The Thief Read online

  He removed the magazine and the cartridge from the chamber and took the slide and return spring from the barrel. He swabbed the parts clean with a rag he took from the cleaning kit in his desk. Then he reassembled the pistol, inserted a fresh magazine, and shoved it toward her. “Now you do it.”

  Pauline mimicked the field stripping of the little Browning, step by step. Curtis was not surprised. She was as sharp a cookie as he had ever met.

  “Good. Remember, always check there’s no bullet in the chamber, or you’ll blow your head off by mistake. O.K. Pick it up. Here’s how you cock it.”

  He guided her hands and saw to his relief that she was strong enough to move the slide and chamber a round. “You have small hands, like me. It fits you fine. Keep it clean. Here’s a spare clip.” He took it from the drawer. “O.K. You got fourteen bullets.”

  “You’re giving me your gun?”

  “If anyone ever tries to take it away from you—they will, because you look like a little girl—here’s what you do. You point the gun at his face. And then you look through him, like he’s not there. Like you can’t see him, like he’s made of glass. Then he’ll believe you’re willing to kill him. Understand?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “Still want to be a detective?”

  “More than anything.”

  “Starting this minute, you are a Van Dorn apprentice detective. Here’s your first assignment: report to the Van Dorn field office in Paris.”

  “Paris?”

  “On the Rue du Bac. My old pal Horace Bronson ramrods it. He’ll take care of you. He’s a top man. Used to run the San Francisco office. Here. Here’s money, you’ll need it.” He emptied the notes from his billfold and coins from his pockets into her hands. Then he yanked open another desk drawer. “And here’s some French francs. Tell Mr. Bronson you have a message for Van Dorn’s chief investigator in America…” He tried to catch his breath. It was getting hard to get wind into his lungs.

  “The message is: ‘Krieg Rüstungswerk GmbH’s agent in America is an Imperial Army general major named Christian Semmler.’ Repeat that!”

  Pauline repeated it word for word.

  “Second half of the message: ‘Semmler is nicknamed “Monkey.” He’s thirty-five years old, medium height, powerful frame, blond hair, green eyes, long arms. Like a monkey.’ Repeat that!”

  She did.

  “Now get out of here.”

  “But I can’t you leave you.”

  “A Van Dorn apprentice always obeys orders.” He clasped her face between his trembling hands and glared into her eyes. “This is vital, Pauline. You are the only one who can solve this case and save men’s lives. Go. Please, go.”

  He pushed her away.

  Biting her lips, Pauline put on her coat and hat and pocketed the Browning. Curtis turned out the light. To his immense relief, he heard her open the back window. He heard the fire ladder rungs creak. He listened for her footsteps in the alley, but instead heard boots pounding up the stairs.

  Arthur Curtis picked up Pauline’s rusted revolver and aimed it at the door, hoping it wouldn’t blow up in his hand. Not that that would make much difference. But the longer he could hold them off, the farther she could run.

  “CABLEGRAM FROM PARIS, Mr. Bell.”

  Bell took it with an amused smile. The Van Dorn apprentice detective who had delivered the cablegram, a slender youth in immaculate white shirt and trousers and a lavender bow tie, was aping the sartorial magnificence that the Van Dorn Los Angeles field office was famous for. All he was missing was a lavender bowler, for which he was probably banking his salary.

  “Wait for my reply, please.”

  Isaac Bell slit the envelope:

  GERMAN POLICE REPORT ART CURTIS

  SHOT DEAD. I’VE SENT MAN TO

  BERLIN FOR PARTICULARS.

  BRONSON

  “WHAT’S YOUR REPLY, MR. BELL?”

  Isaac Bell heard the apprentice as if he were calling from a rooftop. When he turned to him, the boy flinched from his raging eyes.

  “Reply, sir?” he repeated bravely.

  “Cable this:

  RETURN BODY DENVER.

  MY EXPENSE.

  BELL

  “Write it down, son.” The tall detective turned away to hide his grief.

  The boy patted his empty pockets in sudden panic.

