The Thief Read online

  She was dressed in a stylish suit, with a long skirt and jacket that hugged her closely, and she had collected her beautiful hair high in the back as the women directors did to allow them to peer through the lens of the camera.

  “You look surprised, Isaac,” she greeted him with a warm laugh. “I assure you, no one is more surprised than I.”

  Bell took the hand she offered. “May I congratulate you on what must be the quickest immigrant success story in America? You have landed on your feet and then some.”

  “Sheer luck. I bumped into an old friend who knew my work in Russia. He introduced me to a banker, who introduced me to a group of Wall Street men who had already jumped on the movie bandwagon and suddenly had this factory and no one to run it. I leaped at the chance. Moving pictures will all be made in California. The sun shines here every day.”

  “Quite a leap,” Bell marveled, “from making pictures to running the entire factory.”

  “Well,” she said, lowering her eyes modestly, “I had experience of business in Petersburg. But I don’t overrate my position here. The Wall Street bankers back in New York call the tune. I am merely the piper. Or, at best, the arranger. They burn the telegraph wires firing demands across the continent night and day. Where is your lovely bride? Taking pictures of Jersey scenery?”

  “San Francisco, visiting her father.”

  “What does she do next?”

  “She’s contemplating her next move.”

  “Perfect. We must get Marion to join us here, where she may take pictures of things more attractive than ‘Jersey scenery.’”

  “I imagine she would like that. I certainly would.”

  “In the meantime, come to lunch and tell me all about ‘Talking Pictures.’”

  They rode the elevator down to a staff commissary feeding actors costumed as plutocrats, policemen, washerwomen, countesses, cowboys, and Indians. Many were grease-painted with purple lips, green skin, and orange hair to show up in the chartreuse glow of the Cooper-Hewitts. Irina sashayed among them, exchanging friendly waves and greetings, and into an exquisite private dining room that looked like it had been removed board by board from a London club and reassembled in the new building.

  Bell asked, “Did Clyde mention anything about his Talking Pictures machine on the boat?”

  “Just enough to make me think, when Mr. Griffith telephoned, that it could be exactly what my investors in the Artists Syndicate are looking for.”

  ISAAC BELL ENJOYED A FLIRTATIOUS lunch with Irina Viorets while making it clear he was a one-woman man, and Marion was that one woman. But he had the strong impression that Irina’s smiles, flashing eyes, and light touches on his arm were more for show than intent.

  “I meant to ask on the ship, how do you happen to speak such interesting English? Sometimes you sound almost like a native-born American.”

  “Almost, but not quite. Though I’m improving. It is a wondrous language.”

  “How did you learn it?”

  “In Petersburg my father played the piano at the American embassy. I had many friends among the children.”

  For some reason, thought Isaac Bell, that was a story he wanted Van Dorn Research to verify. In fact, there was something about this whole setup that rang a little false. Perhaps it was just the incredible speed with which Irina’s good fortune had unfolded, or perhaps the detective’s nemesis, coincidence. Or maybe it was simply a memory of Marion saying that Irina’s story about fleeing the Okhrana changed with each glass of wine, though there was no wine at this lunch, merely orange juice and water.

  “When was that?”

  “Let me think,” she said. “Oh, Isaac, it’s embarrassing how long ago that was. Bloody Nicholas hadn’t taken the throne.”

  “Before, when was that, 1894?”

  “Not too far before,” Irina said, her full lips parting in a warm smile. “Allow a woman a certain latitude with her age.”

  “Forgive me,” Bell smiled back, satisfied that Grady Forrer—the brilliant head of Van Dorn Research, a large man in whose presence barroom brawls tended to peter out quickly and a hound dog of a tracker—would soon put the question to American embassy officers who had served in Russia when Czar Alexander III still reigned.

  “Tell me, Irina, will you miss directing pictures now that you’re running the whole show?”

  “Will I miss positioning the camera and waiting for the sun for hours so I may transfer full beauty to the negative? Yes, very much. Will I miss a banker who lent me the money to position the camera for hours telling me that it would be better if I positioned it there, instead of there? No! Not one bit. Now my only ‘boss’ is the Artists Syndicate, and they are three thousand miles away in New York.”

  “Who are the investors in the Artists Syndicate?”

  “The syndicate is closely held. I met none of them. I don’t even know their names.”

  “Why do you suppose they are so secretive?”

  “For two reasons,” she answered, with a laugh that did not conceal a certain discomfort, Bell thought. “They are probably respectable bankers who don’t want their wives, club brothers, and fellow progressive reformers to know with whom they rub shoulders. Don’t forget, motion picture manufacturers are thought to be either risqué or tainted by sinful nickelodeon profits or careers that started in carnival shows and low-class vaudeville. I am told that this is a uniquely American attitude, but I saw the same snobbishness in London.”

