Secondly, the bank paid for orders of goods as soon as they had been inspected and delivered on board ships at the seaboard. The manufacturers sent their bills of lading to the bank, showing the carload shipments and the vessel to which they were consigned. Thus accurate information was obtained as to every item, the railroad route of shipment and the name of the vessel. All this information was turned over to Koenig, who passed it along for dissemination to the proper persons. Consequently, the Germans knew exactly what ships to attack; in what vessels to place their fire bombs or other explosives.
Schleindl was accustomed to meet Koenig almost every night and hand him papers. Sometimes he would go to Koenig’s office, where “P. K.,” Metzler and Schleindl would spend many hours copying the documents. Other times Schleindl would give the papers to Koenig and receive them on his way to work, so that they would be in their proper place the moment any bank official desired them. Koenig pleaded guilty in the Court of Special Sessions to an information charging him with having corrupted the boy to sell such information. Koenig was set free on a suspended sentence.
The National City Bank leak is only one of a hundred channels through which Koenig and his agents received information. Koenig compiled it with the aid of his secretary, conferred with von Papen or Boy-Ed. He would spend a few weeks gathering facts, and then he would pack hundreds of papers into a trunk and run down to Washington. Arriving there, he would take a taxi to a rooming house, where he would unpack his trunk, and put the contents into another trunk in an adjoining room.
As weeks went by and Koenig believed he was escaping police and Federal espionage, he grew bolder, more defiant of the authorities, and louder in his talk. He treated his employés with less consideration. He always followed a principle of never hiring the same reservist for a second job. Then he quarrelled with George Fuchs, a relative whom he had employed to go to Buffalo with him. The police heard of that quarrel, and quickly got into the confidence of Fuchs, obtained his confession, and enough information on which to arrest Koenig. He has been indicted by the Federal authorities twice on charges that may get him six years, if convicted.
The two men were active workers for a time. Koenig continues in New York, but von Igel sailed with Count Bernstorff when the latter was dismissed from this country.
CHAPTER V
CAPTAIN KARL BOY-ED, THE EMPEROR’S SOCIAL DANDY AND VON TIRPITZ’S TOOL
In the days before the Kaiser booted his spur through the treaties of Europe, you could observe, almost any afternoon, a faultlessly-attired man—well built, his big round head resting firmly on a powerful neck—sauntering down Connecticut Avenue, the Rotten Row or Fifth Avenue of Washington. Jauntily swinging his cane and puffing at his inevitable cigarette, he would bow gracefully in greeting the members of the capital’s smart set. He could be seen later at tea at the Chevy Chase Club, then among government officials and diplomats at the Metropolitan Club, or a guest at the Army and Navy Club. He was much desired at the most brilliant functions in New York in the winter, or at the resorts where, in the summer, the wealthiest and most exclusive Manhattanites gathered. One always found him graceful, suave, clever at repartee, effervescing natural humour—the object of admiration on the part of matchmaking mothers, and the reported seeker after an American heiress—but always mingling with the persons in official, diplomatic and navy circles who knew the innermost government secrets.
He was Germany’s Beau Brummel, Captain Karl Boy-Ed, the Kaiser’s naval attaché, seemingly more interested in the frills, foibles and gaieties of society than in the supremacy of the German Navy. Very much like an American in appearance, Oriental in his sense of luxury, and possessing the French quality of subtlety in rapid-fire wit, he lacked apparently every vestige of the much vaunted Teutonic efficiency. He would occasionally, however, drop out of the scenes of beauty and charm, travelling about the country, visiting warships, tramping over coast country, scrutinizing fortifications, or places where Uncle Sam would have coast defences, until finally it began to be whispered that Captain Boy-Ed knew as much about the American Navy and coast forts as did the naval officers themselves. Under the veneer of lightness and graceful ease, the naval attaché hid with the craft to which that Turkish part of his ancestry made him heir, the persistent methodical thoroughness of his German ancestry.
And, when the Kaiser set the dogs of war loose, Boy-Ed shunted aside the cloak of frivolity, disappeared almost entirely from festive gatherings, settled down by day to room 801, No. 11, Broadway, New York, receiving code messages as “Nordmann,” and by night to his suite in the German Club, where he delved into records, conferred with associates and elaborated plans for activities on the seven seas. From a hale, jolly fellow he became—as if by the shift of the magic wand of a Turkish sorcerer—a veritable machine, mind and body, working for the Kaiser. A man of great brain power, erudite, fertile in schemes, for long an aid to Admiral von Tirpitz, he assumed charge in America of all enterprises dealing with the naval phases of the Teutonic warfare in this country and in or near American waters. These were activities which, despite his boast: “They haven’t got any evidence against B. E.,” caused his dismissal from America by President Wilson.