The Thief

26

General Christian Semmler laughed at Irina Viorets.

“Of course he wants his own guards. He’s cautious. What do you expect of an ‘insurance man’?”

“How would I know what to expect? I am not a soldier, only an artist.”

“You are ‘only an artist’ like a cobra is only a snake.”

“You have no right to mock me. I have done exactly as you wanted.”

“And will continue to.” Christian Semmler watched her gather her courage, then brutally cut the legs out from under her. “No! To answer the question forming on your lovely lips, I have no message for you from your fiancé.”

“You promised,” she said bleakly.

“I promised I would try to get a message.”

He watched tears fill her eyes. When he took mercy upon her, it was not really mercy, but merely another way to make her toe the line. “I can tell you that he is still safe in Germany.”

“In prison.”

“If the czar’s secret police were hunting me,” Christian Semmler replied with withering disdain for her foolish lover, “I would rather be in a German prison than out in the open. The Okhrana are as determined as they are cruel. So if it puts your mind at rest, remember that your young man is safe in an Imperial German Army prison deep inside Prussia. And no one enters that particular prison without my express permission. Or leaves it, for that matter.”

“May I go now?” she said, rising with strength and dignity.

She was a strong woman, Semmler had to admit. He had chosen well. Better than she had. The fool she was engaged to marry, one of her benighted nation’s thousands of impoverished princes, had bungled a quixotic attack on the czar in the name of some murky Russian amalgam of democracy and socialism. Which gave Semmler all the leverage he needed to make Irina Viorets serve the Donar Plan.

“You may go,” he said. “Get Lynds established in his laboratory immediately and do everything necessary to make him productive.”

27

“Isaac! What are you doing in Los Angeles?”

“Hoping you’ll help me, Uncle Andy.”

“Don’t call me Uncle Andy. It makes me feel old, and I am not your uncle.”

Bell regarded the impish-looking Andrew Rubenoff with affection. “You’re my father’s special friend. That makes you uncle enough for me.”

Rubenoff was a dark-haired man in his forties, who wore an impeccably tailored suit of worsted wool and, on his head, a disc of velvet, the yarmulke of the Hebrew faith. A banker like Bell’s father, he was shifting his assets out of coal, steel, and railroads into the three newest industries in America: automobiles, flying machines, and moving pictures. Colleagues who thought him lunatic before he doubled his fortune were further appalled when he pulled up stakes and moved from New York City to Los Angeles. As Bell’s father had put it, “They act as if President Taft had moved the White House to Tokyo. The fact is, Andrew emigrated from Russia to New York to San Francisco and back to New York. There is a bit of the gypsy in the fellow.”

“I need your help,” said Bell. “How would you like to be a detective?”

“I would rather play piano in a Barbary Coast bordello.”

“You’ve already done that, Uncle Andy. I am offering a new experience.”

Andrew Rubenoff gestured out the windows of his hilltop mansion, indicating his pleasure with the views of the mountains to the north and east, the flat coastal plain stretching to the blue Pacific Ocean, and the hazy outline of Catalina Island. Within his lavish office, fine furniture shared the space with oil paintings by the radical artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan and his beloved Mason & Hamlin grand piano, which had traveled with him from New York. “I am enjoying this experience, thank you very much. Will you have tea, Isaac?”

A handsome male secretary brought tea in tall glasses. In New York, Bell recalled, the secetary had been matronly. Rubenoff sipped his tea through a cube of sugar. Bell followed suit, burning his tongue as usual.

“What have you heard about the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company?”

“I heard this morning that Imperial is dropping the word ‘Manufacturing’ from its name. All the picture firms are doing it. It’s dawned on them that movies are more interesting than anvil foundries. And far more complicated.”

“Before this morning, what had you heard about Imperial?”

“Big and rich.”

“But they just got started. They built an expensive building but have just begun distributing films. How did they get so big and rich?”

“Artists Syndicate.”

“Who are Artists Syndicate’s investors?”

“Finally, you ask an interesting question. But a hard one.”

“You’re the man to answer hard questions,” Bell said bluntly.

“Do you know anything about the movies?” Rubenoff asked. “Other than being married to a woman who makes them.”

“She’s taught me a lot,” said Bell. “And by the way, thank you again for the silver service. Next time we have thirty-six to dinner we’ll put it to good use.”

Rubenoff waved his thanks aside. “Ah, the least — you see, Isaac, I find this disturbing. I don’t know who invests in Artists Syndicate and Imperial Film.”

“Disturbing?”

“I should know. They’re potentially my competitors — if not, one day, partners. I should know if I am up against a bunch of furriers from Manhattan, a combine of distributors from Springfield, or a furniture magnate from Ohio who knows a young lady who should be a star, clothiers from Philadelphia, or glovers from Gloversville, or Frenchmen fronting for Pathé. Or English lords snapping up yet another American enterprise. Why is Artists Syndicate so anxious to remain private?”

Bell nodded uncomfortably. The banker was confirming his own worry that he had he steered Clyde Lynds in a potentially dangerous direction. While Grady Forrer had found State Department people who confirmed Irina Viorets’s story of spending her childhood with American embassy children, Van Dorn Research had made no headway on the question of who paid the bills for Imperial Film.

Nor could he forget that Arthur Curtis had cabled early on that Krieg Rüstungswerk had an “appetite” for unrelated businesses.

“Seriously, Andrew. Can I persuade you to play detective for me?”

Rubenoff returned a puckish smile. “Will I have to bear sidearms?”

“Not unless you’re frightened by the sight of a beautiful woman.”

Arthur Curtis opened an envelope containing an enciphered cablegram from Isaac Bell. Pauline read it aloud over his shoulder, decoding it faster than he could. It was apparent by now that she had a true photographic memory for both sights and sounds.

“What is the meaning of ‘On the jump’? Like it sounds?”

“Exactly like it sounds. Get moving without delay. Immediately.”

“What are you going to do on the jump, Detective Curtis?”

“Send you home and go to work.”

Curtis climbed into his coat and felt in the pockets for a couple of apples he had bought earlier.

“Should I come with you?” she asked.

“Go home. It’s bedtime. Here.” He handed her the apples. “Give one to your mother.” He ushered her out and locked the door. Then he turned off the light and watched from the window until she disappeared around the corner. No one else was out at this hour, and no one was watching the office. He went out the back window and down the fire ladder and hurried to a neighborhood Kintopp, hoping to get lucky.

A groschen bought him a pint Topp of beer and entry to the Kino which showed moving pictures in a long, narrow space formed by three apartment flats strung together. The films on the screen this evening would have not passed the test for a police license. Arthur Curtis had been a detective long enough to have only a passing interest in what in his boyhood would have been called “dirty pictures.” But Hans Reuter, his man inside Krieg’s Berlin office, liked them, and this working-class moving picture theater was a sufficiently long walk from Reuter’s expensive neighborhood that he felt safe frequenting it without the locals telling his wife. So Arthur Curtis sipped his beer and pretended to be engrossed in the goings-on flickering on the screen while he kept an eye on the men drifting in from the beer bar.

Curtis sat for two hours in the dark. The place had emptied out a bit, and he was having trouble staying awake, when, all of a sudden, in walked his man from Krieg, hugging his beer and looking for an empty place on the bench that he favored in the back row. Curtis moved over. Herr Reuter sat, sipped, and stared.

The short, round Van Dorn detective remained as silent as the film until the waiters finally interrupted with loud offers of “Beer?” During the storm of affirmative replies, he leaned closer to Reuter and whispered, “Triple.”

“What?” Reuter turned. His mouth tightened when he realized that the man who had been sitting next to him all along was Arthur Curtis. “I said, no more.”

“I can now pay triple,” whispered Curtis. “Three times as much. If you’re interested, meet me in the bar.”

Reuter kept him waiting, but not for long. Greed, in the immortal words of Chief Investigator Isaac Bell, worked wonders.

“Triple?” Reuter echoed in disbelief.

Arthur Curtis passed him the fresh Topp he had ordered and took a sip from his own. “Triple. But only for something special.”

“Like what?”

“Something unique. You know the situation at your employer. You’re best qualified to suggest something that I would really need. Aren’t you?”

Hans Reuter looked worried. “But how am I to guess?”

Curtis shrugged. “Let me guess for you. How many Krieg company executives and directors are former Army officers?”

“Very few.”

“Do you know any?”

“Not personally. I mean, there are none in the Berlin office.”

“Can you find their names?”

“I would have to think about that.”

“While you’re thinking,” Curtis shot back, “think which of those company directors might travel abroad.”

Reuter looked uncomfortable, and Curtis thought he was touching some sort of a nerve here, as if the man had thought of a name he feared.

“One of your responsibilities is to dispense funds overseas, correct?”

“How do you know?”

Curtis’s casual, “I asked around” did not make Reuter look any more comfortable.

Curtis went for broke. “I need a name.”

“A name?”

“The name of the recipient.” Push! Arthur Curtis thought. Push him hard. Don’t give him time to change his mind. “Two days,” he said. “Meet me here. Seven o’clock.”

“It is risky.”

“Don’t worry, it will be the last time I ask.”

“No more?” Hans asked, partly with relief, partly with disappointment that the money would stop. Curtis said, “In addition to triple, I will seek authorization for a separation bonus. A thank-you.”

Greed was Reuter’s middle name. Suddenly he was brave. “But for the name you ask I will have to pay someone else.”

He was lying, bless him, Curtis thought. Reuter was high enough up in Krieg to know the name himself. Curtis said, “O.K. If I must, I will pay your ‘someone else,’ too.” Maybe Reuter was lying. But maybe he wasn’t. Hopefully, he was so grasping he would take a big risk.

On his way back to the office, Art Curtis stopped at the all-night telegraph in a railroad station to cable Isaac Bell.

Andrew Rubenoff reported back to Isaac Bell that he was very impressed by Irina Viorets.

“I’m surprised,” Bell admitted. “I thought there was something fishy about how fast she got the job running such a big outfit.”

“The woman displays a keen understanding of the moving picture business. Not only the taking of the pictures, but the distribution and exhibition — which are absolutely vital to making a profit. Equally important, she understands that more must be done than introducing a couple of new shows with each change. The customers won’t stand much longer for furbishing up of the exhibition with a few new features. The exhibitors must be able to declare that the entire show is new. ‘Keep your show fresh and up-to-the-minute,’ she told me, ‘and you will draw full houses.’”

“Sounds like she was selling you.”

“I pretended to be an exhibitor with a string of picture show shops in Indiana.”

“That was a nice touch,” Bell said admiringly.

“Not really,” Rubenoff replied with a modest smile. “I control houses in Detroit, Toledo, Battle Creek, and Indianapolis.”

“So you think she passes muster?”

“There are poseurs in this line who like to say that anyone can make a moving picture. That is not true, as Mr. Thomas Edison is slowly beginning to learn at great expense. Similarly, not just anyone can distribute movies. Mademoiselle Viorets knows her business. Most important, she knows the future of the business.”

“You didn’t fall for her, Uncle Andy, did you?”

“It is in my makeup,” Rubenoff replied, enigmatically, “to be capable of admiring a beautiful woman without desiring her.”

“How did Irina learn so much about the future of the business?”

“Apparently she made one-reelers in Russia. Much as your bride does when she is not shooting her Picture World newsreels for the ghastly Whiteway.”

“But how did a Russian moving picture director learn about distribution and exhibition?”

Rubenoff smiled. “You’re your father’s son, young Isaac. Always to the core.” Then he turned very serious, and Isaac Bell was reminded that Rubenoff had earned several fortunes since landing as an immigrant and appeared to be on the road to another. “It seems to me that Irina Viorets learned about distribution and exhibition by listening carefully to someone who has manipulated a modern corporation to control the entire chain of production and marketing from top to bottom.”

“Like who?”

“Andrew Carnegie pretty much invented modern vertical integration.”

“Assuming the young lady did not sit on the old philanthropist’s knee, who else? Any Germans?”

“Germans? Krupp has pretty much written the book on German vertical integration.”

“What about Krieg Rüstungswerk?”

“If not quite so large as Krupp, Krieg is better connected in the kaiser’s circle. But wherever the lady absorbed her ideas, she has a clear understanding that the future of moving pictures belongs to those who control every aspect, from hiring actors to projecting the finished product in the theater — only then can we guarantee a place to see our product, and a product to see in our place.”

“Sounds like you’re working at vertical integration, too, Uncle Andy.”

“From your lips to God’s ear, young Isaac. But don’t go blabbing it about.”

“Will you keep digging into who’s behind her?”

“I’ve already begun inquiries,” Rubenoff replied.

“Quiet as a church,” the Van Dorn Protective Services operatives reported whenever Bell dropped by the Imperial Building laboratory where Clyde Lynds was hard at work. “He’s at it from breakfast to supper, and sometimes half the night. The man works hard as a nailer.”

“Have you seen anyone hanging around?”

“No. It’s just him and us and Clyde’s helpers — and you know we looked at them real close.”

“No shadows on the way home?”

“No, sir, Mr. Bell. None coming in either. And the boys watching the house haven’t seen a soul who looked like trouble. Do you think maybe they just gave up and packed it in?”

“I would be very surprised,” said Bell. “Keep on your toes. And remember, the hardest part of guarding a fellow is that the attack can come anytime, night or day.”

Privately, however, Bell had to wonder. Had Krieg given up? Or were they laying back, reasoning that once he was set up in a laboratory, Clyde Lynds wasn’t going anywhere until he had finished the machine, in which event they had him just where they wanted him?

28

Joseph Van Dorn arrived on the train, unexpectedly.

Isaac Bell saw by his expression that the boss doubted that his chief investigator was on the right course, although Van Dorn’s opening salvo was uncharacteristically mild and somewhat oblique.

“Our friends at Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock are alarmed by inquiries from disreputable types.”

“What sort of disreputable types?”

“Some furrier and his cousin in the glove trade marched in big as day demanding to borrow money to build a plant for the manufacture of motion pictures. Thanks to your bankrolling masquerade, word’s getting around the film folk that Dagget has money to lend.”

“Are you sure they weren’t Krieg agents onto us?”

“I looked into them, of course. But they appear legitimate.”

“Legitimately disreputable?” Bell asked with a smile.

“That’s what I just said: a furrier and a glover. How’s Clyde making out with the machine?”

“He’s making progress. Seems excited by a scheme to photograph the sound directly onto the movie film.”

“I hope he makes progress faster. Guarding a man night and day does not come cheap.”

“How did you make out with the German ambassador?” Bell asked.

