The Thief Read online

  EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, in Archie Abbott’s library, Marion read aloud to Isaac Bell the New York Times account of yesterday’s shootout on Pier 54. Steered by Cunard Line publicists charged with maintaining the steamship company’s reputation for safety, and threatened, Bell presumed, by red-faced police and docks commissioners, the newspaper blamed the gunfire on “disgruntled Italian longshoremen.”

  Bell laughed, which made his head hurt.

  “‘The Italians all escaped in the confusion,’” Marion concluded her reading. “‘Arrests are imminent,’ vowed the commissioners.”

  Archie’s butler appeared and said, “A Mr. Harry Warren to see you at the kitchen door, sir.”

  “Bring him in,” said Marion.

  “I tried, Mrs. Bell. He won’t come past the kitchen.”

  The cook poured Harry coffee and made herself scarce.

  Harry stared in some amazement at Bell, who was attired in his customary white linen suit and had combed his thick golden hair to hide a row of surgical stitches. “If you wasn’t white as your duds, no one would know you was recently brained and partly drowned.”

  “He looks better than he is,” said Marion. “The doctor said he ought to be in bed.”

  “I’m fine,” said Bell.

  Harry Warren and Marion Bell traded glances of concern. “You know, boss, Mrs. Bell is right to be worried. So’s the doc. Knocks on the noggin rate respect.”

  “Thank you, Harry,” said Marion. “Could you help me walk him upstairs?”

  “What have you found?” Bell demanded.

  “The Gophers didn’t believe there was a fire on the Mauretania.”

  “What business was it of theirs? It so happens there was a fire. I saw it with my own eyes. It burned up everything in the forward baggage room, including the smuggled film stock that ignited it.”

  “That’s what the Gophers didn’t believe.”

  Bell looked at Marion. The penny dropped. “You mean the Gophers were smuggling the film stock?”

  “They put up the dough for the shipment. When they heard about the fire, they decided that the guy they paid to smuggle it into New York was welshing on the deal, selling the stock to another buyer for more dough.”

  “Where did they get that idea?”

  “They’re Gophers! They get ideas like that. They figure that what they would do to somebody, somebody would do to them. Like the Golden Rule. Backwards. So they met the ship to deal with the guy who they thought welshed.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Clyde Lynds.”

  Bell exchanged a second glance with Marion and shook his head in disgust, setting off new jolts of pain. “I was afraid you were going to say that. Clyde smelled the film going bad and knew exactly what it was because it was his stock.”

  Marion said, “The ‘hero’ who saved the ship is the smuggler who almost sank the ship.”

  “In a nutshell,” Harry Warren agreed. He stood up and put on his derby. “Anyway, when the Yorkville boys showed up, the Gophers jumped to the conclusion that they were taking delivery of the film stock they’d bought out from under them. Fighting ensued.”

  “In a nutshell…”

  “Thanks for the coffee.”

  “Who are the Yorkville boys?”

  “From the new German district up in Yorkville. Uptown, on the East Side.”

  “Germans?”

  “Germans are leaving downtown since the General Slocum fire. You know, the excursion-boat fire when all their poor children were killed. Tore the heart out of the old neighborhood, and they’ve just kind of been retreating north—lock, stock, and breweries.”

  “What’s the gang called?”

  “Marzipan Boys.”

  “Like the candy?”

  “The old gangs mocked ’em with that name. Now they’re proud of it since they’ve been whaling the heck out of everybody. They’re a tough bunch.”

  Harry Warren was halfway out the back door when Bell called, “But why did the Marzipan Boys go to Pier 54?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The film stock did burn in the fire,” Bell said with elaborate patience. “Clyde Lynds didn’t welsh on the deal. The Marzipan Boys didn’t buy it out from underneath the Gophers, therefore they weren’t there to pick up film stock they didn’t even know about. So why did the Yorkville gang meet the Mauretania?”

  Harry Warren’s blank expression got blanker. “Haven’t found out yet.”

  “Find out! Report to me at the office.”

  “Isaac,” said Marion. “The doctor said to stay home today.”

  “O.K.,” said Bell. “I’ll stay home today. Harry, report to me at the office tonight.”

  “CLYDE,” SAID ISAAC BELL, “YOU’RE GOING to have to return Captain Turner’s medal.”

  “What do you mean, Mr. Bell?”

  Bell fixed him with an icy stare.

  Clyde Lynds hung his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Bell. I am so sorry.”

  Bell asked, “Sorry for what? Spit it out! What?”

  “The film stock. It was mine.”

  “Go on.”

  Clyde said, “We needed the money to escape from Germany. I mean, I wanted so much to succeed with Talking Pictures. But I was scared crazy for our lives. When the Army issued that phony warrant, I knew my goose was cooked.”

  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.”

  “IHEARD 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 lids 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?” Va
n 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.