The Thief

by Clive Cussler

  “Are you sure you’ve noticed nothing unusual while taking pictures for The Iron Horse? Nothing out of the ordinary? Nothing different than you’d expect or have seen on other jobs?”

  Marion pondered his question. “Only one thing. There’s a film-stock shortage. Everyone in Los Angeles is talking about it. For a month or so, film’s become hard to get and very expensive. Yesterday, Billy and Dave came to me with long faces. Their stock was old. It smelled awful, and they said the pictures would be terribly overexposed. I telephoned Irina. In less than one hour a truck raced up with more than we could use of the most pristine stock you could ask for. It was precisely perforated and smelled fresh as a meadow. You should have seen Billy and Dave rubbing their hands like Silas Marner counting his gold.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “It was Eastman Kodak stock, straight from the factory.”

  “But Imperial is independent. Eastman made a deal with the Edison Trust: they won’t sell to independents.”

  “Where they got it, I don’t know. But for Imperial, at least, there is no shortage.” Anyway, if you’ll limp into the dining room, I’ll bring dinner.”

  “What is our first married home-cooked meal?”

  “The same as our first-ever home-cooked meal. Do you remember what I made you?”

  “I remember you invited me to dinner and cooked pot roast and vegetables. It was splendid, though I have a vague memory that we got sidetracked before dessert— Marion, I’ll bet you’ve some cowboys in The Iron Horse.”

  “Bunkhousesful.”

  “Got room for one more?”

  “Texas Walt?”

  Bell nodded. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “If that will make you feel better, of course.”

  “I would feel much better knowing my good friend the deadly gunfighter was looking out for you.”

  Marion smiled. “Walt may not be a deadly gunfighter much longer. Movie people are all talking about ‘the tall Texan’ playing cowboy parts. Some people think he could be a star.”

  “Please don’t turn his head until we’re sure you’re safe and sound.”

  PAULINE GRANDZAU HAD BEEN MEMORIZING the St. Germain section of her Baedeker on the train when suddenly she had to run from a gendarme who demanded her papers at a station stop. The last few miles of what should have been a twelve-hour train ride stretched to another full day clinging to the underside of a slow-moving coal car that finally dumped her near an open-air market in Paris in the rain. Thanks to the tourist guidebook and the foldout map, she found the Rue du Bac as night fell, climbed a steep flight of stairs, and staggered into the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Paris field office, exhausted, wet, and hungry.

  An enormous man seated next to a bright light asked, “What do you want here, miss?”

  At least that’s what it sounded like. He spoke French. She did not. But she saw in his eyes what he assumed: a street urchin with dirty hands and face and stringy braids and a snuffling nose had sneaked into the building either begging for money or running from the police.

  He asked her again. The light was so bright it was blinding her. He stood up, and the entire room, which had a linoleum floor and a desk and a chair and an interior door that led somewhere, started spinning.

  “Is this the Van Dorn Detective Agency Paris field office?” she asked.

  He looked surprised she spoke English.

  “Yes, it is,” he replied with an accent like Detective Curtis’s. “What can I do for you, little lady?”

  “Are you Detective Horace Bronson?”

  “I’m Bronson. Who are you?”

  Pauline Grandzau pulled herself up to her full five feet two inches. “Apprentice Van Dorn detective Pauline Grandzau reporting from Berlin.”

  She tried to salute, but her arm was heavy, and her legs were rubbery. She saw the linoleum rushing at her face. Bronson moved with surprising speed and caught her.

  “CABLE FROM THE PARIS FIELD office, Mr. Bell.”

  It was from Bronson.

  It was long and detailed.

  Isaac Bell read it twice.

  A hunter’s gleam began burning in his eyes. A smile of grim satisfaction lighted his stern face like the sun glancing off a frozen river, and he vowed to Fritz Wunderlich, to Krieg Rüstungswerk, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and especially to Imperial Army General Major Christian Semmler that Van Dorn Detective Arthur Curtis had not died in vain.

  “TELEGRAPHER! ON the jump!” ISAAC BELL summoned the man who sent and received Morse code on the field office’s private telegraph.

