack made of a metal plate drilled with holes into which fit copper capsules so that they could be stored and carried without touching one another. There were thirty holes, each filled with a copper capsule as big around as a pencil and half as long. From the sulfur plug in the top of each extended two insulated “leg wires.” They were No. 6 high-grade mercury-fulminate detonators, the most powerful.

The secret to “Dragon Wong” Lee’s success in his earlier life blowing rock for the western railroads had been a combination of instinct and bravery. Working seven days a week on the cliffs, and being unusually observant, he had come to understand that any one stick of dynamite contained within its greasy wrapping more power than was supposed. It all depended upon how quickly it exploded. He had developed an innate understanding that multiple detonators fired simultaneously sped up the rate of detonation.

The faster a charge exploded, the greater the power, the more Wong could increase its shattering effect. Few civil engineers had understood that thirty years ago when dynamite was relatively new, still fewer illiterate Chinese peasants. Fewest of all had been brave enough, before electrically fired blasting caps reduced the danger, to take the chances that had to be taken when the only means of detonation was an unreliable burning fuse. So the real secret to big bangs was bravery.

“Do you have the electrical batteries?” Wong asked.

“I got ‘em,” said the schooner’s captain.

“And the wires?”

“All here. Now what?”

Wong savored the moment. The captain, a hard, brutal man who would knock his hat off in the street, was awed by Wong’s dark skills.

“Now what?” Wong repeated. “Now I get busy. You sail boat.”

A DOZEN RIFLE-TOTING RAILROAD police guarded a string of six boxcars on the powder pier. Three kept a sharp eye on the gang of day laborers hired to remove from one of the boxcars eight hundred fifty sixty-pound boxes of six-inch sticks that had been manufactured by the Du Pont de Nemours Powder Works in Wilmington, Delaware. Four more watched the Lillian I’s crew stow the dynamite in the lighter’s capacious hold. One, a bank auditor by training, harassed the lighter’s captain by poring repeatedly through his invoices and dispatches.

Lillian I’s master, Captain Whit Petrie, was in a foul mood. He had already missed a rising tide that would have sped his run upriver. Any more delay, he would be butting against the current the entire sixty miles to the traprock quarry at Sutton Point. On top of that, his new Southern Pacific bosses were even cheaper than his old New Jersey Central bosses, and even less inclined to spend money for necessary repairs on his beloved Oxford. Which they had renamed Lillian, against all tradition, when anyone with half a brain knew it was bad luck to change a vessel’s name, tempting the fates, and, even worse, reducing her to a number, Lillian I, as if she were not a finer steam lighter than Lillians II through XII.

“Say, here’s an idea,” said the exasperated captain. “I’ll go home and have supper with the wife. You boys run the boat.”

Not one cop cracked a smile. Only when they were absolutely sure that he was delivering a legitimate cargo of twenty-five tons of dynamite to a legitimate contractor blasting traprock out of the Hudson Valley cliffs-a run up the river, he pointed out repeatedly, that he had been doing for eight years-did they finally let him go.

Not so fast!

Just as they were casting off lines, a tall, grim-faced, yellow-haired dude in an expensive topcoat came marching up the powder pier, accompanied by a sidekick who looked like a Fifth Avenue swell except for the fine white lines of boxing scars creasing his brow. They jumped aboard, light on their feet as acrobats, and the yellow- haired man flashed a Van Dorn detective badge. He said he was Chief Investigator Isaac Bell, and this was Detective Archibald Abbott, and he demanded to see Petrie’s papers. The ice in Bell’s eyes told Petrie not to joke about going home for supper, and he waited patiently while his dispatches were read line by line for the tenth time that afternoon.

It was the sidekick, Abbott, who finally said, in a voice straight out of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, “All right, Cap, shove off. Sorry to hold you up, but we’re not taking any chances.” He beckoned a Southern Pacific Railroad bull