Clive Cussler - The Spy

“He’s afraid I will kill him on your say-so,” Tommy corrected acidly. “And you will say so.”

“I already have,” Eyes O’Shay answered. “Your so-called Iceman-”

“My so-called Iceman!” Commodore Tommy erupted in tones of wrathful indignation.

“Your so-called Iceman, who you sent to Camden when I paid you five thousand dollars, allowed the only credible witness in that dance hall-a Van Dorn Agency detective, for the love of Mary-to witness him committing murder. When the Van Dorns catch up with him-and we know they will-or the cops nail him for some other transgression, the Van Dorns will ask, ‘Who’d you do murder for?’ And Weeks will answer, ‘Tommy Thompson and his old pal Eyes O’Shay, who we thought was dead but ain’t.’ ”

O’Shay looked up from his boots, expression noncommittal, and added, “Frankly, if I didn’t insist, you’d be screwy not to kill him on your own. You’ve got more to fear than I do. I can disappear, just like I done before. You’re stuck here. Everyone knows where to find the Commodore-on 39th in Commodore Tommy’s Saloon-and pretty soon the word will get around on your new joint on 53rd. Don’t forget, Van Dorns aren’t like cops. You can’t pay Van Dorns to look any other way than at you. Down a gun barrel.”

“So what do you think about Weeks offering to kill the witness?”

Eyes O’Shay pretended to ponder the question.

“I think Weeks is brave. Sensible. Practical. Maybe he has something up his sleeve. If not, then he’s firmly possessed by delusions of grandeur.”

The Gopher Gang boss blinked. “What does that mean?”

“ ‘Delusions of grandeur’? It means Weeks will have to get damned lucky to pull it off. But if he does kill the Van Dorn, your troubles are over.”

“The Iceman is tough,” Tommy said hopefully. “And he’s smart.”

O’Shay shrugged. “With a little luck, who knows?”

“With a little luck, the Van Dorn will kill him, and that it’ll be it for witnesses.”

“Either way, how can you lose? Tell him to give it a whirl.”

Thompson scrawled a cryptic reply on the back of Weeks’s note and shouted for the kid. “Get in here, you little bastard! Take this to wherever that scumbucket is hiding.”

Brian O’Shay marveled at the sheer depths of Tommy’s stupidity. If Weeks did manage to kill the Van Dorn-who was not just any Van Dorn but the famously deadly Chief Investigator Isaac Bell-Iceman Weeks would be the Hero of Hell’s Kitchen, which would make him a prime candidate to take over the Gophers. How surprised Tommy would be by Weeks’s shiv in his ribs.

Tommy’s brand of stupidity reminded O’Shay of the Russian Navy in the Russo-Jap war. Clueless as the Baltic Fleet, when old-fashioned warships and ancient thinking bumped into the modern Japanese Navy. Ahoy, bottom of the Tsushima Strait, here we come!

“Now, could we get back to the business at hand, Tommy-the journey of your Chinamen to San Francisco?”

“They’re not exactly my Chinamen. They’re Hip Sing.”

“Find out how much money they will require to make them your Chinamen.”

“What makes you think they want to go to San Francisco?” Tommy asked. The Gopher Gang boss could not figure out what O’Shay was up to.

“They’re Chinamen,” O’Shay answered. “They’ll do anything for money.”

“You mind me asking how much you can afford?”

“I can afford anything. But if you ever ask me for more than something is worth, I will regard it as an act of war.”

Commodore Tommy changed the subject. “I wonder what the Iceman has up his sleeve.”

DEADLY SNAKE HERE;

SERUM USEFUL IN INSANITY

POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL

AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES

Lachesis Muta Called “the Sudden Death”

by the Natives of Brazil

The wind plucked the sheet of newspaper out of the Washington Park grandstand just as Brooklyn came to bat in the eighth inning. Iceman Weeks watched it float across the infield, past Wiltse on the mound, past Seymour in center, straight toward where he was holed up-cuffless and collarless in drab flannel, disguised as a sorry-looking plumber’s helper-on the grass behind centerfield, where he wasn’t likely to run into any fans from New York.

If the Iceman were capable of loving anything, it was baseball. But he couldn’t risk being spotted in New York at tomorrow’s home opener at the Polo Grounds, so he was making do in the wilds of Brooklyn where no one knew him. His favorite Giants were lambasting the sorry Superbas. The Giants were hitting hard, and the cold wind blowing cinders, hats, and newspapers had no effect on Hooks Wiltse’s throwing arm. His left-handed twisters had dazzled the Brooklyn batters throughout the game, and by the bottom of the eighth New York was ahead 4 to 1.

Weeks’s ice-blue eyes locked on the juicy headline as the newspaper blew overhead.

POISON FROM THE LANCE-HEAD’S BITE WILL KILL

AN OX WITHIN FIVE MINUTES

He leaped off the grass and caught the paper in both hands.

Ball game forgotten, he read avidly, tracing each word with a dirty fingernail. The fact that Weeks could read at all put him miles ahead of most of the Gopher Gang. New York’s daily newspapers were packed with opportunities. The society pages reported when rich men left town for Newport or Europe, leaving their mansions empty. The shipping news gave notice about cargo to be plundered from the docks and Eleventh Avenue sidings. Theater reviews were a guide to pickpockets, obituaries a promise of empty apartments.

He read every word of the snake story, galvanized by hope, then started over. His luck had turned. The snake would recoup his losses from the worst hand ever dealt: Van Dorn detective Isaac Bell turning up in Camden the night they killed the Scotsman.

A lance-headed viper from Brazil, the most deadly of all known reptiles, will be exhibited tomorrow tonight before the Academy of Pathological Science at its monthly meeting at the Hotel Cumberland in 54th Street and Broadway.

The paper said that the sawbones were interested in the snake because a serum made from the lance-head’s deadly venom was used to treat nervous and brain diseases.

The Iceman knew the Cumberland.

It was a twelve-story, first-class hotel billed in the ads as “Headquarters for College Men.” That and the $2.50-a-night room fee ought to keep out the riffraff. But Weeks was pretty sure he could dress like a college man, thanks to his second advantage over ordinary gangsters. He was half real American. Unlike the full-blooded Micks in the Gophers, only his mother was Irish. The time he had met his father, the Old Man had told him that the Weekses were Englishmen who had landed here before the Mayflower. Wearing the right duds, why couldn’t he march into the lobby of the Hotel Cumberland like he belonged?

He figured that the Cumberland house dicks could be got around by twisting the arm of a bellboy to run interference for him. Weeks had one in mind, Jimmy Clark, who had a sideline distributing cocaine for a pharmacist on 49th, which had become a riskier business since the new law said that dust had to be prescribed by a doctor.

A human lives only one or two minutes after the poison enters the system. The viper’s venom seems to paralyze the action of the heart, and the victim stiffens and turns black.

He already had a setup. It wasn’t like he’d been hiding out doing nothing. Soon as he had learned where Isaac Bell slept when he was in town, he had finagled a laundress he knew into a job at the Yale Club of New York City, betting she could sneak him into the detective’s room.

Jenny Sullivan was fresh off the boat from Ireland and deep in hock for her fare. Weeks had bought her debt, intending to put her to work on the sheets instead of ironing them. But after Camden, he had persuaded people who had reason to do him a big favor to wangle Jenny a job at Bell’s club. That was when he wrote Commodore Tommy, offering to kill the detective. But he hadn’t yet managed to screw up the courage to hide under Bell’s bed with a pistol and tangle with him man-to-man.