The Thief ib-5

by Clive Cussler

  She had to cross in the dark.

  And she needed a raft.

  She scoured the woods for fallen limbs, which were few and far between as the farmers probably gathered them for firewood. It took two hours to heap up enough fallen wood to make a raft big enough to cling to while she floated in the dark and big enough to carry her rucksack.

  From her rucksack, Pauline took her extra socks. She explored them with her fingers until she found a break in the wool and then unraveled the yarn from which they were knitted, carefully coiling it so it would not tangle. Then she laid the wood out in a square, laid a second layer of branches criss-crossing the first, and lashed the pieces together at each intersection. She ran out of wool and had to unravel another pair of socks before she could finish. When she was done, she had an alarmingly flexible square raft, four feet by four feet, which she knew would never hold her weight but hoped would help her float. Now she had to wait hours for dark. She was hungry. Starving. A rabbit hopped close by. She was holding a last stick she was thinking of adding to her raft. She looked at the rabbit and thought, Not that hungry. She closed her eyes and tried to sleep.

  She awakened cold. The sun had set. Shivering, she took all her clothes off. She stuffed them and her shoes in the rucksack and tied the sack to the raft, positioning the top opening high up in hopes of keeping Detective Curtis’s gun dry. Then she dragged the raft out of the woods and down the sandy river-bank, trying to move it gently so she wouldn’t break any of the yarn lashings.

  Lights from the town reflected on the river’s rippling surface — but at least if the current did push her off course, she would drift away from the town. She waded into dark water. It was cold. She dragged the raft after her. Suddenly it was afloat, light and easily moved. The current nearly yanked it from her hands. She held on tight, took a step into deeper water, and the raft rushed downstream, dragging her with it.

  The lights were a godsend. Without them she would have had no idea where the current was taking her. But they served like the North Star, and she clung to the sight of their fixed point with every circle the current whirled her in. The raft seemed to draw the river’s ire, presenting something for the water to grab. But if she let it go and tried to swim across the river it would take her clothes, her money, and the gun, so she held tight and forced herself to be patient. The current had to ease where the river widened. It had to.

  The lights seemed very far away when she felt the current slacken abruptly, and she judged by their position that the current had pushed her partway across the river, even as it had dragged her downstream. She let go with one arm and began to paddle and kick. The exertion warmed her. Shortly she saw the loom of the far bank, and soon after, when she kicked she hit bottom. She stumbled out of the water, freed her rucksack, dried herself off with her jacket, and put on her clothes, shoes and socks.

  She wasn’t in France yet, but she was close.

  There were stars in the sky. The immense Fort Driant on the hilltop blocked them to the north. To walk west, she kept the fortress to her right. Soon she spotted the real North Star. She kept it to her right and eventually, when the fortress was behind her, she came to a fence in a field, far from any road. She slipped through strands of barbed wire and started walking in the general direction of Paris, steering clear of farmhouse lights and cocking her ears for the train whistles that would lead her to the railroad station at Batilly.

  37

  “Lights!” The director of Hell’s Bells shouted into his megaphone.

  The dynamo roared. The Cooper-Hewitts blazed.

  “Camera!.. Speed!”

  Isaac Bell, clad in what had become his trademark black costume, flying helmet, and goggles, twisted his grip throttle, revving his motorcycle.

  The camera operator cranked to speed.

  The director took one more look. The locomotive was in place on a raised track bed rented in a remote corner of a Southern Pacific freight yard. Smoke and steam gushed from its stack. The engineer leaned his head and shoulders out of its cab. A giant electric fan just outside the camera’s field of focus blew the smoke and steam the length of the locomotive and parted the engineer’s long beard, making it look like the locomotive was speeding down the track.

  Isaac Bell’s motorcycle spewed white smoke from its exhaust pipe. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Marty, the skinny little Imperial Film mechanician who had tweaked the V-twin engine to make smoke, watching intently. The mechanician gave him the thumbs-up and hurried away, his job done.

