The Thief ib-5

by Clive Cussler

  Isaac Bell turned to the window and stared down at busy First Street, barely seeing the parade of streetcars, autos, trucks, wagons, and a squad of helmeted police on bicycles.

  Joe Van Dorn pushed into the office without knocking.

  “I just heard. I’m sorry, Isaac. I know you liked him.”

  Bell said, “The evidence of the Acrobat’s ruthlessness was right before my eyes. I saw him throw his own man into the sea to conceal his identity. What made me think he wouldn’t murder Art Curtis for the same reason?”

  Joseph Van Dorn shook his head emphatically. “I saw Art once in a gunfight. Most men lose perspective when the lead starts flying. Not Art.”

  “I appreciate the thought, Joe. I know Art could handle himself. Nonetheless, he was working for me.”

  Van Dorn said, “You are, of course, authorized to pull out all stops until we get who did it.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Until Bronson learns otherwise in Berlin, we have to presume he was gunned down by Krieg.”

  “Or the German Army.”

  “Don’t you wonder what he learned that got him killed?” Bronson marveled.

  “He learned a name,” said Bell.

  “How do you know?”

  “He cabled me the day before yesterday asking for more money. He said we’d have the money back — or a name — in two days.”

  “What did you cable back?”

  “‘Blank check.’”

  “Well, if he got the name, he took it to his grave.”

  “I’m afraid so,” said Bell.

  “Now what?” asked Van Dorn.

  “Short of a lucky break walking in that door,” said Isaac Bell, “I’m starting from scratch.”

  There was a knock at the door. The front-desk man, wearing a scarlet vest and matching shoulder holster, called, “Mr. Bell — Oh, there you are, Mr. Van Dorn. Police chief’s phoning from Levy’s Cafe, wondering what happened to you?”

  Van Dorn tugged out his watch. “Telephone the restaurant I’ll be there in ten minutes. Lunch with the chief,” he explained to Bell and rushed out, saying, “Then I’m on the Limited to Chicago. Keep me posted.”

  “Mr. Bell, there’s a fellow to see you. Hebrew gent. Has one of those funny caps on his head.”

  “It’s called a yarmulke. Send him in.”

  Andrew Rubenoff marched in smiling, but when he saw Bell standing by the window, his smile faded. “You do not look well, Isaac.”

  “Lost a friend,” Bell answered tersely. “What have you learned?”

  The newly minted film-manufacturing banker went straight to the purpose of his visit.

  “To my great relief,” he said, “the so-called Artists Syndicate does not exist.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that a syndicate that I knew nothing about, but thought I should, is a sham. It exists only on paper. Its supposed Wall Street investors are ghosts.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Positive.”

  “Then who paid for Imperial Film’s ten-story building?”

  “I don’t know yet. But it was not the Artists Syndicate.”

  “Someone funneled a lot of money into Imperial.”

  “To be sure. But so far Wall Street has greeted my questions about who that someone might be with a wall of silence.”

  “Are the Wall Streeters protecting Imperial?”

  “No, no, no. Imperial’s money almost certainly comes from someplace other than Wall Street. Abroad, I suspect.”

  “Germany?”

  “Perhaps. But English bankers are our biggest source of foreign funds. They invest in American railroads and ranches and ore mines. Why not moving pictures?”

  “And the Germans?”

  “Obviously, your first interest in this is the Germans. We shall see. Not to worry, I’m just getting started.”

  “I’ll have our Research people nose around that, too.”

  Rubenoff smiled modestly. “I’m sure that the Van Dorn Research department will be… helpful.”

  “How did you find out so quickly that there’s no Wall Street interests in the Artists Syndicate?”

  “Isaac! You are talking to Andrew Rubenoff. When the Messiah comes, he’ll ask me to recommend a stockbroker.” He sobered quickly. “I don’t mean to offer false hope. Wall Street was easy. Abroad is much more complicated. I’ve already started, but I can’t deliver such fast results.”

  Bell heard the clatter of a troop of horsemen in the street, not a usual sound in downtown Los Angeles. He looked down from the window again. Twenty actors dressed as cowboys in white hats and bare-chested, war-painted Indians were trotting by, bound, it appeared, for picture taking in nearby Elysian Park. He watched them pass, his brow furrowed in thought. Then he picked up the Kellogg intercommunicating telephone.

