The Thief

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

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

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

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

  West to Paris?

  East to Berlin?

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

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

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

  “Who is that motorcyclist?”

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

  “He looks like Isaac Bell.”

  “HOW CAN YOU TELL UNDER THOSE GOGGLES?”

  “The way he straddles the machine.”

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

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

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

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

  “Bell’s wife?”

  “How soon can you get her here?”

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

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

  “Why her?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I’ll telephone San Francisco.”

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

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

  Semmler barred the door when she left.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  She looked back. The sky was gray.

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

  What was the best?

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

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

  Suddenly thunder shook the caboose, and rain pelted down.

  The hatch slammed shut.

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

  Another bolt of lightning struck, blanketing the locomotive with blue fire. It slowed abruptly, and the train clanged to a stop with a crash of banging couplers. r />
  Balls of electric fire spewed from the locomotive’s wheels and leaped to a tree beside the tracks. The tree flew to splinters when its sap exploded in a burst of superheated steam. Pauline saw green fire race toward her along the boxcar roofs, and she felt the incipient tingle of electrical shock. Clutching her precious rucksack, she scrambled down the ladder and ran into the woods.

  ISAAC BELL CAUGHT MARION IN HIS arms as she stepped off the Coast Line Limited from San Francisco. They kissed, and they kissed again. Bell seized her bag and gave the porter her trunk check, the name of their hotel, and a large tip.

  “Mighty generous, sir.”

  “I am happy to see my beautiful wife.”

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

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

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

  “Joy. I’d get to see you.”

  “And then?”

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

  “And your next thought?”

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

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

  “Did you wonder why Irina hired you?”

  “No.”

  “You weren’t at all surprised?”

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

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

  “You dislike them, intensely.”

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

  “Imperial. Where you have Clyde set up.”

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

  “That’s wonderful!”

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

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

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

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

  “She didn’t?”

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

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

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

  “Why didn’t she ask you first?”

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

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

  “Under you?”

  “So to speak,” Bell returned her smile.

  “What would it entail?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Let me ask you something, Walt.”

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

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

  “What sort of funny feeling?”

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

  “Watched?” asked Hatfield.

  “You did, didn’t you?”

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

  Bell’s eyes were suddenly burning.

  “You, too, Isaac?”

  “I had a feeling.”

  “Where?”

  “The recording room on the fourth floor.”

  “How about in Clyde’s laboratory?”

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

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

  “One way to find out.”

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

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

  “Holian.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  POSITIVE?

  REASONABLY.

  KRIEG-IMPERIAL CONNECTIONS?

  NOT YET.

  KRIEG-HAMBURG BANKHAUS CONNECTIONS?