The Thief Page 17

  Semmler suspected another reason for His Majesty’s favor. He was acutely aware of his long arms and simian brows. He knew that “gorilla” or “monkey” looks would have doomed an ordinary soldier to a stagnant career in an army that revered the handsome features that epitomized superior races and ridiculed the ugly. But the kaiser’s own appearance was blighted by a birth defect—a withered arm that hung from his shoulder like a toy doll’s. Perhaps two refugees from the mirror felt a kinship?

  When they were driven indoors by the rain, Semmler invited the kaiser into his library and entertained him by projecting films of galloping cavalry, armored trains, the new flying machines, and the ocean-churning dreadnoughts of Wilhelm’s beloved High Seas Fleet.

  “Behold, Your Majesty, the newest weapon of all.”

  The kaiser squinted at the screen. “Where is it?”

  “The movies are a weapon, Your Majesty.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You know that the superior classes have always enjoyed theater and opera.”

  “As they should.”

  “The movies are an even bigger event in the lives of the workers. Millions crowd into Kintopps and tenement cinemas. They watch whatever appears on the screen. Mesmerized. Imagine millions upon millions assembled daily to watch the same thing—wanting to be mesmerized; hoping to be mesmerized. They are ripe for propaganda.”

  “Propaganda?” The kaiser had frowned. “They boast in England that movies are a propaganda of democracy.”

  “Movies are even better propaganda for love and hate, Your Majesty. Friendship and war. There are millions watching. They could watch your message.”

  “What message, General Major?”

  Christian Semmler stood face-to-face with Kaiser Wilhelm and said, “Friendship.”

  “Friendship?…”

  Semmler took a deep breath to remind himself that patience was the hunter’s deadliest virtue. He smothered his impulse to grip the kaiser by his shirtfront and shout that if propaganda could convince the German people to pay for a fleet of warships they didn’t need, propaganda could convince anyone of anything. But he could not shout that in so many words without instantly destroying his special rapport.

  “With all the respect due the power of your splendid armies, Majesty, and your navy, when Der Tag dawns we will almost certainly have to fight England, France, and Russia simultaneously.”

  “We will win,” the kaiser said. “Our rail lines will shuttle our armies from front to front, east to west, west to east. A two-front war holds no terrors.”

  “To be sure, Your Majesty. But three fronts? Even Germany will be hard-pressed to fight on three fronts simultaneously…”

  “America.”

  “As you say, Your Majesty. America.”

  It finally dawned on the kaiser. “Allies!”

  “Allies, Your Majesty. The movies can defeat Germany’s enemies by turning them against one another. We will show propaganda movies that depict Germans and the immense German-American minority as America’s friends and the British, French, and Russians as her enemies. Can you imagine a more powerful weapon? Germany, their friend, and England, their enemy.”

  The kaiser had looked at him sharply. “You’ve put great thought into this, haven’t you? This didn’t just pop into your mind.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty. I have thought of little else for a long time. Der Tag must be Germany’s beginning, not her end.”

  Kaiser Wilhelm flung his strong arm around Semmler’s shoulders.

  “Do it,” he said. “Take whatever you need.”

  “I need the Army, the diplomatic corps, the banks, and the steamship lines.”

  “All will serve you.”

  Semmler’s gifts included an unerring eye for a person’s nature and desires. Instead of responding with a soldierly salute, he extended a strong man’s hand. They clasped hard and stared each other in the face. “I swear a sacred oath: I will not let you down, Your Majesty.”

  But the kaiser was famously mercurial. Before Semmler could suggest they rejoin the other guns at the hunt since the rain was slackening, the kaiser’s face took on a dreamy expression, and he said, with what turned out to be amazing prescience, “Wouldn’t it be fine if movies made music?”

  “Music, Your Majesty?”

  “Music! So that thousands watching in giant theaters could listen, too, and feel the emotion of the music. Music is key to effective propaganda. Music is visceral.”

