“I promised I would try to get a message.”
He watched tears fill her eyes. When he took mercy upon her, it was not really mercy, but merely another way to make her toe the line. “I can tell you that he is still safe in Germany.”
“In prison.”
“If the czar’s secret police were hunting me,” Christian Semmler replied with withering disdain for her foolish lover, “I would rather be in a German prison than out in the open. The Okhrana are as determined as they are cruel. So if it puts your mind at rest, remember that your young man is safe in an Imperial German Army prison deep inside Prussia. And no one enters that particular prison without my e
xpress permission. Or leaves it, for that matter.”
“May I go now?” she said, rising with strength and dignity.
She was a strong woman, Semmler had to admit. He had chosen well. Better than she had. The fool she was engaged to marry, one of her benighted nation’s thousands of impoverished princes, had bungled a quixotic attack on the czar in the name of some murky Russian amalgam of democracy and socialism. Which gave Semmler all the leverage he needed to make Irina Viorets serve the Donar Plan.
“You may go,” he said. “Get Lynds established in his laboratory immediately and do everything necessary to make him productive.”
27
“Isaac! What are you doing in Los Angeles?”
“Hoping you’ll help me, Uncle Andy.”
“Don’t call me Uncle Andy. It makes me feel old, and I am not your uncle.”
Bell regarded the impish-looking Andrew Rubenoff with affection. “You’re my father’s special friend. That makes you uncle enough for me.”
Rubenoff was a dark-haired man in his forties, who wore an impeccably tailored suit of worsted wool and, on his head, a disc of velvet, the yarmulke of the Hebrew faith. A banker like Bell’s father, he was shifting his assets out of coal, steel, and railroads into the three newest industries in America: automobiles, flying machines, and moving pictures. Colleagues who thought him lunatic before he doubled his fortune were further appalled when he pulled up stakes and moved from New York City to Los Angeles. As Bell’s father had put it, “They act as if President Taft had moved the White House to Tokyo. The fact is, Andrew emigrated from Russia to New York to San Francisco and back to New York. There is a bit of the gypsy in the fellow.”
“I need your help,” said Bell. “How would you like to be a detective?”
“I would rather play piano in a Barbary Coast bordello.”
“You’ve already done that, Uncle Andy. I am offering a new experience.”
Andrew Rubenoff gestured out the windows of his hilltop mansion, indicating his pleasure with the views of the mountains to the north and east, the flat coastal plain stretching to the blue Pacific Ocean, and the hazy outline of Catalina Island. Within his lavish office, fine furniture shared the space with oil paintings by the radical artists Marcel Duchamp and John Sloan and his beloved Mason & Hamlin grand piano, which had traveled with him from New York. “I am enjoying this experience, thank you very much. Will you have tea, Isaac?”
A handsome male secretary brought tea in tall glasses. In New York, Bell recalled, the secetary had been matronly. Rubenoff sipped his tea through a cube of sugar. Bell followed suit, burning his tongue as usual.
“What have you heard about the Imperial Film Manufacturing Company?”
“I heard this morning that Imperial is dropping the word ‘Manufacturing’ from its name. All the picture firms are doing it. It’s dawned on them that movies are more interesting than anvil foundries. And far more complicated.”
“Before this morning, what had you heard about Imperial?”
“Big and rich.”
“But they just got started. They built an expensive building but have just begun distributing films. How did they get so big and rich?”
“Artists Syndicate.”
“Who are Artists Syndicate’s investors?”
“Finally, you ask an interesting question. But a hard one.”
“You’re the man to answer hard questions,” Bell said bluntly.
“Do you know anything about the movies?” Rubenoff asked. “Other than being married to a woman who makes them.”
“She’s taught me a lot,” said Bell. “And by the way, thank you again for the silver service. Next time we have thirty-six to dinner we’ll put it to good use.”