The Thief

39

“Telegrapher! On the jump!” Isaac Bell summoned the man who sent and received Morse code on the field office’s private telegraph.

“Wire Mr. Joseph Van Dorn: ‘Inquire U.S. Army and State Department German General Major Christian Semmler. Show them Wunderlich sketch.’

“Wire Research Chief Grady Forrer, New York: ‘Who is German General Major Christian Semmler? Obtain photograph or newspaper sketch.’

“Cable Horace Bronson, Paris Office: ‘Who is German General Major Christian Semmler? Obtain photograph or newspaper sketch.’

“Wire Detective Archie Abbott, New York: ‘Ask Lord Strone about German General Major Christian Semmler. Show Wunderlich sketch.’

“Send them. On the jump!”

Of the responses that flooded in over the next twenty-four hours, the one that intrigued Bell most came from the boss. Joe Van Dorn had discovered that General Major Semmler was married to Sophie Roth Semmler, the sole heiress of the Krieg Rüstungswerk fortune. Such wealth and power explained the lone operator’s ability to operate far more independently than a typical German Army officer.

But Joseph Van Dorn’s informants in the Army and diplomatic corps knew almost nothing else about Semmler. The general major did not seek the limelight. A U.S. Army observer in China had heard that Semmler had established an excellent war record in the Boxer Rebellion. A retired embassy attaché had repeated rumors of a fearsome reputation in the South African War, when Semmler had supposedly led rebel Boer commandos behind British lines. But as none of Van Dorn’s informants among the diplomats and soldiers had actually met Semmler, the sketch of Fritz Wunderlich proved useless in Washington.

Grady Forrer’s researchers had hunted in vain for photographs or newspaper sketches. Not unusual, Grady pointed out: only if Semmler had been a prominent member of a visiting German party or an attaché to the kaiser’s embassy would American newspapers have taken note of the soldier.

Bell hoped for more from Bronson in Paris as he would have access to European papers and magazines. But Bronson cabled of the same dearth of images. Even the new man in Berlin could find no photographs or sketches in the German press. Considering how military men were lionized in Germany, it seemed that Christian Semmler went out of his way not to court publicity.

Bell was disappointed, but hardly surprised. As a private detective who habitually avoided cameras, he expected no less of a soldier experienced at behind-the-lines guerrilla warfare. Nonetheless, he had learned that Semmler was rich. And he was independent, which Bell had already guessed. But if the thirty-five-year-old, powerfully built soldier and spy had green eyes, blond hair, and long arms “like a monkey,” no one had yet matched his face to the sketch of Fritz Wunderlich, so they were no closer to proving whether Semmler and Wunderlich were one and the same.

“That is an unfriendly gate,” said Lillian Hennessy Abbott, braking her big red Thomas Flyer Model K 6-70 to a stop in front of it. “Do you suppose it’s locked?”

“I was told it would be,” said Archie.

Attached to tall stone pillars, the double gate that blocked the road into the Earl of Strone’s Greenwich estate was made of heavy wrought-iron bars painted black and looked, Archie Abbott thought, very much locked.

He stepped down from the big touring car in which they had driven up to Connecticut and paused to steady himself on the fender. Lillian had gone out of her way to drive smoothly, having deliberately chosen the auto for its long wheelbase, instead of her beloved Packard Wolf racer, but the roads had been hellish.

“Are you all right, Archie?”

“Tip-top.” He hinged out a blade of spring steel from what looked like an ordinary penknife and worked the lock open. He swung the two halves of the gate wide enough for the auto. Lillian drove through, and Archie locked it behind them.

“Drive on.”

A quarter mile along a curving driveway paved with crushed slate, they saw a sizable mansion of brick decorated with stone in a style that reminded Archie of Henry VIII’s palace at Hampton Court.

The thick, wooden front door had no knocker. To save his knuckles, Archie banged on it with the butt of the Navy Colt.45 automatic he had taken to carrying since being shot nearly to death. When he heard the door being opened, he smoothly holstered the weapon and drew a calling card from his vest.

A strapping butler — a retired sergeant major, by the look of him — who had been stuffed into a swallowtail coat peered out with an expression that was less than friendly.

Archie proffered his card. “Be so good as to inform His Lordship that Archibald Angel Abbott and Mrs. Abbott are here for tea.”

“I am not aware you’re expected, sir.”

“We sailed on the Mauretania with His Lordship. He invited my wife to drop in if we were ever in the neighborhood. We are in the neighborhood.”

The butler took in the sight of Lillian behind the wheel of the Thomas. She had removed her dust hat and veil. Her blond hair shone in the sun, and her eyes gleamed like sapphires. It occurred to the butler that the next time he clapped eyes on a smile like hers it would be on the far side of the Pearly Gates. “Please come in, sir. I will inform His Lordship.”

“I will collect my wife.”

As he helped Lillian out of her auto, Archie said, “I feel vaguely like a procurer.”

Lillian kissed him on the lips. “And you would be so good at it. Fortunately for me, you have other talents. Are you sure you’re all right?’

“I am alive and in love on a beautiful day in the country.”

Strone was in tweed. He had a shotgun draped over his arm. “Lovely to see you again, my dear,” he said to Lillian. To Archie he was brusque. “Just going out for a tramp about the marsh. Come along if you like.”

He put a deerstalker on his head and led the way at a quick pace down a garden path and over lawns, heading toward a vast marsh that disappeared in the haze of the Long Island Sound.

“I was under the impression that my front gate was locked.”

“We locked it on the way in,” said Archie.

Lillian said, “Let’s walk slowly. My husband is recovering from an accident.”

“Terribly sorry. Of course we’ll slow our pace. What sort of accident, Abbott?”

“I bumped into a Webley-Fosbery.”

Strone stopped walking and looked at Archie. “Hmmm. You never mentioned that on the boat.”

“Automatic revolvers never make for wedding small talk.”

“I say, are you in the insurance trade like your friend Bell?”

“Isaac Bell and I will remain in the insurance trade as long as you remain ‘retired.’”

A smile twitched Strone’s red cheeks and gray mustache.

“One does not step out of retirement willy-nilly.”

“What if I gave you a good reason?”

“I pride myself as a man open to reason. Though one man’s reason could be another man’s poison.”

“Then I won’t give you a reason. I’ll give you a name.”

“A name?”

“Semmler,” said Archie, who observed nothing on Strone’s face move except his pupils, which narrowed momentarily.

“Can’t say it rings a bell, old boy,” Strone lied.

“Christian Semmler.”

“No. I don’t believe—”

“Colonel Christian Semmler. The rank he held when you were stationed in South Africa.”

“Where did you get the notion that I was stationed in South Africa?”

“Oberst Christian Semmler, as our German friends addressed him.”

“I don’t have German friends.”

“Lately,” said Archie, “I’ve been dropping mine. Semmler has been promoted several times since the South African War. He is currently a general major.”

Strone abruptly dropped all pretense of ignorance. “Yes, I know.”

“He is plotting in America.”

“Plotting what?”

“We don’t know.”

Strone’s jaw tightened. “He is a slippery, nervy bastard. He was as cold-blooded an operator as any we encountered, harassing our columns, sniping our pickets. And God help the scouts he waylaid. He made the Boers seem sweet as schoolboys.”

“Would you recognize him if you saw him?”

“I only saw him once. And only through a glass at a great distance.”

“Lillian?” said Archie.

Lillian pulled a notebook from her long duster and opened it to the sketch of Fritz Wunderlich.

“Did he look like this man?”

Strone took wire-frame spectacles from the folds of his shooting clothes and studied the copy of the salesman’s sketch. “This man is older,” he said at last. “Of course it’s been, what?”

“Nearly ten years,” said Archie. “How far away was he?”

Strone looked across the marsh in silence, his mouth working, his eyes bleak.

Archie and Lillian exchanged a glance. Archie gestured for her to say nothing.

“One thousand yards,” Strone answered at last. “We thought we were safe from his rifle at that range and that we could ride closer. And, of course, he was just one man alone… What made you come to me?”

“Isaac Bell had a feeling you were more than you appeared to be. He was right. When we dug deeper, we learned that you were decorated in that action.”

Strone flushed angrily. “Ruddy nonsense.”

“What do you mean, nonsense? You received the Distinguished Service Order.”

“I mean nonsense. Semmler lured us onto a bridge he had mined with dynamite. He sniped the wounded with rifle fire. My DSO was awarded to the only man that murderous swine missed.”

Isaac Bell rounded up Texas Walt Hatfield and Larry Saunders and a crew of Saunders’s handpicked men for a powwow.

“Information from Art Curtis and his Berlin apprentice, expanded upon by Archie Abbott and the Research department, proves that the murderer we called the Acrobat, the drummer Fritz Wunderlich, and German Imperial Army General Major Christian Semmler are all one and the same. In addition, Mr. Van Dorn has established that General Major Christian Semmler is not only Krieg Rüstungswerk’s agent, but also a principal. To put it bluntly, he married the boss’s daughter.

“Semmler’s alias, Fritz Wunderlich, flew the coop when he caught wind of our visits to his shops and my calling on his hotel in Denver. Before we congratulate ourselves on Wunderlich’s loss of a string of shops that gave him and his accomplices safe passage around the continent, remember that the German consulates offer General Major Semmler even safer places to hide, get money, rest, eat, and sleep. Tracking Semmler will not be like tracking an ordinary criminal to his hideout. As much as we might enjoy it, we cannot smash open the doors of a sovereign nation’s consulates.

“I had already expressed copies of this ‘Wunderlich’ picture to every field office covering a German consulate in New York, Chicago, St. Louis, San Francisco, and the vice-consul’s office here in Los Angeles. Now I’ve informed them it’s a likeness of Semmler.”

“Isaac Bell’s voice resonates with confidence,” said Christian Semmler. “Listen!”

He thrust the telephone earpiece at Hermann Wagner.

Wagner, sick with fear, took it with a trembling hand. The Berlin banker had seen the Donar leader’s face for the first time tonight. He had speculated that the mysterious leader might be Semmler, mainly because of rumors about the kaiser’s affection for the officer they called the Monkey. The heavy browridges, the massive protruding jaw, and the gangly arms were frightening confirmation. The leader was indeed the kaiser’s favorite, General Major Christian Semmler. For some reason Semmler had allowed him to see his face, and Wagner feared that Semmler intended to kill him when he was done.

“Listen to him!”

Wagner pressed the telephone to his ear.

He and Semmler were hunched across from each other over a table in the cellar of Germany’s Los Angeles vice-consul’s mansion. The vice-consul was upstairs, aware in only the most general terms of the use they were putting his building to, and probably deeply relieved that he had been forbidden entry to his own cellar.

The telephone was one that Christian Semmler had had connected via the vice-consul’s private line to a microphone he had stolen from Clyde Lynds and had paid an electrician to hide in the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Like an innkeeper tapping a keg of lager, Semmler had laughed as he explained the eavesdropping system to the disbelieving Hermann Wagner.

It seemed like a miracle. More than a miracle, it seemed impossible. But Wagner could actually hear Isaac Bell speaking to his private investigators even though a full two miles separated the Van Dorn Detective Agency from the German consulate.

“You hear?”

“A little. Not very well.”

