The Thief

brush in his fingers, and he grasped it as tightly as he could. The bristles slipped through his fingers, and there was nothing the tall detective could do to stop himself from falling backwards into the water.

16

Isaac Bell fell flat on his back and sank like a stone.

The slack tide on which the Mauretania had landed had begun to ebb, and cold river water was swirling through the slip. The deeper he sank, the harder the current pushed him. He felt it sluice him across the slip, and he slammed hard into something solid — one of the piles on which sat the pier. The current pinned him against it. Then something grabbed his foot. It was soft but insistent, and it pulled him farther down. Mud? he wondered, vaguely. He had sunk to the bottom of the slip, and the mud wanted to hold him there as if it were alive and hungry.

Something started pounding. Then his face was suddenly cold as if someone had thrown a champagne bucket of ice water in his face. Not “someone.” Marion. It was Marion throwing ice water in his face. “Wake up, Isaac. Wake up! Wake up! Please wake up!”

He awakened and suddenly knew a lot. The pounding was his own heart. The ice water was an invigorating tongue of cold river current. The mud indicated he was thirty-five feet beneath the surface. He had to breathe air or he would die. He kicked the mud and pulled himself up the slippery piling. The water grew warmer, the current less strong. He kicked harder and rose faster. Instinct told him to place one hand on his head to protect it, and a moment after he did he bumped up against an underwater crossbeam that braced two pilings. He was out of air. His heart thundered. Lights stormed in front of his eyes. He couldn’t hold his breath any longer. He opened his mouth and inhaled, and suddenly sunlight was blazing in his face.

“Isaac!”

He spit water and gulped air, coughed, gulped more air, and swam toward the shouting. They were yelling about a ladder. He found it fixed to a pile and pulled himself onto it. He held on a while, ignoring the shouting, breathing, collecting himself.

* * *

Isaac Bell climbed out of the river in a foul mood. The Acrobat had gotten clean away. His head ached. Blood was stinging his eyes. And he’d lost his hat and his favorite derringer.

“You O.K., Isaac?”

It was Harry Warren — head of the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s New York gang squad — a studiedly nondescript-looking fellow who wore a loose-fitting dark suit with plenty of pockets for sidearms and a black derby with a reinforced crown. Harry’s face, normally as expressionless as the lid of an ashcan, was clenched with worry, a look repeated on the scarred countenances of his hard-bitten detectives, who were watching over Harry’s shoulder as Isaac Bell gathered his feet under him and rose, swaying.

Harry handed Bell a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.”

Bell said, “Find out who was mixing it up with the Gophers.”

“What?”

Bell mopped the blood off his face and wadded the cloth against the source, a ragged furrow parting his hair. “I want to know what the devil was going on. We didn’t just happen to land in a gang war. The Gophers were waiting for someone on the ship. I want to know who and why. And I want to know why those other boys came along at that moment. On the jump!”

Warren and his boys trooped off. Bell went looking for dry clothes.

* * *

Early the next morning, in Archie Abbott’s library, Marion read aloud to Isaac Bell the New York Times account of yesterday’s shootout on Pier 54. Steered by Cunard Line publicists charged with maintaining the steamship company’s reputation for safety, and threatened, Bell presumed, by red-faced police and docks commissioners, the newspaper blamed the gunfire on “disgruntled Italian longshoremen.”

Bell laughed, which made his head hurt.

“‘The Italians all escaped in the confusion,’” Marion concluded her reading. “‘Arrests are imminent,’ vowed the commissioners.”

Archie’s butler appeared and said, “A Mr. Harry Warren to see you at the kitchen door, sir.”

“Bring him in,” said Marion.

“I tried, Mrs. Bell. He won’t come past the kitchen.”

The cook poured Harry coffee and made herself scarce.

Harry stared in some amazement at Bell, who was attired in his customary white linen suit and had combed his thick golden hair to hide a row of surgical stitches. “If you wasn’t white as your duds, no one would know you was recently brained and partly drowned.”

“He looks better than he is,” said Marion. “The doctor said he ought to be in bed.”

“I’m fine,” said Bell.

Harry Warren and Marion Bell traded glances of concern. “You know, boss, Mrs. Bell is right to be worried. So’s the doc. Knocks on the noggin rate respect.”

“Thank you, Harry,” said Marion. “Could you help me walk him upstairs?”

“What have you found?” Bell demanded.

“The Gophers didn’t believe there was a fire on the Mauretania.”

“What business was it of theirs? It so happens there was a fire. I saw it with my own eyes. It burned up everything in the forward baggage room, including the smuggled film stock that ignited it.”

“That’s what the Gophers didn’t believe.”

Bell looked at Marion. The penny dropped. “You mean the Gophers were smuggling the film stock?”

“They put up the dough for the shipment. When they heard about the fire, they decided that the guy they paid to smuggle it into New York was welshing on the deal, selling the stock to another buyer for more dough.”

“Where did they get that idea?”

“They’re Gophers! They get ideas like that. They figure that what they would do to somebody, somebody would do to them. Like the Golden Rule. Backwards. So they met the ship to deal with the guy who they thought welshed.”

“Who is he?”

“Clyde Lynds.”

Bell exchanged a second glance with Marion and shook his head in disgust, setting off new jolts of pain. “I was afraid you were going to say that. Clyde smelled the film going bad and knew exactly what it was because it was his stock.”

Marion said, “The ‘hero’ who saved the ship is the smuggler who almost sank the ship.”

“In a nutshell,” Harry Warren agreed. He stood up and put on his derby. “Anyway, when the Yorkville boys showed up, the Gophers jumped to the conclusion that they were taking delivery of the film stock they’d bought out from under them. Fighting ensued.”

“In a nutshell…”

“Thanks for the coffee.”

“Who are the Yorkville boys?”

“From the new German district up in Yorkville. Uptown, on the East Side.”

“Germans?”

“Germans are leaving downtown since the General Slocum fire. You know, the excursion-boat fire when all their poor children were killed. Tore the heart out of the old neighborhood, and they’ve just kind of been retreating north — lock, stock, and breweries.”

“What’s the gang called?”