  “And the second reason?”

  “The second reason is what I suspect is the real reason: fear. As wealthy as they are, they are not as powerful as Thomas Edison. They’re afraid that if Edison interests learn who they are, the Trust will fight back by shutting them out of their other businesses, not only moving pictures.”

  Bell eyed her closely. There was something about the Russian woman he liked—a sense of decency, he supposed, and her liveliness. And she certainly was easy on the eyes. But he wondered, would she ever question the nature of the investors backing her dream of being a boss? Or would her ambition still her doubts?

  “We have a proverb,” he said. “‘She who sups with the devil should have a long spoon.’”

  Irina Viorets laughed it off. “Russians have a proverb, too: ‘When the devil finds a lazy woman, he puts her to work.’ I admit to many flaws, but sloth is not among them. And I never forget that we Russians also say, ‘God keeps her safe who keeps herself safe.’”

  Isaac Bell reckoned he might have opened a chink in her armor. Nonetheless, he would wire a second inquiry to Grady Forrer:

  WHO PAYS THE BILLS FOR

  IMPERIAL FILM???

  AFTER LUNCH THEY GOT DOWN TO business, with Bell acting his part as a Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock insurance executive anxious to invest in the movies. Bearing in mind the outright rejection by Pirate King Tarses, he opened with Marion’s fierce defense. “Without pictures that talk, the screen shrinks drama, tragedy, comedy, and farce to pantomime.”

  “But the screen is democracy,” said Viorets, “if not socialism. We are reproducing the rich man’s tragedies, comedies, and farces in pantomime that men on the street can afford.”

  “Clyde has invented a way to do it with words and music instead of pantomime,” said Isaac Bell.

  Irina nodded. “I heard that your insurance firm was investing in Clyde’s Talking Pictures machine. That’s really why I was intrigued when Mr. Griffith telephoned.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “From moving picture people you were shopping it to in New Jersey.”

  “Then you heard that my firm seeks manufacturers who are up to taking superior pictures with the same photography and finish as the French.”

  Irina Viorets reached across the table and placed a pretty hand on Bell’s arm. “I promise you, Mr. Bell, Imperial will out-French the French—let me show you,” she said, and took him on a tour of the Imperial Building that left Bell with no doubt that Irina Viorets was in command of a going concern.

&nb
sp; She showed him the laboratories and machine, repair, and carpentry shops that Griffith had raved about. He saw printing and perforating instruments in the darkrooms, properties and wardrobe rooms of costumes for hundreds of soldiers, police, and cowboys, and rows of flats in the scenic department painted black and white. On the fourth floor was a soundproof recording room, like Edison’s, the walls padded, the floor corked tile, with an array of acoustic horns to capture sound.

  She took him outside. In a vacant lot on the south side of the building, a mock street facing toward the sun could be made to look like New York, or London, or medieval Paris.

  Next to the building was a life net. Ordinarily held by firemen to catch people jumping from a burning house, this one was permanently fixed. “For catching actors,” Irina laughed, pointing at the building’s parapet a hundred feet off the ground. “Just outside of camera range.”

  Bell quoted Clyde Lynds: “Providing thrills dear to the heart of the exhibitor.”

  They went back indoors and rode the elevator ten stories to the roof. Irina said, “The best photoplays of the future will be those that are created inside the film studio.”

  The picture-taking studio had room for several cinematograph studio stages with glass ceilings to capture natural light. At one edge of the roof stood a stone wall that could serve as a precipice or a building. Bell leaned over and looked down. The life net winked back at him, no bigger than a dime.

  “I have one more thing to show you.” She took him down to the eighth floor to a gleaming camera and projector machine shop, with a laboratory attached.

  “Everything is up-to-date. Would you like to use our facility, Isaac?”

  “Will your Artists Syndicate allow it?”

  “I will deal with the Artists Syndicate. You and Clyde will deal with me.”

  “Done,” said Isaac Bell. “With one proviso. My firm will staff Lynds’s workshop with mechanicians.”

  “If you like, though we already have the best in Los Angeles.”

  “And we will provide our own guards.”

  “Whatever for? This building is a fortress.”

  “So I noticed. Nonetheless, my directors are conservative. They will demand that we do everything possible to protect Lynds’s invention.”

  “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.

  IRINA VIORETS LOCKED THE DOORto 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.”

  GENERAL CHRISTIAN SEMMLER 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.”

  “ISAAC! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN LOS 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 r
ich?”

  “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.”