  “Send an apprentice.”

  One came instantly. It was the kid wearing the lavender bow tie. “Mike, transmit a wire on the private line to Texas Walt Hatfield. The Houston office will know where to find him.”

  The kid whipped out pad and pencil. “Yes, sir, Mr. Bell. What’s the message?”

  COME LA.

  SEEK EMPLOYMENT WITH IMPERIAL FILM AS COWBOY PLAYER.

  “Go on, Mike. That’s all.”

  “Should I sign it ‘BELL’?”

  “Sign it ‘ISAAC.’”

  Mike Adams ran out.

  Andrew Rubenoff raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  Bell said, “Walt Hatfield rode with the Texas Rangers before he joined Van Dorn. He’ll make a believable cowboy looking for work as an extra in Wild West dramas. Heck, they might make him a Western star. He looks like he was carved from cactus.”

  “I presume that Texas Walt is an old friend?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Sometimes we need an old friend on the premises.”

  “Maybe so. But what I need most is a crackerjack detective inside Imperial Film.”

  “What can one detective do? Imperial is an enormous company with four hundred hands.”

  “He won’t be the only one.”

  * * *

  Bell wired Grady Forrer on the Van Dorn private telegraph, inquiring what progress he had made with Imperial’s bankers.

  The redoubtable head of the Research department wired back:

  MY BOYS ARE DIGGING DEEP.

  REMEMBER BANKS LIKE SECRETS.

  HOPEFUL MORE SOON.

  SORRY ABOUT ART. GOOD MAN.

  Isaac Bell replied:

  CONCENTRATE GERMAN OVERSEAS

  MERCHANT BANKS WITH ARMY TIES.

  LOOK FOR KRIEG-IMPERIAL

  CONNECTION.

  32

  Pauline Grandzau woke up in a haystack with four tines of a pitchfork inches from her face. The steel was shiny from use and recently sharpened. Three of the tines tapered to a needle point. The fourth was bent as if the farmer had accidently hit a rock shortly before finding her in his hay.

  She asked herself, What is the best thing possible at this moment?

  The best thing was that her disguise worked. She didn’t look like a girl. She looked like a boy, a tough Berlin factory boy in a cloth cap and a rough woolen jacket and trousers. She had traded her dress, her coat, and her beautiful hat last night with her friend Hilda for Hilda’s brother’s things. Five groschen from the marks Detective Curtis gave her had bought the brother’s rucksack. It held dry socks, a wool jumper, an apple and biscuits (which she had already eaten), a Strand magazine, a map of France and Baedeker’s Paris and Its Environs purchased in a railroad station, and Detective Curtis’s gun.

  Best of all, her disguise worked so well that the farmer was frightened. The haystack was behind his barn. There was a dense wood across the field, and beyond the wood were the railroad tracks, which brought tramps and gypsies and troublemakers from Berlin.

  Pauline asked herself, now what? What would Sherlock Holmes do when his disguise worked? She forced her voice low and in guttural tone
s asked, “Why are you pointing your pitchfork at me?”

  “Who are you?” asked the farmer. What would Sherlock Holmes do? The answer: Sherlock Holmes would observe everything, not just the steel tines in her face. The farmer was young, she saw. This was not the farmer, but the farmer’s son.

  “Who are you?” she demanded. “Why are you pointing that at me? What kind of German are you? Have you no shame?”

  The boy blinked. “But what are you doing here?”

  “I won’t tell until you move that thing away from my face.”

  He lowered the pitchfork.

  Pauline climbed to her feet, taking her time, observing. His legs were short. Hers were longer. She could run faster. She saw a bulge in his jacket and white cloth poking from his pocket. It was a bundle a mother would pack. “I’m hungry,” she growled. “Do you have food?”

  He pulled it from his pocket, and she smelled ham. It was wrapped in a piece of buttered bread. She bit hungrily into it, two enormous, delicious bites.

  “Hans!” a man shouted. “What are you doing there?”

  It could only be Hans’s father. And he would not be fooled.

