The Cutthroat by Clive Cussler (popular books to read txt) 📗

eager to share in her boomtown riches. In the dark days of the Civil War, Cincinnatians improvised a pontoon bridge of coal barges for fifty thousand Union troops who had arrived in the nick of time to block a Confederate Army invasion. And when the Kaiser’s brother—the much-loved Prince Henry of Prussia—arrived on his American tour, the police had to shoo adoring mobs off the roofs of his train cars while the United German Singing Societies serenaded him.

But no arrival could prepare Cincinnati for the Jekyll & Hyde Special.

For days in advance, newspaper writers described the show train in awed detail—Jackson Barrett and John Buchanan’s private cars, decorated to the actor-managers’ personal taste; the leading actors’ and actresses’ lavish staterooms; the dormitory cars, stacked with Pullman berths, for players, stagehands, carpenters, electricians, clerks, publicists, accountants, and musicians; the dining car, “the heart of the train that serves mouthwatering repasts all round the clock”; the freight cars that carried the elaborate sets; and the express/baggage car, with its monumental steel safe for the box office receipts, guarded by a heavily armed, ice-eyed agent of Van Dorn Protective Services, the trusted subsidiary of the famous detective agency that furnished house detectives for first class hotels, and as jewelers’ escorts, bodyguards, and for discreet assistance to William Howard Taft’s Secret Service squad when the president ventured from the White House—ten gleaming red cars in all—cannonballed from city to city by a high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2 Deaver-built locomotive that was, her engineer confided to the Cincinnati Enquirer, “a good steamer and rides easy.”

Telegraph operators relayed its progress as it thundered south through Detroit. Would the Jekyll & Hyde Special deliver actors, scenery, and musicians in time to stage the show for their first-night curtain?

No one knew that Barrett and Buchanan had deliberately scheduled a close-run arrival to build suspense and encourage the Cincinnati, Hamilton & Dayton Railroad to clear tracks for their special rather than risk the wrath of a city that loved its theaters. Betting pools sprang up in saloons, beer gardens, and gentlemen’s clubs, and fortunes changed hands for side bets on the precise moments it would tear past intervening stations.

Suddenly, when it was ten miles out and no greater excitement could be imagined, a blood-red biplane—the spitting image of the airplane everyone had heard was in the play—soared over the city, skimmed the river, and swooped under the Roebling suspension bridge.

The most unlikely event tripped up the Cutthroat.

This sweet little dancer’s upturned nose was as sensitive as his.

“I smell spirit gum.”

He had stuck to his rules. He had practiced self-discipline and restraint. He had planned. He had anticipated. He had hoped. But still he was tripped up: Little Beatrice’s nose was as sensitive as his. In Cincinnati, of all places, despite laying extraordinarily elaborate groundwork.

“Is that a false beard?”

She actually reached up to tug it. He recoiled, jerked his head away from her hand.

“It is, isn’t it?” She laughed, and stood on tiptoe to inspect it closely. “That’s the best one I’ve ever seen.” Her laughter died as she considered the oddity.

He was quick, he reminded himself. He had better be. The suspicion of danger had narrowed her eyes. Still, he was confident that he held the advantage. She was only operating on instinct. He had at his command decades of know-how.

“Why are you wearing a false beard?”

“To hide . . .” he said, then cast his eyes down as if too dismayed to complete his thought. He could still control her.

“From what?” she asked sharply. Her voice had an unpleasant edge, a grating noise that he longed to silence. But he couldn’t silence her before he coaxed her to join him inside his cottage. It was next to the river at the end of a dark lane. The last girl he had brought here, Rose—Rose Bloom—had entered willingly. But Rose had not smelled spirit gum, nor noticed anything to trip him up.

It was all too easy to imagine how the cottage would look to a girl who was already wary: remote, tucked away in a storehouse district, the only dwelling on the lane. He had had the front porch painted a warm yellow so that it looked welcoming and had installed an electric light on the front porch, and had left another burning inside. Pleasant, lived-in, welcoming, a cosy cottage on the outskirts of town, with a rowboat dock convenient to the Ohio.

“For you,” he answered.

“I don’t understand.”

She stopped walking abruptly and looked around as if noticing for the first time that the street was devoid of people. They had just reached the storehouses at the corner of his lane. They could smell the river. “What do you mean from me?”

“Not from you,” he stammered. “To protect you. To hide my face.”

“From what?”

“Scars. I was wounded horribly in the Spanish War.” The false beard was so gray, it was nearly white, which would make him rather too old to have fought in the 1898 War. But hopefully for a girl so young, a war of thirteen years ago could have been fought a hundred years in the past. Ancient history. Civil War. Revolutionary War. War of 1898.

She said, “Oh.” Still standing there, still gazing around—looking for help, he feared—she said, “Well, so am I.”

He searched her pretty face by the streetlamp. “Scarred?”

“From a fire.”

“Where?”

“Where you can’t see.”

“Can’t see? I saw you dance on the stage.”

“The corset covers it. A lamp exploded when I was a little girl. It looks horrible. I’ll never let anyone see.”

“You poor thing.”

“Well, you’re a poor thing, too.”

“Aren’t we a pair?”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. And I promised you supper. My housekeeper will be quite put out if we let it get cold.”

“Is she there now?”

“She better be. Who do you think serves supper and washes the dishes?”

Still, she hesitated.

He took a chance and went for broke. “You know, Beatrice, in all my days of booking national tours, I’ve never met a dancer who wasn’t famished after her show.”

That got him a grin that