The Thief ib-5 Read online

  Curtis had operated in Berlin less than a year and was still developing the network of contacts — in government, business, the military, police, and criminals — that he would need to raise the field office to Van Dorn standards. He made swift progress nonetheless, establishing that Professor Franz Bismark Biederbecke held a prestigious chair at Vienna’s Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute and that Clyde Lynds’s multiple degrees confirmed that he was the genius his mentor had proclaimed him to be.

  But he ran smack into a stone wall when he popped his first question about the munitions trust. A policeman he had cultivated, a middle-ranked detective, fell silent on the telephone. Curtis listened to the wires hiss, wondering why the sudden reticence. Finally, the policeman said, “It could be dangerous.”

  “What could be dangerous?”

  “When Krieg Rüstungswerk GmbH hears that you are asking questions, it will be very dangerous.”

  Threatening Arthur Curtis was a surefire way to get his dander up. “Is that so?”

  “That is so, Herr Private Detective,” said the German. “I have kept you far too long on the telephone. Good day, sir.”

  Arthur Curtis returned the earpiece to his telephone, took out his favorite pistol, a finely crafted lightweight Browning 1899 that fit his small hand, and broke it down and cleaned it to clear his mind. A sharp knock at the door alerted him to trouble.

  “I told you,” he said, without looking up as the door opened, “go away.”

  “I am here for your own good,” Pauline Grandzau replied, stepping in uninvited and draping the coat and hat she had already taken off on the clothes tree. “You need me.”

  Art Curtis ground his teeth. He had come to think of her as Pauline the Plague.

  “For the last time: I do not need a girl in this office. Even if I did, which I don’t, I would not need a girl who is only seventeen years old and is probably lying about her actual age which is plausibly sixteen or less.”

  “Every great detective needs an apprentice.”

  Curtis looked up, wearily. This had been going on for weeks. She was standing there with that same hopeful smile on her freckled face, a skinny little German student with yellow braids, bright blue eyes, and the moxie of a Berlin street fighter.

  “I’m not a great detective,” said Curtis, who could play disguises with the best of them. He wheeled out a favorite: roughhewn Westerner. “I’m not that fancy Sherlock Holmes you’re always reading about. I’m just a working stiff. That lets me off the hook.”

  “It is your duty to society to take an apprentice. How else will the young learn?”

  “I don’t believe in girl detectives. And I’m not running a charity for society. Go away.”

  She had already moved closer, edging up behind him, peering over his shoulder at the papers on his desk. Lots of luck reading Van Dorn cipher, he thought.

  “You know you’ll hire me in the end,” she said blithely. “You need me. I speak perfect English. I am studying library and can look up anything. I am even a powerful skier, taught by my grandfather in the Alps.” Curtis put his head in his hands. He knew what was coming next. Sure enough, she quoted the infernal Holmes. “‘When the other fellow has all the trumps, it saves time to throw down your hand.’”

  “Out!”

  Pauline Grandzau grabbed her coat and hat and waved as she left the office. Art Curtis locked the door. Her English was actually pretty good — not as good as she thought, and not that he needed a German-English translator.

  He trolled through his growing list of acquaintances, telephoned a talkative bank manager he had befriended and invited him to a beer garden, where they sat in companionable conversation on bentwood chairs under the shade trees, occasionally clinking their pewter steins and puffing their own contributions to the blue haze of cigar smoke.

  The bank manager knew a bit about Krieg Rüstungswerk. The munitions manufacturer was controlled by the ancient Prussian Roth family, known to be secretive, which was hardly surprising in the arms trade. Krieg, as it was known colloquially, was especially well connected with the Army because it was “smiled upon” by the kaiser. Krieg also had a penchant for buying up firms in unrelated businesses. Unlike the policeman on the telephone, the bank manager made no mention of any danger from asking questions. Curtis was just shaking hands good-bye, intending to move on to a working class beer garden where a retired German Army sergeant drank, when the bank manager said casually, “I know a chap who works in their Berlin office.”

