The Thief - Страница 5

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“I don’t believe in girl detectives. And I’m not running a charity for society. Go away.”

She had already moved closer, edging up behind him, peering over his shoulder at the papers on his desk. Lots of luck reading Van Dorn cipher, he thought.

“You know you’ll hire me in the end,” she said blithely. “You need me. I speak perfect English. I am studying library and can look up anything. I am even a powerful skier, taught by my grandfather in the Alps.” Curtis put his head in his hands. He knew what was coming next. Sure enough, she quoted the infernal Holmes. “‘When the other fellow has all the trumps, it saves time to throw down your hand.’”

“Out!”

Pauline Grandzau grabbed her coat and hat and waved as she left the office. Art Curtis locked the door. Her English was actually pretty good — not as good as she thought, and not that he needed a German-English translator.

He trolled through his growing list of acquaintances, telephoned a talkative bank manager he had befriended and invited him to a beer garden, where they sat in companionable conversation on bentwood chairs under the shade trees, occasionally clinking their pewter steins and puffing their own contributions to the blue haze of cigar smoke.

The bank manager knew a bit about Krieg Rüstungswerk. The munitions manufacturer was controlled by the ancient Prussian Roth family, known to be secretive, which was hardly surprising in the arms trade. Krieg, as it was known colloquially, was especially well connected with the Army because it was “smiled upon” by the kaiser. Krieg also had a penchant for buying up firms in unrelated businesses. Unlike the policeman on the telephone, the bank manager made no mention of any danger from asking questions. Curtis was just shaking hands good-bye, intending to move on to a working class beer garden where a retired German Army sergeant drank, when the bank manager said casually, “I know a chap who works in their Berlin office.”

“Really? On what level?”

“Rather high up, actually. An executive.”

“I would like to meet him. Would that be possible?”

“It will cost you an expensive meal. He is greedy.”

“Why don’t we all three dine together?” asked Arthur, which was exactly what the bank manager wanted to hear.

Arthur went on to his next beer garden. The retired sergeant was there. Plied with a fresh stein, he spoke admiringly of a highly accurate Krieg Rüstungswerk rifled cannon and repeated what Curtis had heard about the kaiser’s warm feelings for the firm. With another stein down the hatch, the sergeant recalled fondly the time his regiment was reviewed by the kaiser himself dressed in the black uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars.

Arthur Curtis went back to the office to draft a reply to Isaac Bell.

He unlocked his door and stepped inside. Hairs prickled the back of his neck. He slewed sideways, pressed his back to the wall, and slid his pistol from his shoulder holster.

“It is only me,” said the shadow sitting at his desk.

“Pauline, how did you get in here?”

“But if I had been Colonel Moran I could have shot you with my silent air gun. No one in the building would hear.”

“Who the devil is Colonel Moran?”

“He tried to kill Sherlock Holmes. Holmes arrested him.”

“I said, how did you get in here?”

She pointed at the window, accessed by an alley fire ladder, which Curtis occasionally used to leave the office undetected. “As Sherlock told Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’: ‘Elementary.’”

“Elementary? Here’s elementary.” Curtis picked up his telephone. “I’m going to call the cops and have you arrested for breaking and entering if you don’t get lost once and for all.”

“Guess what I found in the library about Clyde Lynds.”

Art Curtis felt his jaw drop. “How do you know that name?”

“It’s in the marconigram you received from the Mauretania. The one about Professor Beiderbecke and Krieg Rüstungswerk.”

“That marconigram was in code.”

Pauline shrugged. “It’s not a hard code.”

4

“You are up to something.”

Marion braced herself against the movement of the ship and regarded Isaac Bell with a dreadnought admiral’s collected gaze. Her coral-sea green eyes, her loveliest feature, Bell thought, if forced to choose only one, shimmered with equal parts warm love and healthy skepticism.

“A picnic,” he answered.

