shaft or another stairway, and he prayed that Marion had not left the temporary safety of the rooftop studio in a doomed attempt to descend.
At the fifth-floor landing, when he was halfway to the top of the building, the flames feeding on the hundreds of reels in the film exchange far below breached a vault and detonated tons of film stock stored inside. The explosion shook the stairs under Bell’s feet. A shock wave traveled up the shaft and lofted him off the rubber treads.
He tumbled down half a flight of stairs, clambered to his feet, and ran harder, climbing past Irina’s office on the seventh floor, Clyde’s laboratory on the eighth, and Semmler’s lair on the ninth. After one more flight he was at the top, gasping for breath and stymied by walls on every side. He yanked open a judas door and saw a studio stage in semidarkness, with a looming shadow of a ship and towers bearing Cooper-Hewitt light banks. Silhouetted against a lurid sky, Marion was stepping through the door in the northern glass wall, climbing out on the terrace that overlooked the life net.
Bell shouted. The wall was thick, and she could not hear him.
Remembering the sliding fourth-floor wall, he spotted the bulge where the wall thickened to make room for the pocket. He looked for a lever but saw none. He flattened his palms against it and tried to slide it, which had no effect. Then he saw what looked like an ordinary electric light switch on the floor molding. He moved it and the wall glided aside.
“Marion!”
A second explosion rocked the building.
Bell ran the length of the studio stage, dodging wires and camera tracks, and tripped over a sandbag counterbalancing a fly lift. He rolled to his feet and pulled open the door in the glass wall. Marion was climbing the steps that had been built in hopes of one day convincing an extra to try the life net.
“Marion!”
“
Bell bounded up beside her and held her close, overwhelmed with the relief of finding her alive. The net appeared even smaller than it had when he last saw it from here. Flames leaping from many windows were lighting it clearly. There were dark splotches on the white canvas that he hadn’t noticed before.
“They built it strong enough for two,” said Marion. “Irina wanted a ‘Lovers’ Leap.’”
“We have to hold each other tight, or we’ll smash into each other when we bounce.”
“Thank God, you’re here. I didn’t know if I had the courage to jump.”
“What is that dark color? Those splotches?”
“They shine,” said Marion. “Like liquid.”
A third explosion shook the building. It felt as if it were swaying in an earthquake. Bell, staring down at the net, puzzling over the splotches, saw great torrents of fire thrusting from windows on the sixth floor. They had moments to jump before the building collapsed. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t leave without me.”
“We can’t stay here, General Major,” Herman Wagner pleaded with Christian Semmler.
A fire engine thundered up the street, pulled by two bay horses, and from the opposite direction came police on
bicycles.
Wagner’s chauffeur, who kept turning around to stare anxiously, opened the glass that separated the passenger compartment. “We’re blocking the gate. We have to move.”
“Wait!” said Semmler, his voice muffled by the blood-soaked coat sleeve he pressed to his face. “Do not move this auto.”
“But they will see that you were wounded, General Major.”
Semmler did not deign to reply to the obvious, saying instead, “Wounds and war march in lockstep. That is the reason I ordered you to stand by. Don’t disappoint me— Look!” Semmler pointed at the parapet of the Imperial Building. The flames, fanned by a stiffening wind, were shooting higher than the roof. Suddenly something moved in front of them. A man in white teetered on the parapet. “See! There he goes!”
Smoke obscured the figure. Then he separated from the parapet, as if he were pushing off with all his strength to clear the building, and fell through the air.
“I think it’s both of them.”
“My God, it is.” Hermann Wagner held his breath. It seemed that it took them forever to plunge past the burning windows. How afraid they must be that they would miss the tiny net. What would they do if they saw that they were falling off course? To Wagner’s immense relief, the poor couple did not miss the net. They landed dead center. But instead of bouncing back up in the air, they smashed through it to the ground.
“Bull’s-eye,” said Christian Semmler.
“The net collapsed,” cried Wagner. “It didn’t hold.” He stared at the wreckage, but, of course, no one moved from it. How could they? A moment later a section of the building’s wall gave way and thundered down, burying their remains under tumbled bricks.
The first team of fire horses clattered alongside the auto.
“Drive!”
Wagner’s chauffeur almost stalled the motor in his haste to get away.
“Where now, General Major?” asked Wagner, staring back over his shoulder at the burning building, and grateful that the wooden fence blocked his view of where Bell and his wife had died. “To the freight yard?”
“Take me to a doctor. While he sutures this, charter a special to New York. We are done in Los Angeles. For now.”
Christian Semmler sounded remarkably pleased, Wagner thought, for a man who had seen his entire enterprise go up in smoke. And he displayed a God-like indifference to his grievous wounds. God-like, or machine- like — it was as if he didn’t feel pain.
Semmler noticed him staring. “Of course it hurts,” he said, spitting blood so he could speak. “You should pray you never feel anything like it.”
“We’re running out of rope. Hang on! I’ll see what I can do.”
Isaac Bell let go of the last inches of a seventy-foot-long string of Cooper-Hewitt light cables and stage fly ropes he had knotted together, and dropped ten feet to the roof of the Imperial Moving Picture Palace marquee that sheltered the sidewalk in front of the building. He landed on stinging soles and looked up. Flames were gushing from windows they had descended past moments ago.
“Let go. I’ve got you.”
Marion slid down to the end of the rope, shredding the little that remained of her gloves, and opened her hands. Bell caught her in his arms, swooped her to a gentle landing, and held her tightly for a grateful moment.
The clatter of hoofs and the throb of steam pumps heralded the arrival of the fire department. “Firemen!” Bell called down to them. “Did you boys happen to bring a ladder?”
“I still can’t sleep,” Marion whispered, “I keep seeing that sandbag burst on the ground. That could have been us.”
Bell held her close. “But it wasn’t us. Don’t worry, we’re fine.”
Marion laughed. “I’m not worried. And I know why I can’t sleep. It feels so wonderful to be awake — Isaac, thank God you saw his blood on the net. But what made you think he cut the ropes? I’d have thought he would have run for his life, particularly if he was so badly wounded as to be bleeding like that.”
“He’s a killer. He calls himself a soldier, but he is first a killer. In fact, I’ll bet he waited to watch us hit bottom.”
“When he finds out you tested the net with a sandbag, he’s going to be badly disappointed.”
“He’s going to be more than disappointed,” Bell promised grimly, climbing out of bed and kissing her good night. “Sleep tight.”
“Where are you going?’
“New York.”