  Bell twisted his throttle wide open and slapped his clutch lever.

  The motorcycle tore into the lights, its exhaust streaming an arresting picture as Bell raced tight circles around the locomotive, jumping the machine into the air every time he crossed the humped train tracks at forty miles per hour. On his fourth landing his front wheel felt wobbly. The camera operator was still cranking. The lights still blazed. Bell poured on the gas for one last jump.

  The wheel fell off.

  The motorcycle crashed down on its front fork. The rear end left the ground, pivoted straight up, and catapulted Isaac Bell over the handlebars.

  Bell flew through the air — skull first — at the locomotive. He tried to tuck into a somersault to fend off with his boots instead of his head, but he was flying at forty miles an hour. As he hurtled, time seemed to stop for the tall detective. It looked as if suddenly the operator were cranking more slowly, resting his arm, and slowing the film. Bell saw the ground pass lazily under him. He saw the Indian standing on its front end with its back wheel spinning in the air, saw the camera itself, perched on its sturdy tripod, saw the wind fan, saw the company of actors, stagehands, grips, and horse wranglers all watching as if nothing were amiss and men performing stunts on motorcycles flew at locomotives every day.

  The steel behemoth filled his vision, black as night and big as the sky. An instant later, he smashed into it. A startlingly sharp pain in his ankle told him that his somersault had saved his skull. He bounced off the boiler, fell to the rail bed, and tumbled down the ballast embankment, raking arms and legs on the crushed stone.

  Sprawled, dazed, in the dirt, he heard people yelling.

  He sat up to put everyone’s mind at ease. Everything hurt, but he thought he would be able to stand in another minute or two.

  The yelling stopped — except for the director who was still calling through his megaphone, “That was terrific! Let’s do it one more time!”

  Isaac Bell climbed painfully to his feet, walked unsteadily to the wrecked motorcycle, knelt down, and inspected it.

  He felt in his jacket that his Browning was still in its holster and moving freely. Thanks to his lightning-fast reflexes, he had just survived the Los Angeles version of the Cincinnati, Chicago, and Jersey City attacks on Van Dorns who shopped in the Leipzig Organ stores.

  “Hurry it up,” the director shouted. “We’re losing the light.”

  “Soon as you get me a new machine,” said Bell as he limped off in search of the mechanician who had tuned his motorcycle.

  The Hell’s Bells company had established a temporary machine shop in an abandoned caboose on a rusty siding. Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he mounted the ramp the mechanician had laid to wheel the motorcycle up and down, and entered the gloomy interior in a sudden rush.

  “Marty,” he asked in a low and dangerous voice. “Tell me who took a hacksaw to my front axle.”

  Marty did not reply.

  Bell found him on the floor behind his workbench, his eyes bulging wide open, fixed intently on nothing. Bell lighted a lamp and looked at him closely. The mechanician had been garroted with a wire that had cut his head half off his neck. It looked like the Acrobat had silenced his accomplice with the same thin cable he had wrapped around the neck of the Golden State Limited express messenger he had murdered in New Mexico. It was also the same cable he had used to vault over the locomotive and to “fly” from the Mauretania’s boat deck.

  Isaac Bell spoke out loud, ad
dressing the Acrobat as if the murderer were still in the caboose.

  “I am worrying you,” he said, reviewing in his mind the many strands of his investigation and wondering which had alarmed the murderer. “I am making you afraid.”

  The Acrobat apparently saw those strands as forming a net. Which ones? Bell wondered. Which of the many strands had spooked him?

  Grady Forrer was pursuing a Hamburg Bankhaus — Imperial Film connection. Andrew Rubenoff had connected Hamburg Bankhaus to Leipzig Organ & Piano and was now hunting Imperial’s foreign bankers. The Van Dorn field offices had exposed Leipzig Organ for a sham. Bell himself had tracked Leipzig’s Fritz Wunderlich to Denver, and now the men watching the consulates had the German’s likeness. Joe Van Dorn was working his Washington, D.C., contacts to establish German consulate connections. Larry Saunders was probing City Hall for the Imperial Building floor plans. Texas Walt had covered Imperial Protection and was currently employed as an extra inside Imperial’s penthouse studios.

