Suddenly she sat up, wide awake. The caboose was moving. She jumped to a window and pulled back the curtain on a blur of lights. The caboose was passing through a town at sixty kilometers an hour, attached to the back of a train that was picking up speed.

West to Paris?

East to Berlin?

She heard a rattling at the door, louder than the clatter of the wheels. The brakemen who had coupled the caboose to the train were unlocking the door.

IRINA VIORETS AND CHRISTIAN SEMMLER were watching Imperial’s latest film projected on a screen in Semmler’s ninth-floor apartment before showing it to their distributors. It ended with a bang-up chase involving brewery trucks dropping beer barrels, a puffing locomotive, and a motorcycle that jumped the barrels and landed beside a Pierce-Arrow limousine. A bride in a flowing wedding dress jumped out of the limousine and jumped onto the motorcycle, which raced off, pursued by beer trucks, careened onto railroad tracks, and was chased by a train.

Suddenly Semmler leaned forward and stared hard at the flickering screen.

“Who is that motorcyclist?”

“I hope it’s an extra and not a good actor,” answered Viorets. “He’s not going to live long.”

“He looks like Isaac Bell.”

34

“HOW CAN YOU TELL UNDER THOSE GOGGLES?”

“The way he straddles the machine.”

“But Isaac Bell is a Connecticut insurance executive. It can’t be Bell.”

“Of course not,” Semmler mused. “I can’t imagine an insurance man pursuing such a dangerous line of work.”

The picture ended happily with the eloping couple married in a Lutheran church and boarding a Hamburg-America ocean liner for a honeymoon in Germany.

“Irina, I want you to engage Marion Bell.”

“Bell’s wife?”

“How soon can you get her here?”

“Tomorrow, if she’s willing. She’s visiting her father in San Francisco.”

“She should make our history of the western railroads.”

“Why her?”

“I’m betting she’s ready to make something big.”

Irina Viorets looked at Semmler sitting in the shadows. The German general was a strange one up to stranger things, but he often had good ideas. He knew what he was up to in the moving picture business. The Iron Horse, Imperial’s history of the western railroads, would be an ambitious two- or three-reeler. Marion Morgan would bring a topical filmmaker’s sensibility to the story and all the skills necessary to take pictures of real events out-of-doors.

“I’ll telephone her long-distance. I just hope she hasn’t engaged with Preston Whiteway already.”

“Tell her if she’ll leave Whiteway she can have a fleet of locomotives at her disposal. Promise her you’ll put Theda Bara, King Baggot, and Florence Lawrence under contract.”

“She’s not the type to walk out on her contract.”

“Tell her she can tie Billy Bitzer and his camera to the front of a locomotive if that will make her happy. Just get her here! Immediately.”