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“Whom do you suspect?”
“No one I am prepared to discuss. Mr. Van Dorn will keep you appraised.”
“Isaac-may I call you Isaac?”
“All right, if you want.”
“There is something I told you once. I would like to make it clear.”
“If it’s about Mr. Whitmark,” Bell smiled, “be aware he’s headed this way.”
“I will repeat,” she said quietly. “I am not rushing into anything. And he is leaving for San Francisco.”
It struck Bell that a key difference between Marion and Dorothy was how they regarded men. Dorothy wondered whether she could add one to her list of conquests. Whereas Marion Morgan had no doubt she could conquer and therefore was not inclined to bother. It showed in their smiles. Marion’s smile was as engaging as an embrace. Dorothy’s was a dare. But Bell could not ignore her desperate fragility, despite her bold manner. It was almost as if she were putting herself forth and asking to be saved from the loss of her father. And he did not believe that Ted Whitmark was the man to do that.
“Bell, isn’t it?” Whitmark called loudly as he bustled up.
“Isaac Bell.”
He saw tugboats gathering in the river to take charge of the hull when she hit the water. “Excuse me. I’m expected on the ways.”
YAMAMOTO KENTA HAD STUDIED photographs of American warship launchings to choose his costume. He could not disguise that he was Japanese. But the less alien his clothes, the farther he could roam the shipyard and the closer he could approach the distinguished guests. Observing his fellow travelers on the train up from Washington, he was proud to see that he had dressed perfectly for the occasion in a pale blue-and-white seersucker suit and a pea green four-in-hand necktie matched by the color of his straw boater’s hatband.
At the shipyard in Camden, he doffed the boater repeatedly in polite acknowledgment of ladies, important personages, and older gentlemen. The first person he had run into upon arriving at the remarkably up-to-date Camden shipyard was Captain Lowell Falconer, the Hero of Santiago. They had spoken late last fall at the unveiling of a bronze tablet to commemorate Commodore Thomas Tingey, the first commandant of the Washington Navy Yard. Yamamoto had given Falconer the impression that he had retired from the Japanese Navy holding the rank of lieutenant before returning to his first love, Japanese art. Captain Falconer had given him a cursory tour of the arsenal with the notable exception of the Gun Factory.
This morning, when Yamamoto congratulated Falconer on the imminent launch of America’s first dreadnought, Falconer had replied with a wry “almost dreadnought” on the assumption-from one sea dog to another-that a former officer of the Japanese Navy would recognize her shortcomings.
Yamamoto touched his brim once again, this time for a tall, striking blond woman.
Unlike the other American ladies who streamed past with chilly nods for “that puny Asiatic,” as he had heard one murmur to her daughter, she surprised him with a warm smile and the observation that the weather had turned lovely for the launching.
“And for the blooming of the flowers,” said the Japanese spy, who was actually comfortable with American woman, having secretly romanced several high-ranking Washington wives who had convinced themselves that a visiting curator of Asian art must be soulfully artistic as well as exotically Asiatic. At his flirtatious remark, he could expect her to either stalk off or move closer.
He was deeply flattered when she chose the latter.
Her eyes were a startling sea-coral green.
Her manner was forthright. “Neither of us is dressed as a naval officer,” she said. “What brings you here?”
“It is my day off from where I am working at the Smithsonian Institution,” Yamamoto replied. He saw no bulge of a wedding ring under her cotton glove. Probably the daughter of an important official. “A colleague in the Art Department give me his ticket and a letter of introduction that makes me sound far more important than I am. And you?”
“Art? Are you an artist?”
“Merely a curator. A large collection was given to the Institution. They asked me to catalog a small portion of it-a very small portion,” he added with a self-deprecating smile.
“Do you mean the Freer Collection?”
“Yes! You know of it?”
“My father took me to Mr. Freer’s home in Detroit when I was a little girl.”
Yamamoto was not surprised that she had visited the fabulously wealthy manufacturer of railway cars. The social set that swirled around the American’s New Navy included the privileged, the well-connected, and the newly rich. This young lady appeared to be of the former. Certainly, her ease of manner and sense of style set her off from the oft-shrill nouveaux. “What,” he asked her, “do you recall from that visit?”
Her engaging green eyes seemed to explode with light. “What stays in my heart are the colors in Ashiyuki Utamaro’s woodcuts.”
“The theatrical pieces?”
“Yes! The colors were so vivid yet so subtly united. They made his scrolls seem even more remarkable.”
