Remember Black Tom!
Marcus was sharp enough that Hoover’s intent could never have slipped past him. He picked up the thread at once.
The elaborate con Kieran had orchestrated against the swindler Duquesne spilled smoothly from Marcus’s mouth.
“A few months back I happened to hear Duquesne speak to a crowd. Back then he introduced himself as an Australian officer and spun war stories about his service.”
All of it was a lie, of course. Marcus’s claim was a lie as well.
He had simply read the newspaper accounts and pretended he had been one of those spectators.
“Then the other day I saw Duquesne’s face in the paper after his arrest. The article called him an insurance fraud and a suspected German spy.”
That was the moment Marcus had supposedly learned Duquesne’s true nature and been shocked by it.
“Coincidentally, around the same time, someone dropped something on a street in the Lower East Side.”
Marcus pulled the scrap from his pocket and held it up.
It was a scrap of cloth stitched with the slogan God Punish England.
“That’s a slogan they shout in Germany. I’m German too, but I hate the German government that started the war and every last one of the bastards who defend it. I was born and raised in America—why should I have to take the heat because of those animals?”
Marcus was racing ahead, drawing a hard line between himself and the criminal regime of his ancestral homeland. The people listening, however, had their attention fixed elsewhere.
Detectives, patrolmen, and investigators were all hunting for logical contradictions and weak spots in the statement of the man who had killed Dropper.
And they found the “clue I just happened to pick up” more than a little suspicious.
“Stay on the subject. Keep going.”
“Yes, sir. It felt wrong, so I started following Kaplan. I passed everything I learned to Agent Hoover through a friend of mine named Kieran.”
Hoover, who could hardly keep silent any longer, slipped in a quiet addition.
“Kieran was Big Tom Foley’s bodyguard—the one who eliminated two anarchists.”
“Oh-ho.”
A murmur of acceptance ran through the room: If it’s that kid, it checks out.
Hoover stepped back as though he had done his part, and Marcus continued.
“I tailed Kaplan for several days. Yesterday I followed him when he left a saloon.”
Even after Kaplan returned to the motel, Marcus had tried to keep watch from the second floor by climbing the iron fire escape. That was when he was discovered.
“They grabbed me, beat me, and tried to shoot me.”
In a desperate fight for his life he had resisted, and in the end Kaplan was killed by the very pistol he himself had drawn.
That completed Marcus’s statement.
Hoover’s senior agent, who had listened in silence, finally asked a question.
“So what exactly is the connection between Duquesne and Kaplan? Finding a newspaper clipping about Duquesne in Kaplan’s things isn’t enough to prove a relationship.”
The question applied to Hoover as well.
Why had they suspected a link between Duquesne and Kaplan in the first place?
Again Marcus spoke before Hoover could.
“I overheard it by chance. Kaplan said they had to get Duquesne out.”
“Your story is full of ‘by chance.’ You ever win a big lottery ticket?”
“No, sir…”
“Yet the decisive clue that made you suspicious of Kaplan you just happened to pick up, and you just happened to overhear him mention Duquesne? And you expect us to believe you started tracking a dangerous man like Kaplan over one scrap of cloth with a slogan on it? That’s hard to swallow.”
The agent’s sharp point made Marcus’s eyelid twitch. Hoover slipped in at once.
“I hear the woman who’d been staying in Kaplan’s room since yesterday suddenly vanished. Know anything about her?”
—If they ask about the woman, just say you saw her.
Following Kieran’s instructions, Marcus nodded.
“I only saw her.”
“She left with Kaplan around dawn, but she wasn’t there when they attacked you?”
“It was dark and everything was chaos. I didn’t see her. For all I know she was still watching.”
Marcus had to answer every question from Hoover and the others. Those diligent answers were what kept him out of a cell.
Before he was released, Marcus met Hoover alone in a private room.
“Kaplan was a German spy and the weapon used was the pistol he was carrying—self-defense will be accepted. That’s a big reason we didn’t hold you.”
“Whew. That’s a relief.”
“But is it true you really just happened to pick up that clue on the street? Kieran told me he was investigating the strike leaders.”
Marcus came clean on that point.
“It’s exactly as you said, Agent Hoover. But Kieran didn’t want that angle used.”
“Why not?”
“If the strike leaders come up, it could put you in a tough spot. The Bureau is already taking heat from every side for arresting IWW members.”
Marcus was right.
The recent string of arrests of IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) organizers had drawn accusations of labor suppression.
And now they had been surveilling and suspecting—on flimsy grounds—a longshoremen’s strike leader, and under espionage charges at that?