“We danced around each other, me pretending I was merely curious about Army officers serving as consular attachés, the ambassador pretending not to wonder why I was pretending mere curiosity. I left the Cosmos Club with the distinct impression that he hasn’t a clue what his consuls are up to, much less the German Army. Nor does he want to.”

“In other words, the consuls do the dirty work.”

“As I told you in Washington.”

“So nothing new from the ambassador.”

Van Dorn sighed. “Look here, Isaac, is it possible Krieg and company have thrown in the towel?”

“No. They’re biding their time.”

“Until when?”

“Until Clyde gets closer to finishing.”

“That could be years!” Van Dorn exploded. “‘Several years.’ Clyde’s own words.”

“I doubt they’ll hold off that long. For now, he’s working on the machine and they can wait until he’s made enough progress so they’ll know it really works.”

“How will they know? You’ve forted him up. He’s surrounded with costly detectives, night and day, in the laboratory, home in bed, and the quick-march in between.”

“All they need is one spy in the Imperial Building, watching and reporting back. There are scores of employees within range of Clyde’s laboratory. It would only take one to keep an eye on him — an otherwise legitimate technical fellow or a mechanician.”

“If that’s the case, then Clyde Lynds is safe while he works on his machine.”

“Temporarily safe,” retorted Isaac Bell. “Each time they’ve tried to lay hands on him it was clear they intended to take him back to Germany, where they’re ready to put him to work making the machine. Now we’ve put him to work, so right now they’re watching and waiting. What will trigger their next attempt will either be movement ahead on Clyde’s part, or us lowering our guard.”

“It is very hard to keep your guard up for a long time, Isaac.”

“That is why I am investigating what Krieg Rüstungswerk is up to in America. When we find out what and put a stop to it, Clyde and the talking machine will be free and clear.”

Van Dorn sighed again. “What if all they are ‘up to in America’ is grabbing Clyde and his machine? It’s the machine they want. If you hadn’t stopped them on the ship, they’d be happily holed up in some Prussian castle while Clyde and Beiderbecke tinkered away with guns to their heads. The first the world would know was when the Germans showed talking pictures.”

“The Germans were here already,” said Bell.

“Here? What do you mean?”

“Here in America, long before I broke up the kidnapping.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Look at the operation to grab Clyde off the Limited. Back in Chicago they smuggled the Acrobat into the express car. Only thirty-six hours later in New Mexico, halfway across the continent, they wrecked the train and had horsemen and mounts positioned to spirit Clyde across the Mexican border and onto a train. Five to one, they had a ship waiting in Veracruz. And they organized the entire operation in the few short days after Clyde gave their Marzipan Boys the slip in New York. Don’t you see, Joe? This is a gigantic outfit with a continental reach. I’ll bet you ten to one, Krieg secretly owns American factories, farms, ranches, and hotels where their agents hole up.”

In dead silence, and in movements so lithe he seemed to flow like oil, Christian Semmler roamed up and down a stairwell concealed in the center of the Imperial Building. The hidden shaft let him enter every floor from the subcellar to the roof. He could watch, unseen, seeing everything. On the penthouse story, he pressed his eye to a spy hole. The cinematography stage camera operator was photographing a scene of a couple kissing good-bye in their parlor as the man went off to war.

Semmler descended three floors to watch Irina Viorets busy at her desk, female stenographers on either side, a runner hurrying notes to a telegrapher tapping in a far corner, and the telephone pressed to her ear. Though the walls that encased his secret stairwell were thick, he fancied he smelled her perfume.

Floor by floor he descended, peering through spy holes at scene shops, carpenters, and seamstresses, ranks of darkroom chemists laboring under red lights, films being loaded into canisters. He stopped to watch an entire ten-minute reel of film being presented to Imperial Company salesmen, who would take it to the exhibitors and distributors around America. All was up-to-date, all the latest way of doing things, with one glaring exception: the sound-recording studio on the fourth floor.

Christian Semmler surveyed the recording studio with a knowledgeable eye. It was antiquated — even though the equipment was the latest available — because words and music were recorded here as feebly as they had been when Edison and his competitors first tinkered with phonographs and gramophones thirty years ago. Grim proof of how antiquated was the makeup of the band of trumpets, clarinets, and saxophones playing into an acoustical horn. Where were the violins? Where was the double bass? Where was the piano? Where was the tympani? Nowhere! None of those instruments could be recorded faithfully. The saxophone played for the string bass. The clarinet was supposed to fill in for the violins. Banjos attempted to keep the beat. The untutored listener of the recorded wax disc would assume that the piano had never been invented.

General Major Semmler climbed back up to the eighth floor for another look at the one man who could change that. He watched through the spy hole as Clyde Lynds’s eager assistants scurried. He saw that Lynds had had a cot moved in so he could work long nights. Semmler grunted approval at the sight. The scientist who was key to surmounting the shortcomings on the fourth floor was what Fritz Wunderlich’s drummer friends applauded as a “live wire.” Lynds was working, Semmler thought with a cold smile, just as hard as if he were locked in a Prussian dungeon with a gun to his head.

Semmler glided up the stairs to his lair on the ninth floor, confident that he had Clyde Lynds exactly where he needed him to save Germany from the fatal flaw of Der Tag. And, despite Isaac Bell’s repeated interference, the grand scheme of the Donar Plan was unfolding as it was destined to.

General Major Christian Semmler had soldiered abroad. Fighting in China and Africa, he had seen firsthand foreigners’ weaknesses and their strengths, and he knew better than any other officer in the kaiser’s army that Germany could never survive a war against all the world at once.

The Donar Plan — Semmler’s strategy to save Germany — had sprung to life in a rainstorm at Katrinahall, the hunting lodge on the Rominter Heath that was the jewel of his wife’s dowry. Kaiser Wilhelm II had come to shoot wild boar. A royal visit was a singular honor that aristocrats vied for at court. Semmler had stocked the estate with that in mind, but in fact the kaiser had always cast a warm eye on his youngest general major. He called Semmler a man’s man and a soldier’s soldier, and he chortled over rumors of deadly duels at school and reports of savage battles in Peking and with the Boers behind the English lines.

Semmler suspected another reason for His Majesty’s favor. He was acutely aware of his long arms and simian brows. He knew that “gorilla” or “monkey” looks would have doomed an ordinary soldier to a stagnant career in an army that revered the handsome features that epitomized superior races and ridiculed the ugly. But the kaiser’s own appearance was blighted by a birth defect — a withered arm that hung from his shoulder like a toy doll’s. Perhaps two refugees from the mirror felt a kinship?

When they were driven indoors by the rain, Semmler invited the kaiser into his library and entertained him by projecting films of galloping cavalry, armored trains, the new flying machines, and the ocean-churning dreadnoughts of Wilhelm’s beloved High Seas Fleet.

“Behold, Your Majesty, the newest weapon of all.”

The kaiser squinted at the screen. “Where is it?”

“The movies are a weapon, Your Majesty.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You know that the superior classes have always enjoyed theater and opera.”

“As they should.”

“The movies are an even bigger event in the lives of the workers. Millions crowd into Kintopps and tenement cinemas. They watch whatever appears on the screen. Mesmerized. Imagine millions upon millions assembled daily to watch the same thing — wanting to be mesmerized; hoping to be mesmerized. They are ripe for propaganda.”

“Propaganda?” The kaiser had frowned. “They boast in England that movies are a propaganda of democracy.”

“Movies are even better propaganda for love and hate, Your Majesty. Friendship and war. There are millions watching. They could watch your message.”

“What message, General Major?”

Christian Semmler stood face-to-face with Kaiser Wilhelm and said, “Friendship.”

“Friendship?…”

Semmler took a deep breath to remind himself that patience was the hunter’s deadliest virtue. He smothered his impulse to grip the kaiser by his shirtfront and shout that if propaganda could convince the German people to pay for a fleet of warships they didn’t need, propaganda could convince anyone of anything. But he could not shout that in so many words without instantly destroying his special rapport.

“With all the respect due the power of your splendid armies, Majesty, and your navy, when Der Tag dawns we will almost certainly have to fight England, France, and Russia simultaneously.”

“We will win,” the kaiser said. “Our rail lines will shuttle our armies from front to front, east to west, west to east. A two-front war holds no terrors.”

“To be sure, Your Majesty. But three fronts? Even Germany will be hard-pressed to fight on three fronts simultaneously…”

“America.”

“As you say, Your Majesty. America.”

It finally dawned on the kaiser. “Allies!”

“Allies, Your Majesty. The movies can defeat Germany’s enemies by turning them against one another. We will show propaganda movies that depict Germans and the immense German-American minority as America’s friends and the British, French, and Russians as her enemies. Can you imagine a more powerful weapon? Germany, their friend, and England, their enemy.”

The kaiser had looked at him sharply. “You’ve put great thought into this, haven’t you? This didn’t just pop into your mind.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. I have thought of little else for a long time. Der Tag must be Germany’s beginning, not her end.”

Kaiser Wilhelm flung his strong arm around Semmler’s shoulders.

“Do it,” he said. “Take whatever you need.”

“I need the Army, the diplomatic corps, the banks, and the steamship lines.”

“All will serve you.”

Semmler’s gifts included an unerring eye for a person’s nature and desires. Instead of responding with a soldierly salute, he extended a strong man’s hand. They clasped hard and stared each other in the face. “I swear a sacred oath: I will not let you down, Your Majesty.”

But the kaiser was famously mercurial. Before Semmler could suggest they rejoin the other guns at the hunt since the rain was slackening, the kaiser’s face took on a dreamy expression, and he said, with what turned out to be amazing prescience, “Wouldn’t it be fine if movies made music?”

“Music, Your Majesty?”

“Music! So that thousands watching in giant theaters could listen, too, and feel the emotion of the music. Music is key to effective propaganda. Music is visceral.”

“You are right, of course, Your Majesty, I will look into it.”

But there were few orchestras in the small theaters in most American towns. Nor would a tinny piano do much to stir emotions. He investigated the likelihood that movies themselves could make their own music and learned the sorry history of those attempts.

And then the strangest thing happened. Semmler had already set the Donar Plan in motion to show pro-German movies to American audiences. He had established the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company and was integrating exchange men and exhibitors to control film production, distribution, and exhibition when all of a sudden — like a comet roaring through the atmosphere — came news from Vienna of Sprechendlichtspieltheater, a talking pictures machine that actually worked.

The kaiser himself had virtually predicted it, and there it was. The invention that Beiderbecke and Lynds had named the Talking Pictures machine would transform movies into far more potent voices to persuade, cajole, and play on the emotions. Music and the human voice married to moving images would stir millions to go to war in the name of love.

Arthur Curtis got to the Kintopp an hour early for his appointment with Hans Reuter. The Kino was full already with a hundred film patrons in the narrow space, both men and women tonight, watching Sarah Bernhardt. He took his beer and wandered toward the screen, simulating a search for a closer seat while he looked for a back way out. There was none — which would make a fire a precarious proposition, and the effect of Reuter betraying him even worse.

The safer move would be to stay out of the Kino and nurse his beer at the bar. With an unpleasant premonition gnawing at him, Curtis emerged from the darkened theater and took a place at the bar. At six forty-five, a carpenter with his toolbox in hand and sawdust on his overalls came in, ordered beer, and drank it slowly, ignoring the entrance to the Kino and glancing occasionally at the street door, as if waiting for a friend. Arthur Curtis studied the man intently. The premonition grew sharp, but it took him too long to isolate the source.

The sawdust was what troubled him, he realized at last. German workmen were precise. They swept up at the end of every day. They would never step out in public covered in sawdust, even hurrying home from work, and this one wasn’t hurrying. He was barely touching his stein to his lips.

Art Curtis downed his beer, nodded a casual farewell to the barmaid, and pushed through the front doors into the street. He breathed in the evening air and glanced around the bustling neighborhood of shops and tenements.

As luck would have it, Hans Reuter was early. He was walking fast, his head down, either unconcerned that he was being followed or hoping like an ostrich that what he couldn’t see couldn’t hurt him.

Curtis made a lightning decision and took a huge chance that his initial glance at the street had correctly picked up no shadows.

Reuter flinched as Art Curtis took his arm.

“Let’s walk, instead.”

“Why?” asked Reuter. But his hunger for the money gave him no choice but to let Curtis set their course.

“We can transact our business in half a minute. Give me the name. I’ll give you the money, and we can go our separate ways.” Run our separate ways was what he meant — in his case, straight to the French border, the hell with the office. But telling Reuter they were under observation was no way to make him take a chance.

“His name?”

“They call him ‘the Monkey.’”

Isaac Bell had called him an acrobat. “What’s his real name?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t pay for ‘I don’t know,’” Curtis shot back, scanning the street ahead and behind. He saw workmen homeward bound, shoppers with groceries, couples holding hands converging on the Kintopp. Oddly, there were no cops.

“He’s an Army officer.”

“That much I knew already.”

“You didn’t know he was a general major,” Reuter replied smugly.

“His rank means nothing without a name,” Curtis lied. If it was true, such a high rank would narrow the possibilities to a handful.

“Would you accept a description?” Reuter asked.

“It’d better be precise.”

They were passing under a streetlamp and Curtis got a good look at Reuter’s face. A confident expression matched his smug tone as he said, “Thirty-five years old, medium height, powerful frame, blond hair, green eyes, long arms like a monkey.”

Thirty-five was unusually young for a general major in the German Army. But the rest of the description was too incongruous to be a lie.

“If you can tell me that, you know his name. There can’t be two officers his age who look like that. No name, no money.”

Two men gliding toward them on bicycles took PO8 Lugar pistols from the baskets attached to their handlebars, and behind him Arthur Curtis heard the carpenter burst out of the Kintopp and drop his toolbox.

29

Hans Reuter ran.

The bicyclists shot him down. He tumbled into the gutter. Pedestrians screamed, dove to the cobblestones, and bolted into shops. Art Curtis had already pulled his Browning. He whirled around and dropped the carpenter with a lucky shot to the chest, then spun back around and fired twice, wounding the nearest bicyclist. The man he missed returned his fire.

Art Curtis felt the hammer blow of a 9mm slug and found himself suddenly on his back, staring up at the darkening sky. If anyone had shouted Polizei!, he might have stayed on the ground. But no one did, and the men on the bicycles had Army pistols, and the cops had been ordered out of the neighborhood. That meant they’d been sent to kill him, which gave him the fear-driven strength to stagger to his feet. The man who had shot him looked surprised, raised his pistol, and took deliberate aim.