  If the Acrobat had ordered the murder of Art Curtis in Berlin, then he knew the Van Dorns were after him. The attacks on the Van Dorn apprentices confirmed that. But today’s sabotage of Bell’s motorcycle indicated that the Acrobat had penetrated Bell’s “insurance man” disguise, too, and saw him either as aligned with the Van Dorn Detective Agency or an actual agent of the outfit.

  “I still don’t know what you’re up to. But I’m closer than I think.”

  Then it struck Bell hard. If — as seemed likely, though not close to proven — Imperial Film was mixed up with the Acrobat and Krieg Rüstungswerk, then Marion’s job at Imperial was no coincidence, but rather the Acrobat’s cold-blooded ace in the hole.

  * * *

  Bell rode the Angels Flight funicular railway two blocks up a steep grade to the residential neighborhood on top of Bunker Hill, where he had rented a mansion after Marion took the job Irina Viorets had offered at Imperial. Concealing his limp, he climbed the back steps and bounded into the kitchen.

  “Just in time for our first married home-cooked meal,” Marion greeted him. “Oh, Isaac, what a wonderful day this is.” She hugged him hard and kissed him. “Would you like a cocktail for whatever you’ve done to your poor foot?”

  “I’ll mix them,” Bell smiled, ruefully, reminded forcibly that if women were more observant than men, then women who made movies missed absolutely nothing.

  Marion’s eyes were ablaze with joy. “It’s like I died and went to heaven. Irina gives me anything I want — locomotives, Pullmans, mule trains, Conestoga wagons. She even got me Billy Bitzer to operate the camera.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “Billy brought Dave Davidson, his number one assistant, to operate the second camera. So I have the two best operators in the business. And to top it all off — do you remember Franklin Mowery?”

  “The old bridge builder. Of course. He worked for Lillian’s father.”

  “Franklin retired out here. I invited him to where we’re taking pictures to answer my research questions. He’s a walking encyclopedia of railroad history, having been there for most of it. Fabulous stories. And here’s the best part: Dave Davidson has a portrait painter’s eye; he took one look at Franklin’s granite profile and, without saying a word, just started cranking the camera, pretending he was adjusting it or something. Later he showed me twenty feet of Franklin Mowery. The camera absolutely loves him. So I’m putting him in the picture— Oh, Isaac, I’m so excited!”

  “Indeed,” said Bell, wondering, How can I ask her to leave this job on a suspicion?

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “I warned Franklin Mowery that you are working in disguise and not to reveal that you’re a Van Dorn.”

  “It probably doesn’t matter by now.”

  “Is that what happened to your foot?”

  “My ankle got off easy compared to my motorcycle,” said Bell, and told her what had happened. Then he laid out the strands of the Talking Pictures investigation one by one, from Grady and Rubenoff to his and Texas Walt’s fruitless spying inside Imperial. “Having failed to kill you,” asked Marion, “what do you suppose he’ll try next?”

  Isaac Bell looked his beautiful wife in the eye. “You tell me.”

  “I know what you’re thinking, Isaac. You’re worried that I’m somehow in danger because I’m ‘coincidentally’ taking pictures for the same company where you installed Clyde Lynds, and now you are having second thoughts.”

  “I couldn’t put it better myself,” said Bell. “Something is amiss at Imperial.”

  “But I can’t believe that Irina would be part of anything that would hurt me. Besides, you don’t know that Imperial isn’t on the up-and-up.”

  “Imperial’s finances are deeply suspect.”

  “Everyone’s business finances in moving pictures are deeply suspect. It’s a brand-new business. Nobody knows what’s really going on. We’re all making it up as we go along. That’s why the bankers lend money for only one picture at a time.”

  “Are you sure you’ve noticed nothing unusual while taking pictures for The Iron Horse? Nothing out of the ordinary? Nothing different than you’d expect or have seen on other jobs?”

