The Thief (5 page)

“Only by reputation,” Hermann Wagner answered, as the Chimney Baron glanced aside.

“What is Krieg’s reputation?”

“Innovative,” Hermann Wagner interrupted, again. “Full of get-up-and-go, as Americans would say.”

A
RTHUR
C
URTIS, WHO MANNED THE
V
AN
D
ORN
Detective Agency’s one-room Berlin field office, was a short, rotund Coloradan. With a quick, sunny smile, a friendly glint in his blue eyes, and a potbelly straining his vest, Art Curtis looked less like a first-class private investigator than a prosperous liquor salesman.

He got busy on Beiderbecke and Lynds the instant he received Bell’s marconigram. It was in his nature to get right to it, but in the case of Isaac Bell, he would never forget that when his old partner Glenn Irvine was killed by the Butcher Bandit, it had been Bell, shot twice in that gun battle, who paid from his own pocket to look after the dead detective’s aged mother.

Curtis had operated in Berlin less than a year and was still developing the network of contacts—in government, business, the military, police, and criminals—that he would need to raise the field office to Van Dorn standards. He made swift progress nonetheless, establishing that Professor Franz Bismark Biederbecke held a prestigious chair at Vienna’s Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute and that Clyde Lynds’s multiple degrees confirmed that he was the genius his mentor had proclaimed him to be.

But he ran smack into a stone wall when he popped his first question about the munitions trust. A policeman he had cultivated, a middle-ranked detective, fell silent on the telephone. Curtis listened to the wires hiss, wondering why the sudden reticence. Finally, the policeman said, “It could be dangerous.”

“What could be dangerous?”

“When Krieg Rüstungswerk GmbH hears that you are asking questions, it will be very dangerous.”

Threatening Arthur Curtis was a surefire way to get his dander up. “Is that so?”

“That is so, Herr Private Detective,” said the German. “I have kept you far too long on the telephone. Good day, sir.”

Arthur Curtis returned the earpiece to his telephone, took out his favorite pistol, a finely crafted lightweight Browning 1899 that fit his small hand, and broke it down and cleaned it to clear his mind. A sharp knock at the door alerted him to trouble.

“I told you,” he said, without looking up as the door opened, “go away.”

“I am here for your own good,” Pauline Grandzau replied, stepping in uninvited and draping the coat and hat she had already taken off on the clothes tree. “You need me.”

Art Curtis ground his teeth. He had come to think of her as Pauline the Plague.

“For the last time: I do not need a girl in this office. Even if I did, which I don’t, I would not need a girl who is only seventeen years old and is probably lying about her actual age which is plausibly sixteen or less.”

“Every great detective needs an apprentice.”

Curtis looked up, wearily. This had been going on for weeks. She was standing there with that same hopeful smile on her freckled face, a skinny little German student with yellow braids, bright blue eyes, and the moxie of a Berlin street fighter.

“I’m not a great detective,” said Curtis, who could play disguises with the best of them. He wheeled out a favorite: roughhewn Westerner. “I’m not that fancy Sherlock Holmes you’re always reading about. I’m just a working stiff. That lets me off the hook.”

“It is your duty to society to take an apprentice. How else will the young learn?”

“I don’t believe in girl detectives. And I’m not running a charity for society. Go away.”

She had already moved closer, edging up behind him, peering over his shoulder at the papers on his desk. Lots of luck reading Van Dorn cipher, he thought.

“You know you’ll hire me in the end,” she said blithely. “You need me. I speak perfect English. I am studying library and can look up anything. I am even a powerful skier, taught by my grandfather in the Alps.” Curtis put his head in his hands. He knew what was coming next. Sure enough, she quoted the infernal Holmes. “‘When the other fellow has all the trumps, it saves time to throw down your hand.’”

“Out!”

Pauline Grandzau grabbed her coat and hat and waved as she left the office. Art Curtis locked the door. Her English was actually pretty good—not as good as she thought, and not that he needed a German-English translator.

He trolled through his growing list of acquaintances, telephoned a talkative bank manager he had befriended and invited him to a beer garden, where they sat in companionable conversation on bentwood chairs under the shade trees, occasionally clinking their pewter steins and puffing their own contributions to the blue haze of cigar smoke.

The bank manager knew a bit about Krieg Rüstungswerk. The munitions manufacturer was controlled by the ancient Prussian Roth family, known to be secretive, which was hardly surprising in the arms trade. Krieg, as it was known colloquially, was especially well connected with the Army because it was “smiled upon” by the kaiser. Krieg also had a penchant for buying up firms in unrelated businesses. Unlike the policeman on the telephone, the bank manager made no mention of any danger from asking questions. Curtis was just shaking hands good-bye, intending to move on to a working class beer garden where a retired German Army sergeant drank, when the bank manager said casually, “I know a chap who works in their Berlin office.”

“Really? On what level?”

“Rather high up, actually. An executive.”

“I would like to meet him. Would that be possible?”

