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The forward baggage room was cavernous — over sixty feet long and nearly forty feet wide, although so close to the Mauretania’s bow that its width tapered to sixteen feet as it traced the sharpening line of the hull. It held far more bales and wooden crates than luggage, rows and rows of shipping barrels marked “Fragile” and “China,” oak casks of wine and brandy, a pair of Daimler limousines, and a handsome yellow Wolseley-Siddeley touring car. Bell smelled something in the fetid air, not the autos’ gasoline odor, which he had noted on earlier visits, but a more acrid stink, like coal tar, or, he thought, simply the ubiquitous odor of paint from the constant maintenance performed by the ship’s crew.
The lion cage sat near the front. As Bell and Archie pushed through the door, they saw that their Van Dorn Protective Services operative had fall
en asleep beside the cage and that their swindler, a lanky, middle-aged sharper with a matinee idol’s leonine mane of hair and a choirboy’s trustworthy smile, was straining to reach through the bars for the keys.
“Lawrence Block?” asked Archie, using the alias under which he had conducted his stock manipulations. “Even if you got the door open, where do you think you would go on a steamer in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?”
“For a walk,” said the swindler. “Maybe even find someone to talk to. This fellow and I have run out of subjects of interest to either of us. Failing that, maybe I’d bust into one of those brandy casks and get drunk.”
The guard woke with a start and jumped to his feet. “Sorry, Mr. Bell. The boat keeps moving up and down, and there’s a smell in the air that makes me tired.”
Archie said, “Next time hide your keys.”
Bell said, “We’re looking for a middle-aged Viennese gentleman with a fancy mustache and pince-nez glasses. He was wearing a frock coat and carrying a walking stick with a silver head. Has anyone of that description come in here?”
“No, sir.”
“Has anyone at all come in here while you were awake?”
“Just a young feller looking for the same guy you’re looking for. Ran in, ran out.”
That would be Clyde. “No one else?”
“Nope.”
Swindler Block called, “What about the guy who took a trunk?”
“What guy?” asked Bell.
“Just a crewman,” said the PS guard.
“What did he want?”
“Took a trunk. They’re in and out all the time. They get sent down for trunks when folks in First Class want something they forgot.”
“He wasn’t crew,” said the swindler.
“What?” Bell looked at him gripping the bars of the lion cage, glad as any prisoner of a break in his empty routine. “What are you talking about, Mr. Block?”
“He wasn’t crew.”
“He was so crew,” protested the Protective Services man. “I saw him with my own eyes.”
Bell ignored him and asked Block, “Why do you say the fellow you saw was not a member of the ship’s company?”
Block said, “The food down here is lousy. I want a good meal.”
“You’ll get one if you tell me what you mean.”
“He was pretending he was crew.”
“The hell he was,” said the Protective Services man.
“The hell he wasn’t,” said the swindler.
“Archie!”
Archie marched the Protective Services man out the door. Bell asked Block, “How do you know that the man who took the trunk was not a member of the ship’s company?”
