The Thief ib-5 Read online

  Their laughter was abruptly quelled by a hard thump that rattled the silverware. Crystal rang musically. Five hundred people in the enormous dining saloon fell silent.

  Bell thought it felt as if something heavy had smashed the carpeted deck under their feet. Either another vessel had struck the ship, or somewhere in the eight-hundred-and-ninety-foot hull something had exploded with terrific force. Then came the most frightening cry heard at sea.

  “Fire!”

  Book Two: Flickers

  13

  “Fire! Fire in the forward baggage room!”

  Isaac Bell raced down the grand staircase.

  Captain Turner was running up the stairs, heading for the bridge, shouting orders to turn the Mauretania away from the wind to keep it from fanning the flames.

  Bell ran to the fire. His prisoner was trapped in the baggage room in the bow. He had to get the man and his PS guard to safety.

  The bugle shrieked the alarm. Fight fire! Fight fire!

  Passengers milled. Stewards tried to calm them but had no answers to their frightened questions. The ship heeled, leaning away from a sharp turn that put her stern to the weather. The decks lurched. Ship’s officers bellowed into megaphones: “Passengers to the boat deck. All passengers to the boat deck.”

  The stewards began pleading with people to put on their life vests.

  A woman screamed.

  * * *

  Isaac Bell smelled smoke before he got close enough to see the fire. It was a bitter chemical blend of coal tar and gunpowder oddly layered with sweet whiffs of brandy. Suddenly he saw flames explode from the end of a corridor. It was as strikingly bright a fire as he had ever seen, with an intense white-orange color. He felt the heat fifty feet away.

  He saw a band of stewards whose uniforms had been burnt to smoldering rags stagger from a cross-corridor dragging a hose. Bell ran to help them charge the flames. They were led by a tall man singed half bald. His green eyes blazed in a face black with soot.

  “Archie?”

  “How was dinner?” asked Archie, striding into the burning baggage room, spewing steam from the hose.

  “You O.K.?”

  “Tip-top. Most of the explosion went up the hatch, and our PS boy did himself proud getting Block out.”

  “What’s burning?”

  “Nitrate film stock. Clyde says it feeds on its own oxygen.”

  Bell asked, “Any more hoses?”

  “This is steam. There’s a saltwater hose in the companionway.”

  Bell unreeled it and followed Archie into the burning room. “Where’s Clyde?”

  “He went up the hatchway ladder to vent the fumes.”

  Bell looked at the square opening in the ceiling. The bitter, undoubtedly poisonous smoke was billowing up it. “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know. It blew soon after he left. But it looks to me like he got the hatch open. Unless it blew open.”

  Three dozen seaman streamed down from their sleeping berths directly above the fire. Stewards joined them, mobbing the forward baggage room with long hoses, directing steam and salt water into the furious orange maw of poisonous smoke and intense heat that threatened the ship. The water tended to spread the burning film, scattering it. The steam was better at smothering it. As they fought to confine the fire to the baggage room, paint on surrounding bulkheads was bubbling from the heat, all three automobiles exploded, and the brandy, a dining saloon steward shouted, threatened to “turn the bloomin’ ship into Maury flambé.”

  With the crew fighting the fire, and his saltwater hose a less effective extinguisher than the low-pressure steam that Archie refused to relinquish, Isaac Bell ran up the companionways looking for Clyde. He could see that the steel hatchway that rose forty feet from the baggage room to the foredeck had directed the flaming force of the explosion straight up like an enormous square cannon, past the cram-packed quarters of seamen and stewards on the upper deck, and past the officers’ mess hall on the shelter deck. He stepped out on the open foredeck. A pillar of flame and smoke pouring skyward from the open hatch lighted the Mauretania’s mast, vents, and smokestacks bright as day.

  He found Clyde Lynds sprawled facedown on the spare anchor, coughing and retching the poison fumes out of his lungs and gulping water from a bucket held by a pair of black and greasy stokers, who pounded him on the back and poured more water into him, shouting, “Good lad. Spit it up, lad. Spit it up. You’ll be right as rain.”