“I know that!” snapped Semmler. “Lynds’s microphone is not thoroughly perfected yet. But he’s on the right track, and if you listen closely, you can hear the confidence in Bell’s voice. Why shouldn’t he sound assured? He’s learned so much these past several days.”

“Yes, he has,” Wagner agreed nervously.

“Events do not always unfold as we plan them,” said Semmler. “It is the nature of plans, and events.” He looked up and his green eyes sparkled with amusement. “I recall one night on the high veldt, when three British Tommies cornered me, my escape went according to plan. But no sooner had I killed them than I was seized by my arm and dragged to the ground. I could hardly believe it. I was attacked out of nowhere by a lion! A lion! The beast was attracted by the scent of the Tommies’ blood.”

Semmler reached across the table and laid a powerful hand on Hermann Wagner’s arm. “Relax, Herr Wagner, you look terrified.”

“I am terrified,” the banker admitted. “You warned me on the Mauretania never to look on your face. Tonight you show me your face. What am I to think but the worst?”

“Do not worry. You are valuable alive. I still need you. I need you more than ever. There is much to be done.”

“What can be done? Bell is onto you. And he’s closing in on Imperial Film.”

Semmler snatched the telephone from the banker’s hand and listened. A brilliant smile filled his strange face. It brightened his eyes and spread his lips, but bright as it was, Wagner thought, it looked cold as distant lightning.

“Bell,” said the leader of the Donar Plan, “would sound less confident if he knew we could hear him.”

40

“Mr. Bell, could I see that picture again?”

Isaac Bell handed the Wunderlich sketch to a Los Angeles Van Dorn disguised in the patched clothing and dark glasses of a blind newspaper seller. The detective took off the glasses and studied the sketch.

“You know, he didn’t look quite like this. But it could have been him.”

“When?”

The blind newsie opened his notebook and read deadpan: “Individual possibly resembling Mr. Bell’s sketch of Fritz Wunderlich entered German vice-consul’s residence Saturday at ten past eight. Detective Balant decided it wasn’t him.”

“Ten past eight this evening?”

“Yes, sir.”

“When did he come out?”

“Didn’t.”

Every detective in the room reached for his hat. Bell was already at the door. “He never came out? Are you sure?”

“I covered the front door, right across the street from my newsstand. When I needed relief to come here, Patrolman Joe Thomas, who lends us a hand, promised to cover till I got back.”

“Come on, boys, let’s have a look.”

They piled into two Ford autos and raced across town.

Larry Saunders asked Bell, “Is there any way we can get inside the consulate?”

“Not without setting off an international hullabaloo.”

Bell ordered the cars stopped a block from the residence of the German vice-consul, who had been recently appointed by the San Francisco consul general. “Wait here. I don’t want them looking out their window at half the detectives in California.”

He walked down the block and stopped at the “blind newsie’s” newspaper stand. The cop, Patrolman Joe Thomas, was seated inside, yawning. “Van Dorn,” said Bell, picking up the evening edition of the Los Angeles Times to shield the act of showing the sketch. “Have you seen this fellow come out of the consulate?”

“You just missed him,” said the cop. “Lit out of there like the house was on fire.”

“Isaac Bell will confront you,” Christian Semmler warned Irina Viorets. “Be prepared.”

“I am prepared.”

“I would recommend that you act both disbelieving and fiercely defiant.”

“I said I am prepared.”

“I would play the J. P. Morgan card if I were you.”

“I intend to.”

“It would not be an exaggeration,” Semmler smiled, “to say that the life of your ‘prince’ hangs in the balance.”

She did not have long to wait. The lobby guards telephoned on the Imperial Building’s Kellogg system.

“Of course,” she said. “Send Mr. Bell straight up.”

She told her secretaries, “No interruptions.”

Bell came in briskly, tall and lanky and handsome as ever, even with his face so stern.

“Isaac,” she teased, smiling as she rose from her desk to greet him, “you look as if you exited your bed from the wrong side this morning.”

“Irina, your ‘investors’ are Hamburg merchant bankers funneling money from the Imperial German Army.”

“That is not true.”

“The bank goes by the name Hamburg Bankhaus.”

“Isaac, please. You’re being silly.”

“The operation is run by your boss, a German general major named Christian Semmler.”

She looked him boldly in the eye. “I know no Christian Semmler. Imperial Film is a going concern. We are building a great national enterprise to produce, distribute, and exhibit moving pictures.”

Bell did not give an inch. “If you don’t know Christian Semmler, then to whom do you report?”

“I report to the head of the Artists Syndicate.”

“There is no Artists Syndicate. It’s a sham.”

Irina Viorets let the silence build between them. Then she sat behind her desk and picked up a long silver letter opener and twirled it slowly in her fingers, pointing it first at Bell, then back at herself, then again at Bell.

He broke the silence. “The Artists Syndicate is a sham. It does not exist.”

“That will come as a surprise to the man who heads it.”

“What? Who?”

“Singleton Brooks.”

She saw that Isaac Bell was puzzled and thrown off. It was almost as if he knew the name, which was the one thing she had not expected. But that appeared to be precisely the case. Bell actually knew the man. All the better, she thought, relief flooding through her. A good plan — a plan to derail Bell’s suspicions — had unexpectedly gotten even better. Her prince’s luck had turned. She could feel it in her soul.

The name Singleton Brooks was familiar to Isaac Bell, but he couldn’t recall why. Then it struck him. He remembered an unpleasant interview on Wall Street in the course of the Wrecker investigation.

“Singleton Brooks works for J. P. Morgan.”

Irina staggered him with a beautiful smile and a smug, “I believe that Mr. Morgan is not a sham.”

“I will have people in New York check on Mr. Brooks.”

“No need. Mr. Brooks arrives on the Golden State Limited tomorrow night. You can meet him at the station and ask him face-to-face… Is there anything else, Isaac? If not, please convey my warmest regards to Marion.”

Isaac Bell recovered with a smile, shook Irina’s hand, and left the building. It appeared that Christian Semmler has laid his groundwork even more thoroughly than he had imagined.

He went straight to Bunker Hill, rode up on the Angels Flight, and burst into Andrew Rubenoff’s mansion. Rubenoff was at the piano, singing “That Mesmerizing Mendelssohn Tune.”

“This Berlin fellow has a knack.”

“Does Singleton Brooks still work for J. P. Morgan?”

“Last I heard. And I would have heard if he had left.”

“Irina Viorets claims that Brooks represents Artists Syndicate, which you said didn’t exist.”

“I never said it would never exist. It did not exist when I inquired. Perhaps it exists now.”

“What the heck is going on?”

“Morgan’s shipping combine is taking a bath. International Mercantile Marine has been sorely used by the British government and the American Congress. Perhaps he sees an opportunity in Imperial Film. However it was financed aside, Imperial is poised to seize a controlling interest in much of independent film manufacturing, distribution, and exhibition. That’s the sort of meat Morgan feasts on.”

“But Krieg and the German Army—”

“Things change, Isaac. Events do not always unfold as first planned.”

The bookcase in Irina Vioret’s office slid open on silent, ball-bearing tracks. Christian Semmler emerged from his stairwell. “Tomorrow night,” he said, “after the Iron Horse company returns from taking pictures, I want you to ask Mrs. Bell to do you a favor.”

“What sort of favor?”

“I overheard our bloody director upstairs threatening to quit — just when they finished building the ship and pier.”

“Why?”

“He says the scenario won’t work. Something about the searchlights in the dark. I want him fired tomorrow. Then I want you to ask Mrs. Bell to help you by staying late to take pictures for his immigrant arrival scenario so the carpenters can clear the ship and a pier and build her Iron Horse stage set.”

“What if she says no?”

“You know as well as I do that Marion Bell will not say no to anything that would help her production. Nor would she miss an opportunity to take pictures in the dark by the glare of searchlights. She will rise to the challenge. Particularly when you can tell her that the original director quit because he wasn’t up to it.”

Irina Vioret’s dark eyes filled with anxious foreboding. “What are you going to do to her?”

“Nothing! Gott im Himmel, what are you thinking, woman? I promise you I will do nothing to derail the success of The Iron Horse. Just make sure that damned cowboy has gone before you ask her.”

41

Minutes before Isaac Bell went to LA Grande Station to meet Singleton Brooks’s train, Los Angeles field office chief Larry Saunders reported that the city records clerk, who Saunders had hoped would admit to the existence of a secret set of blueprints for the Imperial Building, had been crushed to death under an Angels Flight funicular railway car.

“The cops say he got oiled and tried to walk up the tracks. But being they are so steep, I’d expect that stunt more of a drunken sailor than an overweight, middle-aged file clerk. I’m sorry, Mr. Bell, he was my best shot, but I’ll keep trying.”

Bell thought hard. Then he said, “Larry, I want you to take personal charge of the Van Dorn Protective Service men guarding Clyde Lynds starting right now.”

The dandified Saunders asked why.

Isaac Bell replied in a manner that left no latitude for debate: “Because I have a very strong feeling about tonight.”

Then Bell switched tactics at La Grande Station.

Singleton Brooks’s Limited was due in at nine. Instead of simply walking up to Brooks and challenging him, Bell decided to have the J. P. Morgan executive followed first. Where he went might reveal a lot. He believed that Brooks might lead him to Christian Semmler — or did he merely hope? Regardless, Brooks would likely recognize Bell. Even if Bell disguised himself in his black motorcycle costume, the odds were Irina had alerted him to Bell’s suspicions.

So Bell had ordered Texas Walt Hatfield to do the primary tracking, and Texas Walt was ensconced in a saloon just outside the station’s main entrance. Bell would point out Singleton to him. Bell had another Van Dorn standing by in an Oldsmobile taxicab in the event that Singleton was picked up in an auto, while Balant, the blind newsie, transformed tonight into a gawking tourist, would follow the New York banker if he boarded a streetcar.

Van Dorn detective Chuck Shipley, a young, eager-to-prove-himself transfer from the Kansas City office, sat inside the blind newsie’s stand wearing a cap rented from a rooming house neighbor who made a living hawking newspapers on the street. Mr. Saunders had encouraged Shipley to get a nickel-plated changemaker to hook over his belt, enhancing his disguise. But Detective Balant had forbidden him to wear dark glasses, explaining, testily, that even if the Germans inside the vice-consul’s mansion were stupid — and there was no evidence they were — they would still wonder why the recently installed newsstand on their corner employed only blind men.

“In other words, Chuck, get your own disguise.”

Along with the cap and the changemaker, Shipley affected a severe limp, but seated behind the counter it was hard to show it off, as the only time he got to step out was when the trucks arrived with fresh editions. But here came one now, bearing bundles of the Los Angeles Examiner. The driver stayed behind the wheel. The helper slung a bundle under his arm and brought it around to the side, blocking the door so Chuck Shipley couldn’t get out to strut his limp.

“Where’s the blind guy?”

“He’s off tonight. His old man got sick.”

“Here, I got something for him. You give it to him.”

“What is it?”

“Look here.” The helper was holding something below his knees. Chuck looked. He saw nothing but the helper’s hand, which suddenly formed a fist encased in brass knuckles that traveled at his jaw like a rocket. Caught flat-footed, Chuck saw fireballs of different colors and then nothing but night.

The helper stretched Shipley out on the floor and grabbed more bundles from the truck to cover the body.