  She ran for the wood through which she had felt her way from the railroad. It was still dark, and the train she was clinging to had suddenly rumbled through a switch and stopped on a siding, shorn of its locomotive, which then had steamed back toward Berlin.

  She heard the farmers shouting behind her. “Catch him!” the father yelled. Hans was scampering as fast as he could on his short legs, and the father was limping on a cane.

  Ahead through the trees Pauline saw the siding and on it the single railcar on which she had escaped from Berlin, but which the train had dropped. She ran past it and jumped onto the main line. Then she ran on the crossties until her legs ached and her lungs were burning and the blood was pounding in her head so loudly that she couldn’t hear the speeding train behind her.

  * * *

  In Griffith Park, a wilderness in the hills north of Los Angeles, Jay Tarses complained to the petite dark-haired woman who served as his mistress and business manager, “I want to go back to New Jersey.”

  “Jersey? Are you nuts? Best thing we ever did was beat it to California. It’s beautiful here. The sun has shined all day. You’ve already exposed eight hundred feet of film. You’ll finish the whole picture before dark. And tomorrow you’ll start a Western drama.”

  “This is the worst day of my life.”

  The City of Los Angeles had just fined Tarses twenty-five dollars because gunfire between his French Foreign Legionnaires and his Arabs abducting his heroine had frightened the elk in Griffith Park. Then his camels had stampeded a herd of horses that were not used to their smell. And now, just as his wranglers had finished rounding up the horses so he could start taking pictures again, a squad of Edison thugs piled out of a Marmon auto, itching to pull out their blackjacks if he wasn’t taking pictures with an overpriced Edison camera.

  The head thug, a rangy street fighter with bony fists and a Hoboken accent, saw at a glance that he wasn’t.

  “You think California’s so far from Joisey Mr. Edison don’t notice?”

  “Let the girls go,” Tarses told him. “I’ll take my lumps.”

  “You’re all takin’ yer lumps this time. We’re setting an example for the rest of youse independents.”

  He grabbed Tarses by his lapels and held him stiff-armed for the first blow.

  “Hold it!” someone shouted.

  If Jay Tarses had any hope he’d been rescued, the sight of chief Edison bull Joe McCoy swaggering out of the woods disabused him of that. McCoy, the meanest Edison detective Tarses had even met, reported directly to Mr. Dyer, Edison’s lawyer, who enforced Trust restrictions with an iron hand. McCoy had a coal trimmer’s shoulders and less mercy in his face than a cinder block.

  “Mr. Tarses,” he snickered. “I would have recognized your picture taking anywhere by the camel stink.”

  “Any chance of buying you off?” asked Tarses, his eyes locked on McCoy’s blackjack.

  McCoy raised a mighty arm. The blackjack whistled as it tore down from the sky, and the Edison thug holding Tarses by the lapels went flying sideways into a camel and fell on his face. Tarses was vaguely aware that he himself was still on his feet and nothing hurt. Aside from that, he had no idea what was going on.

  McCoy handed him a calling card. Through a smudge of blood from McCoy’s blackjack, Jay Tarses read:

  IMPERIAL FILM PROTECTION SERVICE

  “THE INDEPENDENT’S FRIEND”

  “Telephone number’s on the back. Operator on-station night and day.”

  “You don’t work for Edison anymore?” Tarses asked.

  “Didn’t you hear?” McCoy grinned. “I’m a trustbuster. Just like Teddy Roosevelt.”

  “What the hell is Imperial Film Protection Service?”

  “‘The Independent’s Friend.’ Can’t you read?”

  “Friend? I’ll bet. What’s it going to cost me?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on, Joe. What’s the big idea?”

  McCoy threw a heavy arm around Tarses’s shoulder. “Jay, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. And stop asking stupid questions.”

  Tarses knew he had his share of flaws, but stupidity wasn’t one of them, and he said, “Thanks, Joe.”

  “Don’t thank me. Thank Imperial. Well, sun’s in the sky. Bet you’re itching to get back to work— Say, what’s your picture called?”

  “The Imperial Horseman.”

  McCoy tipped his hat to Tarses’s pretty business manager, slung the unconscious thug over his shoulder, and carried him away.

  Tarses shouted for his players to climb on their animals.

