The Thief (9 page)

“I just know.”

“You better know more than ‘just know’ or you’ll be dining on bread and water.”

“I’m not dodging you, Mr. Bell. I’m telling you that it takes one to know one. I smoked right off that the fellow was an imposter. For one thing, he was covered in coal dust. Like a stoker. Well, do they send a stoker to retrieve a rich man’s shiny clean steamer trunk? Of course they don’t. They send a shiny clean bedroom steward. You get my meaning?”

“And for another thing?”

“The stewards usually come in pairs, help each other carry. He was alone.”

“What did he look like?”

“Like I just told you. Like a stoker. Hard as nails tough from the black gang.”

“Big man?”

“Not so big. Powerful build, though. Long arms. Like an ape. Like I said, what you’d expect shoveling coal.”

“Long arms? Did you see his face?”

“Black with soot.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him again?”

“I doubt it.”

“Why not?” Bell demanded.

The swindler answered, “Cap pulled down over his eyes, collar up round his ears. All that soot on his face, for all I saw he could have been dancing in a minstrel show.”

Bell looked at him with a wintry eye. Block was a very intelligent crook.

“What color was the trunk?”

“Silver.”

“How long ago was this?”

“Hour? Little more.”

“Enjoy your dinner.” Bell started out the door, then stopped with a new thought. “Was there a sticker on the trunk indicating the passenger’s class?”

“First.”

“Lawrence Block, you’ve earned your first honest meal since you graduated reform school.”

Bell sent the PS man back in with a stern warning to stay on his toes. Then he told Archie, “A coal stoker, or someone who looked like a coal stoker, lifted a silver-colored steamer trunk with a First Class sticker. Question is, why?”

“Assuming the Professor’s been kidnapped, I’d say they stashed him inside it so they could smuggle him into a cabin they booked somewhere in First Class.”

“So would I.”

“But,” Archie said, “we found his glasses down here. How would they know he was coming down here? Maybe they have someone in the crew watching him.”

“Or a passenger,” said Isaac Bell. “We better get Captain Turner to rustle up a search party.”

“I
SAAC!
T
HEY FOUND THE TRUNK ON THE
promenade deck!”

Bell passed Archie at a dead run, climbing the grand staircase. There was a mob at the top of the stairs. The corridors converging outside a service pantry were jammed with the junior officers: saloon, deck, and bedroom stewards and seamen who had been pressed into the search. Bell saw a saloon steward sprawled on his back, his normally immaculate tunic filthy, and beside him the silver trunk. A husky seaman stood over it, aiming a fire ax at the lock.

“I’ll open it,” said Bell, shouldering him aside. He knelt by the trunk and felt with his hands that it was heavy. “Would there be a wine screw handy?”

The sommelier’s assistant produced a corkscrew. Bell twisted it into the lock, manipulated for a moment while gazing into the middle distance, and the lock clicked open. To the murmur of acclaim, and before anyone asked how an insurance executive happened to know the fine art of lock picking, he said, “Parlor trick my great-aunt Isabel taught me. She was a regular whiz.”

Stewards and seamen laughed.

“Never would say where she learned it,” Bell added, and the officers laughed, too.

He hinged the hasp up and lifted the lid. The laughter died.

Professor Beiderbecke had been squeezed into the trunk. His legs were bent sharply to his chest, his arms pressed about his head. His eyes were wide open. His face was rigid with pain and fear. His skin was blue.

Without a word, an elderly dining saloon steward passed Isaac Bell a gleaming fish knife. Bell held it to Beiderbecke’s nostrils. He did not expect that the poor man’s breath would cloud the silver, but it did.

“He’s alive!” A dozen hands helped Bell pull Beiderbecke out of the trunk. They laid him on the rubber-tile floor and gently straightened his limbs. Beiderbecke groaned, gasped, and inhaled fitfully.

“Doctor!”

“Get the surgeon.”

Bell leaned closer, searching for a spark in his wide-open eyes. They seemed to focus on him. “You’ll be fine,” said Bell. “The doctor’s coming.”

Beiderbecke’s body convulsed. “My heart,” he whispered. Racked with pain, he clutched his chest. “Bell!” he gasped.

“I’m right here, Professor.”

“Bell. My… protégé…”

“Don’t worry, I’ll look out for Clyde.”

“Protect him, please.”

“I will.”

“Protect him from the akkk…”

“From what?” Bell put his ear to Beiderbecke’s lips, for the man was surely dying. “From what?”

“Akrobat
.”

The ship’s surgeon arrived, shooing people from his path. Bell stood up to make room for him, then watched as the surgeon parted vest and shirt with sure hands and pressed a stethoscope to Beiderbecke’s chest. He listened for a long time, shaking his head, and finally removed the instrument.

“What did Beiderbecke say? Archie asked Bell.

“Made me promise to protect Clyde.”

“From Krieg?”

