Bell pulled his gun and was yanking the slide to cock his first shot when the Cutthroat lunged. His blade leaped in a sudden rapier thrust. Bell parried it with his gun barrel, deflecting all but the lightest touch. It barely pierced his upper arm, but the needle point seemed to strike a nerve, and he felt his hand convulse as if jolted by an electric shock. It popped his fingers open. The pistol fell.
The Cutthroat whipped his blade high.
Bell, in a lightning move, caught the falling gun out of the air with his left hand, forced his right to close around the slide, and cocked it. The locomotive passed them in the instant he fired. Its main rod, which connected the piston to the drive wheels, brushed Bell’s shoulder like a steel fist. It banged him against a trestle girder. The girder kept him from falling into the canyon. But his shot went wild, his gun flew under the flatcars trundling past, and the Cutthroat slashed downward.
The killing blow plunged squarely into the crown of Isaac Bell’s hat.
The Cutthroat delivered his coup de grâce—a skin-flaying slash.
The tall detective was toppling backwards between two girders. He raised the shredded remains of his slicker as if it were a shield.
This time, the Cutthroat was ready. Nothing could distract him.
But to his astonishment, even as Isaac Bell fell backwards, even locked in the remorseless grip of gravity, he evaded the blade with a twist of fluid grace, took cool, deliberate aim, and flicked his left arm violently. The strip of oilcloth cracked into the Cutthroat’s face like a bullwhip.
A metal button seared the tender flesh beneath his eye.
Roaring in rage that Bell had marked him, he wheeled beside the moving train, vaulted onto a flatcar, and caught hold before it rolled him off. His last glimpse of Isaac Bell had been of the man falling backwards. Now he was rewarded by the sight of an empty trestle.
His spirits soared.
We’ll never know, Mr. Bell: Did my singing fool you? Or the stench?
By a miracle, his rucksack had stayed on his back. It reeked of its contents, a rotting length of a human leg. Thank you, Beatrice.
By now, Isaac Bell’s corpse was tumbling down the flooded arroyo.
The worst the Cutthroat suffered was a black eye.
48
Archie, thought Isaac Bell, I owe you a drink.
The alloy-steel derringer rack inside the crown of his hat had saved his skull, but the oilskin cowboy slicker that Archie had lifted from Wardrobe had served him three times—distracting the Cutthroat while he drew his gun, parrying a sword thrust with a counterpunch to the Cutthroat’s eye, and now acting as a lifeline.
The shreds of it had caught in the thicket of beams under the trestle. Dangling above the rushing arroyo, he swung in among the supports and hauled himself up onto the tracks.
The freight train’s red lights were fading toward Los Angeles.
Bell started after them at a dead run. He would never catch it, but dawn was graying fresh rain clouds, and morning trains would soon crowd the line to the city.
Isaac Bell jumped off an express from Santa Barbara and telephoned the Van Dorn railcar from a coin telephone. Harry Warren answered, sounding jubilant.
“We nailed him, Isaac. John Buchanan.”
“Buchanan? How?”
“Dashwood did it. He found a Jekyll and Hyde program that Buchanan inscribed to one of his rich ladies—the banker’s wife he killed in Cleveland.”
“But he must inscribe programs to all of his rich ladies.”
“This one was for the Cincinnati show.”
“She was killed before Cincinnati.”
“That’s what Dashwood tumbled to! It was printed ahead of time. Only Buchanan could have given it to her. Here’s the best part: Buchanan’s got no alibi. He did one of his ‘disappearing acts’ that night. Young stood in for him. Buchanan claims he was sick and slept on the train. Train crew says no. They saw him leave. Buchanan refuses to say where he went.”
“Does he have a black eye?”
“What?”
“Does he have a black eye?”
“Who knows? He’s slathered with makeup. We got him in Glendale on his way to Marion’s movie.”
“Where’d you put him?”
“We got him right here in the car.”
“Scrub him off!”
“What?”
“Remove his makeup! On the jump!”