  “Wire Mr. Joseph Van Dorn: ‘Inquire U.S. Army and State Department German General Major Christian Semmler. Show them Wunderlich sketch.’

  “Wire Research Chief Grady Forrer, New York: ‘Who is German General Major Christian Semmler? Obtain photograph or newspaper sketch.’

  “Cable Horace Bronson, Paris Office: ‘Who is German General Major Christian Semmler? Obtain photograph or newspaper sketch.’

  “Wire Detective Archie Abbott, New York: ‘Ask Lord Strone about German General Major Christian Semmler. Show Wunderlich sketch.’

  “Send them. On the jump!”

  OF THE RESPONSES THAT FLOODED in over the next twenty-four hours, the one that intrigued Bell most came from the boss. Joe Van Dorn had discovered that General Major Semmler was married to Sophie Roth Semmler, the sole heiress of the Krieg Rüstungswerk fortune. Such wealth and power explained the lone operator’s ability to operate far more independently than a typical German Army officer.

  But Joseph Van Dorn’s informants in the Army and diplomatic corps knew almost nothing else about Semmler. The general major did not seek the limelight. A U.S. Army observer in China had heard that Semmler had established an excellent war record in the Boxer Rebellion. A retired embassy attaché had repeated rumors of a fearsome reputation in the South African War, when Semmler had supposedly led rebel Boer commandos behind British lines. But as none of Van Dorn’s informants among the diplomats and soldiers had actually met Semmler, the sketch of Fritz Wunderlich proved useless in Washington.

  Grady Forrer’s researchers had hunted in vain for photographs or newspaper sketches. Not unusual, Grady pointed out: only if Semmler had been a prominent member of a visiting German party or an attaché to the kaiser’s embassy would American newspapers have taken note of the soldier.

  Bell hoped for more from Bronson in Paris as he would have access to European papers and magazines. But Bronson cabled of the same dearth of images. Even the new man in Berlin could find no photographs or sketches in the German press. Considering how military men were lionized in Germany, it seemed that Christian Semmler went out of his way not to court publicity.

  Bell was disappointed, but hardly surprised. As a private detective who habitually avoided cameras, he expected no less of a soldier experienced at behind-the-lines guerrilla warfare. Nonetheless, he had learned that Semmler was rich. And he was independent, which Bell had already guessed. But if the thirty-five-year-old, powerfully built soldier and spy had green eyes, blond hair, and long arms “like a monkey,” no one had yet matched his face to the sketch of Fritz Wunderlich, so they were no closer to proving whether Semmler and Wunderlich were one and the same.

  “THAT IS AN UNFRIENDLY GATE,” said Lillian Hennessy Abbott, braking her big red Thomas Flyer Model K 6-70 to a stop in front of it. “Do you suppose it’s locked?”

  “I was told it would be,” said Archie.

  Attached to tall stone pillars, the double gate that blocked the road into the Earl of Strone’s Greenwich estate was made of heavy wrought-iron bars painted black and looked, Archie Abbott thought, very much locked.

  He stepped down from the big touring car in which they had driven up to Connecticut and paused to steady himself on the fender. Lillian had gone out of her way to drive smoothly, having deliberately chosen the auto for its long wheelbase, instead of her beloved Packard Wolf racer, but the roads had been hellish.

  “Are you all ri
ght, Archie?”

  “Tip-top.” He hinged out a blade of spring steel from what looked like an ordinary penknife and worked the lock open. He swung the two halves of the gate wide enough for the auto. Lillian drove through, and Archie locked it behind them.

  “Drive on.”

  A quarter mile along a curving driveway paved with crushed slate, they saw a sizable mansion of brick decorated with stone in a style that reminded Archie of Henry VIII’s palace at Hampton Court.

  The thick, wooden front door had no knocker. To save his knuckles, Archie banged on it with the butt of the Navy Colt .45 automatic he had taken to carrying since being shot nearly to death. When he heard the door being opened, he smoothly holstered the weapon and drew a calling card from his vest.

  A strapping butler—a retired sergeant major, by the look of him—who had been stuffed into a swallowtail coat peered out with an expression that was less than friendly.

