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“It ain’t a cut. It’s a gouge.”
“You can call it a gouge if you like, mate, but I say he whacked it with a sword.”
“Where the bloomin’ hell would a First Cabin nob get his paws on a sword?”
“Concealed in his walking stick. Wouldn’t you agree, sir?” he added, enlisting support when he saw Isaac Bell studying the gouge intently.
“Wire,” Isaac Bell said.
“Beg your pardon, sir?”
“Wire. A thin braided-wire cable.”
“Well, yes, it could be braided cable, sir. On the other hand, you might ask where would the swell get a braided cable and why would he whack the rail with it? Unless he was an out-and-out vandal. Not that we don’t get the odd one or two of them aboard— You’ll recall, Jake, there was that Frenchman.”
“What do you expect?”
“An acrobat,” Bell said, half aloud. Had the Acrobat somehow grappled the railing with a flexible wire cable?
“Acrobat? No, sir, begging your pardon, that Frenchie was no acrobat.”
“A German acrobat.”
The seamen traded baffled looks.”Well, if you say so, sir.”
“An acrobat it is, sir.”
As Bell hurried away, he heard whispers behind him. “What the blazes was he rattlin’ on about?”
“Acrobats.”
“Next’ll be monkeys.”
Isaac Bell walked faster. He could imagine that a superb athlete, a muscular, lithe acrobat, could stop his fall by hooking a thin cable over the railing. But he could not imagine where the man could suddenly get the cable. Nor how he had secured it in the split second that he hurtled past the railing. Nor why the wire didn’t slip through his hands. Or cut him to the bone if he wrapped it around his wrist.
Bell passed a barrier into Second Class, said good morning to the seaman Captain Turner had assigned to stand guard outside Clyde Lynds’s cabin door, and knocked loudly. “It’s Isaac Bell, Clyde. Open up.”
Lynds let him into the cramped, windowless space he had shared with the Professor. He appeared to hav
e slept in his shirt and trousers.
“You look a mess,” said Bell.
“Didn’t sleep a wink. The Professor was a good man. A kind man. He didn’t deserve dying that way.”
“You wouldn’t either,” said Bell.
“Am I next?”
“Make a clean breast of it, Clyde. Your life’s in danger. Who are they? What do they want?”
“I swear I don’t know them.”
“Does it have to do with you deserting the German Army?”
“I didn’t desert. I was never in the Army. I’ve never been a soldier.”
“Then why is the German Army after you?”
