“Hang on to Clyde,” Bell whispered. “Don’t let him ashore.”
“Where you going?”
“I’m going to find out why the Gophers are staring at Clyde like they want to eat him for lunch.”
Bell turned to Clyde Lynds. “Stay here with Archie. Do not leave the ship until I come back for you.”
“What’s up?”
Bell shoved past the seamen at the embarkation port and jumped for the top of the Second Class gangway, which the longshoremen were pivoting toward the ship. It was five feet short of being secured to the hull, and it swayed wildly under his weight. Bell ran down it and into the waiting room.
“Hold on there!” shouted a Cunard official.
Isaac Bell brushed past him and headed straight for Blinky Armstrong, who had pocketed his opera glasses and was glowering up at Clyde Lynds and smacking a meaty fist into a stony palm. The tall detective was twenty feet away from the gangster, his progress slowed by thickening crowds, when suddenly a woman screamed. The sound parting her lips was as much a shout as a scream, a feral noise that spoke more hate than fear.
Two gangsters were fighting, rolling around on the asphalt, kicking and gouging and smashing each other with blackjacks. Blood flew. Two more piled on, and ordinary people ran screaming from the vicious tangle. Only when a flying wedge of gangsters tore through the crowd, hurling men, women, and children from their path, and swinging fists and lengths of lead pipe, did Isaac Bell realize that the newcomers were not more Gophers but attackers from a rival gang.
The melee spread like wildfire. Fifteen men pummeled one another. A tall cop charged, swinging his nightstick. Strong and agile, he floored three gangsters like bowling pins. A fallen man’s boot snagged his ankle, and the tall cop went down in the tangle and disappeared as if swallowed whole.
Knives flashed, eliciting angry shouts and screams of pain.
Then a shot rang out, stunningly loud.
Wild-eyed gangsters ran to their women cheering on the sidelines, snatched their revolvers, and raked the pier with gunfire. Bullets banged on corrugated-iron doors and shattered glass. Citizens nearby flattened themselves on the asphalt, and Bell saw the way suddenly clear as if a swaying field of wheat had been mowed by a giant McCormick reaper. He saw Blinky Armstrong and two of his Gophers sprint toward the West Street portal, trampling cowering citizens and knocking down those too terrified to move.
Isaac Bell tore after them.
Halfway to West Street, they ducked into a stairwell.
Bell followed, pounding down steel steps that led to the baggage deck below. The Gophers were racing alongside the Mauretania toward the rows of doors that led off the pier onto West Street. Before they could get out the doors, squads of cops arrived on the run, reserves from nearby station houses, and the Gophers and the rivals who had attacked them were suddenly in a mad rush to avoid arrest.
Instead of trying to escape directly toward West Street, where they could melt into the neighborhoods, they turned back toward the water to get rid of their weapons. Revolvers, pocket pistols, and sleeve guns clanged against Mauretania’s black hull and splashed into the slip.
Isaac Bell cut the corner of the dogleg the gangsters had turned to the slip and caught up with them. He was close enough to see the seams in Armstrong’s coat and was just about to launch a diving tackle at the big man’s ankles when he passed the Mauretania’s bow and could suddenly see two hundred feet across the slip to the next pier. Lighters were moored there to shuttle sheets, towels, napkins, and tablecloths to the city’s laundries. Chandlers’ boats waited to deliver fresh supplies. Tugboats maneuvered coal barges with shovel-wielding trimmers to replenish Mauretania’s bunkers.
Oblivious to the tumult on the pier — or capitalizing on the distraction of fleeing gangsters and pursuing cops — two bill posters steered a little steam launch under the flare of Mauretania’s bow, took up long-handled brushes, and began to plaster advertisements on the express liner’s hull as if she were a billboard.
THE ELECTRIC THEATER
323 West 14th Street
Finest
MOVING PICTURE PALACE
in
New York City
“NEW SHOWS DAILY”
Twenty more cops stormed in the West Street doors.
The Gophers jinked abruptly to the right.
Isaac Bell veered after them.
The Gopher ahead of Armstrong leaped from the pier toward the landward edge of the slip, missed his footing, and fell into the water. Armstrong jumped next, made it, and ran past Mauretania’s bow. Bell leaped the same watery corner and landed running full tilt. He put on a burst of speed to dive for Armstrong. But just as he was about to launch himself in the air, he sensed as much as saw in the corner of his eye an eerie flicker of a familiar grim silhouette moving down the side of the ship with sure-footed grace.
15
Isaac Bell skidded to a stop, hardly believing his eyes. Coal chutes gaped open along the middle of the hull, fifteen feet above the barges. Beneath each hung staging, wooden platforms suspended by ropes for the trimmers to stand on. On the farthest stage, halfway back along the Mauretania’s hull, four hundred feet toward the river — and nearly obscured by shadows and work gangs hoisting buckets from the barges into the chutes — crouched the long-armed, almost simian silhouette of the kidnapper Bell had seen jump from the boat deck the night they sailed from Liverpool.
Bell looked for the fastest route out there. It would take too long to go back through the ship. He had to get across the water. He spotted the enterprising bill posters slathering the Mauretania with advertisements from the bobbing perch of their steam launch.
“Bill posters! You men, there! Bill posters!”
They heard him, he saw by the way they ducked their heads, but their only response was to glue faster. Accustomed to being chased off private property, they were trying to slap on as many ads as they could until they had to run from shipowners and pier officials. Before Isaac Bell could get their attention, the man that Professor Beiderbecke had dubbed the Akrobat glided down a rope holding a stage. He dropped lightly onto a barge riding high in the water that the trimmers had unloaded. A tug was already approaching, deckhands poised with lines, to back the empty away and make room for a fresh load.
The Acrobat, Bell realized, had timed his drop to coincide with the barge’s removal. Dispensing fat bribes to the boatmen, he would ride the empty barge ashore in the guise of an American trimmer and step onto dry land in a distant coal yard, neatly dodging the customs agents and immigration officials guarding the Mauretania’s pier.
Bell cupped his hands. “Fifty dollars for a boat ride.”
The bill posters’ eyes swiveled at him like searchlights.
Bell yanked his wallet from his coat and waved the money.
A poster that proclaimed
DREAMLAND THEATER
9 West 9th Street
NEW “MOVIES” EVERY DAY
was abandoned in a flash.
One man used his brush like a barge pole to shove off the Mauretania as if the ship were on fire while the other seized the helm and shoved the steam quadrant full ahead. The launch shot toward the pier. Bell jumped eight feet to the deck, nearly capsizing the narrow craft, and pointed at the tug hipped alongside the empty coal barge. “Follow that barge.”