The Thief ib-5

by Clive Cussler

  “Then we’ll buy one.”

  “We’ll pool our cash.”

  “I’ve got Dad’s check. I’ll buy it.”

  “How about that one?” a girl cried, and they gathered around it, two of them plopping down on the bench, throwing open the key lid, and pounding out a ragtime duet.

  The salesman kept saying, “Not for sale. Not for sale,” and when he had at last showed the buoyant mob out the door, he discovered that the tall golden-haired gentleman hoping to buy a piano for his niece had slipped away in the confusion.

  Good riddance, he thought, and locked the door.

  * * *

  “Nicely done,” Isaac Bell told the Los Angeles field office apprentices and secretaries and their girlfriends and boyfriends. “You were thoroughly authentic ‘gilded youth’ on a lark. That poor salesman never knew what hit him.”

  “Did you find what you were looking for, Mr. Bell?”

  All eyes locked on the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s legendary chief investigator.

  “With your help, I found a letter in his desk and a business card. The Leipzig Organ and Piano Company is represented by a traveling man named Fritz Wunderlich who collects his mail in Denver at the Brown Palace Hotel.”

  * * *

  Isaac Bell telegraphed Van Dorn field offices around the country to cover Leipzig’s other piano shops to see what they could pick up. Those large enough to maintain apprentices would instruct them to pretend to be shopping on behalf of their school or church. Agents in smaller one-and two-man outfits would shop, as Bell had, for nieces and daughters.

  Bell himself boarded the flyer to Salt Lake City, changed trains a day later to the Overland Limited, arrived in Denver early the next morning, and walked the short distance up Broadway to the Brown Palace Hotel, a favorite haunt. He knocked on a door just inside the main entrance. Omar P. Armstrong, the Brown Palace’s managing partner, invited him to breakfast.

  As they walked across a vast marble and cast-iron atrium lobby where tier upon tier of balconies soared to a skylight one hundred feet above the carpet, Bell asked, “Have you ever met a salesman named Fritz Wunderlich?”

  “Fritz? Of course.”

  Bell had journeyed to Denver expecting no less. Omar P. Armstrong knew everyone worth knowing west of the Mississippi. “Have you seen him lately?”

  “He’s here every two or three weeks.”

  “What’s he like?”

  “Pleasant enough fellow,” Armstrong replied with a neutral smile.

  Isaac Bell was fully aware that any man who managed a grand hotel had to be as observant as a whale-ship lookout and as discreet as the madam of a first-class bordello. Omar’s studiedly disinterested expression said that if Isaac Bell wished to inquire about Brown Palace guests but still be known as an innocent insurance executive, that was Bell’s business but Omar P. Armstrong wasn’t born yesterday.

  “Have you known him long?”

  “If you are interested in Herr Wunderlich, why not ask his friends?”

  They paused in the entrance to the dining room. The Brown Palace’s guests were breakfasting at tables set with snowy linen, gleaming silver, and fine china. Omar nodded in the direction that Bell suspected he would. At a table placed in the alcove of a tall window, three well-dressed, barbershop-pinked salesmen were in animated conversation.

  “If you like, I can introduce you.”

  Bell grinned. “Did you ever meet a drummer who needed an introduction?”

  He walked straight to the salesmen’s table. “Morning, gents. Isaac Bell. Insurance. May I join you?”

  They took in his hand-tailored suit, polished boots, and confident smile.

  “Sit down, brother. Sit down. Waiter! Coffee for Mr. Bell — or something a mite stronger, if you’re so inclined.”

  “Coffee will be fine. Long day ahead.”

  They shook hands around and introduced themselves, a rep for the Gillette Safety Razor Company, a Locomobile salesman, and a traveler in the cereal line. The Locomobile man said, “Mr. Bell, stop me if I’m wrong, but don’t you drive a Locomobile?”

  “I thought I recognized you, Jake,” said Bell. “We met in Bridgeport when I was picking her up at the factory.”

  “Red one, if I recall?”

  “Red as fire.”

  “How’s she running?”

  “Like a top. Small world, isn’t it? I ran into a traveling man the other day. We got to talking about autos, and when I told him about mine he mentioned he knew a fellow who handled the line. That could have been you.”