The Van Dorn detective did not waste precious time aiming at a target six feet away. He triggered his Browning, jumped over the body, and ran.

“You’re white as a ghost, my friend,” exclaimed the old Army sergeant when Arthur Curtis collapsed onto the bentwood chair beside him.

“Too much schnapps last night.”

He kept telling himself it was only a shoulder wound, except he could feel in his lungs that the bullet, which was still lodged inside him, had done greater damage. At least it hadn’t broken any bones, and for some reason there was no blood on his coat, just a tiny hole that a moth could have eaten. But it hurt to breathe and his head was spinning, and the walk to the sergeant’s beer garden had nearly killed him.

“Good German lager will fix that! Waitress! Beer for my friend.”

Arthur Curtis rested until the beer arrived, tipped the stein toward the old man, and asked, through gritted teeth, “Do you recall before you retired a general major nicknamed ‘Monkey’?”

The old sergeant shook his head. “No.”

“I heard it the other day. It’s such a strange nickname for a high-serving officer.”

“Well, he wasn’t so high then.”

“What? I mean, what do you mean he wasn’t so high then? Who?”

“I retired, what was it… six years ago? He was only a colonel, a very young colonel. What a man! What a soldier! You’ve never seen a fighter like him. They say he resigned his commission to fight in Africa. A guerrilla fighter with the Boer commandos.”

“Did you know him?”

“Me? A sergeant from Berlin know a Prussian aristocrat? What could you be thinking, my friend?”

Curtis gripped the table to right himself as a sudden burst of pain nearly knocked him off his chair. He put all his might into composing his voice. “I meant, did you serve under him?”

“I only knew him by reputation. He was admired. Still is, I’m sure.”

“Why did they call him Monkey?”

“Not to his face,” the sergeant chuckled. “Mein Gott, Colonel Semmler would have sliced their ears off and made them eat them.”

“Semmler… But why did they call him ‘Monkey’?”

“He looked like one. Enormous arms and big brows like a monkey.” The sergeant glanced about and lowered his voice. “Not quite the picture of the purebred Prussian aristocrat, if you know what I mean. More the sturdy peasant, like me.”

“I thought Semmler was a Prussian name?”

“Of course. And they said he’s a Roth, too — buckets of superior Prussian blood, if not the superior shape. My friend, are you all right? You look at death’s door.”

“What is his first name?”

“Christian.”

Arthur Curtis gathered his spirit in an effort to stand.

“I am thinking it is more than the schnapps. Bad oysters. I had a dozen at lunch. Perhaps… I better go — here, let me pay.”

“No, no, my friend. You always pay. You hardly touched your beer. I’ll pay and finish it for you. You go home and get to bed.”

The telegraph offices in the main railroad stations were open all night. He would cable Semmler’s name and description to Isaac Bell, care of the New York office, and just to be sure he would also wire it to the Van Dorn field office in Paris. He headed for the nearest station, hoping that his lurching pace would not draw attention on the well-lit streets. He paused just inside the main entrance to check in a kiosk mirror that no blood showed on his coat, and as he did, he saw across the vast hall that the police were checking the papers of the men lined up at the telegraph office. They’d be doing the same at every office open all night and, he realized with a touch of panic, at the hospitals, too. And as the night wore on and the streets and bars and restaurants emptied, they would stop any man still about.

The French border, four hundred and fifty miles west, was a fantasy. He could barely walk. Nor could he go home to his Pension. It was filled with busybody boarders and a nosy dragon of a landlady. Anyone who saw him in the lighted foyer would report his condition. Kicking himself for not trading the convenience of the boarding house for the privacy of a furnished apartment, and with panic rising, Arthur Curtis convinced himself that he could hole up in his office. There he could rest, regain his strength, and then light out for the border in the morning — or maybe the North Sea coast. A million and a half people lived in Berlin, and when they all rushed to work in the morning the railroad stations would be too crowded for the police to check everyone. Concentrating on placing one foot after another, he headed for the tram. They stopped running at eleven. He had time. He pulled himself aboard with a herculean effort, staggered off at his stop, managing not to fall, and walked toward his office.

A man in a macintosh was standing across the street.

Art Curtis reached deep into his pocket and closed his hand around his Browning, which had a round in the chamber and two left in the magazine. He looked for the man’s partner and spotted him in a doorway. He veered off the sidewalk into the street, drawing both from their cover. They exchanged looks and moved quickly. He let them come close. When they drew their weapons — Army Lugars again — he fired twice through the cloth of his coat, dropped both men, and staggered into his building. He hauled himself up the steps, fumbled his key into his lock, pushed inside, and locked the door, wondering whether he still had the strength in his hands to reload. There’d be more of them coming any minute.

The desk lamp flared on, and he whirled to fire his last bullet.

“What happened?” asked Pauline. Her eyes were clouded with sleep, her face creased where she had rested her cheek on her sleeve.

30

“Nothing. Go home. Go on. Get out of here!”

“I’m sorry. I was doing my homework, and I fell asleep. I can’t go home, my mother’s friend—”

“Get out of here!” Curtis roared. The girl flinched and tears of hurt filled her eyes. Curtis started coughing. He pressed his hand to his mouth, and it came away full of blood.

“Oh my God,” she whispered. “You’ve been shot.”

“Turn out the light.”

She did, instantly. “Are they coming?”

“Soon,” he said. “Get out. Use the window.”

She had jumped up from the chair and was standing behind his desk. He could see her silhouetted against the light in the alley. She stood stock-still.

“Quickly,” he urged. “Get away.”

“I can’t leave you like this.”

“Go!”

“Come with me.”

“I wish I could. I can’t move another step, much less climb down that ladder. Go. Please go before they come.”

“I can’t leave you.”

“They’ll kill you, Pauline.”

She rummaged in her book bag and pulled something out. He heard the sharp click of a hammer cocking.

“What the devil is that?”

“I bought a gun.”

Arthur Curtis felt a part of himself die. This silly child, he thought, is going to stay here like I’m Sherlock Holmes and die with me, and I cannot think of a worse way for a man to leave this earth than drag a child with him.

There was only one way to get her to leave.

“Give that to me!”

She handed it over, butt first. It was a little revolver. He could feel rust on the trigger guard.

“Draw the window shade. Stand to one side as you do it. Good. O.K., now. Bend the desk lamp down until it just lights the desk. Turn it on.”

It cast a dim glow.

“Let me sit there.” He lurched to the desk and sank into his chair. He shoved her pistol aside, drew his own from his coat, and laid it on the desk. “Watch this.”

He removed the magazine and the cartridge from the chamber and took the slide and return spring from the barrel. He swabbed the parts clean with a rag he took from the cleaning kit in his desk. Then he reassembled the pistol, inserted a fresh magazine, and shoved it toward her. “Now you do it.”

Pauline mimicked the field stripping of the little Browning, step by step. Curtis was not surprised. She was as sharp a cookie as he had ever met.

“Good. Remember, always check there’s no bullet in the chamber, or you’ll blow your head off by mistake. O.K. Pick it up. Here’s how you cock it.”

He guided her hands and saw to his relief that she was strong enough to move the slide and chamber a round. “You have small hands, like me. It fits you fine. Keep it clean. Here’s a spare clip.” He took it from the drawer. “O.K. You got fourteen bullets.”

“You’re giving me your gun?”

“If anyone ever tries to take it away from you — they will, because you look like a little girl — here’s what you do. You point the gun at his face. And then you look through him, like he’s not there. Like you can’t see him, like he’s made of glass. Then he’ll believe you’re willing to kill him. Understand?”

She nodded solemnly.

“Still want to be a detective?”

“More than anything.”

“Starting this minute, you are a Van Dorn apprentice detective. Here’s your first assignment: report to the Van Dorn field office in Paris.”

“Paris?”

“On the Rue du Bac. My old pal Horace Bronson ramrods it. He’ll take care of you. He’s a top man. Used to run the San Francisco office. Here. Here’s money, you’ll need it.” He emptied the notes from his billfold and coins from his pockets into her hands. Then he yanked open another desk drawer. “And here’s some French francs. Tell Mr. Bronson you have a message for Van Dorn’s chief investigator in America…” He tried to catch his breath. It was getting hard to get wind into his lungs.

“The message is: ‘Krieg Rüstungswerk GmbH’s agent in America is an Imperial Army general major named Christian Semmler.’ Repeat that!”

Pauline repeated it word for word.

“Second half of the message: ‘Semmler is nicknamed “Monkey.” He’s thirty-five years old, medium height, powerful frame, blond hair, green eyes, long arms. Like a monkey.’ Repeat that!”

She did.

“Now get out of here.”

“But I can’t you leave you.”

“A Van Dorn apprentice always obeys orders.” He clasped her face between his trembling hands and glared into her eyes. “This is vital, Pauline. You are the only one who can solve this case and save men’s lives. Go. Please, go.”

He pushed her away.

Biting her lips, Pauline put on her coat and hat and pocketed the Browning. Curtis turned out the light. To his immense relief, he heard her open the back window. He heard the fire ladder rungs creak. He listened for her footsteps in the alley, but instead heard boots pounding up the stairs.

Arthur Curtis picked up Pauline’s rusted revolver and aimed it at the door, hoping it wouldn’t blow up in his hand. Not that that would make much difference. But the longer he could hold them off, the farther she could run.

“Cablegram from Paris, Mr. Bell.”

Bell took it with an amused smile. The Van Dorn apprentice detective who had delivered the cablegram, a slender youth in immaculate white shirt and trousers and a lavender bow tie, was aping the sartorial magnificence that the Van Dorn Los Angeles field office was famous for. All he was missing was a lavender bowler, for which he was probably banking his salary.

“Wait for my reply, please.”

Isaac Bell slit the envelope:

31

“What’s your reply, Mr. Bell?”

Isaac Bell heard the apprentice as if he were calling from a rooftop. When he turned to him, the boy flinched from his raging eyes.

“Reply, sir?” he repeated bravely.

“Cable this:

“Write it down, son.” The tall detective turned away to hide his grief.

The boy patted his empty pockets in sudden panic.

Bell said, “Son, never go anywhere without a pencil. If you’re going to become a detective, you have to write down your thoughts and observations. What’s your name?”

“Apprentice Detective Adams, sir. Mike Adams.”

“Here, Mike, use mine.” Bell lent him his pencil and gave him a sheet of paper from the desk he had commandeered.

Apprentice Adams wrote the message, read it back, and ran.

Isaac Bell turned to the window and stared down at busy First Street, barely seeing the parade of streetcars, autos, trucks, wagons, and a squad of helmeted police on bicycles.

Joe Van Dorn pushed into the office without knocking.

“I just heard. I’m sorry, Isaac. I know you liked him.”

Bell said, “The evidence of the Acrobat’s ruthlessness was right before my eyes. I saw him throw his own man into the sea to conceal his identity. What made me think he wouldn’t murder Art Curtis for the same reason?”

Joseph Van Dorn shook his head emphatically. “I saw Art once in a gunfight. Most men lose perspective when the lead starts flying. Not Art.”

“I appreciate the thought, Joe. I know Art could handle himself. Nonetheless, he was working for me.”

Van Dorn said, “You are, of course, authorized to pull out all stops until we get who did it.”

“Thank you.”

“Until Bronson learns otherwise in Berlin, we have to presume he was gunned down by Krieg.”

“Or the German Army.”

“Don’t you wonder what he learned that got him killed?” Bronson marveled.

“He learned a name,” said Bell.

“How do you know?”

“He cabled me the day before yesterday asking for more money. He said we’d have the money back — or a name — in two days.”

“What did you cable back?”

“‘Blank check.’”

“Well, if he got the name, he took it to his grave.”

“I’m afraid so,” said Bell.

“Now what?” asked Van Dorn.

“Short of a lucky break walking in that door,” said Isaac Bell, “I’m starting from scratch.”

There was a knock at the door. The front-desk man, wearing a scarlet vest and matching shoulder holster, called, “Mr. Bell — Oh, there you are, Mr. Van Dorn. Police chief’s phoning from Levy’s Cafe, wondering what happened to you?”

Van Dorn tugged out his watch. “Telephone the restaurant I’ll be there in ten minutes. Lunch with the chief,” he explained to Bell and rushed out, saying, “Then I’m on the Limited to Chicago. Keep me posted.”

“Mr. Bell, there’s a fellow to see you. Hebrew gent. Has one of those funny caps on his head.”

“It’s called a yarmulke. Send him in.”

Andrew Rubenoff marched in smiling, but when he saw Bell standing by the window, his smile faded. “You do not look well, Isaac.”

“Lost a friend,” Bell answered tersely. “What have you learned?”

The newly minted film-manufacturing banker went straight to the purpose of his visit.

“To my great relief,” he said, “the so-called Artists Syndicate does not exist.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that a syndicate that I knew nothing about, but thought I should, is a sham. It exists only on paper. Its supposed Wall Street investors are ghosts.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“Then who paid for Imperial Film’s ten-story building?”

“I don’t know yet. But it was not the Artists Syndicate.”

“Someone funneled a lot of money into Imperial.”

“To be sure. But so far Wall Street has greeted my questions about who that someone might be with a wall of silence.”

“Are the Wall Streeters protecting Imperial?”

“No, no, no. Imperial’s money almost certainly comes from someplace other than Wall Street. Abroad, I suspect.”

“Germany?”

“Perhaps. But English bankers are our biggest source of foreign funds. They invest in American railroads and ranches and ore mines. Why not moving pictures?”

“And the Germans?”

“Obviously, your first interest in this is the Germans. We shall see. Not to worry, I’m just getting started.”

“I’ll have our Research people nose around that, too.”

Rubenoff smiled modestly. “I’m sure that the Van Dorn Research department will be… helpful.”

“How did you find out so quickly that there’s no Wall Street interests in the Artists Syndicate?”

“Isaac! You are talking to Andrew Rubenoff. When the Messiah comes, he’ll ask me to recommend a stockbroker.” He sobered quickly. “I don’t mean to offer false hope. Wall Street was easy. Abroad is much more complicated. I’ve already started, but I can’t deliver such fast results.”

Bell heard the clatter of a troop of horsemen in the street, not a usual sound in downtown Los Angeles. He looked down from the window again. Twenty actors dressed as cowboys in white hats and bare-chested, war-painted Indians were trotting by, bound, it appeared, for picture taking in nearby Elysian Park. He watched them pass, his brow furrowed in thought. Then he picked up the Kellogg intercommunicating telephone.

“Send an apprentice.”

