The Thief (20 page)

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.

T
HE
“D
RUMMERS’S
T
ABLE” 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, Connecticut, front office involving accidentally switched department store deliveries of ladies’ gloves and undergarments.

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.

“Waiter! Waiter! Breakfast for Mr. Wunderlich.”

“Only time for coffee. I’m catching the train for Los Angeles.”

Fritz Wunderlich was a funny-looking fellow, with heavy brow ridges, a mighty anvil of a jaw, and long arms like a gorilla, but he had a smile that any drummer would give his eye-teeth for. It opened wide as the prairie and bright as the sun and pulled the customers in like suction from a sinking ship.

Fritz worked hard as a nailer—“Eight days in the week, thirteen months in the year”—and it paid off, judging by the cut of his funereal black suit, his immaculate linen, his fine homburg, his weighty gold watch chain, and the ten-cent polish on his shoes.

“Coffee for Fritz!”

“Mit schlag!”

“Hear that, waiter?
Mit schlag.
”

“Vat is the story I interrupt?”

The Locomobile drummer started over again, repeating the beginning about the mixed-up ladies’ gloves and undergarments. “So then the lady who received the panties gets a letter from the fellow who sent her his gift of gloves. Here’s what he wrote.”

Fritz broke in with the last line of the joke: “Whoever sees you in these vill admire my good taste and your delicate looks!”

The table roared with laughter and choruses of “That’s a good one!”

“But it’s a brand-new joke,” protested the drummer from Bridgeport. “How’d you hear it? I came direct to Chicago on the Pennsylvania Limited.”

“I heard it in ’Frisco last veek,” said Fritz.

“’Frisco? How? Did anyone else at the table ever hear it before?”

Salesmen shook their heads. “New to me, Jake.”

The youngest, a Chicago hometown fellow making big money on a line from the Gillette Safety Razor Company, had the explanation: “Electricity is faster than steam.”

“What the heck do you mean by that?” asked the Locomobile representative.

“He means,” said Fritz Wunderlich, “vile you ride the train, your joke flies to San Francisco on the telegraph vire.”

“Who can afford to telegraph jokes?”

“No one goes to the expense. But late at night when the wires are quiet and the operators have nothing else to do, they click jokes to one another.”

The Quaker Oats salesman nodded. “They know their pals by their ‘fists.’ One pal clicks another, city to city, and the jokes get passed along the wire all the way across the continent.”

“Fritz? How are things in Leipzig?”

“I am happy to say that America remains a nation of God-fearing, music-loving churchgoers, so things in Leipzig are very vell indeed. At least among the organ builders,
danke
.
Und
you, gentlemen? All are vell?”

“Very well, Fritz. Say, weren’t you trying to sell a new organ to that big church in St. Louis last time? How did that go?”

“Detroit, if I recall. And thank you, it vent O.K.”

“They bought the new organ?”

“Two!”

“Two organs for one church? Why did they buy two?”

Wunderlich’s smile warmed the table, and his response was the drummer’s anthem: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

The table roared. Salesmen slapped their thighs. Those indulging in eye-openers signaled the waiters for another round.

“Must go. Time is money.
Ja!
I almost forget. I took on a new line. Hymnals. Here, sample pages.” He opened a calfskin satchel decorated in solid brass and passed around beautifully printed single sheets.

“Onvard, Christian Soldiers,” he sang as he bundled up his things. His beautiful voice, a thrilling lyric tenor, stopped every conversation in the room. “Marching as to Var.”

The drummers took up the hymn, beating time with coffee cups and highball glasses and waving farewell to good old Fritz, who was running to catch his train.

“That is one tip-top traveling man,” said the Locomobile representative loud enough for Fritz to hear.

“‘Eight days in the veek,’” chuckled another as the German disappeared out the door. “‘Thirteen months in the year.’”

“‘Time is money!’”

“‘Mit schlag.’”

“Funny thing, though,” said the Gillette Razor man.

“What’s that?”

“I stopped in one of his firms’ piano shops in Akron. They said they couldn’t take any orders, they was all backed up.”

“You heard Fritz. Business is booming.”

“Yeah, except it weren’t the kind of shop you’d think. Dusty old place. Surly fella behind the desk looked more like the ‘floor manager’ in a saloon than a piano salesman. Hard to believe anybody ever bought anything there.”

“Maybe you just stopped by on a bad day.”

“Suppose.”

G
ENERAL
M
AJOR
C
HRISTIAN
S
EMMLER,
Imperial German Army, Division of Military Intelligence, hurried out of the Palmer House, basking in the drummers’ laughter and their warm farewells. As a child in the circus Semmler had learned from the clowns that an actor who
inhabited
an alias would never be caught out of character.

There was a “Drummers’ Table” in every fine hotel in America. In this club, “Fritz Wunderlich,” commission salesman of organs and pianos, was a brother.

“Fritz Wunderlich” could travel where he pleased.

Christian Semmler, mastermind of the Donar Plan, never had to explain himself.

I
SAAC
B
ELL AND
C
LYDE
L
YNDS CHANGED TRAINS
at Chicago to continue across the continent on the Rock Island’s  all-Pullman Golden State Limited to Los Angeles. Van Dorn detectives shadowed them so discreetly from the 20th Century’s LaSalle Street Station to the Golden State’s Dearborn Station that even Bell only spotted them twice.

Once aboard the Golden State, he asked a Van Dorn agent costumed as a conductor if they’d been followed. He was assured, categorically, no. Bell figured it was quite likely true. Joseph Van Dorn had founded the agency in Chicago. The detectives headquartered in the Palmer House were top-notch and proud of it.

T
HE
G
OLDEN
S
TATE
L
IMITED WAS
a transcontinental express that would stop only at major stations along a 2,400-mile run south and west on the low-altitude El Paso Route. A luxurious “heavyweight,” it consisted of a drawing room sleeper, a stateroom and drawing room sleeper, a stateroom car of smaller cabins—where Bell had again booked top and bottom berths—the dining car, and a buffet-library-observation car in the back of the train. Mail, baggage, and express cars rode at the front end directly behind the tender that carried coal and water for the Pacific 4-6-2 locomotive.

Five minutes before its scheduled departure from Chicago, a slab-sided Bellamore Armored Steel Bank Car bearing the name of the Continental & Commercial National Bank rumbled on solid rubber tires into the Dearborn Station’s train shed. It stopped beside the Golden State. Shotgun-toting guards unloaded an oversized strongbox into the express car.

The strongbox, as long as a coffin, was addressed to the Los Angeles Trust and Savings Bank at 561 South Spring Street. The destination, and the closemouthed guards who wrestled it into the express car, guaranteed that it was packed with gold, negotiable bearer bonds, banknotes, or a strikingly valuable combination of all three. A friendly remark by the express car messenger, that when he was recently in Los Angeles the bank’s building on South Spring Street was still under construction, was met with cold stares and a curt “Sign here.”

The express messenger, Pete Stock, a cool customer with a well-oiled Smith & Wesson on his hip, was nearing retirement with every expectation of receiving a fine Waltham watch for brave service to the company. Having guarded innumerable shipments of specie, paper money, and ingots of silver and gold—and having shot it out more than once with gunmen intending to “transact business with the express car”—he checked carefully that the paperwork the brusque Bellamore guard handed him tallied with his manifest, and then he signed.