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 can’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.”
Bell thought fleetingly that Holian had to be one of the luckiest men alive to survive a fusillade of gunfire with only flesh wounds.
“Where’s Saunders?”
“Dead. All dead.”
Bell pounded up the stairs. At the fourth flight, the wall had disappeared, having been slid aside into a pocket. He stepped through the opening and stared in horror. The recording studio was a slaughterhouse.
Larry Saunders lay dead on the floor. Two men Bell didn’t know lay dead, revolvers locked in their fists, slouch hats fallen beside them. A third man had been strangled and bore the bloody gouge around the throat that was the Acrobat’s signature. Then he saw Clyde Lynds sprawled on his back, his chest covered in blood, his face drained of color.
“Clyde?” Pistol in hand, Isaac Bell knelt beside him. He saw immediately that the brash young scientist was not long for this world, and he had a horrible feeling that he had let him down.
Clyde opened his eyes. “Say, Isaac,” he whispered. “You didn’t make the rescue this time.”
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” said Isaac Bell. “I wish I had insisted you take your chances with Edison.”
“At least Edison wouldn’t kill me.”
“Did they take your machine?”
Clyde answered slowly, in a whisper so faint that Bell had to move within inches to hear him. “They took a jury-rigged contraption
