The Thief (30 page)

“I presume that Texas Walt is an old friend?”

“What makes you say that?”

“Sometimes we need an old friend on the premises.”

“Maybe so. But what I need most is a crackerjack detective inside Imperial Film.”

“What can one detective do? Imperial is an enormous company with four hundred hands.”

“He won’t be the only one.”

B
ELL WIRED
G
RADY
F
ORRER ON
the Van Dorn private telegraph, inquiring what progress he had made with Imperial’s bankers.

The redoubtable head of the Research department wired back:

MY BOYS ARE DIGGING DEEP.

REMEMBER BANKS LIKE SECRETS.

HOPEFUL MORE SOON.

SORRY ABOUT ART. GOOD MAN.

Isaac Bell replied:

CONCENTRATE GERMAN OVERSEAS

MERCHANT BANKS WITH ARMY TIES.

LOOK FOR KRIEG-IMPERIAL

CONNECTION.

P
AULINE
G
RANDZAU WOKE UP IN A HAYSTACK
with four tines of a pitchfork inches from her face. The steel was shiny from use and recently sharpened. Three of the tines tapered to a needle point. The fourth was bent as if the farmer had accidently hit a rock shortly before finding her in his hay.

She asked herself, What is the best thing possible at this moment?

The best thing was that her disguise worked. She didn’t look like a girl. She looked like a boy, a tough Berlin factory boy in a cloth cap and a rough woolen jacket and trousers. She had traded her dress, her coat, and her beautiful hat last night with her friend Hilda for Hilda’s brother’s things. Five groschen from the marks Detective Curtis gave her had bought the brother’s rucksack. It held dry socks, a wool jumper, an apple and biscuits (which she had already eaten), a
Strand
magazine, a map of France and Baedeker’s
Paris and Its Environs
purchased in a railroad station, and Detective Curtis’s gun.

Best of all, her disguise worked so well that the farmer was frightened. The haystack was behind his barn. There was a dense wood across the field, and beyond the wood were the railroad tracks, which brought tramps and gypsies and troublemakers from Berlin.

Pauline asked herself, now what? What would Sherlock Holmes do when his disguise worked? She forced her voice low and in guttural tones asked, “Why are you pointing your pitchfork at me?”

“Who are you?” asked the farmer. What would Sherlock Holmes do? The answer: Sherlock Holmes would observe 
everything
, not just the steel tines in her face. The farmer was young, she saw. This was not the farmer, but the farmer’s son.

“Who are
you
?” she demanded. “Why are you pointing that at me? What kind of German are you? Have you no shame?”

The boy blinked. “But what are you doing here?”

“I won’t tell until you move that thing away from my face.”

He lowered the pitchfork.

Pauline climbed to her feet, taking her time, observing. His legs were short. Hers were longer. She could run faster. She saw a bulge in his jacket and white cloth poking from his pocket. It was a bundle a mother would pack. “I’m hungry,” she growled. “Do you have food?”

He pulled it from his pocket, and she smelled ham. It was wrapped in a piece of buttered bread. She bit hungrily into it, two enormous, delicious bites.

“Hans!” a man shouted. “What are you doing there?”

It could only be Hans’s father. And he would not be fooled.

She ran for the wood through which she had felt her way from the railroad. It was still dark, and the train she was clinging to had suddenly rumbled through a switch and stopped on a siding, shorn of its locomotive, which then had steamed back toward Berlin.

She heard the farmers shouting behind her. “Catch him!” the father yelled. Hans was scampering as fast as he could on his short legs, and the father was limping on a cane.

Ahead through the trees Pauline saw the siding and on it the single railcar on which she had escaped from Berlin, but which the train had dropped. She ran past it and jumped onto the main line. Then she ran on the crossties until her legs ached and her lungs were burning and the blood was pounding in her head so loudly that she couldn’t hear the speeding train behind her.

I
N
G
RIFFITH
P
ARK, A WILDERNESS
in the hills north of Los Angeles, Jay Tarses complained to the petite dark-haired woman who served as his mistress and business manager, “I want to go back to New Jersey.”

“Jersey? Are you nuts? Best thing we ever did was beat it to California. It’s beautiful here. The sun has shined all day. You’ve already exposed eight hundred feet of film. You’ll finish the whole picture before dark. And tomorrow you’ll start a Western drama.”

“This is the worst day of my life.”

