tired military intelligence officer in the eye. The Briton, at least, ought to know that the days of romantic cavalry charges were long dead. Then he widened his commanding gaze to encompass the Germans and said to all, “Before you resort to war, I recommend you observe closely the effects of up-to-date machine guns. If you gents can’t sort out your differences, you’ll turn Europe into a slaughterhouse.”
“Are you in the arms trade, Mr. Bell?” asked Wagner.
“Insurance.”
“Oh, really? May I ask what firm?”
“Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock.”
“Venerable firm,” Lord Strone rumbled. “My solicitors engage them for my American holdings. But tell me, old chap, is it common for insurance men to observe the effects of modern machine guns?”
“We number among our clients Connecticut and Massachusetts arms factories,” Bell answered smoothly. “And by extension, factories with whom they conduct business abroad. Vickers, of course, in England,” he said to Strone, and to Schultz, “Krieg Rüstungswerk in Germany. Are you familiar with Krieg?”
“Only by reputation,” Hermann Wagner answered, as the Chimney Baron glanced aside.
“What is Krieg’s reputation?”
“Innovative,” Hermann Wagner interrupted, again. “Full of get-up-and-go, as Americans would say.”
3
Arthur Curtis, who manned the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s one-room Berlin field office, was a short, rotund Coloradan. With a quick, sunny smile, a friendly glint in his blue eyes, and a potbelly straining his vest, Art Curtis looked less like a first-class private investigator than a prosperous liquor salesman.
He got busy on Beiderbecke and Lynds the instant he received Bell’s marconigram. It was in his nature to get right to it, but in the case of Isaac Bell, he would never forget that when his old partner Glenn Irvine was killed by the Butcher Bandit, it had been Bell, shot twice in that gun battle, who paid from his own pocket to look after the dead detective’s aged mother.
Curtis had operated in Berlin less than a year and was still developing the network of contacts — in government, business, the military, police, and criminals — that he would need to raise the field office to Van Dorn standards. He made swift progress nonetheless, establishing that Professor Franz Bismark Biederbecke held a prestigious chair at Vienna’s Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute and that Clyde Lynds’s multiple degrees confirmed that he was the genius his mentor had proclaimed him to be.
But he ran smack into a stone wall when he popped his first question about the munitions trust. A policeman he had cultivated, a middle-ranked detective, fell silent on the telephone. Curtis listened to the wires hiss, wondering why the sudden reticence. Finally, the policeman said, “It could be dangerous.”
“What could be dangerous?”
“When Krieg Rüstungswerk GmbH hears that you are asking questions, it will be very dangerous.”
Threatening Arthur Curtis was a surefire way to get his dander up. “Is that so?”
“That is so, Herr Private Detective,” said the German. “I have kept you far too long on the telephone. Good day, sir.”
Arthur Curtis returned the earpiece to his telephone, took out his favorite pistol, a finely crafted lightweight Browning 1899 that fit his small hand, and broke it down and cleaned it to clear his mind. A sharp knock at the door alerted him to trouble.
“I told you,” he said, without looking up as the door opened, “go away.”
“I am here for your own good,” Pauline Grandzau replied, stepping in uninvited and draping the coat and hat she had already taken off on the clothes tree. “You need me.”
Art Curtis ground his teeth. He had come to think of her as Pauline the Plague.
“For the last time: I do not need a girl in this office. Even if I did, which I don’t, I would not need a girl who is only seventeen years old and is probably lying about her actual age which is plausibly sixteen or less.”
“Every great detective needs an apprentice.”
Curtis looked up, wearily. This had been going on for weeks. She was standing there with that same hopeful smile on her freckled face, a skinny little German student with yellow braids, bright blue eyes, and the moxie of a Berlin street fighter.
“I’m not a great detective,” said Curtis, who could play disguises with the best of them. He wheeled out a favorite: roughhewn Westerner. “I’m not that fancy Sherlock Holmes you’re always reading about. I’m just a working stiff. That lets me off the hook.”
“It is your duty to society to take an apprentice. How else will the young learn?”
“I don’t believe in girl detectives. And I’m not running a charity for society. Go away.”
She had already moved closer, edging up behind him, peering over his shoulder at the papers on his desk. Lots of luck reading Van Dorn cipher, he thought.