  Archie proffered his card. “Be so good as to inform His Lordship that Archibald Angel Abbott and Mrs. Abbott are here for tea.”

  “I am not aware you’re expected, sir.”

  “We sailed on the Mauretania with His Lordship. He invited my wife to drop in if we were ever in the neighborhood. We are in the neighborhood.”

  The butler took in the sight of Lillian behind the wheel of the Thomas. She had removed her dust hat and veil. Her blond hair shone in the sun, and her eyes gleamed like sapphires. It occurred to the butler that the next time he clapped eyes on a smile like hers it would be on the far side of the Pearly Gates. “Please come in, sir. I will inform His Lordship.”

  “I will collect my wife.”

  As he helped Lillian out of her auto, Archie said, “I feel vaguely like a procurer.”

  Lillian kissed him on the lips. “And you would be so good at it. Fortunately for me, you have other talents. Are you sure you’re all right?’

  “I am alive and in love on a beautiful day in the country.”

  Strone was in tweed. He had a shotgun draped over his arm. “Lovely to see you again, my dear,” he said to Lillian. To Archie he was brusque. “Just going out for a tramp about the marsh. Come along if you like.”

  He put a deerstalker on his head and led the way at a quick pace down a garden path and over lawns, heading toward a vast marsh that disappeared in the haze of the Long Island Sound.

  “I was under the impression that my front gate was locked.”

  “We locked it on the way in,” said Archie.

  Lillian said, “Let’s walk slowly. My husband is recovering from an accident.”

  “Terribly sorry. Of course we’ll slow our pace. What sort of accident, Abbott?”

  “I bumped into a Webley-Fosbery.”

  Strone stopped walking and looked at Archie. “Hmmm. You never mentioned that on the boat.”

  “Automatic revolvers never make for wedding small talk.”

  “I say, are you in the insurance trade like your friend Bell?”

  “Isaac Bell and I will remain in the insurance trade as long as you remain ‘retired.’”

  A smile twitched Strone’s red cheeks and gray mustache.

  “One does not step out of retirement willy-nilly.”

  “What if I gave you a good reason?”

  “I pride myself as a man open to reason. Though one man’s reason could be another man’s poison.”

  “Then I won’t give you a reason. I’ll give you a name.”

  “A name?”

  “Semmler,” said Archie, who observed nothing on Strone’s face move except his pupils, which narrowed momentarily.

  “Can’t say it rings a bell, old boy,” Strone lied.

  “Christian Semmler.”

  “No. I don’t believe—”

  “Colonel Christian Semmler. The rank he held when you were stationed in South Africa.”

  “Where did you get the notion that I was stationed in South Africa?”

  “Oberst Christian Semmler, as our German friends addressed him.”

  “I don’t have German friends.”

  “Lately,” said Archie, “I’ve been dropping mine. Semmler has been promoted several times since the South African War. He is currently a general major.”

  Strone abruptly dropped all pretense of ignorance. “Yes, I know.”

  “He is plotting in America.”

  “Plotting what?”

  “We don’t know.”

  Strone’s jaw tightened. “He is a slippery, nervy bastard. He was as cold-blooded an operator as any we encountered, harassing our columns, sniping our pickets. And God help the scouts he waylaid. He made the Boers seem sweet as schoolboys.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him?”

  “I only saw him once. And only through a glass at a great distance.”

  “Lillian?” said Archie.

  Lillian pulled a notebook from her long duster and opened it to the sketch of Fritz Wunderlich.

  “Did he look like this man?”

  Strone took wire-frame spectacles from the folds of his shooting clothes and studied the copy of the salesman’s sketch. “This man is older,” he said at last. “Of course it’s been, what?”

  “Nearly ten years,” said Archie. “How far away was he?”

  Strone looked across the marsh in silence, his mouth working, his eyes bleak.

  Archie and Lillian exchanged a glance. Archie gestured for her to say nothing.

  “One thousand yards,” Strone answered at last. “We thought we were safe from his rifle at that range and that we could ride closer. And, of course, he was just one man alone… What made you come to me?”

