THE RENDEZVOUS WAS the Hoboken ferry terminal, as before, the black Ford parked in the same place, Hans the sour-faced driver reading his German newspaper. Written on the red card in the windscreen, the code word
‘We’re to meet him there?’ Wolff nodded towards the strip. Surely it was madness to attempt such a thing. Hans wouldn’t say but pushed on a little faster and after a few minutes it was plain that the road led to Black Tom and nowhere else. At the perimeter fence it bent away from the shore through marshland and along a stretch of abandoned railroad track, petering out at last at an iron gate. Beyond it the gable end of a warehouse and in the sooty yellow of the wharf lamps a loading gantry and the triangular points of dockside cranes like broken teeth in an old man’s mouth. Opposite the gate, a siding choked with weeds and a dozen old boxcars, the black flag of the Lehigh Valley Railroad peeling from their sides. As Hans cut the engine, the door of the nearest slid open and the silhouette of a slight figure was caught for a second in the light of a shrouded lamp. Wolff stepped down from the Ford and pushed the door shut gently. Rintelen was picking his way across rough ground towards him, with Hinsch and two associates in tow. The smaller man tripped and cursed and Wolff recognised the voice of McKee, the Clan’s fixer on the docks and his guide on the night he planted the bombs on the
‘You know where you are?’ Rintelen asked, offering his hand.
‘This place must be a fortress.’ Wolff sounded quite as concerned as he felt. What the hell were they proposing to do if they did get inside?
‘I thought you liked an adventure, Mr de Witt,’ Rintelen replied.
‘Eleven. It’s time.’ Hinsch brandished his pocket watch. Koenig was already lumbering to the gate. Pushing a flashlight through the railings to the left of it, he directed the beam at the ground, flicking it on and off three times. His signal was answered immediately from the corner of the warehouse and after a few seconds the light began to approach the gate.
‘That will be our man.’ McKee’s hands were thrust in his coat pockets, pulling it tight for comfort. ‘The guards on the trains carry rifles — and on the dock for loading — but there’s only a couple of fellas on the sheds at night.’
Their contact stepped up to the gate, his stevedore cap pulled low over a thin face and grizzled moustache. Koenig slipped him a packet, then turned to beckon them over.
‘That’s it, he’s paid.’ McKee’s voice shook a little. ‘We’ve an hour until the shift changes and a new watchman. No more.’
‘For what?’ No one was carrying a case like the one they’d given Wolff the evening he’d placed the detonators on the
‘Calm yourself,’ Rintelen replied disapprovingly.
‘I am calm,’ he lied. ‘I don’t like surprises and this…’
‘We are paying enough for your patience, I think,’ Rintelen interjected.
‘Have it your own way.’ You bastard, he thought.
From the gate, the watchman led them round the warehouse and between sheds to the flat yard at the neck of the dock. A small works engine was shunting empty wagons into a siding, a railroad man at the switches, his face bent into his coat. To their right, a boiler house and chimneys and a windowless wharf building, a single dim lamp above its door, three men in its light, rifles slung on their shoulders. The watchman waved his flashlight and one of them raised his hand in acknowledgement.
‘The main explosives store?’ Rintelen enquired.
‘One of them,’ the watchman replied, a hint of Irish in his voice. ‘There are more on the island. Most of the stuff is held in barges at the piers, so they can turn it round quick.’
‘And that is the only door?’ Rintelen took a small pocketbook and pen from his coat. ‘How much explosive is kept in there?’
‘It changes, Jim, don’t it?’ said McKee. ‘Fifty, maybe a hundred thousand pounds. Crates mostly.’
Rintelen made a note in his book. ‘In the yard at one time — the island too?’
McKee lifted his cap and scratched his head. ‘A million,’ he ventured. ‘Maybe more.’
That went into the book too, and Wolff began to feel more easy. Rintelen wasn’t there to plant detonators, merely to explore and plan. There would be time to raise the alarm.
They left Koenig and Hinsch and walked along the track towards the island, stopping from time to time so Rintelen could make notes of the distance between a pierhead and a storage shed, the ‘correct’ position of the pontoons and the places that were too well lit by the wharf lamps. Ahead of them always, and closer, the shadow of Liberty, glimpsed here through a cloud of steam, there between buildings or below the steel hook of a crane. Nobody challenged Rintelen, nobody asked why a man in a well-tailored wool coat and a homburg from Hermes was striding yards out on the dock; no one enquired because no one gave a damn. It was quiet because they were waiting for British ships, the watchman explained; there were barges of the ‘stuff’ at pier 4 and crates the length of a small city block on the wharf.
‘Show me,’ Rintelen commanded.
Most of the materiel was stacked at the railhead on the north side of the island. Hundreds of howitzer shells were standing on their base plates in the open as if in readiness for a push on Wall Street. Rintelen muttered something uncharacteristically profane: someone at the works with a little education had chalked ‘Gott strafe Deutschland’ on one of the crates. A couple of guards were stamping and blowing into their hands. McKee shuffled over to say his piece and very obligingly they turned and walked away. ‘From Green’s,’ he muttered on his return. ‘They say they’re expecting three ships at dawn.’
‘How much would you need for something like this, and those…’ Rintelen nodded to the water between piers 3 and 4, ‘…those barges, Mr de Witt?’
‘That depends on what’s inside them,’ he said cautiously.
‘Shine your flashlight here.’ McKee reached up to one of the crates. ‘Can you read that?’
‘Don’t need to, Billy,’ the watchman replied. ‘They’re Canadian Car from Kingsland. Three-inch shells. This lot’s on its way to Russia. The big stuff’s from Bethlehem Steel, that’s on its way to France.’
‘Well?’ Rintelen prompted.
‘Not very much,’ Wolff declared bullishly. ‘A fire would be enough.’
‘And those?’
‘Ha.’ He rapped his knuckles against a crate. ‘Don’t concern yourself with the rest of this stuff. They’ll be picking up the pieces in Bronx County.’
Rintelen pursed his lips thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded, ‘Enough.’
They walked back along the causeway swiftly and in silence. At the gate, a hearty pat on the back and more money for the watchman. ‘For the love of old Ireland,’ he remarked without irony as he slipped it into his breast pocket. They pressed Wolff to join them at Martha’s. ‘What better place to be at this hour?’ Rintelen enquired with a disingenuous little smile. ‘My own bed,’ he replied curtly, and for once the German wasn’t inclined to argue. ‘But you must come to the ship tomorrow at eight.’
‘Oh, must I?’
‘If you want to work, yes,’ he retorted in a clipped no-nonsense voice that implied he was happy to dispense with Wolff’s services. Wolff promised to be there.
It was after midnight when he paid off the cab close to his apartment. The diminutive spy in the derby hat was loitering in a doorway down the street. To be sure I’m as good as my word, Wolff reflected, as he closed the sitting-room curtains. A mistake to appear flustered in front of Rintelen; a poor performance. An old ham with stage fright. He poured a whisky and sat with his eyes closed, breathing deeply. Just a few minutes, then he would leave a coded message for Thwaites. Tonight. No more blunders like the
