Текст книги "The Thief"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Justin Scott
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

23

When the lights went out, the German whom Professor Beiderbecke had dubbed the Acrobat climbed out of the Continental & Commercial National Bank of Chicago strongbox. Express messenger Pete Stock had already located a flashlight, but he hesitated a fatal, disbelieving half second before reaching for the Smith & Wesson on his gun belt.

The Acrobat spooled a thin braided cable from a leather gauntlet buckled to his powerful wrist, looped it around Stock’s neck, and strangled him. Then he went hunting for Clyde Lynds, confident that his people had everything in place to execute a swift and orderly escape: across the Mexican border on horseback, a special train to Veracruz, a North German Lloyd freighter, and home to Prussia, where the inventor would be persuaded to rebuild his machine.

He jumped off the train and ran back toward the Pullmans, counting cars in the starlight as he loped past baggage, mail, diner, and two drawing-room stateroom cars and finally climbing up into the vestibule of the regular stateroom car where Clyde Lynds had just woken up to the chaos of derailment.

* * *

Isaac Bell made a practice of sleeping with his feet to the front of a train. Awakened abruptly when his feet smashed into the bulkhead, he pulled on his boots and his shoulder holster.

“What happened?” Clyde called sleepily from the upper berth.

“She’s on the ground.”

“Derailed?”

Bell drew his Browning and chambered a round. “Climbing slowly on a straight track? Two to one, she had help.”

“What are you doing?”

“Soon as I’m out the door, lock it. Let no one in, not even the conductor.”

Bell stepped into the pitch-black corridor and shut the door behind him. As far as he could see, the corridor was empty. He could hear people shouting in their staterooms. They sounded more confused than frightened. Train wreck was never far from any traveler’s mind, but the Limited’s stop, while sudden, had not ended in the splintered wood, twisted metal, smashed bones, and burning flesh that got their names among the dead and injured in tomorrow’s newspapers.

Bell stood still with his back pressed against the door. His eyes adjusted to the dark in seconds. The corridor was still empty. He could see the shapes of the windows on the opposite side of the narrow corridor outlined by the starlight that bathed the high-desert floor. Outside in the starlit dark he saw a flicker of motion. Were his eyes playing tricks or did he see horses clumped close together, a hundred yards from the train? It was too far and too dark to see if they were saddled, but wild animals so near the thundering derailment would have stampeded to the far side of the mountains by now. These were horses with men.

Bell saw a flashlight at the head end of the car and, in its flickering back glow, the snow-white uniform of the Pullman porter, Edward, roused from a nap in his pantry. Bell closed one eye to protect his night vision. He sensed motion behind Edward. Before he could shout a warning, the porter crumpled silently to the floor. His flashlight fell beside him, arcing its beam along the corridor toward Bell.

A stateroom door flew open, and a fat man in pajamas stepped out, shouting, “Porter!”

More doors banged open. Passengers stumbled into the dark corridor, and Bell realized that the Acrobat’s plan had suddenly gone wrong. He saw the shadowy figure who had knocked down the porter move oddly, thrusting one arm out and folding the other across his face.

Bell smelled a familiar scent and covered his eyes. He heard a champagne cork pop.A blaze of intensely white light flooded the corridor. Blinded, the passengers fell back into their staterooms, crying out in fear and dismay.

No one stood between the Acrobat and Clyde Lynds’s door except Isaac Bell.

Bell had remembered from his circus days the peculiar odor of flash cotton. The clowns loved the gag of igniting cloth impregnated with nitrocellulose to shoot fire from their fingertips, and he had recognized its smell in time to avoid being blinded.

He charged into the dark straight at the starlit simian shape of the Acrobat.

“I can’t see!” cried the fat man, stumbling back into the corridor. The tall detective slammed into the fat man. Both lost their footing, and the pair went down in a tangle. Bell somersaulted off and rolled to his feet. The fat man grabbed his ankle in a surprisingly strong grip.

Bell wrenched himself loose and ran to the head of the car and through the vestibules into the next car. At the far end, flame from the spirit stove for brewing tea in that car’s porter’s closet illuminated a broad-shouldered, long-armed silhouette running past. That porter, too, lay on the floor, either out cold or dead. The tall detective raised his gun and did not waste time ordering the Acrobat to stop.

Bell aimed for his legs and squeezed the trigger.

Just as the weapon’s firing pin descended on the rim of the cartridge, detonating the charge within, Isaac Bell jerked the gun upward with all his might. A woman in a dressing gown that glowed white in the starlight had stepped out of her stateroom. She screamed and Bell saw her sleeping cap fly from her head.