Then the Examiner truck pulled across the street and stopped in front of the German vice-consul’s mansion. Six powerful men in a variety of slouch hats and loose-fitting suits of clothes exited the mansion by a basement door. Most wore short beards; all had the blue-eyed, strong-jawed features of the South African Dutch. They piled into the truck, which drove straight to the Imperial Building. The six entered the lobby by the side entrance. The doormen greeted them warmly, like old comrades-in-arms.

The Golden State Limited rumbled into La Grande Station on time.

From a distance, Bell spotted a familiar short, compact figure jump impatiently from the stateroom car that Research had determined was Brooks’s. Brooks pushed through the crowd on the platform and through the arrival hall to the front of the station.

Bell gave Texas Walt the nod. Brooks hopped into a taxi. Walt eased into the Oldsmobile, and the Van Dorn driver trailed Brooks’s taxi away from the station. Balant, waiting by the streetcar track, hailed another taxi and tore after them.

“Mr. Bell. Mr. Bell.”

Bell recognized the out-of-breath Van Dorn messenger running up to him.

“Best to keep your voice low, son, while engaging a colleague on duty,” Bell cautioned, mildly. He took the messenger’s arm. “Walk along with me while we try to notice who took notice… What do you make of that fellow in the straw hat? Is he watching us?… Oh, there he goes with that lady kissing him. Otherwise, we’re clear. What’s the message?”

“Telephone Mr. Clyde Lynds soon as you can.”

Bell hurried inside the train station and telephoned the laboratory. Clyde Lynds sounded even more excited than the messenger. “Come see. I’ve synchronized sound and pictures.”

“I’ll be right there.”

But as Bell exited the station to race to the Imperial Building, he bumped into Texas Walt.

“What are you doing here? Did you lose Brooks?”

“Nope.”

“Where is he?”

“Stopped in Levy’s Café for supper. Balant’s watching him.”

“Cover him closely. I’ll be at the Imperial Building.”

“Can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Guess who he’s eating supper with?”

“Irina Viorets.”

“Nope. He’s eating with a fellow who’ll spot me in a second.”

“Who?”

“The feller who directed me in those Western dramas, the Pirate King himself, Jay Tarses.”

Bell shook his head in disbelief. “I figured Brooks would meet Irina first thing. And I hoped he would lead us to Semmler. What’s he doing with Tarses?”

“Balant took a table near ’em. We met up in the alley outside the facilities and Balant told me that Tarses mumbles too quiet to hear, but he heard Brooks jawing up a storm.”

“About Imperial?”

“No. J. P. Morgan is fixing to start a moving picture factory, and he wants Tarses to run it for him. Brooks is troweling it on thick about how much they need Tarses. Tarses is watching him like a snake. So it don’t sound to me like Brooks came to Los Angeles to visit Imperial. He’s come out here to grubstake a new outfit.”

“Maybe he’s meeting Irina tomorrow,” Bell said with little confidence.

“Hell, Isaac, why don’t I just walk in and ask him straight off?”

“I’ll do it. I know Brooks slightly, and I want to watch to see if he’s lying.”

“You want me to back you up?”

“I think between Balant and me,” Bell answered drily, “we can handle one back-East banker… Walt, would you do me a favor?”

“Shore, Isaac. What do you need?”

“Get an auto and park outside the house we took up on Bunker Hill.”

“Keep an eye on Marion?”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“You want me to go in the house?”

“No, she’s up so early, she’s probably sleeping by now. Just watch from outside.”

Bell hurried to Levy’s Café. Many of the tables were empty as the late second seating was finishing up. Boot heels clicking on the tile floor, he strode straight to the table where Tarses was listening to the Morgan banker with an expression of unconcealed suspicion. Bell pulled up a chair. Tarses looked up, remembering Bell but not quite sure why. Singleton Brooks, too, recognized Bell, and the banker turned out to have a very fine memory.

“Detective Bell. What are you doing here?”

“My question exactly,” said Isaac Bell. “Why are you dining with Mr. Tarses instead of Mademoiselle Irina Viorets?”

Jay Tarses’s face darkened, as if his suspicions had all been confirmed. “Why didn’t you tell me you were talking to Imperial, too?”

“I am not talking to Imperial. I told you, I came all the way out here specially to talk to you.”

“Oh, yeah? Then why are you meeting Irina Viorets, who happens to run Imperial?”

“I’m not,” Brooks protested. “I don’t know the woman.”

“You know who she is.”

“Of course I know who she is.”

Tarses looked at Isaac Bell. “Mr. Bell, what is it about moving pictures that rewards the worst and punishes the best?”

“What, sir, are you implying?” demanded Brooks.

Isaac Bell said, “Hold on, gentlemen, I owe you an apology. Answer one more question, Mr. Brooks, and I will be able to assure Mr. Tarses that you are on the level. Do you represent the Artists Syndicate?”

“I don’t even know what the Artists Syndicate is. And whatever it is I certainly don’t represent it.”

“And you don’t know Mademoiselle Viorets?”

“I know who she is. I do not recall ever meeting her.”

“You would,” said Tarses. “She’s a looker.”

“I am a married man,” Brooks said stiffly.

Bell stood up. “Further proof that he’s on the up and up, Mr. Tarses. Sorry to have interrupted your supper.”

“Mrs. Rennegal,” Marion said to her favorite Cooper-Hewitt operator. “We are supposed to be laying a scene on a pier beside a ship on a foggy night in the spooky glare of searchlights. This looks like a romantic candlelit dinner for two.”

“But Mrs. Bell,” said Rennegal, climbing wearily down the ladder from yet another adjustment of the Cooper-Hewitts hanging high in the flies over a stage decorated to depict the immigrants’ landing at Ellis Island, “Mr. Bitzer and Mr. Davidson keep complaining the searchlights overexpose their film.”

“That is why I sent Mr. Bitzer and Mr. Davidson out for a late supper — before I shot one of them — so you and I can try some other stunts to light this scene.” Davidson had joked that tossing spare actors off the roof carrying cameras to film their own fall in the general direction of the life net would be easier than faking a foggy night scene in the studio, while providing bigger thrills for the exhibitors.

“What if we painted the side of the ship a darker color?”

“I’m really sorry, Mrs. Bell. I can’t stay any later. My husband is working the graveyard shift, and there’s no one to stay with the baby.”

“Go. Thanks for staying as long as you could. I will figure it out. See you at The Iron Horse in the morning. We will try this again tomorrow night. The sooner we’re done, the sooner they can knock down this ship and put up our locomotive. Good night, dear. Thank you. Good night, everyone. Thank you all.”

Rennegal, her assistant, and the stagehands and electricians trooped into the elevator, chorusing, “Good night, Mrs. Bell.”

The elevator hummed down to the lobby, leaving her in a silence. Marion paced the empty stage. What if, she wondered, she got rid of the smoke? Did it soften the light or make it brighter?

She really had to go home and rest up for tomorrow. But as tired as she was, she could not stop thinking.

She opened the door in the glass north wall of the penthouse and stepped outside, onto the narrow terrace. A chilly breeze from the mountains plucked at her blouse. She hugged herself for warmth and peered over the parapet down at the tiny circle of the life net a hundred feet below.

Lighted by the spill from the windows of the first-floor film exchange, the canvas gleamed like a silver dollar. Marion studied it intently. There had to be a way to depict the beams of the searchlights without washing out the surrounding darkness.

“Welcome, Bittereinders,” Christian Semmler greeted the fighters he had summoned from the vice-consulate. These six had been the last of the so-called Bittereinders, holdouts who had refused to surrender when the British defeated the Boers’ regular armies and had fought on, extending the last days of hostilities by harassing slow-moving British columns, cutting their lines of communication, and killing sentries.

In the decade since the lost war, they had wandered, fighting for pay in the remote parts of the world where disciplined mercenaries fetched a premium. Ten years of such work had seasoned them into quick and nimble gunmen intimately familiar with up-to-date weapons, who were brave when they had to be and feared no one. But Semmler gave them pause. Some had seen him in action. All knew him by reputation. Each vowed privately that he would do exactly what the strange-looking German demanded — for despite his dazzling smile, he carried himself in a light and fluid way that promised sudden violence of memorable speed and ferocity.

He issued weapons, heavy-caliber American revolvers, clean and oiled, and short lengths of dynamite with fuses attached.

He showed them a map of the escape route from a secret exit out of the Imperial Building to a boxcar in the nearby Southern Pacific freight yards, where a special had steam up to shuttle them to the harbor at San Pedro and a ship ready to sail. Then he showed them blueprints of the building.

“We will survey the recording studio through this judas hole. After we locate our targets, we will enter through this wall, which slides open to the right.

“We will take the machines down these this hidden stairs. Once outside the building we will throw these quarter sticks of dynamite through the windows of the film exchange.”

One of the Boers held the quarter stick disdainfully between two fingers. “What will this little piece do other than make a loud noise?”

“The film stock is highly flammable. When the dynamite ignites it, it will burn the building to the ground.”

Semmler was a guerrilla fighter at heart, which made him a realist. He sensed that Isaac Bell was tightening a noose around his neck. The cold truth was that a single piece of bad luck — Isaac Bell appearing on the Mauretania’s boat deck at precisely the wrong moment — threatened to run the Donar Plan off the rails. Everything that had gone wrong since could be traced to that night on the ship, and it was only a matter of time until the private detective exposed the Imperial Film scheme to spread pro-German propaganda.

But the Imperial Film system of manufacturing, distributing, and exhibiting propaganda movies was only a device. Better that he destroy it himself, incinerating all connections to the German Army. The volatile moving picture business would welcome a new “Imperial Film” by whatever name and under whatever pretense. The key to the Donar Plan was still the Talking Pictures machine that would make the moving pictures irresistible.

With Talking Pictures in hand, he could still implement his original goal of using propaganda to divide Germany’s enemies. Killing three birds with one stone, he would take his revenge on Isaac Bell, destroy all evidence, and escape home to Germany with the propaganda tool he needed to start anew.

He beckoned his fighters closer. “Pay strict attention to this photograph.”

Christian Semmler showed the fighters a picture of Clyde Lynds that had been snapped by an Imperial publicity photographer when the scientist visited the penthouse studio stages.

“Not one hair on the head of this scientist is to be disturbed. He is the sole purpose of this raid. So mark well where he stands when we raid the studio. We will take him and his instruments — him unharmed, his equipment intact. Is that clear?” He looked each man in the eye until he answered, “Yes, General.”

42

Isaac Bell telephoned Irina Viorets.

“I was hoping you were working late,” he said when she answered.

“I am always working late.”

“I met Mr. Brooks.”

Irina Viorets surprised him. She said, “Then you know I lied to you.”

“Why?”

“I think you should come to see me. Now.”

“All right. Tell the doormen to let me in.”

“No. Not here. I’ll meet you on the street.”

Impressed by Isaac Bell’s cold confidence that events were coming to a head, Larry Saunders had shed his tailored jacket for a still-stylish but more loosely draped garment with room for a Colt.45 in a shoulder holster and a couple of pocket pistols. And just to be on the safe side, he brought with him his top man, the formidable Tim Holian, who was the only detective in the field office who didn’t care how he looked and slouched about the city in a disreputable-looking sack coat bulging with firearms.

