The Thief

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.

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 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.”

Book Three: Hollywood

26

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.”

27

“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.”