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.