Semmler jumped to the nearest furnace and opened the door.
49
“Here,” Semmler shouted. “In here.”
Bell could see the bed of coals glowing yellow. Red flame rippled over their incandescent surface. From six feet away the heat was unbearable, and as they dragged him toward it, it grew hotter. A corner of Bell’s mind stood aside as if he were looking down on the tableau of the trimmers holding him and the Acrobat urging them on. They would not be able to fit him through the furnace door sideways. They would have to feed him into the fire either head- or feetfirst. They would have to let go of his arms or his legs to align him. But to let go would be to let him fight back, and so before they let go, they would have to incapacitate him by breaking some bones.
“Headfirst!” said Semmler, picking up a slice bar. He raised it high, his eyes fixed on Bell’s arms.
For a single heartbeat the men holding him were distracted by having to maneuver in the cramped space. Isaac Bell contracted every muscle in his body, ripped one leg and one arm free, and exploded in a flurry of kicks and punches. A kick caught the trimmer who was holding his other leg in the face, cracking his nose, and he let go with a cry. Bell’s fist landed solidly. The man who had been holding his arm fell backwards. His head struck the rim of the firebox opening, and he screamed as his hair burst into flame. Desperately trying to escape the fire, he banged his brow on the rim of the furnace mouth and fell deeper into the coals, his head in the furnace, his body thrashing on the deck.
Bell was already trying to roll beyond the range of Semmler’s slice bar, which hit the deck an inch from his head, scattering sparks. He leaped up and dodged a wild swing, then rounded unexpectedly on the trimmer whose nose he had broken, who was creeping up behind him, and dropped him with a punch that smashed his jaw.
He spun around, reeling on his feet. “Just us, Semmler.”
Christian Semmler flashed his dazzling smile. “First you’ll have to catch me.”
He crouched, sprang up, caught the bottom rung of the ladder that rose up the ventilator shaft that shared the interior of the No. 4 funnel, and pulled himself up effortlessly. Bell jumped for the ladder and went after him. It was 220 feet to the top of the stack, and in the first hundred Bell realized he would not catch the man until he ran out of ladder. For if anything rang true about Semmler’s nickname, he climbed like a monkey.
Nearing the top, Bell saw daylight silhouette Semmler, who was clinging to the upper rim of the funnel. Smoke from the three forward funnels was streaming over him blackening his face and hair. His green eyes gleamed eerily within that dark frame. Then his teeth flashed.
“Thank you for joining me,” he smiled. “Now I have you where I want you.” He folded back his sleeve, revealing the leather gauntlet that held the braided wire with which he had strangled so many. It was Bell’s first close look at it, and he saw a lead weight on the end of the cable. Semmler straightened his arm suddenly, and the weight drew six feet of wire from its spool and wrapped it around one of the steel stays stiffening the funnel top.
Bell lunged suddenly and reached for the man’s foot.
The Acrobat moved just as swiftly, eluding Bell’s grasp and launching himself off the ladder to the other side of the ventilator shaft, where he hooked an elbow over the rim and smiled down on Bell.
“The man who falls two hundred and twenty feet to the bottom of the ship will not be the man who learned to fly in the circus.”
With that, Semmler used his elbow to flip over the rim and disappear.
Bell climbed to the top of the ladder and jumped across the ventilator. He caught the rim with both hands, pulled himself over the top, and peered down through hot smoke into the soot-blackened uptake that exhausted No. 4 boiler room’s furnaces. As it shared the funnel with the ventilator they had climbed up, it was only ten feet in diameter.
Semmler crouched with bird-like grace on a foothold several feet down.
“Now when you fall,” he taunted, “you will fall into the furnace.”
Bell surveyed Semmler’s new position. The foothold, a steel shelf less than a foot deep, circled the entire uptake. There were handhol
ds welded just beneath the top rim, and Semmler’s eyes blazed again as he chose his next landing. The cable shot from his gauntlet, snagged a handhold, and the Acrobat flew, while launching a deadly kick at Bell’s head.
Isaac Bell jumped at the same time, landed beside him on the foothold, grabbed the nearest handhold, and punched Semmler in the stomach as hard as he could, staggering the man. “I was in the circus, too.”
But he had not reckoned with Semmler’s superhuman speed, nor his capacity to shrug off pain. In a move too quick to anticipate, Semmler flipped the cable off the rung and around Isaac Bell’s neck.
Bell drove punch after punch into Semmler’s torso, but even the hardest blow did nothing to relieve the pressure that was suddenly cutting blood and air from his brain. White lights stormed before his eyes, and he felt his strength ebb. A roar in his ears smothered the pounding of his heart. Gripping a handhold with the remaining strength in his left hand, he rammed Semmler with his knee, and the German slipped from the foothold. The only thing that kept him from falling was the wire stretched between his wrist and Isaac Bell’s neck.
* * *
With the man’s entire weight hanging from his throat, Bell could barely see. He felt as if he had not drawn breath in a year. His hand was slipping.
“Interesting situation, Detective. When you die, I’ll fall. But you’ll die first.”
“No,” gasped Bell. His hand moved convulsively.
“No, Detective?” Semmler mocked. “No deeper last words, than ‘no’ before we plunge into the fires? Speak now or forever hold your peace. What was that, you say?”
“Thank you, Mike Malone.”