  “You are right, of course, Your Majesty, I will look into it.”

  But there were few orchestras in the small theaters in most American towns. Nor would a tinny piano do much to stir emotions. He investigated the likelihood that movies themselves could make their own music and learned the sorry history of those attempts.

  And then the strangest thing happened. Semmler had already set the Donar Plan in motion to show pro-German movies to American audiences. He had established the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company and was integrating exchange men and exhibitors to control film production, distribution, and exhibition when all of a sudden—like a comet roaring through the atmosphere—came news from Vienna of Sprechendlichtspieltheater, a talking pictures machine that actually worked.

  The kaiser himself had virtually predicted it, and there it was. The invention that Beiderbecke and Lynds had named the Talking Pictures machine would transform movies into far more potent voices to persuade, cajole, and play on the emotions. Music and the human voice married to moving images would stir millions to go to war in the name of love.

  ARTHUR CURTIS GOT TO THE KINTOPP an hour early for his appointment with Hans Reuter. The Kino was full already with a hundred film patrons in the narrow space, both men and women tonight, watching Sarah Bernhardt. He took his beer and wandered toward the screen, simulating a search for a closer seat while he looked for a back way out. There was none—which would make a fire a precarious proposition, and the effect of Reuter betraying him even worse.

  The safer move would be to stay out of the Kino and nurse his beer at the bar. With an unpleasant premonition gnawing at him, Curtis emerged from the darkened theater and took a place at the bar. At six forty-five, a carpenter with his toolbox in hand and sawdust on his overalls came in, ordered beer, and drank it slowly, ignoring the entrance to the Kino and glancing occasionally at the street door, as if waiting for a friend. Arthur Curtis studied the man intently. The premonition grew sharp, but it took him too long to isolate the source.

  The sawdust was what troubled him, he realized at last. German workmen were precise. They swept up at the end of every day. They would never step out in public covered in sawdust, even hurrying home from work, and this one wasn’t hurrying. He was barely touching his stein to his lips.

  Art Curtis downed his beer, nodded a casual farewell to the barmaid, and pushed through the front doors into the street. He breathed in the evening air and glanced around the bustling neighborhood of shops and tenements.

  As luck would have it, Hans Reuter was early. He was walking fast, his head down, either unconcerned that he was being followed or hoping like an ostrich that what he couldn’t see couldn’t hurt him.

  Curtis made a lightning decision and took a huge chance that his initial glance at the street had correctly picked up no shadows.

  Reuter flinched as Art Curtis took his arm.

  “Let’s walk, instead.”

  “Why?” asked Reuter. But his hunger for the money gave him no choice but to let Curtis set their course.

  “We can transact our business in half a minute. Give me the name. I’ll give you the money, and we can go our separate ways.” Run our separate ways was what he meant—in his case, straight to the French border, the hell with the office. But telling Reuter they were under observation was no way to make him take a chance.

  “His name?”

  “They call him ‘the Monkey.’”

  Isaac Bell had called him an acrobat. “What’s his real name?”

  “I don�
��t know.”

  “I don’t pay for ‘I don’t know,’” Curtis shot back, scanning the street ahead and behind. He saw workmen homeward bound, shoppers with groceries, couples holding hands converging on the Kintopp. Oddly, there were no cops.

  “He’s an Army officer.”

  “That much I knew already.”

  “You didn’t know he was a general major,” Reuter replied smugly.

  “His rank means nothing without a name,” Curtis lied. If it was true, such a high rank would narrow the possibilities to a handful.

  “Would you accept a description?” Reuter asked.

  “It’d better be precise.”

  They were passing under a streetlamp and Curtis got a good look at Reuter’s face. A confident expression matched his smug tone as he said, “Thirty-five years old, medium height, powerful frame, blond hair, green eyes, long arms like a monkey.”

  Thirty-five was unusually young for a general major in the German Army. But the rest of the description was too incongruous to be a lie.

