“What can one detective do? Imperial is an enormous company with four hundred hands.”

“He won’t be the only one.”

BELL WIRED GRADY FORRER ON the Van Dorn private telegraph, inquiring what progress he had made with Imperial’s bankers.

The redoubtable head of the Research department wired back:

MY BOYS ARE DIGGING DEEP.

REMEMBER BANKS LIKE SECRETS.

HOPEFUL MORE SOON.

SORRY ABOUT ART. GOOD MAN.

Isaac Bell replied:

CONCENTRATE GERMAN OVERSEAS

MERCHANT BANKS WITH ARMY TIES.

LOOK FOR KRIEG-IMPERIAL

CONNECTION.

32

PAULINE GRANDZAU WOKE UP IN A HAYSTACK with four tines of a pitchfork inches from her face. The steel was shiny from use and recently sharpened. Three of the tines tapered to a needle point. The fourth was bent as if the farmer had accidently hit a rock shortly before finding her in his hay.

She asked herself, What is the best thing possible at this moment?

The best thing was that her disguise worked. She didn’t look like a girl. She looked like a boy, a tough Berlin factory boy in a cloth cap and a rough woolen jacket and trousers. She had traded her dress, her coat, and her beautiful hat last night with her friend Hilda for Hilda’s brother’s things. Five groschen from the marks Detective Curtis gave her had bought the brother’s rucksack. It held dry socks, a wool jumper, an apple and biscuits (which she had already eaten), a Strand magazine, a map of France and Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs purchased in a railroad station, and Detective Curtis’s gun.

Best of all, her disguise worked so well that the farmer was frightened. The haystack was behind his barn. There was a dense wood across the field, and beyond the wood were the railroad tracks, which brought tramps and gypsies and troublemakers from Berlin.

Pauline asked herself, now what? What would Sherlock Holmes do when his disguise worked? She forced her voice low and in guttural tones asked, “Why are you pointing your pitchfork at me?”

“Who are you?” asked the farmer. What would Sherlock Holmes do? The answer: Sherlock Holmes would observe everything, not just the steel tines in her face. The farmer was young, she saw. This was not the farmer, but the farmer’s son.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you pointing that at me? What kind of German are you? Have you no shame?”

The boy blinked. “But what are you doing here?”

“I won’t tell until you move that thing away from my face.”

He lowered the pitchfork.

Pauline climbed to her feet, taking her time, observing. His legs were short. Hers were longer. She could run faster. She saw a bulge in his jacket and white cloth poking from his pocket. It was a bundle a mother would pack. “I’m hungry,” she growled. “Do you have food?”