She turned to the sound of his voice. Her eyes were bright with tears. Her voice trembled. “Do not speak,” she said. “I will speak.”

Bell listened with some skepticism and then growing sympathy as she told him how her fiancé was locked in Semmler’s Army prison in Prussia. “Semmler says he’s a fool. But his cause is right. His dreams are just. I know, now, that he was not meant to survive in the world in which he chooses to fight. I am his only hope.”

“Irina, why are you telling me this?”

“Because maybe if you kill Semmler, perhaps, just perhaps, there will be no one else to order them to kill my prince.”

“I’m a private detective, Irina. I’m not a murderer.”

“I know that, Isaac. But if you confront Christian Semmler, only one will survive. Call it what you want. Self-defense. I don’t care. You are my only hope.”

“To confront him, I have to find him.”

“I will tell you how to find him. There is a secret stairwell that rises from the basement to the penthouse. He roams it. He spies from it. On the ninth floor he has his own hidden quarters. Now you can find him.”

“Where is the basement entrance?”

“Do you recall the life net that I showed you behind the building? For the actors to jump in?”

“Yes.”

“There is a trapdoor directly under it.”

“Why tonight?” Bell asked. “Why did you tell me tonight?”

“Because I have done a terrible thing, and only you can save me from it.”

“What?”

“Semmler asked me to make sure that Marion is in the building tonight.”

“She’s here? She can’t be. She’s home.”

“I put her to work, last minute, taking pictures in the roof studio. She’s up there now. Where he wanted her. I am so sorry, Isaac, but my—”

Bell whirled away and ran full tilt down the block and around the corner. He saw an International truck pulling away from the gate in the wooden fence that surrounded the vacant lot behind the building. One of the uniformed lobby doormen was standing guard at the gate and moved to stop him.

“Where the hell you think you’re going?”

Bell hit him twice, continued through the gate, and ran past the temporary outdoor studio stages. He saw the life net in the light of a nearby window. The canvas was stretched between springy ropes, five feet above the ground. Bell ducked under it and found the trapdoor. Oddly, it was open.