The Titanic Secret Read online

  “They are a large chandlering company. They’re based here in Paris, but they operate large warehouses in all the major French ports.”

  “Do they just provision ships?”

  “Mostly, but they’ve been known to provide foodstuffs and other items to scientific expeditions as well as for wealthy people who want to go on safari. A bit like your Abercrombie & Fitch, but not quite so luxurious.”

  “That makes sense,” Bell said absently. “They’d want the finest hard-rock-mining gear Colorado had to offer, but other provisions could come from France. I bet Brewster and Hall are heading to Bourgault’s office for some taste-testing.”

  “Who are Brewster and Hall?”

  “Sorry, Henri, I’m tired and talking to myself. They’re two Americans I need to warn about the true nature of the Société des Mines de Lorraine.”

  “Ah.”

  Bell asked, “Can anyone just show up at Bourgault’s offices?”

  “I believe you need an appointment. I can perhaps help. I know a few people in the shipping industry. Someone should be able to get you in as a ship broker of some kind.”

  “No, the men will be with the expedition side of the business, not the guys who buy groceries for freighters. Get me in as a Serbian naturalist looking to buy provisions for a trip into the Sahara.”

  “Why such a ridiculous cover?”

  “It’s the exact opposite of who Gly would suspect.”

  “Gly, the lead thug?”

  “He’s seen me briefly from a distance, so I don’t want him in Bourgault’s chancing upon an American looking to go to the Arctic. I don’t want him hearing my Americanized French, and it’s likely someone in the office speaks German, so I can’t pretend I’m from Germany. Serbia is an obscure enough part of the Austrian Empire that few outsiders speak their language. I figure I can fake speaking English with a Serb accent and no one will be the wiser.”

  “D’accord. I see again why you are so good at what you do. I will make this happen. Name?”

  “Ah, Dr. Aleksandar Dragović.”

  “I will get you an eleven o’clock meeting to discuss provisioning a five-man team for two weeks in the desert with native guides who will fend for themselves.” Favreau paused for effect. “It will cost you one favor in the future with no questions asked.”

  That was an extremely open-ended deal, and normally Isaac would have negotiated conditions. That’s how these things worked, but he was desperate. The French fixer knew he had Bell over a barrel. Bell closed his eyes and nodded. “Done.”

  16

  At ten minutes to eleven later that morning, Isaac Bell stepped from an elevator and through the door to the offices of A. C. Bourgault. They occupied the sixth floor of a building on the edge of an area called La Villette, where many of the city’s stockyards and slaughterhouses were located. The air on the street carried the coppery scent of blood.

  He’d bought an appropriately tweedy suit from the Le Bon Marché department store a block down the Rue de Sèvres from his hotel and wore nonprescription glasses he kept as part of a regular disguise kit in his luggage. He carried his body in a round-shouldered slouch that effectively masked his height. Since his hair darkened significantly when it was wet—what Gly might have espied back in the foothills of the Rockies—he let his naturally blond shine brightly on another dreary Parisian day.

  A reception desk guarded a large room furnished with two dozen identical desks at which sat two dozen nearly identical clerks shuffling papers, typing, or fielding from the general background drone of ringing telephones. Behind were individual offices with closed doors. There were no windows, so all lighting came from glass domes attached to the ten-foot ceiling. In all, the place had a rather dim, soul-crushing atmosphere.

  A heavyset receptionist with poorly bleached hair asked him his name and business in French. Bell replied in a comically accented English, “I am Dr. Dragović. I have appointment with Herr Duchamp at eleven. Please do not disturb, because I am early. I do not mind the waiting.”

  She merely shrugged and went back to the magazine she’d been thumbing through.

  A minute before eleven, Bell heard the elevator chime in the lobby behind the office door and seconds later four men strode into the reception area. Bell kept his face neutral, with a hint of a smile that said he was a man of good cheer. Foster Gly eyed him hard, head to toe and back again, before dismissing him with a scowl. The detective marveled at how Gly could get such a thick neck into a shirt and manage to wrap it with a tie. With him was the twin brother of the man Bell had seen Gly shoot dead.

