When he reached a commercial district, he watched for reflections in the shop windows. All seemed well until a fellow in a fine gabardine coat appeared on the sidewalk ahead, twenty minutes after Curtis had first noticed him.

The man was richly dressed for a detective or a secret policeman. But Krieg and the German Army could afford the best, couldn’t they? When he noticed a uniformed mounted police officer signal someone with a nod, Arthur Curtis hopped onto a tram, partly to think things over and partly to watch who got on next. A portly fellow in an expensive homburg boarded at the next stop, perspiring from a hard run, and Curtis knew that he was either paranoid or in trouble and had to act as if it were the latter.

On the other hand, he thought with a smile that broadcast innocence, he’d been working the private detective game for fifteen years—nearly twenty if he counted his apprenticeship with a Denver-based bullion-escort outfit ramrodded by a couple of old Indian fighters—and since arriving in Germany, he’d devoted every spare moment to learning the ins and outs of the Berlin neighborhoods. He jumped off the tram and onto another.

The street traffic changed from autos to bicyclists and horsecarts, and he hopped down in a workers’ district of five-story tenements interspersed with coal yards where homburgs and gabardine coats would stand out like sore thumbs. He walked purposefully, like a man headed home—or, considering the quality of his clothing, come to collect the rent. He continued down several streets, fingering the money clip in his pocket. He rounded a corner, flashed marks at a teenager on a bicycle, and bought the bike for double its value. Then he pedaled away at three times the speed a shadow could run, hoping no cop behind him had flashed a badge at another bike rider.

It felt like a clean getaway. But getting away was not the same as getting the job done. Isaac Bell was pressing him hard, and Arthur Curtis wanted to deliver the goods. But if he couldn’t corral his man inside Krieg, how could he ask whether a former Army officer now held a high position in the company?

25

ISAAC BELL WAS FIRST OFF THE LIMITED IN Los Angeles.

Boots to the platform while the train was still rolling into La Grande Station, guiding Clyde Lynds firmly by the elbow and trading discreet nods with a Van Dorn detective attired as a porter, Bell burst from the station into the fierce morning sun. He looked for an olive green Santa Monica trolley with the dash sign “Hollywood,” and they jumped off thirty minutes later at a brick depot that served the farm village.