The Thief Page 11

  “I am deadly sure,” Reuter replied. “For all we know, they are listening in on this telephone wire.”

  “They would have to be soothsayers to listen in on telephone kiosks in post offices on opposite sides of Berlin.”

  “I would not be surprised if they were.”

  “I have an idea,” said Arthur Curtis.

  “No more ideas,” said Hans Reuter, and broke the connection.

  Arthur Curtis worked his way slowly back to the office. Redoubling ordinary habits of caution, watching reflections in shop windows, changing trams repeatedly, stepping in and out of bakeries and cafes, he did not enter his building until he was one hundred percent sure that he was not being observed.

  Pauline was sitting behind his desk, reading his mail.

  “You should be home in bed. It’s late.”

  “I’m not tired.”

  “Don’t you have school tomorrow?”

  “My mother’s friend is visiting. He’ll be gone at midnight.”

  “Have you had your supper?”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Here.” He handed Pauline a sweet bun he had picked up just in case and watched her tear into it like a timber wolf taking down a mule deer. And then the darnedest thing happened. Art Curtis was suddenly scared. Not for himself but for her, the silly kid hanging around. What if they did catch up with him and she was here? What would they do to her when they got done doing him?

  “‘FLICKERS’ HAVE BEEN AROUND for years,” Joseph Van Dorn protested.

  Issac Bell had just concluded the story of Beiderbecke and Clyde Lynds and their Talking Pictures machine with the recommendation that the Van Dorn agency take up the job of protecting Lynds while he built a new machine in exchange for a share of the profits.

  “Moving pictures won’t be mere ‘flickers’ anymore when sound makes them so visceral, they play on the emotions. The Talking Pictures machine is revolutionary.”

  Van Dorn shrugged. “I attended a talking picture once in Cincinnati. They called it a ‘Kinetophone’ or some such, and the advertisement claimed that the songs followed in perfect unison the movements of the actors’ lips. But in fact the lips and words were at sixes and sevens, making it impossible to follow the story.”

  “Synchronization is the crux of the problem.”

  “Besides, there was the usual unnatural and discordant mechanical grate you hear from talking machines.”

  “Amplification is another problem Lynds and Beiderbecke claim to have solved.”

  “I’ll say it’s a problem. I attempted to hear an Actologue troupe in Detroit. One poor player had a feeble voice that was unable to penetrate the picture screen. Every word he uttered disappeared straight up into the fly loft.”

  “You bought tickets,” said Bell. “You paid money to see these various attempts at talking pictures. That proves there’s a demand for this kind of attraction. But the way they’re going about is too expensive. Marion says a typical Actologue company consists of at least eight people, including the machine operator, piano player, singers, manager, and actors to imitate the parts behind the screen. That same film shown by Lynds’s Talking Pictures machines could be distributed to a thousand theaters at once. Film reels don’t eat, don’t sleep, and don’t demand a salary. It would be like a frying pan factory that doesn’t need to pay workmen because machines make frying pans automatically.”

  Van Dorn, as hard-nosed and tightfisted a businessman as Bell had ever met, smiled at the thought of not having to pay labor. “You are very persuasive, Isaac. When you put it that way, you make me think he’s got something worth protecting.”

  The savvy founder of the detective agency stroked his chin, ruminated silently, and fiddled absently with his candlestick telephone and his speaking tube. “But Professor Beiderbecke is dead. Can Clyde Lynds reproduce Talking Pictures without him?”

  “Beiderbecke claimed Clyde is smart as a whip. The German Army believes he can. So do the German consuls.”

  “I find it hard to believe the kaiser’s army is fighting this hard just for the money.”

  “I agree,” said Bell. “They’re not businessmen. They’re soldiers. There’s something more to this.”

  Van Dorn nodded vigorously. “Find out what,” he ordered. “Continue to watch developments at the New York consulate. I’ll nose around here in Washington.”

  “Why not invite the German ambassador to lunch at the Cosmos Club?”

