The Thief

  “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.”

  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.

  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 c
an’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.”