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tired ence officer in the eye The Briton, at least, ought to know that the days of ro dead Then he widened his coaze to encompass the Germans and said to all, “Before you resort to war, I recouns If you gents can’t sort out your differences, you’ll turn Europe into a slaughterhouse”

“Are you in the arner

“Insurance”

“Oh, really? May I ask what firm?”

“Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock”

“Venerable fire thes But tell me, old chap, is it common for insurance uns?”

“We nu our clients Connecticut and Massachusetts arms factories,” Bell answered smoothly “And by extension, factories holand,” he said to Strone, and to Schultz, “Krieg Rüstungswerk in Ger?”

“Only by reputation,” Herlanced aside

“What is Krieg’s reputation?”

“Innovative,” Hero, as Americans would say”

3

Arthur Curtis, who ency’s one-room Berlin field office, was a short, rotund Coloradan With a quick, sunny slint in his blue eyes, and a potbelly straining his vest, Art Curtis looked less like a first-class private investigator than a prosperous liquor salesman

He got busy on Beiderbecke and Lynds the instant he received Bell’s ht to it, but in the case of Isaac Bell, he would never forget that when his old partner Glenn Irvine was killed by the Butcher Bandit, it had been Bell, shot twice in that gun battle, who paid froed mother

Curtis had operated in Berlin less than a year and was still developing the network of contacts — in government, business, the military, police, and criminals — that he would need to raise the field office to Van Dorn standards Hethat Professor Franz Bisious chair at Vienna’s Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute and that Clyde Lynds’s enius his mentor had proclaimed him to be

But he ran smack into a stone hen he popped his first question about the munitions trust A policeman he had cultivated, a middle-ranked detective, fell silent on the telephone Curtis listened to the wires hiss, wondering why the sudden reticence Finally, the policeerous”