  They told Isaac Bell that they had just sneaked out for a breath of fresh air on the dark foredeck when they heard his frantic pounding on the hatch. “Undogged the hatch, he did, but it was too heavy for him to lift. Good luck we was there to help him out. And we opened it just in the nick. The lad’s a bloomin’ hero, he is. Saved the ship. Spit it up, lad! Spit it up.”

  * * *

  Late that night, Isaac Bell interviewed Archie Abbott, Clyde Lynds, the Mauretania’s chief purser, and finally the bosun’s mate, who had operated the winch that had loaded cargo and luggage down the forward hatch the day they sailed from Liverpool. He reported privately to Captain Turner on the bridge.

  “As you know, the entire contents of the forward baggage room were incinerated. Nothing remains but ash, so hot was the fire. But I can tell you with some confidence that the fire was caused by the spontaneous explosion of a large shipment of deteriorating celluloid film stock. I’m sure you’re aware that film-stock smugglers profit by going around the Edison Trust to sell to independent manufacturers who can’t buy direct from Eastman Kodak.”

  The mariner was livid. “I will personally hang them from Mauretania’s foremast if I ever got my hands on them. This has happened time and again in the past year, endangering ships at sea.”

  “There were as many as eight wooden crates disguised as a shipment of rare books destined to a bibliophile in Reistertown, Maryland — a gentleman whom I strongly doubt was expecting more than a single crate. The books were a clever device as they’re very heavy, much like film stock.”

  “Damned smugglers! Have they no regard for the lives of three thousand souls?”

  * * *

  Captain Turner agreed with the stokers that Clyde Lynds was a hero. In a brisk early-morning ceremony on the flying bridge — while down on the forepeak seamen in a paint party were touching up the blackened hatchway — he pinned a medal on Clyde’s chest. “For quick thinking and brave action that prevented a catastrophic explosion. I’ll lend you one of mine for the moment until the line strikes a proper one for you.”

  “The stokers who helped me deserve medals, too.”

  “I’ve already presented theirs, not to worry, lad.”

  Clyde looked questioningly at Bell, and the detective thought that the normally brash scientist seemed uncharacteristically reluctant to accept the honor. “What do you think, Mr. Bell?”

  “I think it is the least you deserve. Hopefully it will make up a little for your losing your crate in the fire.”

  Oddly, the mention of the loss caused the young man to break into a broad grin, the first Bell had seen on his face since Professor Beiderbecke had died.

  “Wasn’t it important?” Bell asked.

  Instead of answering, Lynds said, briskly, “Thank you, Captain Turner. And thank you for the temporary loan of your medal until they strike mine. What did you get yours for?”

  “Good day, gentlemen,” Turner dismissed them brusquely. “As I have promised the company a quick turnaround rehearsing for the Christmas voyages, I have to land my ship, disgorge passengers, and load coal and victual for the next lot at breakneck speed.”

  Walking down the grand staircase as the luncheon bugle blew, Bell asked again, “Wasn’t your crate important?”

  “It sure was. It held the only prototype of the Beiderbecke and Lynds Talking Pictures machine.”

  “Then why were you smiling?”

  “It’s safe in my head. Give me some time and some dough and I can replicate it even without poor Professor Beiderbecke.”<
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  Isaac Bell stopped in the middle of the grand staircase and took Lynds firmly by the arm. “Clyde, you are a first-rate jackass.”

  “You think I’m bragging? Listen, I’m not saying it’ll be a snap, but give me several years with proper financing and a top-notch laboratory, and I can do it. And I’ll build it even better than it was. After we finished, we kept thinking about ways to perfect it. It’s not like I’m starting from scratch. We solved most of the big problems, and the solutions are safe in my head.” He tapped his head with one finger. “Right here. Deep in my skull.”

  Isaac Bell said, “If your enemies suspect that, you’re in more danger than ever.”

  * * *

  Hermann Wagner filled out a marconigram blank and gave it to an assistant purser.

  The assistant purser, who had been thoroughly briefed on the identity of all important passengers before the Mauretania left Liverpool, was not surprised that a leading Berlin banker would send his marconigrams in cipher, particularly a message addressed to the German consulate in New York City. Bankers had secrets to guard, and you could double that for diplomats.

