“Onvard, Christian Soldiers,” he sang as he bundled up his things. His beautiful voice, a thrilling lyric tenor, stopped every conversation in the room. “Marching as to Var.”

The drummers took up the hymn, beating time with coffee cups and highball glasses and waving farewell to good old Fritz, who was running to catch his train.

“That is one tip-top traveling man,” said the Locomobile representative loud enough for Fritz to hear.

“‘Eight days in the veek,’” chuckled another as the German disappeared out the door. “‘Thirteen months in the year.’”

“‘Time is money!’”

“‘Mit schlag.’”

“Funny thing, though,” said the Gillette Razor man.

“What’s that?”

“I stopped in one of his firms’ piano shops in Akron. They said they couldn’t take any orders, they was all backed up.”

“You heard Fritz. Business is booming.”

“Yeah, except it weren’t the kind of shop you’d think. Dusty old place. Surly fella behind the desk looked more like the ‘floor manager’ in a saloon than a piano salesman. Hard to believe anybody ever bought anything there.”

“Maybe you just stopped by on a bad day.”

“Suppose.”

GENERAL MAJOR CHRISTIAN SEMMLER, Imperial German Army, Division of Military Intelligence, hurried out of the Palmer House, basking in the drummers’ laughter and their warm farewells. As a child in the circus Semmler had learned from the clowns that an actor who inhabited an alias would never be caught out of character.

There was a “Drummers’ Table” in every fine hotel in America. In this club, “Fritz Wunderlich,” commission salesman of organs and pianos, was a brother.

“Fritz Wunderlich” could travel where he pleased.

Christian Semmler, mastermind of the Donar Plan, never had to explain himself.

22

ISAAC BELL AND CLYDE LYNDS CHANGED TRAINS at Chicago to continue across the continent on the Rock Island’s  all-Pullman Golden State Limited to Los Angeles. Van Dorn detectives shadowed them so discreetly from the 20th Century’s LaSalle Street Station to the Golden State’s Dearborn Station that even Bell only spotted them twice.

Once aboard the Golden State, he asked a Van Dorn agent costumed as a conductor if they’d been followed. He was assured, categorically, no. Bell figured it was quite likely true. Joseph Van Dorn had founded the agency in Chicago. The detectives headquartered in the Palmer House were top-notch and proud of it.

THE GOLDEN STATE LIMITED WAS a transcontinental express that would stop only at major stations along a 2,400-mile run south and west on the low-altitude El Paso Route. A luxurious “heavyweight,” it consisted of a drawing room sleeper, a stateroom and drawing room sleeper, a stateroom car of smaller cabins—where Bell had again booked top and bottom berths—the dining car, and a buffet-library-observation car in the back of the train. Mail, baggage, and express cars rode at the front end directly behind the tender that carried coal and water for the Pacific 4-6-2 locomotive.