  “I’ll do it tomorrow. But don’t get your hopes up. His Excellency is not likely to be informed of such a vicious operation, particularly if it’s a military scheme.”

  “Will you give Art a free hand in Berlin?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” Van Dorn growled, reluctantly.

  “I’d rather he didn’t waste time clearing each payment through you.”

  Van Dorn grimaced. “O.K., dammit. You’re authorized to spend what you need.”

  “Don’t worry. Art won’t squander a penny.”

  “Just remember that while you’re trying to figure out what the Germans are up to, our valuable young genius is already in their crosshairs. Keep him safe— Where is he right now?”

  “Lipsher’s got him.”

  “Who’s Lipsher?”

  “The PS boy who guarded Block on the ship. Turned out to be a good man in a pinch.” Bell stood up. “If you will clear it with Dagget’s managing director, I’ll continue under my insurance executive guise and spread the word that Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock is investing in Lynds’s invention. That such a staid old firm is interested ought to burnish its appeal.”

  “Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock consorting with moving picture people?” Van Dorn laughed. “The founders will be spinning in their graves. But you’re right. Keep us out of it as long as you can. Best to not show our hand till we know who’s across the table.”

  “And what he wants,” said Isaac Bell, grabbing his hat and charging out the door.

  “Where you headed?”

  “Union Station. I’m meeting Clyde in West Orange, New Jersey.”

  “Thomas Edison’s laboratory? Hang on to the fillings in your teeth.”

  ISAAC BELL WAS SURPRISED TWICE UPON ARriving at the red brick building that housed Thomas Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. It had never occurred to him how young Edison’s scientists would be. The laboratories were teeming with nattily dressed bright young fellows like Clyde Lynds. Nor had he expected Edison, with his reputation for hard bargaining, to have such a warm smile. It widened his full mouth engagingly and lighted his deep-set eyes.

  Bell was not surprised, when a functionary led them into a soundproof phonograph-cylinder recording room, by the sight of the great man trying to hear music by biting down on the piano lid. Edison’s deafness was public knowledge. He stood up from the piano, dismissed the man playing it with a pleasant nod, and said in a loud but friendly voice, “Never go deaf. You’ll hate it. You must be Mr. Bell.”

  Bell shook the strong hand Edison extended.

  “And you, young fellow, must be Mr. Lynds, about whom Mr. Bell has telegraphed so glowingly. Shrewd move with the telegraph, Mr. Bell. I am hopeless on the telephone. All right, come in, sit down. Tell me what you’ve brought me.”

  Clyde had prepared a sketchbook with drawings and titles written out in block letters. Thomas nodded appreciatively. “This even beats Mr. Bell’s telegram.” He flipped through the pages. “‘Pictures that talk’? Everyone brings me pictures that talk. Trouble is, none of them work.”

  Clyde Lynds faced the inventor and spoke loudly and slowly, moving his lips to exaggerate each word. “This. One. Works.”

  “You don’t say? O.K., show me. Where is it?”

  Lynds tapped the sketch pad and then tapped his head. “In here.”

  “What was that?”

  Bell watched with admiration as Clyde turned a page of his pad to display the words he had written out ahead of time: The first machine was lost. I need a laboratory, machine shop
s, and money to build a new one.

  “What do you mean ‘lost’?” Edison shouted.

  Clyde flipped to the next page, on which he had written In a fire, and Isaac Bell’s admiration went up a notch. The penniless young scientist was choreographing his conversation with the richest, most famous inventor in the world.

  Edison glanced at Bell. Whatever the expression in his eyes, it was lost in the shadow of his brow, but Bell sensed a shift in his attitude. “Mr. Bell,” he said briskly, suddenly all business, “I suspect that the purely scientific conversation we are about to embark on will bore you. I’ve arranged a tour of my laboratories for your enjoyment while Mr. Lynds and I pursue what makes his talking pictures different from all the others.”

