The Spy

“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 Gu

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 ma

“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 Gu

“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 gri

“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 Gu

“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 Gu

“Hold on!” said Bell. “Are you telling me that three engineers specializing in dreadnought battleships have all died in the last month?”

“Sounds like a jinx, doesn’t it?” MacDonald’s big hand passed over his chest in the sign of the cross. “I would never say our dreadnoughts are jinxed. But for the sake of the United States Navy, I hope to bloody hell Farley Kent and Ron Wheeler aren’t next.”

“Hulls at the Brooklyn Navy Yard,” said Bell. “Torpedoes at Newport.”

MacDonald looked at him sharply. “You get around.”

“Dorothy Langner mentioned Kent and Wheeler. I gathered they were Langner counterparts.”

“Counterparts?” MacDonald laughed. “That’s the joke of the dreadnought race, don’t you see?”

“No I don’t. What do you mean?”

“It’s like a shell game, with a pea under every shell and every pea packed with dynamite. Farley Kent devises watertight compartments to protect his hulls from torpedoes. But up in Newport, Ron Wheeler improves torpedoes-builds a longer-range torpedo that carries heavier explosives, maybe even figures out how to arm it with TNT. So Artie has to-had to-increase gun range so the ship can fight farther off, and Chad Gordon had to cast stronger armor to take the hits. Enough to drive a man to drink…” MacDonald refilled their glasses. “God knows how we’ll get along without those lads.”

“But speed you say is also vital. What about you in Steam Engineering?” Bell asked. “They say you’re a wizard with turbines. Wouldn’t Alasdair MacDonald’s loss be as devastating to the dreadnought program?”

MacDonald laughed. “I’m indestructible.”

Another fistfight broke out across the dance hall.

“Excuse me, Isaac,” said MacDonald, and he waded cheerfully into it.

Bell shouldered after him. The flashily dressed gangsters he’d seen when he came in were hovering around the impromptu ring of cheering men. MacDonald was trading punches with a young heavyweight who had the arms of a blacksmith and admirable footwork. The Scotsman appeared slower than the younger man. But Bell saw that Alasdair MacDonald was allowing his opponent to land punches as a way of gauging what he had. So subtle was he that none of the blows scored any damage. Suddenly Alasdair seemed to have learned all he needed to. Suddenly he was fast and deadly, throwing combinations. Bell had to admit they outclassed the best he had thrown when he boxed for Yale, and he recalled with a grateful smile Joe Van Dorn steering him into “graduate study” in Chicago’s saloons.