The Thief (Isaac Bell 5)

“Red one, if I recall?”

“Red as fire.”

“How’s she running?”

“Like a top. Small world, isn’t it? I ran into a traveling man the other day. We got to talking about autos, and when I told him about mine he mentioned he knew a fellow who handled the line. That could have been you.”

“Probably was me. What’s his name?”

“German fellow. Fritz Wunderlich.”

“Fritz! Yes, we just saw him in— Where’d we see him?”

“Chicago?”

“Chicago it was. Isn’t he a character? ‘Mit schlag’!”

“‘Time is money.’”

“‘Eight days in the veek.’”

“Pretty good salesman, I gather,” said Bell.

“Valuable man. No question. Valuable man.”

“Lucky for him he’s got that smile,” the cereal salesman chortled.

“What do you mean?” asked Bell.

“Well, you know… Fritz is a heck of a worker, but he sort of looks like a monkey.”

“Sort of?” snickered Jake. “I’ll say he looks like an ape in the jungle.”

“You mean his long arms?” asked Bell.

“Arms like a monkey. Face like one, too.”

“He didn’t really look like a monkey,” Bell protested, mildly.

“He does to me.”

Isaac Bell drew his notebook from his pocket and opened his Waterman fountain pen. “No. Fritz looks more like this.” He tried to draw a man’s face with a prominent brow. “Sort of like this. I’m not much of a hand at drawing.”

The cereal salesman took out his order book and his pen. “No, more like this.”

“Neither of you can draw worth a darn,” laughed the Gillette man. He opened his order book and moved his pen over it, laboriously. “He looks like this.”

The cereal salesman disagreed vehemently, and Bell said, “Not one bit like that. How about you, Jake?”

Jake, the Locomobile man from Bridgeport, took out his book. Isaac Bell watched, holding his breath. Jake was his last chance to get a sketch that resembled Fritz Wunderlich. Surely one of the men at the table could draw. Jake, it turned out, possessed a modicum of artistic talent.

“Like this,” said Jake. He drew in a few quick lines a simian face with long cheeks and deep-set eyes. Then he turned his pencil on the side and shaded in a heavy brow.

The others stared. “You got him just about right, Jake,” one marveled. “That’s Fritz. Darned near.”

“I think you’re right,” Bell ventured, looking to the cereal salesman for confirmation.

“He sure does.”