“If it can’t be fixed, why are you working on it?”
“Because this is the only job Edison will give me,” the old man answered bitterly. “He has younger men working on similar experiments, but they’re all trash.”
“Why don’t you work elsewhere?”
The old man looked at Isaac Bell. A strange light shone in his eyes as if he were staring so deeply inward that he could not quite see what was in front of him. “Edison bankrupted me. I had debts I could never repay. Edison bought them up. I owe him. I am forced to work here.”
“Why would Mr. Edison want you to work on something that doesn’t work?”
“Don’t you understand?” the old man railed, and Bell wondered about the man’s sanity. “He keeps me from inventing things that would put him out of business. He stole my greatest invention, and now he makes sure I will never invent another.”
“What invention?” Bell asked gently, feeling sorrow for the man’s distress.
“I invented an inexpensive gramophone. Edison copied it — poorly, shabbily. Mine was better, but he undercut the price and inundated the market with cheap copies. He named his ‘phonograph.’ People fell for it — people are such fools — and bought the less expensive one. He drove me out of business.”
“When was this?” asked Bell.
“Long, long ago.” His face worked, contorted, and he shouted, “Mine was a beautiful machine. He is a monster.”
The door flew open. The functionary had returned with a heavyset bruiser whose coat bulged with saps and a pistol. “O.K., mister, out of here,” he ordered, and took Bell’s arm.
The tall detective turned eyes on him as bleak as an ice field and said, very softly, “Don’t.”
The bruiser let go.
“Take me back to Mr. Edison.”
Thomas Edison was not smiling when Isaac walked into the soundproof recording room, and Clyde Lynds’s normally cheery countenance had hardened into one tight-lipped with anger.
“There you are, Mr. Bell. We were just finishing up our discussion. Clyde, I look forward to hearing back from you as soon as you’ve had the opportunity to speak with your lawyer. Good day, gentlemen.”
The shadow of a grin crossed Clyde’s face, and he scrawled on his sketch pad, Good day.
“Would you leave your drawings with me?” Edison asked. “Let me peruse them at my leisure.”
To Isaac Bell’s surprise, Clyde handed them over.
He was unusually quiet on the trolley to Newark. Bell waited until they boarded a train for Pennsylvania Station to ask, “What did Mr. Edison think of your machine?”
“I believe he thinks that it is very, very valuable. Of course he didn’t say that.”
“What did he say?”
“In exchange for providing a laboratory, he demands complete control of the patent, not just license to manufacture it. In other words, he would own it.”
“Those are harsh terms.”
Clyde grinned. “I’m taking them as a genuine vote of confidence. If a man as smart as Thomas Edison wants to steal it, Talking Pictures must be worth a fortune.”
Bell said, “I had a gander at his ‘Kinetophone.’ It didn’t strike me it’s going anywhere.”
“All mechanical methods of synchronization are doomed to failure,” Clyde said, flatly. “The Professor and I figured out at the start that we’d never get two separate machines to run precisely synchronized. We knew we had to invent a better way. And we did. Better and completely different.”
“Wasn’t it risky giving Edison your plans?”
Clyde laughed. “I gave him fake plans.”
“Did you really? That was slickly done,” said Bell. “I never tumbled.”
“I gave him notes for an acoustic microphone instead of the Professor’s electrical one, and I gave him drawings for a synchronization contraption similar to the Kinetophone you saw at the laboratory.”
“Similar? How do you know?”
“The Professor and I studied every cockamamie talker scheme in the world — French, Russian, German, British — plus every damned one Edison copied from someone else.”
Isaac Bell was fast coming to the conclusion that Clyde Lynds was shrewder than he had let on. “So you weren’t surprised by Edison’s move this afternoon.”
Clyde Lynds sighed and looked suddenly weary. “Not surprised, but I am disappointed. The Professor and I had hoped our superior machine would convince Edison to treat us like equals. So I’m going to have to go it alone.”
Isaac Bell smiled. “Not quite alone.”
“What do you mean?”
“My wife pulled some wires for you in case things didn’t work out with Edison. She’s lined it up for you to meet an independent called the Pirate King. He’s top dog among fellows who make movies outside the Edison Trust.”
“That’s mighty kind of her.”
“Better than kind. Marion’s rooting for you. She intends to make the first real talking picture.”
20
“Don’t interrupt moving picture people when the sun is shining,” Marion warned her husband. “They hate to waste the light.”
Isaac Bell searched the sky for a promising hint of haze as the ferry to the Fort Lee district of New Jersey crossed the Hudson River. A sultry southwest wind suggested that clouds were in the offing. With any luck, he told Clyde Lynds, the skies would darken by noon.
They rented a Ford auto at a general store with a gasoline pump in front and drove up the steep palisade. In the village of Fort Lee they passed motion picture factories sanctioned by the Edison Trust. Through the glass walls and roofs of barn-like structures, they could see arc lights hanging from the rafters and banks of Cooper-Hewitt mercury-vapor lamps to boost the sunlight. Substantial brick outbuildings housed scenery, property, and costume shops, offices, film-processing laboratories, machine shops to maintain the cameras, and dynamos to power the Cooper-Hewitts.
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 Tonightwas alive with human interest. What can I do for you?”