  Bell said, “Son, never go anywhere without a pencil. If you’re going to become a detective, you have to write down your thoughts and observations. What’s your name?”

  “Apprentice Detective Adams, sir. Mike Adams.”

  “Here, Mike, use mine.” Bell lent him his pencil and gave him a sheet of paper from the desk he had commandeered.

  Apprentice Adams wrote the message, read it back, and ran.

  Isaac Bell turned to the window and stared down at busy First Street, barely seeing the parade of streetcars, autos, trucks, wagons, and a squad of helmeted police on bicycles.

  Joe Van Dorn pushed into the office without knocking.

  “I just heard. I’m sorry, Isaac. I know you liked him.”

  Bell said, “The evidence of the Acrobat’s ruthlessness was right before my eyes. I saw him throw his own man into the sea to conceal his identity. What made me think he wouldn’t murder Art Curtis for the same reason?”

  Joseph Van Dorn shook his head emphatically. “I saw Art once in a gunfight. Most men lose perspective when the lead starts flying. Not Art.”

  “I appreciate the thought, Joe. I know Art could handle himself. Nonetheless, he was working for me.”

  Van Dorn said, “You are, of course, authorized to pull out all stops until we get who did it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Until Bronson learns otherwise in Berlin, we have to presume he was gunned down by Krieg.”

  “Or the German Army.”

  “Don’t you wonder what he learned that got him killed?” Bronson marveled.

  “He learned a name,” said Bell.

  “How do you know?”

  “He cabled me the day before yesterday asking for more money. He said we’d have the money back—or a name—in two days.”

  “What did you cable back?”

  “‘Blank check.’”

  “Well, if he got the name, he took it to his grave.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Bell.

  “Now what?” asked Van Dorn.

  “Short of a lucky break walking in that door,” said Isaac Bell, “I’m starting from scratch.”

  There was a knock at the door. The front-desk man, wearing a scarlet vest and matching shoulder holster, called, “Mr. Bell—Oh, there you are, Mr. Van Dorn. Police chief’s phoning from Levy’s Cafe, wondering what happened to you?”

  Van Dorn tugged out his watch. “Telephone the restaurant I’ll be there in ten minutes. Lunch with the chief,” he explained to Bell and rushed out, saying, “Then I’m on the Limited to Chicago. Keep me posted.”

  “Mr. Bell, there’s a fellow to see you. Hebrew gent. Has one of those funny caps on his head.”

  “It’s called a yarmulke. Send him in.”

  Andrew Rubenoff marched in smiling, but when he saw Bell standing by the window, his smile faded. “You do not look well, Isaac.”

  “Lost a friend,” Bell answered tersely. “What have you learned?”

  The newly minted film-manufacturing banker went straight to the purpose of his visit.

  “To my great relief,” he said, “the so-called Artists Syndicate does not exist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that a syndicate that I knew nothing about, but thought I should, is a sham. It exists only on paper. Its supposed Wall Street investors are ghosts.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Then who paid for Imperial Film’s ten-story building?”

  “I don’t know yet. But it was not the Artists Syndicate.”

  “Someone funneled a lot of money into Imperial.”
r />   “To be sure. But so far Wall Street has greeted my questions about who that someone might be with a wall of silence.”

  “Are the Wall Streeters protecting Imperial?”

  “No, no, no. Imperial’s money almost certainly comes from someplace other than Wall Street. Abroad, I suspect.”

  “Germany?”

  “Perhaps. But English bankers are our biggest source of foreign funds. They invest in American railroads and ranches and ore mines. Why not moving pictures?”

  “And the Germans?”

  “Obviously, your first interest in this is the Germans. We shall see. Not to worry, I’m just getting started.”

  “I’ll have our Research people nose around that, too.”

  Rubenoff smiled modestly. “I’m sure that the Van Dorn Research department will be… helpful.”

  “How did you find out so quickly that there’s no Wall Street interests in the Artists Syndicate?”

  “Isaac! You are talking to Andrew Rubenoff. When the Messiah comes, he’ll ask me to recommend a stockbroker.” He sobered quickly. “I don’t mean to offer false hope. Wall Street was easy. Abroad is much more complicated. I’ve already started, but I can’t deliver such fast results.”