  “Camera…”

  That evening, when Tarses was paying off his extras, the one last in line drawled, “Who were those fellers pushing you around?”

  Tarses was about to tell him to mind his own business when he recognized the extra as the tall, barbed-wire-thin cowboy with whom his costume girl had traded a French Foreign Legionnaire kepi for the cowboy’s Stetson, with a promise to trade hats again over a glass of wine after work. Tarses had noticed him sitting in his saddle as if born to it, and now, close up, he saw angular bone structure in the cowboy’s face that looked ferocious in the light of the setting sun.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Tex.”

  “Come back tomorrow, Tex. I’ll be taking pictures for a Wild West drama.”

  * * *

  Texas Walt Hatfield sauntered into the Los Angeles field office, cast a withering glance at the front-desk man’s fancy duds, and shook howdy with Isaac Bell.

  Bell felt the tall Texan flinch.

  “What happened to your hand?”

  “Busted it falling off my damned horse. Camel spooked him.”

  Bell was astonished. There was no finer horseman in the West. “When’s the last time you fell off a horse?”

  “Unless you mean shot off,” Texas Walt drawled, “Ah was three years old, and he hadn’t been broke yet.”

  “Did you catch up with Joe McCoy?”

  “Yup. Like Tarses told me, used to thug for Edison — McCoy called it ‘engaged by Mr. Edison’s legal department.’ Quit or got fired, Ah couldn’t tell, came out here, and hired on with Imperial Protection. McCoy claims they’ve been whupping the heck out of the Edison Boys.”

  “I just saw a bunged-up bunch headed back East on the train,” Bell said. “McCoy have any inkling what Imperial Protection’s all about?”

  “He’s not a talkative feller. Though near as Ah can gather, he himself’s on the level.”

  “Are they?”

  “All I know is they ain’t asking for protection money. But if it’s not a racket, why is Imperial taking the independents’ side in the Trust war? Kindness of their hearts?”

  Bell said, “I suspect that the truth is printed on their calling card.”

  “‘The Independent’s Friend?’ How you f
igure that?”

  “If an outfit that distributes and exhibits moving pictures befriends all the independents, they can rent out a lot of films.”

  Texas Walt shoved his Stetson back on his head. “Like the cattle broker buying up every herd at the railhead.”

  “And the meat packer in Chicago buying by the trainload. The Independent’s Friend could control the distribution and exhibition of all the independents’ moving pictures.”

  “You’re sure they’re the same Imperial as the outfit you’re tracking?”

  Bell nodded emphatically. “Larry Saunders got the Los Angeles exchange to trace their telephone number back to the Imperial Building.”

  “And you’re sure Imperial Film’s a blind for something else?” Hatfield asked.

  “That’s what we’re going to find out,” said Isaac Bell.

  “Reckon you want me to continue riding for Tarses?”

  “No. I want you inside that building. They’ve got cinematography studio stages up in the penthouse. Audition at Imperial to get a job acting inside.”

  “Acting jobs ain’t all that easy to tie on to, Isaac. There’s men and women lined up everywhere they’re taking pictures.”

  “You have a leg up, Walt. You look like you should be in pictures. And you’ve already worked in a couple. Get inside Imperial first thing tomorrow.”

  Texas Walt hesitated.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Bell.

  “Well, I don’t want to leave Tarses in a lurch.”

  “Tarses? What does Tarses have to do with the Talking Pictures case?”

  Texas Walt scuffed the carpet with his boot. “Fact is, he’s talking about me playing a bigger part.”

  “Why don’t you ask Mr. Van Dorn for a leave of absence?” Bell asked in a quiet, silky manner that Texas Walt Hatfield misinterpreted.

  “Think the boss would go for that?”

  “After we crack the case.”

  Texas Walt worked a deep groove into the carpet. “Sorry, Isaac. I didn’t mean to say I won’t take home the gal I brung to the dance.”

  “Appreciate it,” said Bell. “Here’s where we stand: I’ve got the boys watching Clyde on the eighth floor of the Imperial Building; I want you up top in the roof studios. I’ve seen Mademoiselle Viorets’s office on the seventh, and I’m heading now to the fourth floor where they do the recordings.”