  “Probably was me. What’s his name?”

  “German fellow. Fritz Wunderlich.”

  “Fritz! Yes, we just saw him in— Where’d we see him?”

  “Chicago?”

  “Chicago it was. Isn’t he a character? ‘Mit schlag’!”

  “‘Time is money.’”

  “‘Eight days in the veek.’”

  “Pretty good salesman, I gather,” said Bell.

  “Valuable man. No question. Valuable man.”

  “Lucky for him he’s got that smile,” the cereal salesman chortled.

  “What do you mean?” asked Bell.

  “Well, you know… Fritz is a heck of a worker, but he sort of looks like a monkey.”

  “Sort of?” snickered Jake. “I’ll say he looks like an ape in the jungle.”

  “You mean his long arms?” asked Bell.

  “Arms like a monkey. Face like one, too.”

  “He didn’t really look like a monkey,” Bell protested, mildly.

  “He does to me.”

  Isaac Bell drew his notebook from his pocket and opened his Waterman fountain pen. “No. Fritz looks more like this.” He tried to draw a man’s face with a prominent brow. “Sort of like this. I’m not much of a hand at drawing.”

  The cereal salesman took out his order book and his pen. “No, more like this.”

  “Neither of you can draw worth a darn,” laughed the Gillette man. He opened his order book and moved his pen over it, laboriously. “He looks like this.”

  The cereal salesman disagreed vehemently, and Bell said, “Not one bit like that. How about you, Jake?”

  Jake, the Locomobile man from Bridgeport, took out his book. Isaac Bell watched, holding his breath. Jake was his last chance to get a sketch that resembled Fritz Wunderlich. Surely one of the men at the table could draw. Jake, it turned out, possessed a modicum of artistic talent.

  “Like this,” said Jake. He drew in a few quick lines a simian face with long cheeks and deep-set eyes. Then he turned his pencil on the side and shaded in a heavy brow.

  The others stared. “You got him just about right, Jake,” one marveled. “That’s Fritz. Darned near.”

  “I think you’re right,” Bell ventured, looking to the cereal salesman for confirmation.

  “He sure does.”

  “Well, I’ll be, Jake’s an artist.”

  Jake beamed.

  “Could I see that?” asked Bell, picking it up and studying it by the light of the window. “Yes, I believe that’s what he looks like. You’re a real artist, Jake.”

  Jake flushed with embarrassment. “Naw, not really. I just started out in the design shop, before I started selling. You really think it’s good?”

  “Sure do. Mind if I keep it?”

  “You ought to pay for it,” laughed the man from Chicago. “It’s a piece of artwork.”

  “You’re right,” said Isaac Bell, reaching for his wallet. “How much?”

  “No, no, no.” said Jake. “Go on, you take it.”

  “O.K. But when I need a new auto, I’ll know who to come to.”

  “Just don’t show it to Fritz,” the cereal man laughed.

  “It don’t matter he looks like that,” said Jake. “Fritz’s got that smile, and folks just buy anything he sells.”

  “I don’t know about that,” said the man from Gillette.

  “What do you mean?” asked Bell.

  “Eh, you’re
always going on about that,” the cereal sales rep protested. “Fritz is a valuable man.”

  “About what?” asked Bell.

  “Those shops his firm supplies. I just don’t see them selling that many pianos or sheets of music, for that matter. It’s not a well-run business. From what I’ve seen.”

  “They’ve got a fancy-looking shop in Los Angeles,” said Bell.

  “Well, you just try buying a piano, you’ll find a waiting list as long as your arm.”

  “Or Fritz’s arm,” Jake said, and the table roared.

  “Where’s Fritz now?” asked Bell.

  “Hope he’s not at the next table listening to this,” said Jake, and the others looked around uncomfortably.

  “I’m trying to remember when I saw him,” Bell persisted. “Must have been two weeks, maybe more. Time flies. Anyone seen him lately?”

  “I thought in Chicago, he said he was going to Los

  Angeles.”

