He kept hunting, as the stockmen began returning from the piers, the rail yards, and the city of Weehawken, driving captured steers that shambled into the yards too exhausted to pose any threat. Evening shadows cast by the stone cliffs of the Palisades were growing long when the Van Dorn detective stumbled upon a curved brick structure a few inches below the cobblestones. It was a circle of brick and mortar a full six feet in diameter, partly covered by a thick cast-iron disk. He knelt to inspect the disk. It had a date in raised numbers: 1877.

A stockman came along, cracking a whip. “What is this?” Bell demanded.

“Old manhole cover.”

“I see that. What does it cover?”

“Old sewer, I guess. There’s a few of ’em around. They used to drain the manure . . . Say, what the heck moved it? Must weigh a ton.”

“A strong man,” Bell mused. He peered into the darkness under it. He could see a brick-lined shaft. “Does it drain to the river?”

“Used to. Probably stops under one of them piers now. You see where they filled in the water and built the pier?”

Bell ran in search of a flashlight and hurried back with one he bought from a railroad cop. He lowered himself into the shaft, hunched under the low brick ceiling, and started walking. The tunnel ran straight and sloped slightly. It smelled of cow dung and decades of damp. And as the stockman predicted, after nearly a quarter mile he found a timber bisecting it vertically. Judging by the broken-brick rubble scattered around it, Bell reckoned it was a piling unknowingly driven down through the long-forgotten disused sewer by the builders of the pier.

The tall detective squeezed around it and walked toward the sound of rushing water. Now he could smell the river. The brick grew slippery, and the flashlight revealed streaks of moss, as if the walls were wetted twice daily when the tide rose. He passed another vertical timber and came abruptly to the mouth of the sewer. This would have been the end, underwater at high tide, originally extending into the river forty years ago before landfill extended the shore.

At his feet, a torrent of ebbing saltwater tide and freshwater river current raced toward the sea. Overhead, he saw the shadows of a dense frame of piles and timbers—the underbelly of the pier. He stepped onto a final crumbling lip of brick and looked around.

“What took you so long?” said a voice.

Isaac Bell had a split second to train his light on a bearded face, slick with blood, before Harry Frost hurled a pile-driver punch.

Chapter 20

20

WITH FOUR YEARS of college boxing and ten years as a Van Dorn agent, including an investigation in the Arizona Territory disguised as an itinerant prizefighter, and another as a lumberjack, Isaac Bell reacted by rolling with the punch.