  For a fleeting moment he wondered if there was a way to sow some sort of discord between these two, reveal to Yves Massard that Gly had murdered his brother. Since there was no proof, it was a matter of trust. Who would Massard believe, a longtime compatriot who likely consoled him for several boozy nights following Marc’s death and locked in that loyalty or an American stranger with nothing more than his word that he was telling the truth? The mere idea of it was so ridiculous that Bell banished it before it could even fully form in his mind.

  The other two men were strangers. One was tall and broad-shouldered, and he was missing two fingers from his left hand. He had dark hair and a farmer’s stoic face—the face of a man that nothing and no one ever riled. By sheer size alone, Bell was certain he was Joshua Hayes Brewster. The second was a bantam of a man barely five feet two inches tall, but he did possess a pugnacious thrust to his chin and swagger to his walk.

  It wasn’t until the small man’s gaze swept past Bell that he saw the spark of madness. His eyes glittered with an inner fire that looked like it was about to burn out of control. Bell immediately changed his mind. The shorter miner was Brewster. Only someone with that kind of intensity could convince eight other men to pull off something as audacious as what they were attempting.

  Gly informed the secretary of his appointment. His French was accented with a Scottish burr that made it almost incomprehensible. She’d had no qualms leaving Bell in the waiting area, but she rightly decided that making the newcomer wait for even a second was not in her best interest.

  She begged her leave and lurched from her desk to fetch the representative assigned to his account.

  “Madame,” Bell called as she rushed by. “Please, I am to see Herr Duchamp. You tell him I am here. Da?”

  She made an impatient gesture with her hand, like a bird fluttering its wing, but she also nodded. She worked her way through the bull pen and went first to one office, where she knocked and poked her head inside, and then on to an adjacent office. The same perfunctory knock, the same swinging open the door, announcing the client, closing the door again. She moved with the rote efficiency of an automaton. Soon she was back at her desk, studiously not looking at Gly, Yves, or the two miners, who stood uneasily in a cluster between her and the sofa Bell occupied. Very soon two mid-level functionaries emerged from their vaunted offices. They were older than the young men toiling at the open desks, and were balding and spread-waisted, but with a haughtiness that they could lord over the ranks of drones they themselves had emerged from a year or two previously.

  There was a moment of awkward handshaking as the two parties sorted themselves out. Bell, playing the hapless Serb, even shook hands with Massard, Vernon Hall, and Joshua Hayes Brewster. Gly refused the gesture with a sneer and pushed past Bell to speak with his rep from the ship-and-expedition provisioning company. Hall did take the detective’s outstretched hand without a change of expression. Brewster’s eyebrows went up when he felt a square of paper pressed into his palm so subtly that he’d almost missed it. There was a barest pause while Bell mouthed the name Patmore, which Brewster, to his credit, didn’t acknowledge.

  Duchamp led Bell back through the bull pen to his office while the others followed their representative to his. Duchamp’s office had a window, at least, behind his small, cluttered desk, but the
view was of a brick wall no more than a dozen feet away. What light filtered down to the window was anemic and gray.

  The Frenchman indicated Bell could take one of the chairs in front of the desk. He was a small man with a pinched expression. “I am not comfortable with this situation. We are a reputable company.”

  “Pardon me?” Bell said. “I do not understand.”

  “I know you are not some Serbian naturalist. I was ordered by my superiors to help you with a task concerning the other party that is here now.”

  Henri had gone for the direct approach in getting Bell this interview. On hindsight, it was for the best. Bell needed to pretend to be someone else only in front of Gly. Favreau had saved him the tedium of playing a role for an hour or two.

  “Oh, I see. Good, then,” Bell replied, a little taken aback, but he recovered quickly. “You do realize large favors were exchanged by powerful people to secure your cooperation. I do have your cooperation, yes?”

