The Thief

“Isaac Bell had a feeling you were more than you appeared to be. He was right. When we dug deeper, we learned that you were decorated in that action.”

Strone flushed angrily. “Ruddy nonsense.”

“What do you mean, nonsense? You received the Distinguished Service Order.”

“I mean nonsense. Semmler lured us onto a bridge he had mined with dynamite. He sniped the wounded with rifle fire. My DSO was awarded to the only man that murderous swine missed.”

* * *

Isaac Bell rounded up Texas Walt Hatfield and Larry Saunders and a crew of Saunders’s handpicked men for a powwow.

“Information from Art Curtis and his Berlin apprentice, expanded upon by Archie Abbott and the Research department, proves that the murderer we called the Acrobat, the drummer Fritz Wunderlich, and German Imperial Army General Major Christian Semmler are all one and the same. In addition, Mr. Van Dorn has established that General Major Christian Semmler is not only Krieg Rustungswerk’s agent, but also a principal. To put it bluntly, he married the boss’s daughter.

“Semmler’s alias, Fritz Wunderlich, flew the coop when he caught wind of our visits to his shops and my calling on his hotel in Denver. Before we congratulate ourselves on Wunderlich’s loss of a string of shops that gave him and his accomplices safe passage around the continent, remember that the German consulates offer General Major Semmler even safer places to hide, get money, rest, eat, and sleep. Tracking Semmler will not be like tracking an ordinary criminal to his hideout. As much as we might enjoy it, we cannot smash open the doors of a sovereign nation’s consulates.

“I had already expressed copies of this ‘Wunderlich’ picture to every field office covering a German consulate in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the vice-consul’s office here in Los Angeles. Now I’ve informed them it’s a likeness of Semmler.”

* * *

“Isaac Bell’s voice resonates with confidence,” said Christian Semmler. “Listen!”

He thrust the telephone earpiece at Hermann Wagner.

Wagner, sick with fear, took it with a trembling hand. The Berlin banker had seen the Donar leader’s face for the first time tonight. He had speculated that the mysterious leader might be Semmler, mainly because of rumors about the kaiser’s affection for the officer they called the Monkey. The heavy browridges, the massive protruding jaw, and the gangly arms were frightening confirmation. The leader was indeed the kaiser’s favorite, General Major Christian Semmler. For some reason Semmler had allowed him to see his face, and Wagner feared that Semmler intended to kill him when he was done.

“Listen to him!”

Wagner pressed the telephone to his ear.

He and Semmler were hunched across from each other over a table in the cellar of Germany’s Los Angeles vice-consul’s mansion. The vice-consul was upstairs, aware in only the most general terms of the use they were putting his building to, and probably deeply relieved that he had been forbidden entry to his own cellar.

The telephone was one that Christian Semmler had had connected via the vice-consul’s private line to a microphone he had stolen from Clyde Lynds and had paid an electrician to hide in the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Like an innkeeper tapping a keg of lager, Semmler had laughed as he explained the eavesdropping system to the disbelieving Hermann Wagner.

It seemed like a miracle. More than a miracle, it seemed impossible. But Wagner could actually hear Isaac Bell speaking to his private investigators even though a full two miles separated the Van Dorn Detective Agency from the German consulate.

“You hear?”

“A little. Not very well.”

“I know that!” snapped Semmler. “Lynds’s microphone is not thoroughly perfected yet. But he’s on the right track, and if you listen closely, you can hear the confidence in Bell’s voice. Why shouldn’t he sound assured? He’s learned so much these past several days.”

“Yes, he has,” Wagner agreed nervously.

“Events do not always unfold as we plan them,” said Semmler. “It is the nature of plans, and events.” He looked up and his green eyes sparkled with amusement. “I recall one night on the high veldt, when three British Tommies cornered me, my escape went according to plan. But no sooner had I killed them than I was seized by my arm and dragged to the ground. I could hardly believe it. I was attacked out of nowhere by a lion! A lion! The beast was attracted by the scent of the Tommies’ blood.”

Semmler reached across the table and laid a powerful hand on Hermann Wagner’s arm. “Relax, Herr Wagner, you look terrified.”

“I am terrified,” the banker admitted. “You warned me on the Mauretania never to look on your face. Tonight you show me your face. What am I to think but the worst?”

“Do not worry. You are valuable alive. I still need you. I need you more than ever. There is much to be done.”

“What can be done? Bell is onto you. And he’s closing in on Imperial Film.”

Semmler snatched the telephone from the banker’s hand and listened. A brilliant smile filled his strange face. It brightened his eyes and spread his lips, but bright as it was, Wagner thought, it looked cold as distant lightning.

“Bell,” said the leader of the Donar Plan, “would sound less confident if he knew we could hear him.”

40

“Mr. Bell, could I see that picture again?”

Isaac Bell handed the Wunderlich sketch to a Los Angeles Van Dorn disguised in the patched clothing and dark glasses of a blind newspaper seller. The detective took off the glasses and studied the sketch.

“You know, he didn’t look quite like this. But it could have been him.”

“When?”

The blind newsie opened his notebook and read deadpan: “Individual possibly resembling Mr. Bell’s sketch of Fritz Wunderlich entered German vice-consul’s residence Saturday at ten past eight. Detective Balant decided it wasn’t him.”

“Ten past eight this evening?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did he come out?”

“Didn’t.”

Every detective in the room reached for his hat. Bell was already at the door. “He never came out? Are you sure?”

“I covered the front door, right across the street from my newsstand. When I needed relief to come here, Patrolman Joe Thomas, who lends us a hand, promised to cover till I got back.”

“Come on, boys, let’s have a look.”

They piled into two Ford autos and raced across town.

Larry Saunders asked Bell, “Is there any way we can get inside the consulate?”

“Not without setting off an international hullabaloo.”

Bell ordered the cars stopped a block from the residence of the German vice-consul, who had been recently appointed by the San Francisco consul general. “Wait here. I don’t want them looking out their window at half the detectives in California.”

He walked down the block and stopped at the “blind newsie’s” newspaper stand. The cop, Patrolman Joe Thomas, was seated inside, yawning. “Van Dorn,” said Bell, picking up the evening edition of the Los Angeles Times to shield the act of showing the sketch. “Have you seen this fellow come out of the