The Thief

She wasn’t in France yet, but she was close.

There were stars in the sky. The immense Fort Driant on the hilltop blocked them to the north. To walk west, she kept the fortress to her right. Soon she spotted the real North Star. She kept it to her right and eventually, when the fortress was behind her, she came to a fence in a field, far from any road. She slipped through strands of barbed wire and started walking in the general direction of Paris, steering clear of farmhouse lights and cocking her ears for the train whistles that would lead her to the railroad station at Batilly.

37

“Lights!” The director of Hell’s Bells shouted into his megaphone.

The dynamo roared. The Cooper-Hewitts blazed.

“Camera!.. Speed!”

Isaac Bell, clad in what had become his trademark black costume, flying helmet, and goggles, twisted his grip throttle, revving his motorcycle.

The camera operator cranked to speed.

The director took one more look. The locomotive was in place on a raised track bed rented in a remote corner of a Southern Pacific freight yard. Smoke and steam gushed from its stack. The engineer leaned his head and shoulders out of its cab. A giant electric fan just outside the camera’s field of focus blew the smoke and steam the length of the locomotive and parted the engineer’s long beard, making it look like the locomotive was speeding down the track.

Isaac Bell’s motorcycle spewed white smoke from its exhaust pipe. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Marty, the ski

Bell twisted his throttle wide open and slapped his clutch lever.

The motorcycle tore into the lights, its exhaust streaming an arresting picture as Bell raced tight circles around the locomotive, jumping the machine into the air every time he crossed the humped train tracks at forty miles per hour. On his fourth landing his front wheel felt wobbly. The camera operator was still cranking. The lights still blazed. Bell poured on the gas for one last jump.

The wheel fell off.

The motorcycle crashed down on its front fork. The rear end left the ground, pivoted straight up, and catapulted Isaac Bell over the handlebars.

Bell flew through the air — skull first — at the locomotive. He tried to tuck into a somersault to fend off with his boots instead of his head, but he was flying at forty miles an hour. As he hurtled, time seemed to stop for the tall detective. It looked as if suddenly the operator were cranking more slowly, resting his arm, and slowing the film. Bell saw the ground pass lazily under him. He saw the Indian standing on its front end with its back wheel spi

The steel behemoth filled his vision, black as night and big as the sky. An instant later, he smashed into it. A startlingly sharp pain in his ankle told him that his somersault had saved his skull. He bounced off the boiler, fell to the rail bed, and tumbled down the ballast embankment, raking arms and legs on the crushed stone.

Sprawled, dazed, in the dirt, he heard people yelling.

He sat up to put everyone’s mind at ease. Everything hurt, but he thought he would be able to stand in another minute or two.

The yelling stopped — except for the director who was still calling through his megaphone, “That was terrific! Let’s do it one more time!”

Isaac Bell climbed painfully to his feet, walked unsteadily to the wrecked motorcycle, knelt down, and inspected it.

He felt in his jacket that his Browning was still in its holster and moving freely. Thanks to his lightning-fast reflexes, he had just survived the Los Angeles version of the Cinci

“Hurry it up,” the director shouted. “We’re losing the light.”

“Soon as you get me a new machine,” said Bell as he limped off in search of the mechanician who had tuned his motorcycle.

The Hell’s Bells company had established a temporary machine shop in an abandoned caboose on a rusty siding. Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he mounted the ramp the mechanician had laid to wheel the motorcycle up and down, and entered the gloomy interior in a sudden rush.

“Marty,” he asked in a low and dangerous voice. “Tell me who took a hacksaw to my front axle.”

Marty did not reply.

Bell found him on the floor behind his workbench, his eyes bulging wide open, fixed intently on nothing. Bell lighted a lamp and looked at him closely. The mechanician had been garroted with a wire that had cut his head half off his neck. It looked like the Acrobat had silenced his accomplice with the same thin cable he had wrapped around the neck of the Golden State Limited express messenger he had murdered in New Mexico. It was also the same cable he had used to vault over the locomotive and to “fly” from the Mauretania’s boat deck.

Isaac Bell spoke out loud, addressing the Acrobat as if the murderer were still in the caboose.

“I am worrying you,” he said, reviewing in his mind the many strands of his investigation and wondering which had alarmed the murderer. “I am making you afraid.”

The Acrobat apparently saw those strands as forming a net. Which ones? Bell wondered. Which of the many strands had spooked him?

Grady Forrer was pursuing a Hamburg Bankhaus — Imperial Film co

If the Acrobat had ordered the murder of Art Curtis in Berlin, then he knew the Van Dorns were after him. The attacks on the Van Dorn apprentices confirmed that. But today’s sabotage of Bell’s motorcycle indicated that the Acrobat had penetrated Bell’s “insurance man” disguise, too, and saw him either as aligned with the Van Dorn Detective Agency or an actual agent of the outfit.

“I still don’t know what you’re up to. But I’m closer than I think.”

Then it struck Bell hard. If — as seemed likely, though not close to proven — Imperial Film was mixed up with the Acrobat and Krieg Rüstungswerk, then Marion’s job at Imperial was no coincidence, but rather the Acrobat’s cold-blooded ace in the hole.

Bell rode the Angels Flight funicular railway two blocks up a steep grade to the residential neighborhood on top of Bunker Hill, where he had rented a mansion after Marion took the job Irina Viorets had offered at Imperial. Concealing his limp, he climbed the back steps and bounded into the kitchen.

“Just in time for our first married home-cooked meal,” Marion greeted him. “Oh, Isaac, what a wonderful day this is.” She hugged him hard and kissed him. “Would you like a cocktail for whatever you’ve done to your poor foot?”

“I’ll mix them,” Bell smiled, ruefully, reminded forcibly that if women were more observant than men, then women who made movies missed absolutely nothing.