Five minutes before its scheduled departure from Chicago, a slab-sided Bellamore Armored Steel Bank Car bearing the name of the Continental & Commercial National Bank rumbled on solid rubber tires into the Dearborn Station’s train shed. It stopped beside the Golden State. Shotgun-toting guards unloaded an oversized strongbox into the express car.
The strongbox, as long as a coffin, was addressed to the Los Angeles Trust and Savings Bank at 561 South Spring Street. The destination, and the closemouthed guards who wrestled it into the express car, guaranteed that it was packed with gold, negotiable bearer bonds, banknotes, or a strikingly valuable combination of all three. A friendly remark by the express car messenger, that when he was recently in Los Angeles the bank’s building on South Spring Street was still under construction, was met with cold stares and a curt “Sign here.”
The express messenger, Pete Stock, a cool customer with a well-oiled Smith & Wesson on his hip, was nearing retirement with every expectation of receiving a fine Waltham watch for brave service to the company. Having guarded innumerable shipments of specie, paper money, and ingots of silver and gold — and having shot it out more than once with gunmen intending to “transact business with the express car”—he checked carefully that the paperwork the brusque Bellamore guard handed him tallied with his manifest, and then he signed.
Isaac Bell sent and received telegrams at every station stop.
At Kansas City, Kansas, a wire from Marion, who never wasted money on telegraphed words, read:
GRIFFITH AWAITS CLYDE.
BRIDE MISSES GROOM.
Griffith, similarly parsimonious as well as courteous, wired:
EXPECTANT.
Pondering the Acrobat, Bell wired Harry Warren in New York:
MISSED A BET? BRUNO DIDN’T
TELL BROTHER FRANK WHO HIRED
HIM. BUT DID BRUNO TELL HIS GIRLFRIEND?
Harry Warren’s response caught up with Bell the next night. The train was taking on an additional “helper” locomotive to climb the mountains, seventy miles east of the Arizona Territory border at Deming, New Mexico Territory.
BRUNO TOLD GIRLFRIEND OF COAL STOKER LIKE APE.
SOUND FAMILIAR?
Familiar. And odd. The same man seemed to be everywhere, and it occurred to Isaac Bell that the Acrobat was an unusually deadly type rarely encountered in the underworld — a criminal mastermind who did his own dirty work. Whether outlaw or foreign spy, lone operators were elusive, being immune to betrayal by inept subordinates.
Bell chewed on this while he watched a precision rail-yard ballet performed by the Deming brakemen coupling on the helper. A thought struck him like a bolt of lightning. Despite the military precision of the Acrobat’s attack that had almost succeeded in kidnapping Lynds and Beiderbecke off the Mauretania, if he was a soldier, the Acrobat was no ordinary soldier.
Military men were not by nature lone operators. Soldiers accepted discipline from above and dispensed orders below. The Acrobat may have been a soldier once, but he wasn’t one anymore. Or if he still was, then he had carved out a unique and exclusive niche above and beyond the supervision and encumbrance of an army.
Bell cabled Art Curtis in Berlin:
ACROBAT? MAYBE CIRCUS PERFORMER? MAYBE SOLDIER?
NOW? BUSINESSMAN WITH KRIEG RUSTUNGSWERK GMBH???
Bell was painfully aware that it was expecting a lot to believe a one-man field office could unearth facts to support such vague speculation — even with as superb a detective as Art Curtis — so he wired the same message to Archie Abbott in New York. And then, just as the Golden State Limited sounded the double-whistle “Ahead,” Bell fired off another copy to Joseph Van Dorn in Washington.
A train wrecker wielded a track wrench by starlight. He was twenty-five miles west of Deming and ten miles from the Continental Divide, where the grade climbed steeply on the Southern Pacific line over which the Rock Island trains ran between El Paso and the West Coast. He was unbolting a fishplate that held the butt ends of two rails together.
His partner was prying up spikes that fastened the steel rails to the wooden ties. With every bolt and spike removed, the strong cradle built to support hundred-ton locomotives was rendered weaker and weaker. Substantial weight on the rails would now spread them apart. The rails did not have to move far. A single inch would make all the difference between safe passage and eternity.
But to ensure success, when the wreckers were done removing bolts and spikes, they reeved a longer bolt through a hole in the side of the rail that had carried a fishtail bolt and fastened it to the last link of a logging chain. They had already laid the chain out to its full length along an arroyo, a dry creek bed deep enough to hide the Rolls-Royce touring car they had stolen from a wealthy tourist visiting Lordsburg.
They were just in time. A haze of locomotive headlamps was brightening in the east.
A piercing two-finger whistle alerted their man, who was farther up the hill with the horses. The hostler whistled back. Message received — he would commence buckling cinches and loading saddlebags bulging with food and water for the long trek to Mexico.
The wreckers started the auto and eased it ahead to take the slack out of the chain. Then they waited, the soft mutter of the Rolls’s finely turned motor gradually drowned out by the deepening thunder of twin Pacifics pulling in tandem. When the train was too close to stop even if the engineer happened to see his rail suddenly break loose, they throttled the Rolls-Royce ahead. The rail resisted. The tires spun in sand. But they only had to pull one inch.
Had The Golden State Limited been distinguishing herself at her usual mile-a-minute clip, the entire train would have jumped the tracks, rolled down the embankment, been set ablaze by the coals in her firebox, and burned to the wheels. But the wreckers were old hands in the sabotage line, and they had deliberately chosen the heavy grade rising up from Demings toward the Divide. Even with her helper locomotive, the train was barely doing thirty miles an hour when they ripped the rail from under her.
Locomotives, tenders, and the first express car crashed eight inches between the spreading rails and crunched along the ties, splintering wood and scattering ballast. For what on board the train seemed like an eternity, she skidded along in a cacophony of screeching steel.
The coupler between the express car and the mail car parted. Electric cables, plumbing pipes, and pneumatic hoses tore loose. With air pressure gone, the rearmost cars’ air brakes clenched their shoes on the wheels. Slowed by the additional drag, the Golden State’s mail car, diner, and sleeping cars finally ground to a stop, half on the tracks and half on the ballast, still upright though leaning at a frightening angle, and plunged into darkness.
23
When the lights went out, the German whom Professor Beiderbecke had dubbed the Acrobat climbed out of the Continental & Commercial National Bank of Chicago strongbox. Express messenger Pete Stock had already located a flashlight, but he hesitated a fatal, disbelieving half second before reaching for the Smith & Wesson on his gun belt.
The Acrobat spooled a thin braided cable from a leather gauntlet buckled to his powerful wrist, looped it around Stock’s neck, and strangled him. Then he went hunting for Clyde Lynds, confident that his people had everything in place to execute a swift and orderly escape: across the Mexican border on horseback, a special train to Veracruz, a North German Lloyd freighter, and home to Prussia, where the inventor would be persuaded to rebuild his machine.