The Bureau could easily find itself under a fresh barrage of public fury for supposedly cracking down on the ILA (International Longshoremen’s Association).
Yet this case, turned the other way, had handed them a natural pretext to move against the ILA.
The bomb-target map hanging in Kaplan’s motel room pointed to nothing less than a pier in New York Harbor.
Link that to the longshoremen’s strike and you had every justification to investigate who had been backing Kaplan.
With this single incident Kieran had secured several results at once.
He had funneled the credit for catching a German spy straight to Hoover, forestalled any potential public backlash, and manufactured a clean pretext for BOI involvement in the ILA investigation.
And he even tied Duquesne into it. Kieran, what the hell are you…
As if on cue, Marcus brought up the ILA.
“Kieran says there’s a strong chance the man who hired Kaplan was ILA vice president Paul Kelly.”
Was he telling them to dig there?
If it was Kieran pointing the way, something was bound to turn up.
“We’ll look into it.”
Suddenly Hoover cast his mind back to the moment the case had begun to accelerate. Laid out chronologically against Marcus’s statement…
It all seems to have started after I met Kieran at Bellevue Hospital.
Right after Kieran showed up claiming his uncle had been beaten and hospitalized, events had come roaring in like a storm.
It was impossible, of course—but the timing was uncomfortably neat.
If a man could weave plan after plan and chain incident after incident simply because his uncle had been assaulted, that would be the work of a god.
Hoover let out a short breath, feeling he was overestimating Kieran.
He shoved the figure circling inside his skull back down and forced himself to focus on the present.
He understood now why Marcus had dressed everything as coincidence.
If other agents kept hammering that point, it would be Hoover’s problem to solve.
His attention settled on the young man in front of him—still a boy, but clearly sharp.
“What’s your relationship with Kieran?”
“Friend and colleague.”
They had once shined shoes together; now Marcus worked at the company run by Kieran’s mother.
“So Kieran put you up to tracking Kaplan the whole time?”
This was a critical question. Marcus sensed at once that the answer could change the course of his life.
“I’ve been interested in that side of things for a long time. I read Swope’s book Inside the German Empire and decided the German government was a pack of corrupt demons.”
“You’re German yourself.”
“That’s exactly why I hate them more. Hoover, I’m an American citizen. I love liberty, capitalism, and democracy more than anyone.”
And yet he was still paying the price for the German government’s insanity.
“I hate with every fiber of my being the anti-American forces that want to destroy the freedom my family and friends enjoy.”
The line was one Kieran had fed him, and it landed. Hoover’s eyes lit up.
“The guts to shadow a man twice your size like Kaplan… the ability to turn the tables and kill him in the fight…”
The only real shortcoming was Marcus’s education.
“If you want something, first make sure you have the basics. If circumstances are tight, go to night school at least.”
Hoover held out his card.
“I’m still a rookie myself, so I don’t know how much help I’ll be, but if you ever have a question or something important comes up, call me anytime.”
“Thank you.”
Finished with the station questioning, Marcus walked away turning Hoover’s words over in his mind.
—High school is mandatory, and college would be even better. Law or accounting would be useful. That’s the path my seniors and I took.
He had planned to walk beside Kieran for the rest of his life. Suddenly another road had opened—two roads that could not have been more opposite: a criminal syndicate and a federal law-enforcement agency.
Had Kieran expected Hoover to say something like that?
What was Kieran thinking about the situation right now?
“Don’t overthink it. When you and I walk together, that is the road. And that road is going to keep getting wider and bigger until it’s a proper highway.”
In the second-floor office of the twin buildings, I made him understand it this way: I was the highway, Marcus the feeder road joining at the interchange.
The very idea of a highway didn’t exist yet in this era, but Marcus grasped it. The lightness that settled on his face proved it. At the same time it was proof of just how hard he had been turning the problem over the whole way here.
Ever since I first met Edgar Hoover I had been weighing who to place at his side.
The one I chose was Marcus.
“As long as you can project perfect patriotism toward America, being German can actually become your strength.”
He could slip into German immigrant communities, and his personal talent for gathering and analyzing information was solid. Exactly as Hoover had said—if the educational credentials were there, he would make an ideal Bureau agent.
“I’ll cover your college tuition too, so study without worrying about money.”
“Ha—tuition as well?”
“That much is only natural.”
That way you’ll never be able to turn on me later.
A promising Bureau agent who took tuition money from a mafia boss and even joined him in crime?
If you don’t want that past wrapped around your ankle and both of us sinking together, you will protect me completely.
The same applied to Hoover, of course.