“Are you all right?” an aghast Isaac Bell cried. This was his nightmare: an innocent had stepped into his line of fire. He ran to her, feeling his way along the row of stateroom doors. Then he felt a stinging sensation in his hand – wooden splinters his bullet had gouged from her door – and he realized with enormous relief that no woman shot in the head could keep screaming that loudly. He confirmed that she was unhurt, guided her gently back to her berth, then charged after the Acrobat.

* * *

Unlike Isaac Bell, the German was not slowed by confused and frightened passengers blundering out of their staterooms yelling for porters and demanding explanations. He smashed through them, knocking bodies to the floor and shattering glass as he pushed others through the windows. The derailment had extinguished the lights, so no one could see him – although at the moment his own wife would not recognize his face, so contorted was it by rage. Twice now Isaac Bell had upended an intricately planned and precisely executed operation.

He ran toward the head of the train, and when he reached the mail car whose couplers had parted, he jumped to the ballast and ran past the express cars and the tender. He heard Isaac Bell pound after him. Seizing a golden opportunity to put a stop to Bell’s interference once and for all, the German climbed the side of the helper locomotive.

Out of nowhere, a brakeman grabbed his ankle.

The German laid him flat with a kick so powerful the man’s neck broke. But the impact caused him to lose his own balance. He started to fall backwards. Reacting coolly, with a cat’s economy of motion, he flipped his left hand forward. Launched from the gauntlet buckled to his wrist, the weighted end of the wire he had used to strangle the express messenger whirled around a handrail.

24

Isaac Bell saw the acrobat jump onto the cylinder rod that connected the piston to the drive wheels of the helper engine, and he saw the shadow of a trainman who tried to stop him fall to the ground. For a second, Bell thought the Acrobat himself was falling off. Instead, his arm shot up in a peculiar overhead motion. Suddenly he appeared to fly from the connecting rod up past the wheel fender to a handrail above it. He gripped the rail and flipped backwards. The simian silhouette blurred the stars atop the big helper engine, and then he was gone, disappearing like smoke.

Bell scrambled after him. The locomotive was festooned with handholds and steps so workmen could reach every part that had to be oiled, greased, cleaned, and adjusted. The fender above the Pacific’s seven-foot-high drive wheels formed a ledge alongside the boiler. He jumped onto the connecting rod, hauled himself on the ledge, stood up, and reached for the handrail. Only after he had locked both hands on it and was clenching his arms to pull himself up did he see the shadow of a boot cannonballing at his face. The Acrobat had not fled, but was waiting on top.

Bell whipped his head back and sideways, as if slipping a punch.

The boot whizzed past his ear and smashed into his shoulder. The Acrobat wore boots with india rubber soles and heels, Bell realized. A kick that hard with leather soles would have shattered bone.

The impact threw him off the locomotive. He fell backwards, tucking into a ball to protect his head. Tucking, twisting, he fought to regain his equilibrium in the air. If he could somehow land on the steeply angled side of the track bed instead of the flat top, he might survive the fall. The star-speckled sky spun circles like a black-and-white kaleidoscope. The dark ground rushed at his face. He hit the lip between flat and slope and skidded down the slope into a dry ditch.

Bell sprawled there, the stars still spinning. He heard a drumming noise, like hoofbeats. He wondered if he had cracked his skull again. But he hadn’t. His head, in fact, was about the only part of him that wasn’t going to hurt for a week. Scrambling to his feet, ignoring sharp pains in his shoulders and both knees, he heard the sound fade in the distance. Hoofbeats, of course. He had seen horses in starlight. And horses were the fastest way out of rough country.

He climbed up the embankment and came face-to-face with Clyde Lynds.

“Are you O.K., Mr. Bell?”

“I told you to stay inside and lock the door.”

“They’re gone. They rode away on horses.”

“Happen to catch a look at any faces?”

“No. But… Uh…”

“But what?” Bell demanded sharply, hoping for some clue.

“One of the horses had no rider,” Lynds said, looking around fearfully at the passengers clustered beside the derailed train. “Maybe he’s still here…”

“No, Clyde. That empty saddle was reserved for you.”

* * *

“Mister, if you’ll get off that locomotive,” bellowed a redheaded giant of a railroad wreck master, “we can put this train back together.”

First light found Isaac Bell poring over the Golden State’s helper locomotive with a magnifying glass. A wreck train had finally steamed up the grade from Deming, while out of the west another had just arrived from Lordsburg. Between them, the two were preparing to hoist the Limited back on the tracks, piece by piece.

