“If the boss won’t pay, I will,” said Bell. “How is he?”

“They kicked him in the face with axheads in their boots, cracked his skull with a lead pipe, broke his right arm and both legs.”

“Is he going to make it?”

“The Tobins are Staten Island scowmen—oysters, tugboats, smuggling—so he’s a tough kid. Or was. Hard to say how a man comes out of a beating like that. Near as I can tell there were four of them. He didn’t stand a chance.”

Bell went into the room and stood with clenched fists over the unconscious detective. His entire head was swathed in thick, white bandages seeping blood. A doctor was sliding a stethoscope incrementally across his chest. A nurse stood by in starched linen. “Spare no expense,” Bell said. “I want a nurse with him day and night.”

He rejoined Harry Warren in the hall. “It’s your town, Harry, what are we going to do about this?”

The gang expert hesitated, clearly not happy with the answer he had to deliver. “One on one they don’t mess with Van Dorns. But the Gophers outnumber us by a lot, and if comes to war, they’re fighting on their own territory.”

“It already has come to war,” said Isaac Bell.

“The cops won’t be any help. The way the city works, politicians, builders, the church, the cops, and gangsters divide it up. Long as nobody gets so greedy that the reformers take hold, they’re not going to bother each other over a private detective getting beat up. So we’re on our own. Listen, Isaac, this is odd. It’s not Tommy Thompson’s way to take on trouble he doesn’t have to. Sending a message telling us to back off? You do something like that to a rival gang—the Dusters or the Five Pointers. He knows you don’t do that to the Van Dorns. He’s as much as admitting he’s taking orders from the spy.”

“I want you to send a message back.”

“I can get the word passed to people who will tell him, if that’s what you mean.”

“Tell them that Isaac Bell is wiring his old friend Jethro Watt—Chief of the Southern Pacific Railroad Police—asking him to dispatch two hundred yard bulls to New York to guard the Eleventh Avenue freight sidings.”

“Can you do that?”

“Jethro is always spoiling for a fight, and I know for a fact that the railroads are getting fed up with their freight trains being robbed. Tommy Thompson will think twice before he hits a Van Dorn again. The SP’s cinder dicks may be the dregs but they’re tough as nails, and the only thing they fear is Jethro. Until they get here, none of our boys go alone. Two Van Dorns or more on the job, and careful when they’re off duty.”