The Thief ib-5 Read online

  Bell bored into him with his eyes. Then he asked, softly, “Was this smuggling scheme Professor Beiderbecke’s idea?”

  “No!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The poor old guy didn’t have a clue. It was all my idea. Remember I told you I got lucky? What happened was I bumped into a Gopher I used to know in New York when he was a sceneshifter at the Hammerstein. He had moved up in the Gophers, and they sent him to Germany looking for film stock. He had the dough. I knew an outfit I’d bought from and they steered me to a shipper to pack it and hide it. We worked a deal.” He hung his head again. “I thought, What the heck, everyone smuggles film stock, why not me? I didn’t realize the stuff was so old it was unstable.” He barked a bitter laugh. “I got taken like a rube. Seven crates of garbage.”

  “Deadly garbage.”

  “I swear, I didn’t know it was old. I think they switched it on me. I mean, I wouldn’t risk hurting all those people.”

  “And you are absolutely positive that Beiderbecke had nothing to do with it?”

  “I didn’t tell him until it was on the boat… What are you going to do?”

  Isaac Bell sighed. “I’m afraid you leave me no choice but to help keep you alive and unkidnapped while you build a new Talking Pictures machine.”

  “Help me? Why? It was terrible. All those people could have died.”

  “Why? You’re a jackass. But you’re an honest jackass. I just gave you an easy out and you didn’t take it. All you had to do was blame the Professor, but you didn’t. That’s good enough for me.”

  * * *

  “Somebody put the fear of god into these Marzipan Boys,” Harry Warren told Isaac Bell that night at Van Dorn headquarters in the Knickerbocker Hotel, “which ain’t easy to do.”

  “How’d they manage that?’

  “The guy who led the raid on Pier 54?”

  “What about him?”

  As the agency’s New York gang specialist, rubbing shoulders with Gophers, Dusters, and Chinatown tongs, Detective Harry Warren had seen his share of evil in the slums. But his hands were shaking as he tugged a flask from his hip pocket, took a long pull on it, then passed it to Isaac Bell.

  “They burned him alive in a brewery furnace.” Harry took the flask back, wiped it with his sleeve, and drank again. “The guy’s brother told me.”

  “Why’d he tell you?”

  “Good question. It was like whoever did this has different stripes than he’s used to. It was like the Gophers and the Marzipans and the Van Dorns and even the cops are on one side of a big hole in the street, like from an earthquake or something, and these folks roasting his brother are on the other.”

  Bell asked, “What else did he tell you?”

  “Nothing. Clammed up.”

  Bell said, “Let’s go see him.”

  * * *

  Isaac Bell and Harry Warren made the rounds of dives in the East Eighties and finally found the dead man’s brother leaning on a saloon front under the Third Avenue El. He was fumbling for money in empty pockets. Hi name was Frank, and he was a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered German-American with a street fighter’s scarred face and fists. He assessed Isaac Bell in a glance and nodded his head as if to say he would fight the tall detective if he had to, but he didn’t want to. Bell read something else in the resigned nod, a confirmation of what Harry Warren had told him. The gangster had seen evil that shook him to the core.

  They took Frank into the saloon and bought a bottle.

  Bell said, “I’m sorry about your brother.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Were you and Bruno close?”

  “Used to be. When we was kids. Not so much now.”

  “Did your brother tell you what the deal was at the pier?”

  Frank shrugged. “Grab a fellow who got off the boat.”

  “What did this fellow look like?”

  “Twenties, five-six, mussed brown hair, blue eyes, pencil mustache.”

  Clyde Lynds to a T.

  “He say why?”

  “No.”

  “Did your brother say who you were grabbing the guy for?”

  “No.”

  “Did you ever see him?”

  “How could I see him? Bruno kept him to himself.”

  “Did your brother tell you how much the guy was paying?”

  Frank shook his head. “Bruno would never tell me. He’d take what it was and pay us what he felt like.”