When they got to the Imperial Building, they found that Clyde Lynds and his Protective Services guard had descended from the laboratory to set up camp in the soundproof fourth-floor recording studio, and they joined them there.

The detectives were edgy as the evening began, but when Clyde Lynds suddenly demanded a messenger to find Isaac Bell so Lynds could report to Bell, even Saunders and Holian were swept up in the scientist’s excitement.

Detectives, Protective Service operatives, and Clyde Lynds gathered around Lynds’s machine, which was projecting a moving picture on a white wall that served as a screen. Mounted on both sides of the makeshift screen were stacks of phonograph horns.

“Listen to this!” shouted Lynds.

His face alight with glee, Lynds grabbed the handle of an electrical switch and pulled it toward him.

A woman’s voice came from the horns. She sounded hoarse and far away, but every eye in the room fixed on the image of her lips, which moved in precise synchronization with the words she was speaking.

Larry Saunders felt his own mouth drop open in amazement. It was an arresting sight. “Wait till Bell sees this. It’s like she’s alive.”

Clyde Lynds grinned with pride. “We’re getting there,” he said. “We’re on our way.”

The wall on which the woman talking was projected moved.

Clyde Lynds stared in puzzlement.

The wall was sliding to his left, revealing darkness behind it that seemed to swallow the moving picture. And suddenly the woman’s face vanished, and where it had been was the smile of the German whom the Professor had named the Akrobat.

43

Men with guns in their hands flanked the Acrobat.

Larry Saunders and Tim Holian stepped in front of Clyde Lynds, shielding him as they reached for their pistols. Saunders whipped his Colt from his shoulder holster with blinding speed.

Christian Semmler’s gunmen fired as one. Six shots exploded in deafening thunder. The chief of the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Los Angeles field office fell dead with six bullets in his chest.

Their second volley dropped both Protective Service men, who had been so startled by the raid that they were still reaching for their weapons. The guns wheeled toward Tim Holian, whom they had been afraid to fire at because he was next to Clyde Lynds. Holian took full advantage of the two-second respite. Standing tall, pistols flaming in both hands, he stalked the raiders. One Bittereinder went down, and another fell back with a cry of pain. Four returned Holian’s fire. The big detective tumbled across the laboratory, and crashed into a table, splintering it.

Clyde Lynds ran. The Acrobat leaped over the fallen men’s bodies and bounded lithely after him, catching him by the arm. He drew him close in a powerful grip, squeezed until Lynds groaned in pain, and glared in the frightened scientist’s eyes. “I have you, Herr Lynds. Do not struggle, or I will hurt you. Where is the Talking Pictures machine?”

“You’re looking at it,” Lynds said sullenly.

“That is the part for showing the Talking Pictures,” Semmler said, gesturing for his men to pack it down the stairs. “Where is the part that manufactures it?”

He squeezed harder, crushing muscle against bone. Gasping, Lynds led him to a camera on a tripod.

“This is for pictures,” said Semmler. “What captures the sound?”

Lynds nodded mutely at a carbon microphone on a tall wooden box.

Semmler said, “Lastly, where is the machine for imprinting the sounds on the film?”

Clyde Lynds sagged in Semmler’s grip. The monster knew everything. It was as if he had been watching over his shoulder. Pain bored through his arm as Semmler shook him like a terrier. “Where?”

“Upstairs in the lab.”

Semmler was relentless. Squeezing harder, grinding Lynds’s flesh agonizingly against bone, he asked, “Where are your plans?”

Clyde Lynds realized with a sinking heart that, having been outfoxed in the past, the German was too suspicious to be fooled again. “There!” he gasped, indicating a satchel full of drawings and schematics. That seemed to appease the Acrobat, Lynds thought, but he soon realized he was wrong.

“Let’s go!” Semmler dragged him toward the opening that had appeared so suddenly in the wall.

“Where?”

“Up to the laboratory for your imprinting machine, then home to Germany.”

“Germany’s not my home,” Lynds protested.

“It will be your home until your machine is made absolutely perfect.”

The Gopher gangsters back in New York had taught Clyde Lynds their favorite fighting trick. They had done it as a joke, thinking he was an overeducated sissy boy, but, craving their respect, he had learned it anyhow. With nothing to lose, he tried it now, so unexpectedly that he startled even the Acrobat. Springing off his toes he butted his forehead against the big German’s massive jaw. In the split second that the grip on his arm eased, Lynds wrenched free and ran. He stumbled over Larry Saunders’s body, arrested his fall with one hand, and scooped up a fallen pistol.

Clyde Lynds heard a shot.

The sound seemed to come from a great distance, and he heard it long after he realized that his legs had stopped moving and that the shot had hammered him to the floor. He tried to sit up. He saw the man who had shot him, a yellow-bearded Dutchman in a slouch hat, still holding the gun and violently shaking his head. The Acrobat was standing close behind the man, his face contorted with rage and stupendous effort as he yanked a garrote around the Dutchman’s neck so tightly that it sawed through flesh.

“Take everything to the train,” Semmler ordered his remaining men. “I’ll go up to the laboratory.” He threw the Boer’s body out of his way and knelt to pick up Clyde Lynds to have him identify the correct imprinting machine. The scientist had lost consciousness. Air bubbled bloodily from his chest, and Semmler could see that he was mortally wounded.

Again cursing the trigger-happy fool who had shot Lynds and remembering how Lynds had tricked him in the past, Christian Semmler searched the dying scientist’s clothing. He found tucked beneath his shirt a flat object carefully folded in a wrapping of oilskin. He opened it and found a single sheet of heavy parchment paper. To his joy, written on it in a fine, clear, miniature hand were diagrams and schematic drawings annotated with mathematical formulas.

Semmler rewrapped it with reverent care in the waterproof oilskin. Surely this was the cagey Lynds’s true plan for the Talking Pictures machine. Why else would he have wrapped it so carefully? Why else would he hide it? Semmler slipped it inside his own shirt. He would take it, along with the satchel full of plans and the machine itself, back to Germany and let the scientists determine which was real.

Isaac Bell spotted Irina Viorets standing just at the edge of the light drifting down from a streetlamp. She was craning her neck, staring up at the top of the Imperial Building. Her coat was too heavy for the mild climate. At her feet was a carpetbag.

“You look,” said Bell as he came up behind her, “like a woman leaving town.”

She turned to the sound of his voice. Her eyes were bright with tears. Her voice trembled. “Do not speak,” she said. “I will speak.”

Bell listened with some skepticism and then growing sympathy as she told him how her fiancé was locked in Semmler’s Army prison in Prussia. “Semmler says he’s a fool. But his cause is right. His dreams are just. I know, now, that he was not meant to survive in the world in which he chooses to fight. I am his only hope.”

“Irina, why are you telling me this?”

“Because maybe if you kill Semmler, perhaps, just perhaps, there will be no one else to order them to kill my prince.”

“I’m a private detective, Irina. I’m not a murderer.”

“I know that, Isaac. But if you confront Christian Semmler, only one will survive. Call it what you want. Self-defense. I don’t care. You are my only hope.”

“To confront him, I have to find him.”

“I will tell you how to find him. There is a secret stairwell that rises from the basement to the penthouse. He roams it. He spies from it. On the ninth floor he has his own hidden quarters. Now you can find him.”

“Where is the basement entrance?”

“Do you recall the life net that I showed you behind the building? For the actors to jump in?”

“Yes.”

“There is a trapdoor directly under it.”

“Why tonight?” Bell asked. “Why did you tell me tonight?”

“Because I have done a terrible thing, and only you can save me from it.”

“What?”

“Semmler asked me to make sure that Marion is in the building tonight.”

“She’s here? She can’t be. She’s home.”

“I put her to work, last minute, taking pictures in the roof studio. She’s up there now. Where he wanted her. I am so sorry, Isaac, but my—”

Bell whirled away and ran full tilt down the block and around the corner. He saw an International truck pulling away from the gate in the wooden fence that surrounded the vacant lot behind the building. One of the uniformed lobby doormen was standing guard at the gate and moved to stop him.

“Where the hell you think you’re going?”

Bell hit him twice, continued through the gate, and ran past the temporary outdoor studio stages. He saw the life net in the light of a nearby window. The canvas was stretched between springy ropes, five feet above the ground. Bell ducked under it and found the trapdoor. Oddly, it was open.

Isaac Bell climbed into the hole and down a steel ladder affixed to a concrete wall. At the bottom, he saw light at the end of a narrow hall and ran toward it, drawing his Browning. The hall ended at a dimly lit narrow stairwell. Steps spiraled tightly upward into the highest reaches of the building. Bell bounded up them, the sound of his boots muffled by rubber tile.

At an abbreviated landing at the top of the first flight, he saw several twelve-inch-square doors set in the walls at head height. He jerked one open. It covered the judas he had suspected was there. The spy hole took in the lobby. He saw four doormen blocking the front door, the stairs, and the steps to the theater. The elevators were open, their lights off, out of service.

Bell opened the judas hole cover on the opposite wall. The film exchange was empty at this late hour, and a steel scissors gate was closed across the motorcycle messengers’ entrance. Irina had given him the only way to breach the building’s defenses.

He climbed another flight and ran face-to-face into Detective Tim Holian. Holian shambled past him, bleeding from bullet wounds in his arms and legs, white with shock, and muttering, “Hospital, hospital, gotta get to the hospital.”

Bell thought fleetingly that Holian had to be one of the luckiest men alive to survive a fusillade of gunfire with only flesh wounds.

“Where’s Saunders?”

“Dead. All dead.”

Bell pounded up the stairs. At the fourth flight, the wall had disappeared, having been slid aside into a pocket. He stepped through the opening and stared in horror. The recording studio was a slaughterhouse.

Larry Saunders lay dead on the floor. Two men Bell didn’t know lay dead, revolvers locked in their fists, slouch hats fallen beside them. A third man had been strangled and bore the bloody gouge around the throat that was the Acrobat’s signature. Then he saw Clyde Lynds sprawled on his back, his chest covered in blood, his face drained of color.

“Clyde?” Pistol in hand, Isaac Bell knelt beside him. He saw immediately that the brash young scientist was not long for this world, and he had a horrible feeling that he had let him down.

Clyde opened his eyes. “Say, Isaac,” he whispered. “You didn’t make the rescue this time.”

“I’m sorry I got you into this,” said Isaac Bell. “I wish I had insisted you take your chances with Edison.”

“At least Edison wouldn’t kill me.”

“Did they take your machine?”

Clyde answered slowly, in a whisper so faint that Bell had to move within inches to hear him. “They took a jury-rigged contraption I slapped together with baling wire. It will drive their scientists nuts. Joke’s on the Acrobat. I fooled him again. And I kept the new plans— Isaac!”

“What?”

“You have to take care of the plans.”

“I will.”

“You have to promise.”

“I promise. Where are they?” Bell asked.

“Right here.”

“Where?”

Clyde raised his hand as if to point at his head as Bell remembered he had on the Mauretania, claiming he held it in his mind and only needed time and money to finish Talking Pictures. A lot of good that would do. They would die with him this time. But instead Clyde was reaching to pat his chest, then hastily to cover his mouth. He coughed, a harsh sound that wracked his body head to toe. The cough ended abruptly with a sudden intake of breath and a long sigh, and before Clyde Lynds could tell Isaac Bell where he had put his plans, the young scientist was dead.