  “Thoughtful of you,” said Bell, rising to his feet. “I’m curious to see your operation.” Clearly, Edison wanted to get rid of him. But just as clearly, Bell concluded, Clyde could take care of himself. Besides, they had made a pact that Clyde would sign no papers without Van Dorn attorneys reading them first.

  The functionary sprang into the room as if he had had his ear pressed to the door, and Isaac Bell allowed him to walk him through a standard canned tour of the Edison laboratory. He saw the chemical plant, machine shops, laboratories. At the storeroom he watched a clerk dispense a length of manatee skin, which would be fashioned into belt drives, his guide told him. From a gallery Bell could look down at Mr. Edison’s two-story, book-lined office. The functionary pointed out Edison’s marble statue of an angel shining an electric lightbulb on a heap of broken oil lamps.

  “What’s that?” Bell asked. They were passing a door marked “Kinetophone Laboratory,” and through the top glass he could see an older bearded man hunched over a cat’s cradle of wires and pulleys that linked a moving picture projector to a phonograph. Joe Van Dorn, Bell recalled, had been disappointed by a Kinetophone. “I said, ‘What’s that?’”

  “Just an experiment.”

  “I’d like to see it.”

  “It’s not ready to be seen.”

  “I don’t mind,” said Bell, and pushed through the door, ignoring his guide’s protests. The bearded old man looked up, blinking in surprise, as if unaccustomed to visitors.

  “We should not be in here, Mr. Bell,” said the functionary. “This experiment is very important to Mr. Edison. Much is riding on it.”

  “Go ask Mr. Edison’s permission,” said Bell. “I’ll wait here. Go on!”

  The functionary scuttled out. Bell said to the old man, “A fellow I know saw one of these in Cincinnati. Is this one that you’re repairing?”

  “Repairing? Don’t make me laugh. God Himself couldn’t repair this piece of trash.”

  “What’s wrong with it? Why is it trash?”

  “Listen.” He moved an electric switch, and the machine projected on the wall a moving picture of a woman singing. At the same time, the phonograph cylinder began spinning. The wires connecting the two machines whirred, their pulleys clattered, and the woman’s voice emerged from the phonograph horn, thin, harsh, and grating, as Van Dorn had said. Within ten seconds her voice had fallen behind the movement of her lips.

  “She doesn’t sound synchronized with her picture,” said Bell.

  “And never will be,” said the old man.

  The song ended, but the woman appeared to keep on singing. Her mouth opened wide, holding a note, while from the horn a male voice said, “What a fine voice you have.” Five seconds later a man appeared, mouthing the words he had spoken earlier and clapping silently as an invisible violin played. At last the violinist appeared.

  “That’s rather funny,” said Bell.

  “It is supposed to be a drama.”

  “If it can’t be fixed, why are you working on it?”

  “Because this is the only job Edison will give me,” the old man answered bitterly. “He has younger men working on similar experiments, but they’re all trash.”

  “Why don’t you work elsewhere?”

  The old man looked at Isaac Bell. A strange light shone in his eyes as if he were staring so deeply inward that he could not quite see what was in front of him. “Edison bankrupted me. I had debts I could never repay. Edison bought them up. I owe him. I am forced to work here.”

  “Why would Mr. Edison want you to work on something that doesn’t work?”

  “Don’t you understand?” the old man railed, and Bell wondered about the man’s sanity. “He keeps me from inventing things that would put him out of business. He stole my greatest invention, and now he makes sure I will never invent another.”

  “What invention?” Bell asked gently, feeling sorrow for the man’s distress.

  “I invented an inexpensive gramophone. Edison copied it—poorly, shabbily. Mine was better, but he undercut the price and inundated the market with cheap copies. He named his ‘phonograph.’ People fell for it—people are such fools—and bought the less expensive one. He drove me out of business.”

  “When was this?” asked Bell.

  “Long, long ago.” His face worked, contorted, and he shouted, “Mine was a beautiful machine. He is a monster.”

  The door flew open. The functionary had returned with a heavyset bruiser whose coat bulged with saps and a pistol. “O.K., mister, out of here,” he ordered, and took Bell’s arm.

