The Spy (Isaac Bell 3)

“Let them try. All right, Louis. Off you go. Hope you enjoy being luggage for the next five days.”

“You will never make me talk.”

“We’ll find a way,” Bell promised.

LUXURY TRAIN TICKETS, a suit of “wealthy English writer” tweed, a gold pocket watch, expensive luggage, and a hundred dollars were all it had cost the spy to hire the defrocked J. L. Skelton to masquerade as Arnold Bennett. So reported Horace Bronson, the head of the San Francisco office, in a wire waiting for Isaac Bell in Ogden. But although threats of a long prison term had frightened him into talking freely, Skelton had no idea why he had been hired to pretend to escort so-called missionary students.

“He swore on a stack of Bibles,” Bronson noted wryly, “that he did not know why he was then paid another hundred dollars to revert to clergy status and hold a service in the Mare Island chapel. And he denied any knowledge of why Harold Wing and Louis Loh tried to make it look like the Japanese blew up the Mare Island magazine to cripple ships of the Great White Fleet.” Horace Bronson believed him. So did Isaac Bell. The spy was an expert at making others do his dirty work. Like Arthur Langner’s big guns, he stayed miles away from the explosion.

The source of the pass that Loh had used to get his wagon aboard the ferry into the navy yard would have been a clue. But the paper itself had burned up in the explosion, along with the wagon and the truck. Even the mule was no help. It had been stolen in Vaca the day before. The guards, who had admitted hundreds of trucks and wagons, could not pinpoint any helpful information about the passes or the wagon load of strawberries they had allowed on the island.

Two days later, when the train was highballing across Illinois, Bell brought Louis Loh a newspaper from Chicago. The tong gangster lay on a fold-down cot in the dark, windowless baggage car with a wrist and ankle handcuffed to the metal frame. The PS operative guarding him was dozing on a stool. “Get yourself some coffee,” Bell ordered, and when they were alone he showed Louis the newspaper. “Hot off the press. News from Tokyo.”

“What do I care about Tokyo?”

“The Emperor of Japan has invited America’s Great White Fleet to make an official visit when it crosses the Pacific.”

The bland mask that Louis Loh habitually wore on his face slipped a hair. Bell detected a minute slumping of his shoulders that broadcast an inner collapse of hope that his failed attack had still somehow provoked a clash between Japan and the United States.

Bell was puzzled. Why did Louis care so? He had already been caught. He was facing prison, if not the hangman, and had lost the money he would have been paid for success. What did he care? Unless he had done it for reasons other than money.

“We can assume, Louis, that His Imperial Majesty would not have invited the fleet if you had managed to blow up the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in his name.”

“What do I care about the Emperor of Japan?”

“That is my question. Why would a Chinese tong hatchet man try to inflame U.S.-Japanese antagonism?”

“Go to hell.”

“And for whom? Who did you do it for, Louis?”

Louis Loh smiled mockingly. “Save your breath. Torture me. Nothing will make me talk.”

“We’ll find a way,” Bell promised. “In New York.”

Heavily armed Chicago Van Dorns backed up by railroad police transferred Louis Loh from the Overland Limited across LaSalle Station to the 20th Century Limited. No one tried to snatch Louis or kill him, which Bell had half expected. He decided to leave him in the care of Protection Services until the 20th Century got to New York. And Bell continued to stay out of Louis’s sight at Grand Central, where another squad of Van Dorns put Louis in a truck and drove him to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Lowell Falconer was on hand to smooth the way for Louis Loh to spend his first night in a Navy brig.

Bell waited for the captain on his turbine yacht. Dyname was moored to a navy yard pier, between Hull 44’s ways and a huge wooden barge attended by a seagoing tugboat. On the barge, engineers were erecting a cage mast. It was a full-scale rendition of the twelve-to-one scale model that Bell had seen in Farley Kent’s design loft.

High overhead, Hull 44’s stern filled the blue sky. Hull plating was creeping higher up her frame, and she more and more was taking the shape of a ship. If she became half the fighting ship Falconer had envisioned and Alasdair MacDonald and Arthur Langner had labored to make swift and deadly, Bell thought, then this view of the back of her was one the enemy would never see until their own ships were adrift and on fire.

Falconer came aboard after he got the prisoner settled. He reported that Louis’s last words as they clanged the door shut were, “Tell Isaac Bell I will not talk.”

“He’ll talk.”

“I would not count on that,” Falconer cautioned. “When I was in the Far East, Japs and Chinese virtually eviscerated captured spies. Not a peep.”

The Van Dorn detective and the Navy captain stood on the foredeck as Dyname backed into the East River, her nine propellers spinning with a smoothness that Bell still found eerie.

“There is something more to Louis Loh,” he mused. “I can’t yet put my finger on what makes him different.”

“Strikes me as being fairly low down the totem pole.”

“I don’t think so,” said Bell. “He conducts himself with pride, like a man who has a mission.”

“IT’S AN UP-AND-DOWN WORLD for the New York gangs,” said Harry Warren, and the handful of Van Dorn detectives who kept track of them nodded solemnly. “One day they’re high-and-mighty, next they’re in the gutter.”

The back room of the Knickerbocker headquarters was gray with cigar and cigarette smoke. A bottle of whiskey Isaac Bell had bought was making the rounds.