Wrecker got you in his sights the instant Osgood Hennessy sealed his deal to take control of the Jersey Central, which gained him access to the city.”
The harbor vessel that had sparked Abbott’s civic pride was a long, low-in-the-water steam lighter, a materials and work vessel considerably bigger than a tugboat. She belonged to the newly formed Eastern Marine Division of the Southern Pacific Railroad and flew her colors more boldly than the local work vessels plying the Port of New York. A brand-new vermilion flag snapped in the breeze, and four red rings, bright as sealing wax, circled her soot-smeared smokestack.
Even her old name, Oxford, had been painted over. Lillian I now circled her cruiser stern. Hennessy had renamed every lighter and tugboat in the Eastern Marine Division fleet, Lillian I through Lillian XII, and had ordered SOUTHERN PACIFIC RAILROAD painted on their transoms and wheelhouses in bright-white letters.
“Just in case,” Archie remarked, “the Wrecker doesn’t know he’s here.”
“He knows,” Bell said grimly.
His restlessly probing blue eyes were dark with concern. New York City was the Holy Land, as Harper’s Weekly had put it, to which all railroaders longed make a pilgrimage. Osgood Hennessy had achieved that goal, and Isaac Bell knew in his heart that the Wrecker’s taunting note on the magazine’s cartoon of the railroad president was no bluff. The murderous saboteur was bent on a public attack. The next battle would be fought here.
Stone-faced, Bell watched one of the countless tugboats shunting a rail barge, or car float, past the pier. Deckhands cut the barge loose, and it continued under its own momentum to glide smoothly and accurately as a billiard ball in for a gentle landing. In the short time it took longshoremen to secure the barge’s lines, the tug had seized another barge filled with a dozen freight cars and shoved it into the strong current, urging it toward Manhattan. Similar maneuvers were being repeated everywhere Bell looked, like the moving parts in a colossal, well-oiled machine. But despite every precaution he had taken, the rail yards, the piers, and the car floats looked to him like the Wrecker’s playground.
He had put a score of Van Dorn operatives in charge of the terminal. Superintendent Jethro Watt had furnished one hundred handpicked Southern Pacific special railway police, and for a week nothing had moved in or out that they did not approve. No cargo went unchecked. Dynamite trains especially were searched car by car, box by box. They had discovered an astonishingly casual approach to the handling of high explosives in Jersey City, which was the largest city in the state and as densely peopled as Manhattan and Brooklyn across the harbor.
Under Bell’s regime, armed guards boarded the dynamite trains miles before even entering the yards. After allowing the trains to enter, the guards oversaw every step of the off-loading, as boxcars bearing twenty-five tons of dynamite dispensed their deadly cargo into steam lighters and barges and into smaller two-ton loads for wagons drawn by draft horses. Van Dorn detectives intercepted all but that which would be immediately shipped out to contractors.
Still, Bell knew that the Wrecker would find no shortage of high explosives. Dynamite was in such demand that trainloads arrived on the powder pier day and night. New Yorkers were blowing up the city’s bedrock of mica schist to dig subways and cellars in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. New Jerseyites were blasting traprock from hilltops to make concrete. Quarrymen were carving building stone out of the Hudson River cliffs, from New Jersey’s Palisades all the way up to West Point. Railroad builders were blasting approaches to the Hudson tunnels being bored under the river.
“When the rail tunnels connecting New Jersey and New York are finished next year,” Archie bragged, “Osgood Hennessy can park his special eight blocks from Times Square.”
“Thank the Lord the tunnels are not finished,” said Bell. “If they were, the Wrecker would try to blow them with a Southern Pacific Limited trapped under the river.”
Archie Abbott flaunted the New Yorker’s disdain for districts west of the Hudson in general, and the state of New Jersey in particular, by reminding Isaac Bell that over the years entire sections of Jersey City and nearby Hoboken had been periodically leveled by dynamite accidents, most recently in 1904.
Bell did not need any reminding. The word about the new police presence had gotten around, and tips had poured in from a fearful public. Just yesterday, they had they caught some fool in a wagon carting a half ton of dynamite for the New York and New Jersey Trap Rock Company up Newark Avenue. Failure to dodge a trolley would have resulted in a deadly explosion on the busiest street in Jersey City. The company was protesting mightily about the expense of being forced to take dynamite up the Hackensack River to their Secaucus mine. But the Jersey City fire commissioner, not at all pleased by all the public attention, had stood untypically firm.
“These Jersey harebrains won’t need any help from the Wrecker to blow themselves sky-high one of these days,” Archie Abbott predicted, “purely through negligence.”
“Not on my watch,” said Isaac Bell.
“In fact,” Abbott persisted. “If there were an explosion, how would we know it was the Wrecker and not a Jersey harebrain?”
“We’ll know. If he manages to get around us, it will be the biggest explosion New York has ever seen.”
Accordingly, Bell had stationed railway police on every train and boat and freight wagon owned by the Southern Pacific. He backed them up with Van Dorn operatives and inspectors borrowed from the Bureau of Explosives, newly founded by the railroads to promote safe transportation of dynamite, gunpowder, and TNT.
Every man carried the lumberjack’s sketch. Bell’s hopes for it had been bolstered by a report on the Ogden disaster from Nicolas Alexander, the self-important head of the Denver office, who, despite his flaws, happened to be an able detective. Some had wondered if the Wrecker had sought Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton out deliberately to attack Van Dorn agents. But Alexander had confirmed Bell’s initial conclusion that Wally and Mack had pursued the Wrecker down an alley. Which meant they had recognized him from the sketch. And the by-now-familiar sword-puncture wounds left no doubt the Wrecker had killed them with his own hand.
“My friend,” said Archie, “you’re worrying too much. We have every base covered. We’ve been at it a week. Not a peep out of the Wrecker. The boss is tickled pink.”
Bell knew that Joseph Van Dorn would not be tickled entirely pink until they arrested the Wrecker or shot him dead. But it was true that the powerful Van Dorn presence had already had the wonderful side effect of apprehending various criminals and fugitives. They had arrested a Jersey City gangster masquerading as a Jersey Central railroad detective, a trio of bank robbers, and a corrupt Fire Commission inspector who had taken bribes to overlook the dangerous practice of storing dynamite on steam radiators to keep it from freezing in the winter cold.
The powder pier worried Bell the most, even though it swarmed with railroad police. Isolated as far as possible from the main piers, it was still too close in Bell’s opinion. And as many as six cars at a time were off-loading dynamite onto the lighters that nuzzled around it. Taking no chances, Bell had put in command of the railway police the seasoned Van Dorn agent Eddie Edwards, who knew well the rail yards, the docks, and the local gangs.
WONG LEE WALKED TO the Communipaw piers, his tiny frame bent nearly in half under the weight of a huge laundry sack. A railroad detective loomed over him, demanding where the hell chink boy thought he was going.
“Chop-chop, laundry for captain,” Wong answered in the pidgin English that he knew the detective expected of him.
“What ship?”
Deliberately mispronouncing the /s and rs, he named the Julia Reidhead, a steel three-masted barque carrying bones for fertilizer, and the cop let him pass.
But when he got to the barque where Polish day laborers were unloading the reeking cargo, he plodded past and climbed the gangplank to a battered two-masted schooner in the lumber trade.
“Hey, chink?” shouted the mate. “Where the hell are you going?”
“Captain Yatkowski, chop-chop, clothes.”