Bell closed Clyde’s eyelids and spread a handkerchief over his face. Mindful of his promise, he searched Clyde’s clothing.

“Looking for something, Detective?”

44

The Acrobat was speaking directly behind him. His English was fluent, his accent light.

“Place your pistol on his chest.”

Isaac Bell laid the Browning on Clyde’s chest and raised both hands. As his right hand passed his head, he whipped his derringer from his hat, spun around, and fired both barrels in the direction of Semmler’s voice. The slugs clanged through a tin acoustical horn.

The Acrobat laughed.

Now Bell saw him on the far side of the room, a man with hair as gold as his and green eyes bright as emeralds. He was standing behind a disc microphone mounted on a wooden box, smiling the “Fritz Wunderlich” smile that the drummers had raved about. The sketch had failed to capture the magnetic power of his presence. Nor were his thick brow and massive jaw monkey-like. Isaac Bell thought that Semmler, the Acrobat, looked like the work of a brilliant sculptor more enchanted by the structure within his stone than by the surface. The word “mighty” sprang to Bell’s mind. There was a quality to the man of power that made him seem larger than life.

Semmler returned Bell’s inquiring gaze, and his smile broadened and his eyes brightened. Bell was reminded of Art Curtis — though six inches shorter than Semmler and round instead of rangy, Art had possessed a similarly compelling smile. Art had been a fighting man, too, and his eyes could turn cold. But Semmler’s eyes were of a different order, as cold and empty as the stars.

His hands were hidden behind the box.

Bell could not see if he was holding a weapon.

“Clyde’s microphone is quite effective, don’t you think? You thought I sounded real.”

“You sounded like a murderer.”

“I am not a murderer,” Semmler replied, with such conviction that Bell knew he was confronting a madman. “I am a soldier for my country and my kaiser.”

Bell gathered his legs to spring. “That insults every soldier who ever served. You murdered eight men starting with your own accomplice on the Mauretania.”

“None would have died if you had not interfered,” Semmler shot back. “Every death is on your head.”

Bell surged to his feet and rushed the Acrobat in a burst of fluid motion.

Semmler raised a Webley automatic pistol and leveled it at Bell’s chest. “I load hollow-point.455s. I’m told that your friend Abbott will never fully recover from his encounter with a ‘manstopper.’”

Bell stopped, reluctantly.

“We will leave the building,” Semmler said. “Walk ahead of me. Lead the way downstairs.”

Bell had no choice but to do as the Acrobat demanded. But at least with every step down the stairs, he was drawing Semmler farther away from Marion. They descended four flights to the lobby and another to the cellar. Semmler indicated the narrow hall and switched positions when they reached the ladder to the trapdoor.

“I’ll go first,” he said, backing agilely up the ladder, covering Bell until, crouched under the life net, he beckoned with the Webley for Bell to come up next.

When the detective climbed out, Semmler said, “Feel around at the foot of the wall. There’s some loose bricks. Pick one up.”

Bell stepped from under the canvas life net and two paces to the wall of the building, crouched down and felt in the dark until he found a brick. Glad of another weapon, he stood with it in his left hand. His right was reserved for his throwing knife, which he would draw from his boot the instant he saw a chance.

Semmler said, “Your interference ruined years of meticulous planning. It cost me time and treasure and dimmed my star. Promises made to my kaiser, my army, and my family have all been broken. I will redeem them now that I have Talking Pictures in hand. But it did not have to take so long.”

He gestured with his pistol. “Before you get any silly ideas about braining me with that brick, throw it through that window.”

Bell raised the brick, watching Semmler’s posture for signs of the split second of distraction he needed to go for his knife. But Semmler was watching closely and with sublime confidence in his mastery of the situation. Bell tried another tack. “Meticulous planning for what? I am mystified. What is it you want?”

“I want to save Germany from well-meaning fools. Throw the brick.”

Bell tried again. “What—”

Semmler trained his gun at Bell’s chest. “Throw the brick or convalesce with Abbott.”

Bell threw the brick at the lighted window. The glass shattered, and shards fell from the frame, widening a jagged hole.

“Here’s your next choice: either keep dogging my steps or try to save what is dear to you.”

Christian Semmler raised his free hand for Bell to see. Between his thumb and forefinger he held a book of safety matches. Beneath the matches, cupped in his big palm, was a dark cylinder, which looked to Bell in the uncertain light from the broken window to be a small chunk sawed off a stick of dynamite and fitted with a fuse and detonator. Semmler manipulated his fingers with the dexterity of a magician. He lighted a match and touched the flame to the fuse.

It caught with a shower of sparks. Semmler lobbed the dynamite through the broken window. Bell heard it hit the floor. There was a moment of silence, then a loud explosion. Bright white-orange flame suddenly lit the spot outside the window where they were standing, making it bright as day.

Christian Semmler looked Isaac Bell in the face.

“I could have simply shot you. But I prefer revenge. So it is up to you to choose, Chief Investigator Bell. Shadow me like a good detective or jump down that trapdoor like a good husband and climb to the roof in hopes of leading your lovely wife out of the fire before she burns to death. If the stairs are too thick with smoke, you can always jump from the roof in hopes of landing on this life net. We’ve yet to persuade the actors to try it, and I regret that I don’t have time to watch your landing. Go ahead. Choose!”

Isaac Bell spun on his heel, dove under the life net that concealed the trapdoor, and vaulted himself feetfirst through the opening. As his foot grazed the top rungs of the ladder, he pulled his throwing knife from his boot and, without wasting a step of his swift descent, flung it overarm at Christian Semmler’s throat.

Isaac Bell’s blade streaked through the air like a silver bolt of electricity.

Superhuman speed saved the Acrobat from instant death.

But no power on earth could save his face.

Bell’s knife pierced his cheek and his tongue and rasped against his teeth.

Desperate to reach Marion in time, Bell had not lingered to watch.

But as he dropped off the bottom rung of the ladder and whirled toward the narrow hall that led to the stairs, he heard Semmler scream. Loud with dismay, shrill with pain, and sharp as a clarinet, the sound suddenly thickened, gurgling hollowly, drowned in blood.

45

Delicately, but shaking with the effort, Christian Semmler pulled the smooth blade from his flesh. The pain threatened to knock him off his feet. He staggered to the life net, propped an elbow on it to keep his balance, and spewed a mouthful of blood. Then he slashed his coat sleeve with the razor-sharp knife. Spitting more blood, he wadded the cloth, stuffed it in his mouth, and bit down hard to staunch the wound.

He had to get moving. He had to get away. Fire engines were coming. He was afraid he would pass out. But a second explosion blowing glass from more windows galvanized him with the realization that the fire was spreading so fast that if Isaac Bell somehow did manage to reach the roof ahead of the flames, he and his bride’s only way down was to jump to the life net.

The Acrobat’s sudden laughter lanced pain through his face, but he couldn’t help it. It was such perfect justice for all Bell had done to him. With Bell’s own knife, he slashed the ropes that held the net.

White smoke seeped into the secret stairwell. The acrid, tarry stink of nitrate gas clawed at Bell’s lungs. As he raced by the film exchange, a judas hole cover blew open and hot flame shot through the spy hole like a fiery arrow. Bell ducked it and kept climbing, bounding three steps at once, pursued by smoke and fire. He passed the opening to the recording studio. The fire was there ahead of him, licking the bodies, having leaped up an elevator shaft or another stairway, and he prayed that Marion had not left the temporary safety of the rooftop studio in a doomed attempt to descend.

At the fifth-floor landing, when he was halfway to the top of the building, the flames feeding on the hundreds of reels in the film exchange far below breached a vault and detonated tons of film stock stored inside. The explosion shook the stairs under Bell’s feet. A shock wave traveled up the shaft and lofted him off the rubber treads.

He tumbled down half a flight of stairs, clambered to his feet, and ran harder, climbing past Irina’s office on the seventh floor, Clyde’s laboratory on the eighth, and Semmler’s lair on the ninth. After one more flight he was at the top, gasping for breath and stymied by walls on every side. He yanked open a judas door and saw a studio stage in semidarkness, with a looming shadow of a ship and towers bearing Cooper-Hewitt light banks. Silhouetted against a lurid sky, Marion was stepping through the door in the northern glass wall, climbing out on the terrace that overlooked the life net.

Bell shouted. The wall was thick, and she could not hear him.

Remembering the sliding fourth-floor wall, he spotted the bulge where the wall thickened to make room for the pocket. He looked for a lever but saw none. He flattened his palms against it and tried to slide it, which had no effect. Then he saw what looked like an ordinary electric light switch on the floor molding. He moved it and the wall glided aside.

“Marion!”

A second explosion rocked the building.

Bell ran the length of the studio stage, dodging wires and camera tracks, and tripped over a sandbag counterbalancing a fly lift. He rolled to his feet and pulled open the door in the glass wall. Marion was climbing the steps that had been built in hopes of one day convincing an extra to try the life net.

“Marion!”

“Isaac? Oh my God, it’s you. Hurry! All the stairs are blocked. The elevators won’t come. We have to jump.”

Bell bounded up beside her and held her close, overwhelmed with the relief of finding her alive. The net appeared even smaller than it had when he last saw it from here. Flames leaping from many windows were lighting it clearly. There were dark splotches on the white canvas that he hadn’t noticed before.

“They built it strong enough for two,” said Marion. “Irina wanted a ‘Lovers’ Leap.’”

“We have to hold each other tight, or we’ll smash into each other when we bounce.”

“Thank God, you’re here. I didn’t know if I had the courage to jump.”

“What is that dark color? Those splotches?”

“They shine,” said Marion. “Like liquid.”

A third explosion shook the building. It felt as if it were swaying in an earthquake. Bell, staring down at the net, puzzling over the splotches, saw great torrents of fire thrusting from windows on the sixth floor. They had moments to jump before the building collapsed. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t leave without me.”

“We can’t stay here, General Major,” Herman Wagner pleaded with Christian Semmler.

A fire engine thundered up the street, pulled by two bay horses, and from the opposite direction came police on

bicycles.

Wagner’s chauffeur, who kept turning around to stare anxiously, opened the glass that separated the passenger compartment. “We’re blocking the gate. We have to move.”

“Wait!” said Semmler, his voice muffled by the blood-soaked coat sleeve he pressed to his face. “Do not move this auto.”

“But they will see that you were wounded, General Major.”

Semmler did not deign to reply to the obvious, saying instead, “Wounds and war march in lockstep. That is the reason I ordered you to stand by. Don’t disappoint me— Look!” Semmler pointed at the parapet of the Imperial Building. The flames, fanned by a stiffening wind, were shooting higher than the roof. Suddenly something moved in front of them. A man in white teetered on the parapet. “See! There he goes!”

Smoke obscured the figure. Then he separated from the parapet, as if he were pushing off with all his strength to clear the building, and fell through the air.

“I think it’s both of them.”

“My God, it is.” Hermann Wagner held his breath. It seemed that it took them forever to plunge past the burning windows. How afraid they must be that they would miss the tiny net. What would they do if they saw that they were falling off course? To Wagner’s immense relief, the poor couple did not miss the net. They landed dead center. But instead of bouncing back up in the air, they smashed through it to the ground.

“Bull’s-eye,” said Christian Semmler.

