The Thief ib-5 Read online

  * * *

  “Three hundred and twenty passers, trimmers and firemen, mostly Irish from Liverpool,” said the Mauretania’s chief engineer, a compact, no-nonsense Scot with a walrus mustache and four gold stripes on his sleeve. “Plus your odd foreigner.” Captain Turner had ordered him to escort Bell and Archie and their witnesses down to the stokehold.

  He pressed an electric switch, and a massive watertight steel door ground open on a sulfurous scene of heat and thunder. Men stripped to the waist and hunched double were shoveling coal and wheeling barrows in near darkness.

  The chief engineer had to shout for Bell to hear him warn, “Doubt you’ll get much out of ’em. The black gang are a hard lot.”

  “I’d be amazed if they weren’t.”

  “You should see ’em brawl. We dog the hatches till the fightin’s over. Mind, it’s no picnic. Our Maury wants a thousand tons a day to make her knots.”

  The devil, thought Isaac Bell, would feel right at home deep in the ship. It was one thing to envision the principle that fire heated water into steam that spun the blades of Mauretania’s turbines that turned the propellers that drove her through the sea. It was another to peer through air thick with eye-stinging coal dust at scores of men sweating to feed her.

  Timing gongs clanged. Furnace doors flew open. In the leaping light of flames, firemen with wet rags tied over their faces for protection from the heat thrust ten-foot steel-slicing bars into seething beds of yellow embers. They stabbed white-hot clinkers of fused impurities loose from the fire grates, smashed the clinkers, and raked away the pieces. They dug their shovels into coal heaped on the deck. They straightened up and scattered a scoopful into the furnaces, bent over and dug up another. Scoop after scoop after scoop after scoop they scattered onto the fires. They worked fast, endeavoring to open the furnace doors for the shortest possible time to keep the heat up. For seven minutes the firemen sliced and raked and shoveled, skillfully spreading even layers of fresh fuel on the incandescent coals. The searing heat dried their face rags stiff.

  Furnace doors banged shut. Darkness fell. The firemen lunged for water buckets. Sweating trimmers manhandled wheelbarrows into the fire aisle and tipped them on the deck, heaping new coal beside the furnace doors. The trimmers raced back to the bunkers for more. Inside the bunkers themselves, Bell could see passers shifting coal from the back to the front. The gongs rang again, and the stoking indicator showed the number of the next furnace to be fed.

  “How are long are their shifts?” Bell asked the chief engineer.

  “Four hours on, eight off.”

  Bell led the steward and the swindler along the fire aisles of all four boiler rooms, past one hundred and ninety-two furnaces under twenty-four boilers, in and out of bunkers, then by trimmers greasing machinery and shoveling white-hot cinders from ash pits into ejectors. Finally, he walked them through the fetid passers’ and trimmers’ barracks on the lower deck and the firemen’s on the main deck, where exhausted men sprawled on tightly stacked berths. Not a single glowering face of those awake or those unmasked in dreamless sleep sparked a memory that swindler Block or the steward would admit to.

  * * *

  Returning from the wedding feast, Hermann Wagner opened the door to his Regal Suite. Truly fit for a king, he smiled, with two bedrooms, a parlor, his own dining room, and a second entrance through a pantry for the servants. Oddly, the lights were out. On previous nights a well-lit cabin had welcomed him after dinner with his bed turned down, a pot of his favorite hot chocolate on the nightstand, and a brandy beside the chocolate. Well, if the newly minted Mr. and Mrs. Bell’s wedding had thrown the entire ship into a tizzy, it was worth the trouble. It had been a wonderful party with a dazzling bride and groom, excellent food and wine, great dollops of love in the air, even a whiff of mystery. It was rumored that half the ship’s company was knocking on doors searching for a passenger who had gone missing from Second Class.

  Strange, too, was a scent hanging in the air, a heavy, acrid odor, as if the smoke billowing from the Mauretania’s stacks had drifted down the vents into his quarters. He had never smelled coal smoke in his stateroom while crossing the Atlantic in First Class. With British and German and French ships competing for the wealthiest passengers, every detail was de luxe.

