The Thief ib-5

by Clive Cussler

  “Stand watch!” he ordered, and when they turned their backs, he stuffed the flat oilskin into a narrow slot between the side of the bunker and a frame where it would be safe until the end of his shift. A stoking gong rang.

  “You’re up!” Hall warned, and Semmler darted back to the fire aisle, scooped up a shovelful of coal, and spread it on the flames. The pace was accelerating as the ship forged into the open ocean, gaining speed, and the bells rang faster. A door shut. Another opened. Semmler bent to scoop from the pile the trimmers had dropped at his feet. Someone stepped on his scoop.

  He looked up.

  “Leaving town, General?” asked Isaac Bell.

  * * *

  Bell feinted a hard right, and when Semmler slipped the phantom punch with his usual speed, Bell was ready to hit his jaw with a left, which tumbled the German across the fire aisle. Semmler crashed into a hot bulkhead and stood swaying, trying to shake off the effect of the heavy blow. He had a long coal-blackened bandage on his cheek.

  Bell was already moving in on him. He feinted again, this time with his left, and landed a right to the jaw. Semmler went flying. He skidded along the fire aisle, bounced off a stoker scrambling out of the way, and regained his feet. The blow had knocked the bandage from his face, revealing a long string of finely fashioned sutures. Bell threw another punch. This was not a feint. The Acrobat fell again.

  Bell drew his pistol to make the arrest.

  Down the aisle, a furnace door opened. In the sudden flash of red coals Bell saw, from the corner of his eye, a ten-foot steel slice bar arcing at his head, and he realized that Semmler was not alone. It was too late to dodge the bar. But if it hit him, it would splinter bone. Bell hurled himself inside the arc, straight into the arms of the coal trimmer swinging it. The bar slammed into the furnace, ringing like a giant chime. The man who had swung it made the mistake of holding on to it, and Bell took full advantage, pounding his torso, doubling him over.

  The timing gong sounded. Another door flew open. In the flash of coals Isaac saw a shovel flying at his head, and he realized, even as he ducked, that the trimmer he had doubled over was not alone either. The shovel missed his head, but it knocked the Browning out of his hand. The man who had thrown the shovel charged Bell, swinging his fists and catching the tall detective off balance.

  Bell rolled with one punch but caught the next one square in the face.

  His feet flew out from under him, and he went down hard, slamming onto the steel deck with an impact that shook him to the core. He was vaguely aware that the rest of the men on the fire aisle were fleeing from the battle. He heard an engineer shout, “Leave ’em to it.”

  Watertight doors ground shut, and he was alone with the three of them.

  “Knife in his boot,” shouted Semmler.

  Bell saw where his gun had landed and scrambled for it. The trimmer who had scored with his fist lunged for it, too. Bell got to it first, barely managing to grab the barrel, and when he saw that the trimmer would have his hand on the butt before he could stop him, Bell flipped it into an open furnace.

  Then he went for his knife, but he was still too slow. The man yanked it from his boot, stood up, and kicked Bell in the chest, and as Bell rolled away from the next kick he saw the shadow of the trimmer he had doubled over loom above him like a maddened grizzly. Bell felt his hand brush a lump of coal. He picked it up and threw it with all his strength. It struck the “grizzly” a glancing blow that knocked him backwards into Christian Semmler, who shoved him back at Bell, shouting, “Pick him up!”

  Still on his back, Isaac Bell kicked out at the trimmer, who was lurching at him. The man dodged and grabbed Bell’s foot. As Bell tried to break free, the other trimmer seized both his wrists. Before the detective could break his powerful grip, he was suspended between the two by his arms and legs.

  Semmler jumped to the nearest furnace and opened the door.

  49

  “Here,” Semmler shouted. “In here.”

  Bell could see the bed of coals glowing yellow. Red flame rippled over their incandescent surface. From six feet away the heat was unbearable, and as they dragged him toward it, it grew hotter. A corner of Bell’s mind stood aside as if he were looking down on the tableau of the trimmers holding him and the Acrobat urging them on. They would not be able to fit him through the furnace door sideways. They would have to feed him into the fire either head- or feetfirst. They would have to let go of his arms or his legs to align him. But to let go would be to let him fight back, and so before they let go, they would have to incapacitate him by breaking some bones.

