The Wrecker (Isaac Bell 2)

Emma sank to her knees, sobbing over Kincaid’s body. Despite himself, Bell was moved. He asked, “Will you be all right here?”

“I will survive,” she said. “I always do.”

Emma Comden retreated to her piano and began to play a sad, slow rag. As Bell knelt to hoist Kincaid’s body onto his shoulder, he recognized a melancholy improvisation on a song she had played long ago on a special in the Oakland Terminal, Adaline Shepherd’s “Pickles and Peppers.”

Bell carried the Wrecker’s body down the stairs and out the tower door and into the snow. Across the courtyard, he opened the single bolt he had left in place, pushed through the massive gate and along the wall to where he had left the sled. He strapped it into the canvas litter, put on his skis, and started down the mountain.

It was a somewhat easier run than the long, brutal slog across the valley, three miles of steep but regular slopes. And though the snow fell thicker than ever, navigation was a simple matter of going downhill. But, as Hans had warned him, the slope tilted suddenly much more sharply for the last thousand yards to the village. Tiring, starting to lose control of his legs, he fell. He got up, righted the sled, and got close enough to see the railroad station lights before he fell again. Back on his skis, the sled upright, he descended the last two hundred yards without incident and stopped behind a shed a short way from the station.

“Halt!”

A man was watching from the doorway. Bell recognized the trench coat and high officer’s visor cap of the Geheime Staatspolizei.

“You look straight out of vaudeville.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Archie Abbott. “And I’ll take our friend to the baggage car.” He wheeled a wood coffin from the shed. “Do we have to worry about him having enough air to breathe?”

“No.”

They heaved Kincaid, still wrapped in the litter, into it and screwed the lid shut.

“Train on time?”

“It takes more than a blizzard to delay a German railroad. Got your ticket? I’ll see you at the border.”

A halo of snow whirled by a rotary

plow in front of the train sparkled in the locomotive’s headlight as it steamed into the station. Bell boarded, showed his ticket. Only when he sank gratefully into a plush seat in a warm first-class compartment did he realize how cold and weary he was and how much he ached.

Yet he reveled in a powerful sense of joy and accomplishment. The Wrecker was finished, run to ground for his crimes. Charles Kincaid would kill no more. Bell asked himself whether Emma Comden was sufficiently punished for helping him by spying on Osgood Hennessy. Had he let her go scot-free? The answer was no. She would never be free until she escaped the prison of her heart. And that, Isaac Bell knew better than most men, would never happen.

An hour later, the train slowed at Mittenwald. The conductors came through loudly warning passengers to have their papers ready for inspection.

“I came for the skiing,” said Bell, when asked by the border guard.

“What is this ‘luggage’ in the baggage car?”

“An old friend crashed into a tree. I was asked to accompany his body home.”

“Show me!”

Soldiers armed with Karabiner 98b rifles snapped to attention in the corridor and trailed closely as Bell followed the border guard to the baggage car. Archie Abbott was sitting on the coffin. He was smoking a Sturm cigarette, a nice touch Bell admired, as the Sturm brand was owned by the Nazi Party.

Abbott did not bother to stand for the border guard. Gray eyes cold, face a mask of disdain, he barked in flawless, curt German, “The victim was a friend of the Reich.”

The guard clicked heels, saluted, returned Bell’s papers, and shooed away the riflemen. Bell stayed in the baggage car. Half an hour later, they got off at Innsbruck. Austrian porters loaded the coffin into a hearse that was waiting on the station platform, accompanied by an embassy limousine. Both vehicles flew American flags.

An assistant charge d‘affaires shook hands with Bell. “His excellency, the Ambassador, sends his regrets that he couldn’t greet you personally. Hard to get around these days. Old football injuries, you know.”

“And half a ton of blubber,” muttered Abbott. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, grappling with the Great Depression, had defanged the obstacle of Preston Whiteway’s reactionary newspapers by appointing Marion’s old boss Ambassador to Austria.

Bell laid his hand on the coffin. “Tell Ambassador Whiteway that the Van Dorn Detective Agency appreciates his help and give him my personal thanks … Wait one moment!”

Bell took a delivery label from deep inside his jacket, licked the back, and glued it on the coffin. It read:

VAN DORN DETECTIVE AGENCY

CHICAGO