Bell waited, drumming his fingers, depositing more nickels when the operator asked for them. Harry Warren came back on the telephone. “No black eye. What’s the big idea?”
“Where are Jackson Barrett and Henry Young?”
“Taking pictures.”
“With Marion?”
Harry Warren laughed. “Nothing stops that wife of yours. The minute we grabbed Buchanan, she telephoned Young to stand in for him.”
“Who’s with her?”
“Barrett, Young, couple of camera guys, and that lights lady—Rennegal.”
“That’s all?”
“It’s raining. She gave the rest of the company the day off.”
“Hang on to Buchanan. Don’t give him to the cops ’til you hear from me.”
“Where are you going?”
“Glendale.”
49
Making up as fast as he could in a tiny hotel room on the outskirts of Glendale, eight miles from Los Angeles, Henry Young dabbed spirit gum on his nose. While it dried, he lighted a candle, kneaded some toupee paste into a soft lump, and melted the surface in the flame. He worked the thick paste onto his nose, altering the shape to make it appear broad and flat. A bushy wig already heightened his brow and had the grotesque effect of making his head look extremely wide.
Just as he was finishing his new nose with a bluish greasepaint that would turn his face a ghastly pale white for the camera, the door swung open so hard, it banged against the wall. Through it strode Isaac Bell.
“That’s a sensational effect, Mr. Young. I doubt your own mother would recognize you face-to-face.”
“What? What are you doing here?”
“Catching up. What are you doing?”
“Your wife asked me to stand in for Mr. Buchanan. He seems to have gotten arrested.”
“I have a question for you: How’s your eye feel?”
“My eye? Fine.”
“Show me.”
Henry Young wet his lips and looked around nervously. “I don’t understand, Mr. Bell.”
Bell snapped up a small bottle of olive oil.
“Wipe off that makeup and we both will.”
The rain was driving Marion Morgan Bell to extreme measures. It would not stop. She had yet to film a scene out of doors, and her leading lady, who was even more compelling on the screen than on the stage, was threatening to jump on the Golden State Limited to Chicago and the 20th Century home to “civilization.”
She had already lost John Buchanan—but that to a great cause, the end of Jack the Ripper’s rampage, which she couldn’t wait to hear about when Isaac returned from wherever that chase had taken him. She still had a star, in Jackson Barrett, and a stand-in, in Mr. Young. But no female “Mr. Young” existed who could replace the Isabella Cook, the “Great and Beloved.”
Her only chance was to show Isabella a compelling scene to recapture her interest in the movie and keep her engaged. And so with the rough-and-ready ingenuity she had learned making topical films on the fly, Marion moved her Dream Duel scene indoors—deep indoors—inside a collapsed tunnel abandoned by an interurban streetcar company.
It was tailor-made for filming a sword fight—the rubble an illusion of an ancient castle. It was a hundred feet long from the mouth to the rocks that partially blocked the back end, ten feet high and twelve feet wide, and so far away from town that they’d never be found by gawking tourists. Like a ca
stle, the long, narrow, high-ceilinged hall had nooks and crannies indented in the rough walls—where she could hide her cameras.
Marilyn Rennegal—Marion’s equally rough-and-ready Cooper Hewitt operator on The Iron Horse film—had festooned the rocky ceiling with mercury-vapor lamps and dangled them with hundreds of white silk ribbons for visual effect. A dynamo outside the tunnel generated electricity for the lights. It was powered by an ingenious system of drive belts turned by the same eight-cylinder airplane motor that spun Marion’s wind machine. From inside, that contraption looked like an airplane about to fly into the tunnel at the expense of its wings.
The ninety-horsepower V-8 Curtiss Pusher airplane engine drove an enormous pusher propeller at fourteen hundred revolutions per minute. The wooden propeller’s blade faces were carved with a reverse twist to push air in front of it. It stood taller than a man, and when spinning at top speed, the varnished blades disappeared in a lethal blur.
