When the dinner was over Trent renewed his acquaintance with Captain Kent and was introduced to Lincoln, the Harvardian driver of an ambulance. Over coffee in the Pirates’ Den Lincoln told them more of his work.
“This afternoon,” he said, “I had tea with the Baroness von Eckstein. You know who she is?”
Trent nodded. The Baroness was the enormously wealthy widow of a St. Louis brewer who had married a Westphalian noble and hoped thereby to get into New York and Washington society. The Baron had been willing to sell his title—not an old one—for all the comforts of a wealthy home. He had become naturalized and was not suspected by the Department of Justice of treachery. His one ambition seemed to be to drink himself to death on the best cognac that could be obtained. This potent brew, taken half and half with champagne, seemed likely to do its work. It was rumored that his wife did not hinder him in this interesting pursuit.
“I sat behind him at a theater once,” Trent admitted. “He’s a thin little man with an enormous head and a strong Prussian accent.” He resisted the temptation to mimic the Baron as he could have done. He could not readily banish his professional caution.
“I tried to get the Baroness to buy and equip four ambulances,” Lincoln went on. “It would only have cost her twenty thousand dollars—nothing to her—but she refused.”
“Before we went into the war,” Captain Kent reminded him, “she was strongly pro-German.”
“She’s had enough sense to stop that talk in New York,” Lincoln went on. “She’s still trying to break into the Four Hundred and you’ve got to be loyal to your country for that, thank God!”
“I thought she was in St. Louis,” Trent observed.
“She’s taken a house in town,” Lincoln told him. “The Burton Trent mansion on Washington Square, North. Took it furnished for three months. She had to pay like the deuce for the privilege. Gotham Gossip unkindly remarks that she did it so some of the Burton Trents’ friends may call on her, thinking they are visiting the Trents. It’s the nearest she’ll ever get to high society. It made me sick to hear her hard luck story. Couldn’t give me a measly twenty thousand dollars because of income tax and high cost of living and all that sort of bunk, while she had a hundred thousand dollars in diamonds on her fat neck. I felt like pulling them off her.”
Anthony Trent pricked up his ears at this.