“I’ll just be a minute,” Bell called down.

“Get off my train!” roared the giant, clambering up the locomotive onto the drive wheel fender.

Bell turned with a smile and thrust out his hand. “Mike Malone. I would recognize that Irish brogue in a thunderstorm.”

“Well, I’ll be damned. Isaac Bell. Put ’er there.”

They shook hands – two tall men, one lean as a rail, the other with limbs thick as chestnut crossties.

“What are you doing here?”

“Escort job,” Bell answered cryptically. He had known Mike since they had come within inches of being blown to smithereens by dynamite ingeniously hidden under Osgood Hennessy’s Southern Pacific Railroad tracks.

“Under guise,” he added, encouraging Mike to refrain from asking what Bell’s magnifying glass had to do with an escort job – not to mention the express messenger found strangled in his car and the Rolls-Royce auto chained to a broken rail.

Malone winked. “Mum’s the word.”

Bell showed him a groove rubbed in the handrail. “What do you think made this mark?”

The wreck master ran his calloused finger over it. “Hacksaw?”

“How about a braided cable?”

Malone shrugged mighty shoulders. “Could be.”

“Wouldn’t happen to have a small cutting pliers on that wreck train I could borrow?”

“Linesman’s pliers do you?”

“Long as they’re sharp as the devil and small enough to slip up my sleeve.”

“Never seen them that small. I’ll have my toolmaker run ’em up for you. Where should I send them?”

“Los Angeles.”

* * *

Isaac Bell was sure that the intention of the attack was to kidnap Clyde Lynds, not injure him. But it had come close to succeeding, and Clyde was terrified. The bravado and smart-aleck talk had been frightened out of him. His eyes were darting everywhere, seeking solace, finding fear.

Bell had no intention of walking away from the Krieg investigation. But the detective felt honor bound to ask the young scientist whether he would rather take the safe course and sell his machine to Thomas Edison so the Germans would stop plaguing him. “You’d be free of this mess in a flash.”

Clyde asked if Bell was abandoning him.

“Absolutely not. But I am saying that the attack came close, and the next might succeed, even though the Van Dorn Agency – and I in particular – will lay our lives on the line to protect you.”

“Why? What do you care? It could be years before Van Dorn sees any money out of Talking Pictures.”

To Isaac Bell, the innocent were sacred and must always be protected. But to answer Clyde, he only laughed. “I already told you. Marion hopes that your invention will help her make ever-better moving pictures. That’s good enough for me.”

“If you say so,” Clyde said, his eyes still darting, “I guess it’s good enough for me, too.”

“Are you sure, Clyde? I can’t guaranteeyour safety. I can only guarantee that I will do whatever is required to keep you alive, but I can’t guarantee we will succeed. The Acrobat is no slouch.”

Clyde conjured a brave smile. “What about Van Dorn’s motto, ‘We never give up. Never!’”

“Oh, we’ll get him in the end,” Bell smiled back.

“Lot of good that will do me if he gets me first.”

“That’s why I’m asking if you’re sure.”

Clyde took a deep breath. “I’m sure.”

“Good man.”

* * *

In Berlin, Arthur Curtis wandered in and out of the Tiergarten, passing through the park’s huge Egyptian gates twice in twenty minutes. The skittish Hans Reuter had failed to show up for a meeting. Curtis had hoped that his greed, if not his hatred of his employer, had made him brave again. The nattily dressed, potbellied Van Dorn started to enter the park a third time, but gave it up when he noticed a plainclothes policeman noticing him.

Seeing his jaunty stride, no one would guess that Arthur Curtis had shifted into a state of high alert and was employing every trick he knew to determine, before he returned to his office, whether he was being followed. The contact could have turned on him. It was a remote possibility, but not impossible, that he had confessed to his employer that he was selling Krieg company secrets. He might even have gone to the police; guilty men were prone to panic, and panic made fools.

Curtis worked his way cautiously through the diplomatic quarter adjoining the park, taking his time on the handsome streets that served the mansions of the ambassadors. There were Army officers aplenty in the neighborhood. It seemed every second German was wearing a uniform. By sheer coincidence, he bumped into an acquaintance, a minor British embassy official with a taste for French brandy, who said, “You’re looking all spiffed today, Arthur, what? Did you win the lottery?”

Curtis winked, “I was just visiting a friend,” which drew a lewd grin and the expected, “Might she have a sister?”

