thousand tiny interior and exterior lights along the entire length of her superstructure. The red and green running lights on either side of her bow were as big as golf balls. She hit another button and the tiny anchors started to drop.
“Holy shit,” Stoke said. The thing was truly beautiful.
“That’s nothing. Watch this,” Jet said. She hit a button and the interior of the glass case began filling with clear blue water illuminated from below. It rapidly rose up the walls of the case until it reached Leviathan’s waterline.
“You can simulate all kinds of sea conditions,” Jet said, “There are wave paddles hidden at the bottom of the case. And sensors throughout the tank to monitor the parameters of wave action on the hull. Want to see a Force Five gale? A tsunami? Seas of fifty feet?”
“Not right now.”
“Would you like me to start her engines?”
“Yes, that I would like to see,” Stoke said, transfixed as Jet fingered the remote. There were propulsion pods hung from the stern. As she pushed the joystick, the pods revolved 360 degrees and the minature bronze props began spinning, creating whorls of white water around them.
“There you go. Four propulsion pods. She carries two fixed, and two azimuthing. This model is an exact replica of the real thing, down to the most minute detail.”
“What’s that big bulge in the keel? Weird looking.”
“That? Bulb keel. Lowers the VCG. The vertical center of gravity.”
“You know a lot about this stuff, Jet.”
“Enough.”
“How come she doesn’t have any smokestacks?”
“That’s an easy one. She’s nuclear.”
“Holy shit,” Stoke said, “Nuclear? An ocean liner?”
“Hmm.”
“Is the baron actually building this thing?”
“Oh, she’s already built. Her maiden voyage is coming up soon. She’s sailing from Le Havre to New York.”
“Le Havre,” Stoke said, “That’s in France, isn’t it? I’d like to be at that launching. But first I think we ought to go back to Berlin and poke our noses around that Tempelhof aerodrome. Do it at night like this, you know, so nobody will bother us.”
“Hmm,” Jet said, looking at her watch. “Look, it’s getting late. We’d better get down the mountain and back in our beds before we’re missed.”
“You ever read ‘Hansel and Gretel’?” Stoke asked, “No? Just curious.”
Chapter Thirty-five
Coney Island
“HE WON’T COME DOWN?” CAPTAIN MARIUCCI WAS ASKING the manager of the Wonder Wheel at Coney Island. “What do you mean he won’t come down?” The captain was clenching his jaw in frustration. It seemed the semiretired mobster, a Mr. Joseph Bones, was alive but currently unavailable for questioning. Joey was holed up in one of the sixteen swinging cars at the very top of the world’s tallest Ferris wheel.
“How can I say this better? I mean, he won’t come down,” Samuel Gumpertz said, running his hands through the imaginary hair on top of his head. He’d been studying the car where Joey was hiding through his binoculars. He’d gaze in frustration at all the unhappy customers standing around the old Wonder, and then he’d look back up at Joey. The Gumpertz family had been running the number-one attraction at Coney for the last three decades. But it was Sammy’s baby. It was his show. This action, he had to admit, was a first.
His night man, Joey Bones, an old Mob guy who knew his carny shit backward and forward, was ordinarily a stand-up guy. But about an hour ago, what happened was Joey had flipped out about something, he wouldn’t say what. So now, he was up at the top of the wheel holed up in one of the cars and there was no way on earth to get his skinny old ass down.
In addition to a growing crowd of very pissed-off paying customers, he also had this NYPD captain all over his ass. Him and his sidekick, this English cop from Scotland Yard looking like something out of an old Sherlock Holmes movie wearing a caped coat and one of those weird goddamn backward and forward caps on his head. Smoking a pipe, for chrissakes. Give me a frigging break with this shit.
“May I borrow those binoculars?” this English character Congreve asked Gumpertz.
“Why, certainly,” Gumpertz replied, “My pleasure.”
“Thanks so much.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“I hate to interrupt this little tea party, Mr. Gumpertz,” Captain Mariucci said, “But I’m only going to say this one more time. I want you to start up that goddamn Ferris wheel up and bring that man down. Okay? Capisce?”
“How many times I gotta explain this again, Captain? All right. One, Joey is an old goombah, you know. He’s eighty-five. Set in his ways. He’s stubborn. He don’t like being told what to do by nobody. Two, he’s my brother-in- law, all right? He’s my wife Marie’s brother, okay? Bottom line, anything happens to Joey up there, I’m dead meat. And, three, he did something funny to the frigging gearbox. So we can’t turn the wheel. End of story.”
Mariucci said, “Whatever he did to it, it ain’t funny. Fix it.”
“Fix it, he says.”
“That’s what I said, fix it.”
“Would that I could, Captain, just fix it. You see that fat-assed guy in the machine shed now? That’s my mechanic, Manny. What do you think he’s doing in there right now? Jerking off? Playing canasta? No. He’s trying to fix the frigging Ferris wheel. But there’s a little problem, as I explained to you earlier. Joey did something to the mechanism before he went up; you see what I’m saying? He took something out of the machinery, I dunno. Something critical. A wheel, a gear, who the fuck knows.”
“He stuck a fucking monkey wrench in the thing,” the mechanic said. He had appeared in the shed’s doorway, his face and T-shirt blackened with century-old grease from the machinery. The news on his face wasn’t good.
“You see that,” Gumpertz said, “a monkey wrench sounds about right.”
“He jammed a big spanner in the main drive wheel,” Manny said. “He stuck it in so the big wheel would only do one half a rotation. Then she’d lock up. Smart.”
“Yeah, he’s a frigging genius,” Gumpertz said. “So pull the frigging spanner out, all right? Hey! It’s Friday night! Hello? I got huddled masses coming out the friggin’ wazoo here, and you’re giving out progress reports. Get your ass back in there and pull that thing out of there. Could you do that for me, please?”
“Yeah, yeah, okay,” the mechanic said, turning his back on them. “I’ll give it another shot.”
“Give it a shot? Do me a favor. Just do it. Jesus. I need this, right, Captain?”
A strong wet wind had suddenly come up, howling in off the Atlantic. The undersides of boiling black and purple clouds were painted bright yellow and red with the carnival glow of the midway below. Congreve stood with the borrowed binoculars observing the car with Joe Bones inside.
The swinging car rocked violently to and fro in the gusty easterly wind. To the east, a flash followed by a rumble of thunder. A big storm. Ambrose imagined the pendulum-like motion of the rocking car was enough to make even a strong man wish he were someplace else. And it hadn’t even started to blow yet.
“Mr. Gumpertz,” Congreve said, “Tell me again precisely what caused Mr. Bones to engineer his current predicament.”
“Okay, look, here’s what I know, Inspector. Something spooked him, okay? Earlier. About nine-thirty I think it was. He got a call in the ticket box. He came outside, offloaded the wheel, then put the chains up, closing down the ride. I said something like, ‘Hey, asshole, what the fuck you think you’re doing?’ and he’s like, ‘Sammy, ya gotta help me, I’m in deep shit.’”
“But he didn’t say what kind of trouble?”
