The Thief ib-5

by Clive Cussler

  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 The Girls 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 machin
e.”

  “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.

  “When was that?”

  “Let me think,” she said. “Oh, Isaac, it’s embarrassing how long ago that was. Bloody Nicholas hadn’t taken the throne.”

  “Before, when was that, 1894?”

  “Not too far before,” Irina said, her full lips parting in a warm smile. “Allow a woman a certain latitude with her age.”

  “Forgive me,” Bell smiled back, satisfied that Grady Forrer — the brilliant head of Van Dorn Research, a large man in whose presence barroom brawls tended to peter out quickly and a hound dog of a tracker — would soon put the question to American embassy officers who had served in Russia when Czar Alexander III still reigned.

  “Tell me, Irina, will you miss directing pictures now that you’re running the whole show?”

  “Will I miss positioning the camera and waiting for the sun for hours so I may transfer full beauty to the negative? Yes, very much. Will I miss a banker who lent me the money to position the camera for hours telling me that it would be better if I positioned it there, instead of there? No! Not one bit. Now my only ‘boss’ is the Artists Syndicate, and they are three thousand miles away in New York.”

  “Who are the investors in the Artists Syndicate?”

  “The syndicate is closely held. I met none of them. I don’t even know their names.”

  “Why do you suppose they are so secretive?”