  He felt cautiously for the light switch. The champagne had made him clumsy. He bumped into a lamp and lunged to rescue it before he realized that it was anchored securely against the motion of the ship. Behind him, he heard a metallic click. What had he knocked over, he wondered? Then he realized the sound had been the door being locked. Something brushed close to him. A steely hand closed around his arm. He felt himself dragged backwards against a rock-hard body.

  Another hand clamped his mouth shut before he could even yelp in surprise, much less shout for help. Hermann Wagner was young and athletic. He fought hard to break free. But his captor held him with astonishing strength. It was the man crushing the life out of him who reeked of coal.

  Suddenly salvation! A knock at the door. “Steward, sir. May I enter?”

  Wagner kicked out, hoping to knock something to the floor that would make a noise. The knock was repeated with a firm rap of impatient knuckles, not the usual deferential forgive-the-interruption-sir, but a demanding open-the-door-and-let-me-in. The missing passenger! The crew was searching the ship. He struggled harder. The hand over his mouth slid down his chin and closed around his throat. Neither blood nor air could rise to his brain. He felt his legs give out from under him and he realized with a loss of all hope that he was being strangled to death.

  “Sir? Are you there, sir?”

  The man who stunk of coal muttered in Wagner’s ear. “Ich bin Donar.”

  It was the most beautiful sound that Wagner had ever heard in his life. Donar. German for Thor, god of thunder. It meant that he would not die. Donar named the leader of a secret Imperial German Army plan, blessed, Wagner had been assured beyond any doubt, by the kaiser himself.

  The grip on his throat eased fractionally.

  Wagner nodded, confirming what he had sworn in blood: obey without question.

  The hand eased a little more, just enough for Wagner to whisper, “Forgive me, please. I didn’t know.”

  “Tell the steward that you are sleeping. Tell him to go away.”

  “What if he won’t go? They’re searching the ship.”

  “If he insists, let him in, but not into your bedroom. Tell him there is a lady there who wishes to remain anonymous. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.” said Wagner. He had an impulse to salute. The last man to speak to him with such compelling authority had been his colonel in the Army.

  “Do it!”

  * * *

  “Do you suppose they’re looking for the German?”

  Two young trimmers in the No. 1 boiler room — Bill Chambers from County Mayo and Parnell Hall from Munster — passed in opposite directions, heaving wheelbarrows between the forward cross-bunker and the firing aisle. They had no fear of being heard over the thundering furnaces. Besides, the chief engineer, the American swell, the saloon steward, and the prisoner who’d been locked in the baggage room had finally left the stokehold.

  “Who else?”

  Chambers and Hall were leaders of a new breed of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. To hell with compromising old men. They were true rebels, and they had vowed to drive British rulers out of Ireland or die trying. Neither would deny they were hotheads. In fact, they would accept that charge as a compliment. Nor would anyone who had seen them harry English Army patrols with rocks and slingshots deny their bravery. As for being seduced by promises of rifles and explosives in exchange for helping the German, that depended on your definition of seduction.

  “Think they’ll find him?”

  “If they do they’ll wish they hadn’t.”

  Though both were young and brave and had fought the patrols, Bill Chambers and Parnell Hall let go of their wheelbarrows and made the sign of the cross. The
man they knew as the German was in a fighting class by himself.

  As the poet said, plague and famine ran together.

  * * *

  Through his regal suite bathroom door, Hermann Wagner listened to the leader of the Donar Plan wash off the coal dust in the needle-spray shower affixed to his porcelain tub.

  “Turn around,” Donar called through the door. Earlier, he had warned in a cold voice that left no doubt of the consequence, “Never look upon my face.”

  Wagner stepped into the parlor and turned his back. His throat hurt since the man had nearly squeezed the life out of him.

  “Order your dinner in your suite tonight so you may stand guard while I sleep.”