The City of Los Angeles had just fined Tarses twenty-five dollars because gunfire between his French Foreign Legionnaires and his Arabs abducting his heroine had frightened the elk in Griffith Park. Then his camels had stampeded a herd of horses that were not used to their smell. And now, just as his wranglers had finished rounding up the horses so he could start taking pictures again, a squad of Edison thugs piled out of a Marmon auto, itching to pull out their blackjacks if he wasn’t taking pictures with an overpriced Edison camera.

The head thug, a rangy street fighter with bony fists and a Hoboken accent, saw at a glance that he wasn’t.

“You think California’s so far from Joisey Mr. Edison don’t notice?”

“Let the girls go,” Tarses told him. “I’ll take my lumps.”

“You’re all takin’ yer lumps this time. We’re setting an example for the rest of youse independents.”

He grabbed Tarses by his lapels and held him stiff-armed for the first blow.

“Hold it!” someone shouted.

If Jay Tarses had any hope he’d been rescued, the sight of chief Edison bull Joe McCoy swaggering out of the woods disabused him of that. McCoy, the meanest Edison detective Tarses had even met, reported directly to Mr. Dyer, Edison’s lawyer, who enforced Trust restrictions with an iron hand. McCoy had a coal trimmer’s shoulders and less mercy in his face than a cinder block.

“Mr. Tarses,” he snickered. “I would have recognized your picture taking anywhere by the camel stink.”

“Any chance of buying you off?” asked Tarses, his eyes locked on McCoy’s blackjack.

McCoy raised a mighty arm. The blackjack whistled as it tore down from the sky, and the Edison thug holding Tarses by the lapels went flying sideways into a camel and fell on his face. Tarses was vaguely aware that he himself was still on his feet and nothing hurt. Aside from that, he had no idea what was going on.

McCoy handed him a calling card. Through a smudge of blood from McCoy’s blackjack, Jay Tarses read:

IMPERIAL FILM PROTECTION SERVICE

“THE INDEPENDENT’S FRIEND”

“Telephone number’s on the back. Operator on-station night and day.”

“You don’t work for Edison anymore?” Tarses asked.

“Didn’t you hear?” McCoy grinned. “I’m a trustbuster. Just like Teddy Roosevelt.”

“What the hell is Imperial Film Protection Service?”

“‘The Independent’s Friend.’ Can’t you read?”

“Friend? I’ll bet. What’s it going to cost me?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Joe. What’s the big idea?”

McCoy threw a heavy arm around Tarses’s shoulder. “Jay, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. And stop asking stupid questions.”

Tarses knew he had his share of flaws, but stupidity wasn’t one of them, and he said, “Thanks, Joe.”

“Don’t thank me. Thank Imperial. Well, sun’s in the sky. Bet you’re itching to get back to work— Say, what’s your picture called?”

“The Imperial Horseman.”

McCoy tipped his hat to Tarses’s pretty business manager, slung the unconscious thug over his shoulder, and carried him away.

Tarses shouted for his players to climb on their animals.

“Camera…”

That evening, when Tarses was paying off his extras, the one last in line drawled, “Who were those fellers pushing you around?”

Tarses was about to tell him to mind his own business when he recognized the extra as the tall, barbed-wire-thin cowboy with whom his costume girl had traded a French Foreign Legionnaire kepi for the cowboy’s Stetson, with a promise to trade hats again over a glass of wine after work. Tarses had noticed him sitting in his saddle as if born to it, and now, close up, he saw angular bone structure in the cowboy’s face that looked ferocious in the light of the setting sun.

“What’s your name?”

“Tex.”

“Come back tomorrow, Tex. I’ll be taking pictures for a Wild West drama.”

T
EXAS
W
ALT
H
ATFIELD SAUNTERED
into the Los Angeles field office, cast a withering glance at the front-desk man’s fancy duds, and shook howdy with Isaac Bell.

Bell felt the tall Texan flinch.

“What happened to your hand?”

“Busted it falling off my damned horse. Camel spooked him.”

Bell was astonished. There was no finer horseman in the West. “When’s the last time you fell off a horse?”

“Unless you mean shot off,” Texas Walt drawled, “Ah was three years old, and he hadn’t been broke yet.”

“Did you catch up with Joe McCoy?”

“Yup. Like Tarses told me, used to thug for Edison—McCoy called it ‘engaged by Mr. Edison’s legal department.’ Quit or got fired, Ah couldn’t tell, came out here, and hired on with Imperial Protection. McCoy claims they’ve been whupping the heck out of the Edison Boys.”

“I just saw a bunged-up bunch headed back East on the train,” Bell said. “McCoy have any inkling what Imperial Protection’s all about?”