The Thief

“Propaganda?” The kaiser had frowned. “They boast in England that movies are a propaganda of democracy.”

“Movies are even better propaganda for love and hate, Your Majesty. Friendship and war. There are millions watching. They could watch your message.”

“What message, General Major?”

Christian Semmler stood face-to-face with Kaiser Wilhelm and said, “Friendship.”

“Friendship?…”

Semmler took a deep breath to remind himself that patience was the hunter’s deadliest virtue. He smothered his impulse to grip the kaiser by his shirtfront and shout that if propaganda could convince the German people to pay for a fleet of warships they didn’t need, propaganda could convince anyone of anything. But he could not shout that in so many words without instantly destroying his special rapport.

“With all the respect due the power of your splendid armies, Majesty, and your navy, when Der Tag dawns we will almost certainly have to fight England, France, and Russia simultaneously.”

“We will win,” the kaiser said. “Our rail lines will shuttle our armies from front to front, east to west, west to east. A two-front war holds no terrors.”

“To be sure, Your Majesty. But three fronts? Even Germany will be hard-pressed to fight on three fronts simultaneously…”

“America.”

“As you say, Your Majesty. America.”

It finally dawned on the kaiser. “Allies!”

“Allies, Your Majesty. The movies can defeat Germany’s enemies by turning them against one another. We will show propaganda movies that depict Germans and the immense German-American minority as America’s friends and the British, French, and Russians as her enemies. Can you imagine a more powerful weapon? Germany, their friend, and England, their enemy.”

The kaiser had looked at him sharply. “You’ve put great thought into this, haven’t you? This didn’t just pop into your mind.”

“Yes, Your Majesty. I have thought of little else for a long time. Der Tag must be Germany’s beginning, not her end.”

Kaiser Wilhelm flung his strong arm around Semmler’s shoulders.

“Do it,” he said. “Take whatever you need.”

“I need the Army, the diplomatic corps, the banks, and the steamship lines.”

“All will serve you.”

Semmler’s gifts included an unerring eye for a person’s nature and desires. Instead of responding with a soldierly salute, he extended a strong man’s hand. They clasped hard and stared each other in the face. “I swear a sacred oath: I will not let you down, Your Majesty.”

But the kaiser was famously mercurial. Before Semmler could suggest they rejoin the other guns at the hunt since the rain was slackening, the kaiser’s face took on a dreamy expression, and he said, with what turned out to be amazing prescience, “Wouldn’t it be fine if movies made music?”

“Music, Your Majesty?”

“Music! So that thousands watching in giant theaters could listen, too, and feel the emotion of the music. Music is key to effective propaganda. Music is visceral.”

“You are right, of course, Your Majesty, I will look into it.”

But there were few orchestras in the small theaters in most American towns. Nor would a tinny piano do much to stir emotions. He investigated the likelihood that movies themselves could make their own music and learned the sorry history of those attempts.

And then the strangest thing happened. Semmler had already set the Donar Plan in motion to show pro- German movies to American audiences. He had established the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company and was integrating exchange men and exhibitors to control film production, distribution, and exhibition when all of a sudden — like a comet roaring through the atmosphere — came news from Vienna of Sprechendlichtspieltheater, a talking pictures machine that actually worked.

The kaiser himself had virtually predicted it, and there it was. The invention that Beiderbecke and Lynds had named the Talking Pictures machine would transform movies into far more potent voices to persuade, cajole, and play on the emotions. Music and the human voice married to moving images would stir millions to go to war in the name of love.

* * *

Arthur Curtis got to the Kintopp an hour early for his appointment with Hans Reuter. The Kino was full already with a hundred film patrons in the narrow space, both men and women tonight, watching Sarah Bernhardt. He took his beer and wandered toward the screen, simulating a search for a closer seat while he looked for a back way out. There was none — which would make a fire a precarious proposition, and the effect of Reuter betraying him even worse.

The safer move would be to stay out of the Kino and nurse his beer at the bar. With an unpleasant premonition gnawing at him, Curtis emerged from the darkened theater and took a place at the bar. At six forty-five, a carpenter with his toolbox in hand and sawdust on his overalls came in, ordered beer, and drank it slowly, ignoring the entrance to the Kino and glancing occasionally at the street door, as if waiting for a friend. Arthur Curtis studied the man intently. The premonition grew sharp, but it took him too long to isolate the source.

The sawdust was what troubled him, he realized at last. German workmen were precise. They swept up at the end of every day. They would never step out in public covered in sawdust, even hurrying home from work, and this one wasn’t hurrying. He was barely touching his stein to his lips.

Art Curtis downed his beer, nodded a casual farewell to the barmaid, and pushed through the front doors into the street. He breathed in the evening air and glanced around the bustling neighborhood of shops and tenements.

As luck would have it, Hans Reuter was early. He was walking fast, his head down, either unconcerned that he was being followed or hoping like an ostrich that what he couldn’t see couldn’t hurt him.

Curtis made a lightning decision and took a huge chance that his initial glance at the street had correctly picked up no shadows.

Reuter flinched as Art Curtis took his arm.

“Let’s walk, instead.”

“Why?” asked Reuter. But his hunger for the money gave him no choice but to let Curtis set their course.

“We can transact our business in half a minute. Give me the name. I’ll give you the money, and we can go our separate ways.” Run our separate ways was what he meant — in his case, straight to the French border, the hell with the office. But telling Reuter they were under observation was no way to make him take a chance.

“His name?”

“They call him ‘the Monkey.’”

Isaac Bell had called him an acrobat. “What’s his real name?”

“I don’t know.”

“I don’t pay for ‘I don’t know,’” Curtis shot back, scanning the street ahead and behind. He saw workmen homeward bound, shoppers with groceries, couples holding hands converging on the Kintopp. Oddly, there were no cops.

“He’s an Army officer.”

“That much I knew already.”

“You didn’t know he was a general major,” Reuter replied smugly.

“His rank means nothing without a name,” Curtis lied. If it was true, such a high rank would narrow the possibilities to a handful.

“Would you accept a description?” Reuter asked.

“It’d better be precise.”

They were passing under a streetlamp and Curtis got a good look at Reuter’s face. A confident expression