Free The Thief by Clive Cussler, Justin Scott Page A

back aboard on the promenade deck?
    The answer was no.
    Bell leaned over the railing and looked straight down at the water. Then he looked up the side of the Marconi house. As he had told Archie, the nearest lifeboat hanging from davits beside the boat deck was thirty feet from where the Acrobat jumped the railing. A quick count of boats revealed something he had never really thought about before. They had room for only five hundred people, while Mauretania carried three thousand…
    Suddenly Isaac Bell bolted to the nearest companionway and bounded up the stairs. Would he have noticed in the dark if the Acrobat had jumped up rather than down? Up to one of the many stays and cables rising to the sundeck, immediately above the boat deck, where the Marconi house sat. Would he have seen him grip a line and scramble up to the sundeck?
    Bell ran along the boat deck past the library windows that had backlighted the scene that night and saw immediately that the answer was no. There were no stays remotely near enough for a man to jump to. Therefore, if the Acrobat hadn’t fallen into the sea, he had to have landed on the deck below the boat deck. Also impossible. Baffled, Isaac Bell wandered slowly back down to the promenade deck.
    Two seamen were smoothing the wood railing with rasps and sandpaper.
    “Good morning, sir.”
    “Good morning, gents. Up early?”
    “Soon as we can see to work,” said one.
    The other said, “If we let wear and tear go, the ship would be a bloomin’ embarrassment. Look at this gouge! Fairly tore the rail in half.” He stepped back to show Bell their repair of what was actually the minutest gouge in the teak, which only an eagle-eyed bosun would notice.
    Oddly, the gouge traced the full twelve-inch curve of the wood from inboard to outboard as if something flexible had wrapped around it. “What do you suppose caused that?” Bell asked.
    “Some bloomin’ swell, begging your pardon, sir, must have whacked it with his walking stick.”
    “Or sword,” ventured his mate.
    “Sword?” the first echoed derisively.
    “The grain of the wood is cut.”
    “It ain’t a cut. It’s a gouge.”
    “You can call it a gouge if you like, mate, but I say he whacked it with a sword.”
    “Where the bloomin’ hell would a First Cabin nob get his paws on a sword?”
    “Concealed in his walking stick. Wouldn’t you agree, sir?” he added, enlisting support when he saw Isaac Bell studying the gouge intently.
    “Wire,” Isaac Bell said.
    “Beg your pardon, sir?”
    “Wire. A thin braided-wire cable.”
    “Well, yes, it could be braided cable, sir. On the other hand, you might ask where would the swell get a braided cable and why would he whack the rail with it? Unless he was an out-and-out vandal. Not that we don’t get the odd one or two of them aboard— You’ll recall, Jake, there was that Frenchman.”
    “What do you expect?”
    “An acrobat,” Bell said, half aloud. Had the Acrobat somehow grappled the railing with a flexible wire cable?
    “Acrobat? No, sir, begging your pardon, that Frenchie was no acrobat.”
    “A German acrobat.”
    The seamen traded baffled looks.”Well, if you say so, sir.”
    “An acrobat it is, sir.”
    As Bell hurried away, he heard whispers behind him. “What the blazes was he rattlin’ on about?”
    “Acrobats.”
    “Next’ll be monkeys.”
    Isaac Bell walked faster. He could imagine that a superb athlete, a muscular, lithe acrobat, could stop his fall by hooking a thin cable over the railing. But he could not imagine where the man could suddenly get the cable. Nor how he had secured it in the split second that he hurtled past the railing. Nor why the wire didn’t slip through his hands. Or cut him to the bone if he wrapped it around his wrist.
    Bell passed a barrier into Second Class, said good morning to the seaman Captain Turner had assigned to stand guard outside Clyde Lynds’s cabin door, and knocked loudly. “It’s Isaac Bell, Clyde. Open