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Impossible as it seemed, the piano suddenly got louder. Someone banged on a drum. The crowd made way for Angelo Del Rossi to mount a low stage opposite the bar. He drew from his frock coat a conductor’s baton.
Waiters and bouncers put down trays and blackjacks and picked up banjos, guitars, and accordions. Waitresses jumped onto the stage and cast off their aprons, revealing skirts so short that police in any city with more than one church would raid the joint. Del Rossi raised his baton. The musicians banged out George M. Cohan’s “Come On Down,” and the ladies danced what appeared to Bell to be an excellent imitation of the Paris cancan.
“You were saying?” he shouted.
“I was?”
“About the dreadnoughts that you and the Gunner…”
“Take the Michigan. When she’s finally commissioned, our newest battleship will have the best gun arrangement in the world-all big guns on superimposed turrets. But tissue-thin armor and rattletrap piston engines doom her to be a semi-dreadnought at best-target practice for German and English dreadnought
s.”
MacDonald drained his glass.
“All the more terrible that the Bureau of Ordnance lost a great gun builder in Artie Langner. The technical bureaus hate change. Artie forced change… Don’t get me started on this, laddie. It’s been an awful month for America’s battleships.”
“Beyond the death of Artie Langner?” Bell prompted.
“The Gunner was only the first to die. One week later we lost Chad Gordon, our top armorer at Bethlehem Iron Works. Horrible accident. Six lads roasted alive-Chad and all his hands. Then last week that damned fool Grover Lakewood fell off the hill. The cleverest fire-control expert in the business. And a hell of a fine young man. What a future he’d have given us-gone in a stupid climbing accident.”
“Hold on!” said Bell. “Are you telling me that three engineers specializing in dreadnought battleships have all died in the last month?”
“Sounds like a jinx, doesn’t it?” MacDonald’s big hand passed over his chest in the sign of the cross. “I would never say our dreadnoughts are jinxed. But for the sake of the United States Navy, I hope to bloody hell Farley Kent and Ron Wheeler aren’t next.”
“Hulls at the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” said Bell. “Torpedoes at Newport.”
MacDonald looked at him sharply. “You get around.”
“Dorothy Langner mentioned Kent and Wheeler. I gathered they were Langner counterparts.”
“Counterparts?” MacDonald laughed. “That’s the joke of the dreadnought race, don’t you see?”
“No I don’t. What do you mean?”
“It’s like a shell game, with a pea under every shell and every pea packed with dynamite. Farley Kent devises watertight compartments to protect his hulls from torpedoes. But up in Newport, Ron Wheeler improves torpedoes-builds a longer-range torpedo that carries heavier explosives, maybe even figures out how to arm it with TNT. So Artie has to-had to-increase gun range so the ship can fight farther off, and Chad Gordon had to cast stronger armor to take the hits. Enough to drive a man to drink…” MacDonald refilled their glasses. “God knows how we’ll get along without those lads.”
“But speed you say is also vital. What about you in Steam Engineering?” Bell asked. “They say you’re a wizard with turbines. Wouldn’t Alasdair MacDonald’s loss be as devastating to the dreadnought program?”
MacDonald laughed. “I’m indestructible.”
Another fistfight broke out across the dance hall.
“Excuse me, Isaac,” said MacDonald, and he waded cheerfully into it.
Bell shouldered after him. The flashily dressed gangsters he’d seen when he came in were hovering around the impromptu ring of cheering men. MacDonald was trading punches with a young heavyweight who had the arms of a blacksmith and admirable footwork. The Scotsman appeared slower than the younger man. But Bell saw that Alasdair MacDonald was allowing his opponent to land punches as a way of gauging what he had. So subtle was he that none of the blows scored any damage. Suddenly Alasdair seemed to have learned all he needed to. Suddenly he was fast and deadly, throwing combinations. Bell had to admit they outclassed the best he had thrown when he boxed for Yale, and he recalled with a grateful smile Joe Van Dorn steering him into “graduate study” in Chicago’s saloons.
The blacksmith was weaving. MacDonald finished him off with an upper cut that was no harder than it had to be to do the job, then helped him to his feet, slapped his back, and bellowed for all to hear, “You did good, laddie. I just got lucky… Isaac, did you note this fellow’s footwork? Don’t you think he’s got a future in the ring?”
“He’d have floored Gentleman Jim Corbett in his prime.”
The blacksmith accepted the compliment with a glassy-eyed grin.
MacDonald, whose own eyes were still restlessly scanning the crowd, noticed the gangsters coming purposefully his way. “Oh, here’s another contender-two more. No rest for the weary. All right, lads, you’re runts, but there’s two of ya. Come and get it.”
They weren’t quite runts, although MacDonald outweighed them handily, but they moved with assurance and held their hands well. And when they attacked, it was clearly not the first time they had teamed up. Talented street fighters, Bell assessed them, tough slum kids who had fought their way into the upper ranks of a gang. Full-fledged gangsters now, out for a night of mayhem. Bell moved closer in case things got out of hand.
Hurling filthy curses at Alasdair MacDonald, they attacked him simultaneously from both sides. There was a viciousness to the concerted assault that seemed to anger the Scotsman. Face flushed, he feinted a retreat, which drew them forward into a powerful left jab and a devastating right. One gangster staggered backward, blood spurting from his nose. The other crumpled up, holding his ear.