  “Of course,” the Frenchman replied, his voice softening and his face showing a bit more openness. “In truth, being singled out by Monsieur Michaud, the office manager, for this assignment shows the company’s faith in me.”

  “There you go.” Bell smiled, putting the salaryman at ease. “Consider it an honor rather than a burden. Now, how does this process work? For them, I mean. The other party.”

  “After some preliminaries, my counterpart, Monsieur Gauthier, will take the men to a tasting room, where they will sample some of our canned goods—stews, soups, and vegetables, mostly, plus our popular pastas—and a full assortment of desserts. As you may know, the process for preserving food in cans started here in France at the time of Napoléon.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Bell admitted.

  “After, they will enjoy samples of cured meats, and porridges that can be reconstituted on-site with a little water. I understand they are bound for the Arctic, so Gauthier will recommend foods that are high in fat and rich with kilocalories. The men will select the ones they deem the tastiest. An order will be transmitted to our warehouse at whichever port they are departing from. Workers there fill the order and put everything on pallets that can be hoisted aboard a ship.”

  “And this is how you provision a large freighter?”

  “More or less. It is usually company representatives who meet here and often they don’t sample much of anything since they take on more fresh stores than canned goods. A well-fed crew tends to work harder than ones with poor nutrition.”

  “I never gave any of this much thought. Amazing how many parts must work together to keep ships at sea.”

  Bell pulled his pocket watch by its chain and checked the time. He had ten more minutes before the note he’d passed Brewster said to meet in the men’s washroom. Though he had plenty of time, Bell got to his feet. He wanted to reconnoiter the lavatory. “I’m sorry to cut you short, monsieur. However, I don’t know what level of paranoia I’m dealing with, so it’s best I get into position now.”

  “Oh, bien sûr. I understand completely.” Far from the dour functionary Bell had greeted just moments earlier, Duchamp seemed pleased to be able to help. Securing quick cooperation from people was among Bell’s many talents, one that Marion was forever suspicious of, as she too often found herself doing things Bell suggested.

  “La salle de bain?”

  “À droite. To the right.”

  Bell saw himself out of Duchamp’s office. None of the workers in the outer space paid him the slightest interest. He moved along the wall of doors until he came to one with the proper words on the door versus a person’s name. He swung open the door and was stupefied. There was just a sink and toilet. He’d expected to be able to hide in one of several stalls. He fully expected Gly or Massard to escort Brewster to the men’s room because that’s what he would have done had their roles been reversed.

  Though there were dozens of workers, the bath’s small size was just one more dehumanizing aspect of this office. Bell poked his head around the door and saw that behind it was a closet. He stepped into the bathroom and let the door close behind him. The closet handle didn’t lock, but above it was a dead bolt. Bell dropped to his knees and fished out his lockpicks.

  The lock was a sloppy old thing that his slender picks had difficulty engaging. The problem was having too fine of instruments for the job at hand. He’d be better off with a couple of straightened hairpins. Again and again he tried the picks to no avail, pulling them free before another fresh attempt. He was more than aware of time getting away from him. He stood and fished his hotel key from his pocket. The peaks along the top crenellation weren’t optimal for what he had in mind, but they weren’t terrible either. He unlaced his shoe. Befitting the Eastern European doctor he was imitating, it had a solid thick heel as tough as stone.

  He positioned the heavy brass key just outside the lock’s slot and wacked it with the shoe at the same time he twisted it. The force of the blow, called a bump in the vernacular of lockpicking, was enough to move the lock’s driver pins and create a momentary gap around the shear line. His quick wrist twist had been timed, through countless hours of practice, to exploit this momentary lapse, and the lock snicked open.

  “Do not complain again.” Bell heard Gly’s raised Scottish voice just outside the bathroom. “I am checking it first.”

  With failure not an option, Bell opened the closet door. The space was smaller than a phone booth and packed with mops, brooms, and other cleaning supplies. He backed in, trying not to jostle anything, and pulled the door closed. The air reeked of ammonia, and in just seconds his nose burned. The bathroom door squealed open. Bell groped for the dead bolt lock only to discover that there wasn’t a toggle on the inside. He couldn’t lock the door.

