The Thief

“Who else can we approach?”

“I wonder…”

Bell waited. They were in Archie’s library. From the drawing room came the sounds of a di

When Bell returned in a midnight blue di

“But Biograph is part of the Trust.”

“He’s chafing under company rule. He wants to make his own pictures. He’s so forward-thinking — he’s invented all sorts of wonderful tricks with the camera — he might realize the potential of Clyde’s machine.”

“Let’s go see him.”

“He just took fifty people to California. He’s making a Biograph picture in some little village outside Los Angeles.”

“What’s his name?”

“Griffith. You’ve seen his pictures. D. W. Griffth.”

“Of course! He made Is This Seat Taken?”

“He’s your man.”

Isaac Bell said, “I hate to leave you so soon after our wedding, but I had better take Clyde to see him.”

Marion said, “I would love to visit my father in San Francisco and tell him all about the wedding.”

“Wonderful! ’Frisco’s only five hours on the train. We’ll meet in the middle.”

Marion straightened his bow tie and pressed close. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could travel together to California?”

Bell shook his head with a rueful smile. “I wish we could.”

“I love riding trains with you.” She laughed. “Now that we’re married, we don’t have to book two staterooms for propriety’s sake.”

“Unfortunately, escorting Clyde, I’m obliged to double up with him to keep a close watch.”

“Do you expect Krieg to try to kidnap him?”

“No, no, no. Just to be on the safe side. Don’t worry, after we meet Mr. Griffith, I’ll stash Clyde with the Los Angeles office for a weekend, and you and I can rendezvous in Santa Barbara.”

“And after I’ve seen my father, I’ll come down to Los Angeles to find some work.”

The old Grand Central Station was no more. Its classical facade and its six-hundred-and-fifty-foot glass train shed had just been razed, and now steam shovels and hard-rock miners were burrowing sixty feet into the Manhattan schist to make room for a new, two-level Grand Central Terminal.

Isaac Bell led Clyde Lynds into a temporary station that was operating out of the Grand Central Palace, a convention and trade fair building around the corner on Lexington Avenue, and headed for the makeshift gate marked “20th Century Limited.” The chaos of new construction had not persuaded the crack Chicago-bound express to lower its standards. Temporary or not, its famous red carpet had been rolled out the length of the platform.

“Hang on a minute,” said Bell. “Loose shoelace.” He planted his foot on a fire department standpipe protruding from a wall and busied his hands around his boot.

“How can you have a loose shoelace?” asked Clyde. “Your boots don’t have laces.”

“Don’t tell anyone.” Bell straightened up and headed for the telephones. “I have to phone the office. Stick close.”

“I heard there’s a phone on the train.”

“There will be a line of businessmen waiting to telephone their offices that they didn’t miss the train. Stick close.”

Bell told the operator at the front desk, “Van Dorn Agency, Knickerbocker Hotel,” and followed the attendant to a paneled booth. When the Van Dorn operator answered, he asked for the duty man.

“This is Chief Investigator Bell. Two tall yellow-haired men in dark suits and derbies followed me across Forty-second Street and into the Grand Central Palace. They’re hanging around the waiting room pretending not to watch the Twentieth Century gate. One has a mustache and is wearing a green four-in-hand necktie. The other is clean-shaven, with a dark bow tie. I’ll telephone again when we change locomotives at Harmon.”

Bell paid the attendant.

“Let’s go buy some magazines, Clyde— No, don’t look in their direction.”

21

Forty-five minutes after leaving New York, the 20th Century Limited stopped in Harmon to exchange the electric engine that had hauled it out of the Manhattan tu

The duty man at the Knickerbocker reported that Van Dorn operatives were trailing the “gentlemen thugs” who had followed Bell across 42nd Street.

A wire waiting for Bell at Albany, where the flyer got a fresh locomotive and a dining car, reported laconically,

NOTHING YET.

After di

Bell had booked a stateroom with two narrow berths. He stretched out on the bottom berth, fully clothed.

Clyde said, “You know I could have saved money sleeping in a Pullman berth.”

“I assure you, Clyde, you would not be my first choice of company for a night on an express train, but this way I can keep an eye on you.”

“Who were those men? Krieg?”

“I should know for sure by morning.”

“How would they know to follow us from your detective agency?”

“They followed us from the hotel, not the agency.” Bell had stashed Clyde for safekeeping in a room at the Knickerbocker next door to the Van Dorn bull pen. The hotel was enormous, and the Krieg agents would have no reason to co

“How’d they know what hotel?”

“They probably followed us to the Knickerbocker from Edison’s laboratory. I believe you did mention Thomas Edison while discussing your machine with Krieg?”

“Sure. I wanted Krieg to know there were others we could go to.”

“You can bet they’ve been watching the Edison laboratory since the Mauretania landed, waiting for you to show up.”

Bell locked the door and closed his eyes, recalling nights on the 20th Century when he and Marion would drink champagne in the privacy of adjoining staterooms.

At Rochester, the telegraph delivered pay dirt.

GTS TO ATTACHE AT GC.

Isaac Bell broke into a lupine smile.

Translated, the wire read that the “gentleman thugs” who had followed him to the train had reported to a diplomatic attaché whom the Van Dorn detectives covering the Bowling Green Office Building had already identified at the German consulate. In other words, Krieg and the German Army knew that he and Clyde were steaming to Chicago. But they did not know that Bell knew.

He wired the Chicago field office from the next engine stop.

The “drummers’s table” in the breakfast room at the exclusive Palmer House Hotel in Chicago was like a private club, but any traveling salesman who could afford the best hotel in town was welcome to sit in. The club brothers — valuable men who worked on commission only and paid their own expenses — had expensive suits, florid complexions, and proud bellies, and they laughed louder and told newer jokes than the founders of steel and slaughterhouse fortunes at the surrounding tables.

The top salesman for the Locomobile Company of America was telling a new story he had heard two days earlier at the Bridgeport, Co

The representative of the Victor Talking Machine Company interrupted. “Hey, here’s Fritz!”

“Hello, Fritz! Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”

Men shuffled around to make room for the new arrival, a broad-shouldered, light-on-his feet German in his mid-thirties who traveled America peddling church organs and parlor pianos.