“I’ll inquire next time,” said Curtis, and they parted on a laugh.

When he reached a commercial district, he watched for reflections in the shop windows. All seemed well until a fellow in a fine gabardine coat appeared on the sidewalk ahead, twenty minutes after Curtis had first noticed him.

The man was richly dressed for a detective or a secret policeman. But Krieg and the German Army could afford the best, couldn’t they? When he noticed a uniformed mounted police officer signal someone with a nod, Arthur Curtis hopped onto a tram, partly to think things over and partly to watch who got on next. A portly fellow in an expensive homburg boarded at the next stop, perspiring from a hard run, and Curtis knew that he was either paranoid or in trouble and had to act as if it were the latter.

On the other hand, he thought with a smile that broadcast innocence, he’d been working the private detective game for fifteen years – nearly twenty if he counted his apprenticeship with a Denver-based bullion-escort outfit ramrodded by a couple of old Indian fighters – and since arriving in Germany, he’d devoted every spare moment to learning the ins and outs of the Berlin neighborhoods. He jumped off the tram and onto another.

The street traffic changed from autos to bicyclists and horsecarts, and he hopped down in a workers’ district of five-story tenements interspersed with coal yards where homburgs and gabardine coats would stand out like sore thumbs. He walked purposefully, like a man headed home – or, considering the quality of his clothing, come to collect the rent. He continued down several streets, fingering the money clip in his pocket. He rounded a corner, flashed marks at a teenager on a bicycle, and bought the bike for double its value. Then he pedaled away at three times the speed a shadow could run, hoping no cop behind him had flashed a badge at another bike rider.

It felt like a clean getaway. But getting away was not the same as getting the job done. Isaac Bell was pressing him hard, and Arthur Curtis wanted to deliver the goods. But if he couldn’t corral his man inside Krieg, how could he ask whether a former Army officer now held a high position in the company?

25

Isaac Bell was first off the limited in Los Angeles.

Boots to the platform while the train was still rolling into La Grande Station, guiding Clyde Lynds firmly by the elbow and trading discreet nods with a Van Dorn detective attired as a porter, Bell burst from the station into the fierce morning sun. He looked for an olive green Santa Monica trolley with the dash sign “Hollywood,” and they jumped off thirty minutes later at a brick depot that served the farm village.

While the electric sped out of town, Bell scrutinized the tourists who had gotten off with them and confirmed the all-clear from a Van Dorn buying picture postcards. He entered the nearest of the hotels and guesthouses clustered around the depot and asked the front-desk clerk, “Where is Mr. D. W. Griffith taking pictures?”

“Right around the corner. It’s a two-reeler called In Old California. But you won’t find work. There’s fourteen players lined up ahead of you. I’m number twelve.”

“Thanks for the warning – come along,” Bell said to Clyde.

Clyde had recovered from his scare on the train. “Who the heck cares about old California? Griffith could use a snappier title. Like TheGirls of Old California.”

“Stick close,” said Bell.

He traced the Griffith movie by the growl of a dynamo powering the lights. It was a big outside operation in a vacant lot with a distant view of majestic mountains. Bell counted more than fifty people engaged – horse wranglers, mechanicians, actors, and scene shifters, and a camera operator he recognized as a valuable man named Bitzer who had worked for Marion and was known as the best in the business.

Griffith, a lanky man of thirty-five or so, was directing from a chair, his face shaded by an enormous, floppy straw hat. He had a soft Kentucky accent and a revolver tucked in his waistband.

“Now, young lady,” he told an actress dressed in an old-fashioned Spanish señorita gown and shawl, “you will try again to walk from where you are currently standing to that tree.”

“Yes, Mr. Griffith.”

Griffith raised a two-foot megaphone to his lips. “Lights!”

The Cooper-Hewitts flared, doubling the effect of the brilliant sun.

“Camera!”

Bitzer focused and started cranking.

“Speed!”

Bitzer cranked to a speed that sent the film past the camera lens at a rate of a thousand feet in twelve and a half minutes.

“Action!”

The señorita pointed at the tree.

“Stop!”

The camera operator stopped cranking. Griffith slumped a little lower under his hat and drawled, politely but firmly, “Billy’s camera will present you as a close-up figure. In return for that honor Ah would appreciate a certain restraint of expression.”

“I have to point out to the audience where I’m heading next.”

“The least patient among them will soon see where you are headed next. Don’t point. And stop looking at the camera.”

“Yes, Mr. Griffith.”

“Speed!”

