The Thief (36 page)

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.

She had to cross in the dark.

And she needed a raft.

She scoured the woods for fallen limbs, which were few and far between as the farmers probably gathered them for firewood. It took two hours to heap up enough fallen wood to make a raft big enough to cling to while she floated in the dark and big enough to carry her rucksack.

From her rucksack, Pauline took her extra socks. She explored them with her fingers until she found a break in the wool and then unraveled the yarn from which they were knitted, carefully coiling it so it would not tangle. Then she laid the wood out in a square, laid a second layer of branches criss-crossing the first, and lashed the pieces together at each intersection. She ran out of wool and had to unravel another pair of socks before she could finish. When she was done, she had an alarmingly flexible square raft, four feet by four feet, which she knew would never hold her weight but hoped would help her float. Now she had to wait hours for dark. She was hungry. Starving. A rabbit hopped close by. She was holding a last stick she was thinking of adding to her raft. She looked at the rabbit and thought, Not that hungry. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

She awakened cold. The sun had set. Shivering, she took all her clothes off. She stuffed them and her shoes in the rucksack and tied the sack to the raft, positioning the top opening high up in hopes of keeping Detective Curtis’s gun dry. Then she dragged the raft out of the woods and down the sandy river-bank, trying to move it gently so she wouldn’t break any of the yarn lashings.

Lights from the town reflected on the river’s rippling surface—but at least if the current did push her off course, she would drift away from the town. She waded into dark water. It was cold. She dragged the raft after her. Suddenly it was afloat, light and easily moved. The current nearly yanked it from her hands. She held on tight, took a step into deeper water, and the raft rushed downstream, dragging her with it.

The lights were a godsend. Without them she would have had no idea where the current was taking her. But they served like the North Star, and she clung to the sight of their fixed point with every circle the current whirled her in. The raft seemed to draw the river’s ire, presenting something for the water to grab. But if she let it go and tried to swim across the river it would take her clothes, her money, and the gun, so she held tight and forced herself to be patient. The current had to ease where the river widened. It had to.

The lights seemed very far away when she felt the current slacken abruptly, and she judged by their position that the current had pushed her partway across the river, even as it had dragged her downstream. She let go with one arm and began to paddle and kick. The exertion warmed her. Shortly she saw the loom of the far bank, and soon after, when she kicked she hit bottom. She stumbled out of the water, freed her rucksack, dried herself off with her jacket, and put on her clothes, shoes and socks.

She wasn’t in France yet, but she was close.

There were stars in the sky. The immense Fort Driant on the hilltop blocked them to the north. To walk west, she kept the fortress to her right. Soon she spotted the real North Star. She kept it to her right and eventually, when the fortress was behind her, she came to a fence in a field, far from any road. She slipped through strands of barbed wire and started walking in the general direction of Paris, steering clear of farmhouse lights and cocking her ears for the train whistles that would lead her to the railroad station at Batilly.

“L
IGHTS!” THE DIRECTOR OF
H
ELL’S
B
ELLS
shouted into his megaphone.

The dynamo roared. The Cooper-Hewitts blazed.

“Camera!… Speed!”

Isaac Bell, clad in what had become his trademark black costume, flying helmet, and goggles, twisted his grip throttle, revving his motorcycle.

The camera operator cranked to speed.

The director took one more look. The locomotive was in place on a raised track bed rented in a remote corner of a Southern Pacific freight yard. Smoke and steam gushed from its stack. The engineer leaned his head and shoulders out of its cab. A giant electric fan just outside the camera’s field of focus blew the smoke and steam the length of the locomotive and parted the engineer’s long beard, making it look like the locomotive was speeding down the track.

Isaac Bell’s motorcycle spewed white smoke from its exhaust pipe. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Marty, the skinny little Imperial Film mechanician who had tweaked the V-twin engine to make smoke, watching intently. The mechanician gave him the thumbs-up and hurried away, his job done.

Bell twisted his throttle wide open and slapped his clutch lever.

The motorcycle tore into the lights, its exhaust streaming an arresting picture as Bell raced tight circles around the locomotive, jumping the machine into the air every time he crossed the humped train tracks at forty miles per hour. On his fourth landing his front wheel felt wobbly. The camera operator was still cranking. The lights still blazed. Bell poured on the gas for one last jump.

The wheel fell off.

