The Thief

“No need, no need.”

The American concurred hastily. “We’re fine, mister. You’ve gone to plenty trouble already. We oughta just go to bed.”

“My name is Bell. Isaac Bell. What are yours?”

“Forgive my ill manners,” said the Viennese, bowing and pawing at his vest with shaking fingers, muttering distractedly, “I appear to have lost my cards in the struggle.” He stopped searching and said, “I am Beiderbecke, Professor Franz Bismark Beiderbecke.”

Beiderbecke offered his hand, and Bell took it.

“May I present my young associate, Clyde Lynds?”

Clyde Lynds threw Bell a mock salute. Bell reached for his hand and looked him in the face, gauging his worth. Lynds stopped clowning and met his gaze, and Bell saw a steadiness not immediately apparent.

“Why did they try to kidnap you?”

The two exchanged wary looks. Beiderbecke spoke first. “We can only presume they were agents of a munitions trust.”

“What munitions trust?”

“A German outfit,” said Lynds. “Krieg Rustungswerk GmbH.”

Bell took note of Lynds’s fluent pronunciation. “Where did you learn to speak German, Mr. Lynds?”

“My mother was German, but she married a lot. I spent some of my childhood on my Swedish-immigrant father’s North Dakota wheat farm, some in Chicago, and a bunch of time backstage in New York City theaters. ‘Mutter’ finally hooked a Viennese, which she wanted all along only didn’t know it, and I landed in Vienna, where the good Professor here took me in.”

“Fortunate Professor, is the truth of the matter, Mr. Bell. Clyde is a brilliant scientist. My colleagues are still gnashing their teeth that he chose to work in my laboratory.”

“That’s because I came cheap,” Clyde Lynds grinned.

Bell asked, “Why would agents of a munitions company kidnap you?”

“To steal our invention,” said Beiderbecke.

“What sort of invention?” asked Bell.

“Our secret invention,” Lynds answered before the Professor could speak. He turned to the older man and said, “Sir, we did agree that secrecy was all.”

“Yes, of course, of course, but Mr. Bell has so kindly treated us. He saved our lives, at no small risk to his own.”

“Mr. Bell is a handy fellow with his fists. What else do we know about him? I recommend we stick to our deal to keep quiet about it, like we agreed.”

“Of course, of course. You’re right, of course.” Professor Beiderbecke turned embarrassedly to Bell. “Forgive me, sir. Despite my age, I am not a man of the world. My brilliant young protege has persuaded me that I am too trusting. Obviously, you’re a gentleman. Obviously, you sprang to our defense while never pausing to consider your own safety. On the other hand, it behooves me to remember that we have been sorely used by others who appeared to be gentlemen.”

“And who tried to yank the fillings from our teeth,” grinned Lynds. “Sorry, Mr. Bell. You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? Not that we’re not grateful for you charging to the rescue.”

Isaac Bell returned what could be judged a friendly smile.

“Your gratitude does not have to take the form of giving away an important secret.” His mild answer disguised curiosity that would be best satisfied by biding his time. As Archie had noted, for the next four and half days on the high seas no one was going anywhere. “But I am concerned for your safety,” he added. “These munitions people mounted an audacious campaign with military precision to kidnap you from a British liner putting to sea. What makes you think they won’t try again?”

“Not on a British liner,” Lynds fired back. “On a German ship we’d worry about the crew. That’s why we took a British ship.”

“You mean they tried before?”

“In Bremen.”

“How did you happen to give them the slip?”

“Got lucky,” said Lynds. “We saw them coming, so we made a big show of booking passage on the Prinz Wilhelm. Then we ran like heck the other way, to Rotterdam, and caught a steamer to Hull. By the time they figured out we hadn’t sailed on the Wilhelm, we were on the train to London.”

Bell had many more questions, but they were forestalled by the arrival of the ship’s doctor. When the chief officer bustled in right behind the doctor, Bell emptied his whiskey glass into a spittoon before the officer could see and conspicuously poured another from the bottle.

The chief officer listened with an increasingly skeptical expression as the Professor and Lynds described an attack by three men who subsequently fell overboard. Then, while the doctor examined Beiderbecke’s cut lip and Lynds’s swelling eye, the officer said quietly to Bell, with a significant glance at the whiskey in his hand, “One cannot help but wonder whether those two gentlemen had a falling out and covered it up with a tall tale of, shall we say, ‘piracy in Liverpool Bay’?”

Isaac Bell sipped his whiskey. He intended to get to the bottom of the bizarre attack, as well as the nature of Beiderbecke and Lynds’s self-described secret invention, which had provoked it. But the kidnappers had drowned in the night, miles behind the ship. The Austrian and the American-raised German-Swede were the only sources of information available. And the Mauretania’s officers were even less qualified than a small town police force to investigate the motive for the attack. They would only get in his way.

“I say…” the chief officer went on. He had begun politely, almost diffidently, the model of the smooth company man unfazed by the peccadillos of wealthy passengers. Now he fixed Bell with a flinty eye practiced at terrorizing junior officers: “As no one jumped, fell, or was thrown overboard, I am curious how they induced you, Mr. Bell, to embroider their story.”

“Sympathy,” Isaac Bell smiled. He touched the whiskey to his lips. “Poor chaps were so embarrassed by their behavior… and I had had a drink or two.” He peered into his glass. “Seemed like a good idea at the time…” He looked the officer full in the face and grinned sheepishly. “It felt jolly good to be a hero, even for a moment…”

“I appreciate your candor, Mr. Bell. I am sure that you will agree that as soon as the surgeon has done his work it will be best if we all turn in for the night and let sleeping dogs lie.”

* * *

“Krieg Rustungswerk GMBH?” echoed Archie Abbott, who had traveled regularly back and forth to Europe his whole life. Most recently, in the course of an extended honeymoon, he had laid the groundwork for overseas Van Dorn field offices. “They’re a private munitions outfit with strong Army connections. As you’d expect of a cannon manufacturer gearing up for a European war.”

Isaac Bell had joined him in the dining saloon moments after the breakfast bugle had blown. The Mauretania was steaming past Malin Head on the northern tip of Ireland, and as she left the Irish Sea in her wake, the liner had begun lifting her bow into unusually tall Atlantic swells, churning rumors in the elevators and vestibules of rough weather ahead.

“Why do you ask?”

“Do you recall the motorboat you could not hear last night?”

“If I couldn’t hear it, how could I recall it?”

Bell told him what had happened. Archie was crestfallen. “Of all the darned times to go to bed early. All three overboard?”

“The one who tried to stab me, the one who got tossed by his boss. And the boss under his own steam.”

“You have all the fun, Isaac.”

“What sort of lunatic drowns himself?”

Archie smiled. “Is it possible he was afraid of a fellow who had already floored two of his gang and was suddenly waving a gun?”

Bell shook his head. “A man afraid would not have taken the time to throw his accomplice overboard. No, he made sure there was no one left to confess. Not even himself. Lunacy.”