“The poor old guy didn’t have a clue. It was all my idea. Remember I told you I got lucky? What happened was I bumped into a Gopher I used to know in New York when he was a sceneshifter at the Hammerstein. He had moved up in the Gophers, and they sent him to Germany looking for film stock. He had the dough. I knew an outfit I’d bought from and they steered me to a shipper to pack it and hide it. We worked a deal.” He hung his head again. “I thought, What the heck, everyone smuggles film stock, why not me? I didn’t realize the stuff was so old it was unstable.” He barked a bitter laugh. “I got taken like a rube. Seven crates of garbage.”

“Deadly garbage.”

“I swear, I didn’t know it was old. I think they switched it on me. I mean, I wouldn’t risk hurting all those people.”

“And you are absolutely positive that Beiderbecke had nothing to do with it?”

“I didn’t tell him until it was on the boat… What are you going to do?”

Isaac Bell sighed. “I’m afraid you leave me no choice but to help keep you alive and unkidnapped while you build a new Talking Pictures machine.”

“Help me? Why? It was terrible. All those people could have died.”

“Why? You’re a jackass. But you’re an honest jackass. I just gave you an easy out and you didn’t take it. All you had to do was blame the Professor, but you didn’t. That’s good enough for me.”

“SOMEBODY PUT THE FEAR OF GOD into these Marzipan Boys,” Harry Warren told Isaac Bell that night at Van Dorn headquarters in the Knickerbocker Hotel, “which ain’t easy to do.”

“How’d they manage that?’

“The guy who led the raid on Pier 54?”

“What about him?”

As the agency’s New York gang specialist, rubbing shoulders with Gophers, Dusters, and Chinatown tongs, Detective Harry Warren had seen his share of evil in the slums. But his hands were shaking as he tugged a flask from his hip pocket, took a long pull on it, then passed it to Isaac Bell.

“They burned him alive in a brewery furnace.” Harry took the flask back, wiped it with his sleeve, and drank again. “The guy’s brother told me.”

“Why’d he tell you?”

“Good question. It was like whoever did this has different stripes than he’s used to. It was like the Gophers and the Marzipans and the Van Dorns and even the cops are on one side of a big hole in the street, like from an earthquake or something, and these folks roasting his brother are on the other.”

Bell asked, “What else did he tell you?”

“Nothing. Clammed up.”

Bell said, “Let’s go see him.”