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No one dared asked a senator traveling without his wife whom he was meeting at midnight. Even the ferry captain, a veteran North River waterman, was not brave enough to explain that a Van Dorn detective dressed like a deckhand had barged into his wheelhouse and drawn from his wallet a railroad pass unlike any he had ever seen. The document required all employees to accord him privileges of the line that exceeded even that of a senator who voted religiously in favor of legislation the railroads approved. Handwritten and signed and sealed by the president of the line, and witnessed by a federal judge, it superseded all dispatchers. Its only limits were common sense and the rules of safety.
“What did you do to get that pass?” the captain had asked as he hurriedly signaled the engine room Stop Engines.
“The president returned a favor,” had said the detective. “And I always tell the president how kindly I am treated by his employees.”
So the captain told the legislator, “A mechanical breakdown, Senator.”
“How the devil long are we going to wait here?”
“Everyone is disembarking for the next boat, sir. Let me carry your bag.” The captain seized the senator’s valise and led him to the main deck and down the gangway, where cold-faced detectives observed every passenger trooping off.
Isaac Bell stood behind the other Van Dorns, watching over their heads each and every face. The manner that Yamamoto had chosen to get away-jumping aboard at the last instant-made it clear that the shadows had slipped up, and the Japanese spy knew he was being followed. Now it was a chase.
Three hundred eighty passengers, men, women, and sleepy children, shuffled past. Thank the Lord, thought Bell, it was the middle of the night. The boats carried thousands at rush hour.
“That’s the last of them.”
“O.K. Now we check every nook and cranny on the boat. He’s hiding somewhere.”
A SMALL, elderly woman in a long black dress, a warm shawl, and a straw bonnet tied to her head with a dark scarf boarded a streetcar outside the Jersey City Exchange Place Terminal. It was a slow, stop-and-start ride to the city of Hoboken. The trolley looped around the square at Ferry and River streets, and now her journey moved swiftly as she descended to the first completed of the McAdoo tubes. For a nickel, she boarded an eight-car electric train so new it smelled of paint.
It whisked her under the Hudson River. Ten minutes after boarding, she left the tube train at the first station in New York. The conductors operating the air-powered doors exchanged a glance. The neighborhood at Christopher and Greenwich streets above the beautifully lighted vaulted ceilings of the tube line was nowhere near as pleasant as the subterranean station, particularly at such a late hour. Before they could call a warning, the woman hurried past a pretty florist’s shop at the foot of the stairs-closed, with lights still shining on the flowers-and disappeared.
At street level she found a dark square of grimy cobblestones. Warehouses loomed over formerly genteel residences long since partitioned into rooming houses. She drew the attention of a thug who followed her, drawing close as she neared an alley. She whirled suddenly, pressed a small pistol to his forehead, and said in a soft male voice with a slight accent the thug had never heard before, “I can pay you handsomely to guide me to a clean room where I can spend the night. Or I can pull the trigger. I will let you choose.”
29
I HAVE A JOB FOR HARRY WING AND LOUIS LOH,” SAID Eyes O’Shay.
“Who?” asked Tommy Thompson, who was beginning to think that he was seeing more of Eyes than he wanted to.
“Your Hip Sing highbinders,” Eyes said impatiently. “The high-class tong Chinamen you made a hookup with the same day I came back from the dead. Stop playing stupid with me. We’ve discussed this before.”
“They ain’t mine, I told you. I just made a deal with ’em to open some joints.”
“I have a job for them.”
“What do you need me for?”
“I do not want to meet them. I want you to deal with them for me. Do you understand?”
“You don’t want them to see your mug.”
“Or hear about me. Not one word, Tommy. Unless you want to spend the rest of your life as a blind man.”
Tommy Thompson had had just about enough. He leaned back in his chair, tipping it up on the two back legs, and said coldly, “I’m thinking it’s time to pick up a gun and blow your brains out, O’Shay.”
Brian O’Shay was on his feet in a flash. He kicked one of the chair legs, splintering it. The gang boss crashed to the floor. At the sounds, which shook the building, Tommy’s bouncers charged into the room. They pulled up short. O’Shay had the boss in a headlock, down on one knee, pointing Tommy’s face toward the ceiling, with his gouge scraping his left eye.
“Deal with your floor managers.”
“Get out of here,” Tommy said in a strangled voice.
The bouncers backed out of the room. O’Shay let him go abruptly, dropping the bigger man on his back and rising to brush sawdust from his trousers. “Here’s what I want,” he said conversationally. “I want you to send Harry Wing and Louis Loh to San Francisco.”
“What’s in San Francisco?” Tommy asked sullenly, climbing to his feet and pulling a bottle from his desk.
“The Mare Island Naval Shipyard.”
