Bell called out, and Harry Warren and two of his men trooped down the stairs. “Tommy says it wasn’t his idea to beat up little Eddie Tobin. Some fellow made him do it.”

“Some fellow?” Harry echoed scornfully. “Did this ‘some fellow’ who ordered you to beat up a Van Dorn happen to be the same fellow who ordered you to send Louis Loh and Harold Wing to blow up the magazine at Mare Island?”

“He didn’t order me. He paid me. There’s a difference.”

“Who?” Bell demanded.

“Bastard, left me to stick around and face the music.”

“Who?”

“Goddamned Eyes O’Shay. That’s who.”

“Eyes O’Shay?” Harry Warren echoed incredulously. “You take us for jackasses? Eyes O’Shay is dead fifteen years.”

“No he ain’t.”

“Harry,” Bell snapped. “Who is Eyes O’Shay?”

“Gopher kid, years ago. Vicious piece of work. A comer, ’til he disappeared.”

“I heard talk he was back,” muttered one of Harry’s detectives. “I didn’t believe it.”

“I still don’t.”

“I do,” said Isaac Bell. “The spy’s been acting like a gangster all along.”

A STREAK OF GOD

A STREAK OF GOD

Chapter 42

42

JUNE 1, 1908

NEW YORK

ISAAC BELL ASKED, “WHY DID THEY CALL HIM EYES?”

“If you got in a fight with him, he’d gouge your eye out,” said Tommy Thompson. “He fit a copper pick over his thumbnail. Now it’s made of stainless steel.”

“I imagine,” said Bell, “he didn’t get in many fights.”

“Not once word got around,” Tommy agreed.

“Other than that, what is he like?”

Tommy Thompson said, “If I’m going sit here yapping, I want a drink.”

Bell nodded. The Van Dorns produced an array of hip flasks. Tommy took long pulls from a couple and wiped his mouth with his bloody sleeve. “Other than gouging eyes, what’s Brian O’Shay like? He’s like he always was. A guy who can see around a corner.”

“Would you call him a natural leader?”

“A what?”

“A leader. Like you. You run your own gang. Is he that kind of a man?”

“All I know is he’s thinking all the time. Always ahead of you. Eyes could see inside of people.”

“If you’re telling us the truth, Tommy, that O’Shay is not dead, where is he?”

The gang leader swore he did not know.

“What name does he go by?”

“He didn’t say.”

“What does he look like?”

“He looks like anybody. Clerk in a store, guy owns a bank, bartender. I hardly recognized him. Duded up like a Fifth Avenue swell.”

“Big man?”

“No. A little guy.”

“Compared to you, Tommy, most guys are little. How tall is he?”

“Five-eight. Built like a fireplug. Strongest little guy I ever saw.” Bell continued conversationally, “He didn’t need the gouge to win a fight, did he?”

“No,” said Tommy, taking another slug of whiskey. “He just liked doing it.”