The Thief Read online

  “Enjoy your dinner.” Bell started out the door, then stopped with a new thought. “Was there a sticker on the trunk indicating the passenger’s class?”

  “First.”

  “Lawrence Block, you’ve earned your first honest meal since you graduated reform school.”

  Bell sent the PS man back in with a stern warning to stay on his toes. Then he told Archie, “A coal stoker, or someone who looked like a coal stoker, lifted a silver-colored steamer trunk with a First Class sticker. Question is, why?”

  “Assuming the Professor’s been kidnapped, I’d say they stashed him inside it so they could smuggle him into a cabin they booked somewhere in First Class.”

  “So would I.”

  “But,” Archie said, “we found his glasses down here. How would they know he was coming down here? Maybe they have someone in the crew watching him.”

  “Or a passenger,” said Isaac Bell. “We better get Captain Turner to rustle up a search party.”

  “ISAAC! THEY FOUND THE TRUNK ON THE promenade deck!”

  Bell passed Archie at a dead run, climbing the grand staircase. There was a mob at the top of the stairs. The corridors converging outside a service pantry were jammed with the junior officers: saloon, deck, and bedroom stewards and seamen who had been pressed into the search. Bell saw a saloon steward sprawled on his back, his normally immaculate tunic filthy, and beside him the silver trunk. A husky seaman stood over it, aiming a fire ax at the lock.

  “I’ll open it,” said Bell, shouldering him aside. He knelt by the trunk and felt with his hands that it was heavy. “Would there be a wine screw handy?”

  The sommelier’s assistant produced a corkscrew. Bell twisted it into the lock, manipulated for a moment while gazing into the middle distance, and the lock clicked open. To the murmur of acclaim, and before anyone asked how an insurance executive happened to know the fine art of lock picking, he said, “Parlor trick my great-aunt Isabel taught me. She was a regular whiz.”

  Stewards and seamen laughed.

  “Never would say where she learned it,” Bell added, and the officers laughed, too.

  He hinged the hasp up and lifted the lid. The laughter died.

  Professor Beiderbecke had been squeezed into the trunk. His legs were bent sharply to his chest, his arms pressed about his head. His eyes were wide open. His face was rigid with pain and fear. His skin was blue.

  Without a word, an elderly dining saloon steward passed Isaac Bell a gleaming fish knife. Bell held it to Beiderbecke’s nostrils. He did not expect that the poor man’s breath would cloud the silver, but it did.

  “He’s alive!” A dozen hands helped Bell pull Beiderbecke out of the trunk. They laid him on the rubber-tile floor and gently straightened his limbs. Beiderbecke groaned, gasped, and inhaled fitfully.

  “Doctor!”

  “Get the surgeon.”

  Bell leaned closer, searching for a spark in his wide-open eyes. They seemed to focus on him. “You’ll be fine,” said Bell. “The doctor’s coming.”

  Beiderbecke’s body convulsed. “My heart,” he whispered. Racked with pain, he clutched his chest. “Bell!” he gasped.

  “I’m right here, Professor.”

  “Bell. My… protégé…”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll look out for Clyde.”

  “Protect him, please.”

  “I will.”

  “Protect him from the akkk…”

  “From what?” Bell put his ear to Beiderbecke’s lips, for the man was surely dying. “From what?”

  “Akrobat.”

  The ship’s surgeon arrived, shooing people from his path. Bell stood up to make room for him, then watched as the surgeon parted vest and shirt with sure hands and pressed a stethoscope to Beiderbecke’s chest. He listened for a long time, shaking his head, and finally removed the instrument.

  “What did Beiderbecke say? Archie asked Bell.

  “Made me promise to protect Clyde.”

  “From Krieg?”

  “I suppose,” Bell answered. “But that wasn’t all he said.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “A name or a word that sounded like ‘acrobat.’ How do you say it in German?”

  “The same, except spelled with a ‘k,’ said Archie. “But what did Beiderbecke mean by ‘acrobat’?”

  “A man,” Isaac Bell mused thoughtfully, “who can fly.”

  “Like the one who jumped overboard.”

  “And somehow flew back.”

  Archie said, “But acrobats can’t really fly.”

  “Maybe not. But the best of them can do a darned good imitation…” Isaac Bell thought hard. “Mauretania’s carrying three thousand people, passengers and crew. Whoever killed Beiderbecke is hiding among them.”

  “That’s like hiding in a city.”

  “We need a witness. Let’s ask this steward if he got a look at who knocked him down.”

  The steward, who was sitting up blearily, shook his head. “Sorry, guv. Jumped me from behind, he did, when I walked in the pantry.”

  Bell helped him to his feet. “Not even a glimpse as you fell? Did you see how big he was or what he was wearing?”

  “Not a peep, guv.” He looked at his tunic sleeve, then down at the trousers. “Blimey, am I a sight. Better get out of these before the boss sees me.”

  Bell noticed brown grease stains on his trousers from the pantry floor. But the smudges on his sleeve looked like soot. He ran his finger on one.

  “Coal dust,” he told Archie. “Let’s go visit the black gang.”

  BLOCK, THE SWINDLER, SWORE up and down, again, that he had not seen the face of the black gang crewman who had taken the silver trunk from the baggage room, but Isaac Bell brought him along anyway, intending to watch his face for signs of lying as they scrutinized the men who stoked the furnaces. He brought the saloon steward, too, on the theory that the man who knocked him down could not know beyond a doubt that the steward hadn’t seen his face. The sight of two witnesses might set off a case of nerves. Or so he thought until he clapped eyes on the stokers and the hellish place where they worked.

  “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 p
art 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.

  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…