The Titanic Secret (Isaac Bell 11)

That was an extremely open-ended deal, and normally Isaac would have negotiated conditions. That’s how these things worked, but he was desperate. The French fixer knew he had Bell over a barrel. Bell closed his eyes and nodded. “Done.”

16

At ten minutes to eleven later that morning, Isaac Bell stepped from an elevator and through the door to the offices of A. C. Bourgault. They occupied the sixth floor of a building on the edge of an area called La Villette, where many of the city’s stockyards and slaughterhouses were located. The air on the street carried the coppery scent of blood.

He’d bought an appropriately tweedy suit from the Le Bon Marché department store a block down the Rue de Sèvres from his hotel and wore nonprescription glasses he kept as part of a regular disguise kit in his luggage. He carried his body in a round-shouldered slouch that effectively masked his height. Since his hair darkened significantly when it was wet—what Gly might have espied back in the foothills of the Rockies—he let his naturally blond shine brightly on another dreary Parisian day.

A reception desk guarded a large room furnished with two dozen identical desks at which sat two dozen nearly identical clerks shuffling papers, typing, or fielding from the general background drone of ringing telephones. Behind were individual offices with closed doors. There were no windows, so all lighting came from glass domes attached to the ten-foot ceiling. In all, the place had a rather dim, soul-crushing atmosphere.

A heavyset receptionist with poorly bleached hair asked him his name and business in French. Bell replied in a comically accented English, “I am Dr. Dragovic. I have appointment with Herr Duchamp at eleven. Please do not disturb, because I am early. I do not mind the waiting.”

She merely shrugged and went back to the magazine she’d been thumbing through.

A minute before eleven, Bell heard the elevator chime in the lobby behind the office door and seconds later four men strode into the reception area. Bell kept his face neutral, with a hint of a smile that said he was a man of good cheer. Foster Gly eyed him hard, head to toe and back again, before dismissing him with a scowl. The detective marveled at how Gly could get such a thick neck into a shirt and manage to wrap it with a tie. With him was the twin brother of the man Bell had seen Gly shoot dead.

For a fleeting moment he wondered if there was a way to sow some sort of discord between these two, reveal to Yves Massard that Gly had murdered his brother. Since there was no proof, it was a matter of trust. Who would Massard believe, a longtime compatriot who likely consoled him for several boozy nights following Marc’s death and locked in that loyalty or an American stranger with nothing more than his word that he was telling the truth? The mere idea of it was so ridiculous that Bell banished it before it could even fully form in his mind.

The other two men were strangers. One was tall and broad-shouldered, and he was missing two fingers from his left hand. He had dark hair and a farmer’s stoic face—the face of a man that nothing and no one ever riled. By sheer size alone, Bell was certain he was Joshua Hayes Brewster. The second was a bantam of a man barely five feet two inches tall, but he did possess a pugnacious thrust to his chin and swagger to his walk.

It wasn’t until the small man’s gaze swept past Bell that he saw the spark of madness. His eyes glittered with an inner fire that looked like it was about to burn out of control. Bell immediately changed his mind. The shorter miner was Brewster. Only someone with that kind of intensity could convince eight other men to pull off something as audacious as what they were attempting.

Gly informed the secretary of his appointment. His French was accented with a Scottish burr that made it almost incomprehensible. She’d had no qualms leaving Bell in the waiting area, but she rightly decided that making the newcomer wait for even a second was not in her best interest.

She begged her leave and lurched from her desk to fetch the representative assigned to his account.

“Madame,” Bell called as she rushed by. “Please, I am to see Herr Duchamp. You tell him I am here. Da?”

She made an impatient gesture with her hand, like a bird fluttering its wing, but she also nodded. She worked her way through the bull pen and went first to one office, where she knocked and poked her head inside, and then on to an adjacent office. The same perfunctory knock, the same swinging open the door, announcing the client, closing the door again. She moved with the rote efficiency of an automaton. Soon she was back at her desk, studiously not looking at Gly, Yves, or the two miners, who stood uneasily in a cluster between her and the sofa Bell occupied. Very soon two mid-level functionaries emerged from their vaunted offices. They were older than the young men toiling at the open desks, and were balding and spread-waisted, but with a haughtiness that they could lord over the ranks of drones they themselves had emerged from a year or two previously.

There was a moment of awkward handshaking as the two parties sorted themselves out. Bell, playing the hapless Serb, even shook hands with Massard, Vernon Hall, and Joshua Hayes Brewster. Gly refused the gesture with a sneer and pushed past Bell to speak with his rep from the ship-and-expedition provisioning company. Hall did take the detective’s outstretched hand without a change of expression. Brewster’s eyebrows went up when he felt a square of paper pressed into his palm so subtly that he’d almost missed it. There was a barest pause while Bell mouthed the name Patmore, which Brewster, to his credit, didn’t acknowledge.

Duchamp led Bell back through the bull pen to his office while the others followed their representative to his. Duchamp’s office had a window, at least, behind his small, cluttered desk, but the

view was of a brick wall no more than a dozen feet away. What light filtered down to the window was anemic and gray.

The Frenchman indicated Bell could take one of the chairs in front of the desk. He was a small man with a pinched expression. “I am not comfortable with this situation. We are a reputable company.”

“Pardon me?” Bell said. “I do not understand.”

“I know you are not some Serbian naturalist. I was ordered by my superiors to help you with a task concerning the other party that is here now.”

Henri had gone for the direct approach in getting Bell this interview. On hindsight, it was for the best. Bell needed to pretend to be someone else only in front of Gly. Favreau had saved him the tedium of playing a role for an hour or two.

“Oh, I see. Good, then,” Bell replied, a little taken aback, but he recovered quickly. “You do realize large favors were exchanged by powerful people to secure your cooperation. I do have your cooperation, yes?”

“Of course,” the Frenchman replied, his voice softening and his face showing a bit more openness. “In truth, being singled out by Monsieur Michaud, the office manager, for this assignment shows the company’s faith in me.”

“There you go.” Bell smiled, putting the salaryman at ease. “Consider it an honor rather than a burden. Now, how does this process work? For them, I mean. The other party.”

“After some preliminaries, my counterpart, Monsieur Gauthier, will take the men to a tasting room, where they will sample some of our canned goods—stews, soups, and vegetables, mostly, plus our popular pastas—and a full assortment of desserts. As you may know, the process for preserving food in cans started here in France at the time of Napoléon.”

“I didn’t know that,” Bell admitted.

“After, they will enjoy samples of cured meats, and porridges that can be reconstituted on-site with a little water. I understand they are bound for the Arctic, so Gauthier will recommend foods that are high in fat and rich with kilocalories. The men will select the ones they deem the tastiest. An order will be transmitted to our warehouse at whichever port they are departing from. Workers there fill the order and put everything on pallets that can be hoisted aboard a ship.”

“And this is how you provision a large freighter?”

“More or less. It is usually company representatives who meet here and often they don’t sample much of anything since they take on more fresh stores than canned goods. A well-fed crew tends to work harder than ones with poor nutrition.”