“An amazing opportunity,” his man agreed. “I will call Ortega now in case Bell goes straight to his hotel. Good night, Herr Dreissen.”
“Good night.”
25
The two nurses, Jenny and Ruth, stood at the rail of the Spatminster with Marion Bell until her husband walked off the docks and headed back to the parking lot. They stayed out until the breakwater, built of rock and stone wrested from the Culebra Cut, was off to the port side, and the liner began to roll with the long Pacific waves.
“Come on,” said Ruth Buschman, “Jenny and I have already unpacked. We’ll show you the cabin, and we can get changed for dinner. We’re scheduled for the early seating.”
Their shared cabin was one deck up from the main deck, which meant they had a private entrance from the promenade and a real window rather than a single porthole like the accommodations in the liner’s hull.
The room had bunk beds, tucked behind the door, as well as a standard bed. There was a washbasin, with hot and cold running water, but no en suite bathroom. That was down the hall and shared by five other cabins. The walls were paneled in wood veneer, and the carpet was surprisingly plush.
“We left you the big bed, Marion,” Jenny Sanders said. “At the hospital, we had old cots we joked were left behind by De Lesseps, so the bunk beds are going to feel downright extravagant to us.”
“We should draw straws for the bed,” Marion protested. “It’s only fair.”
“Don’t worry yourself,” Ruth said. “After a year in Panama, this is the pinnacle of luxury. Right, Jen?”
“Right.”
“Well, thank you both,” Marion said and set her hatbox on the bed. Her other cases were stacked in one corner. “Tell you what, I didn’t bring a whole lot of clothes with me, but let’s all three of us get dolled up tonight. Borrow anything you’d like.”
The two nurses exchanged a look. “Deal.”
At dinner, they talked about how Illinois had recently passed women’s suffrage, making it the first state east of the Mississippi to grant the vote, and how that boded well for national passage. Marion told them she’d had friends who’d been at the disastrous rally in Washington, D.C., ahead of President Wilson’s inauguration, and how the police did nothing to protect the women marchers, two hundred of whom were injured.
“I’m afraid it will be a few more years yet before we all have the vote,” she concluded.
“Maddening,” Ruth said. “I’m going to medical school in a couple months. I’m going to be a doctor and yet I can’t vote for the people passing laws that affect how I do my job.”
“Makes no sense,” Jenny agreed.
“Oh, it makes perfect sense,” Marion said with a devilish look in her eye, “from the perspective of inferior men who can’t grasp that women can be smarter and more capable in everything we do.”
That got a knowing laugh.
After dinner, they stayed in the parlor, listening to a pair of passengers take turns at an upright piano. People sang along with the songs they knew, and a few of the other ladies aboard accepted invitations to dance from gentlemen passengers and crew alike. Marion declined at least a dozen offers.
It was almost ten when they returned to their cabin. The Spatminster had left a storm far to the south. The moon was a bright half circle, and the seas had flattened. The ship’s forward movement meant there was a nice breeze running the length of her wooden deck, and now that she was many miles from land, the humidity was tolerable.
After readying themselves for bed, they wished one another good night, and Marion switched off the electric light. She drifted off worrying about Isaac and his memory issues.
She awoke in the middle of the night, unsure what had roused her from slumber. The cabin was noisy, in the sense she could hear the wind blowing past and also whistling through the ventilation louvers, and then there was the deep rumble of steam engines grinding away deep in the ship’s guts.
But then came a tiny rasp, barely perceptible. It was as soft as a mouse’s paw on a metal floor, but it had been enough to wake her. Though not quickly enough.
The intruder had finished manipulating the pins inside the cabin door’s lock and snicked it open just as Marion was coming to realize what was happening. Uniformed men burst into the cabin in a wave, each holding an electric flashlight and a Luger pistol with a silencer attached to the barrel. They had to have known in advance the number of passengers in the cabin because there were three men, plus one more who appeared to be in charge.
Two of the men went for the bunk beds while the third lunged across the room at Marion. When he tried to get his hands around her throat, Marion managed to pull her right hand free of the covers and connect with a solid blow to his jaw before he could grasp her.
She wanted to kick free of the bedding, but her attacker’s weight had pinned her legs. Her punch had done little more than stun him, and he was soon on the attack. Because he was still above her, he had enough leverage to elbow the side of her neck. It was an expert strike. The muscles around her carotid artery contracted at the blow, cutting off the flow of blood to her brain, and Marion Bell fell unconscious.
While the two men had no trouble subduing the two terrified nurses, Marion came back around just as a hood was about to be pulled over her head by the third man. She roused in time to bite her attacker’s hand hard enough to draw blood.
“Scheisse,” he said.
Filled with determination and rage, Marion kicked free from her blankets and stood up on the bed in a fighting stance. She struck her attacker, slamming the heel of her right foot just below his sternum. Air blew from his mouth in an explosive whoosh that left him doubled over and gasping as his diaphragm spasmed and refused to refill his lungs.
