WITH THE MAN’S ENTIRE WEIGHT hanging from his throat, Bell could barely see. He felt as if he had not drawn breath in a year. His hand was slipping.

“Interesting situation, Detective. When you die, I’ll fall. But you’ll die first.”

“No,” gasped Bell. His hand moved convulsively.

“No, Detective?” Semmler mocked. “No deeper last words, than ‘no’ before we plunge into the fires? Speak now or forever hold your peace. What was that, you say?”

“Thank you, Mike Malone.”

“Thank you for what?”

“Cutting pliers.” Holding on with the last of the strength in his left hand, Bell jerked his right hand, and the tool slid out of his sleeve into his palm. He closed his fingers around the handles and squeezed with all he had left in him.

The cable snapped.

Isaac Bell’s last sight of the Acrobat before he vanished down the Mauretania’s stack was the astounded light in his eyes.

50

ARRIVING AT THE BERLINER STADTSCHLOSS in a triumphal mood, Hermann Wagner handed his top hat to the palace maid attending the commoners’ cloakroom and proceeded upstairs to Kaiser Wilhelm II’s private throne room, where a small, select company of high-ranking soldiers, industrialists, and bankers—the elite of the elite—had been summoned to observe the final demonstration of a device that the kaiser himself had proclaimed the epitome of German achievement.

A pair of generals flaunting gruesome dueling scars looked down their noses at the banker. Wagner serenely ignored the scornful aristocrats and took great pleasure in watching their expressions change when the kaiser marched straight to Hermann Wagner and shook his hand, shouting, “Behold a true German patriot. Wait till you see what he has made happen. Begin!”

Lackeys rushed in with a moving picture screen, acoustic horns, and an enormous new film projector. The lights were dimmed. His Majesty the kaiser sat on his throne. The company stood and watched a moving picture of Kaiser Wilhelm himself striding into this very room with his favorite dachshund tucked under his arm.

When the monarch on the screen opened his mouth to speak and his words poured mightily from the acoustic horns, the expressions on the generals’ scarred faces, thought Hermann Wagner, were priceless. The worm had turned. Soldiers were no longer the only ones whose magic enchanted the kaiser.

“Der Tag!” spoke the kaiser’s image, easily heard over the clatter of the film projector. “Der Tag will be Germany’s beginning, not her end. Victory depends not only on soldiers.”

Hermann Wagner closed his eyes. He knew these words by heart. He had edited the film, having discovered a knack for such things, and in a brilliant touch, when the kaiser had proclaimed his piece, the dachshund would bark at the camera and the kaiser would pat his head. Millions would smile, touched that the kaiser loved his pets as much as any ordinary German.