  The assistant purser noticed that Wagner’s hands were shaking, but of course he did not remark upon it. Even stolid German bankers were known to indulge in a few too many schnapps on their last night at sea. A good night’s sleep ashore and the banker would be nose to the grindstone tomorrow morning.

  “They’ll send this immediately, Herr Wagner. May we help arrange your lodgings in New York?”

  “No, thank you. Everything is planned.”

  14

  “‘Colossal’ is the only word to describe the new steamship terminal of the Chelsea Improvement,” said Archie Abbott, who was as tireless a promoter of his beloved New York as a Chamber of Commerce publicity man. To shelter as many as sixteen express liners as big as the Mauretania, he enthused, the terminal’s piers extended six hundred feet into the Hudson River and burrowed two hundred feet inland for three-quarters of a mile from Little West 12th Street all the way to West 23rd.

  “There’s even room for Titanic when she goes into service. And wait till you see the portals on West Street — pink granite! An eyesore of a waterfront is transformed.”

  “Not entirely transformed,” said Isaac Bell, studying the pier through field glasses. Crowds of people had stepped out of the second-story waiting room onto the pier’s apron to wave handkerchiefs to friends and relatives on the approaching ship.

  Earlier, steaming up the harbor, Isaac and Marion Bell and Archie and Lillian Abbott had stood arm in arm admiring the city from the promenade deck railing. It was a beautiful day. The air was crisp. A stiff northeast wind parted the coal smoke that normally blanketed the harbor. Manhattan’s skyscrapers gleamed in a blue sky.

  Now, as music from a ragtime band danced on the water and tugboats battled to land thirty-two thousand tons of Mauretania against the wind pushing her lofty superstructure, the detectives were concentrating on getting their prisoner and Clyde Lynds safely ashore, after which they would meet up with their wives at Archie and Lillian’s town house on East 64th, where the newlyweds were invited to stay.

  “What do you mean not entirely?” Archie protested. “We sailed from Hoboken last month. You haven’t seen the Chelsea portals or the magnificent waiting rooms. The elevators are solid bronze. There’s never been a city project like it.”

  Bell passed him the field glasses. “They forgot to transform the plug-uglies.”

  “You’ll always find a couple of pickpockets when a ship lands,” Archie scoffed.

  “I’m not talking about pickpockets. Look closer.”

  A thousand people awaited the liner at Pier 54. Longshoremen were poised to work ship, heaving lines and unloading mail and baggage. Treasury Department customs agents swarmed the pier’s lower deck to inspect luggage for dutiable gowns and jewels being smuggled. On coal barges in the slip, trimmers had gathered before the usual time to refill the Mauretania’s bunkers for Captain Turner’s extraordinarily speedy turnaround. And up on the second-story waiting room terrace, the regular contingents of sneak thieves sidled among the passengers’ friends and relatives, crackerjack vendors, newspaper reporters, and moving picture operators. But it was six Hell’s Kitchen gangsters who had caught Bell’s attention.

  “Gophers!” said Archie.

  The Gophers, pronounced “goofers,” were snappy dressers, favoring tight suits, pearl gray bowler hats, fancy shoes, and colorful hose.

  “Who the heck gave them pier passes?”

  “It’s possible they know someone in Tammany Hall,” Bell said, drily. In New York, politicians, builders, priests, cops, and gangsters shared the spoils, a system derailed only occasionally by the reformers. “Do you see who they brought with them?”

  “Molls,” said Archie, focusing on a cluster of extravagantly coiffed women in towering hats and elaborate dresses.

  “Not a good sign.”

  The Police Department had been cracking down on firearms lately. Faced with arrest if caught in possession, the gangsters had taken to stashing their pistols in their girlfriends’ hats and bustles.

  “Loaded for bear. Who do you suppose they came to meet?”

  Bell took back the field glasses. The gangsters were glowering at the back of the ship, where the Second Class passengers would go ashore. In a sight that would be comic if it didn’t mean someone was going to get badly hurt, a burly Gopher raked the Second Class embarkation port with dainty mother-of-pearl opera glasses he had stolen from somewhere.

  “Archie, do you recognize the thug with the opera glasses?”

