“That is why I am investigating what Krieg Rüstungswerk is up to in America. When we find out what and put a stop to it, Clyde and the talking machine will be free and clear.”

Van Dorn sighed again. “What if all they are ‘up to in America’ is grabbing Clyde and his machine? It’s the machine they want. If you hadn’t stopped them on the ship, they’d be happily holed up in some Prussian castle while Clyde and Beiderbecke tinkered away with guns to their heads. The first the world would know was when the Germans showed talking pictures.”

“The Germans were here already,” said Bell.

“Here? What do you mean?”

“Here in America, long before I broke up the kidnapping.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Look at the operation to grab Clyde off the Limited. Back in Chicago they smuggled the Acrobat into the express car. Only thirty-six hours later in New Mexico, halfway across the continent, they wrecked the train and had horsemen and mounts positioned to spirit Clyde across the Mexican border and onto a train. Five to one, they had a ship waiting in Veracruz. And they organized the entire operation in the few short days after Clyde gave their Marzipan Boys the slip in New York. Don’t you see, Joe? This is a gigantic outfit with a continental reach. I’ll bet you ten to one, Krieg secretly owns American factories, farms, ranches, and hotels where their agents hole up.”

IN DEAD SILENCE, AND IN MOVEMENTS so lithe he seemed to flow like oil, Christian Semmler roamed up and down a stairwell concealed in the center of the Imperial Building. The hidden shaft let him enter every floor from the subcellar to the roof. He could watch, unseen, seeing everything. On the penthouse story, he pressed his eye to a spy hole. The cinematography stage camera operator was photographing a scene of a couple kissing good-bye in their parlor as the man went off to war.

Semmler descended three floors to watch Irina Viorets busy at her desk, female stenographers on either side, a runner hurrying notes to a telegrapher tapping in a far corner, and the telephone pressed to her ear. Though the walls that encased his secret stairwell were thick, he fancied he smelled her perfume.

Floor by floor he descended, peering through spy holes at scene shops, carpenters, and seamstresses, ranks of darkroom chemists laboring under red lights, films being loaded into canisters. He stopped to watch an entire ten-minute reel of film being presented to Imperial Company salesmen, who would take it to the exhibitors and distributors around America. All was up-to-date, all the latest way of doing things, with one glaring exception: the sound-recording studio on the fourth floor.