One came instantly. It was the kid wearing the lavender bow tie. “Mike, transmit a wire on the private line to Texas Walt Hatfield. The Houston office will know where to find him.”

The kid whipped out pad and pencil. “Yes, sir, Mr. Bell. What’s the message?”

COME LA.

SEEK EMPLOYMENT WITH IMPERIAL FILM AS COWBOY PLAYER.

“Go on, Mike. That’s all.”

“Should I sign it ‘BELL’?”

“Sign it ‘ISAAC.’”

Mike Adams ran out.

Andrew Rubenoff raised an inquiring eyebrow.

Bell said, “Walt Hatfield rode with the Texas Rangers before he joined Van Dorn. He’ll make a believable cowboy looking for work as an extra in Wild West dramas. Heck, they might make him a Western star. He looks like he was carved from cactus.”

“I presume that Texas Walt is an old friend?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Sometimes we need an old friend on the premises.”

“Maybe so. But what I need most is a crackerjack detective inside Imperial Film.”

“What can one detective do? Imperial is an enormous company with four hundred hands.”

“He won’t be the only one.”

Bell wired Grady Forrer on the Van Dorn private telegraph, inquiring what progress he had made with Imperial’s bankers.

The redoubtable head of the Research department wired back:

Isaac Bell replied:

32

Pauline Grandzau woke up in a haystack with four tines of a pitchfork inches from her face. The steel was shiny from use and recently sharpened. Three of the tines tapered to a needle point. The fourth was bent as if the farmer had accidently hit a rock shortly before finding her in his hay.

She asked herself, What is the best thing possible at this moment?

The best thing was that her disguise worked. She didn’t look like a girl. She looked like a boy, a tough Berlin factory boy in a cloth cap and a rough woolen jacket and trousers. She had traded her dress, her coat, and her beautiful hat last night with her friend Hilda for Hilda’s brother’s things. Five groschen from the marks Detective Curtis gave her had bought the brother’s rucksack. It held dry socks, a wool jumper, an apple and biscuits (which she had already eaten), a Strand magazine, a map of France and Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs purchased in a railroad station, and Detective Curtis’s gun.

Best of all, her disguise worked so well that the farmer was frightened. The haystack was behind his barn. There was a dense wood across the field, and beyond the wood were the railroad tracks, which brought tramps and gypsies and troublemakers from Berlin.

Pauline asked herself, now what? What would Sherlock Holmes do when his disguise worked? She forced her voice low and in guttural tones asked, “Why are you pointing your pitchfork at me?”

“Who are you?” asked the farmer. What would Sherlock Holmes do? The answer: Sherlock Holmes would observe everything, not just the steel tines in her face. The farmer was young, she saw. This was not the farmer, but the farmer’s son.

“Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you pointing that at me? What kind of German are you? Have you no shame?”

The boy blinked. “But what are you doing here?”

“I won’t tell until you move that thing away from my face.”

He lowered the pitchfork.

Pauline climbed to her feet, taking her time, observing. His legs were short. Hers were longer. She could run faster. She saw a bulge in his jacket and white cloth poking from his pocket. It was a bundle a mother would pack. “I’m hungry,” she growled. “Do you have food?”

He pulled it from his pocket, and she smelled ham. It was wrapped in a piece of buttered bread. She bit hungrily into it, two enormous, delicious bites.

“Hans!” a man shouted. “What are you doing there?”

It could only be Hans’s father. And he would not be fooled.

She ran for the wood through which she had felt her way from the railroad. It was still dark, and the train she was clinging to had suddenly rumbled through a switch and stopped on a siding, shorn of its locomotive, which then had steamed back toward Berlin.

She heard the farmers shouting behind her. “Catch him!” the father yelled. Hans was scampering as fast as he could on his short legs, and the father was limping on a cane.

Ahead through the trees Pauline saw the siding and on it the single railcar on which she had escaped from Berlin, but which the train had dropped. She ran past it and jumped onto the main line. Then she ran on the crossties until her legs ached and her lungs were burning and the blood was pounding in her head so loudly that she couldn’t hear the speeding train behind her.

In Griffith Park, a wilderness in the hills north of Los Angeles, Jay Tarses complained to the petite dark-haired woman who served as his mistress and business manager, “I want to go back to New Jersey.”

“Jersey? Are you nuts? Best thing we ever did was beat it to California. It’s beautiful here. The sun has shined all day. You’ve already exposed eight hundred feet of film. You’ll finish the whole picture before dark. And tomorrow you’ll start a Western drama.”

“This is the worst day of my life.”

The City of Los Angeles had just fined Tarses twenty-five dollars because gunfire between his French Foreign Legionnaires and his Arabs abducting his heroine had frightened the elk in Griffith Park. Then his camels had stampeded a herd of horses that were not used to their smell. And now, just as his wranglers had finished rounding up the horses so he could start taking pictures again, a squad of Edison thugs piled out of a Marmon auto, itching to pull out their blackjacks if he wasn’t taking pictures with an overpriced Edison camera.

The head thug, a rangy street fighter with bony fists and a Hoboken accent, saw at a glance that he wasn’t.

“You think California’s so far from Joisey Mr. Edison don’t notice?”

“Let the girls go,” Tarses told him. “I’ll take my lumps.”

“You’re all takin’ yer lumps this time. We’re setting an example for the rest of youse independents.”

He grabbed Tarses by his lapels and held him stiff-armed for the first blow.

“Hold it!” someone shouted.

If Jay Tarses had any hope he’d been rescued, the sight of chief Edison bull Joe McCoy swaggering out of the woods disabused him of that. McCoy, the meanest Edison detective Tarses had even met, reported directly to Mr. Dyer, Edison’s lawyer, who enforced Trust restrictions with an iron hand. McCoy had a coal trimmer’s shoulders and less mercy in his face than a cinder block.

“Mr. Tarses,” he snickered. “I would have recognized your picture taking anywhere by the camel stink.”

“Any chance of buying you off?” asked Tarses, his eyes locked on McCoy’s blackjack.

McCoy raised a mighty arm. The blackjack whistled as it tore down from the sky, and the Edison thug holding Tarses by the lapels went flying sideways into a camel and fell on his face. Tarses was vaguely aware that he himself was still on his feet and nothing hurt. Aside from that, he had no idea what was going on.

McCoy handed him a calling card. Through a smudge of blood from McCoy’s blackjack, Jay Tarses read:

“Telephone number’s on the back. Operator on-station night and day.”

“You don’t work for Edison anymore?” Tarses asked.

“Didn’t you hear?” McCoy grinned. “I’m a trustbuster. Just like Teddy Roosevelt.”

“What the hell is Imperial Film Protection Service?”

“‘The Independent’s Friend.’ Can’t you read?”

“Friend? I’ll bet. What’s it going to cost me?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Joe. What’s the big idea?”

McCoy threw a heavy arm around Tarses’s shoulder. “Jay, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. And stop asking stupid questions.”

Tarses knew he had his share of flaws, but stupidity wasn’t one of them, and he said, “Thanks, Joe.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Imperial. Well, sun’s in the sky. Bet you’re itching to get back to work— Say, what’s your picture called?”

“The Imperial Horseman.”

McCoy tipped his hat to Tarses’s pretty business manager, slung the unconscious thug over his shoulder, and carried him away.

Tarses shouted for his players to climb on their animals.

“Camera…”

That evening, when Tarses was paying off his extras, the one last in line drawled, “Who were those fellers pushing you around?”

Tarses was about to tell him to mind his own business when he recognized the extra as the tall, barbed-wire-thin cowboy with whom his costume girl had traded a French Foreign Legionnaire kepi for the cowboy’s Stetson, with a promise to trade hats again over a glass of wine after work. Tarses had noticed him sitting in his saddle as if born to it, and now, close up, he saw angular bone structure in the cowboy’s face that looked ferocious in the light of the setting sun.

“What’s your name?”

“Tex.”

“Come back tomorrow, Tex. I’ll be taking pictures for a Wild West drama.”

Texas Walt Hatfield sauntered into the Los Angeles field office, cast a withering glance at the front-desk man’s fancy duds, and shook howdy with Isaac Bell.

Bell felt the tall Texan flinch.

“What happened to your hand?”

“Busted it falling off my damned horse. Camel spooked him.”

Bell was astonished. There was no finer horseman in the West. “When’s the last time you fell off a horse?”

“Unless you mean shot off,” Texas Walt drawled, “Ah was three years old, and he hadn’t been broke yet.”

“Did you catch up with Joe McCoy?”

“Yup. Like Tarses told me, used to thug for Edison — McCoy called it ‘engaged by Mr. Edison’s legal department.’ Quit or got fired, Ah couldn’t tell, came out here, and hired on with Imperial Protection. McCoy claims they’ve been whupping the heck out of the Edison Boys.”

“I just saw a bunged-up bunch headed back East on the train,” Bell said. “McCoy have any inkling what Imperial Protection’s all about?”

“He’s not a talkative feller. Though near as Ah can gather, he himself’s on the level.”

“Are they?”

“All I know is they ain’t asking for protection money. But if it’s not a racket, why is Imperial taking the independents’ side in the Trust war? Kindness of their hearts?”

Bell said, “I suspect that the truth is printed on their calling card.”

“‘The Independent’s Friend?’ How you figure that?”

“If an outfit that distributes and exhibits moving pictures befriends all the independents, they can rent out a lot of films.”

Texas Walt shoved his Stetson back on his head. “Like the cattle broker buying up every herd at the railhead.”

“And the meat packer in Chicago buying by the trainload. The Independent’s Friend could control the distribution and exhibition of all the independents’ moving pictures.”

“You’re sure they’re the same Imperial as the outfit you’re tracking?”

Bell nodded emphatically. “Larry Saunders got the Los Angeles exchange to trace their telephone number back to the Imperial Building.”

“And you’re sure Imperial Film’s a blind for something else?” Hatfield asked.

“That’s what we’re going to find out,” said Isaac Bell.

“Reckon you want me to continue riding for Tarses?”

“No. I want you inside that building. They’ve got cinematography studio stages up in the penthouse. Audition at Imperial to get a job acting inside.”

“Acting jobs ain’t all that easy to tie on to, Isaac. There’s men and women lined up everywhere they’re taking pictures.”

“You have a leg up, Walt. You look like you should be in pictures. And you’ve already worked in a couple. Get inside Imperial first thing tomorrow.”

Texas Walt hesitated.

“What’s wrong?” asked Bell.

“Well, I don’t want to leave Tarses in a lurch.”

“Tarses? What does Tarses have to do with the Talking Pictures case?”

Texas Walt scuffed the carpet with his boot. “Fact is, he’s talking about me playing a bigger part.”

“Why don’t you ask Mr. Van Dorn for a leave of absence?” Bell asked in a quiet, silky manner that Texas Walt Hatfield misinterpreted.

“Think the boss would go for that?”

“After we crack the case.”

Texas Walt worked a deep groove into the carpet. “Sorry, Isaac. I didn’t mean to say I won’t take home the gal I brung to the dance.”

“Appreciate it,” said Bell. “Here’s where we stand: I’ve got the boys watching Clyde on the eighth floor of the Imperial Building; I want you up top in the roof studios. I’ve seen Mademoiselle Viorets’s office on the seventh, and I’m heading now to the fourth floor where they do the recordings.”

“How you fixin’ to get in?”

“I already am in.”

The tough nuts in fancy uniforms who guarded the Imperial Building lobby were not exactly friendly toward Isaac Bell, but he had visited Clyde Lynds often enough that they acknowledged a familiar face and greeted him by name.

“Afternoon, Mr. Bell,” said the doorman, then spoke sharply to the well-built men crowding behind Bell who were carrying musical cases for horns, saxophones, a clarinet, a violin, and a double bass. “Wait right there, gents! I’ll be with youse in a minute.”

“They’re with me,” said Bell.

“All of ’em?”

“Mr. Lynds requested a band.”

“Open those cases.”

“Gentlemen,” Bell said mildly, “they’re jumpy here. Show him your instruments.”

Hinged open, the cases revealed shiny trumpets and saxophones, clarinets, a little violin, and an enormous string bass.

“Fourth floor,” Bell told the glowering elevator operator, who glanced for the O.K. from the chief doorman before delivering them to the fourth floor.

Clyde Lynds was waiting impatiently in the recording room. “What took so long?”

“Nervous doormen thought the boys were smuggling Gatling guns.”

“Idiots— All right, boys, sit yourselves around that recording horn. Violin closest, trumpet over there, saxophone and string bass back there.”

“Where you want me?’ asked the clarinetist, a nattily dressed wisp of a fellow whom Isaac Bell had last seen in Idaho separating two bank robbers from their shotguns.

Clyde said, “Stand behind the violin and wait to come in until I tell you.”

The string bass player, most famous at the Van Dorn Detective Agency for infiltrating San Francisco’s corrupt police department, blew A on a pitch pipe to start the tuning process.

Clyde said, “When making acoustic recordings of music, we have to replace the violins with horns and clarinets and reinforce the string bass with a bass saxophone and the drums with banjos. One of my goals is to replace the acoustic mechanical systems invented by Edison. Edison machines can’t record strings and drums and can’t record piano, which is really just a bunch of strings and drums. It comes out flat and tinny.”

Isaac Bell glanced over his shoulder. He had an eerie sense that someone was watching him. But the only people he saw were Clyde’s assistants coming into the room carrying a box trailing wires. While they began attaching the wires to a disc-cutting machine, Bell went to the door and looked out. The corridor was empty, but the feeling persisted that he was under observation.

Clyde’s helpers lugged in a wooden box on top of which stood a thick round disc peppered with holes. They placed it next to the horn. “This is a carbon microphone, like you’ll find in a telephone, only much bigger. Inside this box is an electrically charged glass vacuum valve that will amplify and regenerate what the microphone hears. It is my theory that an electric recording will add an octave of sound reproduction so that we can record violins, and hopefully one day, the piano. Eventually I’ll make a microphone that lets the sound wave be lazy, unlike Edison’s microphone, which demands lots of work. By the time the sound comes out of Edison’s horn it’s exhausted, just like some poor laborer. O.K., why don’t you boys tune up while they finish hooking up wires?”

Clyde joined Bell at the door, and they stepped down the hall into a soundproof room that Clyde had built next to the recording studio. It had a window made of multiple layers of glass that looked out on the musicians. There was an enormous tin gramophone horn on a wooden box, which, Bell noticed, had wires trailing out of it and through the wall into the recording room.

