The Thief ib-5

by Clive Cussler

  “Humanovas make sound for the movies,” Marion told Strone.

  “Sound? In the cinema? Do you mean like the orchestra?”

  “Much more than an orchestra. The actors speak lines of dialogue. And make effects.”

  “Effects?”

  “Gunshots, whistles, bells. Surely you’ve heard Humanovas in London. Or Actologues?”

  “Rarely get to town anymore, m’dear. Retired, don’t you know?”

  Bell concealed a smile at the sight of Archie’s red eyebrow cocked toward the skylight. Strone was laying it on with a trowel, but a flurry of marconigrams from Van Dorn informants in England had repeated, in guarded language, rumors that His Lordship was, as Bell suspected, attached to Great Britain’s newly formed Secret Service Bureau with offices at Whitehall in the center of London. He left London only to undermine England’s enemies abroad.

  Urged on by Irina Viorets, the stewards arranged chairs facing the improvised screen, and within minutes the lounge had been transformed into a moving picture theater. Members of the ship’s orchestra gathered around the piano with violins and a trumpet. They struck a clarion chord.

  The wedding guests took their seats. The lamps were lowered. The projector clattered and light flickered on the screen. From behind the screen, an actor read aloud the movie’s title card.

  “Is This Seat Taken?”

  “It’s a Biograph comic,” Marion whispered to Bell. “Florence Lawrence is in it.”

  The scene was laid in a ten-cent moving picture theater just as the movie ended. A well-dressed audience applauded when a woman with a pistol arrested a villain, who was marched off by a policeman. The actors behind the sailcloth clapped their hands as the movie audience applauded. The next film on the ten-cent theater screen showed a conductor and piano player auditioning singers and dancers.

  The actors behind the sailcloth sang and shuffled their feet on the washboards, and the ship’s piano played ragtime.

  A lady looking very much like the woman with the pistol walked into the ten-cent theater wearing an enormous hat and looked for a seat. An actress called, repeatedly, “Is this seat taken?” Theater patrons refused to move, protesting that her hat would block their view of the screen.

  The lady in the big hat was followed by a man in a top hat, who looked very much like the villain just arrested. An actor called in a strong voice, “Is this seat taken?”

  Theater patrons yelled that his hat was too big. Shouting matches ensued — angry words and a general banging came from behind the sailcloth.

  Lord Strone laughed, “If my wife could see the thoroughly unpleasant sort who attend the cinema, she’d stop badgering me to take her there.”

  The ship’s orchestra took up an aria from La Bohème.

  On the theater screen, the director threw auditioning singers out the door.

  Behind the sailcloth, the door banged and actors laughed.

  In the ten-cent theater, ladies in increasingly large hats took their seats, provoking a riot.

  A whistle blew behind the sailcloth. In the ten-cent theater, the clamshell jaws of a steam shovel descended from the ceiling and plucked off a lady’s hat. Ladies removed their hats. The lady in the biggest hat refused. The jaws descended again and lifted her, hat and all, out of the ten-cent theater. The actors behind the sailcloth cheered.

  Lord Strone led the laughter. “I say! That’ll teach her. Whisked off like rubbish.”

  “Irina!” cried Marion as the lights came back on, “That was splendid. Thank you.”

  Irina stood and bowed. “Could we have a hand for the players?”

  The Humanova troupe stepped out from behind the sailcloth. The wedding guests clapped.

  Isaac Bell shook the actors’ hands, pressing into each a ten-dollar gold piece. “Thank you for a memorable performance.”

  “Would that we could have rehearsed longer,” one sighed, “but Mademoiselle Viorets kept changing the dialogue.”

  The wedding party trooped down Mauretania’s grand staircase to the dining saloon. Bell and Marion made the rounds of the tables, thanking guests for coming and fielding questions.

  “To the beautiful bride!” shouted a red-faced Chimney Baron, draining his glass and waving for a refill. “Und to you, Mr. Bell, as ve say in Germany, Da hast du Glück gehabt!”

  “Which means,” Herr Wagner translated, “Did you get lucky!”

  “Danke schön!” Bell grinned back.