“The net collapsed,” cried Wagner. “It didn’t hold.” He stared at the wreckage, but, of course, no one moved from it. How could they? A moment later a section of the building’s wall gave way and thundered down, burying their remains under tumbled bricks.

The first team of fire horses clattered alongside the auto.

“Drive!”

Wagner’s chauffeur almost stalled the motor in his haste to get away.

“Where now, General Major?” asked Wagner, staring back over his shoulder at the burning building, and grateful that the wooden fence blocked his view of where Bell and his wife had died. “To the freight yard?”

“Take me to a doctor. While he sutures this, charter a special to New York. We are done in Los Angeles. For now.”

Christian Semmler sounded remarkably pleased, Wagner thought, for a man who had seen his entire enterprise go up in smoke. And he displayed a God-like indifference to his grievous wounds. God-like, or machine-like — it was as if he didn’t feel pain.

Semmler noticed him staring. “Of course it hurts,” he said, spitting blood so he could speak. “You should pray you never feel anything like it.”

“We’re running out of rope. Hang on! I’ll see what I can do.”

Isaac Bell let go of the last inches of a seventy-foot-long string of Cooper-Hewitt light cables and stage fly ropes he had knotted together, and dropped ten feet to the roof of the Imperial Moving Picture Palace marquee that sheltered the sidewalk in front of the building. He landed on stinging soles and looked up. Flames were gushing from windows they had descended past moments ago.

“Let go. I’ve got you.”

Marion slid down to the end of the rope, shredding the little that remained of her gloves, and opened her hands. Bell caught her in his arms, swooped her to a gentle landing, and held her tightly for a grateful moment.

The clatter of hoofs and the throb of steam pumps heralded the arrival of the fire department. “Firemen!” Bell called down to them. “Did you boys happen to bring a ladder?”

“I still can’t sleep,” Marion whispered, “I keep seeing that sandbag burst on the ground. That could have been us.”

Bell held her close. “But it wasn’t us. Don’t worry, we’re fine.”

Marion laughed. “I’m not worried. And I know why I can’t sleep. It feels so wonderful to be awake — Isaac, thank God you saw his blood on the net. But what made you think he cut the ropes? I’d have thought he would have run for his life, particularly if he was so badly wounded as to be bleeding like that.”

“He’s a killer. He calls himself a soldier, but he is first a killer. In fact, I’ll bet he waited to watch us hit bottom.”

“When he finds out you tested the net with a sandbag, he’s going to be badly disappointed.”

“He’s going to be more than disappointed,” Bell promised grimly, climbing out of bed and kissing her good night. “Sleep tight.”

“Where are you going?’

“New York.”

“Why New York?”

“Christian Semmler’s got what he came for. He’s going back to Germany.”

“How do you know?”

“He asked me, mockingly, ‘Looking for something?’ I was searching Clyde’s body because Clyde told me as he died that he had kept the real plans. Doesn’t ‘Looking for something?’ sound like Christian Semmler already found them?”

Marion sat up. “And since he asked when he saw you searching Clyde, that means he found them in Clyde’s clothing.”

“Meaning he can carry them in his clothing.”

Bell dressed hastily. He filled his pockets, holstered his spare Browning in his coat and a fresh throwing knife in his boot, and reloaded the empty derringer he had managed to palm without the Acrobat noticing.

“From the sound of his scream, I’d say he’s sporting a good-sized bandage. In fact, I’m hoping he needed stitches. Lots of them.”

“But how do you know he’s going to New York?”

“I don’t for sure, but it’s a good bet. If Clyde’s plans were on his person, then Semmler’s traveling light. And if he’s traveling light, the fastest way home to Germany is a train across the continent and a boat from New York.”

46

Joseph Van Dorn welcomed Isaac Bell to the New York headquarters with words that Bell could have construed as compliments were it not for the thunderclouds on the boss’s face.

“Excellent reasoning,” said Van Dorn. “Downright intriguing, even: traveling light, swathed in bandages, a murderer responsible for the deaths of two of my best agents races fleet-footedly across the continent, having stolen the plans to a revolutionary machine in which I have invested heavily, and boards a steamship for Germany. Our investigative agency pulls out all stops; we cover every Limited train station between Los Angeles and New York; we pull every wire we have in the government to obtain passenger manifests from eastbound German and French liners; we shake hands with the devil — currently masquerading as a British earl and military intelligence officer — to obtain the passenger lists of British ships; we canvas shipping clerks to watch for a man who fits Semmler’s description booking passage to Europe; we pay enormous sums of money to policemen and customs officers to help watch those ships when our forces are stretched to the breaking point. And who do we find?”

“No one, yet,” answered Bell.

“Did it ever occur to you that he might have gone the other way and boarded a ship in San Pedro, in which case he is now steaming hell-for-leather toward the Panama Canal?”

“A Talking Pictures machine is doing just that,” replied Isaac Bell, “aboard a German freighter, which will reach the canal in ten days. After they traverse it they will likely load the machine onto a warship. The Imperial German Navy has a squadron stationed off Venezuela.”

“What?” exploded Van Dorn. “He has the machine? How do you know that?”

“Tim Holian and his boys traced it and a gang of gunmen from the Los Angeles Southern Pacific freight yard to San Pedro and onto the ship. Holian is positive that Semmler wasn’t with them.”

“I was told that Holian was shot four times.”

“Apparently it didn’t take. Flesh wounds.”

“Well, he had flesh to spare, last time I saw him. So they have the machine?” Van Dorn smiled and stroked his beard. “I think I can pull a wire or two in the Canal Zone and have that freighter held up.”

“No, sir,” said Bell.

“What do you mean, ‘No, sir’? Why not?”

“Clyde switched machines. He gave Semmler a contraption that will cause them no end of confusion. Better to let them take it to Germany.”

“Where’s the right one?”

“Burned up in the fire.”

“Destroyed,” Van Dorn said, gloomily.

“Except for the plans.”

“Which General Major Semmler has.”

“I’m afraid so.”

Van Dorn sighed. “What about that Russian woman, Isaac? Might she not be helping him?”

“She vanished. The Los Angeles office is hunting, but she’s nowhere to be found.”

“So she could be with him.”

“Highly unlikely. She betrayed him, hoping I would kill him.”

“A sentiment echoed warmly in this office, Isaac. Unfortunately, first you have to find him. I saw in the wires you exchanged at your train’s station stops that you think Semmler may have chartered a special.”

“So far nothing’s turned up,” said Bell. “The difficulty is, even though we’re watching the German consulates like hawks, his private contacts, German businessmen or commercial travelers, could have chartered it for him.”

“So the long and short is that General Major Christian Semmler, Imperial German Army, Military Intelligence, could be sleeping upstairs in one of the Knickerbocker’s palatial suites directly over our heads.”

“I would not rule that out,” Bell admitted. “He is a guerrilla fighter — a behind-the-lines operator. But we can hardly roust every guest in the hotel without management taking notice and terminating our lease.”

“You are remarkably flippant for a detective who has no idea where his quarry is.”

“He is either in New York or still on his way to New York, and he’s going to board a ship to Europe.”

“You sound awfully sure for a detective with no facts.”

“I have more irons in the fire.”

“Other than the obvious advice to keep an eye peeled for doctors, I saw no talk about ‘more irons’ when I read your wires.”

“Not everyone talks by electricity,” said Bell. He reached for his hat.

“What does that mean? Isaac, where in hell are you going?”

“Harlem.”

The Monarch Lodge of the improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks offered a home away from home on West 135th Street to Pullman porters laying over in New York. A man could get a decent meal and sleep on a clean cot. Or he could smoke in a comfortable chair in a big parlor and swap tales, both true and fanciful, with friends from all across the United States who served on the trains. It was true that the white Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks was suing the Negro Elks to stop them from using a similar name, but the Monarch Lodge remained, for the moment, a sanctuary. No one there would shout “George” to demand service, as if a black man didn’t have his own name. In fact, a white man crossing the Negro Elks’ threshold was extremely unlikely, which was why everyone looked up when a tall white man in a white suit knocked at the door, took his hat off as he stepped inside, and said, politely, “Excuse me for interrupting, gentlemen. I’m Isaac Bell.”

Heads swiveled. Many stood to get a better view of him. They knew the name. Who didn’t? One dark night — the story went — when the Overland Limited was highballing across Wyoming at eighty miles per hour, a passenger named Isaac Bell who had won a big hand in a poker game had tipped a porter one thousand dollars. The Pullman porter might be the highest-paid man in his neighborhood, but he still had to work two years for a thousand dollars, and few in the Elks parlor had believed the tale until they saw him standing there.

Bell said, “I wonder if I might speak with Mr. Clement Price— Oh, there you are, Mr. Price,” and when Clem stepped forward, Bell thrust out his hand and said, “Good to see you again. Did you have any luck?”

“Just walked in myself,” said Price, a fit young fellow with an eye for the ladies, whom the others were a little wary of. Clem kept talking about how everybody would be better off forming a labor union, which leveler heads feared would provoke the Pullman Company to fire every last one of them, as it had done numerous times in the past.

Price addressed the room. “Mr. Bell has his eye out for a yellow-haired, green-eyed gentleman riding to New York wearing a fresh bandage on his head or neck. Such a gentleman was seen in Denver and someone similar-looking might have passed through Kansas City, but no one I saw in Chicago had seen him when Mr. Bell asked me yesterday.”

“Bandage?” echoed a sharp-eyed older man, who looked Bell over carefully and asked with a smile, “Like he ran into something?”

“Me,” said Bell, to knowing winks and laughter.

“Is he riding in the open section or a stateroom?”

“Stateroom, almost certainly,” said Bell.

The men exchanged glances, shook heads, shrugged.

“Not that I’ve seen.”

“I just got off from D.C. Didn’t see him.”

“He’s traveling from the west,” said Bell. “Though he could be plying a circuitous route.”

“I just come in from Pittsburgh. Didn’t see him. Didn’t hear anyone mention him, either.”

“He would have stood out, aside from the bandage,” Bell answered. “He has unusually long arms. I was really hoping his appearance would have caused some talk. Long arms, heavy brow. And a bright smile that could sell you ice in Alaska. Here. Here’s a sketch.”

They passed it around, shaking their heads.

“Would have stood out, if folks had seen him,” the porter in from Pittsburgh ventured.

Bell said, “It is possible that he’s traveling with someone else. Possibly a doctor.”

“Doctor?”

“For his injury.”

“Well, funny you should say doctor, Mr. Bell.”

“How’s that?’ Bell asked, eagerly.

“I saw two men like you’re saying, but they weren’t on a Pullman. Least not a scheduled one.”

“He could have chartered a special.”

“It was a special I saw. Out in New Jersey, in the Elizabeth yards. They were walking by a special that had just pulled in. I thought they were tramps, but they could have got off the special. And the other fellow was carrying a little bag, that could have been a doctor’s bag.”

“Was he wearing a bandage?”

“I don’t know. But when you ask, I realize he had his collar turned up and his hat pulled low.”

“Yellow hair?”

“Hard to tell under that hat — big old slouch with a wide brim pulled down low.”

“Did you notice whose special it was?”

“I think she was private. I just wasn’t paying much mind.”

“I don’t suppose you saw the engine number?” said Bell.

