The Thief by Clive Cussler (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📕

Frank shrugged. “Grab a fellow who got off the boat.”

“What did this fellow look like?”

“Twenties, five-six, mussed brown hair, blue eyes, pencil mustache.”

Clyde Lynds to a T.

“He say why?”

“No.”

“Did your brother say who you were grabbing the guy for?”

“No.”

“Did you ever see him?”

“How could I see him? Bruno kept him to himself.”

“Did your brother tell you how much the guy was paying?”

Frank shook his head. “Bruno would never tell me. He’d take what it was and pay us what he felt like.”

“Hard man, your brother.”

“Not as a hard as them.”

“No, I suppose not… Mind me asking something?”

“Nothing’s stopped you so far.”

“Nothing’s stopped you from answering, and I do appreciate that, especially at such a hard time.”

“You gunning for those guys?”

“Yes,” said Bell.

Frank nodded. “What was you asking?”

“Did your brother ever work for them before?”

Frank hesitated.

Bell asked, “Was this the first time?”

“I dunno. I mean, I dunno if it was the same or who knew the same. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

“I mean, for when they have a party, sometimes, we sell ’em dust. We sell ’em goils.”

“Who?”

“They might have been who told this guy about my brother.”

“Could have been,” Bell agreed. “Who are they?”

Frank hesitated. “I don’t want to queer things with them. Maybe it wasn’t them who told the guy about us. I don’t want to…”

“You don’t want to mess up a good arrangement,” said Bell. “I don’t blame you.”

“Neither do I,” said Harry Warren.

“Yeah, I mean, steady money is steady money.”

“With your brother out of action, money’s going to be tight,” said Bell. “At least until your crew gets back on its feet. Look, Harry’s standing so no one can see me handing you this. Just a couple of hundred dollars to tide you over.”

“Two hundred bucks? Crissakes, mister. What do you get outta this?”

“I get the guy who killed your brother. If you can tell me who introduced him to your brother. Was it the customers who buy your cocaine and your girls?”

“Yeah.”

“And who are they?”

“They live at the consulate.”

Bell found himself holding his breath. “Which consulate?”

“The German consulate.”

Isaac Bell and Harry Warren walked quickly to the Third Avenue El and rode downtown to the tip of lower Manhattan. They got off at South Ferry and strolled up Broadway. Deep in conversation as they passed the handsome sixteen-story Bowling Green Office Building, they barely glanced at the Hellenic Renaissance granite, white brick, and terra-cotta facade.

Of the thirteen bays of windows from ground floor to roof, all but two were dark this late at night. The White Star and American Line shippers, the naval architects, bankers, and lawyers who conducted business at the prestigious address were home in their beds. Of the lights still burning, both were on the ninth floor, which housed the offices of the German consul general.

“Cover the place,” Isaac Bell ordered. “Try to pick up something more.”

“IHEARD THAT THE AGENCY HAD A PROTECTION contract with the German consul general of New York City back in ’02,” said Isaac Bell, when he strode into Joseph Van Dorn’s walnut-paneled Washington, D.C., headquarters office in the Willard Hotel, two blocks from the White House. The boss spent the majority of his time in Washington these days drumming up business from the Justice Department, Congress, and the Navy, and was intimate with the workings of the capital city.

Van Dorn laughed heartily. “We did indeed, and I’ll never forget it.”

Mirth reddened his face—a grand moon of an affair wreathed in robust red whiskers and splendid burnsides and topped by a shining bald crown—and his hooded eyes almost disappeared as their lids crinkled around them. He was a large, powerfully built man. His affable manner and ready laughter disguised ambition, ferocious intelligence, and an unyielding love of justice that made him the scourge of criminals.

“Prince Henry of Prussia was touring the country,” Van Dorn explained in a rich voice softened by the faintest of Irish accents. “After all the assassinations in Europe, who knew if some anarchist or homicidal crank might take a potshot at him? The Germans had battalions of their own agents, of course, plus the Secret Service on loan from the Treasury Department, but they hired us, along with local cops, rail dicks to guard his trains, and some of the lesser private agencies. Turned into a regular Chinese fire drill: thirteen varieties of detectives were covering Henry, most blissfully unaware of one another’s identity. He was lucky to get home alive before some sorry Pinkerton shot him by mistake.”

“What did you mean the Germans’ ‘own agents’?”

“Foreign consulates import their secret police to shadow their countrymen who live or travel in America, keeping an eye on criminals and anarchists who might go back to Europe and make trouble.”

Isaac Bell said, “I understand that German consulates also field spies disguised as legitimate military and commercial attachés.”

“As do the British, French, Austrians, Italians, Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese. Why did you ask about the contract?”

“Do they also have dealings with local criminals?”

“Ah, that’s where you’re headed… I wouldn’t read a lot into ‘dealings with local criminals.’ The consuls and vice-consuls stationed in the field are not what the Germans call hoffähig—gents, to the manner born—compared to the aristo diplomats in the Washington embassies. Consuls and vice-consuls mix it up with businessmen and cops and all sorts of troublemakers that traveling foreigners run into.”

Bell seemed to change the subject. “I received several cables from Art Curtis.”

Van Dorn frowned. “At your instigation, Curtis is pestering me to authorize hefty expenditures for information about the inner workings of Krieg Rüstungswerk GmbH. Information about something that no one has seen fit to inform me of yet,” Van Dorn added tartly. “Leaving the proprietor of this detective agency to speculate whether he will be the last to know what’s going on, and whether it has anything to do with that fire on the Mauretania, or that shootout on Pier 54, or the rumor that two or three people fell off the ship you happened to be sailing in,