The Wrecker

“He wants to be president, too.”

“Of the railroad?” asked Archie. “Or the United States?”

“The United States. He told me he’s having a secret meeting with California businessmen who want him to run if Teddy Roosevelt doesn’t stand again next year.”

“If it’s secret, why did he tell you?” asked Archie.

“That’s what I was wondering. Only a complete fool would blab that about.”

“Do you believe him?”

“Good question, Archie. Funny thing is, he said nothing about William Howard Taft.”

“That’s like not mentioning the elephant in the drawing room. If Roosevelt doesn’t choose to run for a third term, then Secretary of War Taft will be the good friend he designates to replace him. No wonder Kincaid wants it secret. He’ll be challenging his own party.”

“Yet another reason not to confide in me,” said Isaac Bell. “What is he up to?”

Across the boxes, Lillian Hennessy asked, “What did you think of Mr. Abbott, Charles?”

“The Abbotts are among the oldest families in New York, except for the Dutch, and they’ve got plenty of Dutch roots under their family tree. Too bad they lost all their money in the Panic of ‘93,” Kincaid added with a big smile.

“He told me that straight off,” said Lillian. “It doesn’t seem to trouble him.”

“It would certainly trouble the father of any young woman he proposed to,” Kincaid needled her.

“And what do you think of Isaac Bell?” Lillian needled back. “Archie told me you and Isaac played cards. I noticed you two deep in conversation in the lobby.”

Kincaid kept smiling, deeply pleased by his conversation with Bell. If the detective was getting suspicious, then pretending that he was one of the many senators who dreamed of becoming president of the United States had to be a convincing demonstration that he was not a train wrecker. If Bell investigated further, he would discover that there were California businessmen, Preston Whiteway first among them, who were shopping for their own candidate for president. And Senator Charles Kincaid topped their list, having encouraged and manipulated the mercurial San Francisco newspaper magnate to believe that the Hero Engineer he had helped make a senator would serve him in the White House.

“What were you talking about?” Lillian persisted.

Kincaid’s smile turned cruel.

“Bell is engaged to be married. He told me he was buying a mansion for his intended… the lucky girl.”

Was there sadness in her face or was it merely the houselights dimming for Act Two?

“JERSEY CITY DEAD AHEAD, chink boy!” yelled the mate “Big Ben” Weitzman, whom Captain Yatkowski had put aboard Lillian I to steer after they threw the steam lighter’s crew in the river. “Shake a leg down there.”

Wong Lee kept working at his own pace, treating twenty-five tons of dynamite with the respect it deserved. Decades of pressing shirts with heavy irons had thickened his hands. His fingers were not so nimble anymore.

He had one detonator left over when he was done and he slipped it in his pocket, maintaining old habits of frugality. Then he reached for the double electric wire that he had strung from the bow of the boat into the hold where the boxes of dynamite were stacked. He had already exposed two inches of its copper core by stripping off the insulation. He connected one wire to one leg of the first detonator. He reached for the second wire and stopped.

“Weitzman! Are you up there?”

“What?”

“Check that the switch at the bow is still open.”

“It’s open. I already checked.”

“If it is not open, we will explode when I touch these wires.”

“Wait! Hold on. I’ll check again.”

Weitzman slipped a loop of rope around the wheel spoke to hold the lighter on course and hurried to the bow, cursing the cold rain. Yatkowski had given him a cylinder flashlight and in its flickering beam he saw that the jaws of the switch the Chinaman had rigged to the tip of the bow were open and would stay open until the bow crashed into the powder pier. The impact would close the jaws, completing the electric connection between the battery and the detonators, and blow up twenty-five tons of dynamite. That, in turn, would set off a hundred tons more on the powder pier, which would make it the biggest explosion New York had ever heard.

Weitzman hurried back to the wheel and shouted down the hatch. “It’s open. Like I told you.”

Wong took a breath and attached the positive wire to the detonator’s second leg. Nothing happened. Of course, he thought wryly, if it had gone wrong he wouldn’t know it, being suddenly dead. He scrambled up the ladder, emerged from the hatch, and told the man steering to signal the schooner. It came alongside, sails flapping wetly, and banged hard against the lighter.

“Take it easy!” yelled Weitzman. “You want to kill us?”

“Chinaman!” yelled Captain Yatkowski. “Get up here.”

Wong Lee launched his creaky middle-aged limbs up a rope ladder. He had climbed much worse in the mountains, but he had been thirty years younger.

“Weitzman!” the captain yelled. “Do you see the pier?”

“How could I miss it?”

Electric lights blazed a quarter mile ahead. The railroad cops had it lit up like the Great White Way so no one could sneak up on them from the yards, but it had never occurred to them that somebody would sneak up from the water.

“Aim her at it and get off quick.”

Weitzman turned the wheel until he had lined Lillian I’s bow with the lights on the powder pier. They were coming in from the side, and the pier was six hundred feet long, so even if she went off course a bit she would still hit close enough to the five boxcars of dynamite.

“Quick, I say!” roared the captain.

Weitzman didn’t need any urging. He scrambled onto the wooden deck of the schooner.

“Go fast!” shouted Wong. “Get us away.”

No one was better qualified than Wong to understand the forces about to be unleashed on the rail yards, the harbor, and the cities around it.

When Wong and the schooner’s crew looked back to check that the steam lighter was on course, they saw a New Jersey Central Railroad ferryboat cast off lines to steam out of the Communipaw Passenger Terminal. A train must have just pulled in from somewhere, and the ferry was taking the passengers on the last leg.

“Welcome to New York!” the captain muttered. When twenty-five tons on the lighter detonated one hundred tons on the powder pier, that ferryboat would vanish in a ball of fire.

25

MARION MORGAN STOOD OUTSIDE ON THE OPEN DECK OF THE Jersey Central Ferry. She pressed against the railing, ignoring the rain. Her heart was pounding with joy and excitement. She had not seen New York City since her father had taken her on a trip back East when she was a little girl. Now dozens of skyscrapers with lighted windows soared just across the river. And somewhere on that fabled island was her beloved Isaac Bell.

She had debated whether to wire ahead or surprise him. She had settled on surprise. Her trip had been on again and off again and on again as Preston Whiteway juggled his busy schedule. He had decided at the last minute to stay in California and send her to meet with his bankers in New York to present his proposal for financing the Picture World moving picture newsreels. The brash young newspaper publisher must have been impressed enough by her banking experience to give her such an important assignment. But the real reason he would send a woman, she suspected, was that he hoped to woo her and thought that the way to her heart was to