The Thief (21 page)

I
SAAC
B
ELL SENT AND RECEIVED
telegrams at every station stop.

At Kansas City, Kansas, a wire from Marion, who never wasted money on telegraphed words, read:

GRIFFITH AWAITS CLYDE.

BRIDE MISSES GROOM.

Griffith, similarly parsimonious as well as courteous, wired:

EXPECTANT.

Pondering the Acrobat, Bell wired Harry Warren in New York:

MISSED A BET? BRUNO DIDN’T

TELL BROTHER FRANK WHO HIRED

HIM. BUT DID BRUNO TELL HIS GIRLFRIEND?

Harry Warren’s response caught up with Bell the next night. The train was taking on an additional “helper” locomotive to climb the mountains, seventy miles east of the Arizona Territory border at Deming, New Mexico Territory.

BRUNO TOLD GIRLFRIEND OF COAL STOKER LIKE APE.

SOUND FAMILIAR?

Familiar. And odd. The same man seemed to be everywhere, and it occurred to Isaac Bell that the Acrobat was an unusually deadly type rarely encountered in the underworld—a criminal mastermind who did his own dirty work. Whether outlaw or foreign spy, lone operators were elusive, being immune to betrayal by inept subordinates.

Bell chewed on this while he watched a precision rail-yard ballet performed by the Deming brakemen coupling on the helper. A thought struck him like a bolt of lightning. Despite the military precision of the Acrobat’s attack that had almost succeeded in kidnapping Lynds and Beiderbecke off the
Mauretania
, if he was a soldier, the Acrobat was no ordinary soldier.

Military men were not by nature lone operators. Soldiers accepted discipline from above and dispensed orders below. The Acrobat may have been a soldier once, but he wasn’t one anymore. Or if he still was, then he had carved out a unique and exclusive niche above and beyond the supervision and encumbrance of an army.

Bell cabled Art Curtis in Berlin:

ACROBAT? MAYBE CIRCUS PERFORMER? MAYBE SOLDIER?

NOW? BUSINESSMAN WITH KRIEG RUSTUNGSWERK GMBH???

Bell was painfully aware that it was expecting a lot to believe a one-man field office could unearth facts to support such vague speculation—even with as superb a detective as Art Curtis—so he wired the same message to Archie Abbott in New York. And then, just as the Golden State Limited sounded the double-whistle “Ahead,” Bell fired off another copy to Joseph Van Dorn in Washington.

A
TRAIN WRECKER WIELDED
a track wrench by starlight. He was twenty-five miles west of Deming and ten miles from the Continental Divide, where the grade climbed steeply on the Southern Pacific line over which the Rock Island trains ran between El Paso and the West Coast. He was unbolting a fishplate that held the butt ends of two rails together.

His partner was prying up spikes that fastened the steel rails to the wooden ties. With every bolt and spike removed, the strong cradle built to support hundred-ton locomotives was rendered weaker and weaker. Substantial weight on the rails would now spread them apart. The rails did not have to move far. A single inch would make all the difference between safe passage and eternity.

But to ensure success, when the wreckers were done removing bolts and spikes, they reeved a longer bolt through a hole in the side of the rail that had carried a fishtail bolt and fastened it to the last link of a logging chain. They had already laid the chain out to its full length along an arroyo, a dry creek bed deep enough to hide the Rolls-Royce touring car they had stolen from a wealthy tourist visiting Lordsburg.

They were just in time. A haze of locomotive headlamps was brightening in the east.

A piercing two-finger whistle alerted their man, who was farther up the hill with the horses. The hostler whistled back. Message received—he would commence buckling cinches and loading saddlebags bulging with food and water for the long trek to Mexico.

The wreckers started the auto and eased it ahead to take the slack out of the chain. Then they waited, the soft mutter of the Rolls’s finely turned motor gradually drowned out by the deepening thunder of twin Pacifics pulling in tandem. When the train was too close to stop even if the engineer happened to see his rail suddenly break loose, they throttled the Rolls-Royce ahead. The rail resisted. The tires spun in sand. But they only had to pull one inch.

H
AD THE
G
OLDEN
S
TATE
L
IMITED
been distinguishing herself at her usual mile-a-minute clip, the entire train would have jumped the tracks, rolled down the embankment, been set ablaze by the coals in her firebox, and burned to the wheels. But the wreckers were old hands in the sabotage line, and they had deliberately chosen the heavy grade rising up from Demings toward the Divide. Even with her helper locomotive, the train was barely doing thirty miles an hour when they ripped the rail from under her.