  The tall detective turned eyes on him as bleak as an ice field and said, very softly, “Don’t.”

  The bruiser let go.

  “Take me back to Mr. Edison.”

  THOMAS EDISON WAS NOT SMILING when Isaac walked into the soundproof recording room, and Clyde Lynds’s normally cheery countenance had hardened into one tight-lipped with anger.

  “There you are, Mr. Bell. We were just finishing up our discussion. Clyde, I look forward to hearing back from you as soon as you’ve had the opportunity to speak with your lawyer. Good day, gentlemen.”

  The shadow of a grin crossed Clyde’s face, and he scrawled on his sketch pad, Good day.

  “Would you leave your drawings with me?” Edison asked. “Let me peruse them at my leisure.”

  To Isaac Bell’s surprise, Clyde handed them over.

  He was unusually quiet on the trolley to Newark. Bell waited until they boarded a train for Pennsylvania Station to ask, “What did Mr. Edison think of your machine?”

  “I believe he thinks that it is very, very valuable. Of course he didn’t say that.”

  “What did he say?”

  “In exchange for providing a laboratory, he demands complete control of the patent, not just license to manufacture it. In other words, he would own it.”

  “Those are harsh terms.”

  Clyde grinned. “I’m taking them as a genuine vote of confidence. If a man as smart as Thomas Edison wants to steal it, Talking Pictures must be worth a fortune.”

  Bell said, “I had a gander at his ‘Kinetophone.’ It didn’t strike me it’s going anywhere.”

  “All mechanical methods of synchronization are doomed to failure,” Clyde said, flatly. “The Professor and I figured out at the start that we’d never get two separate machines to run precisely synchronized. We knew we had to invent a better way. And we did. Better and completely different.”

  “Wasn’t it risky giving Edison your plans?”

  Clyde laughed. “I gave him fake plans.”

  “Did you really? That was slickly done,” said Bell. “I never tumbled.”

  “I gave him notes for an acoustic microphone instead of the Professor’s electrical one, and I gave him drawings for a synchronization contraption similar to the Kinetophone you saw at the laboratory.”

  “Similar? How do you know?”

  “The Professor and I studied every cockamamie talker scheme in the world—French, Russian, German, British—plus every damned one Edison copied from someone else.”

  Isaac Bell was fast coming to the conclusion that Clyde Lynds was shrewder than he had let on. “So you weren’t surprised by Edison’s move this afternoon.”

  Clyde Lynds
sighed and looked suddenly weary. “Not surprised, but I am disappointed. The Professor and I had hoped our superior machine would convince Edison to treat us like equals. So I’m going to have to go it alone.”

  Isaac Bell smiled. “Not quite alone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My wife pulled some wires for you in case things didn’t work out with Edison. She’s lined it up for you to meet an independent called the Pirate King. He’s top dog among fellows who make movies outside the Edison Trust.”

  “That’s mighty kind of her.”

  “Better than kind. Marion’s rooting for you. She intends to make the first real talking picture.”

  “DON’T INTERRUPT MOVING PICTURE PEOPLE when the sun is shining,” Marion warned her husband. “They hate to waste the light.”

  Isaac Bell searched the sky for a promising hint of haze as the ferry to the Fort Lee district of New Jersey crossed the Hudson River. A sultry southwest wind suggested that clouds were in the offing. With any luck, he told Clyde Lynds, the skies would darken by noon.

  They rented a Ford auto at a general store with a gasoline pump in front and drove up the steep palisade. In the village of Fort Lee they passed motion picture factories sanctioned by the Edison Trust. Through the glass walls and roofs of barn-like structures, they could see arc lights hanging from the rafters and banks of Cooper-Hewitt mercury-vapor lamps to boost the sunlight. Substantial brick outbuildings housed scenery, property, and costume shops, offices, film-processing laboratories, machine shops to maintain the cameras, and dynamos to power the Cooper-Hewitts.