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“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.
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 co
mpany. 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.
