“I was hoping you were working late,” he said when she answered.
“I am always working late.”
“I met Mr. Brooks.”
Irina Viorets surprised him. She said, “Then you know I lied to you.”
“Why?”
“I think you should come to see me. Now.”
“All right. Tell the doormen to let me in.”
“No. Not here. I’ll meet you on the street.”
Impressed by Isaac Bell’s cold confidence that events were coming to a head, Larry Saunders had shed his tailored jacket for a still-stylish but more loosely draped garment with room for a Colt.45 in a shoulder holster and a couple of pocket pistols. And just to be on the safe side, he brought with him his top man, the formidable Tim Holian, who was the only detective in the field office who didn’t care how he looked and slouched about the city in a disreputable-looking sack coat bulging with firearms.
When they got to the Imperial Building, they found that Clyde Lynds and his Protective Services guard had descended from the laboratory to set up camp in the soundproof fourth-floor recording studio, and they joined them there.
The detectives were edgy as the evening began, but when Clyde Lynds suddenly demanded a messenger to find Isaac Bell so Lynds could report to Bell, even Saunders and Holian were swept up in the scientist’s excitement.
Detectives, Protective Service operatives, and Clyde Lynds gathered around Lynds’s machine, which was projecting a moving picture on a white wall that served as a screen. Mounted on both sides of the makeshift screen were stacks of phonograph horns.
“Listen to this!” shouted Lynds.
His face alight with glee, Lynds grabbed the handle of an electrical switch and pulled it toward him.
A woman’s voice came from the horns. She sounded hoarse and far away, but every eye in the room fixed on the image of her lips, which moved in precise synchronization with the words she was speaking.
Larry Saunders felt his own mouth drop open in amazement. It was an arresting sight. “Wait till Bell sees this. It’s like she’s alive.”
Clyde Lynds grinned with pride. “We’re getting there,” he said. “We’re on our way.”
The wall on which the woman talking was projected moved.
Clyde Lynds stared in puzzlement.
The wall was sliding to his left, revealing darkness behind it that seemed to swallow the moving picture. And suddenly the woman’s face vanished, and where it had been was the smile of the German whom the Professor had named the
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Men with guns in their hands flanked the Acrobat.
Larry Saunders and Tim Holian stepped in front of Clyde Lynds, shielding him as they reached for their pistols. Saunders whipped his Colt from his shoulder holster with blinding speed.
Christian Semmler’s gunmen fired as one. Six shots exploded in deafening thunder. The chief of the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Los Angeles field office fell dead with six bullets in his chest.
Their second volley dropped both Protective Service men, who had been so startled by the raid that they were still reaching for their weapons. The guns wheeled toward Tim Holian, whom they had been afraid to fire at because he was next to Clyde Lynds. Holian took full advantage of the two-second respite. Standing tall, pistols flaming in both hands, he stalked the raiders. One
Clyde Lynds ran. The Acrobat leaped over the fallen men’s bodies and bounded lithely after him, catching him by the arm. He drew him close in a powerful grip, squeezed until Lynds groaned in pain, and glared in the frightened scientist’s eyes. “I have you, Herr Lynds. Do not struggle, or I will hurt you. Where is the Talking Pictures machine?”
“You’re looking at it,” Lynds said sullenly.
“That is the part for showing the Talking Pictures,” Semmler said, gesturing for his men to pack it down the stairs. “Where is the part that manufactures it?”
He squeezed harder, crushing muscle against bone. Gasping, Lynds led him to a camera on a tripod.
“This is for pictures,” said Semmler. “What captures the sound?”
Lynds nodded mutely at a carbon microphone on a tall wooden box.
Semmler said, “Lastly, where is the machine for imprinting the sounds on the film?”
Clyde Lynds sagged in Semmler’s grip. The monster knew everything. It was as if he had been watching over his shoulder. Pain bored through his arm as Semmler shook him like a terrier. “Where?”
“Upstairs in the lab.”
Semmler was relentless. Squeezing harder, grinding Lynds’s flesh agonizingly against bone, he asked, “Where are your plans?”
Clyde Lynds realized with a sinking heart that, having been outfoxed in the past, the German was too suspicious to be fooled again. “There!” he gasped, indicating a satchel full of drawings and schematics. That seemed to appease the Acrobat, Lynds thought, but he soon realized he was wrong.
“Let’s go!” Semmler dragged him toward the opening that had appeared so suddenly in the wall.
“Where?”
“Up to the laboratory for your imprinting machine, then home to Germany.”
“Germany’s not my home,” Lynds protested.
“It will be your home until your machine is made absolutely perfect.”
The Gopher gangsters back in New York had taught Clyde Lynds their favorite fighting trick. They had done it as a joke, thinking he was an overeducated sissy boy, but, craving their respect, he had learned it anyhow. With nothing to lose, he tried it now, so unexpectedly that he startled even the Acrobat. Springing off his toes he butted his forehead against the big German’s massive jaw. In the split second that the grip on his arm eased, Lynds wrenched free and ran. He stumbled over Larry Saunders’s body, arrested his fall with one hand, and scooped up a fallen pistol.
Clyde Lynds heard a shot.
The sound seemed to come from a great distance, and he heard it long after he realized that his legs had stopped moving and that the shot had hammered him to the floor. He tried to sit up. He saw the man who had shot him, a yellow-bearded Dutchman in a slouch hat, still holding the gun and violently shaking his head. The Acrobat was standing close behind the man, his face contorted with rage and stupendous effort as he yanked a garrote around the Dutchman’s neck so tightly that it sawed through flesh.
“Take everything to the train,” Semmler ordered his remaining men. “I’ll go up to the laboratory.” He threw the Boer’s body out of his way and knelt to pick up Clyde Lynds to have him identify the correct imprinting machine. The scientist had lost consciousness. Air bubbled bloodily from his chest, and Semmler could see that he was mortally wounded.
Again cursing the trigger-happy fool who had shot Lynds and remembering how Lynds had tricked him in the past, Christian Semmler searched the dying scientist’s clothing. He found tucked beneath his shirt a flat object carefully folded in a wrapping of oilskin. He opened it and found a single sheet of heavy parchment paper. To his joy, written on it in a fine, clear, miniature hand were diagrams and schematic drawings annotated with mathematical formulas.
Semmler rewrapped it with reverent care in the waterproof oilskin. Surely this was the cagey Lynds’s true
