The Thief

“Not a good sign.”

The Police Department had been cracking down on firearms lately. Faced with arrest if caught in possession, the gangsters had taken to stashing their pistols in their girlfriends’ hats and bustles.

“Loaded for bear. Who do you suppose they came to meet?”

Bell took back the field glasses. The gangsters were glowering at the back of the ship, where the Second Class passengers would go ashore. In a sight that would be comic if it didn’t mean someone was going to get badly hurt, a burly Gopher raked the Second Class embarkation port with dainty mother-of-pearl opera glasses he had stolen from somewhere.

“Archie, do you recognize the thug with the opera glasses?”

Archie, whose pride in New York extended even to the superior ferocity of its street gangs, took a look. “Might be Blinky Armstrong.”

“Is he a boss?”

“Not yet, that I’ve heard.”

“It looks like he’s running that crew. Soon as the switchboard’s hooked up, telephone the office. Tell Harry Warren to bring his gang squad.”

“Why?”

“I have an unpleasant feeling.”

The Mauretania’s private-branch telephone system switchboard would plug into the New York City exchanges the moment the ship docked. The Van Dorn New York field office was in the Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street, and while the streets would be clogged with traffic, the magic carpet of the Ninth Avenue Elevated Express could speed Detective Harry Warren and his gang specialists downtown in a flash.

“Harry’ll know if it’s Blinky.”

With the tugboats almost overwhelmed by her tonnage and the wind, it was fully half an hour before they had Mauretania enough inside the slip for her seamen to throw lightweight messenger lines. Longshoremen used them to drag her heavy hawsers ashore.

At last, the bugle blew to announce they were fast to the pier. Engines stopped.

The First Class gangway was hoisted from the cavernous waiting room. First ashore, stiffly ignoring each other, were Lord Strone and Karl Schultz. The Chimney Baron was greeted by a brace of pretty girls, granddaughters, Bell guessed, by the joyful way they took his hands and spirited him, laughing, through the crowds and out the doors to West Street. Strone stepped off alone and discreetly followed a young man, whom Bell supposed was from the British consulate, to the stairs to the lower deck, where the steam yacht Ringer out of Greenwich — which had trailed the ship from Quarantine — would whisk him to his American estate in Connecticut.

Explosions of photographers’ flashlights at the foot of the gangway told Bell that the newspaper reporters had caught sight of Marion and Lillian disembarking, and he could imagine from experience the shouted queries. Had Miss Morgan come back to New York to take new moving pictures? Was it true Miss Morgan had been married to an insurance executive? Had the ceremony actually been performed by the captain of the Mauretania? What did Mrs. Abbott think of the new fashions in London? Was there truth to the rumors that her father had secretly amassed a controlling interest in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe?

The Second Class gangway would rise as soon as First Class had cleared the ship. Third Class, Marion had told Bell, was doomed to spend the night aboard. Two names on the passenger list couldn’t be found. Miscounts were not uncommon, but everyone in Third Class — immigrants and citizens alike, including the moving picture people — would be held on the ship for officials to tally again. Isaac Bell had to wonder whether those missing had been the Acrobat’s accomplices. The chief officer bamboozled that night in the smoking room was probably wondering, too.

“O.K., Archie. Go telephone Harry Warren. I’ll get Clyde. You grab Block and our PS boy. When things settle down, we’ll go off together from Second Class.”

Bell hurried back toward Second Class. He found Clyde Lynds in the embarkation vestibule and tipped the seamen Captain Turner had assigned to guard him. “I’ll take it from here, gents, thanks.”

Clyde, grip in hand, was anxiously studying the crowds.

“See anyone down there you know?” Bell asked, watching for his reaction.

“I doubt it,” Clyde answered, even as his eye locked on the knot of Gophers staring back in his direction. “Been quite a while since I was in town.”

“In the theater, you said?”

“My last stepfather, minus one, was a stage manager.”

“At what theater?”

“All over. Downtown. Fourteenth Street. Then for a while on Broadway. The Hammerstein.”

“Did you live in that neighborhood?” Bell asked. Blinky Armstrong was aiming his opera glasses exactly where he and Clyde were standing.

“Around the corner on Forty-sixth Street.”

“Isn’t that near Hell’s Kitchen?”

Clyde laughed, nervously. “Fortunately, not too near.”

But near enough, thought Bell, that a gang of Gophers just might have gathered to welcome you home. Had the kid somehow offended them? Or had the Krieg Trust perhaps hired Gophers to grab him as he left the boat? From the little Bell could see through the waiting room windows, it appeared that the Gophers’ numbers had swelled. He counted a dozen gangsters converging on the back of the ship. They shoved through the crowd surrounding the foot of the Second Class gangway, which was ascending.

Isaac Bell was liking the situation less and less. He was fully armed, but that would do no good, as gunfire would be lethal to countless innocents. He saw a couple of cops patrolling the waiting room and a few more scattered on the lower level, but not enough to thwart a concentrated attack, if that’s what the Gophers were planning.

Archie hurried into the vestibule, leading the PS man, who had handcuffed himself to a disconsolate-looking Lawrence Block. “Harry Warren’s on his way.”

“Hang on to Clyde,” Bell whispered. “Don’t let him ashore.”

“Where you going?”

“I’m going to find out why the Gophers are staring at Clyde like they want to eat him for lunch.”

Bell turned to Clyde Lynds. “Stay here with Archie. Do not leave the ship until I come back for you.”

“What’s up?”

Bell shoved past the seamen at the embarkation port and jumped for the top of the Second Class gangway, which the longshoremen were pivoting toward the ship. It was five feet short of being secured to the hull, and it swayed wildly under his weight. Bell ran down it and into the waiting room.

“Hold on there!” shouted a Cunard official.

Isaac Bell brushed past him and headed straight for Blinky Armstrong, who had pocketed his opera glasses and was glowering up at Clyde Lynds and smacking a meaty fist into a stony palm. The tall detective was twenty feet away from the gangster, his progress slowed by thickening crowds, when suddenly a woman screamed. The sound parting her lips was as much a shout as a scream, a feral noise that spoke more hate than fear.

Two gangsters were fighting, rolling around on the asphalt, kicking and gouging and smashing each other with blackjacks. Blood flew. Two more piled on, and ordinary people ran screaming from the vicious tangle. Only when a flying wedge of gangsters tore through the crowd, hurling men, women, and children from their path, and swinging fists and lengths of lead pipe, did Isaac Bell realize that the newcomers were not more Gophers but attackers from a rival gang.

The melee spread like wildfire. Fifteen men pummeled one another. A tall cop charged, swinging his nightstick. Strong and agile, he floored three gangsters like bowling pins. A fallen man’s boot snagged his ankle, and the tall cop went down in the tangle and disappeared as if swallowed whole.

Knives flashed, eliciting angry shouts and screams of pain.

Then a shot rang out, stunningly loud.

Wild-eyed gangsters ran to their women cheering on the sidelines, snatched their revolvers, and raked the