“I suppose,” Bell answered. “But that wasn’t all he said.”

“What else did he say?”

“A name or a word that sounded like ‘acrobat.’ How do you say it in German?”

“The same, except spelled with a ‘k,’ said Archie. “But what did Beiderbecke mean by ‘acrobat’?”

“A man,” Isaac Bell mused thoughtfully, “who can fly.”

“Like the one who jumped overboard.”

“And somehow flew back.”

Archie said, “But acrobats can’t really fly.”

“Maybe not. But the best of them can do a darned good imitation…” Isaac Bell thought hard. “
Mauretania
’s carrying three thousand people, passengers and crew. Whoever killed Beiderbecke is hiding among them.”

“That’s like hiding in a city.”

“We need a witness. Let’s ask this steward if he got a look at who knocked him down.”

The steward, who was sitting up blearily, shook his head. “Sorry, guv. Jumped me from behind, he did, when I walked in the pantry.”

Bell helped him to his feet. “Not even a glimpse as you fell? Did you see how big he was or what he was wearing?”

“Not a peep, guv.” He looked at his tunic sleeve, then down at the trousers. “Blimey, am I a sight. Better get out of these before the boss sees me.”

Bell noticed brown grease stains on his trousers from the pantry floor. But the smudges on his sleeve looked like soot. He ran his finger on one.

“Coal dust,” he told Archie. “Let’s go visit the black gang.”

B
LOCK, THE SWINDLER, SWORE
up and down, again, that he had not seen the face of the black gang crewman who had taken the silver trunk from the baggage room, but Isaac Bell brought him along anyway, intending to watch
his
face for signs of lying as they scrutinized the men who stoked the furnaces. He brought the saloon steward, too, on the theory that the man who knocked him down could not know beyond a doubt that the steward hadn’t seen his face. The sight of two witnesses might set off a case of nerves. Or so he thought until he clapped eyes on the stokers and the hellish place where they worked.

“T
HREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY
passers, trimmers and firemen, mostly Irish from Liverpool,” said the
Mauretania
’s chief engineer, a compact, no-nonsense Scot with a walrus mustache and four gold stripes on his sleeve. “Plus your odd foreigner.” Captain Turner had ordered him to escort Bell and Archie and their witnesses down to the stokehold.

He pressed an electric switch, and a massive watertight steel door ground open on a sulfurous scene of heat and thunder. Men stripped to the waist and hunched double were shoveling coal and wheeling barrows in near darkness.

The chief engineer had to shout for Bell to hear him warn, “Doubt you’ll get much out of ’em. The black gang are a hard lot.”

“I’d be amazed if they weren’t.”

“You should see ’em brawl. We dog the hatches till the fightin’s over. Mind, it’s no picnic. Our
Maury
wants a thousand tons a day to make her knots.”

The devil, thought Isaac Bell, would feel right at home deep in the ship. It was one thing to envision the principle that fire heated water into steam that spun the blades of
Mauretania
’s turbines that turned the propellers that drove her through the sea. It was another to peer through air thick with eye-stinging coal dust at scores of men sweating to feed her.

Timing gongs clanged. Furnace doors flew open. In the leaping light of flames, firemen with wet rags tied over their faces for protection from the heat thrust ten-foot steel-slicing bars into seething beds of yellow embers. They stabbed white-hot clinkers of fused impurities loose from the fire grates, smashed the clinkers, and raked away the pieces. They dug their shovels into coal heaped on the deck. They straightened up and scattered a scoopful into the furnaces, bent over and dug up another. Scoop after scoop after scoop after scoop they scattered onto the fires. They worked fast, endeavoring to open the furnace doors for the shortest possible time to keep the heat up. For seven minutes the firemen sliced and raked and shoveled, skillfully spreading even layers of fresh fuel on the incandescent coals. The searing heat dried their face rags stiff.

Furnace doors banged shut. Darkness fell. The firemen lunged for water buckets. Sweating trimmers manhandled wheelbarrows into the fire aisle and tipped them on the deck, heaping new coal beside the furnace doors. The trimmers raced back to the bunkers for more. Inside the bunkers themselves, Bell could see passers shifting coal from the back to the front. The gongs rang again, and the stoking indicator showed the number of the next furnace to be fed.

“How are long are their shifts?” Bell asked the chief engineer.

“Four hours on, eight off.”

Bell led the steward and the swindler along the fire aisles of all four boiler rooms, past one hundred and ninety-two furnaces under twenty-four boilers, in and out of bunkers, then by trimmers greasing machinery and shoveling white-hot cinders from ash pits into ejectors. Finally, he walked them through the fetid passers’ and trimmers’ barracks on the lower deck and the firemen’s on the main deck, where exhausted men sprawled on tightly stacked berths. Not a single glowering face of those awake or those unmasked in dreamless sleep sparked a memory that swindler Block or the steward would admit to.