“It will cost you an expensive meal. He is greedy.”

“Why don’t we all three dine together?” asked Arthur, which was exactly what the bank manager wanted to hear.

Arthur went on to his next beer garden. The retired sergeant was there. Plied with a fresh stein, he spoke admiringly of a highly accurate Krieg Rüstungswerk rifled cannon and repeated what Curtis had heard about the kaiser’s warm feelings for the firm. With another stein down the hatch, the sergeant recalled fondly the time his regiment was reviewed by the kaiser himself dressed in the black uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars.

Arthur Curtis went back to the office to draft a reply to Isaac Bell.

He unlocked his door and stepped inside. Hairs prickled the back of his neck. He slewed sideways, pressed his back to the wall, and slid his pistol from his shoulder holster.

“It is only me,” said the shadow sitting at his desk.

“Pauline, how did you get in here?”

“But if I had been Colonel Moran I could have shot you with my silent air gun. No one in the building would hear.”

“Who the devil is Colonel Moran?”

“He tried to kill Sherlock Holmes. Holmes arrested him.”

“I said, how did you get in here?”

She pointed at the window, accessed by an alley fire ladder, which Curtis occasionally used to leave the office undetected. “As Sherlock told Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’: ‘Elementary.’”

“Elementary? Here’s elementary.” Curtis picked up his telephone. “I’m going to call the cops and have you arrested for breaking and entering if you don’t get lost once and for all.”

“Guess what I found in the library about Clyde Lynds.”

Art Curtis felt his jaw drop. “How do you know that name?”

“It’s in the marconigram you received from the
Mauretania
. The one about Professor Beiderbecke and Krieg Rüstungswerk.”

“That marconigram was in code.”

Pauline shrugged. “It’s not a hard code.”

“Y
OU ARE UP TO SOMETHING.”

Marion braced herself against the movement of the ship and regarded Isaac Bell with a dreadnought admiral’s collected gaze. Her coral-sea green eyes, her loveliest feature, Bell thought, if forced to choose only one, shimmered with equal parts warm love and healthy skepticism.

“A picnic,” he answered.

“It’s midnight. We’re the only two passengers not seasick in their cabins. I see no wicker hamper. Though for some reason you’re carrying a camera.”

“It only appears to be a camera. Take my arm so we don’t fall down the stairs.”

The seas were heavy. The broad grand staircase swayed as the ship rose and fell with stately precision, but after twenty-four hours in a North Atlantic gale, they were getting the hang of it. Bell gripped the banister and they climbed together, gauging the pitch, compensating for the roll. At the top of the stairs, Bell led Marion through the vestibule into the First Class music room, a domed lounge with a thick floral carpet and brocaded furniture in hues of pink, blue, red, and yellow. The lights were low and it was empty of people but for a sleepy saloon steward standing by with a bucket of champagne anchored between a couch and a pillar. Bell tipped him, lavishly. “I’ll open it, thank you. Good night.”

The man left, smiling.

Marion said, “Now you’ll try to make me tipsy.”

“Would you dance with me?”

“Delighted. As soon as the orchestra arrives.”

Bell opened his camera case and wedged it in a corner of the couch. Marion leaned in close. Wisps of her golden champagne hair brushed his cheek. “What is that? Oh my gosh, a little gramophone. Where’s the horn?”

Bell unfolded a flat piece of cardboard and formed it into a horn, which he attached to the cylinder player. He turned a tiny crank, winding the mechanism, put on a two-minute cylinder, and started it.

“Remember this? We saw the show on Broadway.”

“‘Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl,’” Marion answered when the first notes emerged thinly from the horn. The latest musical comedy sensation was a satire of the old 1890s romantic ballads.

Isaac Bell sang along in a credible baritone.

He treated her respectful as those villains always do,

And she supposed he was a perfect gent.

But she found diff’rent when one night she went with him to dine

Into a table d’hôte so blithe and gay.

And he says to her: After this we’ll have a demitasse!”

Marion sang,

Then to him these brave words the girl did say:

and took up the chorus:

Stand back, villain, go your way!

You may tempt the upper classes

With your villainous demitasses,

But Heaven will protect the working girl.”

Bell opened the bottle of Mumm and poured two glasses. “To what?” asked Marion.

“Love?”

“Love it is.”

They locked eyes, kissed, and drank. Bell changed cylinders, and strains of another new song, the romantic hit “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” played through the cardboard horn.

“May I have this dance?”

He took Marion in his arms and wove a waltz through the furniture as if the rolling, carpeted deck were a crowded dance floor. “Do you recall the first time I asked you to marry me?”

She pressed her cheek to his. “Yes. It was during an earthquake.”

“And the second?”

“In the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel. I said I was too old for you. You claimed that I was not.”

“And the third?”

“In New York. When you gave me this lovely emerald, which I thought too bright at first but have grown to love as our lucky charm.”

“And the fourth?”

“Above the Golden Gate. In your flying machine.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Of course.”

“Tomorrow,” said Isaac Bell.