Scanning the arriving audience, Bell suddenly locked eyes with Lillian Hennessy as she took a seat across the way. She looked more beautiful than ever in a gold gown and with her blond hair piled high upon her head. He smiled at her, and her face lit up with genuine pleasure, forgiving him apparently for wrecking her Packard automobile. In fact, he reflected worriedly, she was smiling at him like a girl on the brink of total infatuation-which was the last thing either of them needed.
“Look at that girl!” blurted Abbott.
“Archie, if you lean out any farther, you’ll fall into the cheap seats.”
“Worth it if she’ll weep over my body-you’ll tell her how I died. Wait a minute, she’s smiling at you.”
“Her name is Lillian,” said Bell. “That Southern Pacific steam lighter you were gawking at this afternoon is named after her. As is everything that floats that’s owned by the railroad. She’s old Hennessy’s daughter.”
“Rich, too? God in heaven. Who’s the stuffed shirt with her? He looks familiar.”
“Senator Charles Kincaid.”
“Oh yes. The Hero Engineer.”
Bell returned Kincaid’s nod coolly. He was not surprised that Kincaid’s check for poker losses had still not arrived at the Yale Club. Men who dealt from the bottom of the deck tended not to pay their debts when they thought they could get away with it.
“The Senator certainly got lucky.”
“I don’t think so,” said Bell. “She’s too rich and independent to fall for his line.”
“What makes you say that?”
“She told me.”
“Why would she confide in you, Isaac?”
“She was polishing off her third bottle of Mumm.”
“So yougot lucky.”
“I got lucky with Marion, and I’m going to stay lucky with Marion.”
“Love,” Archie mock mourned in a doleful voice as the houselights began to dim, “stalks us like death and taxes.”
A grand dowager, wrapped in yards of silk, behatted in feathers, and dripping diamonds, leaned from the next box to rap Abbott’s shoulder imperiously with her lorgnette.
“Quiet down, young man. The show is starting… Oh, Archie, it’s you. How is your mother?”
“Very well, thank you, Mrs. Vanderbilt. I’ll tell her you asked.”
“Please do. And Archie? I could not help but overhear. The gentleman with you is correct. The young lady has little regard for that loathsomelegislator. And, I must say, she could handily repair your family’s tattered fortunes.”
“Mother would be delighted,” Abbott agreed, adding in a mutter for only Bell to hear, “As Mother regards the Vanderbilts as uncultivated ‘new money,’ you can imagine her horror were I to bring home the daughter of a ‘shirtsleeve railroader.”’
“You should be so lucky,” said Bell.
“I know. But Mother’s made it clear, no one below an Astor.”
Bell shot a look across the boxes at Lillian, and a brilliant scheme leaped full blown into his mind. A scheme to derail Miss Lillian’s growing infatuation with him and simultaneously get poor Archie’s mother off Archie’s back. But it would require the restraint of a diplomat and the light touch of a jeweler. So all he said was, “Pipe down! The show is starting.”
IN THE MIDDLE OF the Hudson River, a mile west of Broadway, the pirated Southern Pacific steam lighter LillianI dashed downstream. The outflowing tide doubled the speed of the current, making up for the time they had lost repairing her steering gear. She steamed in company with the wooden sailing schooner that had captured her. The wind was southeast, thick with rain. The schooner’s sails were close-hauled, her gasoline engine churning its hardest to keep up with Lillian I.
The schooner’s captain, the smuggler from Yonkers, felt a twinge of sentiment for the old girl who was about to be blown to smithereens. A minor twinge, Yatkowski thought, smiling, having been paid twice the value of the schooner to drown the steam lighter’s crew in the river and stand by to rescue the Chinaman when they sent her on her last voyage. The boss paying the bills had made it clear: look out for the Chinaman until the job was done. Bring him back in one piece. The boss had use for the explosives expert.
THE ANNA HELD GIRLS, acclaimed by the producer to be “the most beautiful women ever gathered in one theater,” were dancing up a storm, in short white dresses, wide hats, and red sashes, as they sang “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave.”
“Some of those women are imported straight from Paris,” Abbott whispered.
“I don’t see Anna Held,” Bell muttered back, familiar as any man in the nation under the age of ninety with the French actress’s expressive eyes, eighteen-inch waist, and resultantly curvaceous hips. Her skin, it was claimed, was conditioned by daily baths in milk. Bell glanced across at Lillian Hennessy, who was watching with rapt attention, and he suddenly realized that her tutor, Mrs. Comden, was shaped very much like Anna Held. Did President Hennessy pour her milk baths?
Abbott applauded loudly, and the audience followed suit. “For some reason, known best to Mr. Ziegfeld,” he told Bell over the roar, “Anna Held is not one of the Anna Held Girls. Even though she’s his common-law wife.”
“I doubt the entire Van Dorn Detective Agency can get him out of that fix.”
The Follies of 1907raced on. Burlesque comedians argued about a bar bill in German accents like Weber and Fields and a suddenly sobered Bell fixed on Mack and Wally. When Annabelle Whitford came on stage in a black bathing costume as the Gibson Bathing Girl, Abbott nudged Bell and whispered, “Remember the nickelodeon when we were kids? She did the butterfly dance.”
Bell was listening with half attention, pondering the Wrecker’s plan. Where would he attack now that they had all bases covered? And what, Bell wondered, had he himself missed? The grim answer was that whatever he missed, the Wrecker would see.
The orchestra had struck up a raucous “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad,” and Abbott nudged Bell again.
“Look. They put our client in the act.”
The burlesque comedians were posing in front of a painted backdrop of a Southern Pacific locomotive steaming up behind them as if about to run them over. Even paying half attention, it was clear that the comedian in colonial dress cavorting on a hobby horse was supposed to be Paul Revere. His costar in engineer’s striped cap and overalls represented Southern Pacific Railroad president Osgood Hennessy.
Paul Revere galloped up, waving a telegram.
“Telegram from the United States Senate, President Hennessy.”
“Hand it over, Paul Revere!” Hennessy snatched it from the horseman and read aloud, “‘Please, sir, telegraph instructions. You forgot to tell us how to vote.”’
“What are your instructions to the senators, President Hennessy?”
“The railroad is coming. The railroad is coming.”
“How should they vote?”
“One if by land.”
“Shine one lantern in the steeple if the railroad comes by land?”
“Bribes, dummkopf! Not lanterns. Bribes!”
“How many bribes by sea?”
“Two if by-”
Isaac Bell leaped from his seat.
24
IN THE DARK HOLD OF THE STEAM LIGHTER LILLIAN I,WONG Lee was finishing his intricate wiring by the light of an Eveready wooden bicycle lantern powered by three dry cell “D” batteries. Wong Lee was grateful for it, recalling with no nostalgia the old days of connecting dynamite fuses by the light of an open flame. Thank the gods for electricity, which provided light to work by and power to ignite detonators with uncanny precision.