  Isaac Bell took Jake’s drawing of Fritz Wunderlich to the Denver Post Building and paid a newspaper sketch artist to make him copies. He took them to the train stations. The Van Dorn Detective Agency had warm relations with the express companies, as the detectives often cadged rides on express cars, whose messengers were glad of another dependable gun. By noon the copies were headed around the continent, courtesy of Adams Express, American Express, and Wells Fargo, to the field offices covering German consulates in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the vice-consul’s mansion in Los Angeles.

  * * *

  In Jersey City, New Jersey, a short, round Van Dorn apprentice from the New York field office named Nelson Mills found himself wishing he had broken the agency rule that forbade apprentice detectives to carry guns. The baby-faced Mills had just finished his first “solo” assignment, an investigation of the Leipzig Organ & Piano shop in the Heights neighborhood. Scanning his notes as he hurried to catch the Hudson Tube back to Manhattan, he composed in his mind the first sentence of his report—“A yearlong waiting list for pianos, no organs, and sheet music from 1905, conspire to indicate that the Leipzig Organ and Piano Company is a false front for a nefarious business as yet unidentified.”

  Suddenly he remembered that Detective Harry Warren had advised him that using one word instead of three was the best way to get the bosses to read his reports. Mills drew mental Xs through “conspired to indicate,” to be replaced with “suggest,” and was debating deleting “nefarious” when he bumped into a big fellow on the sidewalk.

  “Excuse me. Sorry.”

  Nelson Mills got a fist in his face for his apology.

  The young man fell on his back on the pavement with blood pouring from his nose. He was shocked by the speed of the attack. The pain was ferocious. His eyes were blinded by tears. He sensed more, then saw the man who punched him looming over him, and he started to ask “Why?”

  The man snatched Nelson’s notebook out of his hand and ripped apart the pages, scattering the pieces on his bloody shirt. “Hey, that’s my—”

  A heavy boot smashed into his side. Pain seared his ribs, and Nelson realized too late to save himself that there were two of them. They kicked him repeatedly.

  36

  Isaac Bell found a stack of angry telegrams waiting for him in the Los Angeles field office. Van Dorns in Cincinnati, Chicago, Ohio, and Jersey City reported their apprentices were beaten up on their way back from investigating Leipzig Organ & Piano shops. Two young men were in the hospital, and one boy in Jersey City had already been given last rites while his family sat vigil at his bedside.

  Enraged detectives demanded permission to arrest the shop clerks. But in rapid exchanges of wires, it became clear to Isaac Bell that there was no proof to charge the clerks. The attacks had occurred in streets and alleys far from their shops.

  As chief investigator, the best Bell could do was wire a reminder of Van Dorn’s standing orders regarding thugs and hoodlums who assaulted private detectives, when they had been positively identified beyond any doubt:

  DISCOURAGE PERPETRATORS FROM

  REPEATING ATTACKS.

  * * *

  Larry Saunders stuck his head in Bell’s office door. He had blueprints rolled under his arm. “How was Denver?”

  Bell handed him the Locomobile salesman’s sketch. “Give this to the boys covering the vice-consul’s mansion. Wunderlich is real. No one’s seen him lately. What did Holian learn at City Hall?”

  Saunders unrolled blueprints on Bell’s desk. They anchored them with sidearms. “Fourth floor. Eighth floor. Penthouse. I don’t see where you’d put a judas hole. Public rooms and open stairways. Maybe this storage closet on the eighth.”

  Bell studied the blueprints and agreed that spy holes weren’t likely.

  Saunders said, “Thing is, Holian thought the clerk he borrowed these from was acting a little jumpy.”

  “What did Holian make of that?”

  “Maybe the clerk knew something more he didn’t want to say. Holian wants to nose around a little. I told him I’d take over.”

  Bell looked at Saunders, inquiringly.

  Saunders said, “The clerks know that Holian is a Van Dorn. They don’t know me from Adam.”

  “Go to it,” said Isaac Bell.

  As Saunders hurried out, the front-desk man came in. “Southern Pacific Railroad express car messenger just delivered this, Mr. Bell.”

  It was a small package wrapped in brown paper. It was heavy for its size, and it smelled of machine oil. Bell weighed it speculatively. “Did you happen to recognize the messenger?”

  “Sure did. Benson’s been with the line for years.”

