The Thief Read online

  “You know the way?”

  “Follow us, sir.”

  “Where you headed, Clyde?”

  Clyde Lynds whirled around to discover a wide-awake, hard-eyed Archie Abbott in the doorway behind him. The stewards rushed to his rescue, then thought better of it.

  “Whoa, Emma!”

  Archie held a pistol tucked tight to his torso. “Take it easy, boys. Where are you headed, Clyde?”

  Clyde Lynds explained that he had hired the stewards to escort him safely to the baggage hold so he could see his machine. “I just have to make sure it’s O.K., Mr. Abbott. Can you understand? It’s really important.”

  Archie took a close look at Clyde’s “protection squad.” Second Class stewards were a tougher lot than he’d seen in First. And one bruiser looked like he’d stepped into the prize ring, though not recently.

  “All right.” He pocketed his pistol. “I’m rear guard. Go ahead, gents. Lead the way.”

  They went quickly along the corridor and down companionways, Clyde close behind the stewards and Archie lagging behind Clyde, breathing hard and thinking to himself, I could be dining with my wife instead of herding this motley crew into the bowels of an ocean liner.

  Both the swindler and his guard were fast asleep under blankets. Neither stirred when Archie, Lynds, and the stewards crowded into the baggage room. Archie smelled something sharp and acrid that he hadn’t noticed on his last visit. Clyde smelled it, too. He stopped abruptly in front of the row of wooden crates from which the smell emanated.

  “I smell tar,” said Archie.

  “Could be the wine went bad,” said a steward and laughed, “Why don’t we sample some, see if it’s all right?”

  Clyde did not laugh, Archie noticed. The young man wet his lips and looked around nervously.

  “What’s the matter, Clyde?”

  “Uhhmm.”

  “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “Do you smell something sharp?” Clyde asked.

  “Yes, I just said that. So do they. What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know,” Clyde answered, slowly, though Archie bet that he did. He laid a tentative hand on one of the crates, bent over it, and sniffed the wood. When he straightened up, Archie thought that he looked terrified.

  “Mr. Abbott, we’d better open all the doors and hatches in this baggage room. Immediately—all you men! Open everything. Now!”

  The stewards looked about, uncomprehending.

  Archie said, “What is going on, Clyde?”

  “Unless I’m mistaken,” said Clyde, “these crates contain raw celluloid film stock. Movie film. The tar smell indicates that it’s old and decomposing.”

  “So what?”

  “It breaks down chemically into a volatile nitrate gas. It will explode.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’m a scientist! I experiment all the time with celluloid film. It’s manufactured by dissolving nitrocellulose in camphor and alcohol.”

  “Guncotton,” said Archie, as the penny finally dropped. “Highly flammable.”

  “The gas generated by the breakdown will do more than burn. First it will explode. Then the film will burn. We have to vent the gas before something detonates it.”

  “Open everything!” Archie ordered the stewards. “Do it now. Open every door.”

  They ran to obey.

  Clyde Lynds looked up at a ten-by-ten square opening in the ceiling. “The cargo hatch!”

  “What are you doing?” said Archie.

  Lynds scrambled onto a crate, reached up, and pulled himself onto the bottom rungs of a ladder that rose into the darkness overhead. “The cargo hatch,” he called down. “If I can open it, the shaft will suck the gas out like a chimney.”

  MANY DECKS HIGHER AND THREE hundred feet aft in the First Class dining saloon, Marion said, “Captain, I can’t help but notice that eight of the twelve seats at your table are empty. Surely it can’t be for lack of guests who want to dine with you. This is a splendid dinner, and you are a charming host.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Bell,” Turner replied, studiously ignoring the titans of industry, the London aristocrats, and the American millionaires at nearby tables who were attempting to catch his eye. “I will carry your sweet compliment to my grave. But I only dine with passengers when I feel like it, which is not often. They tend to be a bunch of bloomin’ monkeys, present company excepted.”

  “Doesn’t the line object? Isn’t the captain supposed to woo wealthy passengers?”

  “Cunard have taken notice of a curious fact,” the captain answered. “The more I insult First Class passengers, the more First Class passengers wish to sail in my ship. It was the same way on the Lusitania, my previous command. For some reason the wealthy, particularly the newly wealthy, court abuse. As you know”—Turner lowered his voice and beckoned them closer, conspiratorially—“the White Star Line will soon launch Olympic and Titanic. Neither will ever match Mauretania’s speed, of course, but they will be bigger, and there’s always the appeal of novelty, so competition will be hotter than ever. With that in mind, I’ve suggested to the chairman that I drive up ticket sales by treating passengers in First Class to old-fashioned Royal Navy floggings.”

  Isaac Bell and Marion burst out laughing.

  “Haven’t heard back from him yet,” Captain Turner chortled. “Presumably he’s debating it with his directors.”

  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!”

  “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.”r />
  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.”

  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.”

  “‘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?”