“Sorry, Mr. Bell. Wish I had. Mr. Locomotive was pointed the other way.”

“It is strange,” Bell told Archie, “to think it was Semmler whom the porter saw in the Elizabeth yards. If he crossed the continent on a special, why did he get off way out in Elizabeth?”

Archie agreed. “You would think he would take his train closer to the steamship docks. Step from the privacy of a special train to the privacy of a First Class stateroom.”

“Once on the boat, he takes his meals in his room. No one sees him till he lands in England or France or Germany — First Class and private all the way from Los Angeles to Berlin.”

“So why did he get off in the Elizabeth yards?”

Bell pulled a regional map down from the ceiling of the Van Dorn library. “He could go anywhere from Elizabeth. Newark has a German community. The German steamers dock at Hoboken. Or he could catch the train or the tubes into Manhattan. Lots of choices.”

“But not so private and not First Class.”

Bell raised the map, spun on his heel, and stared at Archie, his eyes alight with sudden realization. “But Christian Semmler did not arrive in America in First Class.”

“What do you mean?”

“He did not disembark from the Mauretania with the First Class passengers at Pier 54.”

“He wasn’t a passenger,” said Archie. “He did not intend to sail on the Mauretania. He would have taken Clyde and Beiderbecke off the ship in Liverpool Bay if you hadn’t stopped him.”

“He crossed the ocean in the Mauretania’s stokehold and landed on a coal barge without leaving a trace of his arrival. What if he goes back the same route? No one in the black gang is going to question a knife wound. I’ll bet half the trimmers who return to ship are bunged up from bar fights and saloon brawls. So while we’re canvassing ship lines, ticket clerks, and customs agents, Semmler will leave the United States the same way he came.”

Bell grabbed the Kellogg’s mouthpiece. “Get me Detective Eddie Tobin. On the jump!”

47

Van Dorn detective Eddie Tobin, whose lopsided face and drooping left eye were the result of a brutal beating inflicted by the Gophers when he apprenticed with the gang squad, was from Staten Island, a faraway, isolated borough of the city. His family, an extended clan of Tobins, Darbees, Richardses, and Gordons, ran oyster boats out of St. George on the northeast tip of the island. Many of the small, flat, innocent-looking vessels were used to tong oysters. But hidden below the decks of some were powerful gasoline engines enabling them to outrun the harbor squad while smuggling taxable goods, ferrying fugitives away from the police, pirating coal, and retrieving items of cargo that fell from the docks. Young Eddie was honest, despite the childhood spent roving with opportunistic uncles and felonious cousins, which made him an invaluable guide to the immense and sprawling Port of New York.

Isaac Bell asked Eddie where the coal barges that bunkered the Cunard liners at the Chelsea Piers might come from.

“Perth Amboy, Joisey, down where the Arthur Kill and the Raritan enter the Bay.”

“Do you know anyone in the coal yards?”

“Sure.”

“What’s our fastest way down there?”

“Boat.”

“Is your Uncle Donny out of jail?”

“He’d be glad of the job. Poor old guy’s got his boat tuned up but nothing to do, seeing as how the harbor squad is shadowing him.”

Eddie Tobin telephoned a Tomkinsville saloon, where a boy was sent running to the docks. Bell and Eddie caught the Ninth Avenue El down to the Battery. They waited at Pier A, at the tip of Manhattan Island, trading gossip with New York Police Department harbor squad roundsman O’Riordan, whose steam launch was bouncing alongside on the chop stirred by the wind and passing boats.

Eying the waterborne traffic, Bell was struck by the near impossibility of their task. The Acrobat had his pick of seagoing ships getting ready to sail — American and British liners and freighters up the west side of Manhattan, German and French boats across the river in Hoboken, and hundreds across the Lower Bay in Brooklyn — all attended by hundreds of barges and lighters. Every few minutes, the thunder of a steam whistle announced another ship putting to sea.

Roundsman O’Riordan’s eyes suddenly narrowed warily. Donald Darbee’s square-nosed oyster scow was closing on his pier. “Our ride,” Bell explained, slipping the cop a couple of bucks. “Good to see you again, Roundsman. Say hello to the captain.”

Six months of regular hours, square meals, and no booze had done Uncle Donny a world of good. “You look ten years younger, sir,” Bell greeted the scraggly old waterman. “I’ll bet the girls are chasing you with a net.”

“Where you want to go?” Donald Darbee growled.

It was fourteen miles down the Upper Bay, through the Narrows, and down the Lower Bay. Hugging the Staten Island shore, passing string after string of tugboat-drawn barges — southbound empties riding high, full ones with decks awash northbound — they rounded Ward Point below Tottenville, crossed the Arthur Kill, and landed in an immense, windswept coal yard where Lehigh Valley hopper trains from the Pennsylvania mines unloaded into the barges that supplied the steamship piers.

A black coal dumper made of steel girders towered over the water and dominated the sky, and Isaac Bell saw that, unlike the backbreaking process of bunkering the ships and stoking their furnaces by hand, here the coal was moved by modern machines. A sloping pier rose to the dumper. On the pier were tracks for the hopper cars. A cable-driven “pig” between the rails clanked tight to a car’s coupler and pushed it up the incline onto a platform on top of the dumper. Positioned beside a gigantic funnel, the entire railroad car was then tilted on its side. Tons of coal spilled out of the car and thundered into the funnel, which directed it through a huge nozzle into a waiting barge. As soon as the barge was full, tugboats whisked it away and nudged an empty into its place. The only handwork was performed by the barge’s trimmers, who leveled the load, spreading the coal with shovels and rakes.

A trimmer suddenly fell off a barge and splashed into the water.

Ropes were thrown and ladders lowered, and within minutes the worker was hauled out, soaking wet and retching on the dock.

The foreman showing Bell and Eddie Tobin around groaned, “They’re usually drunk, but not this drunk. But Pete Lampack suddenly struck it rich. He’s been buying drinks for the house for two days.”

Bell and Eddie Tobin exchanged a glance. “Who is Lampack?”

“Damned fool trimmer on the boats.”

“How did he strike it rich?” asked Bell.

“Who knows? Picked the right horse, aunt died, or some undeserved thing.”

Eddie asked, “Where’s Lampack? Still at the saloon?”

“Naw, he finally ran out of dough. It’s back to work for him. He ought to be on one of those empties.” The foreman indicated the barges lined along the pier awaiting fresh loads.

“I want to speak with this fellow,” said Bell.

Money had already passed between the Van Dorns and the coal yard foreman. From a grimy sheet of paper pulled from inside his derby, the foreman determined that the barge being trimmed by Pete Lampack was next in line to be refilled. “Just back from our best customer. She burns a thousand tons a day.”

“Mauretania?” asked Bell.

“We love the Maury. Gobbles coal like it’s going out of style, and you could set your watch by her: six thousand tons every two weeks.”

“Is Lampack’s barge going back to the Mauretania?”

“Nope, she’s full up. Ought to be sailing just about now.”

Bell nudged Eddie Tobin, and the two detectives ran out on the coaling pier, climbed the incline under the shadows of the dumper, and looked down. “I don’t see no trimmer,” said Eddie.

“What’s that in the corner?”

“Just some coal stuck there.”

Bell ran to the steel ladder affixed to the girders

“Look out, you idiot!” yelled the workman who manipulated the levers that tipped the cars and aimed the dumper nozzle.

“Tell him to wait,” Bell shouted.

Eddie jumped to the controller’s shack. “Hold on a sec.”

“I got fifty barges waiting. I’m not stopping for that fool.”

Eddie opened his coat. The operator saw the checkered grip of a Smith & Wesson and said, “Think I’ll go have a smoke.”

Bell slid thirty feet down the ladder and landed on the pier beside the barge. Eddie was right. It was a heap of coal jammed in the corner of the barge. The breeze swooped down and blew grit. Cloth shimmied. Bell dropped into the barge and scattered coal with his hands. The trimmer lay under it, with the red ring of Semmler’s garrote around his throat.

“Mr. Bell!”

Bell looked up. Eddie Tobin had climbed to the top of the dumper, where he could see over the low buildings of Tottenville that blocked their view of the harbor.

“Mauretania! She’s coming out the Narrows.”

48

The thunder of the liner’s whistle — a stentorian warning that she would stop for nothing — carried for miles. Isaac Bell heard it as he ran to the dock where Darbee had tied his oyster boat.

Seeing him coming, the old man fired up his engine and cast off his lines.

“Who’s chasing you?”

“Can you catch up with the Mauretania?”

The oyster boat soared away, trailing white smoke. They rounded the point and there she was, the largest and fastest ship in the world, emerging from the Narrows, six miles away, steaming down the Lower Bay, billowing smoke from the forward three of her four tall red-and-black stacks. Darbee steered a course to intercept the giant at the mouth of the harbor where the channel passed close to Sandy Hook.

“Is little Eddie O.K?” he asked over the roar of his motor.

“He’s fine. No time to wait. Can you catch the ship?”

“I can probably catch her, but what do I do with her when I do?”

“Put me aboard.”

“Can’t. Pilot door’s much higher than you can reach from my deck.”

“I’ll throw a line.”

“They ain’t gonna catch it.”

“Do you have any grappling hooks?”

“Cops took ’em. But even if you threw a grappling hook, they’d just cut the rope and yell down, ‘Next time, buy a ticket.’”

Isaac Bell saw a black steam launch trailing the Cunard liner. Its masts were draped with signal flags. “Is that the pilot boat?”

“If it ain’t, that New York pilot is going to Europe.”

“Can you put me aboard it?”

“I’ll let you do the talking.”

Darbee altered course slightly. After fifteen minutes of pounding across the Lower Bay, they passed under the immense overhanging stern of the Mauretania and veered alongside the pilot boat. There were several pilots on board — some waiting to be put on incoming ships, others just retrieved from outbound vessels — and they eyed Darbee’s oyster boat warily.

“Now,” Bell shouted.

Darbee steered alongside the lowest part of the afterdeck. Even the pilot boat was considerably higher than the oyster boat. Bell jumped, got his arms over the gunnel, and pulled himself in. “Van Dorn!” he shouted. “Boarding Mauretania.”

One hour into his shift in the No. 4 boiler room, Christian Semmler feared that his perspiration would penetrate the oilskin that protected the Talking Pictures plans. He was sweating like a pig. The other stokers had long ago stripped off their shirts.

The stoking gong gave the signal to shut the door of the furnace into which he was scooping coal. He dropped his shovel and looked in the half-dark, clanging madness for a hiding place that was safer than his soaked clothing. Knowing he had only seconds before a gang boss or an engineer officer shouted for him to get back to work, he stumbled into a coal bunker. Parnall Hall and Bill Chambers were shifting coal to the front.

“Stand watch!” he ordered, and when they turned their backs, he stuffed the flat oilskin into a narrow slot between the side of the bunker and a frame where it would be safe until the end of his shift. A stoking gong rang.

“You’re up!” Hall warned, and Semmler darted back to the fire aisle, scooped up a shovelful of coal, and spread it on the flames. The pace was accelerating as the ship forged into the open ocean, gaining speed, and the bells rang faster. A door shut. Another opened. Semmler bent to scoop from the pile the trimmers had dropped at his feet. Someone stepped on his scoop.

He looked up.

