“That wasn’t my idea!” Tommy protested.
“Wasn’t your idea?” Bell retorted. “Who ramrods the Gophers?”
“It weren’t my idea,” Tommy repeated sullenly.
“You’re asking me to believe that the famous Commodore Tommy Thompson, who’s killed off every rival to command the toughest gang in New York, takes orders from someone else?”
Resentment boiled behind Tommy’s tough façade. Bell played on it, laughing, “Maybe you are telling the truth. Maybe you are just a saloonkeeper.”
“Goddammit!” Tommy Thompson erupted. He tried to get out of the chair. The tall detective restrained him with a warning gesture. “Commodore Tommy don’t take orders from no one.”
Bell called out, and Harry Warren and two of his men trooped down the stairs. “Tommy says it wasn’t his idea to beat up little Eddie Tobin. Some fellow made him do it.”
“Some fellow?” Harry echoed scornfully. “Did this ‘some fellow’ who ordered you to beat up a Van Dorn happen to be the same fellow who ordered you to send Louis Loh and Harold Wing to blow up the magazine at Mare Island?”
“He didn’t order me. He paid me. There’s a difference.”
“Who?” Bell demanded.
“Bastard, left me to stick around and face the music.”
“Who?”
“Goddamned Eyes O’Shay. That’s who.”
“Eyes O’Shay?” Harry Warren echoed incredulously. “You take us for jackasses? Eyes O’Shay is dead fifteen years.”
“No he ain’t.”
“Harry,” Bell snapped. “Who is Eyes O’Shay?”
“Gopher kid, years ago. Vicious piece of work. A comer, ’til he disappeared.”
“I heard talk he was back,” muttered one of Harry’s detectives. “I didn’t believe it.”
“I still don’t.”
“I do,” said Isaac Bell. “The spy’s been acting like a gangster all along.”
A STREAK OF GOD
42
JUNE 1, 1908
NEW YORK
ISAAC BELL ASKED, “WHY DID THEY CALL HIM EYES?”
“If you got in a fight with him, he’d gouge your eye out,” said Tommy Thompson. “He fit a copper pick over his thumbnail. Now it’s made of stainless steel.”
“I imagine,” said Bell, “he didn’t get in many fights.?
?
“Not once word got around,” Tommy agreed.
“Other than that, what is he like?”