“Fifty thousand?”
“Yes, fifty thousand, if you want it.”
“Got it with you?” Barnitz asked instantly.
“No, I haven’t got it all, but I can get it. I’ll pay you a hundred dollars now as a guarantee, and I’ll give you the balance at noon to-morrow.”
Barnitz called two of the other men. “Get this,” he said, and turning to Fay: “All right, where’s your money?” Fay paid him. Then they took him to the Weehawken headquarters, guilty at least of attempted bribery, and Barnitz turned in the cash as Exhibit A.
We suspected that he had something more than the possession of explosives to conceal, and so he had, for a search of his rooms and the garage brought to light the parts for a number of thoroughly ingenious mechanical contrivances which, although they were of a new type, we immediately recognized as bombs. In a packing case at the storage warehouse were four bombs finished and ready to fill. He had apparently intended to manufacture them on a large scale, for in addition to his trial quantity of TNT Fay had twenty-five sticks of dynamite, 450 pounds of chlorate of potash, four hundred percussion caps, and two hundred bomb cylinders. Apparently, too, he had German sympathies, for we found in his rooms a regulation German army pistol, loaded. The discovery of a chart of New York harbor, and the information, which we soon got, that he had a motorboat in a slip opposite West 42nd Street, pointed the finger of guilt toward the waterfront—which after all those months of waiting was the direction in which we were most interested.
Fay told his story. He was a lieutenant of the German Army, detached for special secret service. He ascribed his detachment from his command to his own brilliant realization, as he was on the fighting front in France, that if all the American shells that were being fired at him from French seventy-fives and British eighteen-pounders could be sunk before they reached France they would not cause his countrymen so much annoyance, and also that pushed to its capacity that idea would probably influence the outcome of the war. The fact is that Fay’s career, training, education, languages and character were well known to the secret service in Berlin, and that when they wanted to assign a reliable and desperate man to Captain von Papen in New York, they sent him. They knew that Fay had spent years in America, and that he was trained in mechanics. They gave him $4,000 and a plan of campaign, and said: “Go west.”
It was natural that when he landed he should seek out his brother-in-law, Walter Scholz, who was working as gardener on an estate in Connecticut. It was natural, too, that when he set about getting supplies for his bombs he should call on Dr. Kienzle, who made clock machinery, for Dr. Kienzle had already written to the German secret service in Berlin recommending just such work as Fay had come to undertake. When he came to require explosives, it was only natural that Kienzle should refer him to his friend Max Breitung, with the result which we have seen, and naturally Paul Daeche, who was a good friend of both Kienzle and Breitung (he had tried to return to Germany with both of them on the Kronprinzessin Cecilie when she put out of New York and put in to Bar Harbor in late July, 1914)—naturally Daeche was interested in Fay’s projects and devices, and helped him with them. Daeche was one of those doubtful Germans who had come to America to “study business methods”—in short a commercial spy, willing to make a living.
Copyright, by Underwood and Underwood, N. Y.