“Leaving town, General?” asked Isaac Bell.

Bell feinted a hard right, and when Semmler slipped the phantom punch with his usual speed, Bell was ready to hit his jaw with a left, which tumbled the German across the fire aisle. Semmler crashed into a hot bulkhead and stood swaying, trying to shake off the effect of the heavy blow. He had a long coal-blackened bandage on his cheek.

Bell was already moving in on him. He feinted again, this time with his left, and landed a right to the jaw. Semmler went flying. He skidded along the fire aisle, bounced off a stoker scrambling out of the way, and regained his feet. The blow had knocked the bandage from his face, revealing a long string of finely fashioned sutures. Bell threw another punch. This was not a feint. The Acrobat fell again.

Bell drew his pistol to make the arrest.

Down the aisle, a furnace door opened. In the sudden flash of red coals Bell saw, from the corner of his eye, a ten-foot steel slice bar arcing at his head, and he realized that Semmler was not alone. It was too late to dodge the bar. But if it hit him, it would splinter bone. Bell hurled himself inside the arc, straight into the arms of the coal trimmer swinging it. The bar slammed into the furnace, ringing like a giant chime. The man who had swung it made the mistake of holding on to it, and Bell took full advantage, pounding his torso, doubling him over.

The timing gong sounded. Another door flew open. In the flash of coals Isaac saw a shovel flying at his head, and he realized, even as he ducked, that the trimmer he had doubled over was not alone either. The shovel missed his head, but it knocked the Browning out of his hand. The man who had thrown the shovel charged Bell, swinging his fists and catching the tall detective off balance.

Bell rolled with one punch but caught the next one square in the face.

His feet flew out from under him, and he went down hard, slamming onto the steel deck with an impact that shook him to the core. He was vaguely aware that the rest of the men on the fire aisle were fleeing from the battle. He heard an engineer shout, “Leave ’em to it.”

Watertight doors ground shut, and he was alone with the three of them.

“Knife in his boot,” shouted Semmler.

Bell saw where his gun had landed and scrambled for it. The trimmer who had scored with his fist lunged for it, too. Bell got to it first, barely managing to grab the barrel, and when he saw that the trimmer would have his hand on the butt before he could stop him, Bell flipped it into an open furnace.

Then he went for his knife, but he was still too slow. The man yanked it from his boot, stood up, and kicked Bell in the chest, and as Bell rolled away from the next kick he saw the shadow of the trimmer he had doubled over loom above him like a maddened grizzly. Bell felt his hand brush a lump of coal. He picked it up and threw it with all his strength. It struck the “grizzly” a glancing blow that knocked him backwards into Christian Semmler, who shoved him back at Bell, shouting, “Pick him up!”

Still on his back, Isaac Bell kicked out at the trimmer, who was lurching at him. The man dodged and grabbed Bell’s foot. As Bell tried to break free, the other trimmer seized both his wrists. Before the detective could break his powerful grip, he was suspended between the two by his arms and legs.

Semmler jumped to the nearest furnace and opened the door.

49

“Here,” Semmler shouted. “In here.”

Bell could see the bed of coals glowing yellow. Red flame rippled over their incandescent surface. From six feet away the heat was unbearable, and as they dragged him toward it, it grew hotter. A corner of Bell’s mind stood aside as if he were looking down on the tableau of the trimmers holding him and the Acrobat urging them on. They would not be able to fit him through the furnace door sideways. They would have to feed him into the fire either head- or feetfirst. They would have to let go of his arms or his legs to align him. But to let go would be to let him fight back, and so before they let go, they would have to incapacitate him by breaking some bones.

“Headfirst!” said Semmler, picking up a slice bar. He raised it high, his eyes fixed on Bell’s arms.

For a single heartbeat the men holding him were distracted by having to maneuver in the cramped space. Isaac Bell contracted every muscle in his body, ripped one leg and one arm free, and exploded in a flurry of kicks and punches. A kick caught the trimmer who was holding his other leg in the face, cracking his nose, and he let go with a cry. Bell’s fist landed solidly. The man who had been holding his arm fell backwards. His head struck the rim of the firebox opening, and he screamed as his hair burst into flame. Desperately trying to escape the fire, he banged his brow on the rim of the furnace mouth and fell deeper into the coals, his head in the furnace, his body thrashing on the deck.

Bell was already trying to roll beyond the range of Semmler’s slice bar, which hit the deck an inch from his head, scattering sparks. He leaped up and dodged a wild swing, then rounded unexpectedly on the trimmer whose nose he had broken, who was creeping up behind him, and dropped him with a punch that smashed his jaw.

He spun around, reeling on his feet. “Just us, Semmler.”

Christian Semmler flashed his dazzling smile. “First you’ll have to catch me.”

He crouched, sprang up, caught the bottom rung of the ladder that rose up the ventilator shaft that shared the interior of the No. 4 funnel, and pulled himself up effortlessly. Bell jumped for the ladder and went after him. It was 220 feet to the top of the stack, and in the first hundred Bell realized he would not catch the man until he ran out of ladder. For if anything rang true about Semmler’s nickname, he climbed like a monkey.

Nearing the top, Bell saw daylight silhouette Semmler, who was clinging to the upper rim of the funnel. Smoke from the three forward funnels was streaming over him blackening his face and hair. His green eyes gleamed eerily within that dark frame. Then his teeth flashed.

“Thank you for joining me,” he smiled. “Now I have you where I want you.” He folded back his sleeve, revealing the leather gauntlet that held the braided wire with which he had strangled so many. It was Bell’s first close look at it, and he saw a lead weight on the end of the cable. Semmler straightened his arm suddenly, and the weight drew six feet of wire from its spool and wrapped it around one of the steel stays stiffening the funnel top.

Bell lunged suddenly and reached for the man’s foot.

The Acrobat moved just as swiftly, eluding Bell’s grasp and launching himself off the ladder to the other side of the ventilator shaft, where he hooked an elbow over the rim and smiled down on Bell.

“The man who falls two hundred and twenty feet to the bottom of the ship will not be the man who learned to fly in the circus.”

With that, Semmler used his elbow to flip over the rim and disappear.

Bell climbed to the top of the ladder and jumped across the ventilator. He caught the rim with both hands, pulled himself over the top, and peered down through hot smoke into the soot-blackened uptake that exhausted No. 4 boiler room’s furnaces. As it shared the funnel with the ventilator they had climbed up, it was only ten feet in diameter.

Semmler crouched with bird-like grace on a foothold several feet down.

“Now when you fall,” he taunted, “you will fall into the furnace.”

Bell surveyed Semmler’s new position. The foothold, a steel shelf less than a foot deep, circled the entire uptake. There were handholds welded just beneath the top rim, and Semmler’s eyes blazed again as he chose his next landing. The cable shot from his gauntlet, snagged a handhold, and the Acrobat flew, while launching a deadly kick at Bell’s head.

Isaac Bell jumped at the same time, landed beside him on the foothold, grabbed the nearest handhold, and punched Semmler in the stomach as hard as he could, staggering the man. “I was in the circus, too.”

But he had not reckoned with Semmler’s superhuman speed, nor his capacity to shrug off pain. In a move too quick to anticipate, Semmler flipped the cable off the rung and around Isaac Bell’s neck.

Bell drove punch after punch into Semmler’s torso, but even the hardest blow did nothing to relieve the pressure that was suddenly cutting blood and air from his brain. White lights stormed before his eyes, and he felt his strength ebb. A roar in his ears smothered the pounding of his heart. Gripping a handhold with the remaining strength in his left hand, he rammed Semmler with his knee, and the German slipped from the foothold. The only thing that kept him from falling was the wire stretched between his wrist and Isaac Bell’s neck.

With the man’s entire weight hanging from his throat, Bell could barely see. He felt as if he had not drawn breath in a year. His hand was slipping.

“Interesting situation, Detective. When you die, I’ll fall. But you’ll die first.”

“No,” gasped Bell. His hand moved convulsively.

“No, Detective?” Semmler mocked. “No deeper last words, than ‘no’ before we plunge into the fires? Speak now or forever hold your peace. What was that, you say?”

“Thank you, Mike Malone.”

“Thank you for what?”

“Cutting pliers.” Holding on with the last of the strength in his left hand, Bell jerked his right hand, and the tool slid out of his sleeve into his palm. He closed his fingers around the handles and squeezed with all he had left in him.

The cable snapped.

Isaac Bell’s last sight of the Acrobat before he vanished down the Mauretania’s stack was the astounded light in his eyes.

50

Arriving at the Berliner Stadtschloss in a triumphal mood, Hermann Wagner handed his top hat to the palace maid attending the commoners’ cloakroom and proceeded upstairs to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s private throne room, where a small, select company of high-ranking soldiers, industrialists, and bankers — the elite of the elite — had been summoned to observe the final demonstration of a device that the kaiser himself had proclaimed the epitome of German achievement.

A pair of generals flaunting gruesome dueling scars looked down their noses at the banker. Wagner serenely ignored the scornful aristocrats and took great pleasure in watching their expressions change when the kaiser marched straight to Hermann Wagner and shook his hand, shouting, “Behold a true German patriot. Wait till you see what he has made happen. Begin!”

Lackeys rushed in with a moving picture screen, acoustic horns, and an enormous new film projector. The lights were dimmed. His Majesty the kaiser sat on his throne. The company stood and watched a moving picture of Kaiser Wilhelm himself striding into this very room with his favorite dachshund tucked under his arm.

When the monarch on the screen opened his mouth to speak and his words poured mightily from the acoustic horns, the expressions on the generals’ scarred faces, thought Hermann Wagner, were priceless. The worm had turned. Soldiers were no longer the only ones whose magic enchanted the kaiser.

“Der Tag!” spoke the kaiser’s image, easily heard over the clatter of the film projector. “Der Tag will be Germany’s beginning, not her end. Victory depends not only on soldiers.”

Hermann Wagner closed his eyes. He knew these words by heart. He had edited the film, having discovered a knack for such things, and in a brilliant touch, when the kaiser had proclaimed his piece, the dachshund would bark at the camera and the kaiser would pat his head. Millions would smile, touched that the kaiser loved his pets as much as any ordinary German.

“Victory also depends on Germany persuading our allies to join the war on Germany’s side. One by one, Germany will destroy—”

Laughter interrupted the kaiser’s words — nervous laughter, which was choked off abruptly.

Wagner opened his eyes and saw to his horror that even as the kaiser’s words issued from the horns, the picture showed his dachshund barking at the camera. But that couldn’t be. The dog was supposed to bark after the kaiser had finished speaking. Somehow the sound and the picture had jumped apart.

The kaiser leaped from his throne and stormed out, trailed by his generals.

Hermann Wagner stood frozen with disbelief as the company melted away. How could it have gone so wrong? Left alone, he plunged blindly toward the doors, the Donar Plan a failure, his career destroyed.

A palace maid ran after him. “Your hat, Herr Wagner. Your hat!”

She was a tiny little thing with gold braids. Polite even on the worst day of his life, the gentle Hermann Wagner thanked her with a compliment—“What a sharp-eyed girl you are”—and even tipped her a silver coin.

“Thank you, Herr Wagner.”

Moments after she curtsied her thanks, Detective Pauline Grandzau slipped out of the palace to cable the good news to Chief Investigator Bell.