“I told you. I will contend with the syndicate. Let us shake hands on our deal.”

On his way back to Van Dorn headquarters, Isaac Bell rented a house big enough for Clyde Lynds to share with Lipsher and two more bruisers from Protective Services.

IRINA VIORETS LOCKED THE DOORto her office in the Imperial Film Manufacturing Building and lifted a leather-bound copy of the novel War and Peace from her bookcase, causing the case to slide open on a private stairway. She climbed two flights to a suite hidden on the ninth floor. Its windows were heavily draped, making it cool and dark. To a northern European, it offered welcome refuge from the Los Angeles heat and sunlight.

The man waiting for her report sat behind his desk with his face in shadow.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Bell insists on posting his own guards.”

26

GENERAL CHRISTIAN SEMMLER LAUGHED AT Irina Viorets.

“Of course he wants his own guards. He’s cautious. What do you expect of an ‘insurance man’?”

“How would I know what to expect? I am not a soldier, only an artist.”

“You are ‘only an artist’ like a cobra is only a snake.”

“You have no right to mock me. I have done exactly as you wanted.”

“And will continue to.” Christian Semmler watched her gather her courage, then brutally cut the legs out from under her. “No! To answer the question forming on your lovely lips, I have no message for you from your fiancé.”

“You promised,” she said bleakly.

“I promised I would try to get a message.”

He watched tears fill her eyes. When he took mercy upon her, it was not really mercy, but merely another way to make her toe the line. “I can tell you that he is still safe in Germany.”

“In prison.”

“If the czar’s secret police were hunting me,” Christian Semmler replied with withering disdain for her foolish lover, “I would rather be in a German prison than out in the open. The Okhrana are as determined as they are cruel. So if it puts your mind at rest, remember that your young man is safe in an Imperial German Army prison deep inside Prussia. And no one enters that particular prison without my express permission. Or leaves it, for that matter.”

“May I go now?” she said, rising with strength and dignity.

She was a strong woman, Semmler had to admit. He had chosen well. Better than she had. The fool she was engaged to marry, one of her benighted nation’s thousands of impoverished princes, had bungled a quixotic attack on the czar in the name of some murky Russian amalgam of democracy and socialism. Which gave Semmler all the leverage he needed to make Irina Viorets serve the Donar Plan.

“You may go,” he said. “Get Lynds established in his laboratory immediately and do everything necessary to make him productive.”

27

“ISAAC! WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN LOS ANGELES?”