The Thief Read Online Free PDF Page A

Curtis, who could play disguises with the best of them. He wheeled out a favorite: roughhewn Westerner. “I’m not that fancy Sherlock Holmes you’re always reading about. I’m just a working stiff. That lets me off the hook.”
    “It is your duty to society to take an apprentice. How else will the young learn?”
    “I don’t believe in girl detectives. And I’m not running a charity for society. Go away.”
    She had already moved closer, edging up behind him, peering over his shoulder at the papers on his desk. Lots of luck reading Van Dorn cipher, he thought.
    “You know you’ll hire me in the end,” she said blithely. “You need me. I speak perfect English. I am studying library and can look up anything. I am even a powerful skier, taught by my grandfather in the Alps.” Curtis put his head in his hands. He knew what was coming next. Sure enough, she quoted the infernal Holmes. “‘When the other fellow has all the trumps, it saves time to throw down your hand.’”
    “Out!”
    Pauline Grandzau grabbed her coat and hat and waved as she left the office. Art Curtis locked the door. Her English was actually pretty good—not as good as she thought, and not that he needed a German-English translator.
    He trolled through his growing list of acquaintances, telephoned a talkative bank manager he had befriended and invited him to a beer garden, where they sat in companionable conversation on bentwood chairs under the shade trees, occasionally clinking their pewter steins and puffing their own contributions to the blue haze of cigar smoke.
    The bank manager knew a bit about Krieg Rüstungswerk. The munitions manufacturer was controlled by the ancient Prussian Roth family, known to be secretive, which was hardly surprising in the arms trade. Krieg, as it was known colloquially, was especially well connected with the Army because it was “smiled upon” by the kaiser. Krieg also had a penchant for buying up firms in unrelated businesses. Unlike the policeman on the telephone, the bank manager made no mention of any danger from asking questions. Curtis was just shaking hands good-bye, intending to move on to a working class beer garden where a retired German Army sergeant drank, when the bank manager said casually, “I know a chap who works in their Berlin office.”
    “Really? On what level?”
    “Rather high up, actually. An executive.”
    “I would like to meet him. Would that be possible?”
    “It will cost you an expensive meal. He is greedy.”
    “Why don’t we all three dine together?” asked Arthur, which was exactly what the bank manager wanted to hear.
    Arthur went on to his next beer garden. The retired sergeant was there. Plied with a fresh stein, he spoke admiringly of a highly accurate Krieg Rüstungswerk rifled cannon and repeated what Curtis had heard about the kaiser’s warm feelings for the firm. With another stein down the hatch, the sergeant recalled fondly the time his regiment was reviewed by the kaiser himself dressed in the black uniform of the Death’s Head Hussars.
    Arthur Curtis went back to the office to draft a reply to Isaac Bell.
    He unlocked his door and stepped inside. Hairs prickled the back of his neck. He slewed sideways, pressed his back to the wall, and slid his pistol from his shoulder holster.
    “It is only me,” said the shadow sitting at his desk.
    “Pauline, how did you get in here?”
    “But if I had been Colonel Moran I could have shot you with my silent air gun. No one in the building would hear.”
    “Who the devil is Colonel Moran?”
    “He tried to kill Sherlock Holmes. Holmes arrested him.”
    “I said, how did you get in here?”
    She pointed at the window, accessed by an alley fire ladder, which Curtis occasionally used to leave the office undetected. “As Sherlock told Watson in ‘The Adventure of the Crooked Man’: ‘Elementary.’”
    “Elementary? Here’s elementary.” Curtis picked up his telephone. “I’m going to call the cops and