Clive Cussler - The Spy

“Where in Gloucester City?”

“Del Rossi’s Dance Hall-not that he’s dancing. It’s more saloon than dance hall, if you know what I mean.”

“I’ve encountered similar establishments out west,” Bell said drily.

“Cut over to King Street. Can’t miss it.”

Gloucester City was just down the river from Camden, the two cities blending seamlessly. King Street was near the water. Saloons, quick-and-dirties, and boardinghouses hosted workingmen from the shipyards and the bustling river port. Del Rossi’s was as unmissable as MacDonald’s clerk had promised, boasting a false front mocked up to look like a proscenium arch in a Broadway theater.

Inside was bedlam, with the loudest piano Bell had ever heard, women shrieking with laughter, perspiring bartenders knocking the necks off bottles to pour faster, exhausted bouncers, and wall-to-wall sailors and shipyard hands-five hundred men at least-determined to win the race to get drunk. Bell studied the room over a sea of flushed faces under clouds of blue smoke. The only occupants of the saloon not in shirtsleeves were himself, in his white suit, a handsome silver-haired gent in a red frock coat whom he guessed was the proprietor, and a trio of dandified gangsters tricked out in brown derbies, purple shirts, bright waistcoats, and striped ties. Bell couldn’t see their shoes but suspected they were yellow.

He plowed through broad shoulders toward the frock coat.

“Mr. Del Rossi!” he shouted over the din, extending his hand.

“Good evening, sir. Call me Angelo.”

“Isaac.”

They shook hands. Del Rossi’s were soft but bore the long-healed burns and cuts of ship work in his youth.

“Busy night.”

“God bless our ‘New Navy.’ It’s like this every night. New York Ship launches the Michigan next month and just laid the keel for a twenty-eight-knot destroyer. Across the river, the Philadelphia Navy Yard is building a new dry dock, Cramp launches South Carolina come summer, plus they’ve already nailed a contract for six 700-ton destroyers-six, count ’em, six. What can I do for you, sir?”

“I’m looking for a fellow named Alasdair MacDonald.”

Del Rossi frowned. “The Professor? Follow the sound of fists cracking jaws,” he answered with a nod toward the farthest corner from the door.

“Excuse me. I better get over there before someone floors him.”

“That’s not likely,” said Del Rossi. “He was heavyweight champ of the Royal Navy.”

Bell sized MacDonald up as he worked his way across the room, and he took an immediate shine to the big Scotsman. He looked to be in his forties, tall, with an open countenance and muscles that rippled under a shirt soaked with perspiration. He had several boxing scars over his eyebrows-but not a mark on the rest of his face, Bell noticed-and enormous hands with splayed-out knuckles. He cupped a glass in one, a whiskey bottle in the other, and as Bell drew close he filled the glass and stood the bottle on the bar behind him, his eyes fixed on the crowd. It parted suddenly, explosively, and a three-hundred-pound bruiser lumbered at MacDonald with murder in his eye.

MacDonald tracked him with a wry smile, as if they were both in on a good joke. He took a swig from his glass and then, without appearing to rush, closed his empty hand into an enormous fist and landed a punch almost too fast for Bell to see.

The bruiser collapsed to the sawdust-strewn floor. MacDonald looked down at him amiably. He had a thick Scots accent. “Jake, me friend, you are a purrfectly fine laddie ’til the drink riles your noggin.” Of the group around him, he asked, “Would someone see Jake home?”

Jake’s friends carried him out. Bell introduced himself to Alasdair MacDonald, who, he surmised, was drunker than he looked.

“Do I know you, laddie?”

“Isaac Bell,” he repeated. “Dorothy Langner told me that you were a particular friend of her father.”

“That I was. Poor Artie. When they made the Gunner they broke the mold. Have a drink!”

He called for a glass, filled it to the brim, and passed it to Bell with the Scottish toast, “Slanj.”

“Slanj-uh va,” said Bell, and he threw back the fiery liquor in the same manner as MacDonald.

“How is the lass bearing up?”

“Dorothy is clinging to the hope that her father neither killed himself nor took a bribe.”

“I don’t know about killing himself-mountains shade dark glens. But I do know this: the Gunner would have shoved his hand in a punch press before he’d reach for a bribe.”

“Did you work closely together?”

“Let’s just say we admired each other.”

“I imagine you shared similar goals.”

“We both loved dreadnoughts, if that’s what you mean. Love ’em or hate ’em, the dreadnought battleship is the marvel of our age.”

Bell noticed that MacDonald, drunk or not, was dodging his questions artfully. He backtracked, saying, “I imagine you must be following the progress of the Great White Fleet with keen interest.”

Alasdair snorted scoffingly. “Victory at sea goes to ordnance, armor, and speed. You’ve got to shoot farther than the enemy, survive more punishment, and steam faster. By those standards, the Great White Fleet is hopelessly out-of-date.”

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.”