Marion had plastered warnings inside the tunnel and out:
STAND CLEAR
Isaac Bell had neither returned to Los Angeles alive nor had his body been found. Perhaps another “perfect crime”?
That Van Dorn detectives had arrested John Buchanan seemed to shout, “Yes! Perfect!” But to be on the safe side, the Cutthroat had cleared a path through the rubble at the back of the tunnel in order to escape, with a hostage, if he had to.
He could not have known that Bell was a detective, too. Their boss, no less. But it didn’t matter. Framing Buchanan for the Cleveland murder had worked as planned. Buchanan had no alibi. Not without naming the woman he sneaked off with that night. The philanderer had lost his heart to a pretty little airplane pilot who loved the children she would surely lose in a divorce. Love had made him honorable. Rather than betray her, the poor fool would rot in prison until they executed him.
Plan. Anticipate. Hope.
The Jekyll and Hyde movie had vaulted his usual optimism to stratospheric levels.
Marion Morgan Bell showed them pictures she had taken of the Dream Duel rehearsal.
“Immortal” was hardly the word. Seeing his face and his body in motion had a thousand times the impact of a photograph—ten thousand times—and it was easier than ever to believe that he would never die. And would sure as hell never be captured.
“Please take your places before we start the machines . . . Mr. Davidson? Mr. Blitzer?”
“Right here, Mrs. Bell,” said Davidson. He was standing beside her in the first cranny, twenty feet from the wind machine.
“Here,” Blitzer called from his nook on the other side of the tunnel, fifteen feet deeper in.
“Mrs. Rennegal, please get off that ladder and tend the dynamo.”
Rennegal adjusted one more Cooper Hewitt, descended the ladder reluctantly, and carried it out of the tunnel.
Kellan, Davidson’s assistant, hurried outside to run the wind machine.
“Mr. Barrett?”
Barrett saluted her with his saber. He was the image of a hallucinogenic swordsman, in a plumed musketeer’s hat, thigh-high black boots, and white shirt with puffed sleeves. Above his head, Rennegal’s ribbons stirred in the draft of air drifting from the back of the tunnel.
“Where’s Mr. Young? . . . Is Mr. Young making up at the hotel?”
“Hyde here! Sorry I’m late.”
Mr. Hyde squeezed past the wind machine, observed the various fencing weapons laid out on the prop table, noted that Barrett was holding a weapon with a flat blade and knuckle guard, perfect for thrusting and cutting actions, a dueling saber. He selected a weapon that felt as if it was born in his hand and took his place facing Dr. Jekyll.
Head to toe, his costume was black, his shirt and trousers as tight-fitting as a dancer’s, his hat, helmet-like and unadorned, a stark frame for his grotesquely bloated face mask. He wore a cape that came below his knees.
Marion picked up the megaphone she would need when the wind machine crackled and whirled into action.
“Ready, Mrs. Bell!”
“Lights!”
“Dynamo ready!” Rennegal called.
“Kellan, start the motor!”
“Contact!”
Mrs. Rennegal threw an electrical switch placed well out of range of the propeller. Its violent whirlwind yet to come.
Young Kellan gave the propeller a couple of turns, and when he reached a compression-resistance point, tugged up hard. Two more pulls and the Curtiss clattered to life, pistons popping, valves rattling, propeller building a stiff breeze. Even at idling speed, the silk strips danced and Jekyll’s and Hyde’s capes fluttered.
“Lights!”
Mrs. Rennegal engaged the belt drive powering the dynamo. The Cooper Hewitts flooded a harsh blue-green glare on Jekyll and Hyde.
“Cameras!”
Davidson and Blitzer began to crank slowly.
Marion shouted, “Mr. Barrett, Mr. Young: Good and evil battle to the death. Be ferocious—just please don’t accidentally kill each other, because we have a lot more film to make—if it ever stops raining.”
Jekyll and Hyde poised for engagement.
“Speed!”
Davidson and Blitzer cranked their cameras to take twenty frames per second.