  He grabbed the regular door handle loosely. If Gly checked, the knob needed to turn freely because it was a simple passage set without a lock. But once Gly tried to tug on the door, Bell had to grip it like iron and pray that the Scotsman didn’t put his considerable strength behind the move.

  “Empty bathroom, Gly.” Even muffled by the door, Brewster’s voice was pitched higher than expected.

  “Hold up,” Gly retorted.

  Bell felt the sweat-slick knob suddenly turn in his hand. As soon as it stopped rotating, he crushed it with both fists and tensed the muscles of his arms, shoulders, stomach, and back. He held on so fiercely that it made the door feel as solidly locked as if it had been nailed in place.

  “Be quick,” Gly said threateningly as he left.

  Brewster locked the bathroom and then knocked on the closet door. “He’s gone.”

  Bell stepped out. He stood a full head taller than the miner and had at least fifty pounds on him. For being such a legend of the hard rocks outside of Denver and beyond, Brewster just wasn’t at all as expected. He was weak-chinned, with wispy hair, and had such deep wrinkles around his eyes that it was hard to believe the man wasn’t yet thirty-five years old. He looked a worn-out sixty.

  All except for the eyes themselves. Bell had to admit he had a hard time meeting Brewster’s gaze. It was like looking at the sun, painful, and yet he felt compelled to keep glancing back as if to verify that what he was seeing was real. Brewster’s look was part madman and part confidence man. Someone daring you to trust him while all the time warning you that you must not.

  Bell moved to the sink before speaking and turned on the water. In the small mirror over the basin he saw his face was flushed from the effort of holding the door in position, while his eyes were red from the ammonia burn. He gestured Brewster over to the far corner of the small bath and shook hands. Their conversation was held to a whisper with heads almost touching.

  “Mr. Brewster, my name is Isaac Bell. I’m a private detective working with Colonel Gregg Patmore. I’ve followed you from Central City to Paris with an urgent warning. Gly and Massard are going to kill you and your men as soon as you recover the
byzanium ore.”

  Brewster didn’t even blink. “That was obvious from the beginning. You think I trust any of these frog-eaters?”

  Bell was taken aback. “You knew and you’re going anyway? Are you”—Bell was about to say “crazy,” but he suspected Brewster just might be—“sure that’s wise?”

  “Gregg and I figured he’d have something sussed out before we’re finished tearing into Bednaya Mountain. If not, well, Gly and Massard won’t have the element of surprise. Soon as we suspect something, we’ll jump them sonsabitches. Say, Gly told us the other Massard got killed. You do that?”

  With the world still atilt under his feet, Bell said, “Ah, no. Gly actually shot him to keep him from talking to me.” Realizing he’d just made a potentially fatal mistake, he seized the smaller man by the shoulders. “You can’t let on that you know that.”

  “I was born at night, Mr. Bell. Just not last night. I know how this works. ’Twas me that set it all in motion when I realized the Société des Mines had lied about the ore I’d found and I went to Patmore.”

  “Okay. Let me start again. I know you suspect Gly will try to kill you. Patmore told me that. What you don’t know is, Gly is aware that someone—me—is onto him.”

  “Now I get why he’s been on edge. He’s cagey on a normal day but hell-bent since we left Denver. I thought it was over Marc’s death, yet even Yves isn’t taking it all that badly. Marc wasn’t a natural-born killer like the other two.”

  Bell nodded. “I’ve spoken with his wife. Do they still think you’ll need until June to get the ore?”

  “That’s what I keep telling them.”

  “But you told Patmore you can do it by May.”

  “Yes.” Brewster grimaced and showed a mouth of tobacco-stained teeth. “If they’re suspicious enough, then they’ll sail back as soon as they’re able and wait for us. Gly knows that I won’t allow any of his men to overwinter with us, and the ice gets too thick January through April, so they can’t wait offshore. But they will come back as early as they can.”