Clive Cussler - The Thief

“I think she was private. I just wasn’t paying much mind.”

“I don’t suppose you saw the engine number?” said Bell.

“Sorry, Mr. Bell. Wish I had. Mr. Locomotive was pointed the other way.”

“It is strange,” Bell told Archie, “to think it was Semmler whom the porter saw in the Elizabeth yards. If he crossed the continent on a special, why did he get off way out in Elizabeth?”

Archie agreed. “You would think he would take his train closer to the steamship docks. Step from the privacy of a special train to the privacy of a First Class stateroom.”

“Once on the boat, he takes his meals in his room. No one sees him till he lands in England or France or Germany — First Class and private all the way from Los Angeles to Berlin.”

“So why did he get off in the Elizabeth yards?”

Bell pulled a regional map down from the ceiling of the Van Dorn library. “He could go anywhere from Elizabeth. Newark has a German community. The German steamers dock at Hoboken. Or he could catch the train or the tubes into Manhattan. Lots of choices.”

“But not so private and not First Class.”

Bell raised the map, spun on his heel, and stared at Archie, his eyes alight with sudden realization. “But Christian Semmler did not arrive in America in First Class.”

“What do you mean?”

“He did not disembark from the Mauretania with the First Class passengers at Pier 54.”

“He wasn’t a passenger,” said Archie. “He did not intend to sail on the Mauretania . He would have taken Clyde and Beiderbecke off the ship in Liverpool Bay if you hadn’t stopped him.”

“He crossed the ocean in the Mauretania ’s stokehold and landed on a coal barge without leaving a trace of his arrival. What if he goes back the same route? No one in the black gang is going to question a knife wound. I’ll bet half the trimmers who return to ship are bunged up from bar fights and saloon brawls. So while we’re canvassing ship lines, ticket clerks, and customs agents, Semmler will leave the United States the same way he came.”

Bell grabbed the Kellogg’s mouthpiece. “Get me Detective Eddie Tobin. On the jump!”

Van Dorn detective Eddie Tobin, whose lopsided face and drooping left eye were the result of a brutal beating inflicted by the Gophers when he apprenticed with the gang squad, was from Staten Island, a faraway, isolated borough of the city. His family, an extended clan of Tobins, Darbees, Richardses, and Gordons, ran oyster boats out of St. George on the northeast tip of the island. Many of the small, flat, innocent-looking vessels were used to tong oysters. But hidden below the decks of some were powerful gasoline engines enabling them to outrun the harbor squad while smuggling taxable goods, ferrying fugitives away from the police, pirating coal, and retrieving items of cargo that fell from the docks. Young Eddie was honest, despite the childhood spent roving with opportunistic uncles and felonious cousins, which made him an invaluable guide to the immense and sprawling Port of New York.

Isaac Bell asked Eddie where the coal barges that bunkered the Cunard liners at the Chelsea Piers might come from.

“Perth Amboy, Joisey, down where the Arthur Kill and the Raritan enter the Bay.”

“Do you know anyone in the coal yards?”

“Sure.”

“What’s our fastest way down there?”

“Boat.”

“Is your Uncle Donny out of jail?”

“He’d be glad of the job. Poor old guy’s got his boat tuned up but nothing to do, seeing as how the harbor squad is shadowing him.”

Eddie Tobin telephoned a Tomkinsville saloon, where a boy was sent running to the docks. Bell and Eddie caught the Ninth Avenue El down to the Battery. They waited at Pier A, at the tip of Manhattan Island, trading gossip with New York Police Department harbor squad roundsman O’Riordan, whose steam launch was bouncing alongside on the chop stirred by the wind and passing boats.

Eying the waterborne traffic, Bell was struck by the near impossibility of their task. The Acrobat had his pick of seagoing ships getting ready to sail — American and British liners and freighters up the west side of Manhattan, German and French boats across the river in Hoboken, and hundreds across the Lower Bay in Brooklyn — all attended by hundreds of barges and lighters. Every few minutes, the thunder of a steam whistle announced another ship putting to sea.

Roundsman O’Riordan’s eyes suddenly narrowed warily. Donald Darbee’s square-nosed oyster scow was closing on his pier. “Our ride,” Bell explained, slipping the cop a couple of bucks. “Good to see you again, Roundsman. Say hello to the captain.”

Six months of regular hours, square meals, and no booze had done Uncle Donny a world of good. “You look ten years younger, sir,” Bell greeted the scraggly old waterman. “I’ll bet the girls are chasing you with a net.”

“Where you want to go?” Donald Darbee growled.

It was fourteen miles down the Upper Bay, through the Narrows, and down the Lower Bay. Hugging the Staten Island shore, passing string after string of tugboat-drawn barges — southbound empties riding high, full ones with decks awash northbound — they rounded Ward Point below Tottenville, crossed the Arthur Kill, and landed in an immense, windswept coal yard where Lehigh Valley hopper trains from the Pennsylvania mines unloaded into the barges that supplied the steamship piers.

A black coal dumper made of steel girders towered over the water and dominated the sky, and Isaac Bell saw that, unlike the backbreaking process of bunkering the ships and stoking their furnaces by hand, here the coal was moved by modern machines. A sloping pier rose to the dumper. On the pier were tracks for the hopper cars. A cable-driven “pig” between the rails clanked tight to a car’s coupler and pushed it up the incline onto a platform on top of the dumper. Positioned beside a gigantic funnel, the entire railroad car was then tilted on its side. Tons of coal spilled out of the car and thundered into the funnel, which directed it through a huge nozzle into a waiting barge. As soon as the barge was full, tugboats whisked it away and nudged an empty into its place. The only handwork was performed by the barge’s trimmers, who leveled the load, spreading the coal with shovels and rakes.

A trimmer suddenly fell off a barge and splashed into the water.

Ropes were thrown and ladders lowered, and within minutes the worker was hauled out, soaking wet and retching on the dock.

The foreman showing Bell and Eddie Tobin around groaned, “They’re usually drunk, but not this drunk. But Pete Lampack suddenly struck it rich. He’s been buying drinks for the house for two days.”

Bell and Eddie Tobin exchanged a glance. “Who is Lampack?”

“Damned fool trimmer on the boats.”

“How did he strike it rich?” asked Bell.

“Who knows? Picked the right horse, aunt died, or some undeserved thing.”

Eddie asked, “Where’s Lampack? Still at the saloon?”

“Naw, he finally ran out of dough. It’s back to work for him. He ought to be on one of those empties.” The foreman indicated the barges lined along the pier awaiting fresh loads.

“I want to speak with this fellow,” said Bell.

Money had already passed between the Van Dorns and the coal yard foreman. From a grimy sheet of paper pulled from inside his derby, the foreman determined that the barge being trimmed by Pete Lampack was next in line to be refilled. “Just back from our best customer. She burns a thousand tons a day.”