Jekyll and Hyde saluted each other as a gesture of respect by raising the blades in front of their faces. The scenario, adapted loosely from the play, called for their first exchange to be aggressive. No hallucinogenic flouncing about, but good and evil tested severely. The hard beats of saber on saber rang loudly.
Jackson Barrett was still getting used to the idea that the audience in a movie would not hear the actual steely battle clang of the sabers, but the orchestra’s sound effects. On the other hand, the fact that they would not hear any words the actors spoke made for a rather fun game.
“Are you up for a fencing lesson, Mr. Young?”
In answer, the stage manager attacked without engaging in any feint, and Barrett was stunned to see Young use a counterbeat that swept under Barrett’s blade.
“The cameras are making you bold. Slow down.”
Hyde’s next lightning thrust actually forced Barrett to retreat.
His anger mounting, he snarled, “I’m putting a halt to this before I hurt you, and hurt you badly.”
He advanced to attack.
The stage manager surprised him with a sharp parry, then disengaged and executed his own attack with a sudden leap.
“Your moves are inventive,” said Barrett, with a quick parry. “You must have been practicing since the last time we were onstage.”
The stage manager had yet to speak. It was as if he were devoting himself to every move far in advance. Seeing Young display his sudden skills stunned Marion and the crew. They knew this was unlike any previous movie duel, as he handled a saber with unbelievable agility that was never there before.
“Mr. Young, if you try that again, I shall make you very sorry. Now, follow my lead. I will attack and you will retreat.”
Barrett tested him with a couple of hard beats, striking steel to steel, feinted with a hard beat, and lunged into a calculated move to show the audience the evil Mr. Hyde as if he were a rat scurrying down a dark alley.
It was becoming clear that Young was more adept than Buchanan with a saber. Barrett soon realized he was against one as good, if not better, with a sword than himself.
The stage manager made a direct riposte that ended in a thrust with no feints but with a total circle around Barrett’s blade. Barrett was half a second too quick to disengage and avoid Young’s offensive action.
Everyone on the set stood mesmerized, not certain if the fight had really become a vicious battle or only staged action for the movie.
Hyde waited to parry until Jekyll’s sword arm was fully extended and the point of his saber was only one inch from piercing his shoulder. His ripos
te pierced the sleeve on Barrett’s out-thrust and carved a deep cut in his forearm.
“A late parry, Mr. Hyde? You have neither the sense of distance nor the point control with your tight grip to put one over. How did you do that?”
Hyde gave no answer, and Barrett began to use tactics he hadn’t used in years. He deflected Hyde’s next attack with a straight, smooth line without wavering to attract a reaction—a swift, strong, clean parry without him seemingly noticing the blood flowing from his forearm.
Hyde did not immediately reengage Barrett but stepped back, gave his opponent a grotesque grin through his makeup, and spoke loudly so his voice carried to the crew over the wind machine.
“Jack Spelvin, my name is Isaac Bell, I am an investigator with the Van Dorn Detective Agency. I arrest you for the murder of Anna Waterbury and only God knows how many other women.”
50
Barrett shouted, “Are you crazy? Your fellow detectives arrested Buchanan. He’s the Ripper.”
Blitzer the cameraman yelled over the exhaust roar of the wind machine. “Keep fighting, keep fighting. We’re still running the cameras.”
Bell, keeping a surly eye on Barrett, ignored the crew, their voices mixing with the wind machine and echoing in chorus throughout the cavern.
“Don’t bother attempting to escape, Barrett, or Spelvin,” said Bell. “Or whatever your name is. We found your little escape passage in the rear of the tunnel and it’s guarded by two heavily armed agents.”
“Playing the role of a shrewd detective?” warned Barrett. “It’s still your wife’s movie. I wonder which one of us will see the ending.”
“It won’t be you,” said Bell, with ice in his tone. “Now, wipe the makeup off your left eye. Buchanan did it. So did Henry Young.”
“What did that prove?”
“Neither is Jack the Ripper.”