I would dig relentlessly for every weakness, collect every scrap of information, and stack it neatly inside a cabinet that must never see the light of day.
“By the way, what about the woman? An NYPD detective asked about her.”
“I put a tail on her so she wouldn’t try anything stupid. We already know where she lives. We’ll watch and wait.”
Marcus was summoned for questioning several more times after that. The district attorney accepted self-defense and never even charged him with murder.
On the second day after Kaplan’s death the press decided to blow the case wide open.
Every paper in the city was talking about the Black Tom explosion—the worst bomb attack in American history.
Each article seemed determined to make the public relive the shock of that day, and the details were laid out with clinical care.
One year ago, at 2:08 a.m. on Sunday, July 30, 1916, a colossal explosion ripped through Black Tom Island in New York Harbor.
In the darkness German agents detonated more than two million pounds of munitions bound for Britain.
The blast, equal to a 5.5-magnitude earthquake, was felt as far as Philadelphia and southern Connecticut.
Windows shattered across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. Shrapnel scarred the Statue of Liberty; after that night the public would never again see her torch.
The Black Tom affair had reversed anti-war sentiment and driven the creation of modern intelligence agencies. Edgar Hoover was one of the men who had ridden that wave.
And now Hoover had become the hero who stopped a second Black Tom.
The German spy Kaplan is a Jewish immigrant.
What happened to the man who entered Sing Sing in 1911 and walked free only seven years later?
Experts point to the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence and the Balfour Declaration as the twin roots of Kaplan’s turn to German espionage.
Britain simultaneously promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine through the Balfour Declaration and an Arab state on the same soil through the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence—an impossible contradiction.
That Kaplan carried the slogan God Punish England is offered as proof.
The Bureau’s hero pursued that tiny scrap of cloth with relentless tenacity and stopped Kaplan’s crime cold. Credit must also go to the Lower East Side boy who first discovered the clue. He…
No names were printed, yet Hoover and Marcus had been crowned heroes. The papers and self-appointed experts filled in Kaplan’s motive for themselves and closed the case.
On the fourth day after the killing, a vast crowd packed the Southeast Harbor. Their roar shook the docks.
“For Liberty and Justice!”
“Make the World Safe for Democracy!”
And then:
“Remember Black Tom!”
There was a reason the press and the public kept invoking Black Tom. New York Harbor itself was the X marked on Kaplan’s map—the intended bomb target.
Worse, today was the day the plot was supposed to have been carried out. Recruits from Camp Upton had been mustered as full soldiers ready to sail for Europe. The ships waiting for them were loaded with tons of ammunition, weapons, and high explosives.
What did that mean?
The German government had intended to break American morale and stop the expeditionary force by blowing up the very ships carrying both soldiers and munitions.
Every act needs a purpose and a justification. I had tied that purpose to the troopships carrying draftees to Europe.
That link was also the bridge that would drag the longshoremen’s strike and ILA vice president Paul Kelly into the investigation.
I had not expected the shockwave to travel this far.
The federal government and the City of New York turned Germany’s failed bombing into a patriotic rally that lifted army morale higher than ever.
Crowds drafted from every civic organization cheered the departing soldiers and roared for American liberty.
It was a farewell so grand it could swell even an empty chest with loyalty; it carved fighting spirit and iron resolve into the eyes of every man in uniform.
A few faces in particular stood out.
Gavin, Drift, Teddy, David.
Union gang members who had once been marched off to Camp Upton like cattle to the slaughterhouse now stared at the ships with the eyes of warriors.
They looked ready to charge the enemy lines and wipe them out that very second.
At that rate they’ll get themselves killed early.
Just hold on one year, you bastards.
Keep your heads down until then.
Manhattan’s west side, Chelsea Piers, ILA headquarters—vice president’s office.
Paul Kelly sat at his desk reading the newspapers, his face twisting darker with every line.
“Kid Dropper, you stupid son of a bitch. What the hell did you do?!”
Dropper had been painted as a German spy out of nowhere, and the sparks had jumped straight onto the ILA.
The Bureau had already begun connecting the recent strike to the harbor bomb plot and was hunting spies with new fervor. The disappearance of Kaplan’s underling Weiss only thickened the cloud of suspicion.
For Paul Kelly, the man who had been covering Kaplan’s back, the heat was becoming unbearable.
The problem was that the strike already under way would not be easy to call off.
The striking locals, still blind to the new climate, kept chanting day and night for higher wages and shorter hours.
In the end the only way to smother the strike was with another kind of force. For that emergency, the name that rose as the alternative was Tanner Smith.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
Late though it was, Paul Kelly accepted Tanner’s proposal.