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Delicately, but shaking with the effort, Christian Semmler pulled the smooth blade from his flesh. The pain threatened to knock him off his feet. He staggered to the life net, propped an elbow on it to keep his balance, and spewed a mouthful of blood. Then he slashed his coat sleeve with the razor-sharp knife. Spitting more blood, he wadded the cloth, stuffed it in his mouth, and bit down hard to staunch the wound.
He had to get moving. He had to get away. Fire engines were coming. He was afraid he would pass out. But a second explosion blowing glass from more windows galvanized him with the realization that the fire was spreading so fast that if Isaac Bell somehow did manage to reach the roof ahead of the flames, he and his bride’s only way down was to jump to the life net.
The Acrobat’s sudden laughter lanced pain through his face, but he couldn’t help it. It was such perfect justice for all Bell had done to him. With Bell’s own knife, he slashed the ropes that held the net.
* * *
White smoke seeped into the secret stairwell. The acrid, tarry stink of nitrate gas clawed at Bell’s lungs. As he raced by the film exchange, a judas hole cover blew open and hot flame shot through the spy hole like a fiery arrow. Bell ducked it and kept climbing, bounding three steps at once, pursued by smoke and fire. He passed the opening to the recording studio. The fire was there ahead of him, licking the bodies, having leaped up an elevator shaft or another stairway, and he prayed that Marion had not left the temporary safety of the rooftop studio in a doomed attempt to descend.
At the fifth-floor landing, when he was halfway to the top of the building, the flames feeding on the hundreds of reels in the film exchange far below breached a vault and detonated tons of film stock stored inside. The explosion shook the stairs under Bell’s feet. A shock wave traveled up the shaft and lofted him off the rubber treads.
He tumbled down half a flight of stairs, clambered to his feet, and ran harder, climbing past Irina’s office on the seventh floor, Clyde’s laboratory on the eighth, and Semmler’s lair on the ninth. After one more flight he was at the top, gasping for breath and stymied by walls on every side. He yanked open a judas door and saw a studio stage in semidarkness, with a looming shadow of a ship and towers bearing Cooper-Hewitt light banks. Silhouetted against a lurid sky, Marion was stepping through the door in the northern glass wall, climbing out on the terrace that overlooked the life net.
Bell shouted. The wall was thick, and she could not hear him.
Remembering the sliding fourth-floor wall, he spotted the bulge where the wall thickened to make room for the pocket. He looked for a lever but saw none. He flattened his palms against it and tried to slide it, which had no effect. Then he saw what looked like an ordinary electric light switch on the floor molding. He moved it and the wall glided aside.
“Marion!”
A second explosion rocked the building.
Bell ran the length of the studio stage, dodging wires and camera tracks, and tripped over a sandbag counterbalancing a fly lift. He rolled to his feet and pulled open the door in the glass wall. Marion was climbing the steps that had been built in hopes of one day convincing an extra to try t
he life net.
“Marion!”
“Isaac? Oh my God, it’s you. Hurry! All the stairs are blocked. The elevators won’t come. We have to jump.”
Bell bounded up beside her and held her close, overwhelmed with the relief of finding her alive. The net appeared even smaller than it had when he last saw it from here. Flames leaping from many windows were lighting it clearly. There were dark splotches on the white canvas that he hadn’t noticed before.
“They built it strong enough for two,” said Marion. “Irina wanted a ‘Lovers’ Leap.’”
“We have to hold each other tight, or we’ll smash into each other when we bounce.”
“Thank God, you’re here. I didn’t know if I had the courage to jump.”
“What is that dark color? Those splotches?”
“They shine,” said Marion. “Like liquid.”
A third explosion shook the building. It felt as if it were swaying in an earthquake. Bell, staring down at the net, puzzling over the splotches, saw great torrents of fire thrusting from windows on the sixth floor. They had moments to jump before the building collapsed. “I’ll be right back,” he said. “Don’t leave without me.”
* * *
“We can’t stay here, General Major,” Herman Wagner pleaded with Christian Semmler.
A fire engine thundered up the street, pulled by two bay horses, and from the opposite direction came police on
bicycles.
Wagner’s chauffeur, who kept turning around to stare anxiously, opened the glass that separated the passenger compartment. “We’re blocking the gate. We have to move.”
“Wait!” said Semmler, his voice muffled by the blood-soaked coat sleeve he pressed to his face. “Do not move this auto.”
“But they will see that you were wounded, General Major.”
Semmler did not deign to reply to the obvious, saying instead, “Wounds and war march in lockstep. That is the reason I ordered you to stand by. Don’t disappoint me— Look!” Semmler pointed at the parapet of the Imperial Building. The flames, fanned by a stiffening wind, were shooting higher than the roof. Suddenly something moved in front of them. A man in white teetered on the parapet. “See! There he goes!”