  “If you can tell me that, you know his name. There can’t be two officers his age who look like that. No name, no money.”

  Two men gliding toward them on bicycles took PO8 Lugar pistols from the baskets attached to their handlebars, and behind him Arthur Curtis heard the carpenter burst out of the Kintopp and drop his toolbox.

  HANS REUTER RAN.

  The bicyclists shot him down. He tumbled into the gutter. Pedestrians screamed, dove to the cobblestones, and bolted into shops. Art Curtis had already pulled his Browning. He whirled around and dropped the carpenter with a lucky shot to the chest, then spun back around and fired twice, wounding the nearest bicyclist. The man he missed returned his fire.

  Art Curtis felt the hammer blow of a 9mm slug and found himself suddenly on his back, staring up at the darkening sky. If anyone had shouted Polizei!, he might have stayed on the ground. But no one did, and the men on the bicycles had Army pistols, and the cops had been ordered out of the neighborhood. That meant they’d been sent to kill him, which gave him the fear-driven strength to stagger to his feet. The man who had shot him looked surprised, raised his pistol, and took deliberate aim.

  The Van Dorn detective did not waste precious time aiming at a target six feet away. He triggered his Browning, jumped over the body, and ran.

  “YOU’RE WHITE AS A GHOST, my friend,” exclaimed the old Army sergeant when Arthur Curtis collapsed onto the bentwood chair beside him.

  “Too much schnapps last night.”

  He kept telling himself it was only a shoulder wound, except he could feel in his lungs that the bullet, which was still lodged inside him, had done greater damage. At least it hadn’t broken any bones, and for some reason there was no blood on his coat, just a tiny hole that a moth could have eaten. But it hurt to breathe and his head was spinning, and the walk to the sergeant’s beer garden had nearly killed him.

  “Good German lager will fix that! Waitress! Beer for my friend.”

  Arthur Curtis rested until the beer arrived, tipped the stein toward the old man, and asked, through gritted teeth, “Do you recall before you retired a general major nicknamed ‘Monkey’?”

  The old sergeant shook his head. “No.”

  “I heard it the other day. It’s such a strange nickname for a high-serving officer.”

  “Well, he wasn’t so high then.”

  “What? I mean, what do you mean he wasn’t so high then? Who?”

  “I retired, what was it… six years ago? He was only a colonel, a very young colonel. What a man! What a soldier! You’ve never seen a fighter like him. They say he resigned his commission to fight in Africa. A guerrilla fighter with the Boer commandos.”

  “Did you know him?”

  “Me? A sergeant from Berlin know a Prussian aristocrat? What could you be thinking, my friend?”

  Curtis gripped the table to right himself as a sudden burst of pain nearly knocked him off his chair. He put all his might into composing his voice. “I meant, did you serve under him?”

  “I only knew him by reputation. He was admired. Still is, I’m sure.”

  “Why did they call him Monkey?”

  “Not to his face,” the sergeant chuckled. “Mein Gott, Colonel Semmler would have sliced their ears off and made them eat them.”

  “Semmler… But why did they call him ‘Monkey’?”

  “He looked like one. Enormous arms and big brows like a monkey.” The sergeant glanced about and lowered his voice. “Not quite the picture of the purebred Prussian aristocrat, if you know what I mean. More the sturdy peasant, like me.”

  “I thought Semmler was a Prussian name?”

  “Of course. And they said he’s a Roth, too—buckets of superior Prussian blood, if not the superior shape. My friend, are you all right? You look at death’s door.”

  “What is his first name?”

  “Christian.”

  Arthur Curtis gathered his spirit in an effort to stand.

  “I am thinking it is more than the schnapps. Bad oysters. I had a dozen at lunch. Perhaps… I better go—here, let me pay.”

  “No, no, my friend. You always pay. You hardly touched your beer. I’ll pay and finish it for you. You go home and get to bed.”