  “Really? On what level?”

  “Rather high up, actually. An executive.”

  “I would like to meet him. Would that be possible?”

  “It will cost you an expensive meal. He is greedy.”

  “Why don’t we all three dine together?” asked Arthur, which was exactly what the bank manager wanted to hear.

  Arthur went on to his next beer garden. The retired sergeant was there. Plied with a fresh stein, he spoke admiringly of a highly accurate Krieg Rüstungswerk rifled cannon and repeated what Curtis had heard about the kaiser’s warm feelings for the firm. With another stein down the hatch, the sergeant recalled fondly the time his regiment was reviewed by the kaiser himself dressed in the black uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars.

  Arthur Curtis went back to the office to draft a reply to Isaac Bell.

  He unlocked his door and stepped inside. Hairs prickled the back of his neck. He slewed sideways, pressed his back to the wall, and slid his pistol from his shoulder holster.

  “It is only me,” said the shadow sitting at his desk.

  “Pauline, how did you get in here?”

  “But if I had been Colonel Moran I could have shot you with my silent air gun. No one in the building would hear.”

  “Who the devil is Colonel Moran?”

  “He tried to kill Sherlock Holmes. Holmes arrested him.”

  “I said, how did you get in here?”

  She pointed at the window, accessed by an alley fire ladder, which Curtis occasionally used to leave the office undetected. “As Sherlock told Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’: ‘Elementary.’”

  “Elementary? Here’s elementary.” Curtis picked up his telephone. “I’m going to call the cops and have you arrested for breaking and entering if you don’t get lost once and for all.”

  “Guess what I found in the library about Clyde Lynds.”

  Art Curtis felt his jaw drop. “How do you know that name?”

  “It’s in the marconigram you received from the Mauretania. The one about Professor Beiderbecke and Krieg Rüstungswerk.”

  “That marconigram was in code.”

  Pauline shrugged. “It’s not a hard code.”

  4

  “You are up to something.”

  Marion braced herself against the movement of the ship and regarded Isaac Bell with a dreadnought admiral’s collected gaze. Her coral-sea green eyes, her loveliest feature, Bell thought, if forced to choose only one, shimmered with equal parts warm love and healthy skepticism.

  “A picnic,” he answered.

  “It’s midnight. We’re the only two passengers not seasick in their cabins. I see no wicker hamper. Though for some reason you’re carrying a camera.”

  “It only appears to be a camera. Take my arm so we don’t fall down the stairs.”

  The seas were heavy. The broad grand staircase swayed as the ship rose and fell with stately precision, but after twenty-four hours in a North Atlantic gale, they were getting the hang of it. Bell gripped the banister and they climbed together, gauging the pitch, compensating for the roll. At the top of the stairs, Bell led Marion through the vestibule into the First Class music room, a domed lounge with a thick floral carpet and brocaded furniture in hues of pink, blue, red, and yellow. The lights were low and it was empty of people but for a sleepy saloon steward standing by with a bucket of champagne anchored between a couch and a pillar. Bell tipped him, lavishly. “I’ll open it, thank you. Good night.”

 
The man left, smiling.

  Marion said, “Now you’ll try to make me tipsy.”

  “Would you dance with me?”

  “Delighted. As soon as the orchestra arrives.”

  Bell opened his camera case and wedged it in a corner of the couch. Marion leaned in close. Wisps of her golden champagne hair brushed his cheek. “What is that? Oh my gosh, a little gramophone. Where’s the horn?”

  Bell unfolded a flat piece of cardboard and formed it into a horn, which he attached to the cylinder player. He turned a tiny crank, winding the mechanism, put on a two-minute cylinder, and started it.

  “Remember this? We saw the show on Broadway.”

  “‘Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl,’” Marion answered when the first notes emerged thinly from the horn. The latest musical comedy sensation was a satire of the old 1890s romantic ballads.