  “Headfirst!” said Semmler, picking up a slice bar. He raised it high, his eyes fixed on Bell’s arms.

  For a single heartbeat the men holding him were distracted by having to maneuver in the cramped space. Isaac Bell contracted every muscle in his body, ripped one leg and one arm free, and exploded in a flurry of kicks and punches. A kick caught the trimmer who was holding his other leg in the face, cracking his nose, and he let go with a cry. Bell’s fist landed solidly. The man who had been holding his arm fell backwards. His head struck the rim of the firebox opening, and he screamed as his hair burst into flame. Desperately trying to escape the fire, he banged his brow on the rim of the furnace mouth and fell deeper into the coals, his head in the furnace, his body thrashing on the deck.

  Bell was already trying to roll beyond the range of Semmler’s slice bar, which hit the deck an inch from his head, scattering sparks. He leaped up and dodged a wild swing, then rounded unexpectedly on the trimmer whose nose he had broken, who was creeping up behind him, and dropped him with a punch that smashed his jaw.

  He spun around, reeling on his feet. “Just us, Semmler.”

  Christian Semmler flashed his dazzling smile. “First you’ll have to catch me.”

  He crouched, sprang up, caught the bottom rung of the ladder that rose up the ventilator shaft that shared the interior of the No. 4 funnel, and pulled himself up effortlessly. Bell jumped for the ladder and went after him. It was 220 feet to the top of the stack, and in the first hundred Bell realized he would not catch the man until he ran out of ladder. For if anything rang true about Semmler’s nickname, he climbed like a monkey.

  Nearing the top, Bell saw daylight silhouette Semmler, who was clinging to the upper rim of the funnel. Smoke from the three forward funnels was streaming over him blackening his face and hair. His green eyes gleamed eerily within that dark frame. Then his teeth flashed.

  “Thank you for joining me,” he smiled. “Now I have you where I want you.” He folded back his sleeve, revealing the leather gauntlet that held the braided wire with which he had strangled so many. It was Bell’s first close look at it, and he saw a lead weight on the end of the cable. Semmler straightened his arm suddenly, and the weight drew six feet of wire from its spool and wrapped it around one of the steel stays stiffening the funnel top.

  Bell lunged suddenly and reached for the man’s foot.

  The Acrobat moved just as swiftly, eluding Bell’s grasp and launching himself off the ladder to the other side of the ventilator shaft, where he hooked an elbow over the rim and smiled down on Bell.

  “The man who falls two hundred and twenty feet to the bottom of the ship will not be the man who learned to fly in the circus.”

  With that, Semmler used his elbow to flip over the rim and disappear.

  Bell climbed to the top of the ladder and jumped across the ventilator. He caught the rim with both hands, pulled himself over the top, and peered down through hot smoke into the soot-blackened uptake that exhausted No. 4 boiler room’s furnaces. As it shared the funnel with the ventilator they had climbed up, it was only ten feet in diameter.

  Semmler crouched with bird-like grace on a foothold several feet down.

  “Now when you fall,” he taunted, “you will fall into the furnace.”

  Bell surveyed Semmler’s new position. The foothold, a steel shelf less than a foot deep, circled the entire uptake. There were handhol
ds welded just beneath the top rim, and Semmler’s eyes blazed again as he chose his next landing. The cable shot from his gauntlet, snagged a handhold, and the Acrobat flew, while launching a deadly kick at Bell’s head.

  Isaac Bell jumped at the same time, landed beside him on the foothold, grabbed the nearest handhold, and punched Semmler in the stomach as hard as he could, staggering the man. “I was in the circus, too.”

  But he had not reckoned with Semmler’s superhuman speed, nor his capacity to shrug off pain. In a move too quick to anticipate, Semmler flipped the cable off the rung and around Isaac Bell’s neck.

  Bell drove punch after punch into Semmler’s torso, but even the hardest blow did nothing to relieve the pressure that was suddenly cutting blood and air from his brain. White lights stormed before his eyes, and he felt his strength ebb. A roar in his ears smothered the pounding of his heart. Gripping a handhold with the remaining strength in his left hand, he rammed Semmler with his knee, and the German slipped from the foothold. The only thing that kept him from falling was the wire stretched between his wrist and Isaac Bell’s neck.