He asked, “What’s this about cutting a wax disc? I thought you were putting the sound straight on film.”

“One thing at time. First I have to make a clear electrical recording. There’s no point in putting acoustically recorded sound on the film if I can’t play it back loudly enough for an audience to hear in a big theater.”

“When do you think you’ll be able to?”

“Listen to this.” Clyde closed a knife switch on the box that held the horn. The horn emitted the discordant cacophony of the musicians tuning violins and banjos. Bell listened carefully, trying to distinguish between the different instruments he was watching through the window. “I can’t hear much difference between the violin and the clarinet.”

“The fact that you’re hearing the violin at all tells me I’m on the right track.” Clyde opened the switch, and the noise stopped. “You can tell Mr. Van Dorn that we can sell a version of this microphone to Alexander Graham Bell to make longer long-distance telephone calls. Like from here all the way to New York.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Bell, adding drily, “I’ll also tell him that it sounds like we have a long way to go.”

“I had a better one made, but someone stole it.”

“Stole it? Who?”

Clyde shrugged. “I don’t know. I came in yesterday morning, and the best one I’d made yet had disappeared. None of my boys saw anything. And neither did yours.”

“Do you think someone sneaked in while you were

sleeping?”

“I went back to the house to get a bath and a full night’s sleep. The cleaners might have tossed it out with the garbage, but they claim they didn’t.”

Isaac Bell was troubled that he could not tell for sure whether the young scientist was speaking the truth or making excuses for slow progress. He said, “I’ll post a man in here, overnight, when you’re not here.”

“I don’t leave often.”

“I know. Mr. Van Dorn is impressed by your dedication. Have you heard anything new to do with Imperial?”

Clyde Lynds had made many friends, as was his wont, while wandering the halls and riding the elevators while pondering the knotty science behind his Talking Pictures machine. He shared Bell’s suspicion of the mysteriously wealthy company. “I met an Imperial director who’s taking pictures outside. He got the job ’cause he’s pals with somebody high up in the company. He might know something. Or he might be just another hired hand.”

“What’s his picture called?”

“The Brewer’s Daughter.”

“What’s it about?”

“The hero marries a German immigrant’s daughter, and they live happily ever after.”

“I’ll look into it.”

33

Isaac Bell dabbed a mixture of black shoe polish and Pinaud Clubman Wax on his mustache, stuffed his distinctive golden hair under a leather flying-machine helmet, and pulled a big set of birdman goggles over his blue eyes. Then he mounted a shiny black Indian motorcycle and roared up Second Street, weaving in and out of streetcars, autos, trucks, and wagons at breakneck speed. The machine was the brand-new model with an automatic oil pump, a two-speed transmission for lightning starts, and a springy front fork that Bell hoped would help in the jumps.

Leaning into a turn, he cut along the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks toward Aliso. He careened onto Aliso, headed straight for an intersection occupied by an enormous red brick brewery and its bottling plant, and poured on the speed. Closing fast on the brewery, he saw a canvas sign hanging above a roped-off empty lot that read:

A huge crowd of costumed extras milled around the lot: mustachioed villains, helmeted cops, fat men bulging in loud suits, and dozens of dust-caked cowboys — many twirling lassos — numerous circus clowns, and no less than three female trick riders in buckskin standing on their saddles. Texas Walt was right. Competition was tough. Everyone in Los Angeles wanted to be in a movie. To get the job, you had to stand out.

Bell spotted the camera operator at the brewery’s ornate iron gates, cranking at full speed. The camera was flanked by a director with a megaphone and a blazing bank of Cooper-Hewitt lamps. A Pierce-Arrow limousine rolled in front of the gates. A beautiful actress in evening clothes stepped from it into the glare of the Cooper-Hewitts.

Isaac Bell twisted his throttle and kicked the Indian into first gear. Hunkered low over the handlebars, he headed for a long ramp down which motortrucks and horse-drawn beer wagons were exiting the brewery’s second story. Dodging trucks and horses, he leaned into a sharp turn, raced up the ramp, and leaned into another. The Indian’s motor screamed in protest as his wheels left the pavement.

The motorcycle took to the air, flew from the top of the ramp, and soared over the hood of the Pierce-Arrow. Clearing the auto by a whisker, Bell banged down hard on the cobblestones and skidded to a rubber-scorching halt in front of the camera.

When he saw that the startled camera operator had kept his wits about him and continued cranking, Bell extended his gloved hand to the beautiful woman with a courtly bow. The actress took it, covering her surprise, as if assuming Bell was a part of the film no one had told her about.

“What the hell are you doing?” the director yelled.

“Came for a job,” said Isaac Bell, mimicking the tone of a country man trying his luck in the big city.

“Are you crazy?”

“I hear you got a chase coming up in this Bride of the Brewery show you’re taking pictures for.”

“It’s called The Brewer’s Daughter—hey, hold on a minute! Where’d you hear I have a chase scene?”

“Feller in the business told me.”

Among the acquaintances Clyde Lynds had met in the halls was this Imperial director, who had boasted to Clyde he was planning to have the couple elope on a bicycle chased by brewery trucks and wagons spilling barrels.

“Where’s he work?”

“Works for Mr. Griffith.”

The director beamed proudly. “D.W. heard I’m doing a chase scene?”

“That’s what the feller said.”

“Did Mr. Griffith mention anything specific about it?”

“‘If I was filming it, I’d use something more exciting than a bicycle.’”

The director’s face fell. Then he got truculent. “Oh, I get it. You think I need a lunatic on a motorcycle.”

Isaac Bell pointed at the camera. “Look at the pictures that camera just took. Then tell me I’m not the best motorcycle rider in the movies.”

A Bremserhäuschen — a Brakeman’s van, which Detective Curtis had told Pauline was called a caboose in America — sat by itself on a lonely track siding. It had high spoked wheels like a freight wagon, a cupola above one end, three square windows, a tin chimney, and ventilators in the roof, which the wind was spinning. She saw a door in the middle and two more on the platforms in front and back.

It was starting to rain again. Night was falling. Pauline was cold, hungry, and still hundreds of miles from France. What, she asked herself, is the best thing possible at this moment?

None of the windows showed lights, and no smoke rose from the chimney.

No one was around. All day she had been surprised by the emptiness of the countryside the train tracks traversed. Germany’s population had grown enormous, even in her short lifetime. She had expected the freight trains to take her through busy cities and bustling suburbs. Instead, they trundled past farm after farm and more animals than people. It was an unexpected piece of good luck — this empty caboose. It would be dry inside, and out of the wind. There might even be food.

She checked for the tenth time that no one was near, then sprinted as fast as she could across a muddy field and climbed a short ladder onto the back platform. The door was locked. She climbed down, walked along the siding, and tried the center door. Locked. She went to the front of the caboose, climbed up, and discovered that door locked, too.

She was so cold she began shivering. The cupola! Maybe it had a hatch they’d forgotten to lock. A ladder was attached to the side. She climbed the wet metal rungs, scrambled along the roof, and knelt to inspect the cupola. There was no hatch in its roof, but then she discovered the entire roof was a hatch that hinged open and no one had locked it. She lowered herself down a ladder into near darkness, closing the roof hatch to keep out the rain.

She felt around until her hands brushed a lantern and a box of matches. She was afraid to light it because someone might see. But then she thought, the brakemen sleep in here when they are not working. She was right. The windows had curtains. She felt her way around, drew the curtains shut, located the lantern again, and lighted its wick.

She looked around in amazement.

It was neat and cosy as a dollhouse. It had sleeping bunks along the walls with warm blankets and a little kerosene stove with a teakettle, and she suddenly realized she would give anything for a warm drink. The kettle had water in it. She struck a match to the kerosene, and while the water heated she found a tin of tea and another of sugar. When she found a jar of blackberry jam, she thought she would cry with happiness.

She was spooning the jam from the jar when her active gaze fell on a map of the railroad system that covered one wall. She saw why the route was lonely. The tracks ran in a remarkably straight line southeast from Berlin, through Güsten, Wetzlar, and Koblenz to Metz, in Alsace-Lorraine. The Berlin-Metzer Bahn bypassed cities like Leipzig and Frankfurt in favor of a direct route. This was what people called the Kanonenbahn, the Army’s strategic railway, built with gentle curves and easy grades to transport cannon and soldiers quickly to the border to defend against French invasion. Looking east on the map she saw similarly straight lines radiating from Berlin across Poland to hold the Russians at their border.

Sipping hot tea, the first warm drink she had had in two days, Pauline traced her route from Berlin and saw with a sinking heart that she had a long way to go. Suddenly a train whistle blew. It was coming from the east, headed toward France. She doused the lantern, unlocked a door, jumped to the siding, and hid behind the caboose in hopes of hopping onto the approaching train. She had done this twice already and had survived it only because Detective Curtis had turned unusually talkative one evening when she couldn’t go home. He had told her that when he was her age “riding the rails” older hobos had taught him to jump on the front of a moving railroad car, not the rear. If you fell from the front, you fell to the side. If you fell from the back, you fell under the train.

She crouched on the embankment, shielding her eyes so as not to be blinded by the locomotive’s headlight. It sounded like it was coming too fast, but the instant the locomotive passed she ran alongside, scrambling to catch onto a boxcar ladder. She tripped on a tie and fell, rolled down the embankment, and jumped up. Too late. It was racing by.

Dejected, she went back inside the caboose, wrapped herself in blankets, and fell asleep on a hard mattress. Utterly exhausted, she slept without moving. Deep in the night she dreamed something was shaking her, but it stopped. Later she dreamed she was on a tram rolling along a Berlin street, lurching as it switched tracks. The tram stopped. Later it started again.

Suddenly she sat up, wide awake. The caboose was moving. She jumped to a window and pulled back the curtain on a blur of lights. The caboose was passing through a town at sixty kilometers an hour, attached to the back of a train that was picking up speed.

West to Paris?

East to Berlin?

She heard a rattling at the door, louder than the clatter of the wheels. The brakemen who had coupled the caboose to the train were unlocking the door.

Irina Viorets and Christian Semmler were watching Imperial’s latest film projected on a screen in Semmler’s ninth-floor apartment before showing it to their distributors. It ended with a bang-up chase involving brewery trucks dropping beer barrels, a puffing locomotive, and a motorcycle that jumped the barrels and landed beside a Pierce-Arrow limousine. A bride in a flowing wedding dress jumped out of the limousine and jumped onto the motorcycle, which raced off, pursued by beer trucks, careened onto railroad tracks, and was chased by a train.

Suddenly Semmler leaned forward and stared hard at the flickering screen.

“Who is that motorcyclist?”

“I hope it’s an extra and not a good actor,” answered Viorets. “He’s not going to live long.”

“He looks like Isaac Bell.”

34

“How can you tell under those goggles?”

“The way he straddles the machine.”

“But Isaac Bell is a Connecticut insurance executive. It can’t be Bell.”

“Of course not,” Semmler mused. “I can’t imagine an insurance man pursuing such a dangerous line of work.”

The picture ended happily with the eloping couple married in a Lutheran church and boarding a Hamburg-America ocean liner for a honeymoon in Germany.

“Irina, I want you to engage Marion Bell.”

“Bell’s wife?”

“How soon can you get her here?”

“Tomorrow, if she’s willing. She’s visiting her father in San Francisco.”

“She should make our history of the western railroads.”

“Why her?”

“I’m betting she’s ready to make something big.”

Irina Viorets looked at Semmler sitting in the shadows. The German general was a strange one up to stranger things, but he often had good ideas. He knew what he was up to in the moving picture business. The Iron Horse, Imperial’s history of the western railroads, would be an ambitious two- or three-reeler. Marion Morgan would bring a topical filmmaker’s sensibility to the story and all the skills necessary to take pictures of real events out-of-doors.

“I’ll telephone her long-distance. I just hope she hasn’t engaged with Preston Whiteway already.”

“Tell her if she’ll leave Whiteway she can have a fleet of locomotives at her disposal. Promise her you’ll put Theda Bara, King Baggot, and Florence Lawrence under contract.”

“She’s not the type to walk out on her contract.”

“Tell her she can tie Billy Bitzer and his camera to the front of a locomotive if that will make her happy. Just get her here! Immediately.”

“I’ll telephone San Francisco.”

“And then you get busy writing a scenario that features handsome German-Americans working on the railroad.”

“That much,” said Viorets, “I had already figured out.”

Semmler barred the door when she left.

For a man who was supposed to be a wealthy insurance executive, Isaac Bell had, too many times, appeared at exactly the wrong moment with a gun in his hand. Now he was pretending to be a movie extra — in an Imperial film, no less.

Semmler had already wondered about Bell. Transmitting on the Los Angeles German vice-consul’s private wire, he had ordered the New York consul general to investigate Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock. The Hartford insurance company was genuine, the consul general had reported back, and Isaac Bell was listed as a partner.

Semmler was not convinced. The Leipzig Organ & Piano Company appeared genuine, too. And who was more “one of the boys” than Leipzig’s well-liked American sales representative, Fritz Wunderlich?

Isaac Bell had stopped him from kidnapping Lynds and Professor Beiderbecke from the Mauretania. Isaac Bell had stopped him from taking Lynds off the Golden State Limited. And now a man who looked very much like Isaac Bell was pretending to be a moving picture stunt performer. He would find out whether it was Bell.

But until he knew for sure, General Major Christian Semmler wanted Isaac Bell’s wife in easy reach.

At the sound of the Brakemen unlocking their caboose door, Pauline snatched a blanket and scrambled up the ladder, out the hatch, and onto the roof just as they burst in complaining about the cold. The wind of the speeding train’s passage hit her like a fist. It smelled of coal smoke and rain. Across the forests and farmland, black clouds blacker than the locomotive’s smoke filled the sky. She crouched behind the cupola, seeking shelter.

What would they do when saw her tea mug and the jam jar?

The train was moving too fast to jump off, and the roof was too high even if it weren’t moving.

She looked back. The sky was gray.

She looked ahead. Under lowering clouds, the train looked like a long dark snake. Sparks flew from the distant locomotive. It was the fastest yet that she’d ridden on. In the dull morning light seeping from the storm clouds, she saw why. It was a military train. Flat cars bore either a single long cannon, or two-wheeled artillery caissons. As the train swept through a long curve exposing its side, she saw livestock cars, which would be carrying the artillerymen’s horses, and passenger cars, which would be packed with soldiers.

What was the best?

Hope? A hope that they would assume tramps had broken in to steal food. How did the tramps leave through locked doors? The cupola hatch? Hope was the best she could conjure, hope that the brakemen did not read Sherlock Holmes.

