“Don’t be ridiculous. One passenger doesn’t eat two meals.”
“I meant so you might have dinner, too.”
“I’ll eat yours.”
“Yes, of course. I see.” He heard Donar walk from the bathroom into his bedroom.
“Wipe up that coal dust before the bath steward sees it.”
Hermann Wagner got down on his hands and knees to scrub his own bathroom, something he had not done since he was twelve years old, in the strict boarding school his father had sent him to “make him hard.”
He did not mind. It was an honor to be among the elite diplomats, bankers, and merchants drafted into the Donar Plan. Admittedly, he was no soldier. Nor was he privy to the details of the military scheme. But he could travel freely in the United States of America while conducting legitimate business and mingle in the highest echelons.
Der Tag was coming. Victory depended not only on soldiers. There would be no victory unless a patriot like Hermann Wagner did his part to persuade Americans to join the war on Germany’s side — or at least stay out of it while Germany destroyed Russia, France, and Britain.
10
At dawn the newly wed Isaac Bell slipped silently out of bed, kissed his sleeping bride softly on her brow, dressed quietly, and went out on the promenade deck. It was bitter cold, and the sea was making up again. Long, evenly spaced rollers marched out of the northwest. The sky was clear but for jagged clouds stacked on the horizon like ice-capped mountains. The wind was strong, and the smoke from Mauretania’s tall red funnels streamed flat behind her.
He went straight to the point on the starboard side that the man who jumped from the boat deck would have passed as he fell. Somehow, Bell suspected, he had managed to land safely on the promenade deck — although that did not seem possible, as the boat deck was not set back and the promenade deck did not thrust farther out. But Beiderbecke had called him an acrobat.
Bell paced the area, his eyes roaming. Assume, he thought, that the Akrobat was a real acrobat. Assume he was a trained circus tumbler or trapeze artist. Assume he was extraordinarily strong, astonishingly agile, with no fear of heights and nerves of steel.
Bell smiled, suddenly gripped by a fond memory. He had run away from home to join the circus when he was a boy. Before his father caught up with him in a Mississippi fairground, he had befriended animal tamers, clowns, horseback performers, and especially the acrobats, whom he revered for their bravery and their strength.
Assume this Akrobat possessed every power of a professional big top performer who had honed his skills since childhood, as circus stars did. Surely, from what Bell had seen the night they sailed, the man was indeed strong and agile, with no fear of heights and nerves of steel. Was it possible for such a man to jump off the boat deck, drop ten feet down the sheer side of the ship, and swing back aboard on the promenade deck?
The answer was no.
Bell leaned over the railing and looked straight down at the water. Then he looked up the side of the Marconi house. As he had told Archie, the nearest lifeboat hanging from davits beside the boat deck was thirty feet from where the Acrobat jumped the railing. A quick count of boats revealed something he had never really thought about before. They had room for only five hundred people, while Mauretania carried three thousand…
Suddenly Isaac Bell bolted to the nearest companionway and bounded up the stairs. Would he have noticed in the dark if the Acrobat had jumped up rather than down? Up to one of the many stays and cables rising to the sundeck, immediately above the boat deck, where the Marconi house sat. Would he have seen him grip a line and scramble up to the sundeck?
Bell ran along the boat deck past the library windows that had backlighted the scene that night and saw immediately that the answer was no. There were no stays remotely near enough for a man to jump to. Therefore, if the Acrobat hadn’t fallen into the sea, he had to have landed on the deck below the boat deck. Also impossible. Baffled, Isaac Bell wandered slowly back down to the promenade deck.
Two seamen were smoothing the wood railing with rasps and sandpaper.
“Good morning, sir.”
“Good morning, gents. Up early?”
“Soon as we can see to work,” said one.
The other said, “If we let wear and tear go, the ship would be a bloomin’ embarrassment. Look at this gouge! Fairly tore the rail in half.” He stepped back to show Bell their repair of what was actually the minutest gouge in the teak, which only an eagle-eyed bosun would notice.
Oddly, the gouge traced the full twelve-inch curve of the wood from inboard to outboard as if something flexible had wrapped around it. “What do you suppose caused that?” Bell asked.
“Some bloomin’ swell, begging your pardon, sir, must have whacked it with his walking stick.”
“Or sword,” ventured his mate.
“Sword?” the first echoed derisively.
“The grain of the wood is cut.”
“It ain’t a cut. It’s a gouge.”
“You can call it a gouge if you like, mate, but I say he whacked it with a sword.”
“Where the bloomin’ hell would a First Cabin nob get his paws on a sword?”
“Concealed in his walking stick. Wouldn’t you agree, sir?” he added, enlisting support when he saw Isaac Bell studying the gouge intently.
“Wire,” Isaac Bell said.
“Beg your pardon, sir?”
“Wire. A thin braided-wire cable.”
“Well, yes, it could be braided cable, sir. On the other hand, you might ask where would the swell get a braided cable and why would he whack the rail with it? Unless he was an out-and-out vandal. Not that we don’t get the odd one or two of them aboard— You’ll recall, Jake, there was that Frenchman.”
“What do you expect?”
“An acrobat,” Bell said, half aloud. Had the Acrobat somehow grappled the railing with a flexible wire cable?
“Acrobat? No, sir, begging your pardon, that Frenchie was no acrobat.”
“A German acrobat.”
The seamen traded baffled looks.”Well, if you say so, sir.”
“An acrobat it is, sir.”
As Bell hurried away, he heard whispers behind him. “What the blazes was he rattlin’ on about?”
“Acrobats.”
“Next’ll be monkeys.”
Isaac Bell walked faster. He could imagine that a superb athlete, a muscular, lithe acrobat, could stop his fall by hooking a thin cable over the railing. But he could not imagine where the man could suddenly get the cable. Nor how he had secured it in the split second that he hurtled past the railing. Nor why the wire didn’t slip through his hands. Or cut him to the bone if he wrapped it around his wrist.
Bell passed a barrier into Second Class, said good morning to the seaman Captain Turner had assigned to stand guard outside Clyde Lynds’s cabin door, and knocked loudly. “It’s Isaac Bell, Clyde. Open up.”
Lynds let him into the cramped, windowless space he had shared with the Professor. He appeared to have slept in his shirt and trousers.
“You look a mess,” said Bell.
“Didn’t sleep a wink. The Professor was a good man. A kind man. He didn’t deserve dying that way.”
“You wouldn’t either,” said Bell.
“Am I next?”
“Make a clean breast of it, Clyde. Your life’s in danger. Who are they? What do they want?”
“I swear I don’t know them.”
“Does it have to do with you deserting the German Army?”
“I didn’t desert. I was never in the Army. I’ve never been a soldier.”