  * * *

  With the man’s entire weight hanging from his throat, Bell could barely see. He felt as if he had not drawn breath in a year. His hand was slipping.

  “Interesting situation, Detective. When you die, I’ll fall. But you’ll die first.”

  “No,” gasped Bell. His hand moved convulsively.

  “No, Detective?” Semmler mocked. “No deeper last words, than ‘no’ before we plunge into the fires? Speak now or forever hold your peace. What was that, you say?”

  “Thank you, Mike Malone.”

  “Thank you for what?”

  “Cutting pliers.” Holding on with the last of the strength in his left hand, Bell jerked his right hand, and the tool slid out of his sleeve into his palm. He closed his fingers around the handles and squeezed with all he had left in him.

  The cable snapped.

  Isaac Bell’s last sight of the Acrobat before he vanished down the Mauretania’s stack was the astounded light in his eyes.

  50

  Arriving at the Berliner Stadtschloss in a triumphal mood, Hermann Wagner handed his top hat to the palace maid attending the commoners’ cloakroom and proceeded upstairs to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s private throne room, where a small, select company of high-ranking soldiers, industrialists, and bankers — the elite of the elite — had been summoned to observe the final demonstration of a device that the kaiser himself had proclaimed the epitome of German achievement.

  A pair of generals flaunting gruesome dueling scars looked down their noses at the banker. Wagner serenely ignored the scornful aristocrats and took great pleasure in watching their expressions change when the kaiser marched straight to Hermann Wagner and shook his hand, shouting, “Behold a true German patriot. Wait till you see what he has made happen. Begin!”

  Lackeys rushed in with a moving picture screen, acoustic horns, and an enormous new film projector. The lights were dimmed. His Majesty the kaiser sat on his throne. The company stood and watched a moving picture of Kaiser Wilhelm himself striding into this very room with his favorite dachshund tucked under his arm.

  When the monarch on the screen opened his mouth to speak and his words poured mightily from the acoustic horns, the expressions on the generals’ scarred faces, thought Hermann Wagner, were priceless. The worm had turned. Soldiers were no longer the only ones whose magic enchanted the kaiser.

  “Der Tag!” spoke the kaiser’s image, easily heard over the clatter of the film projector. “Der Tag will be Germany’s beginning, not her end. Victory depends not only on soldiers.”

  Hermann Wagner closed his eyes. He knew these words by heart. He had edited the film, having discovered a knack for such things, and in a brilliant touch, when the kaiser had proclaimed his piece, the dachshund would bark at the camera and the kaiser would pat his head. Millions would smile, touched that the kaiser loved his pets as much as any ordinary German.

  “Victory also depends on Germany persuading our allies to join the war on Germany’s side. One by one, Germany will destroy—”

  Laughter interrupted the kaiser’s words — nervous laughter, which was choked off abruptly.

  Wagner opened his eyes and saw to his horror that even as the kaiser’s words issued from the horns, the picture showed his dachshund barking at the camera. But that couldn’t be. The dog was supposed to bark after the kaiser had finished speaking. Somehow the sound and the picture had jumped apart.

  The kaiser leaped from his throne and stormed out, trailed by his generals.

  Hermann Wagner stood frozen with disbelief as the company melted away. How could it have gone so wrong? Left alone, he plunged blindly toward the doors, the Donar Plan a failure, his career destroyed.

  A palace maid ran after him. “Your hat, Herr Wagner. Your hat!”

  She was a tiny little thing with gold braids. Polite even on the worst day of his life, the gentle Hermann Wagner thanked her with a compliment—“What a sharp-eyed girl you are”—and even tipped her a silver coin.

  “Thank you, Herr Wagner.”

  Moments after she curtsied her thanks, Detective Pauline Grandzau slipped out of the palace to cable the good news to Chief Investigator Bell.