“It’s midnight. We’re the only two passengers not seasick in their cabins. I see no wicker hamper. Though for some reason you’re carrying a camera.”

“It only appears to be a camera. Take my arm so we don’t fall down the stairs.”

The seas were heavy. The broad grand staircase swayed as the ship rose and fell with stately precision, but after twenty-four hours in a North Atlantic gale, they were getting the hang of it. Bell gripped the banister and they climbed together, gauging the pitch, compensating for the roll. At the top of the stairs, Bell led Marion through the vestibule into the First Class music room, a domed lounge with a thick floral carpet and brocaded furniture in hues of pink, blue, red, and yellow. The lights were low and it was empty of people but for a sleepy saloon steward standing by with a bucket of champagne anchored between a couch and a pillar. Bell tipped him, lavishly. “I’ll open it, thank you. Good night.”

The man left, smiling.

Marion said, “Now you’ll try to make me tipsy.”

“Would you dance with me?”

“Delighted. As soon as the orchestra arrives.”

Bell opened his camera case and wedged it in a corner of the couch. Marion leaned in close. Wisps of her golden champagne hair brushed his cheek. “What is that? Oh my gosh, a little gramophone. Where’s the horn?”

Bell unfolded a flat piece of cardboard and formed it into a horn, which he attached to the cylinder player. He turned a tiny crank, winding the mechanism, put on a two-minute cylinder, and started it.

“Remember this? We saw the show on Broadway.”

“‘Heaven Will Protect the Working Girl,’” Marion answered when the first notes emerged thinly from the horn. The latest musical comedy sensation was a satire of the old 1890s romantic ballads.

Isaac Bell sang along in a credible baritone.

He treated her respectful as those villains always do,
And she supposed he was a perfect gent.
But she found diff’rent when one night she went with him to dine
Into a table d’hôte so blithe and gay.
And he says to her: After this we’ll have a demitasse!”

Marion sang,

Then to him these brave words the girl did say:

and took up the chorus:

Stand back, villain, go your way!
You may tempt the upper classes
With your villainous demitasses,
But Heaven will protect the working girl.”

Bell opened the bottle of Mumm and poured two glasses. “To what?” asked Marion.

“Love?”

“Love it is.”

They locked eyes, kissed, and drank. Bell changed cylinders, and strains of another new song, the romantic hit “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” played through the cardboard horn.

“May I have this dance?”

He took Marion in his arms and wove a waltz through the furniture as if the rolling, carpeted deck were a crowded dance floor. “Do you recall the first time I asked you to marry me?”

She pressed her cheek to his. “Yes. It was during an earthquake.”

“And the second?”

“In the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel. I said I was too old for you. You claimed that I was not.”

“And the third?”

“In New York. When you gave me this lovely emerald, which I thought too bright at first but have grown to love as our lucky charm.”

“And the fourth?”

“Above the Golden Gate. In your flying machine.”

“Will you marry me?”

“Of course.”

“Tomorrow,” said Isaac Bell.

* * *

“Tomorrow?”

Marion gave him a curious smile. The music stopped. She stepped back out of his arms, looked searchingly into his eyes, then down at her emerald ring. “Funny you should ask.”

“What is funny about a man asking his fiancée five times to marry him?”

She did not seem to hear him, but marveled, instead, “At the very last minute as I was racing to Euston Station to catch the boat train I made the driver stop at Hanover Square so I could run into Lucile’s to buy a dress. Obviously, there wasn’t time to make one, but a Russian woman I met in London told me that there was such a run on black dresses for mourning King Edward — it turned out he had many more mistresses than rumored — that Lucile’s had scads of not black dresses just hanging about, deeply discounted. I wanted to ask your opinion of it, before I wore it. Now I can’t.”

“Of course you can’t. It’s bad luck to see the bride before the wedding.”

She looked him in the face, and her beautiful eyes filled with tears.

“You’re crying. What’s wrong?”