  “Hard man, your brother.”

  “Not as a hard as them.”

  “No, I suppose not… Mind me asking something?”

  “Nothing’s stopped you so far.”

  “Nothing’s stopped you from answering, and I do appreciate that, especially at such a hard time.”

  “You gunning for those guys?”

  “Yes,” said Bell.

  Frank nodded. “What was you asking?”

  “Did your brother ever work for them before?”

  Frank hesitated.

  Bell asked, “Was this the first time?”

  “I dunno. I mean, I dunno if it was the same or who knew the same. You know what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “I mean, for when they have a party, sometimes, we sell ’em dust. We sell ’em goils.”

  “Who?”

  “They might have been who told this guy about my brother.”

  “Could have been,” Bell agreed. “Who are they?”

  Frank hesitated. “I don’t want to queer things with them. Maybe it wasn’t them who told the guy about us. I don’t want to…”

  “You don’t want to mess up a good arrangement,” said Bell. “I don’t blame you.”

  “Neither do I,” said Harry Warren.

  “Yeah, I mean, steady money is steady money.”

  “With your brother out of action, money’s going to be tight,” said Bell. “At least until your crew gets back on its feet. Look, Harry’s standing so no one can see me handing you this. Just a couple of hundred dollars to tide you over.”

  “Two hundred bucks? Crissakes, mister. What do you get outta this?”

  “I get the guy who killed your brother. If you can tell me who introduced him to your brother. Was it the customers who buy your cocaine and your girls?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And who are they?”

  “They live at the consulate.”

  Bell found himself holding his breath. “Which consulate?”

  “The German consulate.”

  Isaac Bell and Harry Warren walked quickly to the Third Avenue El and rode downtown to the tip of lower Manhattan. They got off at South Ferry and strolled up Broadway. Deep in conversation as they passed the handsome sixteen-story Bowling Green Office Building, they barely glanced at the Hellenic Renaissance granite, white brick, and terra-cotta facade.

  Of the thirteen bays of windows from ground floor to roof, all but two were dark this late at night. The White Star and American Line shippers, the naval architects, bankers, and lawyers who conducted business at the prestigious address were home in their beds. Of the lights still burning, both were on the ninth floor, which housed the offices of the German consul general.

  “Cover the place,” Isaac Bell ordered. “Try to pick up something more.”

  18

  “I heard that the agency had a protection contract with the German consul general of New York City back in ’02,” said Isaac Bell, when he strode into Joseph Van Dorn’s walnut-paneled Washington, D.C., headquarters office in the Willard Hotel, two blocks from the White House. The boss spent the majority of his time in Washington these days drumming up business from the Justice Department, Congress, and the Navy, and was intimate with the workings of the capital city.

  Van Dorn laughed heartily. “We did indeed, and I’ll never forget it.”

  Mirth reddened his face — a grand moon of an affair wreathed in robust red whiskers and splendid burnsides and topped by a shining bald crown — and his hooded eyes almost disappeared as their lid
s crinkled around them. He was a large, powerfully built man. His affable manner and ready laughter disguised ambition, ferocious intelligence, and an unyielding love of justice that made him the scourge of criminals.

  “Prince Henry of Prussia was touring the country,” Van Dorn explained in a rich voice softened by the faintest of Irish accents. “After all the assassinations in Europe, who knew if some anarchist or homicidal crank might take a potshot at him? The Germans had battalions of their own agents, of course, plus the Secret Service on loan from the Treasury Department, but they hired us, along with local cops, rail dicks to guard his trains, and some of the lesser private agencies. Turned into a regular Chinese fire drill: thirteen varieties of detectives were covering Henry, most blissfully unaware of one another’s identity. He was lucky to get home alive before some sorry Pinkerton shot him by mistake.”

  “What did you mean the Germans’ ‘own agents’?”

  “Foreign consulates import their secret police to shadow their countrymen who live or travel in America, keeping an eye on criminals and anarchists who might go back to Europe and make trouble.”