  Archie, whose pride in New York extended even to the superior ferocity of its street gangs, took a look. “Might be Blinky Armstrong.”

  “Is he a boss?”

  “Not yet, that I’ve heard.”

  “It looks like he’s running that crew. Soon as the switchboard’s hooked up, telephone the office. Tell Harry Warren to bring his gang squad.”

  “Why?”

  “I have an unpleasant feeling.”

  The Mauretania’s private-branch telephone system switchboard would plug into the New York City exchanges the moment the ship docked. The Van Dorn New York field office was in the Knickerbocker Hotel on 42nd Street, and while the streets would be clogged with traffic, the magic carpet of the Ninth Avenue Elevated Express could speed Detective Harry Warren and his gang specialists downtown in a flash.

  “Harry’ll know if it’s Blinky.”

  With the tugboats almost overwhelmed by her tonnage and the wind, it was fully half an hour before they had Mauretania enough inside the slip for her seamen to throw lightweight messenger lines. Longshoremen used them to drag her heavy hawsers ashore.

  At last, the bugle blew to announce they were fast to the pier. Engines stopped.

  The First Class gangway was hoisted from the cavernous waiting room. First ashore, stiffly ignoring each other, were Lord Strone and Karl Schultz. The Chimney Baron was greeted by a brace of pretty girls, granddaughters, Bell guessed, by the joyful way they took his hands and spirited him, laughing, through the crowds and out the doors to West Street. Strone stepped off alone and discreetly followed a young man, whom Bell supposed was from the British consulate, to the stairs to the lower deck, where the steam yacht Ringer out of Greenwich — which had trailed the ship from Quarantine — would whisk him to his American estate in Connecticut.

  Explosions of photographers’ flashlights at the foot of the gangway told Bell that the newspaper reporters had caught sight of Marion and Lillian disembarking, and he could imagine from experience the shouted queries. Had Miss Morgan come back to New York to take new moving pictures? Was it true Miss Morgan had been married to an insurance executive? Had the ceremony actually been performed by the captain of the Mauretania? What did Mrs. Abbott think of the new fashions in London? Was there truth to the rumors that her father had secretly amassed a controlling interest in the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe?

  The Secon
d Class gangway would rise as soon as First Class had cleared the ship. Third Class, Marion had told Bell, was doomed to spend the night aboard. Two names on the passenger list couldn’t be found. Miscounts were not uncommon, but everyone in Third Class — immigrants and citizens alike, including the moving picture people — would be held on the ship for officials to tally again. Isaac Bell had to wonder whether those missing had been the Acrobat’s accomplices. The chief officer bamboozled that night in the smoking room was probably wondering, too.

  “O.K., Archie. Go telephone Harry Warren. I’ll get Clyde. You grab Block and our PS boy. When things settle down, we’ll go off together from Second Class.”

  Bell hurried back toward Second Class. He found Clyde Lynds in the embarkation vestibule and tipped the seamen Captain Turner had assigned to guard him. “I’ll take it from here, gents, thanks.”

  Clyde, grip in hand, was anxiously studying the crowds.

  “See anyone down there you know?” Bell asked, watching for his reaction.

  “I doubt it,” Clyde answered, even as his eye locked on the knot of Gophers staring back in his direction. “Been quite a while since I was in town.”

  “In the theater, you said?”

  “My last stepfather, minus one, was a stage manager.”

  “At what theater?”

  “All over. Downtown. Fourteenth Street. Then for a while on Broadway. The Hammerstein.”

  “Did you live in that neighborhood?” Bell asked. Blinky Armstrong was aiming his opera glasses exactly where he and Clyde were standing.

  “Around the corner on Forty-sixth Street.”

  “Isn’t that near Hell’s Kitchen?”

  Clyde laughed, nervously. “Fortunately, not too near.”

  But near enough, thought Bell, that a gang of Gophers just might have gathered to welcome you home. Had the kid somehow offended them? Or had the Krieg Trust perhaps hired Gophers to grab him as he left the boat? From the little Bell could see through the waiting room windows, it appeared that the Gophers’ numbers had swelled. He counted a dozen gangsters converging on the back of the ship. They shoved through the crowd surrounding the foot of the Second Class gangway, which was ascending.