Clive Cussler - The Thief

It felt like a clean getaway. But getting away was not the same as getting the job done. Isaac Bell was pressing him hard, and Arthur Curtis wanted to deliver the goods. But if he couldn’t corral his man inside Krieg, how could he ask whether a former Army officer now held a high position in the company?

Isaac Bell was first off the limited in Los Angeles.

Boots to the platform while the train was still rolling into La Grande Station, guiding Clyde Lynds firmly by the elbow and trading discreet nods with a Van Dorn detective attired as a porter, Bell burst from the station into the fierce morning sun. He looked for an olive green Santa Monica trolley with the dash sign “Hollywood,” and they jumped off thirty minutes later at a brick depot that served the farm village.

While the electric sped out of town, Bell scrutinized the tourists who had gotten off with them and confirmed the all-clear from a Van Dorn buying picture postcards. He entered the nearest of the hotels and guesthouses clustered around the depot and asked the front-desk clerk, “Where is Mr. D. W. Griffith taking pictures?”

“Right around the corner. It’s a two-reeler called In Old California . But you won’t find work. There’s fourteen players lined up ahead of you. I’m number twelve.”

“Thanks for the warning — come along,” Bell said to Clyde.

Clyde had recovered from his scare on the train. “Who the heck cares about old California? Griffith could use a snappier title. Like The Girls of Old California .”

“Stick close,” said Bell.

He traced the Griffith movie by the growl of a dynamo powering the lights. It was a big outside operation in a vacant lot with a distant view of majestic mountains. Bell counted more than fifty people engaged — horse wranglers, mechanicians, actors, and scene shifters, and a camera operator he recognized as a valuable man named Bitzer who had worked for Marion and was known as the best in the business.

Griffith, a lanky man of thirty-five or so, was directing from a chair, his face shaded by an enormous, floppy straw hat. He had a soft Kentucky accent and a revolver tucked in his waistband.

“Now, young lady,” he told an actress dressed in an old-fashioned Spanish señorita gown and shawl, “you will try again to walk from where you are currently standing to that tree.”

“Yes, Mr. Griffith.”

Griffith raised a two-foot megaphone to his lips. “Lights!”

The Cooper-Hewitts flared, doubling the effect of the brilliant sun.

“Camera!”

Bitzer focused and started cranking.

“Speed!”

Bitzer cranked to a speed that sent the film past the camera lens at a rate of a thousand feet in twelve and a half minutes.

“Action!”

The señorita pointed at the tree.

“Stop!”

The camera operator stopped cranking. Griffith slumped a little lower under his hat and drawled, politely but firmly, “Billy’s camera will present you as a close-up figure. In return for that honor Ah would appreciate a certain restraint of expression.”

“I have to point out to the audience where I’m heading next.”

“The least patient among them will soon see where you are headed next. Don’t point. And stop looking at the camera.”

“Yes, Mr. Griffith.”

“Speed!”

The señorita having reached the tree at last and lunch finally announced, Griffith retreated under the shade of an umbrella and removed his floppy hat, revealing jet-black hair, an incipient widow’s peak, a strong hawk nose, and the deeply set, soulful eyes of a matinee idol. A smile warmed them when Bell was introduced.

“May I congratulate you, sir, on your marriage to a wonderful lady and a fine director.”

“Thank you, Mr. Griffith. We had the pleasure of seeing Is This Seat Taken? shown by a Humanova troupe at our wedding feast on Mauretania .”

Griffith rolled his eyes. “With the director putting words in my actors’ mouths?”

“I’m afraid so. That’s what we’ve come to talk to you about. This is Mr. Clyde Lynds. He has invented a wonderful machine to make and show talking pictures.”

“That’s been tried before.”

“But mine works,” said Clyde.

“I’ve never seen voice and picture synchronized for longer than five seconds.”

“You’ll see mine for five reels .”

Griffith glanced from the brash young scientist into the steady gaze of the tall detective.

“My firm, Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock, is betting it will work,” said Bell. “Clyde developed a new process with Professor Franz Beiderbecke, who was an electro-acoustic scientist at the Imperial-Royal Polytechnic Institute in Vienna.”

Griffith said, “I would love to make talking pictures. The human voice is a wondrous factor at intense moments But I am not in any position to invest.”

“I don’t need your money,” Clyde shot back. “All I need is a laboratory like you’ve set up in that shed. And a machine shop like you have for the cameras. And—”

“Most of all,” Isaac Bell interrupted, “Clyde needs an important director to make a picture show with his machine.”

“That would be me,” said Griffith, “Except I’m only here until we finish In Old California . Then it’s back to New York, and I doubt very much that Biograph will have any interest in a machine that would compete with Mr. Edison. But—” Here, with a dramatic pause, he raised a finger for emphasis. “By coincidence, I was, only yesterday, approached by the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company offering to woo me away from Biograph.”

Bell did not like coincidences. “Who is Imperial?”

“They showed me their cinematography studio, and I’ll tell you it’s the finest motion picture plant in the West. Four hundred hands, a corps of stage directors, magnificent stages, complete laboratories, darkrooms, and machine shops. All installed at a cost that must have run into big money, thanks to financial backing by the Artists Syndicate.”

“What is the Artists Syndicate?” asked Bell.

“They’re a combine of Wall Street bankers who don’t give a hoot for the Edison Trust. Wait until you see Imperial. They have a wealth of brand-new equipment capable of turning out a quantity of film, and they’ve engaged stars, both legit and vaud. They’re all set to make big plays — longer, multi-reel pictures.”

Clyde said to Isaac Bell, “Imperial sounds up-to-date.”

“Could you arrange an appointment, Mr. Griffith?”

“I’ll do better than arrange an appointment. I’ll tell them I’ll make the first picture with sound as soon as you’ve perfected it. That ought to get their attention.”

“Don’t you have a contract with Biograph?”

Griffith placed his right hand over his heart. “I promise that I will break my contract with Biograph in a flash for a chance to direct moving pictures that can truly make the sound of human voices. But it’s up to you, Mr. Bell, to sell them the machine, and you, Mr. Lynds, to perfect it. I’ll telephone Imperial right away.”

“Before you phone,” said Bell. “May I do you a kindness in return?”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I notice you carry a six-shooter.”

“Old habit from before Biograph joined the Trust,” Griffith grinned, joking, with a theatrical wink, “Haven’t shot an Edison thug in years.”

“May I see it?”

“Sure.” Griffith tugged the revolver from his waistband.

Bell opened the cylinder, counted six cartridges, and removed one. “Gents I know who carry a six-gun in their waistband make a habit of leaving the hammer on an empty chamber. At least so long as they intend to father children.”