He splashed more liquor in Bell’s glass and refilled his own. “ England’s HMS Dreadnought and the German dreadnought copies have longer range, stronger armor, and dazzling speed. Our ‘fleet,’ which is simply the old Atlantic Squadron tarted up, is a flock of pre-dreadnought battleships.”

“What’s the difference?”

“A pre-dreadnought battleship is like a middleweight fighter who learned to box in college. He has no business in the prize ring with heavyweight Jack Johnson.” MacDonald grinned challengingly at Bell, whom he outweighed by forty pounds.

“Unless he did graduate studies on Chicago’s West Side,” Bell challenged him back.

“And put on a few pounds of muscle,” MacDonald acknowledged approvingly.

Impossible as it seemed, the piano suddenly got louder. Someone banged on a drum. The crowd made way for Angelo Del Rossi to mount a low stage opposite the bar. He drew from his frock coat a conductor’s baton.

Waiters and bouncers put down trays and blackjacks and picked up banjos, guitars, and accordions. Waitresses jumped onto the stage and cast off their aprons, revealing skirts so short that police in any city with more than one church would raid the joint. Del Rossi raised his baton. The musicians banged out George M. Cohan’s “Come On Down,” and the ladies danced what appeared to Bell to be an excellent imitation of the Paris cancan.

“You were saying?” he shouted.

“I was?”

“About the dreadnoughts that you and the Gunner . . .”

“Take the Michigan. When she’s finally commissioned, our newest battleship will have the best gun arrangement in the world—all big guns on superimposed turrets. But tissue-thin armor and rattletrap piston engines doom her to be a semi-dreadnought at best—target practice for German and English dreadnoughts.”

MacDonald drained his glass.

“All the more terrible that the Bureau of Ordnance lost a great gun builder in Artie Langner. The technical bureaus hate change. Artie forced change . . . Don’t get me started on this, laddie. It’s been an awful month for America’s battleships.”

“Beyond the death of Artie Langner?” Bell prompted.

“The Gunner was only the first to die. One week later we lost Chad Gordon, our top armorer at Bethlehem Iron Works. Horrible accident. Six lads roasted alive—Chad and all his hands. Then last week that damned fool Grover Lakewood fell off the hill. The cleverest fire-control expert in the business. And a hell of a fine young man. What a future he’d have given us—gone in a stupid climbing accident.”

“Hold on!” said Bell. “Are you telling me that three engineers specializing in dreadnought battleships have all died in the last month?”

“Sounds like a jinx, doesn’t it?” MacDonald’s big hand passed over his chest in the sign of the cross. “I would never say our dreadnoughts are jinxed. But for the sake of the United States Navy, I hope to bloody hell Farley Kent and Ron Wheeler aren’t next.”

“Hulls at the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” said Bell. “Torpedoes at Newport.”

MacDonald looked at him sharply. “You get around.”