“Irina,” Marion Bell warned with a steely gaze, “we are not in Russia. If you must kiss someone firmly on the lips, start with that handsome boy trailing you with adoring eyes. Isaac, I want you to meet my very good friend Irina Viorets. It was Irina who told me about this dress.”
“A pleasure.” Bell shook the dark-eyed beauty’s hand. “From what Marion’s told me you two had more fun in London than is usual at royal funerals.”
“We are kindred spirits. Marion, I have arranged for you and your handsome husband a special wedding gift to wish you happiness in your marriage.”
“What is it?”
“An entertainment.” She snapped her fingers and took command of a phalanx of saloon stewards, who marched into the crowded lounge carrying an Edison film projector and a screen improvised from a square of sailcloth.
“That is one energetic woman,” Bell whispered to Marion.
“A bit too energetic. She escaped Russia one step ahead of the secret police.”
“How did she annoy the Okhrana?”
“By making a film that the czarina deemed ‘risqué.’ I didn’t get the whole story, and it changed a little with each glass of wine, but she’s hoping to start over again in the movie business in New York.”
“Taking pictures?”
“Manufacturing. She told me, ‘Dis time I vill be boss.’”
“Have I told you that you look absolutely gorgeous in that dress?”
“Only twice since we were married.” She stepped closer to press her lips to his. “Isn’t it wonderful? Now people expect us to kiss in public— Oh my, Irina is giving us a Talking Pictures play.”
The stewards suspended the sailcloth beside the piano. Actors, two men and a woman, positioned themselves behind the cloth with an array of gongs, triangles, drumsticks, whistles, and washboards.
“Where did she find a Humanova Troupe in the middle of the ocean?” marveled Marion.
“I say, what is a Humanova Troupe?” asked Lord Strone. The British colonel had been hovering near Mademoiselle Viorets.
“Humanovas make sound for the movies,” Marion told Strone.
“Sound? In the cinema? Do you mean like the orchestra?”
“Much more than an orchestra. The actors speak lines of dialogue. And make effects.”
“Effects?”
“Gunshots, whistles, bells. Surely you’ve heard Humanovas in London. Or Actologues?”
“Rarely get to town anymore, m’dear. Retired, don’t you know?”
Bell concealed a smile at the sight of Archie’s red eyebrow cocked toward the skylight. Strone was laying it on with a trowel, but a flurry of marconigrams from Van Dorn informants in England had repeated, in guarded language, rumors that His Lordship was, as Bell suspected, attached to Great Britain’s newly formed Secret Service Bureau with offices at Whitehall in the center of London. He left London only to undermine England’s enemies abroad.
Urged on by Irina Viorets, the stewards arranged chairs facing the improvised screen, and within minutes the lounge had been transformed into a moving picture theater. Members of the ship’s orchestra gathered around the piano with violins and a trumpet. They struck a clarion chord.