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

no Wall Street interests in the Artists Syndicate?”

“Isaac! You are talking to Andrew Rubenoff. When the Messiah comes, he’ll ask me to recommend a stockbroker.” He sobered quickly. “I don’t mean to offer false hope. Wall Street was easy. Abroad is much more complicated. I’ve already started, but I can’t deliver such fast results.”

Bell heard the clatter of a troop of horsemen in the street, not a usual sound in downtown Los Angeles. He looked down from the window again. Twenty actors dressed as cowboys in white hats and bare-chested, war-painted Indians were trotting by, bound, it appeared, for picture taking in nearby Elysian Park. He watched them pass, his brow furrowed in thought. Then he picked up the Kellogg intercommunicating telephone.

“Send an apprentice.”

One came instantly. It was the kid wearing the lavender bow tie. “Mike, transmit a wire on the private line to Texas Walt Hatfield. The Houston office will know where to find him.”

The kid whipped out pad and pencil. “Yes, sir, Mr. Bell. What’s the message?”

COME LA.

SEEK EMPLOYMENT WITH IMPERIAL FILM AS COWBOY PLAYER.

“Go on, Mike. That’s all.”

“Should I sign it ‘BELL’?”

“Sign it ‘ISAAC.’”

Mike Adams ran out.

Andrew Rubenoff raised an inquiring eyebrow.

Bell said, “Walt Hatfield rode with the Texas Rangers before he joined Van Dorn. He’ll make a believable cowboy looking for work as an extra in Wild West dramas. Heck, they might make him a Western star. He looks like he was carved from cactus.”

“I presume that Texas Walt is an old friend?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Sometimes we need an old friend on the premises.”

“Maybe so. But what I need most is a crackerjack detective inside Imperial Film.”

“What can one detective do? Imperial is an enormous company with four hundred hands.”

“He won’t be the only one.”

BELL WIRED GRADY FORRER ON the Van Dorn private telegraph, inquiring what progress he had made with Imperial’s bankers.

The redoubtable head of the Research department wired back:

MY BOYS ARE DIGGING DEEP.

REMEMBER BANKS LIKE SECRETS.

HOPEFUL MORE SOON.

SORRY ABOUT ART. GOOD MAN.

Isaac Bell replied:

CONCENTRATE GERMAN OVERSEAS

MERCHANT BANKS WITH ARMY TIES.

LOOK FOR KRIEG-IMPERIAL

CONNECTION.

PAULINE GRANDZAU WOKE UP IN A HAYSTACK with four tines of a pitchfork inches from her face. The steel was shiny from use and recently sharpened. Three of the tines tapered to a needle point. The fourth was bent as if the farmer had accidently hit a rock shortly before finding her in his hay.

She asked herself, What is the best thing possible at this moment?

The best thing was that her disguise worked. She didn’t look like a girl. She looked like a boy, a tough Berlin factory boy in a cloth cap and a rough woolen jacket and trousers. She had traded her dress, her coat, and her beautiful hat last night with her friend Hilda for Hilda’s brother’s things. Five groschen from the marks Detective Curtis gave her had bought the brother’s rucksack. It held dry socks, a wool jumper, an apple and biscuits (which she had already eaten), a Strand magazine, a map of France and Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs purchased in a railroad station, and Detective Curtis’s gun.

Best of all, her disguise worked so well that the farmer was frightened. The haystack was behind his barn. There was a dense wood across the field, and beyond the wood were the railroad tracks, which brought tramps and gypsies and troublemakers from Berlin.

Pauline asked herself, now what? What would Sherlock Holmes do when his disguise worked? She forced her voice low and in guttural tones asked, “Why are you pointing your pitchfork at me?”

“Who are you?” asked the farmer. What would Sherlock Holmes do? The answer: Sherlock Holmes would observe everything, not just the steel tines in her face. The farmer was young, she saw. This was not the farmer, but the farmer’s son.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you pointing that at me? What kind of German are you? Have you no shame?”

The boy blinked. “But what are you doing here?”

“I won’t tell until you move that thing away from my face.”

He lowered the pitchfork.

Pauline climbed to her feet, taking her time, observing. His legs were short. Hers were longer. She could run faster. She saw a bulge in his jacket and white cloth poking from his pocket. It was a bundle a mother would pack. “I’m hungry,” she growled. “Do you have food?”

He pulled it from his pocket, and she smelled ham. It was wrapped in a piece of buttered bread. She bit hungrily into it, two enormous, delicious bites.

“Hans!” a man shouted. “What are you doing there?”

It could only be Hans’s father. And he would not be fooled.

She ran for the wood through which she had felt her way from the railroad. It was still dark, and the train she was clinging to had suddenly rumbled through a switch and stopped on a siding, shorn of its locomotive, which then had steamed back toward Berlin.

She heard the farmers shouting behind her. “Catch him!” the father yelled. Hans was scampering as fast as he could on his short legs, and the father was limping on a cane.

Ahead through the trees Pauline saw the siding and on it the single railcar on which she had escaped from Berlin, but which the train had dropped. She ran past it and jumped onto the main line. Then she ran on the crossties until her legs ached and her lungs were burning and the blood was pounding in her head so loudly that she couldn’t hear the speeding train behind her.

IN GRIFFITH PARK, A WILDERNESS in the hills north of Los Angeles, Jay Tarses complained to the petite dark-haired woman who served as his mistress and business manager, “I want to go back to New Jersey.”

“Jersey? Are you nuts? Best thing we ever did was beat it to California. It’s beautiful here. The sun has shined all day. You’ve already exposed eight hundred feet of