  Wagner, who sang in his church choir and had an ear for voices, heard something slightly off-key in Donar’s High German accent. While smooth and guttural, with the expected educated flair, now and then the tones of the Prussian upper crust roughened like a peasant’s. “Shall I order food for you, too?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. One passenger doesn’t eat two meals.”

  “I meant so you might have dinner, too.”

  “I’ll eat yours.”

  “Yes, of course. I see.” He heard Donar walk from the bathroom into his bedroom.

  “Wipe up that coal dust before the bath steward sees it.”

  Hermann Wagner got down on his hands and knees to scrub his own bathroom, something he had not done since he was twelve years old, in the strict boarding school his father had sent him to “make him hard.”

  He did not mind. It was an honor to be among the elite diplomats, bankers, and merchants drafted into the Donar Plan. Admittedly, he was no soldier. Nor was he privy to the details of the military scheme. But he could travel freely in the United States of America while conducting legitimate business and mingle in the highest echelons.

  Der Tag was coming. Victory depended not only on soldiers. There would be no victory unless a patriot like Hermann Wagner did his part to persuade Americans to join the war on Germany’s side — or at least stay out of it while Germany destroyed Russia, France, and Britain.

  10

  At dawn the newly wed Isaac Bell slipped silently out of bed, kissed his sleeping bride softly on her brow, dressed quietly, and went out on the promenade deck. It was bitter cold, and the sea was making up again. Long, evenly spaced rollers marched out of the northwest. The sky was clear but for jagged clouds stacked on the horizon like ice-capped mountains. The wind was strong, and the smoke from Mauretania’s tall red funnels streamed flat behind her.

  He went straight to the point on the starboard side that the man who jumped from the boat deck would have passed as he fell. Somehow, Bell suspected, he had managed to land safely on the promenade deck — although that did not seem possible, as the boat deck was not set back and the promenade deck did not thrust farther out. But Beiderbecke had called him an acrobat.

  Bell paced the area, his eyes roaming. Assume, he thought, that the Akrobat was a real acrobat. Assume he was a trained circus tumbler or trapeze artist. Assume he was extraordinarily strong, astonishingly agile, with no fear of heights and nerves of steel.

  Bell smiled, suddenly gripped by a fond memory. He had run away from home to join the circus when he was a boy. Before his father caught up with him in a Mississippi fairground, he had befriended animal tamers, clowns, horseback performers, and especially the acrobats, whom he revered for their bravery and their strength.

  Assume this Akrobat possessed every power of a professional big top performer who had honed his skills since childhood, as circus stars did. Surely, from what Bell had seen the night they sailed, the man was indeed strong and agile, with no fear of heights and nerves of steel. Was it possible for such a man to jump off the boat deck, drop ten feet down the sheer side of the ship, and swing back aboard on the promenade deck?

  The answer was no.

  Bell leaned over the railing and looked straight down at the water. Then he looked up the side of the Marconi house. As he had told Archie, the nearest lifeboat hanging from davits beside the boat deck was thirty feet from where the Acrobat jumped the railing. A quick count of boats revealed something he had never really thought about before. They had room for only five hundred people, while Mauretania carried three thousand…

  Suddenly Isaac Bell bolted to the nearest companionway and bounded up the stairs. Would he have noticed in the dark if the Acrobat had jumped up rather than down? Up to one of the many stays and cables rising to the sundeck, immediately above the boat deck, where the Marconi house sat. Would he have seen him grip a line and scramble up to the sundeck?

  Bell ran along the boat deck past the library windows that had backlighted the scene that night and saw immediately that the answer was no. There were no stays remotely near enough for a man to jump to. Therefore, if the Acrobat hadn’t fallen into the sea, he had to have landed on the deck below the boat deck. Also impossible. Baffled, Isaac Bell wandered slowly back down to the promenade deck.

  Two seamen were smoothing the wood railing with rasps and sandpaper.

  “Good morning, sir.”

  “Good morning, gents. Up early?”

  “Soon as we can see to work,” said one.

