The Thief (Isaac Bell 5)

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.”