  They were making their way back to their own table when Clyde Lynds hurried up, his face pale, his expression grave. “Mr. Bell!”

  “Are you all right, Clyde?”

  “I can’t find the Professor anywhere. He’s not in his cabin, he’s not on deck, he’s not here, and he’s not in the Second Class dining room.”

  “When did he leave the party?”

  “Before the ceremony. He said he felt seasick again.” Lynds lowered his voice and whispered, “I had a feeling he was heading down to the baggage rooms. I went down there. I didn’t see him. I checked both of them, back in the stern and up in the bow. He wasn’t in, either.”

  “Why would he go there?”

  Clyde Lynds shrugged. “To check on our things, I guess.”

  “What things?” Bell asked. “Luggage?” The Professor and his protégé had danced repeatedly around the subject of the actual “secret invention.” Was it aboard the ship? Was it in their heads? Was it on another ship? Did it consist only of drawings? Bell had no idea, but now it sounded as if the invention was physically on the Mauretania. It was be ironical if whatever the machine was, it was riding in the same luggage room as a Van Dorn Detective Agency prisoner.

  “What’s in his luggage, Clyde?”

  Lynds hesitated. Then he ducked his head and said, “The Professor had some crates.”

  “Go sit with Mademoiselle Viorets. I’ll have a look.”

  “Don’t you want me to come with you?”

  “No.”

  8

  “Marion, i’m afraid i’m going to have to excuse myself. Beiderbecke has disappeared. Clyde is worried, and so am I.”

  “I’ll hold the fort.”

  Bell walked Marion to her chair and nodded to Archie. The two men left the party separately and joined up in Bell’s stateroom, where Bell slipped a pocket pistol into his trousers and tossed Archie another. “Beiderbecke’s gone missing. Clyde thought he went down to the baggage rooms, but he couldn’t find him there.”

  “We’ve got our Protective Services boy in the forward one.”

  “Let’s see what he has to tell us.”

  They bounded down the grand staircase faster than the elevator would take them, past promenade deck, shelter deck, upper, main, and lower, and hurried forward to the front of the ship, following a route they knew well from visits to their prisoner, the swindler, and his bored and lonely guard. Archie was soon breathing hard, but insisted on matching Bell’s pace. Bell grabbed him suddenly and stopped him in his tracks. “Watch it.”

  He scooped Professor Beiderbecke’s pince-nez spectacles off the deck. They examined them in the light of a ceiling bulb. One of the lenses had cracked. “His all right, pink tint to the glass, like he wore.”

  The forward baggage room was cavernous — over sixty feet long and nearly forty feet wide, although so close to the Mauretania’s bow that its width tapered to sixteen feet as it traced the sharpening line of the hull. It held far more bales and wooden crates than luggage, rows and rows of shipping barrels marked “Fragile” and “China,” oak casks of wine and brandy, a pair of Daimler limousines, and a handsome yellow Wolseley-Siddeley touring car. Bell smelled something in the fetid air, not the autos’ gasoline odor, which he had noted on earlier visits, but a more acrid stink, like coal tar, or, he thought, simply the ubiquitous odor of paint from the constant maintenance performed by the ship’s crew.

  The lion cage sat near the front. As Bell and Archie pushed through the door, they saw that their Van Dorn Protective Services operative had fall
en asleep beside the cage and that their swindler, a lanky, middle-aged sharper with a matinee idol’s leonine mane of hair and a choirboy’s trustworthy smile, was straining to reach through the bars for the keys.

  “Lawrence Block?” asked Archie, using the alias under which he had conducted his stock manipulations. “Even if you got the door open, where do you think you would go on a steamer in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?”

  “For a walk,” said the swindler. “Maybe even find someone to talk to. This fellow and I have run out of subjects of interest to either of us. Failing that, maybe I’d bust into one of those brandy casks and get drunk.”

  The guard woke with a start and jumped to his feet. “Sorry, Mr. Bell. The boat keeps moving up and down, and there’s a smell in the air that makes me tired.”

  Archie said, “Next time hide your keys.”

  Bell said, “We’re looking for a middle-aged Viennese gentleman with a fancy mustache and pince-nez glasses. He was wearing a frock coat and carrying a walking stick with a silver head. Has anyone of that description come in here?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Has anyone at all come in here while you were awake?”

