The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

Bell had turned his chair halfway around when the last of the ten sailors entered the Lundehund so he could watch them while keeping an eye on how Fyrie was handling himself. It was the point in the verbal preliminaries when Fyrie got to his feet to signal that it was time they all went outside and settled the affair as immature adolescents pretending to be men that the other crew suddenly launched themselves in a surprise attack.

The move was a total break in protocol. A popular waterfront bar should be given the reverence of holy ground when it came to a fight of this magnitude. A brawl between two or even four men was certainly allowed, but not a full-on rumble, and that disregard for the inviolability of the tavern’s sanctity kept Fyrie and his crew a fraction slow to respond.

Bell hadn’t expected it either, yet that didn’t mean he didn’t react instantly and with forethought. He’d watched the big sailors enter the dim bar and fan out in a semicircle with the captain at the center. He’d noted who kept their hands in their pockets to disguise the fact they’d armed themselves with some manner of cosh or cudgel. He graded potential fighting abilities by how they held themselves—who was slouching, who favored a bad leg, who looked like he’d poured himself too many drams of liquid courage. He noted all these things on a subconscious level so that when they sprang into action, he’d already prioritized targets and was moving before Fyrie or his men could extricate themselves from behind the table where the Norwegian whalers had hoped to pin them.

In one fluid motion, Bell grabbed the back of his chair and let his momentum lift it off the floor and swing it in a slashing arc. It was a solid piece of furniture, doubtless a veteran of its fair share of fights. It didn’t shatter upon impact with a sailor pulling a baton from the pocket of his peacoat. Instead, the chair legs cracked the man’s forearm at the wrist with sufficient enough force to break both radius and ulna. Bell released the chair and followed through by crashing the bottom of his boot into the outside of the man’s knee. The man crumpled immediately and instinctively tried to break his fall with his broken wrist. The strikes had been so quick that his brain hadn’t yet registered the injury. When the cracked bones took on the weight of his two-hundred-pound frame, the ends came apart like shattered crystal and his scream acted as a distraction for the next man Bell had targeted.

This assailant wasn’t as large as his captain, but he had Bell by three inches and thirty pounds. None of that mattered. The sailor pivoted slightly to square himself with the Van Dorn detective and Bell took a fast step toward the man, coming inside what anyone would consider the fighting perimeter. The big Norwegian didn’t know how to react. In that moment’s hesitation, Bell grabbed the collar of his coat and pulled him forward just enough that his shoulders lost tension and his head dipped.

Bell met the bridge of the sailor’s nose with the thickest part of his forehead in a butt that would do a bighorn sheep proud. The crunch of bone and cartilage was accompanied by fountaining blood.

Twenty percent of the Isbjørn’s crew was out of commission even before the surprise attack reached its intended target. The four sailors to the right of the captain, and the captain himself, grabbed the thick pine table and put their weight into it, hoping to crush the crew of the Hvalur Batur against the wall. The three attackers on Bell’s side of the semicircle were shifting into defensive stances, seeing they were now less of a threat and more like the threatened.

Captain Fyrie and his crew had just enough time to set themselves up for the charge and meet brute strength with brute strength, and rather than have the sharp edge of the table crush them into the wall, they managed to hold their ground and then spin the table enough to throw the five men opposite them off balance. The Icelanders scrambled up over the table, kicking aside spilled pitchers and steins, and launched themselves bodily at the rival crew.

The sneak attack turned into a melee of fists and elbows, wild swings, and precision jabs. Bell fitted the brass knuckles over the fingers of his right hand. Around him, the room turned into a kaleidoscope of violence. For every punch the detective took, he gave two right back. He saw Ragnar Fyrie caught in a crushing hold by the captain of the Isbjørn. His face was suffused with blood and his eyes goggled from their sockets.

Bell didn’t have an angle to hit the attacker’s face and didn’t want to crack open his skull with the knuckle-dusters, so he threw five rapid, and incrementally deeper, punches into the Norwegian captain’s right kidney.