The motorcycle crashed down on its front fork. The rear end left the ground, pivoted straight up, and catapulted Isaac Bell over the handlebars.

Bell flew through the air—skull first—at the locomotive. He tried to tuck into a somersault to fend off with his boots instead of his head, but he was flying at forty miles an hour. As he hurtled, time seemed to stop for the tall detective. It looked as if suddenly the operator were cranking more slowly, resting his arm, and slowing the film. Bell saw the ground pass lazily under him. He saw the Indian standing on its front end with its back wheel spinning in the air, saw the camera itself, perched on its sturdy tripod, saw the wind fan, saw the company of actors, stagehands, grips, and horse wranglers all watching as if nothing were amiss and men performing stunts on motorcycles flew at locomotives every day.

The steel behemoth filled his vision, black as night and big as the sky. An instant later, he smashed into it. A startlingly sharp pain in his ankle told him that his somersault had saved his skull. He bounced off the boiler, fell to the rail bed, and tumbled down the ballast embankment, raking arms and legs on the crushed stone.

Sprawled, dazed, in the dirt, he heard people yelling.

He sat up to put everyone’s mind at ease. Everything hurt, but he thought he would be able to stand in another minute or two.

The yelling stopped—except for the director who was still calling through his megaphone, “That was terrific! Let’s do it one more time!”

Isaac Bell climbed painfully to his feet, walked unsteadily to the wrecked motorcycle, knelt down, and inspected it.

He felt in his jacket that his Browning was still in its holster and moving freely. Thanks to his lightning-fast reflexes, he had just survived the Los Angeles version of the Cincinnati, Chicago, and Jersey City attacks on Van Dorns who shopped in the Leipzig Organ stores.

“Hurry it up,” the director shouted. “We’re losing the light.”

“Soon as you get me a new machine,” said Bell as he limped off in search of the mechanician who had tuned his motorcycle.

The
Hell’s Bells
company had established a temporary machine shop in an abandoned caboose on a rusty siding. Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he mounted the ramp the mechanician had laid to wheel the motorcycle up and down, and entered the gloomy interior in a sudden rush.

“Marty,” he asked in a low and dangerous voice. “Tell me who took a hacksaw to my front axle.”

Marty did not reply.

Bell found him on the floor behind his workbench, his eyes bulging wide open, fixed intently on nothing. Bell lighted a lamp and looked at him closely. The mechanician had been garroted with a wire that had cut his head half off his neck. It looked like the Acrobat had silenced his accomplice with the same thin cable he had wrapped around the neck of the Golden State Limited express messenger he had murdered in New Mexico. It was also the same cable he had used to vault over the locomotive and to “fly” from the
Mauretania
’s boat deck.

Isaac Bell spoke out loud, addressing the Acrobat as if the murderer were still in the caboose.

“I am worrying you,” he said, reviewing in his mind the many strands of his investigation and wondering which had alarmed the murderer. “I am making you afraid.”

The Acrobat apparently saw those strands as forming a net. Which ones? Bell wondered. Which of the many strands had spooked him?

Grady Forrer was pursuing a Hamburg Bankhaus–Imperial Film connection. Andrew Rubenoff had connected Hamburg Bankhaus to Leipzig Organ & Piano and was now hunting Imperial’s foreign bankers. The Van Dorn field offices had exposed Leipzig Organ for a sham. Bell himself had tracked Leipzig’s Fritz Wunderlich to Denver, and now the men watching the consulates had the German’s likeness. Joe Van Dorn was working his Washington, D.C., contacts to establish German consulate connections. Larry Saunders was probing City Hall for the Imperial Building floor plans. Texas Walt had covered Imperial Protection and was currently employed as an extra inside Imperial’s penthouse studios.

If the Acrobat had ordered the murder of Art Curtis in Berlin, then he knew the Van Dorns were after him. The attacks on the Van Dorn apprentices confirmed that. But today’s sabotage of Bell’s motorcycle indicated that the Acrobat had penetrated Bell’s “insurance man” disguise, too, and saw him either as aligned with the Van Dorn Detective Agency or an actual agent of the outfit.

“I still don’t know what you’re up to. But I’m closer than I think.”

Then it struck Bell hard. If—as seemed likely, though not close to proven—Imperial Film was mixed up with the Acrobat and Krieg Rüstungswerk, then Marion’s job at Imperial was no coincidence, but rather the Acrobat’s cold-blooded ace in the hole.