Variations of that stunt occurred time after time. Even the detailing of two men to follow him failed in its purpose, for the Austrian would enter a big office building, leap into an express elevator just as it was about to ascend, slip the operator a dollar to stop at one of the lower floors, and be lost for the day or until some one picked him up by accident.
So Cap Kenney called in four of his best men and told them that it was essential that Weimar be watched.
"Two of you," he directed, "stick with him all the time. Suppose you locate him the first thing in the morning at his house on Twenty-fourth Street, for example. You, Cottrell, station yourself two blocks up the street. Gary, you go the same distance down. Then, no matter which way he starts he'll have one of you in front of him and one behind. The man in front will have to use his wits to guess which way he intends to go and to beat him to it. If he boards a car, the man in front can pick him up with the certainty that the other will cover the trail in the rear. In that way you ought to be able to find out where he is going and, possibly, what he is doing there."
The scheme, thanks to the quick thinking of the men assigned to the job, worked splendidly for months--at least it worked in so far as keeping a watch on Weimar was[77] concerned. But that was all. In the summer of 1915 the government knew precisely where Weimar had been for the past six months, with whom he had talked, and so on--but the kernel of the nut was missing. There wasn't the least clue to what he had talked about and what deviltry he had planned!
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Without that information, all the dope the government had was about as useful as a movie to a blind man.
Washington was so certain that Weimar had the key to a number of very important developments--among them the first attempt to
blow up the Welland Canal--that the chief of the Secret Service made a special trip to New York to talk to Kenney.
"Isn't it possible," he suggested, "to plant your men close enough to Weimar to find out, for example, what he talks about over the phone?"
Kenney smiled, grimly.
"Chief," he said, "that's been done. We've tapped every phone that Weimar's likely to use in the neighborhood of his house and every
time he talks from a public station one of our men cuts in from near-by--by an arrangement with Central--and gets every word. But that bird is too wary to be caught with chaff of that kind. He's evidently worked out a verbal code of some kind that changes every day. He tells the man at the other end, for example, to be at the drug store on the corner of Seventy-third and Broadway at three o'clock to-morrow afternoon and wait for a phone call in the name of Williams. Our man is always at the place at the appointed hour, but no call ever arrives. 'Seventy-third and Broadway' very evidently means some other address, but it's useless to try and guess which one. You'd have to have a man at every pay station in town to follow that lead."[78]
"How about overhearing his directions to the men he meets in the open?"
"Not a chance in the world. His rendezvous are always public places--the Pennsylvania or Grand Central Station, a movie theater, a hotel lobby, or the like. There he can put his back against the wall and make sure that no one is listening in. He's on to all the tricks of the trade and it will take a mighty clever man--or a bunch of them--to nail him."
"H-m-m!" mused the chief. "Well, at that, I believe I've got the man." "Anyone I know?"
"Yes, I think you do--Morton Maxwell. Remember him? Worked on the Castleman diamond case here a couple of years ago for the customs people and was also responsible for uncovering the men behind the sugar-tax fraud. He isn't in the Service, but he's working for the Department of Justice, and I'm certain they'll turn him loose on this if I ask them to. Maxwell can get to the bottom of Weimar's business, if anyone can. Let me talk to Washington--"
And within an hour after the chief had hung up the receiver Morton Maxwell, better known as "Mort," was headed toward New
York with instructions to report at Secret Service headquarters in that city.
Once there, the chief and Kenney went over the whole affair with him. Cottrell and Gary and the other men who had been engaged in shadowing the elusive Weimar were called in to tell their part of the story, and every card was laid upon the table.
When the conference concluded, sometime after midnight, the chief turned to Maxwell and inquired: "Well, what's your idea about it?"
For a full minute Mort smoked on in silence and gazed[79] off into space. Men who had just met him were apt to think this a pose, a play to the grand stand--but those who knew him best realized that Maxwell's alert mind was working fastest in such moments and that he much preferred not to make any decision until he had turned things over in his head.
"There's just one point which doesn't appear to have been covered," he replied. Then, as Kenney started to cut in, "No, Chief, I said appeared not to have been covered. Very possibly you have all the information on it and forgot to hand it out. Who does this Weimar live with?"
"He lives by himself in a house on Twenty-fourth Street, near Seventh Avenue--boards there, but has the entire second floor. So far as we've been able to find out he has never been married. No trace of any wife on this side, anyhow. Never travels with women-- probably afraid they'd talk too much."
"Has he any relatives?"
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"None that I know of--"
"Wait a minute," Cottrell interrupted. "I dug back into Weimar's record before the war ended his official connection with the steamship company, and one of the points I picked up was that he had a cousin--a man named George Buch--formerly employed on one of the boats.
"Where is Buch now?" asked Maxwell.
"We haven't been able to locate him," admitted the police detective. "Not that we've tried very hard, because the trail didn't lead in his direction. I don't even know that he is in this country, but it's likely that he is because he was on one of the boats that was interned here when the war broke."
Again it was a full minute before Maxwell spoke.[80]
"Buch," he said, finally, "appears to be the only link between Weimar and the outer world. It's barely possible that he knows something, and, as we can't afford to overlook any clue, suppose we start work along that line. I'll dig into it myself the first thing in the morning, and I certainly would appreciate any assistance that your men could give me, Chief. Tell them to make discreet inquiries about Buch, his appearance, habits, etc., and to try and find out whether he is on this side. Now I'm going to turn in, for something seems to tell me that the busy season has arrived."
At that Maxwell wasn't far wrong. The weeks that followed were well filled with work, but it was entirely unproductive of results. Weimar was shadowed day and night, his telephones tapped and his mail examined. But, save for the fact that his connection with the German embassy became increasingly apparent, no further evidence was forthcoming.
The search for Buch was evidently futile, for that personage appeared to have disappeared from the face of the earth. All that Maxwell and the other men who worked on the matter could discover was that Buch--a young Austrian whose description they secured--had formerly been an intimate of Weimar. The latter had obtained his appointment to a minor office in the Hamburg-American line and Buch was commonly supposed to be a stool pigeon for the master plotter.
But right there the trail stopped.
No one appeared to know whether the Austrian was in New York, or the United States, for that matter, though one informant did
admit that it was quite probable.
"Buch and the big fellow had a row the last time over," was the information Maxwell secured at the cost of a few drinks. "Something
about some money that Weimar[81] is supposed to have owed him--fifteen dollars or some such amount. I didn't hear about it until afterward, but it appears to have been a pretty lively scrap while it lasted. Of course, Buch didn't have a chance against the big fellow--he could handle a bull. But the young Austrian threatened to tip his hand--said he knew a lot of stuff that would be worth a good deal more money than was coming