Bolts of lightning pierced the clouds. She felt an icy breath of cold wind. She tugged the blanket she had taken around her shoulders and prayed for a miracle. But, answering her worst fear, the hatch began to rise. A brakeman was climbing up to look to see if a tramp was hiding on the roof.

Suddenly thunder shook the caboose, and rain pelted down.

The hatch slammed shut.

A bolt of lightning struck the locomotive. The thunder crashed again and again as if Donar himself had noticed the train and didn’t like it. But she was the luckiest girl alive: the thunder god had saved her from the brakeman.

Another bolt of lightning struck, blanketing the locomotive with blue fire. It slowed abruptly, and the train clanged to a stop with a crash of banging couplers.

Balls of electric fire spewed from the locomotive’s wheels and leaped to a tree beside the tracks. The tree flew to splinters when its sap exploded in a burst of superheated steam. Pauline saw green fire race toward her along the boxcar roofs, and she felt the incipient tingle of electrical shock. Clutching her precious rucksack, she scrambled down the ladder and ran into the woods.

Isaac Bell caught Marion in his arms as she stepped off the Coast Line Limited from San Francisco. They kissed, and they kissed again. Bell seized her bag and gave the porter her trunk check, the name of their hotel, and a large tip.

“Mighty generous, sir.”

“I am happy to see my beautiful wife.”

“Hard to imagine you wouldn’t be, sir.”

They kissed once more. “Andrew found us a house to rent near his place on Bunker Hill,” Bell told Marion. “Until it’s ready, I booked rooms at the Van Nuys.” They walked hand in hand off the platform.

Bell asked, “What was your first thought when Irina telephoned and offered you this job?”

“Joy. I’d get to see you.”

“And then?”

“I thought that The Iron Horse would be very challenging. It’s a big story to pack into three reels, and I thought right away that maybe I can persuade Irina to take a chance on four.”

“And your next thought?”

“Do you really want to know?”

“Yes.”

“Well, it’s somewhat technical, but I was thinking I want to revive the old-fashioned ‘traveling pictures’ they used to take years ago, where the camera moves alongside the action. They’ve fallen out of favor. Everyone is in love with presenting close-up figures. But with handcars available to glide the camera on a smooth track, and the fact that I want to start the scenario before the western railroads with galloping Pony Express riders and stagecoaches— You see what I mean, it’s technical, but that’s what I was thinking.”

“Did you wonder why Irina hired you?”

“No.”

“You weren’t at all surprised?”

“There are many women in the movie business, but more men, and I’ve found that women do like to work with women. Also, she knows that I’ve made topical films, so I’m comfortable taking pictures on the fly. Why do you ask?”

Bell smiled. “I believe you know my feelings about coincidences.”

“You dislike them, intensely.”

“Irina works for a firm that has caught my interest in the Talking Pictures case.”

“Imperial. Where you have Clyde set up.”

“But Imperial turns out to be something of an enigma. They’re spending a lot more money than they earn. No one knows where they get the money. They’ve raised an army of private detectives who are driving the Edison bulls out of Los Angeles.”

“That’s wonderful!”

“They seem to be doing it to court the independents.”

“That’s a brilliant way to ensure plenty of fresh product.”

“And suddenly they’re offering my wife a job. I have to wonder.”

“Oh. Well, put your mind to rest on that score. Irina didn’t telephone to offer me the job.”

“She didn’t?”

“She telephoned wondering when I might be coming to Los Angeles and to say hello and to ask my recommendation for someone to take pictures for The Iron Horse. I mentioned a few people who I thought would be up to it — Christina Bialobrzesky, for one. You remember her?”

“The ‘Polish countess’ with the New Orleans accent.”

“Irina thanked me, and then just as we were saying good-bye, almost as an afterthought, she asked would I have any interest in it.”

“Why didn’t she ask you first?”

“She assumed I was tied up with Preston. I assured her I was not. At any rate, to make a long story short, here I am — a genuine coincidence.”

“I am relieved to hear that,” said Isaac Bell. “But just to be on the safe side, how would you like to be a genuine detective?”

“Under you?”

“So to speak,” Bell returned her smile.

“What would it entail?”

“Keeping alert — with an eye to your own safety — to note anything out of the ordinary.”

“I must say that everything Irina told me about The Iron Horse was absolutely what I would expect of a firm that is making moving pictures.”

“I want to know what they are doing in addition to making moving pictures.”

The Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Los Angeles field office was located in a two-story warehouse on Second Street on the edge of a section devoted to lumber, hardware, machinery, and paint. While the Los Angeles detectives longed loudly for as stylish an address as their counterparts enjoyed in New York, Chicago, and Washington, their comings and goings went unobserved by the wrong element thanks to a variety of entrances through back alleys and neighboring businesses.

Texas Walt Hatfield sauntered in, flicking sawdust off his boots with his bandanna, as Isaac Bell arrived scraping metal shavings off his. Both men were dressed to work in guise, Hatfield in cowboy gear and Bell in flying machine helmet and goggles, with a wide motorcycle belt cinched around his waist.

Hatfield reported nothing new or suspicious in the penthouse cinematography studio stages atop the Imperial Building. Bell had little to add. The picture taking for The Brewer’s Daughter had been wrapped up this afternoon, and he had already been offered another job by the same Imperial director on an as-yet-untitled picture involving a motorcycle and a runaway freight train.

“Let me ask you something, Walt.”

“Shoot,” said Walt, suddenly all ears because Isaac Bell did not usually preface questions with “Let me ask you something.” Something out of the ordinary was on the chief investigator’s mind.

“At any time when you are up in that studio, did you get a funny feeling?”

“What sort of funny feeling?”

“That you were being…” Bell stopped talking and looked the tall Texan in the face. This was not a question he would ask most detectives. But Walt Hatfield was a natural-born hunter who had been raised by Comanche Indians. Of the Van Dorns Isaac Bell had worked with, Hatfield was by far the most sensitive to his surroundings.

“Watched?” asked Hatfield.

“You did, didn’t you?”

“Shore did feel watched, now that you mention it. Didn’t pay it much mind at the moment, what with fellows cranking cameras.”

Bell’s eyes were suddenly burning.

“You, too, Isaac?”

“I had a feeling.”

“Where?”

“The recording room on the fourth floor.”

“How about in Clyde’s laboratory?”

“Possibly there, but not as strong a sensation.”

“Reckon someone’s peeping through a judas hole in the room next door?”

“One way to find out.”

Bell stepped across the hall to see Larry Saunders, the recently promoted head of the Los Angeles office. Saunders, a trim, stylish man, wore a white linen suit like Bell’s, for the warm city. But unlike Bell’s, which was artfully tailored to conceal a good-sized automatic and a spare magazine, with room for a sleeve gun and pocket pistols when the occasion called for it, Saunders’s suit was cut so tightly that the Los Angeles detective would be hard-pressed to hide a weapon larger than a stiletto. Saunders’s hat rack held a white derby and several silk scarves. The derby, Bell hoped, had room for a derringer. Saunders’s patent leather pumps certainly did not.

“Larry, who would you recommend I send over to City Hall to inspect the architect’s plans for the Imperial Building?”

“Holian.”

“I think I’ve met him. Big-in-the-belly fellow who looks like a saloonkeeper?”

“He’s the one, though I’ve seen Tim do a credible job of imitating a brothel bouncer, too.”

“I don’t want this getting back to the owner of the building.”

“Don’t you worry, Mr. Bell. Holian’s got the city clerks eating out of his hand. There isn’t a body buried in Los Angeles he couldn’t jab with a spade. They’ll do as he asks and do it with a smile.” Saunders rubbed his mustache, a pencil-thin affair that Texas Walt had likened, privately, to a “dance hall gal’s eyebrow,” and said, “It wouldn’t hurt if Holian could share a little wealth while he’s poking around.”

“Charge as much as he needs against the Talking Pictures account. Tell him I want layouts of the fourth floor, eighth floor, and penthouse — every room and every closet.”

35

Isaac Bell received a long, speculative report from Grady Forrer by telegraph, which was a hundred times faster than mail but lacked the subtlety and precision of a letter and offered little opportunity for the give-and-take of a conversation by telephone. Clyde Lynds had claimed that his electrical microphone would one day spawn devices for amplifying feeble electrical currents for long-distance telephones to span the continent. That day could not come soon enough for Isaac Bell.

Back and forth he and Grady Forrer transmitted on the Van Dorn private wire. The upshot was that Grady had turned up the name of a private German merchant bank—Hamburg Bankhaus—which the Research department suspected of funneling money to Imperial Film.

Isaac Bell telephoned Andrew Rubenoff, filled him in on Research’s suspicions, and asked, “Is the Bank of Hamburg a real bank or a sham?”

“Where did you hear about Bank of Hamburg, if I may ask?”

“Van Dorn Research.”

“I am impressed,” Rubenoff answered. “I doff my hat to them. Hamburg Bankhaus is not widely known outside professional circles.”

“I’ll pass on the compliment. Is it real or a sham?”

“It’s real. They’re very active in German enterprises doing business in America. First among their enterprises, they’re the principal lender to the Leipzig Organ and Piano Company.”

“The piano shops?”

“You’ve seen them. Leipzig Organ has expanded hugely in America — opening all sorts of branches to sell parlor pianos. Funny you should ask, though.”

“Why is that?”

“I was just in one of their shops the other day trying to buy sheet music. But they were sold out of ‘Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life.’”

“It’s very popular.”

“When a music shop is sold out of a brand-new Victor Herbert song, something is terribly wrong with the shop.”

“Or the publisher.”

“The publisher will blame the shop, of course. Either for not ordering enough or not paying their bills. Though in this instance they may be right. The shop had a very poor selection. The most recent I could find was ‘I Love My Wife; But, Oh, You Kid!’ That’s been around so long the paper was turning yellow.”

“How were their pianos?”

“Decent enough, for uprights. Good German quality.”

Bell asked. “Where is Leipzig’s headquarters?”

“Leipzig. As their name would suggest.”

“I mean here in America.”

“They’d have a sales rep.”

“How do they conduct business?”

“The representative will be a top man on commission. He’ll conduct any business that has to be done here. The rest will be handled in Leipzig.”

“Leipzig wouldn’t be owned by Krieg, by any chance?”

“I doubt they’d borrow money from Hamburg if they were. They’d have access to better rates of interest through Krieg.”

Bell pondered his next move.

“Uncle Andy, tell me about pianos.”

The Leipzig Organ & Piano Company’s plate-glass front window was sparkling clean, Isaac Bell noted as he hurried along the sidewalk. Sheet music shortcomings aside, from the sidewalk at least the shop had nothing to apologize for. He stopped, peered through the glass, pulled his watch from his pocket by its heavy gold chain, pretended to check whether he had time to spare, and went inside.

Sturdy upright pianos lined the walls, each bearing the name Leipzig in gold leaf. Revolving mahogany racks of music flanked a glass-topped counter displaying metronomes and hymnals.

A salesman got up from his desk by the back door. He was a middle-aged German with a military bearing and a cold manner. “Yes?” he demanded.

“I am shopping for a piano for my niece, who has impressed her teacher.”

“Ve have vaiting list for new orders.”

“How long will that be?”

“It is difficult to tell.”

“A month? Two months?”

“More like six months to a year, sir. Our pianos are made carefully. Very carefully.”

“Are they strung with music wire made by Stahl and Drahtwerk?”

The salesman’s jaw tightened.

“Or,” asked Bell, “are the strings from Moritz Poehlmann of Nuremberg?”

The saleman stared straight ahead, his gaze locked on the knot of Isaac Bell’s four-in-hand necktie. At last he said, “I do not know that. But our plates are of cast iron.”

“I would hope so,” said Bell. “Would you play a few of them for me? Let me hear the difference.”

“You may play them, sir.”

“Ah, but sadly I do not. So if you would play for me…”

Again, the tight jaw. Finally, he said, “It is not possible.”

“A man who sells pianos can’t play them?”

“I have injured my hand.”

“I’m so sorry. Could I trouble you to telephone your sales representative.”

“Vat for?”

“I would like to ask whether I could buy an instrument sooner than six months.”

“He is not near.”

“Well, perhaps your head office could help me.”

“No.”

“Then I wonder could I have your representative’s address that I might write him myself.”

“He is traveling.”

Bell stepped to the windows and stood there for a long moment.

Suddenly a stylish crowd of free-spirited young men and women came along the sidewalk and burst in the door. Gaily hailing the salesman, all talking at once, they took a long time to explain they needed to rent a piano for a party tonight. Informed that the shop did not rent pianos, they laughed.

“Then we’ll buy one.”

“We’ll pool our cash.”

“I’ve got Dad’s check. I’ll buy it.”

“How about that one?” a girl cried, and they gathered around it, two of them plopping down on the bench, throwing open the key lid, and pounding out a ragtime duet.

The salesman kept saying, “Not for sale. Not for sale,” and when he had at last showed the buoyant mob out the door, he discovered that the tall golden-haired gentleman hoping to buy a piano for his niece had slipped away in the confusion.

Good riddance, he thought, and locked the door.

“Nicely done,” Isaac Bell told the Los Angeles field office apprentices and secretaries and their girlfriends and boyfriends. “You were thoroughly authentic ‘gilded youth’ on a lark. That poor salesman never knew what hit him.”

“Did you find what you were looking for, Mr. Bell?”

All eyes locked on the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s legendary chief investigator.

“With your help, I found a letter in his desk and a business card. The Leipzig Organ and Piano Company is represented by a traveling man named Fritz Wunderlich who collects his mail in Denver at the Brown Palace Hotel.”

Isaac Bell telegraphed Van Dorn field offices around the country to cover Leipzig’s other piano shops to see what they could pick up. Those large enough to maintain apprentices would instruct them to pretend to be shopping on behalf of their school or church. Agents in smaller one-and two-man outfits would shop, as Bell had, for nieces and daughters.

Bell himself boarded the flyer to Salt Lake City, changed trains a day later to the Overland Limited, arrived in Denver early the next morning, and walked the short distance up Broadway to the Brown Palace Hotel, a favorite haunt. He knocked on a door just inside the main entrance. Omar P. Armstrong, the Brown Palace’s managing partner, invited him to breakfast.

As they walked across a vast marble and cast-iron atrium lobby where tier upon tier of balconies soared to a skylight one hundred feet above the carpet, Bell asked, “Have you ever met a salesman named Fritz Wunderlich?”

“Fritz? Of course.”

