The Wrecker by Clive Cussler (book club reads .TXT) 📕

But Isaac Bell stood stock-still, staring at the telephones, which were lined up like soldiers. Something was nagging at him. Something forgotten. Something overlooked. Or a memory of something wrong.

The Jersey City powder pier leaped into his mind’s eye. He had a photographic memory, and he traced the pier’s reach from the land into the water, foot by foot, yard by yard. He saw the Vickers machine gun pointed at the gate that isolated it from the main yards. He saw the coal tenders he had ordered moved to protect the gate. He saw the string of loaded boxcars, the smoke, the tide-roiled water, the redbrick Communipaw passenger terminal with its ferry dock at the water’s edge in the distance ...

What was missing?

A telephone rang. The duty officer snapped up the middle one, which someone had marked as foremost with an urgent slash of showgirl’s lip rouge. “Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn! ... Yes, sir! He’s here ... Yes, sir! I’ll tell him. Good-bye, Mr. Van Dorn.”

The duty officer, cradling the earpiece, said to Isaac Bell, “Mr. Van Dorn says if you don’t leave the office this minute, you’re fired.”

They fled the Knickerbocker.

Archie Abbott, ever the proud tour guide, pointed out the two-story yellow façade of Rector’s Restaurant as they headed up Broadway. He took particular note of a huge statue out front. “See that griffin?”

“Hard to miss.”

“It’s guarding the greatest lobster palace in the whole city!”

LILLIAN HENNESSY LOVED MAKING her entrance at Rector’s. Sweeping past the griffin on the sidewalk, ushered into an enormous green-and-yellow wonderland of crystal and gold brilliantly lit by giant chandeliers, she felt what it must be like to be a great and beloved actress. The best part was the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that let everyone in the restaurant see who was entering the revolving door.

Tonight, people had stared at her beautiful golden gown, gaped at the diamonds nestled about her breasts, and whispered about her astonishingly handsome escort. Or, to use Marion Morgan’s term, her unspeakably handsome escort. Too bad it was only Senator Kincaid, still tirelessly courting her, still hoping to get his hands on her fortune. How much more exciting it would be to walk in here with a man like Isaac Bell, handsome but not pretty, strong but not brutish, rugged but not rough.

“A penny for your thoughts,” said Kincaid.

“I think we should finish our lobsters and get to the show... Oh, hear the band... Anna Held’s coming!”

The restaurant’s band always played a Broadway actress’s new hit when she entered. The song was “I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave.”

Lillian sang along in a sweet voice in perfect pitch,

In the northeast corner of my face,

and the northeast corner of the self-same place...

There she was, the French actress Anna Held, with her tiny waist shown off by a magnificent green gown much longer than she wore on stage, wreathed in smiles and flashing her eyes.

“Oh, Charles, this is so exciting. I’m glad we came.”

Charles Kincaid smiled at the astonishingly rich girl leaning across the tablecloth and suddenly realized how truly young and innocent she was. He would bet money that she’d learned the tricks she played with her beautiful eyes by studying Held’s every gesture. Very effectively too, he had to admit, as she gave him a well-practiced up-from-under blaze of pale blue.

He said, “I’m so glad you telephoned.”

“The Follies are back,” she answered blithely. “I had to come. Who wants to go to a show alone?”

That pretty much summed up her attitude toward him. He hated that she spurned him. But when he got done with her father, the old man wouldn’t have two bits to leave in his will while he would be rich enough to own Lillian, lock, stock, and barrel. In the meantime, pretending to court her gave him the excuse he needed to spend more time around her father than he would have been permitted in his role of tame senator casting votes on issues dear to the railroad corporations. Let Lillian Hennessy spurn her too old, vaguely comic, gold-digging suitor, a hopeless lover as unremarkable and unnoticed as the furniture. He would own her in the end—not as a wife but an object, like a beautiful piece of sculpture, to be enjoyed when he felt the urge.

“I had to come, too,” Kincaid answered her, silently cursing the Rawlins prizefighters who’d failed to murder Isaac Bell.

This night of all nights, he had to be seen in public. If Bell was not growing suspicious, he would soon. By now, an early sense of something wrong must have begun percolating in the detective’s mind. How long before Bell’s wanted poster jogged the memory of someone who had seen him preparing destruction? The oversize ears in the sketch would not protect him forever.

What better alibis than the Follies of 1907 in Hammerstein’s Jardin de Paris?

Hundreds of people would remember Senator Charles Kincaid dining at Rector’s with the most sought-after heiress in New York. A thousand would see the Hero Engineer arrive at the biggest show on Broadway with an unforgettable girl on his arm—a full mile and half away from a “show” that would outshine even the Follies.

“What are you smiling about, Charles?” Lillian asked him.

“I’m looking forward to the entertainment.”

23

PIRACY WAS RARE ON THE HUDSON RIVER IN THE EARLY YEARS of the twentieth century. When Captain Whit Petrie saw a raked bow loom out of the rain, his only reaction was to blow Lillian I‘s whistle to warn the other boat not to get too close. The sonorous blast of steam woke McColleen, the railroad dick who was snoozing on the bench in the back of the wheelhouse as Lillian I churned north past Yonkers, fighting an ebb tide and a powerful river current.

“What’s that?”

“Vessel under sail ... Damned fool must be deaf.”

The looming bow was still bearing down on him, close enough to reveal that the sails silhouetted against the dark sky were schooner-rigged. Whit Petrie lowered a wheelhouse window to