Marion tried to pull away from the smaller woman. Katherine whipped the gouge back at her face. Bell had his derringer in his hand by then and was squeezing the trigger. O’Shay screamed a piercing “No!” and smashed his cane down on Bell’s arm. The gunshot was deafening in the confined space. Solomon Barlowe dove to the floor. Marion cried out, and Bell thought he had shot her. But it was Katherine Dee who fell.
O’Shay grabbed the girl under one powerful arm and flung the door open. Bell lunged for them. He tripped over Solomon Barlowe. By the time he had hurled himself through the door, he saw O’Shay pushing Katherine into a Packard driven by a uniformed chauffeur. Gunmen in black derbies stepped from behind the car and from doorways, aiming pistols.
“Marion, get down!” Bell roared. The pretty-boy bruisers of Riker & Riker’s private protection agency unleashed a scathing hail of gunfire. Wild ricochets smashed glass and blasted stone dust from the walls and diamonds from the window display. Pedestrians dropped to the sidewalk. Bell fired back as fast as he could pull the trigger. He heard the Packard roar away. He fired again, emptying his Browning. The big car screeched around a corner and crashed into something. But when the lead stopped flying and he galloped after it, the Packard was smoldering against a lamppost, and O’Shay, Katherine Dee, and their gunmen had gotten away. Bell ran back into the jewelry shop, his heart in his throat. Solomon Barlowe was groaning and holding his leg. Marion was on the floor behind the counter, eyes wide open.
Alive!
He knelt beside her. “Are you hit?”
She ran a hand over her face. Her skin was dead white. “I don’t think so,” she said in a small voice.
“Are you all right?”
“Where are they?”
“Got away. Don’t worry. They won’t get far.”
She was clenching something in her tightly closed fist, which she now pressed to her chest.
“What is that?”
Slowly, painfully, she forced her fingers to open. Nestled in her palm was the emerald, green and mysterious as the eye of a cat.
“I thought you didn’t like it,” Bell said.
Marion’s beautiful eyes roved across the broken glass and the walls pocked with bullet holes. “I’m not even scratched. Neither are you. It’s our lucky charm.”
“THE ENTIRE NEWARK fine-jewelry industry is in shock,” said Morris Weintraub, the stocky, white-haired patrician owner of Newark, New Jersey’s largest belt-buckle factory. “I’ve been buying gemstones from Riker and Riker since the Civil War. Back when there was only one Riker.”
“Did you know that Erhard Riker was adopted?”
“You don’t say? No, I didn’t.” Weintraub gazed across a sea of workbenches where jewelers labored in pure north light streaming through tall windows A speculative smile played on his lips, and he stroked his chin. “That explains a lot.”
“What do you mean?” asked Bell.
“He was such a nice man.”
“The father?”
“No! His father was a cold bastard.”
Bell exchanged incredulous glances with Archie Abbott.
The factory owner noticed. “I am a Jew,” he explained. “I know when a man dislikes me because I am a Jew. The father hid his hatred in order to conduct business, but hatred seeps out. He could not hide it completely. The son did not hate me. He was not so European as the old man.”
Bell and Archie exchanged another look. Weintraub said, “I mean, he acted like a good man. He was a gentleman in business and kindly in person. He is one of the very few people I buy from who I would invite into my own home. Not a man who would shoot up a jewelry shop on Maiden Lane. Not a bigot like his father.”
Archie said, “So I suppose you were not that upset when his father was killed in South Africa.”
“Nor was I surprised.”
“I beg your pardon?” asked Archie, and Issac Bell said sharply, “What do you mean by that?”
“I used to joke to my wife, ‘Herr Riker is a German agent.’ ”
“What made you say that?”
“He couldn’t resist boasting to me of his travels. But I noticed over many years that somehow his trips always led him to where Germany was making trouble. In 1870, he just happened to be in Alsace-Lorraine when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. He was on the island of Samoa in ’eighty-one when the United States, England, and Germany instigated their civil war. He was in Zanzibar when Germany stole her so-called East African Protectorate. He was in China when Germany took Tsingtao, and in South Africa when the Kaiser egged on the Boers fighting England.”
“Where,” Archie noted, “he was killed.”
“In an engagement led by General Smuts himself,” said Isaac Bell. “If he wasn’t a German spy, he was a master of coincidence. Thank you, Mr. Weintraub. You have been very helpful.”
On their way back to New York, Bell told Archie, “When I accused O’Shay of repaying the man who adopted him by becoming a murderer and a spy, he answered that rescuing Katherine from Hell’s Kitchen was ‘one’ of the ways he repaid him. He said, ‘I say it with pride.’ I realize now that he was bragging that he followed in his adopted father’s footsteps.”
“If the father who adopted him was a spy, does that mean that Riker-O’Shay spies for Germany? He was born in America. He was adopted by a German father. He attended public school in England and university in Germany. Where are his loyalties?”
“He’s a gangster,” said Bell. “He has no loyalties.”
“Where can he go now that he’s exposed?”
“Anywhere they’ll take him in. But not before he commits a final crime to benefit the nation that will protect a criminal.”
“Using those torpedoes,” said Archie.
“Against what?” wondered Bell.
TED WHITMARK WAS WAITING in the Van Dorn reception room when Bell got back to the Knickerbocker. He was holding his hat on his knees and could not meet Bell’s eye as he asked, “Is there someplace private we can talk, Mr. Bell?”
“Come on in,” Bell said, noting that Whitmark’s Harvard College tie was askew, his shoes scuffed, and his trousers in need of a pressing. He led him to his desk and moved a chair alongside so they could sit close and not be overheard. Whitmark sat, worrying his hands, gnawing his lip.
“How is Dorothy?” Bell asked to put him at ease.
“Well… she’s one of the things I want to talk about. But I’ll get to the main event first, if you don’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“You see, I, uh, I play cards. Often…”
“You gamble.”
“Yes. I gamble. And sometimes I gamble too much. I’ll hit a losing streak and, before I know it, I’m in over my head. All I’m trying to do is win back some of my losses, but sometimes it only gets worse.”
“Are you in a losing streak at the moment?” Bell asked.
“It looks that way. Yes, you could say that.” Again he fell silent.
“Can I assume that Dorothy is upset with this?”
“Well, yes, but that’s the least of it. I’ve been something of a fool. I’ve done several really stupid things. I thought I’d learned my lesson in San Francisco.”
“What happened in San Francisco?”
“I dodged a bullet out there, thanks to you.”
“What do you mean?” Bell asked, suddenly alert to a situation more serious than he had assumed.
“I mean when you stopped that cart from blowing up the Mare Island magazine, you saved my life. There would have been lot of innocent folks killed, and they would have been on my head.”
“Explain,” Bell said tersely.
“I gave them the pass and paperwork to get into the Mare Island Naval Shipyard.”
“Why?”
“I owed so much money. They were going to kill me.”
“Who?”
“Well, Commodore Tommy Thompson at first. Here in New York. Then he sold my debt to a guy who had a casino in the Barbary Coast and I lost more out there and he was going to kill me. He said they’d do it slow. But all I had to do to get out of it was give him one of my wagon passes and my company invoices and show ’em the ropes and everything. I know what you’re thinking, that I allowed a saboteur onto the base, but I didn’t realize that was what they wanted. I thought it was about them landing a big contract. I thought they were doing it for the money.”