Locomotives, tenders, and the first express car crashed eight inches between the spreading rails and crunched along the ties, splintering wood and scattering ballast. For what on board the train seemed like an eternity, she skidded along in a cacophony of screeching steel.

The coupler between the express car and the mail car parted. Electric cables, plumbing pipes, and pneumatic hoses tore loose. With air pressure gone, the rearmost cars’ air brakes clenched their shoes on the wheels. Slowed by the additional drag, the Golden State’s mail car, diner, and sleeping cars finally ground to a stop, half on the tracks and half on the ballast, still upright though leaning at a frightening angle, and plunged into darkness.

W
HEN THE LIGHTS WENT OUT, THE
G
ERMAN
whom Professor Beiderbecke had dubbed the Acrobat climbed out of the Continental & Commercial National Bank of Chicago strongbox. Express messenger Pete Stock had already located a flashlight, but he hesitated a fatal, disbelieving half second before reaching for the Smith & Wesson on his gun belt.

The Acrobat spooled a thin braided cable from a leather gauntlet buckled to his powerful wrist, looped it around Stock’s neck, and strangled him. Then he went hunting for Clyde Lynds, confident that his people had everything in place to execute a swift and orderly escape: across the Mexican border on horseback, a special train to Veracruz, a North German Lloyd freighter, and home to Prussia, where the inventor would be persuaded to rebuild his machine.

He jumped off the train and ran back toward the Pullmans, counting cars in the starlight as he loped past baggage, mail, diner, and two drawing-room stateroom cars and finally climbing up into the vestibule of the regular stateroom car where Clyde Lynds had just woken up to the chaos of derailment.

I
SAAC
B
ELL MADE A PRACTICE OF
sleeping with his feet to the front of a train. Awakened abruptly when his feet smashed into the bulkhead, he pulled on his boots and his shoulder holster.

“What happened?” Clyde called sleepily from the upper berth.

“She’s on the ground.”

“Derailed?”

Bell drew his Browning and chambered a round. “Climbing slowly on a straight track? Two to one, she had help.”

“What are you doing?”

“Soon as I’m out the door, lock it. Let no one in, not even the conductor.”

Bell stepped into the pitch-black corridor and shut the door behind him. As far as he could see, the corridor was empty. He could hear people shouting in their staterooms. They sounded more confused than frightened. Train wreck was never far from any traveler’s mind, but the Limited’s stop, while sudden, had not ended in the splintered wood, twisted metal, smashed bones, and burning flesh that got their names among the dead and injured in tomorrow’s newspapers.

Bell stood still with his back pressed against the door. His eyes adjusted to the dark in seconds. The corridor was still empty. He could see the shapes of the windows on the opposite side of the narrow corridor outlined by the starlight that bathed the high-desert floor. Outside in the starlit dark he saw a flicker of motion. Were his eyes playing tricks or did he see horses clumped close together, a hundred yards from the train? It was too far and too dark to see if they were saddled, but wild animals so near the thundering derailment would have stampeded to the far side of the mountains by now. These were horses with men.

Bell saw a flashlight at the head end of the car and, in its flickering back glow, the snow-white uniform of the Pullman porter, Edward, roused from a nap in his pantry. Bell closed one eye to protect his night vision. He sensed motion behind Edward. Before he could shout a warning, the porter crumpled silently to the floor. His flashlight fell beside him, arcing its beam along the corridor toward Bell.

A stateroom door flew open, and a fat man in pajamas stepped out, shouting, “Porter!”

More doors banged open. Passengers stumbled into the dark corridor, and Bell realized that the Acrobat’s plan had suddenly gone wrong. He saw the shadowy figure who had knocked down the porter move oddly, thrusting one arm out and folding the other across his face.

Bell smelled a familiar scent and covered his eyes. He heard a champagne cork
pop.
A blaze of intensely white light flooded the corridor. Blinded, the passengers fell back into their staterooms, crying out in fear and dismay.

No one stood between the Acrobat and Clyde Lynds’s door except Isaac Bell.

Bell had remembered from his circus days the peculiar odor of flash cotton. The clowns loved the gag of igniting cloth impregnated with nitrocellulose to shoot fire from their fingertips, and he had recognized its smell in time to avoid being blinded.

He charged into the dark straight at the starlit simian shape of the Acrobat.