  Bell heard the clatter of a troop of horsemen in the street, not a usual sound in downtown Los Angeles. He looked down from the window again. Twenty actors dressed as cowboys in white hats and bare-chested, war-painted Indians were trotting by, bound, it appeared, for picture taking in nearby Elysian Park. He watched them pass, his brow furrowed in thought. Then he picked up the Kellogg intercommunicating telephone.

  “Send an apprentice.”

  One came instantly. It was the kid wearing the lavender bow tie. “Mike, transmit a wire on the private line to Texas Walt Hatfield. The Houston office will know where to find him.”

  The kid whipped out pad and pencil. “Yes, sir, Mr. Bell. What’s the message?”

  COME LA.

  SEEK EMPLOYMENT WITH IMPERIAL FILM AS COWBOY PLAYER.

  “Go on, Mike. That’s all.”

  “Should I sign it ‘BELL’?”

  “Sign it ‘ISAAC.’”

  Mike Adams ran out.

  Andrew Rubenoff raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  Bell said, “Walt Hatfield rode with the Texas Rangers before he joined Van Dorn. He’ll make a believable cowboy looking for work as an extra in Wild West dramas. Heck, they might make him a Western star. He looks like he was carved from cactus.”

  “I presume that Texas Walt is an old friend?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Sometimes we need an old friend on the premises.”

  “Maybe so. But what I need most is a crackerjack detective inside Imperial Film.”

  “What can one detective do? Imperial is an enormous company with four hundred hands.”

  “He won’t be the only one.”

  BELL WIRED GRADY FORRER ON the Van Dorn private telegraph, inquiring what progress he had made with Imperial’s bankers.

  The redoubtable head of the Research department wired back:

  MY BOYS ARE DIGGING DEEP.

  REMEMBER BANKS LIKE SECRETS.

  HOPEFUL MORE SOON.

  SORRY ABOUT ART. GOOD MAN.

  Isaac Bell replied:

  CONCENTRATE GERMAN OVERSEAS

  MERCHANT BANKS WITH ARMY TIES.

  LOOK FOR KRIEG-IMPERIAL

  CONNECTION.

  PAULINE GRANDZAU WOKE UP IN A HAYSTACK with four tines of a pitchfork inches from her face. The steel was shiny from use and recently sharpened. Three of the tines tapered to a needle point. The fourth was bent as if the farmer had accidently hit a rock shortly before finding her in his hay.

  She asked herself, What is the best thing possible at this moment?

  The best thing was that her disguise worked. She didn’t look like a girl. She looked like a boy, a tough Berlin factory boy in a cloth cap and a rough woolen jacket and trousers. She had traded her dress, her coat, and her beautiful hat last night with her friend Hilda for Hilda’s brother’s things. Five groschen from the marks Detective Curtis gave her had bought the brother’s rucksack. It held dry socks, a wool jumper, an apple and biscuits (which she had already eaten), a Strand magazine, a map of France and Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs purchased in a railroad station, and Detective Curtis’s gun.

  Best of all, her disguise worked so well that the farmer was frightened. The haystack was behind his barn. There was a dense wood across the field, and beyond the wood were the railroad tracks, which brought tramps and gypsies and troublemakers from Berlin.

  Pauline asked herself, now what? What would Sherlock Holmes do when his disguise worked? She forced her voice low and in guttural tones asked, “Why are you pointing your pitchfork at me?”

  “Who are you?” asked the farmer. What would Sherlock Holmes do? The answer: Sherlock Holmes would observe everything, not just the steel tines in her face. The farmer was young, she saw. This was not the farmer, but the farmer’s son.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you pointing that at me? What kind of German are you? Have you no shame?”

  The boy blinked. “But what are you doing here?”

  “I won’t tell until you move that thing away from my face.”

  He lowered the pitchfork.

  Pauline climbed to her feet, taking her time, observing. His legs were short. Hers were longer. She could run faster. She saw a bulge in his jacket and white cloth poking from his pocket. It was a bundle a mother would pack. “I’m hungry,” she growled. “Do you have food?”

