The Wrecker

UNFINISHED BUSINESS

DECEMBER 12, 1934

GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN

ISAAC BELL FASTENED HIS CLIMBING SKINS TO HIS SKIS ONE LAST time and dragged his sled up a steep slope that was raked by windblown snow and slick with ice. At the top stood Kincaid’s castle. Before he reached it, he stopped to peer at a halo of electric light several hundred yards away that marked the checkpoint of armored vehicles where German soldiers guarded the road that led to the main gate.

He saw no sign that they weren’t huddling from the storm and resumed his climb, veering toward the back of the castle. The looming structure was a testament to Kincaid’s resourcefulness. Even in defeat, he had managed to salvage enough to live in comfort. Towers flanked the ends of a great hall. Lights where the guards and servants lived shone at the bottom of the far tower. A single window lit in the near tower marked Kincaid’s private quarters.

Bell stopped in the drifts beside the ancient walls and caught his breath.

He took a grappling hook from the sled, twirled out a length of knotted rope, and threw it high. The iron grapnel was wrapped in rubber and bit quietly onto the stone. Using the knots for handholds, he pulled himself up to the edge. It was littered with broken glass. He cleared an area with his sleeve, pulling the glass toward him so it fell silently outside the wall. Then he pulled himself over the top, retrieved the knotted rope, lowered it inside the wall, and climbed down into the courtyard. The lighted window was on the second floor of the five-story tower.

He worked his way to the thick outer door and unbolted it, leaving one bolt engaged so the door wouldn’t swing in the wind. Then he crossed the courtyard to a small door in the bottom of the tower. Its lock was modern, but Van Dorn’s spies had ascertained the maker, allowing Bell to practice picking it until he could do it blindfolded.

He had no illusions about an easy arrest. They had almost caught Charles Kincaid eighteen years ago, but he had slipped loose in the chaos that wracked Europe at the end of the World War. They had come close, again, during the Russian civil war, but not close enough. Kincaid had made friends on both sides.

As recently as 1929, Bell thought he had Kincaid cornered in Shanghai, until he escaped by coming as close as any criminal had yet to killing Texas Walt. He had no reason to believe that the Wrecker was any less resourceful five years later, or any less deadly, despite the fact that he was now in his late sixties. Evil men, Joe Van Dorn had warned with the grimmest of smiles, don’t age because they never worry about others.

The lock tumbled open. Bell pushed the door on oiled hinges. Silent as a tomb. He slipped inside, closed it. A dim paraffin lamp illuminated a curving stairway that led to cellars and a dungeon below and the Wrecker’s apartments above. A thick rope hung down the center as a handhold to climb the steep and narrow steps. Bell did not touch it. Stretching from the roof to the dungeon, any movement would make it slap the stone noisily.

He drew his pistol and started up.

Light shone under the door that led to the Wrecker’s apartment. Suddenly, he smelled soap, and he whirled toward motion that he sensed behind him. A heavyset man in servant’s garb and a pistol in a flap holster at his waist had materialized from the dark. Bell struck with lightning swiftness, burying the barrel of his pistol in the German’s throat, stifling his cry, and knocking him senseless with a fist to the head. Quickly, he dragged the man down the hall, tried a door, found it open, dragged him inside. He slashed drapery cords with his knife, tied the man hand and foot, and used a knotted cord as a gag.

He had to hurry. The guard would be missed.

He checked the hall outside Kincaid’s door and found it empty and silent. The door was heavy, the knob large. Bell had learned that Kincaid did not lock it, trusting to the walls, the outer door, his guards, and the German solders who blocked the road.

Bell pressed his ear to the door. He heard music, faintly. A Beethoven sonata. Likely on the phonograph, as it was doubtful the radio penetrated these mountains. All the better to muffle the sound of opening the door. He turned the knob. It was not locked. He pushed the door open and stepped inside a room that was warm and softly lit.

A fire flickered and candles and oil lamps cast light on bookcases, carpets, and a handsome coffered ceiling. A wing chair faced the fire with its back to the door. Bell eased the door shut to avoid alerting the Wrecker with a draft. He stood in silence while his eyes adjusted to the light. The music was playing elsewhere, behind a door.

Isaac Bell spoke in a voice that filled the room.

“Charles Kincaid, I arrest you for murder.”

The Wrecker sprang from the wing chair.

He was still powerfully built but looked his full sixty-nine years. Standing slightly stooped and wearing a velvet smoking jacket and eyeglasses, Kincaid might have passed for a retired banker or even a university professor were it not for the scars from his miraculous escape from the Cascade Canyon. A shattered cheekbone flattened the left side of his once-handsome face. His left arm ended abruptly just below his elbow. His expression mirrored his scars. His eyes were bitter, his mouth twisted with disappointment. But the sight of Isaac Bell seemed to invigorate him, and his manner turned mocking and scornful.