  THE TELEGRAPH OFFICES IN THE main railroad stations were open all night. He would cable Semmler’s name and description to Isaac Bell, care of the New York office, and just to be sure he would also wire it to the Van Dorn field office in Paris. He headed for the nearest station, hoping that his lurching pace would not draw attention on the well-lit streets. He paused just inside the main entrance to check in a kiosk mirror that no blood showed on his coat, and as he did, he saw across the vast hall that the police were checking the papers of the men lined up at the telegraph office. They’d be doing the same at every office open all night and, he realized with a touch of panic, at the hospitals, too. And as the night wore on and the streets and bars and restaurants emptied, they would stop any man still about.

  The French border, four hundred and fifty miles west, was a fantasy. He could barely walk. Nor could he go home to his Pension. It was filled with busybody boarders and a nosy dragon of a landlady. Anyone who saw him in the lighted foyer would report his condition. Kicking himself for not trading the convenience of the boarding house for the privacy of a furnished apartment, and with panic rising, Arthur Curtis convinced himself that he could hole up in his office. There he could rest, regain his strength, and then light out for the border in the morning—or maybe the North Sea coast. A million and a half people lived in Berlin, and when they all rushed to work in the morning the railroad stations would be too crowded for the police to check everyone. Concentrating on placing one foot after another, he headed for the tram. They stopped running at eleven. He had time. He pulled himself aboard with a herculean effort, staggered off at his stop, managing not to fall, and walked toward his office.

  A man in a macintosh was standing across the street.

  Art Curtis reached deep into his pocket and closed his hand around his Browning, which had a round in the chamber and two left in the magazine. He looked for the man’s partner and spotted him in a doorway. He veered off the sidewalk into the street, drawing both from their cover. They exchanged looks and moved quickly. He let them come close. When they drew their weapons—Army Lugars again—he fired twice through the cloth of his coat, dropped both men, and staggered into his building. He hauled himself up the steps, fumbled his key into his lock, pushed inside, and locked the door, wondering whether he still had the strength in his hands to reload. There’d be more of them coming any minute.

  The desk lamp flared on, and he whirled to fire his last bullet.

  “What happened?” asked Pauline. Her eyes were clouded with sleep, her face creased where she had rested her cheek on her sleeve.

  “NOTHING. GO HOME. GO ON. GET OUT OF HERE!”

  “I’m sorry. I was doing my homework, and I fell asleep. I can’t go home, my mother’s friend—”


  “Get out of here!” Curtis roared. The girl flinched and tears of hurt filled her eyes. Curtis started coughing. He pressed his hand to his mouth, and it came away full of blood.

  “Oh my God,” she whispered. “You’ve been shot.”

  “Turn out the light.”

  She did, instantly. “Are they coming?”

  “Soon,” he said. “Get out. Use the window.”

  She had jumped up from the chair and was standing behind his desk. He could see her silhouetted against the light in the alley. She stood stock-still.

  “Quickly,” he urged. “Get away.”

  “I can’t leave you like this.”

  “Go!”

  “Come with me.”

  “I wish I could. I can’t move another step, much less climb down that ladder. Go. Please go before they come.”

  “I can’t leave you.”

  “They’ll kill you, Pauline.”

  She rummaged in her book bag and pulled something out. He heard the sharp click of a hammer cocking.

  “What the devil is that?”

  “I bought a gun.”

  Arthur Curtis felt a part of himself die. This silly child, he thought, is going to stay here like I’m Sherlock Holmes and die with me, and I cannot think of a worse way for a man to leave this earth than drag a child with him.

  There was only one way to get her to leave.

  “Give that to me!”

  She handed it over, butt first. It was a little revolver. He could feel rust on the trigger guard.

  “Draw the window shade. Stand to one side as you do it. Good. O.K., now. Bend the desk lamp down until it just lights the desk. Turn it on.”

  It cast a dim glow.

  “Let me sit there.” He lurched to the desk and sank into his chair. He shoved her pistol aside, drew his own from his coat, and laid it on the desk. “Watch this.”