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“I am terrified,” the banker admitted. “You warned me on the Mauretania never to look on your face. Tonight you show me your face. What am I to think but the worst?”
“Do not worry. You are valuable alive. I still need you. I need you more than ever. There is much to be done.”
“What can be done? Bell is onto you. And he’s closing in on Imperial Film.”
Semmler snatched the telephone from the banker’s hand and listened. A brilliant smile filled his strange face. It brightened his eyes and spread his lips, but bright as it was, Wagner thought, it looked cold as distant lightning.
“Bell,” said the leader of the Donar Plan, “would sound less confident if he knew we could hear him.”
40
“Mr. Bell, could I see that picture again?”
Isaac Bell handed the Wunderlich sketch to a Los Angeles Van Dorn disguised in the patched clothing and dark glasses of a blind newspaper seller. The detective took off the glasses and studied the sketch.
“You know, he didn’t look quite like this. But it could have been him.”
“When?”
The blind newsie opened his notebook and read deadpan: “Individual possibly resembling Mr. Bell’s sketch of Fritz Wunderlich entered German vice-consul’s residence Saturday at ten past eight. Detective Balant decided it wasn’t him.”
“Ten past eight this evening?”
“Yes, sir.”
“When did he come out?”
“Didn’t.”
Every detective in the room reached for his hat. Bell was already at the door. “He never came out? Are you sure?”
“I covered the front door, right across the street from my newsstand. When I needed relief to come here, Patrolman Joe Thomas, who lends us a hand, promised to cover till I got back.”
“Come on, boys, let’s have a look.”
They piled into two Ford autos and raced across town.
Larry Saunders asked Bell, “Is there any way we can get inside the consulate?”
“Not without setting off an international hullabaloo.”
Bell ordered the cars stopped a block from the residence of the German vice-consul, who had been recently appointed by the San Francisco consul general. “Wait here. I don’t want them looking out their window at half the detectives in California.”
He walked down the block and stopped at the “blind newsie’s” newspaper stand. The cop, Patrolman Joe Thomas, was seated inside, yawning. “Van Dorn,” said Bell, picking up the evening edition of the Los Angeles Times to shield the act of showing the sketch. “Have you seen this fellow come out of the consulate?”
“You just missed him,” said the cop. “Lit out of there like the house was on fire.”
* * *
“Isaac Bell will confront you,” Christian Semmler warned Irina Viorets. “Be prepared.”
“I am prepared.”
“I would recommend that you act both disbelieving and fiercely defiant.”
“I said I am prepared.”
“I would play the J. P. Morgan card if I were you.”
