The Thief (25 page)

“Perhaps you could convince them that the building is safe.”

“My directors remember what happened on the
Mauretania.
Professor Beiderbecke was killed. And the machine was destroyed in a fire. You can imagine why they insist that we protect our investment.”

“I understand,” she said reluctantly.

“I hope this wouldn’t cause trouble with the Artists Syndicate.”

“I told you. I will contend with the syndicate. Let us shake hands on our deal.”

On his way back to Van Dorn headquarters, Isaac Bell rented a house big enough for Clyde Lynds to share with Lipsher and two more bruisers from Protective Services.

I
RINA
V
IORETS LOCKED THE DOOR
to her office in the Imperial Film Manufacturing Building and lifted a leather-bound copy of the novel
War and Peace
from her bookcase, causing the case to slide open on a private stairway. She climbed two flights to a suite hidden on the ninth floor. Its windows were heavily draped, making it cool and dark. To a northern European, it offered welcome refuge from the Los Angeles heat and sunlight.

The man waiting for her report sat behind his desk with his face in shadow.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Bell insists on posting his own guards.”

G
ENERAL
C
HRISTIAN
S
EMMLER LAUGHED AT
Irina Viorets.

“Of course he wants his own guards. He’s cautious. What do you expect of an ‘insurance man’?”

“How would I know what to expect? I am not a soldier, only an artist.”

“You are ‘only an artist’ like a cobra is only a snake.”

“You have no right to mock me. I have done exactly as you wanted.”

“And will continue to.” Christian Semmler watched her gather her courage, then brutally cut the legs out from under her. “No! To answer the question forming on your lovely lips, I have no message for you from your fiancé.”

“You promised,” she said bleakly.

“I promised I would
try
to get a message.”

He watched tears fill her eyes. When he took mercy upon her, it was not really mercy, but merely another way to make her toe the line. “I can tell you that he is still safe in Germany.”

“In prison.”

“If the czar’s secret police were hunting
me
,” Christian Semmler replied with withering disdain for her foolish lover, “I would rather be in a German prison than out in the open. The Okhrana are as determined as they are cruel. So if it puts your mind at rest, remember that your young man is safe in an Imperial German Army prison deep inside Prussia. And no one enters that particular prison without my express permission. Or leaves it, for that matter.”

“May I go now?” she said, rising with strength and dignity.

She was a strong woman, Semmler had to admit. He had chosen well. Better than she had. The fool she was engaged to marry, one of her benighted nation’s thousands of impoverished princes, had bungled a quixotic attack on the czar in the name of some murky Russian amalgam of democracy and socialism. Which gave Semmler all the leverage he needed to make Irina Viorets serve the Donar Plan.

“You may go,” he said. “Get Lynds established in his laboratory immediately and do everything necessary to make him productive.”

“I
SAAC!
W
HAT ARE YOU DOING IN
L
OS ANGELES?”

“Hoping you’ll help me, Uncle Andy.”

“Don’t call me Uncle Andy. It makes me feel old, and I am not your uncle.”

Bell regarded the impish-looking Andrew Rubenoff with affection. “You’re my father’s special friend. That makes you uncle enough for me.”

Rubenoff was a dark-haired man in his forties, who wore an impeccably tailored suit of worsted wool and, on his head, a disc of velvet, the yarmulke of the Hebrew faith. A banker like Bell’s father, he was shifting his assets out of coal, steel, and railroads into the three newest industries in America: automobiles, flying machines, and moving pictures. Colleagues who thought him lunatic before he doubled his fortune were further appalled when he pulled up stakes and moved from New York City to Los Angeles. As Bell’s father had put it, “They act as if President Taft had moved the White House to Tokyo. The fact is, Andrew emigrated from Russia to New York to San Francisco and back to New York. There is a bit of the gypsy in the fellow.”

“I need your help,” said Bell. “How would you like to be a detective?”

“I would rather play piano in a Barbary Coast bordello.”

“You’ve already done that, Uncle Andy. I am offering a new experience.”

Andrew Rubenoff gestured out the windows of his hilltop mansion, indicating his pleasure with the views of the mountains to the north and east, the flat coastal plain stretching to the blue Pacific Ocean, and the hazy outline of Catalina Island. Within his lavish office, fine furniture shared the space with oil paintings by the radical artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan and his beloved Mason & Hamlin grand piano, which had traveled with him from New York. “I am enjoying this experience, thank you very much. Will you have tea, Isaac?”

A handsome male secretary brought tea in tall glasses. In New York, Bell recalled, the secetary had been matronly. Rubenoff sipped his tea through a cube of sugar. Bell followed suit, burning his tongue as usual.

“What have you heard about the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company?”

“I heard this morning that Imperial is dropping the word ‘Manufacturing’ from its name. All the picture firms are doing it. It’s dawned on them that movies are more interesting than anvil foundries. And far more complicated.”

“Before this morning, what had you heard about Imperial?”

“Big and rich.”

“But they just got started. They built an expensive building but have just begun distributing films. How did they get so big and rich?”

“Artists Syndicate.”

“Who are Artists Syndicate’s investors?”

“Finally, you ask an interesting question. But a hard one.”

“You’re the man to answer hard questions,” Bell said bluntly.

“Do you know anything about the movies?” Rubenoff asked. “Other than being married to a woman who makes them.”

“She’s taught me a lot,” said Bell. “And by the way, thank you again for the silver service. Next time we have thirty-six to dinner we’ll put it to good use.”

Rubenoff waved his thanks aside. “Ah, the least—you see, Isaac, I find this disturbing. I don’t
know
who invests in Artists Syndicate and Imperial Film.”

“Disturbing?”

“I should know. They’re potentially my competitors—if not, one day, partners. I should know if I am up against a bunch of furriers from Manhattan, a combine of distributors from Springfield, or a furniture magnate from Ohio who knows a young lady who should be a star, clothiers from Philadelphia, or glovers from Gloversville, or Frenchmen fronting for Pathé. Or English lords snapping up yet another American enterprise. Why is Artists Syndicate so anxious to remain private?”

Bell nodded uncomfortably. The banker was confirming his own worry that he had he steered Clyde Lynds in a potentially dangerous direction. While Grady Forrer had found State Department people who confirmed Irina Viorets’s story of spending her childhood with American embassy children, Van Dorn Research had made no headway on the question of who paid the bills for Imperial Film.

Nor could he forget that Arthur Curtis had cabled early on that Krieg Rüstungswerk had an “appetite” for unrelated businesses.

“Seriously, Andrew. Can I persuade you to play detective for me?”

Rubenoff returned a puckish smile. “Will I have to bear sidearms?”

“Not unless you’re frightened by the sight of a beautiful woman.”

A
RTHUR
C
URTIS OPENED AN
envelope containing an enciphered cablegram from Isaac Bell. Pauline read it aloud over his shoulder, decoding it faster than he could. It was apparent by now that she had a true photographic memory for both sights and sounds.

NEED MORE ON KRIEG RUSTUNGSWERK.

NEED KRIEG MAN IN AMERICA.