The Thief (10 page)

R
ETURNING 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!”

“D
O 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.

T
HROUGH HIS
R
EGAL
S
UITE
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.

A
T DAWN THE NEWLY WED
I
SAAC
B
ELL 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.”