“You can’t arrest me. This is Germany.”

“You’ll stand trial in the United States.”

“Are your ears failing with age?” Kincaid mocked. “Listen closely. As a loyal friend of the new government, I enjoy the full protection of the state.”

Bell pulled handcuffs from his ski jacket. “It would be easier for me to kill you than bring you in alive. So keep in mind what happened to your nose last time you tried to pull a fast one while I put the cuffs on you. Turn around.”

Covering Kincaid with his pistol, he clamped one cuff around his whole wrist and the other tightly above the elbow of his maimed arm. He confirmed that Kincaid could not slip it over the protruding joint.

The sound of the cuff locking seemed to paralyze Charles Kincaid. Voice anguished, gaze dull, he asked Isaac Bell, “How did you do this to me? The German Geheime Staatspolizei intercept everyone that comes within twenty miles of my castle.”

“That’s why I came alone. The back way.”

Kincaid groaned as he abandoned all hope.

Bell looked his prisoner in the eye. “You will pay for your crimes.”

The music stopped abruptly, and Bell realized that it had not been a phonograph but an actual piano. He heard a door open and a rustle of silk, and Emma Comden glided into the apartment in a stylish, bias-cut dress that appeared sculpted to her curves. Like Kincaid, her face revealed the years, but minus the scars and the bitter rage that ravished his. Her lines of age, her wrinkles and her crow‘s-feet, traveled the route of smiles and laughter. Though tonight her dark eyes were somber.

“Hello, Isaac. I always knew we’d see you one day.”

Bell was taken aback. He had always liked her, before he knew she had been Kincaid’s accomplice. It was impossible to separate the spying she had done for the Wrecker from the men he had murdered. He said coldly, “Emma, fortunately for you I have room for only one or you’d be coming with me, too.”

She said, “Rest easy, Isaac. You will punish me by taking him from me. And I will suffer for my crime in a way that only you could understand.”

“What do you mean?”

“As you love your Marion, I love him … May I say good-bye?”

Bell stepped back.

She stood on tiptoe to kiss Kincaid’s flattened cheek. As she did, she slid a small pocket pistol toward Kincaid’s cuffed hand.

Bell said, “Emma, I will shoot you both if you pass him that gun. Drop it!”

She froze. But instead of dropping the gun or pointing it at him, she jerked the trigger. The shot was muffled by Kincaid’s body. He went down hard, landing on his back.

“Emma!” he gasped. “Damn you, what’s going on?”

“I cannot bear to think of you dying in prison or executed in the electric chair.”

“How could you betray me?”

Emma Comden tried to say more, and when she could not she turned beseechingly to Isaac Bell.

“She hasn’t betrayed you,” Bell answered bleakly. “She’s given you a gift you don’t deserve.”

Kincaid’s eyes closed. He died with a whisper on his lips.

“What did he say?” asked Bell.

“He said, ‘I deserve everything I want.’ That was his worst belief and his greatest strength.”

“He’s still coming with me.”

“The Van Dorns never give up until they get their man?” she asked bitterly. “Alive or dead?”

“Never.”

Emma sank to her knees, sobbing over Kincaid’s body. Despite himself, Bell was moved. He asked, “Will you be all right here?”

“I will survive,” she said. “I always do.”

Emma Comden retreated to her piano and began to play a sad, slow rag. As Bell knelt to hoist Kincaid’s body onto his shoulder, he recognized a melancholy improvisation on a song she had played long ago on a special in the Oakland Terminal, Adaline Shepherd’s “Pickles and Peppers.”

Bell carried the Wrecker’s body down the stairs and out the tower door and into the snow. Across the courtyard, he opened the single bolt he had left in place, pushed through the massive gate and along the wall to where he had left the sled. He strapped it into the canvas litter, put on his skis, and started down the mountain.

It was a somewhat easier run than the long, brutal slog across the valley, three miles of steep but regular slopes. And though the snow fell thicker than ever, navigation was a simple matter of going downhill. But, as Hans had warned him, the slope tilted suddenly much more sharply for the last thousand yards to the village. Tiring, starting to lose control of his legs, he fell. He got up, righted the sled, and got close enough to see the railroad station lights before he fell again. Back on his skis, the sled upright, he descended the last two hundred yards without incident and stopped behind a shed a short way from the station.

“Halt!”

A man was watching from the doorway. Bell recognized the trench coat and high officer’s visor cap of the Geheime Staatspolizei.

“You look straight out of vaudeville.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Archie Abbott. “And I’ll take our friend to the baggage car.” He wheeled a wood coffin from the shed. “Do we have to worry about him having enough air to breathe?”

“No.”

They heaved Kincaid, still wrapped in the litter, into it and screwed the lid shut.

“Train on time?”

“It takes more than a blizzard to delay a German railroad. Got your ticket? I’ll see you at the border.”