She jumped off the bed in a swirl of nightclothes and went after the men tying gags around her new friends’ mouths. She swept up her purse, hoping to retrieve the .22 caliber pepperbox derringer she carried when she traveled. She didn’t get more than a step when the boarding party’s leader leveled his pistol at her and pulled the trigger. Even with a silencer, the 9 millimeter was as loud as a sharp handclap. Expecting crushing pain, Marion cringed, but the shot had been an intentional miss, though it had whizzed by so close to Marion’s head she smelled singed hair.
“Enough,” the man said tightly.
He switched his aim and pressed the gun’s hot muzzle to Jenny’s temple. The sneer he gave Marion told her that this man wouldn’t care one way or the other if she compelled him to pull the trigger. Human life meant nothing to him.
Marion deflated. If it was just her, she would have fought all four to the death. But she wasn’t alone. She wouldn’t put her new friends in any more danger than they were already facing. She dropped her handbag and allowed one of the men to bind her wrists with rope and another to gag her mouth. The black hood came next. She was thrown over one of the bigger men’s shoulder like a joint of meat and bustled from the cabin. The boarding party made its way aft. At this late hour, the Spatminster was like a ghost ship. The decks were deserted, and any lookouts would be studying the seas ahead of the liner and not be looking over her fantail.
One of the boarders tugged on a tow rope tied to an all-aluminum boat bobbing in the ship’s wake. Two of his compatriots climbed down to keep the craft stable. Marion felt a hemp line being looped under her armpits, and then she was spinning and dancing like a plumb bob as she was lowered to the skiff. Waiting hands guided her the last few feet. The rope was untied, and she was shoved to the floor.
The night air was warm, yet the aluminum hull was chilled by the sea and dripped with condensation. Her silk gown was quickly soaked through, and she began to shiver. She also began to think. She already assumed these men were tied to Isaac’s investigation and that her kidnapping meant they were going to use her as leverage with him. The leader spoke English, but the other had cursed in German. So they were
likely Germans, validating Isaac’s theory that there was a European influence over the Red Vipers.
As the remaining boarders climbed down from the three-hundred-foot liner, Marion Bell vowed to keep fighting. She expected no less of herself, even if in one corner of her mind she wasn’t shivering just because of the cold.
* * *
The line securing the boat to the Spatminster was cut, and the skiff vanished into the night.
The only evidence of the assault were the two ropes hanging off the fantail and the two bound and gagged nurses and a beaten-up purser locked in a closet who’d been forced to disclose the location of Marion’s cabin. The kidnapping went undetected until Ruth Buschman worked herself free of her rope and gag six hours after the assault.
The Spatminster didn’t carry a Marconi radio set, and she wasn’t scheduled to make landfall until the colliery in Rosarito. The captain was torn as to where his duty lay. On the one hand, he had a schedule to maintain, but, on the other hand, he needed to report this brazen act of high seas piracy. He decided the best course was to detour to the closest port that he knew had international telephone service, Acapulco, in Mexico. From there, he could contact the authorities back in Panama.
By then, though, the kidnappers would have an insurmountable head start.
26
Bell had to assume that Otto Dreissen had phoned his people stationed in Panama City and that by now it was open season on his life. The Viboras would be combing the town for him, which meant he couldn’t go back to the Hotel Central. He spent the night in a seedier section of town, in a run-down rooming house on a street full of bars and brothels. He’d paid for a broom-closet-sized room above a cantina and was overcharged by the night clerk, who knew desperation when he saw it.
He’d washed up in the lavatory as best he could. In the silvered mirror over the basin, Bell could see the manchineel burns on his face were barely noticeable, but the lump on his head from the avalanche was a sickly-looking purple. He stood in his undershirt while he wrung out the linen oxford he wore under the poncho. A double whiskey sat on the edge of the sink.
Back in his room, he draped his wet things over a chair and hoped the night air would dry them by morning. The room’s lock was a joke, so he placed his wallet and .45 under his pillow. Ignoring the raucous singing and tuneless piano coming up through the floor, Bell was asleep in seconds.
He awoke to sunshine and recalled dreaming about a great-aunt he’d stayed with when he was a boy who’d punished him by making him swallow a spoonful of castor oil. He hadn’t thought about it in years yet still could feel the greasy emollient on his tongue.
His clothes were damp but wearable. He found a cheap restaurant near the cantina and sat in the far back. The food was simple—eggs, over thick corn tortillas, and a sweet green fruit he didn’t recognize—but the coffee was excellent, and the waitress came by often to refill his mug. The clientele were locals, who eyed him for a moment, then left him in peace.
Bell had parked the Renault a few blocks from his room in case its description had been passed on to the Viboras. He found a vantage point from which to watch the car, or, more accurately, watch if anyone else was watching it. After ten minutes and a careful assessment of all the open windows above the establishment-lined street, he approached the car. He got it fired up in record time and lit out of the rough neighborhood.
After filling the tank at a gas station next to Ancon Hill, Bell took the road back toward Gamboa. He’d thought that traveling it again and seeing where he’d been buried alive might jog some memories.