The blows became so painful that the whaler had no choice but to release his hold on Fyrie. When he turned on Bell, the American dropped him with a haymaker he brought all the way up from his shin, a punch with enough force that the monster Norseman was lifted an inch off the floor before collapsing in an unconscious heap.

That was the symbolic end to the fight, but the bartender had reached for the 12-gauge side-by-side kept for just such purposes under the bar and he fired both barrels as the Norwegian captain hit the filthy floor. The men left standing were raked with twin loads of coarse rock salt, a nonlethal way to drain the fight out of anyone taking a hit.

Bell had his back turned to the blast yet felt the wasp-like sting of a salt fragment biting the back of his neck and others peppering his coat.

In the deafening echo that followed the gunshots, men helped comrades to their feet. Patrons started righting overturned furniture, and, most important, the crew of the Isbjørn gathered the wounded and slunk from the bar. Two men were needed to drape the unconscious captain’s heavy arms over their shoulders and drag him out, while another shepherded the man with the shattered wrist.

Before any protests were raised by the owner and staff, Bell peeled off enough krone notes to cover any damage and slapped them on the bar and then added to the pile, the universal gesture that the next round for everybody was on him. Just like that, all was forgotten.

“You fight well.” Captain Fyrie saluted Bell with a fresh mug of lager.

“In your school, was there a group of bullies who terrorized the other kids?”

“Of course. You were one?”

Bell shook his head at the memory. “No. I was the damned fool trying to defend the weaker students. Took my share of beatings before I got any good at defending myself.”

Fyrie’s laughter

quickly faded. “I must tell you, my new friend, that I have considered every possible way of getting my ship out of the Norwegians’ grasp. The problem is, the thermal inertia of all that cold water in the boilers and how much energy we need to build up sufficient steam to run the engines. I’ve worked it out with my own engineer.” He nodded at a bespectacled man in his early fifties with a black eye and gold tooth. “Even installing a dozen bypasses and running at supercritical pressure, we still need several thousand gallons of water to clear the harbor. With our system, that will take nearly sixteen hours to bring it up to temperature.

“Even if we had coal, which we don’t, we get boarded every morning for an inspection, so there isn’t enough time to fire her up. We thought about using kerosene, gasoline, even propane. They all take too much time or will give off enough exhaust to alert the harbor authorities.” He saw Bell was about to interject, and added, “There’s more than just the gangway guard to worry about. The harbormaster has a particular interest in our case as he will have first dibs to buy the Hvalur Batur.”

“The engineer I worked with and I looked at all kinds of alternative fuels too,” Bell said, “and came to the same conclusion.”

“What do you propose? Magic?”

“To some, I’m sure it’ll seem like it.”

19

The Norwegian authorities had allowed the bulk of Ragnar Fyrie’s crew to return to Reykjavik because they were simple sailors doing what the captain had asked of them. The six who’d remained behind with him in Sandefjord were officers, senior engineers, and the principal harpooner. They were stakeholders in the Hvalur Batur who shared in her profits and were thus considered as culpable as Captain Fyrie.

When it came to implementing Bell’s plan, the seven men and the captain worked with an efficiency born of sailors who’d risked their lives for one another so often that a fresh incident no longer required even a simple thanks. Orders need be given only once and were carried out in a timely fashion. None were questioned, no matter how arcane.

Thirty disassembled whale oil barrels were pulled from stores and knocked together in record time. The barrels had been lowered to a waiting motor skiff through a hatch in the starboard hull so that the guard watching the whaler had no idea anything was afoot. They were then transported to the barn behind Bell’s hotel, where the owner was being paid to keep a fire lit under a two-hundred-gallon steel tank.

Two men had been dispatched to the railroad machine shop near the station where Bell had, by prearrangement with a conductor on his train from Oslo, secured access to a pile of iron filings waste left over from routine brake cleaning. Another crew member had bought several twenty-kilogram bags of coarse salt from a commercial cannery and begun the laborious process of grinding it down to a fine powder.