* * *

The señorita having reached the tree at last and lunch finally announced, Griffith retreated under the shade of an umbrella and removed his floppy hat, revealing jet-black hair, an incipient widow’s peak, a strong hawk nose, and the deeply set, soulful eyes of a matinee idol. A smile warmed them when Bell was introduced.

“May I congratulate you, sir, on your marriage to a wonderful lady and a fine director.”

“Thank you, Mr. Griffith. We had the pleasure of seeing Is This Seat Taken?shown by a Humanova troupe at our wedding feast on Mauretania.”

Griffith rolled his eyes. “With the director putting words in my actors’ mouths?”

“I’m afraid so. That’s what we’ve come to talk to you about. This is Mr. Clyde Lynds. He has invented a wonderful machine to make and show talking pictures.”

“That’s been tried before.”

“But mine works,” said Clyde.

“I’ve never seen voice and picture synchronized for longer than five seconds.”

“You’ll see mine for five reels.”

Griffith glanced from the brash young scientist into the steady gaze of the tall detective.

“My firm, Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock, is betting it will work,” said Bell. “Clyde developed a new process with Professor Franz Beiderbecke, who was an electro-acoustic scientist at the Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute in Vienna.”

Griffith said, “I would love to make talking pictures. The human voice is a wondrous factor at intense moments But I am not in any position to invest.”

“I don’t need your money,” Clyde shot back. “All I need is a laboratory like you’ve set up in that shed. And a machine shop like you have for the cameras. And—”

“Most of all,” Isaac Bell interrupted, “Clyde needs an important director to make a picture show with his machine.”

“That would be me,” said Griffith, “Except I’m only here until we finish In Old California. Then it’s back to New York, and I doubt very much that Biograph will have any interest in a machine that would compete with Mr. Edison. But—” Here, with a dramatic pause, he raised a finger for emphasis. “By coincidence, I was, only yesterday, approached by the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company offering to woo me away from Biograph.”

Bell did not like coincidences. “Who is Imperial?”

“They showed me their cinematography studio, and I’ll tell you it’s the finest motion picture plant in the West. Four hundred hands, a corps of stage directors, magnificent stages, complete laboratories, darkrooms, and machine shops. All installed at a cost that must have run into big money, thanks to financial backing by the Artists Syndicate.”

“What is the Artists Syndicate?” asked Bell.

“They’re a combine of Wall Street bankers who don’t give a hoot for the Edison Trust. Wait until you see Imperial. They have a wealth of brand-new equipment capable of turning out a quantity of film, and they’ve engaged stars, both legit and vaud. They’re all set to make big plays – longer, multi-reel pictures.”

Clyde said to Isaac Bell, “Imperial sounds up-to-date.”

“Could you arrange an appointment, Mr. Griffith?”

“I’ll do better than arrange an appointment. I’ll tell them I’ll make the first picture with sound as soon as you’ve perfected it. That ought to get their attention.”

“Don’t you have a contract with Biograph?”

Griffith placed his right hand over his heart. “I promise that I will break my contract with Biograph in a flash for a chance to direct moving pictures that can truly make the sound of human voices. But it’s up to you, Mr. Bell, to sell them the machine, and you, Mr. Lynds, to perfect it. I’ll telephone Imperial right away.”

“Before you phone,” said Bell. “May I do you a kindness in return?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I notice you carry a six-shooter.”

“Old habit from before Biograph joined the Trust,” Griffith grinned, joking, with a theatrical wink, “Haven’t shot an Edison thug in years.”

“May I see it?”

“Sure.” Griffith tugged the revolver from his waistband.

Bell opened the cylinder, counted six cartridges, and removed one. “Gents I know who carry a six-gun in their waistband make a habit of leaving the hammer on an empty chamber. At least so long as they intend to father children.”

* * *

Isaac Bell left Clyde Lynds in the care of the Los Angeles Van Dorn field office and went alone to his appointment at Imperial Film, intending to get a clear-eyed look at what had fallen into their laps. He found a brand-new, ten-story red sandstone building with a glass penthouse that towered over a newly surveyed block of lots for sale. The neighborhood looked destined to become the next center of the up-and-coming city, and the substantial modern headquarters seemed proof that the independent movie factory had deep enough Wall Street pockets to defy Edison’s Patents Trust.

Motorcycle messengers with sidecars full were rushing reels of film in and out of Imperial’s first-floor film exchange. The exchange was plastered with “No Smoking Allowed” signs, which none of the cyclists distributing highly flammable reels to exhibitors were obeying. The building directory listed offices and lofts on the upper floors housing laboratories, machine and repair shops, properties and costume wardrobes, and a main studio containing Stage 1 and Stage 2 in the glass penthouse.