  Isaac Bell sang along in a credible baritone.

  He treated her respectful as those villains always do,

  And she supposed he was a perfect gent.

  But she found diff’rent when one night she went with him to dine

  Into a table d’hôte so blithe and gay.

  And he says to her: After this we’ll have a demitasse!”

  Marion sang,

  Then to him these brave words the girl did say:

  and took up the chorus:

  Stand back, villain, go your way!

  You may tempt the upper classes

  With your villainous demitasses,

  But Heaven will protect the working girl.”

  Bell opened the bottle of Mumm and poured two glasses. “To what?” asked Marion.

  “Love?”

  “Love it is.”

  They locked eyes, kissed, and drank. Bell changed cylinders, and strains of another new song, the romantic hit “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” played through the cardboard horn.

  “May I have this dance?”

  He took Marion in his arms and wove a waltz through the furniture as if the rolling, carpeted deck were a crowded dance floor. “Do you recall the first time I asked you to marry me?”

  She pressed her cheek to his. “Yes. It was during an earthquake.”

  “And the second?”

  “In the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel. I said I was too old for you. You claimed that I was not.”

  “And the third?”

  “In New York. When you gave me this lovely emerald, which I thought too bright at first but have grown to love as our lucky charm.”

  “And the fourth?”

  “Above the Golden Gate. In your flying machine.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Isaac Bell.

  * * *

  “Tomorrow?”

  Marion gave him a curious smile. The music stopped. She stepped back out of his arms, looked searchingly into his eyes, then down at her emerald ring. “Funny you should ask.”

  “What is funny about a man asking his fiancée five times to marry him?”

  She did not seem to hear him, but marveled, instead, “At the very last minute as I was racing to Euston Station to catch the boat train I made the driver stop at Hanover Square so I could run into Lucile’s to buy a dress. Obviously, there wasn’t time to make one, but a Russian woman I met in London told me that there was such a run on black dresses for mourning King Edward — it turned out he had many more mistresses than rumored — that Lucile’s had scads of not black dresses just hanging about, deeply discounted. I wanted to ask your opinion of it, before I wore it. Now I can’t.”

  “Of course you can’t. It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.”

  She looked him in the face, and her beautiful eyes filled with tears.

  “You’re crying. What’s wrong?”

  “I am so happy.”

  “But—”

  “I love you so much.”

  “But—”

  “May I have your handkerchief?”

  Bell handed Marion a square of snowy linen.

  “I’m surprised by how totally happy you’ve made me. I think I got used to the idea of us always being engaged. That was fine, but I love you with all my heart. I know you love me. But I guess I was holding back a little, because I really, really want to marry you — Isaac, are you sure Captain Turner will marry us? I’ve heard he’s very gruff.”

  “It was touch and go,” Bell admitted. “He has a low opinion of First Class passengers and asked straight off why would we want a ‘bunch of bloomin’ monkeys’ at our wedding. I assured him that some of our best friends were monkeys. He didn’t crack a smile. Just said that having been divorced, he was not, as he put it, ‘much of a hand in the wedding line.’”

  “How did you change his mind? Show him your gun?”

  “I was about to. But he caught sight of you running aboard from the boat train and was suddenly all smiles. Practically fell in the drink leaning over the rail to watch your progress. I said, ‘That is my fianceé.’ Captain Turner said, ‘By Jove, I’ll wear my full dress uniform. The whole bloomin’ rig!’”

  “I would not call my dress ‘full dress.’ It’s not quite white. It is rather creamy, though more an evening dress than a traditional wedding dress.” She gave her eyes one last dab of his handkerchief and handed it back. “Speaking of tradition, Isaac, isn’t it traditional for a man to kiss the woman he’s asked to marry when she says yes?”

  Isaac Bell swept Marion back into his arms. “I couldn’t recall whether it’s bad luck or good luck to kiss the bride before the wedding.”

  “It is required,” said Marion.

  “The very night before?”