  The other said, “If we let wear and tear go, the ship would be a bloomin’ embarrassment. Look at this gouge! Fairly tore the rail in half.” He stepped back to show Bell their repair of what was actually the minutest gouge in the teak, which only an eagle-eyed bosun would notice.

  Oddly, the gouge traced the full twelve-inch curve of the wood from inboard to outboard as if something flexible had wrapped around it. “What do you suppose caused that?” Bell asked.

  “Some bloomin’ swell, begging your pardon, sir, must have whacked it with his walking stick.”

  “Or sword,” ventured his mate.

  “Sword?” the first echoed derisively.

  “The grain of the wood is cut.”

  “It ain’t a cut. It’s a gouge.”

  “You can call it a gouge if you like, mate, but I say he whacked it with a sword.”

  “Where the bloomin’ hell would a First Cabin nob get his paws on a sword?”

  “Concealed in his walking stick. Wouldn’t you agree, sir?” he added, enlisting support when he saw Isaac Bell studying the gouge intently.

  “Wire,” Isaac Bell said.

  “Beg your pardon, sir?”

  “Wire. A thin braided-wire cable.”

  “Well, yes, it could be braided cable, sir. On the other hand, you might ask where would the swell get a braided cable and why would he whack the rail with it? Unless he was an out-and-out vandal. Not that we don’t get the odd one or two of them aboard— You’ll recall, Jake, there was that Frenchman.”

  “What do you expect?”

  “An acrobat,” Bell said, half aloud. Had the Acrobat somehow grappled the railing with a flexible wire cable?

  “Acrobat? No, sir, begging your pardon, that Frenchie was no acrobat.”

  “A German acrobat.”

  The seamen traded baffled looks.”Well, if you say so, sir.”

  “An acrobat it is, sir.”

  As Bell hurried away, he heard whispers behind him. “What the blazes was he rattlin’ on about?”

  “Acrobats.”

  “Next’ll be monkeys.”

  Isaac Bell walked faster. He could imagine that a superb athlete, a muscular, lithe acrobat, could stop his fall by hooking a thin cable over the railing. But he could not imagine where the man could suddenly get the cable. Nor how he had secured it in the split second that he hurtled past the railing. Nor why the wire didn’t slip through his hands. Or cut him to the bone if he wrapped it around his wrist.

  Bell passed a barrier into Second Class, said good morning to the seaman Captain Turner had assigned to stand guard outside Clyde Lynds’s cabin door, and knocked loudly. “It’s Isaac Bell, Clyde. Open up.”

  Lynds let him into the cramped, windowless space he had shared with the Professor. He appeared to hav
e slept in his shirt and trousers.

  “You look a mess,” said Bell.

  “Didn’t sleep a wink. The Professor was a good man. A kind man. He didn’t deserve dying that way.”

  “You wouldn’t either,” said Bell.

  “Am I next?”

  “Make a clean breast of it, Clyde. Your life’s in danger. Who are they? What do they want?”

  “I swear I don’t know them.”

  “Does it have to do with you deserting the German Army?”

  “I didn’t desert. I was never in the Army. I’ve never been a soldier.”

  “Then why is the German Army after you?”

  “I don’t know. They’re lying.”

  “Why would the Army lie? If they are lying, why are they hunting you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “I am not a deserter.”

  “I know you’re not. That’s what makes it worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “The German Army is helping Krieg Rüstungswerk steal your invention.”

  “I’ll be O.K. when I get to America.”

  Isaac Bell asked the question he had come to Clyde’s cabin to ask. “Did you ever hear the Professor mention a name or a word that sounded like ‘acrobat’?”

  Lynds turned pale. “Why do you ask?”

  “When Professor Beiderbecke asked me to protect you, it was the last word he spoke. ‘Acrobat.’”

  “Oh my Lord,” Clyde Lynds breathed. “Are you telling me the guy didn’t fall overboard?”

  “You know who I mean.”

  “Yes,” Clyde admitted. “He’s the one. Is he really on the ship?”