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Clyde opened his eyes. “Say, Isaac,” he whispered. “You didn’t make the rescue this time.”
“I’m sorry I got you into this,” said Isaac Bell. “I wish I had insisted you take your chances with Edison.”
“At least Edison wouldn’t kill me.”
“Did they take your machine?”
Clyde answered slowly, in a whisper so faint that Bell had to move within inches to hear him. “They took a jury-rigged contraption I slapped together with baling wire. It will drive their scientists nuts. Joke’s on the Acrobat. I fooled him again. And I kept the new plans— Isaac!”
“What?”
“You have to take care of the plans.”
“I will.”
“You have to promise.”
“I promise. Where are they?” Bell asked.
“Right here.”
“Where?”
Clyde raised his hand as if to point at his head as Bell remembered he had on the Mauretania, claiming he held it in his mind and only needed time and money to finish Talking Pictures. A lot of good that would do. They would die with him this time. But instead Clyde was reaching to pat his chest, then hastily to cover his mouth. He coughed, a harsh sound that wracked his body head to toe. The cough ended abruptly with a sudden intake of breath and a long sigh, and before Clyde Lynds could tell Isaac Bell where he had put his plans, the young scientist was dead.
Bell closed Clyde’s eyelids and spread a handkerchief over his face. Mindful of his promise, he searched Clyde’s clothing.
“Looking for something, Detective?”
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44
The Acrobat was speaking directly behind him. His English was fluent, his accent light.
“Place your pistol on his chest.”
Isaac Bell laid the Browning on Clyde’s chest and raised both hands. As his right hand passed his head, he whipped his derringer from his hat, spun around, and fired both barrels in the direction of Semmler’s voice. The slugs clanged through a tin acoustical horn.
The Acrobat laughed.
Now Bell saw him on the far side of the room, a man with hair as gold as his and green eyes bright as emeralds. He was standing behind a disc microphone mounted on a wooden box, smiling the “Fritz Wunderlich” smile that the drummers had raved about. The sketch had failed to capture the magnetic power of his presence. Nor were his thick brow and massive jaw monkey-like. Isaac Bell thought that Semmler, the Acrobat, looked like the work of a brilliant sculptor more enchanted by the structure within his stone than by the surface. The word “mighty” sprang to Bell’s mind. There was a quality to the man of power that made him seem larger than life.
Semmler returned Bell’s inquiring gaze, and his smile broadened and his eyes brightened. Bell was reminded of Art Curtis — though six inches shorter than Semmler and round instead of rangy, Art had possessed a similarly compelling smile. Art had been a fighting man, too, and his eyes could turn cold. But Semmler’s eyes were of a different order, as cold and empty as the stars.
His hands were hidden behind the box.
Bell could not see if he was holding a weapon.
“Clyde’s microphone is quite effective, don’t you think? You thought I sounded real.”
“You sounded like a murderer.”
“I am not a murderer,” Semmler replied, with such conviction that Bell knew he was confronting a madman. “I am a soldier for my country and my kaiser.”
Bell gathered his legs to spring. “That insults every soldier who ever served. You murdered eight men starting with your own accomplice on the Mauretania.”
“None would have died if you had not interfered,” Semmler shot back. “Every death is on your head.”