  Isaac Bell said, “I understand that German consulates also field spies disguised as legitimate military and commercial attachés.”

  “As do the British, French, Austrians, Italians, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. Why did you ask about the contract?”

  “Do they also have dealings with local criminals?”

  “Ah, that’s where you’re headed… I wouldn’t read a lot into ‘dealings with local criminals.’ The consuls and vice-consuls stationed in the field are not what the Germans call hoffähig—gents, to the manner born — compared to the aristo diplomats in the Washington embassies. Consuls and vice-consuls mix it up with businessmen and cops and all sorts of troublemakers that traveling foreigners run into.”

  Bell seemed to change the subject. “I received several cables from Art Curtis.”

  Van Dorn frowned. “At your instigation, Curtis is pestering me to authorize hefty expenditures for information about the inner workings of Krieg Rüstungswerk GmbH. Information about something that no one has seen fit to inform me of yet,” Van Dorn added tartly. “Leaving the proprietor of this detective agency to speculate whether he will be the last to know what’s going on, and whether it has anything to do with that fire on the Mauretania, or that shootout on Pier 54, or the rumor that two or three people fell off the ship you happened to be sailing in, Isaac.”

  “Art Curtis’s information is gold,” said Bell. “Pure gold. He turned up a disgruntled Krieg employee, a company executive, who claims that in New York and Los Angeles Krieg pays commissions to German consulate staff to act as unofficial sales representatives.”

  “Gold?” Van Dorn scoffed. “Foreign consuls are supposed to grease the wheels of commerce. That’s their main job. Trade. Introductions. Selling.”

  “Except these consular staff don’t sell anything. Nor do they arrange introductions. Nor do they court American customers. But they get paid commissions as if they do. In other words, Krieg is paying German consuls under the table. Don’t you wonder what kind of favors consulate staff grant in return?”

  Isaac Bell was gratified to see that the boss had stopped laughing. In fact, he wasn’t even smiling. But his eyes were on fire, like a grizzly sniffing prey.

  “That is interesting.”

  “Art Curtis is the best,” said Bell. “I don’t know another man who could get so deep inside so quickly. But suborning a highly placed informant costs a lot of money. In other words, this executive Art turned up is accustomed to first-class remuneration.”

  Van Dorn stood up from his desk and lumbered to the windows, where his second-floor corner office let him view people approaching the Willard’s front and side entrances. Then he wandered to the interior wall and inspected the reception room through a peephole drilled through the eye of Ben Franklin, whose portrait greeted visitors to the detective agency.

  Bell sat still as ice, patient and silent.

  At last, the boss faced him inquiringly. “Is this why you traveled all the way to Washington instead of telephoning me long-distance?”

  “No. I came to tell you something more interesting.”

  * * *

  Hans Reuter — Arthur Curtis’s painstakingly cultivated informant inside the Krieg Rüstungswerk munitions combine — refused to meet in a beer garden anymore. “Too many people,” he kept saying. “Too many people are seeing us together.”

  Had they been speaking face-to-face instead of on the telephone, Arthur would have folded his hands calmly over his potbelly and listened with a sympathetic expression. All he had on the phone was a soothing voice and simple logic. “They don’t know what we talk about. They don’t know that I pay you money.”

  “I was followed last time.”

  “Are you sure?” Arthur Curtis asked more casually than he felt. The fact was, after their last meeting, when Reuter dropped the bombshell that Krieg had German consuls in America on its payroll, Curtis had wondered whether he was being followed and had returned to the office by a circuitous route, after going to great lengths to shake the shadow, if indeed there had been a shadow. Now it sounded like there had been, and a very stealthy one at that. He had to hand it to Krieg. It hadn’t taken long to catch on to him. He knew he had to do something to end the threat. The trouble was, his frightened informant still had a lot of good information bubbling in his embittered mind, although he was doling it out very slowly.