  “Isaac Bell had a feeling you were more than you appeared to be. He was right. When we dug deeper, we learned that you were decorated in that action.”

  Strone flushed angrily. “Ruddy nonsense.”

  “What do you mean, nonsense? You received the Distinguished Service Order.”

  “I mean nonsense. Semmler lured us onto a bridge he had mined with dynamite. He sniped the wounded with rifle fire. My DSO was awarded to the only man that murderous swine missed.”

  ISAAC BELL ROUNDED UP TEXAS Walt Hatfield and Larry Saunders and a crew of Saunders’s handpicked men for a powwow.

  “Information from Art Curtis and his Berlin apprentice, expanded upon by Archie Abbott and the Research department, proves that the murderer we called the Acrobat, the drummer Fritz Wunderlich, and German Imperial Army General Major Christian Semmler are all one and the same. In addition, Mr. Van Dorn has established that General Major Christian Semmler is not only Krieg Rüstungswerk’s agent, but also a principal. To put it bluntly, he married the boss’s daughter.

  “Semmler’s alias, Fritz Wunderlich, flew the coop when he caught wind of our visits to his shops and my calling on his hotel in Denver. Before we congratulate ourselves on Wunderlich’s loss of a string of shops that gave him and his accomplices safe passage around the continent, remember that the German consulates offer General Major Semmler even safer places to hide, get money, rest, eat, and sleep. Tracking Semmler will not be like tracking an ordinary criminal to his hideout. As much as we might enjoy it, we cannot smash open the doors of a sovereign nation’s consulates.

  “I had already expressed copies of this ‘Wunderlich’ picture to every field office covering a German consulate in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the vice-consul’s office here in Los Angeles. Now I’ve informed them it’s a likeness of Semmler.”

  “ISAAC BELL’S VOICE RESONATES with confidence,” said Christian Semmler. “Listen!”

  He thrust the telephone earpiece at Hermann Wagner.

  Wagner, sick with fear, took it with a trembling hand. The Berlin banker had seen the Donar leader’s face for the first time tonight. He had speculated that the mysterious leader might be Semmler, mainly because of rumors about the kaiser’s affection for the officer they called the Monkey. The heavy browridges, the massive protruding jaw, and the gangly arms were frightening confirmat
ion. The leader was indeed the kaiser’s favorite, General Major Christian Semmler. For some reason Semmler had allowed him to see his face, and Wagner feared that Semmler intended to kill him when he was done.

  “Listen to him!”

  Wagner pressed the telephone to his ear.

  He and Semmler were hunched across from each other over a table in the cellar of Germany’s Los Angeles vice-consul’s mansion. The vice-consul was upstairs, aware in only the most general terms of the use they were putting his building to, and probably deeply relieved that he had been forbidden entry to his own cellar.

  The telephone was one that Christian Semmler had had connected via the vice-consul’s private line to a microphone he had stolen from Clyde Lynds and had paid an electrician to hide in the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Like an innkeeper tapping a keg of lager, Semmler had laughed as he explained the eavesdropping system to the disbelieving Hermann Wagner.

  It seemed like a miracle. More than a miracle, it seemed impossible. But Wagner could actually hear Isaac Bell speaking to his private investigators even though a full two miles separated the Van Dorn Detective Agency from the German consulate.

  “You hear?”

  “A little. Not very well.”

  “I know that!” snapped Semmler. “Lynds’s microphone is not thoroughly perfected yet. But he’s on the right track, and if you listen closely, you can hear the confidence in Bell’s voice. Why shouldn’t he sound assured? He’s learned so much these past several days.”

  “Yes, he has,” Wagner agreed nervously.

  “Events do not always unfold as we plan them,” said Semmler. “It is the nature of plans, and events.” He looked up and his green eyes sparkled with amusement. “I recall one night on the high veldt, when three British Tommies cornered me, my escape went according to plan. But no sooner had I killed them than I was seized by my arm and dragged to the ground. I could hardly believe it. I was attacked out of nowhere by a lion! A lion! The beast was attracted by the scent of the Tommies’ blood.”