  “Then we can presume it’s not a bomb?” Bell asked with a smile and sliced it open with his throwing knife. Inside was a wooden box. He opened it. Nestled in cotton packing was a small steel-colored tool.

  “What is that, Mr. Bell?”

  “Cutting pliers.” There was a note from Mike Malone, in a big, open scrawl. “Sorry it took so long. Small was the hard part. Hope you like them.”

  “Never seen them that little,” said the front-desk man. “Think they work?”

  Mike had included a short length of braided cable. Bell slipped the jaws around it and squeezed the handles. The wire parted with a sharp pop.

  * * *

  Pauline Grandzau jumped off a freight train at the ancient fortress city of Metz, fearing the guards in the rail yard. She skirted the overgrown ramparts, shielded from policemen and busybodies by thick brush and tall trees, and followed on foot the ruins of an even older Roman aqueduct, which the brakemen’s map had shown paralleling the tracks all the way to the Moselle River. She covered many miles in the failing light, guided by square heaps of stone and occasional lonely rows of two, three, or more arches still standing.

  Suddenly barking dogs charged from a Jouy-aux-Arches farmhouse. Terrified, she scrambled onto the Roman stonework to escape them and climbed to the top of the archway, where she gnawed the last of the cheese she had stolen in Koblenz, fell asleep, and woke at dawn, forty feet above the ground, with a long view across the river.

  France, made bright red and gold by the sun rising behind her, looked like heaven.

  Even the cold rain that pursued her across Germany had finally stopped, as if it would not dare fall within sight of the border. Perched atop the aqueduct, she saw a gently rolling landscape. The red-tile rooftops of Novéant-sur-Moselle clustered along the Moselle, then gave way to scattered farm fields, woods, and vineyards. A suspension bridge traversed the river. Farther west, beyond her field of vision, would be the town of Batilly, where she would find the French railroad station. With forty francs of Detective Curtis’s money to buy a ticket, she could dream of riding in comfort the two hundred miles to Paris.

  Then she saw two flags run up the pole on the roof of a building at the far side of the suspension bridge. The red, white, and black rectangle of Imperial Germany and the swallowtail of the Customs Service marked Germany’s last outp
ost, a frontier customhouse. Anyone crossing the bridge by train or on foot or on a bicycle would have to show their papers.

  She looked beyond the town, up and down the river and the farmland and woods around it. Flat floodplains bounded the Moselle. The plain on her side was broad. On the west side, where she had to go, it was narrower and rose abruptly to a line of hills. Atop the highest hill, a mile west of the Moselle, sprawled the grim stone parapets of Fort Driant, whose giant guns dominated the Moselle Valley. They were Metz’s first defense against French attack from the southwest and it struck her suddenly that she was abandoning her homeland to escape to the land of the enemy. But she wasn’t really escaping, nor was she abandoning her country. She was doing the job of a private detective, serving the agency and a client who deserved her help, and avenging Detective Curtis. But only if she made it to Paris.

  What was the best she could imagine? What could she see?

  On both sides of the river, the banks sloped gently to the water. Opa Grandzau, the grandfather who had taught her to ski in the Alps, had also taught her how to swim in icy mountain lakes. The Moselle looked warm and lazy by comparison. She picked a route across from her vantage, spotting the narrowest stretch of the river where she could walk unseen out on a wooded point of land that jutted into the water.

  When Pauline had chosen her route, she worked her way down the stones of the aqueduct, marveling as she descended how she had survived the climb last night in near darkness. Fear, it seemed, could have the most wonderfully concentrating effect on both mind and body.

  She headed west from the bottom of the arch, through the woods, keeping the dappled early sunlight on her back. She crossed narrow lanes rutted with wagon wheels, scrambled over the railroad tracks after making sure no trains were coming, and darted over open fields, praying no farmer would see her running.

  She found the wooded point of land and pressed ahead, glimpsing water through the trees on both sides, and soon found herself on the gentle bank. Two difficulties not apparent from the top of the aqueduct were starkly evident at the water’s edge: the narrowing of the river made the water race fast, and the strong current would sweep her into the wider stretches downstream. And if someone were to look in her direction from the suspension bridge or the houses at the edge of the town, he might see her swimming.