  Epilogue

  AFTER THE GREAT WAR

  NEWCASTLE UPON TYNE

  The Widow Skelton had taken up with the Widower Farquhar, which pleased everyone in Newcastle upon Tyne except the priest. Mrs. Skelton, who had served as a nursing sister in the Boer War and a matron of military hospitals in the Great War, and was still a raven-haired beauty, owned the Marysmead Arms, a popular pub in the shadows of the Swan Hunter shipyard. Mr. Farquhar was admired as one of “nature’s gentlemen,” a master craftsman and head foreman at the Swan Hunter furnace works where the legendary Cunard flyer Mauretania—which still held the Blue Riband for the fastest on the Atlantic — had returned to her launching place to be converted to burning oil instead of coal.

  “I brought you something,” said Mr. Farquhar, coming home from his shift on a wet, blustery evening to their flat above the pub.

  “There’s no need,” she said, though pleased. “You should save your money.”

  He thrust an oilskin-wrapped packet in her hand. “It didn’t cost a penny.”

  “I’m not surprised.” It was grimy with coal dust.

  “Aren’t you going to open it?”

  He showed her where he had already unfolded one end. She peeled back the oilskin and found a fancy envelope.

  “What is this?”

  “The lads found it behind a coal bunker. It must have been there for years. See what’s inside.”

  “You didn’t look, yet?’

  “No, I saved that for you.”

  She turned back the flap and pulled out a thick sheet of lavishly decorated parchment paper. Mr. Farquhar rested a hand on her shoulder as he leaned close.

  “That looks like real gold.”

  “Gold leaf.”

  “What does it say?” He’d gone too farsighted to read without specs, but her stone blue eyes were still sharp.

  “It’s an invitation to a wedding. On the ship! They were married on the ship!”

  She gazed in wonder and delight, then turned it over.

  “What’s that?”

  “Wee figures and squiggles. Greek to me.” She slipped the invitation reverently into the envelope and rewrapped the envelope in the oilskin.

  “Don’t you want it?” asked Mr. Farquhar. “It’s pretty. I could make a frame for it.”

  “Take it directly to Mr. Thomas McGeady at the Cunard office. Tell him that I said to find this couple and send it to them.”

  “You know Mr. McGeady?”

  “I own a pub, Mr. Farquhar. I know everyone— Hurry! I’ll hold your tea.”

  “What’s the rush?”

  “Next month is their anniversary.”

  SAN FRANCISCO

  On Nob Hill, in one of the very fe
w mansions to survive the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906, Isaac Bell was telling Marion, “It is possible that my eyesight is not as keen as it once was, so if I am to inspect this supposed wrinkle on your cheek you’re going to have to come closer into the light, here on my lap,” when he was interrupted by a child who ran in with the morning mail, dumped it beside them on the sofa, and ran out.

  After the supposed wrinkle had been thoroughly debunked, they went through the mail and discovered a large manila envelope from the Cunard Line.

  “Captain Turner?” asked Marion, though it couldn’t be. Over the years, Turner used to write on their anniversary. But he had retired from the line after the war and had become a recluse after being unfairly blamed for the torpedoing of the Lusitania.

  Bell opened it with the knife from his boot.

  Inside the manila envelope was a note from a Cunard executive: “The company thought you might enjoy this. It was found by Mr. Alec Farquhar of the Swan Works in Newcastle whilst refitting Mauretania, and sent along by Mrs. Alison Skelton. The chairman joins me in offering the line’s heartiest congratulations on your upcoming anniversary.”

  Isaac and Marion recognized immediately the elaborate envelope that the ship’s printer had run up for their wedding. Moisture had blurred the recipient’s name. “Whose was this?” Marion asked, leaning closer to study the faded letters. Wisps of her golden champagne hair brushed Bell’s cheek. “Oh my gosh, this is Clyde Lynds’s invitation. Oh, poor Clyde.”

  Marion pulled out the invitation itself, only slightly less for wear. “This is lovely. Oh, my dear, it’s like being married again.”

  Isaac Bell asked, “What’s this on the back?”

  FIVE YEARS LATER

  THE STRAND THEATRE ON BROADWAY IN NEW YORK CITY

  Isaac Bell was raising a glass of champagne to the resounding success of the premiere of Marion’s new film, the screwball comedy Listen Here, New York, when he overheard a critic dictating his review from a coin telephone in the lobby: