The Thief

by Clive Cussler

  Bell kept driving, heading north on narrow roads along the top ridge of the Palisades. Following Marion’s directions, he located a turnoff in the middle of nowhere that took them west, deeper and deeper into the countryside. Finally, he pulled into a dairy farm barnyard, hidden from the road, where the independent Pirate King Jay Tarses was shooting outside pictures of a troupe of players costumed like Crusaders, Arabs, and Vestal Virgins.

  A herd of horses was skittering nervously around a corral, spooked by camels that Tarses had gathered for his Arabs. From what Marion had told him, the camera operator draped over an enormously bulky Bianchi camera was actually cranking an Edison-patented camera concealed inside it.

  Isaac Bell stopped the car at a distance to stay out of the picture. An assistant, one of several petite dark-haired girls hanging around Tarses, approached with trepidation.

  “Don’t worry,” Bell told her. “We’re not Edison bulls. I’m Isaac Bell, and my wife, Marion, arranged for me and Mr. Clyde Lynds to visit Mr. Tarses.”

  “Of course,” she exclaimed. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  “Don’t interrupt the picture taking,” said Bell. “We’ll wait for the clouds.”

  By half past one the sun had disappeared. As the players opened box lunches, the assistant led Bell and Lynds to Pirate King Jay Tarses, an unshaven fellow in a slouch hat, shirt-sleeves, and vest who was telling a bespectacled man with ink-stained fingers, “Twenty-five dollars is the most I pay for a scenario converted into a complete photoplay.”

  “I think I deserve fifty.”

  Tarses lighted a five-cent cigar. “If it makes a hit, we’ll send another check for the same sum.”

  “But when I write a short story, the magazines pay two hundred dollars.”

  “The people who watch my pictures don’t know how to read,” said Tarses, turning his back on the writer.

  He cast an amiable smile at Isaac Bell. “Any husband of Marion is a friend of mine, Mr. Bell. She scored a headliner in her first picture. Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight was alive with human interest. What can I do for you?”

  Bell began what Clyde Lynds called a “spiel.”

  “I represent Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock of Hartford, Connecticut.”

  “Unfortunately,” Tarses interrupted, “I’ve never had the pleasure of borrowing money from them, as they’re not the sort that consorts with my sort.”

  “Your luck is about to improve. Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock is considering entering the moving picture business.”

  “I am all ears,” said Tarses. Money talked in a business where it had to be borrowed daily, and a prosperous-looking insurance executive dressed in a bespoke suit and made-to-order boots was listened to.

  “Our first step is to invest in Mr. Lynds’s Talking Pictures machine. We are looking for partners among moving picture folk, experienced manufacturers who are up to taking superior pictures with the same photography and finish as the French. Mr. Lynds will explain the technical details.”

  Tarses’s response was to change the subject. “Is your wife still making those topical films for Whiteway?”

  “You can bet she’ll make talking pictures when Mr. Lynds perfects his machine,” said Bell, and turned the spiel over to Lynds. It was up to Clyde to sell his scheme, and Bell had no doubt that he was a born salesman.

  “Wait,” said Tarses “What do you want from me?”

  “To start, Mr. Lynds needs a laboratory, chemists, machine shops, and moving picture mechanicians.”

  Tarses glanced around the barnyard. A gesture with his cigar indicated horses, camels, and actors. “I don’t have any of that stuff.”

  “You can get it in a flash,” Bell retorted. “My wife chose wisely, Mr. Tarses. You know all the moving picture folk in all the aspects of the business and manufacture. Plus, you’re a natural-born manager. Everyone in the motion picture business says that if you didn’t hate the Trust, you’d be ramrodding your own big outfit.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t get along with bosses.”

  “When his machine is perfected, Mr. Lynds will need a movie manufacturer who knows the line from top to bottom to take charge. You’ll be your own boss, making the pictures and distributing.”

  “But who needs Talking Pictures?”

  Clyde was dumbstruck. He looked at Bell in disbelief. Hadn’t Krieg and the German Army made it painfully clear that they needed it?

  “Who needs them?” shouted Clyde, suddenly red in the face and finding the words to denounce the absurd question. “The world needs them. Talking pictures will enable motion picture men to take pictures that are crackerjacks, full of snap and go, and energy and push. We’ll tell stories of original situations dear to the heart of the exchange men, who will know darned well that exhibitors will recognize great features for their audiences.”

  Jay Tarses crossed his arms over his chest and stated flatly, “Talking pictures will never happen.”

  “Give me one reason why.”

  “I’ll give you four. One: Audiences are happy; they don’t want smart-aleck talk, they want pictures that move. Two: How will foreigners understand what the players are saying? Three: Who’s gonna pay for installing Talking Pictures machines in every theater? Exhibitors hate spending money. Four: Who would dare distribute Talking Pictures? If they’re any good, the Edison Trust will block them.”

  “HE’S WRONG,” MARION SAID fiercely when Bell reported back to the Abbott town house on how they were rebuffed. “Tarses is so busy trying to stay a step ahead of the sheriff, he doesn’t understand. I’m so sorry, I thought he was smarter than that. Isaac, this is so important, we must help Clyde.”

  “Who else can we approach?”

  “I wonder…”

  Bell waited. They were in Archie’s library. From the drawing room came the sounds of a dinner party gathering for cocktails. “Why don’t you get dressed?” said Marion. “Let me think on this.”

  When Bell returned in a midnight blue dinner jacket, Marion was fired up and supremely confident. “There is an innovative director at the Biograph Company—bold and very clever.”

  “But Biograph is part of the Trust.”

  “He’s chafing under company rule. He wants to make his own pictures. He’s so forward-thinking—he’s invented all sorts of wonderful tricks with the camera—he might realize the potential of Clyde’s machine.”

  “Let’s go see him.”

  “He just took fifty people to California. He’s making a Biograph picture in some little village outside Los Angeles.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Griffith. You’ve seen his pictures. D. W. Griffth.”

  “Of course! He made Is This Seat Taken?”

  “He’s your man.”

  Isaac Bell said, “I hate to leave you so soon after our wedding, but I had better take Clyde to see him.”

  Marion said, “I would love to visit my father in San Francisco and tell him all about the wedding.”

  “Wonderful! ’Frisco’s only five hours on the train. We’ll meet in the middle.”

  Marion straightened his bow tie and pressed close. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could travel together to California?”

  Bell shook his head with a rueful smile. “I wish we could.”

  “I love riding trains with you.” She laughed. “Now that we’re married, we don’t have to book two staterooms for propriety’s sake.”

  “Unfortunately, escorting Clyde, I’m obliged to double up with him to keep a close watch.”

  “Do you expect Krieg to try to kidnap him?”

  “No, no, no. Just to be on the safe side. Don’t worry, after we meet Mr. Griffith, I’ll stash Clyde with the Los Angeles office for a weekend, and you and I can rendezvous in Santa Barbara.”

  “And after I’ve seen my father, I’ll come down to Los Angeles to find some work.”

  THE OLD GRAND CENTRAL STATION was no more. Its classical facade and its six-hundred-and-fifty-foot glass tra
in shed had just been razed, and now steam shovels and hard-rock miners were burrowing sixty feet into the Manhattan schist to make room for a new, two-level Grand Central Terminal.

  Isaac Bell led Clyde Lynds into a temporary station that was operating out of the Grand Central Palace, a convention and trade fair building around the corner on Lexington Avenue, and headed for the makeshift gate marked “20th Century Limited.” The chaos of new construction had not persuaded the crack Chicago-bound express to lower its standards. Temporary or not, its famous red carpet had been rolled out the length of the platform.

  “Hang on a minute,” said Bell. “Loose shoelace.” He planted his foot on a fire department standpipe protruding from a wall and busied his hands around his boot.

  “How can you have a loose shoelace?” asked Clyde. “Your boots don’t have laces.”

  “Don’t tell anyone.” Bell straightened up and headed for the telephones. “I have to phone the office. Stick close.”

  “I heard there’s a phone on the train.”

  “There will be a line of businessmen waiting to telephone their offices that they didn’t miss the train. Stick close.”

  Bell told the operator at the front desk, “Van Dorn Agency, Knickerbocker Hotel,” and followed the attendant to a paneled booth. When the Van Dorn operator answered, he asked for the duty man.

  “This is Chief Investigator Bell. Two tall yellow-haired men in dark suits and derbies followed me across Forty-second Street and into the Grand Central Palace. They’re hanging around the waiting room pretending not to watch the Twentieth Century gate. One has a mustache and is wearing a green four-in-hand necktie. The other is clean-shaven, with a dark bow tie. I’ll telephone again when we change locomotives at Harmon.”

  Bell paid the attendant.

  “Let’s go buy some magazines, Clyde— No, don’t look in their direction.”

  FORTY-FIVE MINUTES AFTER LEAVING NEW York, the 20th Century Limited stopped in Harmon to exchange the electric engine that had hauled it out of the Manhattan tunnels for a high-wheeled 4-4-2 Atlantic steamer that would rocket it north to Albany at seventy-five miles an hour. While train and yard crews swiftly uncoupled the old and coupled the new, Isaac Bell ran to the New York Central dispatcher’s office, identified himself as a Van Dorn detective, and asked to use their telephone.

  The duty man at the Knickerbocker reported that Van Dorn operatives were trailing the “gentlemen thugs” who had followed Bell across 42nd Street.

  A wire waiting for Bell at Albany, where the flyer got a fresh locomotive and a dining car, reported laconically,

  NOTHING YET.

  After dinner, there was nothing at Syracuse.

  Bell had booked a stateroom with two narrow berths. He stretched out on the bottom berth, fully clothed.

  Clyde said, “You know I could have saved money sleeping in a Pullman berth.”

  “I assure you, Clyde, you would not be my first choice of company for a night on an express train, but this way I can keep an eye on you.”

  “Who were those men? Krieg?”

  “I should know for sure by morning.”

  “How would they know to follow us from your detective agency?”

  “They followed us from the hotel, not the agency.” Bell had stashed Clyde for safekeeping in a room at the Knickerbocker next door to the Van Dorn bull pen. The hotel was enormous, and the Krieg agents would have no reason to connect Clyde to Van Dorn.

  “How’d they know what hotel?”

  “They probably followed us to the Knickerbocker from Edison’s laboratory. I believe you did mention Thomas Edison while discussing your machine with Krieg?”

  “Sure. I wanted Krieg to know there were others we could go to.”

  “You can bet they’ve been watching the Edison laboratory since the Mauretania landed, waiting for you to show up.”

  Bell locked the door and closed his eyes, recalling nights on the 20th Century when he and Marion would drink champagne in the privacy of adjoining staterooms.

  At Rochester, the telegraph delivered pay dirt.

  GTS TO ATTACHE AT GC.

  Isaac Bell broke into a lupine smile.

  Translated, the wire read that the “gentleman thugs” who had followed him to the train had reported to a diplomatic attaché whom the Van Dorn detectives covering the Bowling Green Office Building had already identified at the German consulate. In other words, Krieg and the German Army knew that he and Clyde were steaming to Chicago. But they did not know that Bell knew.

  He wired the Chicago field office from the next engine stop.

  THE “DRUMMERS’S TABLE” IN THE breakfast room at the exclusive Palmer House Hotel in Chicago was like a private club, but any traveling salesman who could afford the best hotel in town was welcome to sit in. The club brothers—valuable men who worked on commission only and paid their own expenses—had expensive suits, florid complexions, and proud bellies, and they laughed louder and told newer jokes than the founders of steel and slaughterhouse fortunes at the surrounding tables.

  The top salesman for the Locomobile Company of America was telling a new story he had heard two days earlier at the Bridgeport, Connecticut, front office involving accidentally switched department store deliveries of ladies’ gloves and undergarments.

  The representative of the Victor Talking Machine Company interrupted. “Hey, here’s Fritz!”

  “Hello, Fritz! Haven’t seen you in a coon’s age.”

  Men shuffled around to make room for the new arrival, a broad-shouldered, light-on-his feet German in his mid-thirties who traveled America peddling church organs and parlor pianos.

  “Waiter! Waiter! Breakfast for Mr. Wunderlich.”

  “Only time for coffee. I’m catching the train for Los Angeles.”

  Fritz Wunderlich was a funny-looking fellow, with heavy brow ridges, a mighty anvil of a jaw, and long arms like a gorilla, but he had a smile that any drummer would give his eye-teeth for. It opened wide as the prairie and bright as the sun and pulled the customers in like suction from a sinking ship.

  Fritz worked hard as a nailer—“Eight days in the week, thirteen months in the year”—and it paid off, judging by the cut of his funereal black suit, his immaculate linen, his fine homburg, his weighty gold watch chain, and the ten-cent polish on his shoes.

  “Coffee for Fritz!”

  “Mit schlag!”

  “Hear that, waiter? Mit schlag.”

  “Vat is the story I interrupt?”

  The Locomobile drummer started over again, repeating the beginning about the mixed-up ladies’ gloves and undergarments. “So then the lady who received the panties gets a letter from the fellow who sent her his gift of gloves. Here’s what he wrote.”

  Fritz broke in with the last line of the joke: “Whoever sees you in these vill admire my good taste and your delicate looks!”

  The table roared with laughter and choruses of “That’s a good one!”

  “But it’s a brand-new joke,” protested the drummer from Bridgeport. “How’d you hear it? I came direct to Chicago on the Pennsylvania Limited.”

  “I heard it in ’Frisco last veek,” said Fritz.

  “’Frisco? How? Did anyone else at the table ever hear it before?”

  Salesmen shook their heads. “New to me, Jake.”

  The youngest, a Chicago hometown fellow making big money on a line from the Gillette Safety Razor Company, had the explanation: “Electricity is faster than steam.”

  “What the heck do you mean by that?” asked the Locomobile representative.

  “He means,” said Fritz Wunderlich, “vile you ride the train, your joke flies to San Francisco on the telegraph vire.”

  “Who can afford to telegraph jokes?”

  “No one goes to the expense. But late at night when the wires are quiet and the operators have nothing else to do, they click jokes to one another.”

  The Quaker Oats salesman nodded. “They know their pals by their ‘fists.’ One pal clicks anoth
er, city to city, and the jokes get passed along the wire all the way across the continent.”

  “Fritz? How are things in Leipzig?”

  “I am happy to say that America remains a nation of God-fearing, music-loving churchgoers, so things in Leipzig are very vell indeed. At least among the organ builders, danke. Und you, gentlemen? All are vell?”

  “Very well, Fritz. Say, weren’t you trying to sell a new organ to that big church in St. Louis last time? How did that go?”

  “Detroit, if I recall. And thank you, it vent O.K.”

  “They bought the new organ?”

  “Two!”

  “Two organs for one church? Why did they buy two?”

  Wunderlich’s smile warmed the table, and his response was the drummer’s anthem: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  The table roared. Salesmen slapped their thighs. Those indulging in eye-openers signaled the waiters for another round.

  “Must go. Time is money. Ja! I almost forget. I took on a new line. Hymnals. Here, sample pages.” He opened a calfskin satchel decorated in solid brass and passed around beautifully printed single sheets.

  “Onvard, Christian Soldiers,” he sang as he bundled up his things. His beautiful voice, a thrilling lyric tenor, stopped every conversation in the room. “Marching as to Var.”

  The drummers took up the hymn, beating time with coffee cups and highball glasses and waving farewell to good old Fritz, who was running to catch his train.

  “That is one tip-top traveling man,” said the Locomobile representative loud enough for Fritz to hear.

  “‘Eight days in the veek,’” chuckled another as the German disappeared out the door. “‘Thirteen months in the year.’”

  “‘Time is money!’”

  “‘Mit schlag.’”

  “Funny thing, though,” said the Gillette Razor man.

  “What’s that?”

  “I stopped in one of his firms’ piano shops in Akron. They said they couldn’t take any orders, they was all backed up.”