The yelling stopped—except for the director who was still calling through his megaphone, “That was terrific! Let’s do it one more time!”
Isaac Bell climbed painfully to his feet, walked unsteadily to the wrecked motorcycle, knelt down, and inspected it.
He felt in his jacket that his Browning was still in its holster and moving freely. Thanks to his lightning-fast reflexes, he had just survived the Los Angeles version of the Cincinnati, Chicago, and Jersey City attacks on Van Dorns who shopped in the Leipzig Organ stores.
“Hurry it up,” the director shouted. “We’re losing the light.”
“Soon as you get me a new machine,” said Bell as he limped off in search of the mechanician who had tuned his motorcycle.
The Hell’s Bells company had established a temporary machine shop in an abandoned caboose on a rusty siding. Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he mounted the ramp the mechanician had laid to wheel the motorcycle up and down, and entered the gloomy interior in a sudden rush.
“Marty,” he asked in a low and dangerous voice. “Tell me who took a hacksaw to my front axle.”
Marty did not reply.
Bell found him on the floor behind his workbench, his eyes bulging wide open, fixed intently on nothing. Bell lighted a lamp and looked at him closely. The mechanician had been garroted with a wire that had cut his head half off his neck. It looked like the Acrobat had silenced his accomplice with the same thin cable he had wrapped around the neck of the Golden State Limited express messenger he had murdered in New Mexico. It was also the same cable he had used to vault over the locomotive and to “fly” from the Mauretania’s boat deck.
Isaac Bell spoke out loud, addressing the Acrobat as if the murderer were still in the caboose.
“I am worrying you,” he said, reviewing in his mind the many strands of his investigation and wondering which had alarmed the murderer. “I am making you afraid.”
The Acrobat apparently saw those strands as forming a net. Which ones? Bell wondered. Which of the many strands had spooked him?
Grady Forrer was pursuing a Hamburg Bankhaus–Imperial Film connection. Andrew Rubenoff had connected Hamburg Bankhaus to Leipzig Organ & Piano and was now hunting Imperial’s foreign bankers. The Van Dorn field offices had exposed Leipzig Organ for a sham. Bell himself had tracked Leipzig’s Fritz Wunderlich to Denver, and now the men watching the consulates had the German’s likeness. Joe Van Dorn was working his Washington, D.C., contacts to establish German consulate connections. Larry Saunders was probing City Hall for the Imperial Building floor plans. Texas Walt had covered Imperial Protection and was currently employed as an extra inside Imperial’s penthouse studios.
If the Acrobat had ordered the murder of Art Curtis in Berlin, then he knew the Van Dorns were after him. The attacks on the Van Dorn apprentices confirmed that. But today’s sabotage of Bell’s motorcycle indicated that the Acrobat had penetrated Bell’s “insurance man” disguise, too, and saw him either as aligned with the Van Dorn Detective Agency or an actual agent of the outfit.
“I still don’t know what you’re up to. But I’m closer than I think.”
Then it struck Bell hard. If—as seemed likely, though not close to proven—Imperial Film was mixed up with the Acrobat and Krieg Rüstungswerk, then Marion’s job at Imperial was no coincidence, but rather the Acrobat’s cold-blooded ace in the hole.
BELL RODE THE ANGELS FLIGHT funicular railway two blocks up a steep grade to the residential neighborhood on top of Bunker Hill, where he had rented a mansion after Marion took the job Irina Viorets had offered at Imperial. Concealing his limp, he climbed the back steps and bounded into the kitchen.
“Just in time for our first married home-cooked meal,” Marion greeted him. “Oh, Isaac, what a wonderful day this is.” She hugged him hard and kissed him. “Would you like a cocktail for whatever you’ve done to your poor foot?”
“I’ll mix them,” Bell smiled, ruefully, reminded forcibly that if women were more observant than men, then women who made movies missed absolutely nothing.
Marion’s eyes were ablaze with joy. “It’s like I died and went to heaven. Irina gives me anything I want—locomotives, Pullmans, mule trains, Conestoga wagons. She even got me Billy Bitzer to operate the camera.”
“Congratulations.”
“Billy brought Dave Davidson, his number one assistant, to operate the second camera. So I have the two best operators in the business. And to top it all off—do you remember Franklin Mowery?”
“The old bridge builder. Of course. He worked for Lillian’s father.”
“Franklin retired out here. I invited him to where we’re taking pictures to answer my research questions. He’s a walking encyclopedia of railroad history, having been there for most of it. Fabulous stories. And here’s the best part: Dave Davidson has a portrait painter’s eye; he took one look at Franklin’s granite profile and, without saying a word, just started cranking the camera, pretending he was adjusting it or something. Later he showed me twenty feet of Franklin Mowery. The camera absolutely loves him. So I’m putting him in the picture— Oh, Isaac, I’m so excited!”
“Indeed,” said Bell, wondering, How can I ask her to leave this job on a suspicion?
“Don’t worry,” she said, “I warned Franklin Mowery that you are working in disguise and not to reveal that you’re a Van Dorn.”
“It probably doesn’t matter by now.”
“Is that what happened to your foot?”
“My ankle got off easy compared to my motorcycle,” said Bell, and told her what had happened. Then he laid out the strands of the Talking Pictures investigation one by one, from Grady and Rubenoff to his and Texas Walt’s fruitless spying inside Imperial. “Having failed to kill you,” asked Marion, “what do you suppose he’ll try next?”
Isaac Bell looked his beautiful wife in the eye. “You tell me.”
“I know what you’re thinking, Isaac. You’re worried that I’m somehow in danger because I’m ‘coincidentally’ taking pictures for the same company where you installed Clyde
