The Thief

“I say, what is a Humanova Troupe?” asked Lord Strone. The British colonel had been hovering near Mademoiselle Viorets.

“Humanovas make sound for the movies,” Marion told Strone.

“Sound? In the cinema? Do you mean like the orchestra?”

“Much more than an orchestra. The actors speak lines of dialogue. And make effects.”

“Effects?”

“Gunshots, whistles, bells. Surely you’ve heard Humanovas in London. Or Actologues?”

“Rarely get to town anymore, m’dear. Retired, don’t you know?”

Bell concealed a smile at the sight of Archie’s red eyebrow cocked toward the skylight. Strone was laying it on with a trowel, but a flurry of marconigrams from Van Dorn informants in England had repeated, in guarded language, rumors that His Lordship was, as Bell suspected, attached to Great Britain’s newly formed Secret Service Bureau with offices at Whitehall in the center of London. He left London only to undermine England’s enemies abroad.

Urged on by Irina Viorets, the stewards arranged chairs facing the improvised screen, and within minutes the lounge had been transformed into a moving picture theater. Members of the ship’s orchestra gathered around the piano with violins and a trumpet. They struck a clarion chord.

The wedding guests took their seats. The lamps were lowered. The projector clattered and light flickered on the screen. From behind the screen, an actor read aloud the movie’s title card.

“Is This Seat Taken?”

“It’s a Biograph comic,” Marion whispered to Bell. “Florence Lawrence is in it.”

The scene was laid in a ten-cent moving picture theater just as the movie ended. A well-dressed audience applauded when a woman with a pistol arrested a villain, who was marched off by a policeman. The actors behind the sailcloth clapped their hands as the movie audience applauded. The next film on the ten-cent theater screen showed a conductor and piano player auditioning singers and dancers.

The actors behind the sailcloth sang and shuffled their feet on the washboards, and the ship’s piano played ragtime.

A lady looking very much like the woman with the pistol walked into the ten-cent theater wearing an enormous hat and looked for a seat. An actress called, repeatedly, “Is this seat taken?” Theater patrons refused to move, protesting that her hat would block their view of the screen.

The lady in the big hat was followed by a man in a top hat, who looked very much like the villain just arrested. An actor called in a strong voice, “Is this seat taken?”

Theater patrons yelled that his hat was too big. Shouting matches ensued — angry words and a general banging came from behind the sailcloth.

Lord Strone laughed, “If my wife could see the thoroughly unpleasant sort who attend the cinema, she’d stop badgering me to take her there.”

The ship’s orchestra took up an aria from La Bohème.

On the theater screen, the director threw auditioning singers out the door.

Behind the sailcloth, the door banged and actors laughed.

In the ten-cent theater, ladies in increasingly large hats took their seats, provoking a riot.

A whistle blew behind the sailcloth. In the ten-cent theater, the clamshell jaws of a steam shovel descended from the ceiling and plucked off a lady’s hat. Ladies removed their hats. The lady in the biggest hat refused. The jaws descended again and lifted her, hat and all, out of the ten-cent theater. The actors behind the sailcloth cheered.

Lord Strone led the laughter. “I say! That’ll teach her. Whisked off like rubbish.”

“Irina!” cried Marion as the lights came back on, “That was splendid. Thank you.”

Irina stood and bowed. “Could we have a hand for the players?”

The Humanova troupe stepped out from behind the sailcloth. The wedding guests clapped.

Isaac Bell shook the actors’ hands, pressing into each a ten-dollar gold piece. “Thank you for a memorable performance.”

“Would that we could have rehearsed longer,” one sighed, “but Mademoiselle Viorets kept changing the dialogue.”

The wedding party trooped down Mauretania’s grand staircase to the dining saloon. Bell and Marion made the rounds of the tables, thanking guests for coming and fielding questions.

“To the beautiful bride!” shouted a red-faced Chimney Baron, draining his glass and waving for a refill. “Und to you, Mr. Bell, as ve say in Germany, Da hast du Glück gehabt!”

“Which means,” Herr Wagner translated, “Did you get lucky!”

“Danke schön!” Bell gri

They were making their way back to their own table when Clyde Lynds hurried up, his face pale, his expression grave. “Mr. Bell!”

“Are you all right, Clyde?”

“I can’t find the Professor anywhere. He’s not in his cabin, he’s not on deck, he’s not here, and he’s not in the Second Class dining room.”

“When did he leave the party?”

“Before the ceremony. He said he felt seasick again.” Lynds lowered his voice and whispered, “I had a feeling he was heading down to the baggage rooms. I went down there. I didn’t see him. I checked both of them, back in the stern and up in the bow. He wasn’t in, either.”

“Why would he go there?”

Clyde Lynds shrugged. “To check on our things, I guess.”

“What things?” Bell asked. “Luggage?” The Professor and his protégé had danced repeatedly around the subject of the actual “secret invention.” Was it aboard the ship? Was it in their heads? Was it on another ship? Did it consist only of drawings? Bell had no idea, but now it sounded as if the invention was physically on the Mauretania. It was be ironical if whatever the machine was, it was riding in the same luggage room as a Van Dorn Detective Agency prisoner.

“What’s in his luggage, Clyde?”

Lynds hesitated. Then he ducked his head and said, “The Professor had some crates.”

“Go sit with Mademoiselle Viorets. I’ll have a look.”

“Don’t you want me to come with you?”

“No.”

8

“Marion, i’m afraid i’m going to have to excuse myself. Beiderbecke has disappeared. Clyde is worried, and so am I.”

“I’ll hold the fort.”

Bell walked Marion to her chair and nodded to Archie. The two men left the party separately and joined up in Bell’s stateroom, where Bell slipped a pocket pistol into his trousers and tossed Archie another. “Beiderbecke’s gone missing. Clyde thought he went down to the baggage rooms, but he couldn’t find him there.”

“We’ve got our Protective Services boy in the forward one.”

“Let’s see what he has to tell us.”

They bounded down the grand staircase faster than the elevator would take them, past promenade deck, shelter deck, upper, main, and lower, and hurried forward to the front of the ship, following a route they knew well from visits to their prisoner, the swindler, and his bored and lonely guard. Archie was soon breathing hard, but insisted on matching Bell’s pace. Bell grabbed him suddenly and stopped him in his tracks. “Watch it.”

He scooped Professor Beiderbecke’s pince-nez spectacles off the deck. They examined them in the light of a ceiling bulb. One of the lenses had cracked. “His all right, pink tint to the glass, like he wore.”

The forward baggage room was cavernous — over sixty feet long and nearly forty feet wide, although so close to the Mauretania’s bow that its width tapered to sixteen feet as it traced the sharpening line of the hull. It held far more bales and wooden crates than luggage, rows and rows of shipping barrels marked “Fragile” and “China,” oak casks of wine and brandy, a pair of Daimler limousines, and a handsome yellow Wolseley-Siddeley touring car. Bell smelled something in the fetid air, not the autos’ gasoline odor, which he had noted on earlier visits, but a more acrid stink, like coal tar, or, he thought, simply the ubiquitous odor of paint from the constant maintenance performed by the ship’s crew.