The entire second floor was devoted to the factory’s own moving picture theater – the Imperial. Newspaper reviews posted in the lobby called it a “Movie Palace,” and while absorbing the details of the building and the people coming and going, Bell read of gleaming gilt cherubs in a “finely appointed place that will draw the more wealthy classes who do not patronize moving picture shows except on ‘slumming’ exhibitions.”

The doormen patrolling the lobby were harder-cased than he would expect to find wearing uniforms as lavishly gilded as Captain Turner’s. That a bruiser corps was considered a wise precaution for an independent a full three thousand miles from New Jersey spoke volumes about the power of the Edison Trust. One of the doormen watching Bell read the reviews swaggered over to investigate.

Bell said, “It says here that ladies who come downtown on shopping expeditions spend an hour in the Imperial.”

“And bring their friends next time. What can we do for you, mister?”

“I have an appointment with the managing director.”

“Seventh floor, sir.”

The elevator operators were unusually young and fit. On the seventh floor a male receptionist, who looked like he had learned his trade in a football flying wedge, led him through a locked door to a secretary who ushered him into a large office, curtained against the blazing sun. To Isaac Bell’s surprise, the managing director who rose smiling from her desk was Marion’s beautiful, dark-eyed Russian friend Irina Viorets.

She was dressed in a stylish suit, with a long skirt and jacket that hugged her closely, and she had collected her beautiful hair high in the back as the women directors did to allow them to peer through the lens of the camera.

“You look surprised, Isaac,” she greeted him with a warm laugh. “I assure you, no one is more surprised than I.”

Bell took the hand she offered. “May I congratulate you on what must be the quickest immigrant success story in America? You have landed on your feet and then some.”

“Sheer luck. I bumped into an old friend who knew my work in Russia. He introduced me to a banker, who introduced me to a group of Wall Street men who had already jumped on the movie bandwagon and suddenly had this factory and no one to run it. I leaped at the chance. Moving pictures will all be made in California. The sun shines here every day.”

“Quite a leap,” Bell marveled, “from making pictures to running the entire factory.”

“Well,” she said, lowering her eyes modestly, “I had experience of business in Petersburg. But I don’t overrate my position here. The Wall Street bankers back in New York call the tune. I am merely the piper. Or, at best, the arranger. They burn the telegraph wires firing demands across the continent night and day. Where is your lovely bride? Taking pictures of Jersey scenery?”

“San Francisco, visiting her father.”

“What does she do next?”

“She’s contemplating her next move.”

“Perfect. We must get Marion to join us here, where she may take pictures of things more attractive than ‘Jersey scenery.’”

“I imagine she would like that. I certainly would.”

“In the meantime, come to lunch and tell me all about ‘Talking Pictures.’”

They rode the elevator down to a staff commissary feeding actors costumed as plutocrats, policemen, washerwomen, countesses, cowboys, and Indians. Many were grease-painted with purple lips, green skin, and orange hair to show up in the chartreuse glow of the Cooper-Hewitts. Irina sashayed among them, exchanging friendly waves and greetings, and into an exquisite private dining room that looked like it had been removed board by board from a London club and reassembled in the new building.

Bell asked, “Did Clyde mention anything about his Talking Pictures machine on the boat?”

“Just enough to make me think, when Mr. Griffith telephoned, that it could be exactly what my investors in the Artists Syndicate are looking for.”

* * *

Isaac Bell enjoyed a flirtatious lunch with Irina Viorets while making it clear he was a one-woman man, and Marion was that one woman. But he had the strong impression that Irina’s smiles, flashing eyes, and light touches on his arm were more for show than intent.

“I meant to ask on the ship, how do you happen to speak such interesting English? Sometimes you sound almost like a native-born American.”

“Almost, but not quite. Though I’m improving. It is a wondrous language.”

“How did you learn it?”

“In Petersburg my father played the piano at the American embassy. I had many friends among the children.”

For some reason, thought Isaac Bell, that was a story he wanted Van Dorn Research to verify. In fact, there was something about this whole setup that rang a little false. Perhaps it was just the incredible speed with which Irina’s good fortune had unfolded, or perhaps the detective’s nemesis, coincidence. Or maybe it was simply a memory of Marion saying that Irina’s story about fleeing the Okhrana changed with each glass of wine, though there was no wine at this lunch, merely orange juice and water.