Bell had journeyed to Denver expecting no less. Omar P. Armstrong knew everyone worth knowing west of the Mississippi. “Have you seen him lately?”

“He’s here every two or three weeks.”

“What’s he like?”

“Pleasant enough fellow,” Armstrong replied with a neutral smile.

Isaac Bell was fully aware that any man who managed a grand hotel had to be as observant as a whale-ship lookout and as discreet as the madam of a first-class bordello. Omar’s studiedly disinterested expression said that if Isaac Bell wished to inquire about Brown Palace guests but still be known as an innocent insurance executive, that was Bell’s business but Omar P. Armstrong wasn’t born yesterday.

“Have you known him long?”

“If you are interested in Herr Wunderlich, why not ask his friends?”

They paused in the entrance to the dining room. The Brown Palace’s guests were breakfasting at tables set with snowy linen, gleaming silver, and fine china. Omar nodded in the direction that Bell suspected he would. At a table placed in the alcove of a tall window, three well-dressed, barbershop-pinked salesmen were in animated conversation.

“If you like, I can introduce you.”

Bell grinned. “Did you ever meet a drummer who needed an introduction?”

He walked straight to the salesmen’s table. “Morning, gents. Isaac Bell. Insurance. May I join you?”

They took in his hand-tailored suit, polished boots, and confident smile.

“Sit down, brother. Sit down. Waiter! Coffee for Mr. Bell — or something a mite stronger, if you’re so inclined.”

“Coffee will be fine. Long day ahead.”

They shook hands around and introduced themselves, a rep for the Gillette Safety Razor Company, a Locomobile salesman, and a traveler in the cereal line. The Locomobile man said, “Mr. Bell, stop me if I’m wrong, but don’t you drive a Locomobile?”

“I thought I recognized you, Jake,” said Bell. “We met in Bridgeport when I was picking her up at the factory.”

“Red one, if I recall?”

“Red as fire.”

“How’s she running?”

“Like a top. Small world, isn’t it? I ran into a traveling man the other day. We got to talking about autos, and when I told him about mine he mentioned he knew a fellow who handled the line. That could have been you.”

“Probably was me. What’s his name?”

“German fellow. Fritz Wunderlich.”

“Fritz! Yes, we just saw him in— Where’d we see him?”

“Chicago?”

“Chicago it was. Isn’t he a character? ‘Mit schlag’!”

“‘Time is money.’”

“‘Eight days in the veek.’”

“Pretty good salesman, I gather,” said Bell.

“Valuable man. No question. Valuable man.”

“Lucky for him he’s got that smile,” the cereal salesman chortled.

“What do you mean?” asked Bell.

“Well, you know… Fritz is a heck of a worker, but he sort of looks like a monkey.”

“Sort of?” snickered Jake. “I’ll say he looks like an ape in the jungle.”

“You mean his long arms?” asked Bell.

“Arms like a monkey. Face like one, too.”

“He didn’t really look like a monkey,” Bell protested, mildly.

“He does to me.”

Isaac Bell drew his notebook from his pocket and opened his Waterman fountain pen. “No. Fritz looks more like this.” He tried to draw a man’s face with a prominent brow. “Sort of like this. I’m not much of a hand at drawing.”

The cereal salesman took out his order book and his pen. “No, more like this.”

“Neither of you can draw worth a darn,” laughed the Gillette man. He opened his order book and moved his pen over it, laboriously. “He looks like this.”

The cereal salesman disagreed vehemently, and Bell said, “Not one bit like that. How about you, Jake?”

Jake, the Locomobile man from Bridgeport, took out his book. Isaac Bell watched, holding his breath. Jake was his last chance to get a sketch that resembled Fritz Wunderlich. Surely one of the men at the table could draw. Jake, it turned out, possessed a modicum of artistic talent.

“Like this,” said Jake. He drew in a few quick lines a simian face with long cheeks and deep-set eyes. Then he turned his pencil on the side and shaded in a heavy brow.

The others stared. “You got him just about right, Jake,” one marveled. “That’s Fritz. Darned near.”

“I think you’re right,” Bell ventured, looking to the cereal salesman for confirmation.

“He sure does.”

“Well, I’ll be, Jake’s an artist.”

Jake beamed.

“Could I see that?” asked Bell, picking it up and studying it by the light of the window. “Yes, I believe that’s what he looks like. You’re a real artist, Jake.”

Jake flushed with embarrassment. “Naw, not really. I just started out in the design shop, before I started selling. You really think it’s good?”

“Sure do. Mind if I keep it?”

“You ought to pay for it,” laughed the man from Chicago. “It’s a piece of artwork.”

“You’re right,” said Isaac Bell, reaching for his wallet. “How much?”

“No, no, no.” said Jake. “Go on, you take it.”

“O.K. But when I need a new auto, I’ll know who to come to.”

“Just don’t show it to Fritz,” the cereal man laughed.

“It don’t matter he looks like that,” said Jake. “Fritz’s got that smile, and folks just buy anything he sells.”

“I don’t know about that,” said the man from Gillette.

“What do you mean?” asked Bell.

“Eh, you’re always going on about that,” the cereal sales rep protested. “Fritz is a valuable man.”

“About what?” asked Bell.

“Those shops his firm supplies. I just don’t see them selling that many pianos or sheets of music, for that matter. It’s not a well-run business. From what I’ve seen.”

“They’ve got a fancy-looking shop in Los Angeles,” said Bell.

“Well, you just try buying a piano, you’ll find a waiting list as long as your arm.”

“Or Fritz’s arm,” Jake said, and the table roared.

“Where’s Fritz now?” asked Bell.

“Hope he’s not at the next table listening to this,” said Jake, and the others looked around uncomfortably.

“I’m trying to remember when I saw him,” Bell persisted. “Must have been two weeks, maybe more. Time flies. Anyone seen him lately?”

“I thought in Chicago, he said he was going to Los

Angeles.”

Isaac Bell took Jake’s drawing of Fritz Wunderlich to the Denver Post Building and paid a newspaper sketch artist to make him copies. He took them to the train stations. The Van Dorn Detective Agency had warm relations with the express companies, as the detectives often cadged rides on express cars, whose messengers were glad of another dependable gun. By noon the copies were headed around the continent, courtesy of Adams Express, American Express, and Wells Fargo, to the field offices covering German consulates in New York, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the vice-consul’s mansion in Los Angeles.

In Jersey City, New Jersey, a short, round Van Dorn apprentice from the New York field office named Nelson Mills found himself wishing he had broken the agency rule that forbade apprentice detectives to carry guns. The baby-faced Mills had just finished his first “solo” assignment, an investigation of the Leipzig Organ & Piano shop in the Heights neighborhood. Scanning his notes as he hurried to catch the Hudson Tube back to Manhattan, he composed in his mind the first sentence of his report—“A yearlong waiting list for pianos, no organs, and sheet music from 1905, conspire to indicate that the Leipzig Organ and Piano Company is a false front for a nefarious business as yet unidentified.”

Suddenly he remembered that Detective Harry Warren had advised him that using one word instead of three was the best way to get the bosses to read his reports. Mills drew mental Xs through “conspired to indicate,” to be replaced with “suggest,” and was debating deleting “nefarious” when he bumped into a big fellow on the sidewalk.

“Excuse me. Sorry.”

Nelson Mills got a fist in his face for his apology.

The young man fell on his back on the pavement with blood pouring from his nose. He was shocked by the speed of the attack. The pain was ferocious. His eyes were blinded by tears. He sensed more, then saw the man who punched him looming over him, and he started to ask “Why?”

The man snatched Nelson’s notebook out of his hand and ripped apart the pages, scattering the pieces on his bloody shirt. “Hey, that’s my—”

A heavy boot smashed into his side. Pain seared his ribs, and Nelson realized too late to save himself that there were two of them. They kicked him repeatedly.

36

Isaac Bell found a stack of angry telegrams waiting for him in the Los Angeles field office. Van Dorns in Cincinnati, Chicago, Ohio, and Jersey City reported their apprentices were beaten up on their way back from investigating Leipzig Organ & Piano shops. Two young men were in the hospital, and one boy in Jersey City had already been given last rites while his family sat vigil at his bedside.

Enraged detectives demanded permission to arrest the shop clerks. But in rapid exchanges of wires, it became clear to Isaac Bell that there was no proof to charge the clerks. The attacks had occurred in streets and alleys far from their shops.

As chief investigator, the best Bell could do was wire a reminder of Van Dorn’s standing orders regarding thugs and hoodlums who assaulted private detectives, when they had been positively identified beyond any doubt:

Larry Saunders stuck his head in Bell’s office door. He had blueprints rolled under his arm. “How was Denver?”

Bell handed him the Locomobile salesman’s sketch. “Give this to the boys covering the vice-consul’s mansion. Wunderlich is real. No one’s seen him lately. What did Holian learn at City Hall?”

Saunders unrolled blueprints on Bell’s desk. They anchored them with sidearms. “Fourth floor. Eighth floor. Penthouse. I don’t see where you’d put a judas hole. Public rooms and open stairways. Maybe this storage closet on the eighth.”

Bell studied the blueprints and agreed that spy holes weren’t likely.

Saunders said, “Thing is, Holian thought the clerk he borrowed these from was acting a little jumpy.”

“What did Holian make of that?”

“Maybe the clerk knew something more he didn’t want to say. Holian wants to nose around a little. I told him I’d take over.”

Bell looked at Saunders, inquiringly.

Saunders said, “The clerks know that Holian is a Van Dorn. They don’t know me from Adam.”

“Go to it,” said Isaac Bell.

As Saunders hurried out, the front-desk man came in. “Southern Pacific Railroad express car messenger just delivered this, Mr. Bell.”

It was a small package wrapped in brown paper. It was heavy for its size, and it smelled of machine oil. Bell weighed it speculatively. “Did you happen to recognize the messenger?”

“Sure did. Benson’s been with the line for years.”

“Then we can presume it’s not a bomb?” Bell asked with a smile and sliced it open with his throwing knife. Inside was a wooden box. He opened it. Nestled in cotton packing was a small steel-colored tool.

“What is that, Mr. Bell?”

“Cutting pliers.” There was a note from Mike Malone, in a big, open scrawl. “Sorry it took so long. Small was the hard part. Hope you like them.”

“Never seen them that little,” said the front-desk man. “Think they work?”

Mike had included a short length of braided cable. Bell slipped the jaws around it and squeezed the handles. The wire parted with a sharp pop.

Pauline Grandzau jumped off a freight train at the ancient fortress city of Metz, fearing the guards in the rail yard. She skirted the overgrown ramparts, shielded from policemen and busybodies by thick brush and tall trees, and followed on foot the ruins of an even older Roman aqueduct, which the brakemen’s map had shown paralleling the tracks all the way to the Moselle River. She covered many miles in the failing light, guided by square heaps of stone and occasional lonely rows of two, three, or more arches still standing.

Suddenly barking dogs charged from a Jouy-aux-Arches farmhouse. Terrified, she scrambled onto the Roman stonework to escape them and climbed to the top of the archway, where she gnawed the last of the cheese she had stolen in Koblenz, fell asleep, and woke at dawn, forty feet above the ground, with a long view across the river.

France, made bright red and gold by the sun rising behind her, looked like heaven.

Even the cold rain that pursued her across Germany had finally stopped, as if it would not dare fall within sight of the border. Perched atop the aqueduct, she saw a gently rolling landscape. The red-tile rooftops of Novéant-sur-Moselle clustered along the Moselle, then gave way to scattered farm fields, woods, and vineyards. A suspension bridge traversed the river. Farther west, beyond her field of vision, would be the town of Batilly, where she would find the French railroad station. With forty francs of Detective Curtis’s money to buy a ticket, she could dream of riding in comfort the two hundred miles to Paris.

Then she saw two flags run up the pole on the roof of a building at the far side of the suspension bridge. The red, white, and black rectangle of Imperial Germany and the swallowtail of the Customs Service marked Germany’s last outpost, a frontier customhouse. Anyone crossing the bridge by train or on foot or on a bicycle would have to show their papers.

She looked beyond the town, up and down the river and the farmland and woods around it. Flat floodplains bounded the Moselle. The plain on her side was broad. On the west side, where she had to go, it was narrower and rose abruptly to a line of hills. Atop the highest hill, a mile west of the Moselle, sprawled the grim stone parapets of Fort Driant, whose giant guns dominated the Moselle Valley. They were Metz’s first defense against French attack from the southwest and it struck her suddenly that she was abandoning her homeland to escape to the land of the enemy. But she wasn’t really escaping, nor was she abandoning her country. She was doing the job of a private detective, serving the agency and a client who deserved her help, and avenging Detective Curtis. But only if she made it to Paris.

What was the best she could imagine? What could she see?

On both sides of the river, the banks sloped gently to the water. Opa Grandzau, the grandfather who had taught her to ski in the Alps, had also taught her how to swim in icy mountain lakes. The Moselle looked warm and lazy by comparison. She picked a route across from her vantage, spotting the narrowest stretch of the river where she could walk unseen out on a wooded point of land that jutted into the water.

When Pauline had chosen her route, she worked her way down the stones of the aqueduct, marveling as she descended how she had survived the climb last night in near darkness. Fear, it seemed, could have the most wonderfully concentrating effect on both mind and body.

She headed west from the bottom of the arch, through the woods, keeping the dappled early sunlight on her back. She crossed narrow lanes rutted with wagon wheels, scrambled over the railroad tracks after making sure no trains were coming, and darted over open fields, praying no farmer would see her running.

She found the wooded point of land and pressed ahead, glimpsing water through the trees on both sides, and soon found herself on the gentle bank. Two difficulties not apparent from the top of the aqueduct were starkly evident at the water’s edge: the narrowing of the river made the water race fast, and the strong current would sweep her into the wider stretches downstream. And if someone were to look in her direction from the suspension bridge or the houses at the edge of the town, he might see her swimming.

She had to cross in the dark.

And she needed a raft.

She scoured the woods for fallen limbs, which were few and far between as the farmers probably gathered them for firewood. It took two hours to heap up enough fallen wood to make a raft big enough to cling to while she floated in the dark and big enough to carry her rucksack.

