Bell kept driving, heading north on narrow roads along the top ridge of the Palisades. Following Marion’s directions, he located a turnoff in the middle of nowhere that took them west, deeper and deeper into the countryside. Finally, he pulled into a dairy farm barnyard, hidden from the road, where the independent Pirate King Jay Tarses was shooting outside pictures of a troupe of players costumed like Crusaders, Arabs, and Vestal Virgins.

A herd of horses was skittering nervously around a corral, spooked by camels that Tarses had gathered for his Arabs. From what Marion had told him, the camera operator draped over an enormously bulky Bianchi camera was actually cranking an Edison-patented camera concealed inside it.

Isaac Bell stopped the car at a distance to stay out of the picture. An assistant, one of several petite dark-haired girls hanging around Tarses, approached with trepidation.

“Don’t worry,” Bell told her. “We’re not Edison bulls. I’m Isaac Bell, and my wife, Marion, arranged for me and Mr. Clyde Lynds to visit Mr. Tarses.”

“Of course,” she exclaimed. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

“Don’t interrupt the picture taking,” said Bell. “We’ll wait for the clouds.”

By half past one the sun had disappeared. As the players opened box lunches, the assistant led Bell and Lynds to Pirate King Jay Tarses, an unshaven fellow in a slouch hat, shirt-sleeves, and vest who was telling a bespectacled man with ink-stained fingers, “Twenty-five dollars is the most I pay for a scenario converted into a complete photoplay.”

“I think I deserve fifty.”

Tarses lighted a five-cent cigar. “If it makes a hit, we’ll send another check for the same sum.”

“But when I write a short story, the magazines pay two hundred dollars.”

“The people who watch my pictures don’t know how to read,” said Tarses, turning his back on the writer.

He cast an amiable smile at Isaac Bell. “Any husband of Marion is a friend of mine, Mr. Bell. She scored a headliner in her first picture. Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight was alive with human interest. What can I do for you?”

Bell began what Clyde Lynds called a “spiel.”

“I represent Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock of Hartford, Connecticut.”

“Unfortunately,” Tarses interrupted, “I’ve never had the pleasure of borrowing money from them, as they’re not the sort that consorts with my sort.”

“Your luck is about to improve. Dagget, Staples and Hitchcock is considering entering the moving picture business.”

“I am all ears,” said Tarses. Money talked in a business where it had to be borrowed daily, and a prosperous-looking insurance executive dressed in a bespoke suit and made-to-order boots was listened to.