A halo of snow whirled by a rotary plow in front of the train sparkled in the locomotive’s headlight as it steamed into the station. Bell boarded, showed his ticket. Only when he sank gratefully into a plush seat in a warm first-class compartment did he realize how cold and weary he was and how much he ached.

Yet he reveled in a powerful sense of joy and accomplishment. The Wrecker was finished, run to ground for his crimes. Charles Kincaid would kill no more. Bell asked himself whether Emma Comden was sufficiently punished for helping him by spying on Osgood Hennessy. Had he let her go scot-free? The answer was no. She would never be free until she escaped the prison of her heart. And that, Isaac Bell knew better than most men, would never happen.

An hour later, the train slowed at Mittenwald. The conductors came through loudly warning passengers to have their papers ready for inspection.

“I came for the skiing,” said Bell, when asked by the border guard.

“What is this ‘luggage’ in the baggage car?”

“An old friend crashed into a tree. I was asked to accompany his body home.”

“Show me!”

Soldiers armed with Karabiner 98b rifles snapped to attention in the corridor and trailed closely as Bell followed the border guard to the baggage car. Archie Abbott was sitting on the coffin. He was smoking a Sturm cigarette, a nice touch Bell admired, as the Sturm brand was owned by the Nazi Party.

Abbott did not bother to stand for the border guard. Gray eyes cold, face a mask of disdain, he barked in flawless, curt German, “The victim was a friend of the Reich.”

The guard clicked heels, saluted, returned Bell’s papers, and shooed away the riflemen. Bell stayed in the baggage car. Half an hour later, they got off at Innsbruck. Austrian porters loaded the coffin into a hearse that was waiting on the station platform, accompanied by an embassy limousine. Both vehicles flew American flags.

An assistant charge d‘affaires shook hands with Bell. “His excellency, the Ambassador, sends his regrets that he couldn’t greet you personally. Hard to get around these days. Old football injuries, you know.”

“And half a ton of blubber,” muttered Abbott. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, grappling with the Great Depression, had defanged the obstacle of Preston Whiteway’s reactionary newspapers by appointing Marion’s old boss Ambassador to Austria.

Bell laid his hand on the coffin. “Tell Ambassador Whiteway that the Van Dorn Detective Agency appreciates his help and give him my personal thanks … Wait one moment!”

Bell took a delivery label from deep inside his jacket, licked the back, and glued it on the coffin. It read:

VAN DORN DETECTIVE AGENCY

CHICAGO

ATTENTION: ALOYSIUS CLARKE, WALLY SISLEY,

MACK FULTON

IT WAS A RAW, cold morning in Paris when Isaac Bell disembarked from his train at the Gare de l‘Est. As he waved for a taxi, he paused to admire an elegant blue-and-black Bugatti Type 41 Royale. Touted as the world’s most expensive car, it was beyond any doubt as graceful as it was majestic.

The Bugatti swept silently to the curb in front of Bell. The uniformed chauffeur jumped from his open cockpit.

“Bonjour, Monsieur Bell.”

“Bonjour,” said Bell, wondering, Now what? and regretting he had left the German automatic in his bag.

The chauffeur opened the door to the luxurious passenger compartment.

Marion Morgan Bell patted the seat beside her. “I thought you’d like a ride.”

Bell got in and kissed her warmly.

“How did it go?” she asked.

“It’s done,” he said. “By now, Joe Van Dorn has his body on a cruiser in the Mediterranean. In two weeks, it’ll be in the States.

“Congratulations,” Marion said. She knew that he would tell her all when he was ready. “I am so happy to see you.”

Bell said, “I’m so happy to see you, too. But you shouldn’t have gotten up so early.”

“Well, I’m not entirely up.” She opened the top of her coat to reveal a red silk nightgown. “I thought you’d want breakfast.”

The car pulled swiftly into the traffic. Bell took Marion’s hand. “May I ask you something?”

“Anything.” She pressed his hand to her cheek.

“Where did you get this Bugatti Royale?”

“Oh, this. I was having a nightcap in the hotel bar last night and the sweetest Frenchman tried to pick me up. One thing led to another, and he insisted we use his car while we’re in Paris.”

Isaac Bell looked at the woman he had loved for nearly thirty years. “‘Sweetest Frenchman’ is not a phrase to assure a husband. Why do you suppose this old gentleman was so generous with his automobile?”

“He’s not old. Quite a bit younger than you are. Though hardly in such good condition, I might add.”

“Glad to hear it. I still want to know how you charmed him into giving you his car.”

“He was a hopeless romantic. The dear boy actually got tears in his eyes when I told him why I couldn’t go with him.”

Isaac Bell nodded. He waited until he could trust his voice. “Of course. You told him, ‘My heart is spoken for.’”

Marion kissed him on the lips. “Is that a tear in your eye?”