Tommy Thompson said, “If I’m going sit here yapping, I want a drink.”
Bell nodded. The Van Dorns produced an array of hip flasks. Tommy took long pulls from a couple and wiped his mouth with his bloody sleeve. “Other than gouging eyes, what’s Brian O’Shay like? He’s like he always was. A guy who can see around a corner.”
“Would you call him a natural leader?”
“A what?”
“A leader. Like you. You run your own gang. Is he that kind of a man?”
“All I know is he’s thinking all the time. Always ahead of you. Eyes could see inside of people.”
“If you’re telling us the truth, Tommy, that O’Shay is not dead, where is he?”
The gang leader swore he did not know.
“What name does he go by?”
“He didn’t say.”
“What does he look like?”
“He looks like anybody. Clerk in a store, guy owns a bank, bartender. I hardly recognized him. Duded up like a Fifth Avenue swell.”
“Big man?”
“No. A little guy.”
“Compared to you, Tommy, most guys are little. How tall is he?”
“Five-eight. Built like a fireplug. Strongest little guy I ever saw.” Bell continued conversationally, “He didn’t need the gouge to win a fight, did he?”
“No,” said Tommy, taking another slug of whiskey. “He just liked doing it.”
“Surely after he reappeared out of nowhere and paid you all that money, you had him followed.”
“I sent Paddy the Rat after him. Little bastard came back short one eye.”
Bell looked at one of the detectives, who was nodding agreement. “Yeah, I seen Paddy wearing a patch.”
“Disappeared, just like when we was kids. Vanished into thin air that time, too. Never thought we’d see him again. Thought he got thrown in the river.”
“By whom?” asked Bell.
The gang leader shrugged.
Harry Warren said, “A lot of people thought you were the one who threw him in the river, Tommy.”
“Yeah, well a lot of people thought wrong. I used to think Billy Collins done it. ’Til Eyes came back.”
Bell glanced at Harry Warren.
“Dope addict,” Harry said. “Haven’t heard his name in years. Billy Collins ran with Eyes and Tommy. They made quite the trio. Remember, Tommy? Rolling drunks, robbing pushcarts, selling dope, beatin’ up anybody got in their way. O’Shay was the worst, worse than the Commodore here, even worse than Billy Collins. Tommy was sweetness and light compared to those two. The last anybody expected was Tommy taking over the Gophers. Except you got lucky, Tommy, didn’t you? Eyes disappeared, and Billy got the habit.”
Isaac Bell asked, “Tommy, why did you think Billy Collins threw Eyes in the river?”
“Because the last night I ever saw Eyes, they was drinking together.”
“And today you have no idea where O’Shay is?”
“Just like always. He vanished into thin air.”
“Where is Billy Collins?”
The wounded gang leader shrugged, winced, and took another pull on a flask. “Where do hop fiends go? Under a rock. In a sewer.”
43
TEN MILES OFF FIRE ISLAND, A BARRIER BEACH BETWEEN Long Island and the Atlantic Ocean, fifty miles from New York, three vessels converged. The light of day started to slip over the western horizon, and stars took shape in the east. Atlantic Ocean swells were bunching up on the shallow continental shelf. Neither captain of the larger vessels-a 4,000-ton steam freighter with a tall funnel and two king posts, and an oceangoing tugboat hipped up to a three-track railcar barge-was pleased with the prospect of getting close enough to transfer cargo in such choppy seas, particularly with the wind shifting fitfully from sea to shore. When they saw that the third vessel, a broad-beamed little catboat powered only by sail, was steered by a petite redheaded girl, they began snarling at their helmsmen.
It looked like the rendezvous would end before it started. Then the girl took advantage of a shifty gust to bring her craft about so smartly that the steamer’s mate said, “She’s a seaman,” and Eyes O’Shay said to the tugboat captain, “Don’t lose your nerve. We can always throw you overboard and run the boat ourselves.”
He spotted Rafe Engels waving from the steamer’s bridge wing.
Rafe Engels was a gunrunner wanted by the British Special Irish Branch for arming rebels of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, and by the Czar’s secret police for supplying Russian revolutionists. O’Shay had first met him on the Wilhelm der Grosse. They had danced carefully around each other, and again on the Lusitania, probing warily at the kindred spirit they each sensed behind the other’s elaborate disguise. There were differences: the gunrunner, always on the rebels’ side, was an idealist, the spy was not. But over the years they had worked out several trades. This exchange of torpedoes for a submarine would be their biggest.
“Where’s the Holland?” O’Shay called across the water.
“Under you!”
O’Shay peered into the waves. The water started bubbling like a boiling pot. Something dark and stealthy took shape under the bubbles. A round turret of armor steel emerged from the white froth. And then, quite suddenly, a glistening hull parted the sea. It was one hundred feet long and menacing as a reef.
A hinged cover opened on top of the turret. A bearded man thrust his head and shoulders into the air, looked around, and climbed out. He was Hunt Hatch, at one time the Holland Company’s chief trials captain, now on the run from Special Irish Branch. His crew followed him out, one after another, until five Republican Brotherhood fighters who had pledged their lives to win Home Rule for Ireland were standing on the deck, blinking in the light and breathing deeply of the air.
“Treat them well,” Engels had demanded as they clasped hands cementing their deal. “They are brave men.”
“Like my own family,” O’Shay had promised.
All had served as Royal Navy submariners. All had ended up in British prisons. All hated England. They dreamed, O’Shay knew, that when the Americans discovered that the submarine and its electric torpedoes were from England, it would appear that England had instigated an attack to cripple American battleship production. They dreamed that when war engulfed Europe, angry Americans would not side with England. Then Germany would defeat England, and Ireland would be free.
A lovely dream, thought the spy. It would serve no one better than Eyes O’Shay.