  Marion pondered his question. “Only one thing. There’s a film-stock shortage. Everyone in Los Angeles is talking about it. For a month or so, film’s become hard to get and very expensive. Yesterday, Billy and Dave came to me with long faces. Their stock was old. It smelled awful, and they said the pictures would be terribly overexposed. I telephoned Irina. In less than one hour a truck raced up with more than we could use of the most pristine stock you could ask for. It was precisely perforated and smelled fresh as a meadow. You should have seen Billy and Dave rubbing their hands like Silas Marner counting his gold.”

  “Where did it come from?”

  “It was Eastman Kodak stock, straight from the factory.”

  “But Imperial is independent. Eastman made a deal with the Edison Trust: they won’t sell to independents.”

  “Where they got it, I don’t know. But for Imperial, at least, there is no shortage.” Anyway, if you’ll limp into the dining room, I’ll bring dinner.”

  “What is our first married home-cooked meal?”

  “The same as our first-ever home-cooked meal. Do you remember what I made you?”

  “I remember you invited me to dinner and cooked pot roast and vegetables. It was splendid, though I have a vague memory that we got sidetracked before dessert— Marion, I’ll bet you’ve some cowboys in The Iron Horse.”

  “Bunkhousesful.”

  “Got room for one more?”

  “Texas Walt?”

  Bell nodded. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “If that will make you feel better, of course.”

  “I would feel much better knowing my good friend the deadly gunfighter was looking out for you.”

  Marion smiled. “Walt may not be a deadly gunfighter much longer. Movie people are all talking about ‘the tall Texan’ playing cowboy parts. Some people think he could be a star.”

  “Please don’t turn his head until we’re sure you’re safe and sound.”

  38

  Pauline Grandzau had been memorizing the St. Germain section of her Baedeker on the train when suddenly she had to run from a gendarme who demanded her papers at a station stop. The last few miles of what should have been a twelve-hour train ride stretched to another full day clinging to the underside of a slow-moving coal car that finally dumped her near an open-air market in Paris in the rain. Thanks to the tourist guidebook and the foldout map, she found the Rue du Bac as night fell, climbed a steep flight of stairs, and staggered into the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Paris field office, exhausted, wet, and hungry.

  An enormous man seated next to a bright light asked, “What do you want here, miss?”

  At least that’s what it sounded like. He spoke French. She did not. But she saw in his eyes what he assumed: a street urchin with dirty hands and face and stringy braids and a
snuffling nose had sneaked into the building either begging for money or running from the police.

  He asked her again. The light was so bright it was blinding her. He stood up, and the entire room, which had a linoleum floor and a desk and a chair and an interior door that led somewhere, started spinning.

  “Is this the Van Dorn Detective Agency Paris field office?” she asked.

  He looked surprised she spoke English.

  “Yes, it is,” he replied with an accent like Detective Curtis’s. “What can I do for you, little lady?”

  “Are you Detective Horace Bronson?”

  “I’m Bronson. Who are you?”

  Pauline Grandzau pulled herself up to her full five feet two inches. “Apprentice Van Dorn detective Pauline Grandzau reporting from Berlin.”

  She tried to salute, but her arm was heavy, and her legs were rubbery. She saw the linoleum rushing at her face. Bronson moved with surprising speed and caught her.

  * * *

  “Cable from the Paris field office, Mr. Bell.”

  It was from Bronson.

  It was long and detailed.

  Isaac Bell read it twice.

  A hunter’s gleam began burning in his eyes. A smile of grim satisfaction lighted his stern face like the sun glancing off a frozen river, and he vowed to Fritz Wunderlich, to Krieg Rüstungswerk, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and especially to Imperial Army General Major Christian Semmler that Van Dorn Detective Arthur Curtis had not died in vain.

  Book Four: Lights! Camera! Speed!

  39

  “Telegrapher! On the jump!” Isaac Bell summoned the man who sent and received Morse code on the field office’s private telegraph.