The Thief (Isaac Bell 5)

The tough nuts in fancy uniforms who guarded the Imperial Building lobby were not exactly friendly toward Isaac Bell, but he had visited Clyde Lynds often enough that they acknowledged a familiar face and greeted him by name.

“Afternoon, Mr. Bell,” said the doorman, then spoke sharply to the well-built men crowding behind Bell who were carrying musical cases for horns, saxophones, a clarinet, a violin, and a double bass. “Wait right there, gents! I’ll be with youse in a minute.”

“They’re with me,” said Bell.

“All of ’em?”

“Mr. Lynds requested a band.”

“Open those cases.”

“Gentlemen,” Bell said mildly, “they’re jumpy here. Show him your instruments.”

Hinged open, the cases revealed shiny trumpets and saxophones, clarinets, a little violin, and an enormous string bass.

“Fourth floor,” Bell told the glowering elevator operator, who glanced for the O.K. from the chief doorman before delivering them to the fourth floor.

Clyde Lynds was waiting impatiently in the recording room. “What took so long?”

“Nervous doormen thought the boys were smuggling Gatling guns.”

“Idiots— All right, boys, sit yourselves around that recording horn. Violin closest, trumpet over there, saxophone and string bass back there.”

“Where you want me?’ asked the clarinetist, a nattily dressed wisp of a fellow whom Isaac Bell had last seen in Idaho separating two bank robbers from their shotguns.

Clyde said, “Stand behind the violin and wait to come in until I tell you.”

The string bass player, most famous at the Van Dorn Detective Agency for infiltrating San Francisco’s corrupt police department, blew A on a pitch pipe to start the tuning process.

Clyde said, “When making acoustic recordings of music, we have to replace the violins with horns and clarinets and reinforce the string bass with a bass saxophone and the drums with banjos. One of my goals is to replace the acoustic mechanical systems invented by Edison. Edison machines can’t record strings and drums and can’t record piano, which is really just a bunch of strings and drums. It comes out flat and tinny.”

Isaac Bell glanced over his shoulder. He had an eerie sense that someone was watching him. But the only people he saw were Clyde’s assistants coming into the room carrying a box trailing wires. While they began attaching the wires to a disc-cutting machine, Bell went to the door and looked out. The corridor was empty, but the feeling persisted that he was under observation.

Clyde’s helpers lugged in a wooden box on top of which stood a thick round disc peppered with holes. They placed it next to the horn. “This is a carbon microphone, like you’ll find in a telephone, only much bigger. Inside this box is an electrically charged glass vacuum valve that will amplify and regenerate what the microphone hears. It is my theory that an electric recording will add an octave of sound reproduction so that we can record violins, and hopefully one day, the piano. Eventually I’ll make a microphone that lets the sound wave be lazy, unlike Edison’s microphone, which demands lots of work. By the time the sound comes out of Edison’s horn it’s exhausted, just like some poor laborer. O.K., why don’t you boys tune up while they finish hooking up wires?”

Clyde joined Bell at the door, and they stepped down the hall into a soundproof room that Clyde had built next to the recording studio. It had a window made of multiple layers of glass that looked out on the musicians. There was an enormous tin gramophone horn on a wooden box, which, Bell noticed, had wires trailing out of it and through the wall into the recording room.

He asked, “What’s this about cutting a wax disc? I thought you were putting the sound straight on film.”

“One thing at time. First I have to make a clear electrical recording. There’s no point in putting acoustically recorded sound on the film if I can’t play it back loudly enough for an audience to hear in a big theater.”

“When do you think you’ll be able to?”

“Listen to this.” Clyde closed a knife switch on the box that held the horn. The horn emitted the discordant cacophony of the musicians tuning violins and banjos. Bell listened carefully, trying to distinguish between the different instruments he was watching through the window. “I can’t hear much difference between the violin and the clarinet.”

“The fact that you’re hearing the violin at all tells me I’m on the right track.” Clyde opened the switch, and the noise stopped. “You can tell Mr. Van Dorn that we can sell a version of this microphone to Alexander Graham Bell to make longer long-distance telephone calls. Like from here all the way to New York.”

“I’ll tell him,” said Bell, adding drily, “I’ll also tell him that it sounds like we have a long way to go.”

“I had a better one made, but someone stole it.”

“Stole it? Who?”

Clyde shrugged. “I don’t know. I came in yesterday morning, and the best one I’d made yet had disappeared. None of my boys saw anything. And neither did yours.”

“Do you think someone sneaked in while you were

sleeping?”