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Smoke obscured the figure. Then he separated from the parapet, as if he were pushing off with all his strength to clear the building, and fell through the air.
“I think it’s both of them.”
“My God, it is.” Hermann Wagner held his breath. It seemed that it took them forever to plunge past the burning windows. How afraid they must be that they would miss the tiny net. What would they do if they saw that they were falling off course? To Wagner’s immense relief, the poor couple did not miss the net. They landed dead center. But instead of bouncing back up in the air, they smashed through it to the ground.
“Bull’s-eye,” said Christian Semmler.
“The net collapsed,” cried Wagner. “It didn’t hold.” He stared at the wreckage, but, of course, no one moved from it. How could they? A moment later a section of the building’s wall gave way and thundered down, burying their remains under tumbled bricks.
The first team of fire horses clattered alongside the auto.
“Drive!”
Wagner’s chauffeur almost stalled the motor in his haste to get away.
“Where now, General Major?” asked Wagner, staring back over his shoulder at the burning building, and grateful that the wooden fence blocked his view of where Bell and his wife had died. “To the freight yard?”
“Take me to a doctor. While he sutures this, charter a special to New York. We are done in Los Angeles. For now.”
Christian Semmler sounded remarkably pleased, Wagner thought, for a man who had seen his entire enterprise go up in smoke. And he displayed a God-like indifference to his grievous wounds. God-like, or machine-like — it was as if he didn’t feel pain.
Semmler noticed him staring. “Of course it hurts,” he said, spitting blood so he could speak. “You should pray you never feel anything like it.”
* * *
“We’re running out of rope. Hang on! I’ll see what I can do.”
Isaac Bell let go of the last inches of a seventy-foot-long string of Cooper-Hewitt light cables and stage fly ropes he had knotted together, and dropped ten feet to the roof of the Imperial Moving Picture Palace marquee that sheltered the sidewalk in front of the building. He landed on stinging soles and looked up. Flames were gushing from windows they had descended past moments ago.
“Let go. I’ve got you.”
Marion slid down to the end of the rope, shredding the little that remained of her gloves, and opened her hands. Bell caught her in his arms, swooped her to a gentle landing, and held her tightly for a grateful moment.
The clatter of hoofs and the throb of steam pumps heralded the arrival of the fire department. “Firemen!” Bell called down to them. “Did you boys happen to bring a ladder?”
* * *
“I still can’t sleep,” Marion whispered, “I keep seeing that sandbag burst on the ground. That could have been us.”
Bell held her close. “But it wasn’t us. Don’t worry, we’re fine.”
Marion laughed. “I’m not worried. And I know why I can’t sleep. It feels so wonderful to be awake — Isaac, thank God you saw his blood on the net. But what made you think he cut the ropes? I’d have thought he would have run for his life, particularly if he was so badly wounded as to be bleeding like that.”
“He’s a killer. He calls himself a soldier, but he is first a killer. In fact, I’ll bet he waited to watch us hit bottom.”
“When he finds out you tested the net with a sandbag, he’s going to be badly disappointed.”
“He’s going to be more than disappointed,” Bell promised grimly, climbing out of bed and kissing her good night. “Sleep tight.”
“Where are you going?’
“New York.”
“Why New York?”
“Christian Semmler’s got what he came for. He’s going back to Germany.”
“How do you know?”