  He pulled it from his pocket, and she smelled ham. It was wrapped in a piece of buttered bread. She bit hungrily into it, two enormous, delicious bites.

  “Hans!” a man shouted. “What are you doing there?”

  It could only be Hans’s father. And he would not be fooled.

  She ran for the wood through which she had felt her way from the railroad. It was still dark, and the train she was clinging to had suddenly rumbled through a switch and stopped on a siding, shorn of its locomotive, which then had steamed back toward Berlin.

  She heard the farmers shouting behind her. “Catch him!” the father yelled. Hans was scampering as fast as he could on his short legs, and the father was limping on a cane.

  Ahead through the trees Pauline saw the siding and on it the single railcar on which she had escaped from Berlin, but which the train had dropped. She ran past it and jumped onto the main line. Then she ran on the crossties until her legs ached and her lungs were burning and the blood was pounding in her head so loudly that she couldn’t hear the speeding train behind her.

  IN GRIFFITH PARK, A WILDERNESS in the hills north of Los Angeles, Jay Tarses complained to the petite dark-haired woman who served as his mistress and business manager, “I want to go back to New Jersey.”

  “Jersey? Are you nuts? Best thing we ever did was beat it to California. It’s beautiful here. The sun has shined all day. You’ve already exposed eight hundred feet of film. You’ll finish the whole picture before dark. And tomorrow you’ll start a Western drama.”

  “This is the worst day of my life.”

  The City of Los Angeles had just fined Tarses twenty-five dollars because gunfire between his French Foreign Legionnaires and his Arabs abducting his heroine had frightened the elk in Griffith Park. Then his camels had stampeded a herd of horses that were not used to their smell. And now, just as his wranglers had finished rounding up the horses so he could start taking pictures again, a squad of Edison thugs piled out of a Marmon auto, itching to pull out their blackjacks if he wasn’t taking pictures with an overpriced Edison camera.

  The head thug, a rangy street fighter with bony fists and a Hoboken accent, saw at a glance that he wasn’t.

  “You think California’s so far from Joisey Mr. Edison don’t notice?”

  “Let the girls go,” Tarses told him. “I’ll take my lumps.”

  “You’re all takin’ yer lumps this ti
me. We’re setting an example for the rest of youse independents.”

  He grabbed Tarses by his lapels and held him stiff-armed for the first blow.

  “Hold it!” someone shouted.

  If Jay Tarses had any hope he’d been rescued, the sight of chief Edison bull Joe McCoy swaggering out of the woods disabused him of that. McCoy, the meanest Edison detective Tarses had even met, reported directly to Mr. Dyer, Edison’s lawyer, who enforced Trust restrictions with an iron hand. McCoy had a coal trimmer’s shoulders and less mercy in his face than a cinder block.

  “Mr. Tarses,” he snickered. “I would have recognized your picture taking anywhere by the camel stink.”

  “Any chance of buying you off?” asked Tarses, his eyes locked on McCoy’s blackjack.

  McCoy raised a mighty arm. The blackjack whistled as it tore down from the sky, and the Edison thug holding Tarses by the lapels went flying sideways into a camel and fell on his face. Tarses was vaguely aware that he himself was still on his feet and nothing hurt. Aside from that, he had no idea what was going on.

  McCoy handed him a calling card. Through a smudge of blood from McCoy’s blackjack, Jay Tarses read:

  IMPERIAL FILM PROTECTION SERVICE

  “THE INDEPENDENT’S FRIEND”

  “Telephone number’s on the back. Operator on-station night and day.”

  “You don’t work for Edison anymore?” Tarses asked.

  “Didn’t you hear?” McCoy grinned. “I’m a trustbuster. Just like Teddy Roosevelt.”

  “What the hell is Imperial Film Protection Service?”

  “‘The Independent’s Friend.’ Can’t you read?”

  “Friend? I’ll bet. What’s it going to cost me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Joe. What’s the big idea?”

  McCoy threw a heavy arm around Tarses’s shoulder. “Jay, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. And stop asking stupid questions.”