  “I am deadly sure,” Reuter replied. “For all we know, they are listening in on this telephone wire.”

  “They would have to be soothsayers to listen in on telephone kiosks in post offices on opposite sides of Berlin.”

  “I would not be surprised if they were.”

  “I have an idea,” said Arthur Curtis.

  “No more ideas,” said Hans Reuter, and broke the connection.

  Arthur Curtis worked his way slowly back to the office. Redoubling ordinary habits of caution, watching reflections in shop windows, changing trams repeatedly, stepping in and out of bakeries and cafes, he did not enter his building until he was one hundred percent sure that he was not being observed.

  Pauline was sitting behind his desk, reading his mail.

  “You should be home in bed. It’s late.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

  “My mother’s friend is visiting. He’ll be gone at midnight.”

  “Have you had your supper?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Here.” He handed Pauline a sweet bun he had picked up just in case and watched her tear into it like a timber wolf taking down a mule deer. And then the darnedest thing happened. Art Curtis was suddenly scared. Not for himself but for her, the silly kid hanging around. What if they did catch up with him and she was here? What would they do to her when they got done doing him?

  * * *

  “‘Flickers’ have been around for years,” Joseph Van Dorn protested.

  Issac Bell had just concluded the story of Beiderbecke and Clyde Lynds and their Talking Pictures machine with the recommendation that the Van Dorn agency take up the job of protecting Lynds while he built a new machine in exchange for a share of the profits.

  “Moving pictures won’t be mere ‘flickers’ anymore when sound makes them so visceral, they play on the emotions. The Talking Pictures machine is revolutionary.”

  Van Dorn shrugged. “I attended a talking picture once in Cincinnati. They called it a ‘Kinetophone’ or some such, and the advertisement claimed that the songs followed in perfect unison the movements of the actors’ lips. But in fact the lips and words were at sixes and sevens, making it impossible to follow the story.”

  “Synchronization is the crux of the problem.”

  “Besides, there was the usual unnatural and discordant mechanical grate you hear from talking machines.”

  “Amplification is another problem Lynds and Beiderb
ecke claim to have solved.”

  “I’ll say it’s a problem. I attempted to hear an Actologue troupe in Detroit. One poor player had a feeble voice that was unable to penetrate the picture screen. Every word he uttered disappeared straight up into the fly loft.”

  “You bought tickets,” said Bell. “You paid money to see these various attempts at talking pictures. That proves there’s a demand for this kind of attraction. But the way they’re going about is too expensive. Marion says a typical Actologue company consists of at least eight people, including the machine operator, piano player, singers, manager, and actors to imitate the parts behind the screen. That same film shown by Lynds’s Talking Pictures machines could be distributed to a thousand theaters at once. Film reels don’t eat, don’t sleep, and don’t demand a salary. It would be like a frying pan factory that doesn’t need to pay workmen because machines make frying pans automatically.”

  Van Dorn, as hard-nosed and tightfisted a businessman as Bell had ever met, smiled at the thought of not having to pay labor. “You are very persuasive, Isaac. When you put it that way, you make me think he’s got something worth protecting.”

  The savvy founder of the detective agency stroked his chin, ruminated silently, and fiddled absently with his candlestick telephone and his speaking tube. “But Professor Beiderbecke is dead. Can Clyde Lynds reproduce Talking Pictures without him?”

  “Beiderbecke claimed Clyde is smart as a whip. The German Army believes he can. So do the German consuls.”

  “I find it hard to believe the kaiser’s army is fighting this hard just for the money.”

  “I agree,” said Bell. “They’re not businessmen. They’re soldiers. There’s something more to this.”

  Van Dorn nodded vigorously. “Find out what,” he ordered. “Continue to watch developments at the New York consulate. I’ll nose around here in Washington.”

  “Why not invite the German ambassador to lunch at the Cosmos Club?”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow. But don’t get your hopes up. His Excellency is not likely to be informed of such a vicious operation, particularly if it’s a military scheme.”