“Stroll?” They looked up and down the dark and grimy street. “Stroll?” They stared at Isaac Bell. “And I suppose a mosquito drilled that hole in your coat sleeve?” one detective remarked.

“Same one that shot the lock off this door?” asked another.

“And made those Gophers inside hold their hands in the air?” said a third.

Harry Warren beckoned the kid who had just returned. “Eddie, go tell the cops they should send an ambulance.”

Isaac Bell grinned. “Might as well call it a night, boys. Thanks for coming out. Harry, if you’d walk me home, I have questions for you.”

Harry handed his shotgun to the boys, shoved his revolver in his coat pocket, and passed Bell a handkerchief. “You’re bleeding.”

Bell stuffed it up his sleeve.

They walked to Ninth Avenue. The cops had cordoned off the area under the El where Weeks was hanging. Firemen were holding ladders for morgue attendants who were trying to cut the body loose.

“So much for connecting the Iceman to Tommy and your foreign spy,” said Harry.

“This connection is precisely what I want to talk to you about,” said Isaac Bell. “It looks to me like Tommy Thompson is moving up in the world.”

Harry nodded. “Yeah, I hear talk in the neighborhoods that the Gophers are throwing their weight around.”

“I want you to find out who his new friends are. Five’ll get you ten, they will be the connection.”

“You could be onto something. I’ll get right to it. Oh, here, they passed me this as we were leaving.” Harry fished in his pockets. “Wire came in for you from the Philadelphia office.”

They had reached the corner of 42nd Street. Bell stopped under a streetlamp to read the wire.

“Bad news?”

“They got a line on a German sneaking around Camden.”

“Wasn’t that a German who did the Bethlehem job?”

“Possibly.”

“What’s in Camden?”

“They’re launching the battleship Michigan.”

Chapter 22

22

THE SPY SUMMONED HIS GERMAN AGENT WITH A CRYPTIC note left at his Camden rooming house. They met in Philadelphia in a watchman’s shack on a barge tied to the west bank of the Delaware directly across the busy river from the shipyard. Through an ever-moving scrim of tugboats, lighters, ships, ferries, and coal smoke they could see the stern of the Michigan thrusting her propellers out the back of the shed that covered her ways. The river was only a half mile wide, and they could hear the steady drumbeat of carpenters pounding wooden wedges.

The ship workers had built a gigantic wooden cradle big enough to carry the 16,000-ton ship down greased rails from her building place on land to her home in the water. Now they were raising the cradle up to her by driving wedges under it. When the wedges pressed the cradle tightly against the hull, they would continue hammering them until the cradle lifted the ship off her building blocks.