Seen from above, the landslide looked enormous, though it was nothing compared to some of the bigger ones slowing the excavation. A great tongue of soil and rocks stretched from the canal’s rim at Bell’s feet almost halfway across its breadth. In the middle of the rubble field, he could see where the workers had excavated around the water tank that had saved his life. The tank was still buried, but he saw the piles of dirt that had been shoveled from the hole and some large rocks that had been levered out of the way to give them access.
Bell was moved by the dedication his rescuers had shown—the amount of rubble they’d excavated was impressive.
Looking down the artificial valley that was the canal, he spotted work crews already laying a fresh set of tracks to reach the avalanche. They were a mile away or more, but he could see a large mobile crane, which was capable of swinging prefabricated sections of rail in place, atop the gravel bed, the men swarming it tamping each rail flat. When the track was completed, a steam shovel would be brought in to tackle the slide. The debris would be hauled out on a separate rail spur, while the ore cars would remain on the main line to haul out the overburden.
It might take them months—or, in the case of the Cucaracha slide at Panama City, years—to undo the damage, yet they went about their job undeterred.
What Bell didn’t get was the spark that coming here was supposed to ignite to make him remember additional details of that day’s events. While it was a gap of only a couple hours he couldn’t remember, Bell felt a hollowness he could not fill. He lacked trust in himself, his mind, his instincts. He could see yet felt like he was blindly groping, stumbling and lurching when he should be walking easily. Isaac Bell had never been defined by his memories but rather by his ability to recall them so readily. The chunk of missing time was a reminder that he was no longer himself.
He spent ten minutes scouting the area around where he’d left the road. Just beyond the grass verge, he did spot a twenty-foot-long log. He didn’t know its significance. Had it fallen off a lumber truck and forced him off the road? Had it been deliberately laid there as a roadblock? Given the attempts on his life, the latter seemed the more likely option.
Too much time had passed for any subtler clues to have remained. The rains here were so intense, they dissolved footprints and tire tracks in minutes.
Bell saw no point in clambering down the hillside to get a better look at his temporary prison. Not only did he not need to see the oversize and inky black claustrophobic tank, he had no idea if the ordnance disposal team had made certain there weren’t more undetonated charges littering the slope.
Rather than return to an uncertain future in Panama City, Bell continued to the company town of Gamboa. Sam Westbrook told Isaac about meeting with Courtney Talbot there, and Bell recalled a boat being involved. He also recalled the bronze oarlocks. However, driving into the drab town brought back no new memories. There were warehouses near a train station, and a few bunkhouses for workers, plus a handful of dilapidated railcars that had been pulled from the line and left in a field. They housed more workers, and one was a general store.
Bell parked the Renault in an alley between two warehouses. He leaned a pair of rotting cargo pallets against its grille, and, from even a few feet away, it looked like a pile of scrap left abandoned and out of sight.
He double-checked his .45 and crossed the tracks, heading away from the speeding Chagres River to a small field, where he found a makeshift restaurant. Outside, there were no chairs, and the tables were empty barrels set on end. Men stood as they ate. The ten or so watched Bell approach. He didn’t sense hostility, but rather a surprised curiosity. Gamboa was populated exclusively by West Indian islanders. Bell crossed under the awning and stepped into the restaurant proper. That was a misnomer. Inside was just a serving line that separated the entrance from a large commercial kitchen built inside a tin shanty.
“I think you lost, yes?” said a lady at the end of the counter. She was accepting paper scrip from the workers to pay for their meals. She had a heavily lined face, which told of a hard life, but laughing eyes. When she moved her plump arms, bracelets made of twisted copper wire tinkled faintly.
“Not if your food tastes as good as it smells,” Bell replied.
She liked his reply, and a smile creased her face even more. “It taste even better, love, but you ain’t a compa
ny man so I can’t feed you.” While her accent was thick, her grasp of English was good.
“Tell you what.” Bell pulled a dollar from his pocket. It was almost enough to get a filet mignon at Delmonico’s. “What say we pretend I’m a company man just for today.”
The bill vanished into a pocket of her voluminous apron. “Best if you eat out back.”
The irony wasn’t lost on Bell, but he thought it was probably a good idea.
“Go out and sit yourself down, and I’ll bring you a plate,” she told him. She motioned to one of the women tending the stove inside the kitchen. She came out and took over the till while Bell’s new friend went to get him lunch.
Behind the makeshift restaurant was a small garden with meticulously straight rows of lettuce, tomato plants, and all manner of herbs. Some chickens scratched at the ground, and in the distance was a rickety bamboo pen with two goats in it. They rushed the fence when they saw Bell, hopeful he was bringing food. When Bell sat on an overturned bucket next to a covered coal locker, the goats lost interest.
A moment later, the restaurant’s back screen door banged open, and the woman came out with a metal plate mounded with rice and chicken stew. She handed it to him, pulled a spoon from one apron pocket and a bottled beer from the other. “It’s either this or our water, and you don’t want our water.”
“Thank you. It’s fine. Can I ask you something?”
“Your dollar still buyin’, love.”
“Do you know Major Courtney Talbot? He left a few days ago in a boat.”
The Saboteurs Page 22