  “Just a young feller looking for the same guy you’re looking for. Ran in, ran out.”

  That would be Clyde. “No one else?”

  “Nope.”

  Swindler Block called, “What about the guy who took a trunk?”

  “What guy?” asked Bell.

  “Just a crewman,” said the PS guard.

  “What did he want?”

  “Took a trunk. They’re in and out all the time. They get sent down for trunks when folks in First Class want something they forgot.”

  “He wasn’t crew,” said the swindler.

  “What?” Bell looked at him gripping the bars of the lion cage, glad as any prisoner of a break in his empty routine. “What are you talking about, Mr. Block?”

  “He wasn’t crew.”

  “He was so crew,” protested the Protective Services man. “I saw him with my own eyes.”

  Bell ignored him and asked Block, “Why do you say the fellow you saw was not a member of the ship’s company?”

  Block said, “The food down here is lousy. I want a good meal.”

  “You’ll get one if you tell me what you mean.”

  “He was pretending he was crew.”

  “The hell he was,” said the Protective Services man.

  “The hell he wasn’t,” said the swindler.

  “Archie!”

  Archie marched the Protective Services man out the door. Bell asked Block, “How do you know that the man who took the trunk was not a member of the ship’s company?”

  “Do I get a meal?”

  “Prime sirloin and ribs o’ beef, roast turkey poulet, quarters of lamb, smoked ox tongue, and Rouen ducklings. If you help me. How do you know?”

  “I just know.”

  “You better know more than ‘just know’ or you’ll be dining on bread and water.”

  “I’m not dodging you, Mr. Bell. I’m telling you that it takes one to know one. I smoked right off that the fellow was an imposter. For one thing, he was covered in coal dust. Like a stoker. Well, do they send a stoker to retrieve a rich man’s shiny clean steamer trunk? Of course they don’t. They send a shiny clean bedroom steward. You get my meaning?”

  “And for another thing?”

  “The stewards usually come in pairs, help each other carry. He was alone.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “Like I just told you. Like a stoker. Hard as nails tough from the black gang.”

  “Big man?”

  “Not so big. Powerful build, though. Long arms. Like an ape. Like I said, what you’d expect shoveling coal.”

  “Long arms? Did you see his face?”

  “Black with soot.”

  “Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Why not?” Bell demanded.

  The swindler answered, “Cap pulled down over his eyes, collar up round his ears. All that soot on his face, for all I saw he could have been dancing in a minstrel show.”

  Bell looked at him with a wintry eye. Block was a very intelligent crook.

  “What color was the trunk?”

  “Silver.”

  “How long ago was this?”

  “Hour? Little more.”

  “Enjoy your dinner.” Bell started out the door, then stopped with a new thought. “Was there a sticker on the trunk indicating the passenger’s class?”

  “First.”

  “Lawrence Block, you’ve earned your first honest meal since you graduated reform school.”

  Bell sent the PS man back in with a stern warning to stay on his toes. Then he told Archie, “A coal stoker, or someone who looked like a coal stoker, lifted a silver-colored steamer trunk with a First Class sticker. Question is, why?”

  “Assuming the Professor’s been kidnapped, I’d say they stashed him inside it so they could smuggle him into a cabin they booked somewhere in First Class.”

  “So would I.”

  “But,” Archie said, “we found his glasses down here. How would they know he was coming down here? Maybe they have someone in the crew watching him.”

  “Or a passenger,” said Isaac Bell. “We better get Captain Turner to rustle up a search party.”

  9

  “Isaac! They found the trunk on the promenade deck!”

  Bell passed Archie at a dead run, climbing the grand staircase. There was a mob at the top of the stairs. The corridors converging outside a service pantry were jammed with the junior officers: saloon, deck, and bedroom stewards and seamen who had been pressed into the search. Bell saw a saloon steward sprawled on his back, his normally immaculate tunic filthy, and beside him the silver trunk. A husky seaman stood over it, aiming a fire ax at the lock.

  “I’ll open it,” said Bell, shouldering him aside. He knelt by the trunk and felt with his hands that it was heavy. “Would there be a wine screw handy?”

  The sommelier’s assistant produced a corkscrew. Bell twisted it into the lock, manipulated for a moment while gazing into the middle distance, and the lock clicked open. To the murmur of acclaim, and before anyone asked how an insurance executive happened to know the fine art of lock picking, he said, “Parlor trick my great-aunt Isabel taught me. She was a regular whiz.”

  Stewards and seamen laughed.

  “Never would say where she learned it,” Bell added, and the officers laughed, too.

  He hinged the hasp up and lifted the lid. The laughter died.

  Professor Beiderbecke had been squeezed into the trunk. His legs were bent sharply to his chest, his arms pressed about his head. His eyes were wide open. His face was rigid with pain and fear. His skin was blue.

  Without a word, an elderly dining saloon steward passed Isaac Bell a gleaming fish knife. Bell held it to Beiderbecke’s nostrils. He did not expect that the poor man’s breath would cloud the silver, but it did.

  “He’s alive!” A dozen hands helped Bell pull Beiderbecke out of the trunk. They laid him on the rubber-tile floor and gently straightened his limbs. Beiderbecke groaned, gasped, and inhaled fitfully.

  “Doctor!”

  “Get the surgeon.”

  Bell leaned closer, searching for a spark in his wide-open eyes. They seemed to focus on him. “You’ll be fine,” said Bell. “The doctor’s coming.”

  Beiderbecke’s body convulsed. “My heart,” he whispered. Racked with pain, he clutched his chest. “Bell!” he gasped.

  “I’m right here, Professor.”

  “Bell. My… protégé…”

  “Don’t worry, I’ll look out for Clyde.”

  “Protect him, please.”

  “I will.”

  “Protect him from the akkk…”

  “From what?” Bell put his ear to Beiderbecke’s lips, for the man was surely dying. “From what?”

  “Akrobat.”<
br />
  The ship’s surgeon arrived, shooing people from his path. Bell stood up to make room for him, then watched as the surgeon parted vest and shirt with sure hands and pressed a stethoscope to Beiderbecke’s chest. He listened for a long time, shaking his head, and finally removed the instrument.

  “What did Beiderbecke say? Archie asked Bell.

  “Made me promise to protect Clyde.”

  “From Krieg?”

  “I suppose,” Bell answered. “But that wasn’t all he said.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “A name or a word that sounded like ‘acrobat.’ How do you say it in German?”

  “The same, except spelled with a ‘k,’ said Archie. “But what did Beiderbecke mean by ‘acrobat’?”

  “A man,” Isaac Bell mused thoughtfully, “who can fly.”

  “Like the one who jumped overboard.”

  “And somehow flew back.”

  Archie said, “But acrobats can’t really fly.”

  “Maybe not. But the best of them can do a darned good imitation…” Isaac Bell thought hard. “Mauretania’s carrying three thousand people, passengers and crew. Whoever killed Beiderbecke is hiding among them.”

  “That’s like hiding in a city.”

  “We need a witness. Let’s ask this steward if he got a look at who knocked him down.”

  The steward, who was sitting up blearily, shook his head. “Sorry, guv. Jumped me from behind, he did, when I walked in the pantry.”

  Bell helped him to his feet. “Not even a glimpse as you fell? Did you see how big he was or what he was wearing?”

  “Not a peep, guv.” He looked at his tunic sleeve, then down at the trousers. “Blimey, am I a sight. Better get out of these before the boss sees me.”

  Bell noticed brown grease stains on his trousers from the pantry floor. But the smudges on his sleeve looked like soot. He ran his finger on one.

  “Coal dust,” he told Archie. “Let’s go visit the black gang.”

  * * *

  Block, the swindler, swore up and down, again, that he had not seen the face of the black gang crewman who had taken the silver trunk from the baggage room, but Isaac Bell brought him along anyway, intending to watch his face for signs of lying as they scrutinized the men who stoked the furnaces. He brought the saloon steward, too, on the theory that the man who knocked him down could not know beyond a doubt that the steward hadn’t seen his face. The sight of two witnesses might set off a case of nerves. Or so he thought until he clapped eyes on the stokers and the hellish place where they worked.