From her rucksack, Pauline took her extra socks. She explored them with her fingers until she found a break in the wool and then unraveled the yarn from which they were knitted, carefully coiling it so it would not tangle. Then she laid the wood out in a square, laid a second layer of branches criss-crossing the first, and lashed the pieces together at each intersection. She ran out of wool and had to unravel another pair of socks before she could finish. When she was done, she had an alarmingly flexible square raft, four feet by four feet, which she knew would never hold her weight but hoped would help her float. Now she had to wait hours for dark. She was hungry. Starving. A rabbit hopped close by. She was holding a last stick she was thinking of adding to her raft. She looked at the rabbit and thought, Not that hungry. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

She awakened cold. The sun had set. Shivering, she took all her clothes off. She stuffed them and her shoes in the rucksack and tied the sack to the raft, positioning the top opening high up in hopes of keeping Detective Curtis’s gun dry. Then she dragged the raft out of the woods and down the sandy river-bank, trying to move it gently so she wouldn’t break any of the yarn lashings.

Lights from the town reflected on the river’s rippling surface — but at least if the current did push her off course, she would drift away from the town. She waded into dark water. It was cold. She dragged the raft after her. Suddenly it was afloat, light and easily moved. The current nearly yanked it from her hands. She held on tight, took a step into deeper water, and the raft rushed downstream, dragging her with it.

The lights were a godsend. Without them she would have had no idea where the current was taking her. But they served like the North Star, and she clung to the sight of their fixed point with every circle the current whirled her in. The raft seemed to draw the river’s ire, presenting something for the water to grab. But if she let it go and tried to swim across the river it would take her clothes, her money, and the gun, so she held tight and forced herself to be patient. The current had to ease where the river widened. It had to.

The lights seemed very far away when she felt the current slacken abruptly, and she judged by their position that the current had pushed her partway across the river, even as it had dragged her downstream. She let go with one arm and began to paddle and kick. The exertion warmed her. Shortly she saw the loom of the far bank, and soon after, when she kicked she hit bottom. She stumbled out of the water, freed her rucksack, dried herself off with her jacket, and put on her clothes, shoes and socks.

She wasn’t in France yet, but she was close.

There were stars in the sky. The immense Fort Driant on the hilltop blocked them to the north. To walk west, she kept the fortress to her right. Soon she spotted the real North Star. She kept it to her right and eventually, when the fortress was behind her, she came to a fence in a field, far from any road. She slipped through strands of barbed wire and started walking in the general direction of Paris, steering clear of farmhouse lights and cocking her ears for the train whistles that would lead her to the railroad station at Batilly.

37

“Lights!” The director of Hell’s Bells shouted into his megaphone.

The dynamo roared. The Cooper-Hewitts blazed.

“Camera!.. Speed!”

Isaac Bell, clad in what had become his trademark black costume, flying helmet, and goggles, twisted his grip throttle, revving his motorcycle.

The camera operator cranked to speed.

The director took one more look. The locomotive was in place on a raised track bed rented in a remote corner of a Southern Pacific freight yard. Smoke and steam gushed from its stack. The engineer leaned his head and shoulders out of its cab. A giant electric fan just outside the camera’s field of focus blew the smoke and steam the length of the locomotive and parted the engineer’s long beard, making it look like the locomotive was speeding down the track.

Isaac Bell’s motorcycle spewed white smoke from its exhaust pipe. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Marty, the skinny little Imperial Film mechanician who had tweaked the V-twin engine to make smoke, watching intently. The mechanician gave him the thumbs-up and hurried away, his job done.

Bell twisted his throttle wide open and slapped his clutch lever.

The motorcycle tore into the lights, its exhaust streaming an arresting picture as Bell raced tight circles around the locomotive, jumping the machine into the air every time he crossed the humped train tracks at forty miles per hour. On his fourth landing his front wheel felt wobbly. The camera operator was still cranking. The lights still blazed. Bell poured on the gas for one last jump.

The wheel fell off.

The motorcycle crashed down on its front fork. The rear end left the ground, pivoted straight up, and catapulted Isaac Bell over the handlebars.

Bell flew through the air — skull first — at the locomotive. He tried to tuck into a somersault to fend off with his boots instead of his head, but he was flying at forty miles an hour. As he hurtled, time seemed to stop for the tall detective. It looked as if suddenly the operator were cranking more slowly, resting his arm, and slowing the film. Bell saw the ground pass lazily under him. He saw the Indian standing on its front end with its back wheel spinning in the air, saw the camera itself, perched on its sturdy tripod, saw the wind fan, saw the company of actors, stagehands, grips, and horse wranglers all watching as if nothing were amiss and men performing stunts on motorcycles flew at locomotives every day.

The steel behemoth filled his vision, black as night and big as the sky. An instant later, he smashed into it. A startlingly sharp pain in his ankle told him that his somersault had saved his skull. He bounced off the boiler, fell to the rail bed, and tumbled down the ballast embankment, raking arms and legs on the crushed stone.

Sprawled, dazed, in the dirt, he heard people yelling.

He sat up to put everyone’s mind at ease. Everything hurt, but he thought he would be able to stand in another minute or two.

The yelling stopped — except for the director who was still calling through his megaphone, “That was terrific! Let’s do it one more time!”

Isaac Bell climbed painfully to his feet, walked unsteadily to the wrecked motorcycle, knelt down, and inspected it.

He felt in his jacket that his Browning was still in its holster and moving freely. Thanks to his lightning-fast reflexes, he had just survived the Los Angeles version of the Cincinnati, Chicago, and Jersey City attacks on Van Dorns who shopped in the Leipzig Organ stores.

“Hurry it up,” the director shouted. “We’re losing the light.”

“Soon as you get me a new machine,” said Bell as he limped off in search of the mechanician who had tuned his motorcycle.

The Hell’s Bells company had established a temporary machine shop in an abandoned caboose on a rusty siding. Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he mounted the ramp the mechanician had laid to wheel the motorcycle up and down, and entered the gloomy interior in a sudden rush.

“Marty,” he asked in a low and dangerous voice. “Tell me who took a hacksaw to my front axle.”

Marty did not reply.

Bell found him on the floor behind his workbench, his eyes bulging wide open, fixed intently on nothing. Bell lighted a lamp and looked at him closely. The mechanician had been garroted with a wire that had cut his head half off his neck. It looked like the Acrobat had silenced his accomplice with the same thin cable he had wrapped around the neck of the Golden State Limited express messenger he had murdered in New Mexico. It was also the same cable he had used to vault over the locomotive and to “fly” from the Mauretania’s boat deck.

Isaac Bell spoke out loud, addressing the Acrobat as if the murderer were still in the caboose.

“I am worrying you,” he said, reviewing in his mind the many strands of his investigation and wondering which had alarmed the murderer. “I am making you afraid.”

The Acrobat apparently saw those strands as forming a net. Which ones? Bell wondered. Which of the many strands had spooked him?

Grady Forrer was pursuing a Hamburg Bankhaus — Imperial Film connection. Andrew Rubenoff had connected Hamburg Bankhaus to Leipzig Organ & Piano and was now hunting Imperial’s foreign bankers. The Van Dorn field offices had exposed Leipzig Organ for a sham. Bell himself had tracked Leipzig’s Fritz Wunderlich to Denver, and now the men watching the consulates had the German’s likeness. Joe Van Dorn was working his Washington, D.C., contacts to establish German consulate connections. Larry Saunders was probing City Hall for the Imperial Building floor plans. Texas Walt had covered Imperial Protection and was currently employed as an extra inside Imperial’s penthouse studios.

If the Acrobat had ordered the murder of Art Curtis in Berlin, then he knew the Van Dorns were after him. The attacks on the Van Dorn apprentices confirmed that. But today’s sabotage of Bell’s motorcycle indicated that the Acrobat had penetrated Bell’s “insurance man” disguise, too, and saw him either as aligned with the Van Dorn Detective Agency or an actual agent of the outfit.

“I still don’t know what you’re up to. But I’m closer than I think.”

Then it struck Bell hard. If — as seemed likely, though not close to proven — Imperial Film was mixed up with the Acrobat and Krieg Rüstungswerk, then Marion’s job at Imperial was no coincidence, but rather the Acrobat’s cold-blooded ace in the hole.

Bell rode the Angels Flight funicular railway two blocks up a steep grade to the residential neighborhood on top of Bunker Hill, where he had rented a mansion after Marion took the job Irina Viorets had offered at Imperial. Concealing his limp, he climbed the back steps and bounded into the kitchen.

“Just in time for our first married home-cooked meal,” Marion greeted him. “Oh, Isaac, what a wonderful day this is.” She hugged him hard and kissed him. “Would you like a cocktail for whatever you’ve done to your poor foot?”

“I’ll mix them,” Bell smiled, ruefully, reminded forcibly that if women were more observant than men, then women who made movies missed absolutely nothing.

Marion’s eyes were ablaze with joy. “It’s like I died and went to heaven. Irina gives me anything I want — locomotives, Pullmans, mule trains, Conestoga wagons. She even got me Billy Bitzer to operate the camera.”

“Congratulations.”

“Billy brought Dave Davidson, his number one assistant, to operate the second camera. So I have the two best operators in the business. And to top it all off — do you remember Franklin Mowery?”

“The old bridge builder. Of course. He worked for Lillian’s father.”

“Franklin retired out here. I invited him to where we’re taking pictures to answer my research questions. He’s a walking encyclopedia of railroad history, having been there for most of it. Fabulous stories. And here’s the best part: Dave Davidson has a portrait painter’s eye; he took one look at Franklin’s granite profile and, without saying a word, just started cranking the camera, pretending he was adjusting it or something. Later he showed me twenty feet of Franklin Mowery. The camera absolutely loves him. So I’m putting him in the picture— Oh, Isaac, I’m so excited!”

“Indeed,” said Bell, wondering, How can I ask her to leave this job on a suspicion?

“Don’t worry,” she said, “I warned Franklin Mowery that you are working in disguise and not to reveal that you’re a Van Dorn.”

“It probably doesn’t matter by now.”

“Is that what happened to your foot?”

“My ankle got off easy compared to my motorcycle,” said Bell, and told her what had happened. Then he laid out the strands of the Talking Pictures investigation one by one, from Grady and Rubenoff to his and Texas Walt’s fruitless spying inside Imperial. “Having failed to kill you,” asked Marion, “what do you suppose he’ll try next?”

Isaac Bell looked his beautiful wife in the eye. “You tell me.”

“I know what you’re thinking, Isaac. You’re worried that I’m somehow in danger because I’m ‘coincidentally’ taking pictures for the same company where you installed Clyde Lynds, and now you are having second thoughts.”

“I couldn’t put it better myself,” said Bell. “Something is amiss at Imperial.”

“But I can’t believe that Irina would be part of anything that would hurt me. Besides, you don’t know that Imperial isn’t on the up-and-up.”

“Imperial’s finances are deeply suspect.”

“Everyone’s business finances in moving pictures are deeply suspect. It’s a brand-new business. Nobody knows what’s really going on. We’re all making it up as we go along. That’s why the bankers lend money for only one picture at a time.”

“Are you sure you’ve noticed nothing unusual while taking pictures for The Iron Horse? Nothing out of the ordinary? Nothing different than you’d expect or have seen on other jobs?”

Marion pondered his question. “Only one thing. There’s a film-stock shortage. Everyone in Los Angeles is talking about it. For a month or so, film’s become hard to get and very expensive. Yesterday, Billy and Dave came to me with long faces. Their stock was old. It smelled awful, and they said the pictures would be terribly overexposed. I telephoned Irina. In less than one hour a truck raced up with more than we could use of the most pristine stock you could ask for. It was precisely perforated and smelled fresh as a meadow. You should have seen Billy and Dave rubbing their hands like Silas Marner counting his gold.”

“Where did it come from?”

“It was Eastman Kodak stock, straight from the factory.”

“But Imperial is independent. Eastman made a deal with the Edison Trust: they won’t sell to independents.”

“Where they got it, I don’t know. But for Imperial, at least, there is no shortage.” Anyway, if you’ll limp into the dining room, I’ll bring dinner.”

“What is our first married home-cooked meal?”

“The same as our first-ever home-cooked meal. Do you remember what I made you?”

“I remember you invited me to dinner and cooked pot roast and vegetables. It was splendid, though I have a vague memory that we got sidetracked before dessert— Marion, I’ll bet you’ve some cowboys in The Iron Horse.”

“Bunkhousesful.”

“Got room for one more?”

“Texas Walt?”

Bell nodded. “Just to be on the safe side.”

“If that will make you feel better, of course.”

“I would feel much better knowing my good friend the deadly gunfighter was looking out for you.”

Marion smiled. “Walt may not be a deadly gunfighter much longer. Movie people are all talking about ‘the tall Texan’ playing cowboy parts. Some people think he could be a star.”

“Please don’t turn his head until we’re sure you’re safe and sound.”

38

Pauline Grandzau had been memorizing the St. Germain section of her Baedeker on the train when suddenly she had to run from a gendarme who demanded her papers at a station stop. The last few miles of what should have been a twelve-hour train ride stretched to another full day clinging to the underside of a slow-moving coal car that finally dumped her near an open-air market in Paris in the rain. Thanks to the tourist guidebook and the foldout map, she found the Rue du Bac as night fell, climbed a steep flight of stairs, and staggered into the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Paris field office, exhausted, wet, and hungry.

An enormous man seated next to a bright light asked, “What do you want here, miss?”

At least that’s what it sounded like. He spoke French. She did not. But she saw in his eyes what he assumed: a street urchin with dirty hands and face and stringy braids and a snuffling nose had sneaked into the building either begging for money or running from the police.

He asked her again. The light was so bright it was blinding her. He stood up, and the entire room, which had a linoleum floor and a desk and a chair and an interior door that led somewhere, started spinning.

“Is this the Van Dorn Detective Agency Paris field office?” she asked.

He looked surprised she spoke English.

“Yes, it is,” he replied with an accent like Detective Curtis’s. “What can I do for you, little lady?”

“Are you Detective Horace Bronson?”

“I’m Bronson. Who are you?”

Pauline Grandzau pulled herself up to her full five feet two inches. “Apprentice Van Dorn detective Pauline Grandzau reporting from Berlin.”

She tried to salute, but her arm was heavy, and her legs were rubbery. She saw the linoleum rushing at her face. Bronson moved with surprising speed and caught her.

“Cable from the Paris field office, Mr. Bell.”

It was from Bronson.

It was long and detailed.

Isaac Bell read it twice.

A hunter’s gleam began burning in his eyes. A smile of grim satisfaction lighted his stern face like the sun glancing off a frozen river, and he vowed to Fritz Wunderlich, to Krieg Rüstungswerk, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and especially to Imperial Army General Major Christian Semmler that Van Dorn Detective Arthur Curtis had not died in vain.