“Where’s Fritz now?” asked Bell.

“Hope he’s not at the next table listening to this,” said Jake, and the others looked around uncomfortably.

“I’m trying to remember when I saw him,” Bell persisted. “Must have been two weeks, maybe more. Time flies. Anyone seen him lately?”

“I thought in Chicago, he said he was going to Los

Angeles.”

Isaac Bell took Jake’s drawing of Fritz Wunderlich to the Denver Post Building and paid a newspaper sketch artist to make him copies. He took them to the train stations. The Van Dorn Detective Agency had warm relations with the express companies, as the detectives often cadged rides on express cars, whose messengers were glad of another dependable gun. By noon the copies were headed around the continent, courtesy of Adams Express, American Express, and Wells Fargo, to the field offices covering German consulates in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the vice-consul’s mansion in Los Angeles.

IN JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY, a short, round Van Dorn apprentice from the New York field office named Nelson Mills found himself wishing he had broken the agency rule that forbade apprentice detectives to carry guns. The baby-faced Mills had just finished his first “solo” assignment, an investigation of the Leipzig Organ & Piano shop in the Heights neighborhood. Scanning his notes as he hurried to catch the Hudson Tube back to Manhattan, he composed in his mind the first sentence of his report—“A yearlong waiting list for pianos, no organs, and sheet music from 1905, conspire to indicate that the Leipzig Organ and Piano Company is a false front for a nefarious business as yet unidentified.”

Suddenly he remembered that Detective Harry Warren had advised him that using one word instead of three was the best way to get the bosses to read his reports. Mills drew mental Xs through “conspired to indicate,” to be replaced with “suggest,” and was debating deleting “nefarious” when he bumped into a big fellow on the sidewalk.

“Excuse me. Sorry.”

Nelson Mills got a fist in his face for his apology.

The young man fell on his back on the pavement with blood pouring from his nose. He was shocked by the speed of the attack. The pain was ferocious. His eyes were blinded by tears. He sensed more, then saw the man who punched him looming over him, and he started to ask “Why?”

The man snatched Nelson’s notebook out of his hand and ripped apart the pages, scattering the pieces on his bloody shirt. “Hey, that’s my—”

A heavy boot smashed into his side. Pain seared his ribs, and Nelson realized too late to save himself that there were two of them. They kicked him repeatedly.

36