  “All night.”

  5

  “Third class passengers are never admitted to First Class sections of the ship,” Isaac Bell was informed by Mauretania’s chief purser when they met to arrange the wedding. “Not even briefly to celebrate your marriage, I’m sorry to say. Not even ‘moving picture people’ known to your fiancée. You may invite a few from Second Class, provided they come properly attired, but we draw the line at Third mingling with the superior classes for one simple reason.”

  “And what is that?” Bell inquired with a dangerous glint in his eye. He could not abide bigotry. That Marion’s acquaintances were traveling on the cheap was no reason to exclude them.

  “A reason that even the most ardent ‘democrat’ will sympathize with. Were Third Class to mingle with the superior classes and one of their lot were to arrive in New York exhibiting symptoms of measles or mumps or some other of the infectious diseases spread by immigrants, the entire vessel and all who sail in her would be held at Quarantine. No one — not even you and your fellow First Class passengers — would be permitted ashore until the doctors could guarantee no outbreak of infectious disease, which would take weeks. Weeks! Imagine, Mr. Bell, confined to the ship anchored offshore, staring helplessly at New York City, so near but so far.”

  “My fiancée’s acquaintances are not immigrants. They’re artists saving on expenses, trying to make ends meet.”

  “Infectious diseases do not distinguish between motives. I am sorry, but surely you understand.”

  “What’s tomorrow’s dinner menu in steerage?” asked Bell, using the popular term for Third Class.

  “A nourishing soup with bits of beef in it.”

  “May I see tomorrow’s First Class dinner menu?”

  The purser produced a tall menu card beautifully illustrated with a color print of the immensely tall and narrow four-stack Mauretania framed by pink roses. Bell read it from top to bottom.

  “I see nothing here that displeases. For our wedding feast, my bride and I will have prime sirloin and ribs o’ beef, roast turkey poulet, quarters of lamb, smoked ox tongue, and Rouen ducklings sent down to steerage.”

  “Excellent! Give me your acquaintances’ names, and I will see—”

  “To everyone in steerage.”

  “Everyone?”

  �
��Everyone will enjoy our wedding feast.”

  “Most generous, sir,” the chief purser said drily. “May I remind you that we have one thousand one hundred and thirty-five passengers in steer — Third Class.”

  “What’s for dessert in steerage?”

  “On Sunday they’ll get some marmalade.”

  Bell referred back to the First Class menu. “We’ll send down apple tart, petits fours, French ice cream, and rum cake.”

  The chief purser looked around his office, confirming they were alone and the door was closed. “I don’t presume to ask what a private detective earns, sir, but the cost of feeding First Class fare to over a thousand souls will be considerable.”

  “Fortunately,” Isaac Bell smiled, “I had a kindly grandfather. He blessed me with a legacy. Which reminds me, how many children are in steerage?”

  “Many.”

  “Better lay on extra ice cream.”

  * * *

  “Marconigram for mr. bell,” piped a twelve-year-old call boy in a blue uniform.

  “Don’t move, nervous groom,” said Archie. “I’ll get it.”

  The normally nimble-fingered Isaac Bell was having trouble knotting his tie, so best man Archibald Angell Abbott IV was attempting to tie it for him. Archie tossed the boy a coin that made his eyes widen and handed Bell the orange Marconi Wireless envelope.

  Bell tore it open, unfolded the buff-colored marconigram, noted the date and the notation “Handed in at S.S. Adriatic,” indicating the White Star liner had relayed the radio signal from a shore station, and then began to decipher its handwritten contents while Archie started over again on his tie.

  “This is odd.”

  “Hold still! What’s odd?”

  “Art Curtis says that Professor Beiderbecke is not a munitions inventor.”

  “What does he invent?”

  “Hang on, I’m still trying to figure…” Ordinarily as quick with figures as he was nimble-fingered, he was having trouble reading the familiar Van Dorn code.

  “I have never seen a more jittery groom,” said Archie.