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Bell tackled the German. He brought the man down. But the madness that propelled the German to fearlessly face death gave him the strength to wrest free from the detective. The slowly sliding ship still had not left the shed nor reached the water’s edge. The German stood up and ran full tilt at its cradle.
Bell had no idea where his Browning had fallen. His hat had disappeared and with it his derringer. He pulled his knife from his boot, propped erect on one knee, and threw it with a smooth overhand motion. The razor-sharp steel pieced the back of the German’s neck. He stopped in his tracks and reached back as if to swat a fly. Grievously wounded, he buckled at the knees. Yet he staggered toward the ship, raising his bomb. But Isaac Bell’s knife had cost him more than a few precious seconds. By stopping for an instant, he remained directly in the downward path of another falling timber. It hit the German squarely, crushing his head.
The dynamite fell from his upstretched hand. Isaac Bell was already diving for it. He caught it in both hands before the percussion cap hit the ground and drew it gently to his chest as the long red hull hurtled past.
The ground shook. The drag chains thundered. Smoke poured from the cradle. Michigan accelerated out of the shed into the sunlit water, trailing the acrid scent of burning tallow fired by friction and billowing the river into clouds of spray that the sunshine pierced with rainbows.
WHILE EVERY EYE IN CAMDEN locked on the floating ship, Isaac Bell seized the dead German and stuffed him in the wheelbarrow. The detective who had checked the saboteur’s pass came running up, trailed by others. Bell said, “Get this man in the back door of the morgue before anyone sees him. Shipbuilders are superstitious. We don’t want to spoil their party.”
While they covered the body with scrap wood, Bell found his gun and put his hat on his head. A detective handed him his knife, which he sheathed in his boot. “I’m supposed to take my girl to the luncheon. How do I look?”
“Like somebody ironed your suit with a shovel.”
They took out handkerchiefs and brushed his coat and trousers. “You ever consider wearing a darker outfit for days like this?”
Marion took one look when Bell entered the pavilion and asked in a low voice, “Are you all right?”
“Tip-top.”
“You missed the launching.”
“Not entirely,” said Bell. “How did you get along with Yamamoto Kenta?”
“Mr. Yamamoto,” said Marion Morgan, “is a phony.”
25
I LAID A TRAP, AND HE WALKED RIGHT INTO IT-ISAAC! HE did not know about Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls.”
“You’ve got me there. What are Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls?”
“Ashiyuki Utamaro was a famous Japanese woodblock printmaker during the later Edo period. Woodblock artists operate large, complex shops where employees and acolytes do much of the work, tracing, carving, and inking after the master draws the image. They don’t do calligraphy scrolls.”
“Why does it matter that Mr. Yamamoto didn’t know about something that doesn’t exist?”
“Because Ashiyuki Utamaro’s Exile Scrolls do exist. But they were made secretly, so only real scholars know about them.”
“And you! No wonder you won the first law degree ever granted a woman at Stanford University.”
“I wouldn’t know either except my father occasionally bought a Japanese scroll, and I remembered a strange story he told me. I wired him in San Francisco for the details. He wired back a very expensive telegram.
“Ashiyuki Utamaro was at the height of his printmaking career when he got in trouble with the Emperor apparently for making eyes or more at the Emperor’s favorite geisha. Only the fact that the Emperor loved Ashiyuki Utamaro’s woodcuts saved his life.
“Instead of chopping his head off, or whatever they do to Japanese Lotharios, he banished him to the northernmost cape of the northernmost island of Japan-Hokkaido. For an artist who needed his workshop and staff, it was worse than prison. Then his mistress smuggled in paper, ink, and a brush. And until he died, alone in his tiny little hut, he drew calligraphy scrolls. But no one could admit they existed. His mistress and everyone who helped her visit him would have been executed. They could not be displayed. They could not be sold. Somehow the prints ended up with a dealer in San Francisco, who sold one to my father.”
“Forgive me my skepticism, but it does sound like an art dealer’s story,” said Bell.
“Except it is true. Yamamoto Kenta does not know about the Exile Scrolls. Therefore he is no scholar and no curator of Japanese art.”
“Which makes him a spy,” Bell said grimly. “And a murderer. Well done, my darling. We’ll hang him with this.”
THE SPEECHES THAT ACCOMPANIED the luncheon’s toasts were mercifully brief, and the rousing one delivered by Captain Lowell Falconer, Special Inspector of Target Practice, was, in the words of Ted Whitmark, “a real stem-winder.”
With crackling language and powerful gestures, the Hero of Santiago praised Camden’s modern yard, lionized the ship workers, thanked the Congress, commended the chief constructor, and acclaimed the naval architect.
During one of the explosions of applause, Bell whispered to Marion, “The only thing he hasn’t praised is the Michigan.”
Marion whispered back, “You should have heard what he said privately about the Michigan. He compared her to a whale. And I don’t believe he meant it as a compliment.”
