The Thief (18 page)

I
SAAC
B
ELL WAS SURPRISED TWICE UPON AR
riving at the red brick building that housed Thomas Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey. It had never occurred to him how young Edison’s scientists would be. The laboratories were teeming with nattily dressed bright young fellows like Clyde Lynds. Nor had he expected Edison, with his reputation for hard bargaining, to have such a warm smile. It widened his full mouth engagingly and lighted his deep-set eyes.

Bell was not surprised, when a functionary led them into a soundproof phonograph-cylinder recording room, by the sight of the great man trying to hear music by biting down on the piano lid. Edison’s deafness was public knowledge. He stood up from the piano, dismissed the man playing it with a pleasant nod, and said in a loud but friendly voice, “Never go deaf. You’ll hate it. You must be Mr. Bell.”

Bell shook the strong hand Edison extended.

“And you, young fellow, must be Mr. Lynds, about whom Mr. Bell has telegraphed so glowingly. Shrewd move with the telegraph, Mr. Bell. I am hopeless on the telephone. All right, come in, sit down. Tell me what you’ve brought me.”

Clyde had prepared a sketchbook with drawings and titles written out in block letters. Thomas nodded appreciatively. “This even beats Mr. Bell’s telegram.” He flipped through the pages. “‘Pictures that talk’? Everyone brings me pictures that talk. Trouble is, none of them work.”

Clyde Lynds faced the inventor and spoke loudly and slowly, moving his lips to exaggerate each word. “This. One. Works.”

“You don’t say? O.K., show me. Where is it?”

Lynds tapped the sketch pad and then tapped his head. “In here.”

“What was that?”

Bell watched with admiration as Clyde turned a page of his pad to display the words he had written out ahead of time:
The first machine was lost. I need a laboratory, machine shops, and money to build a new one
.

“What do you mean ‘lost’?” Edison shouted.

Clyde flipped to the next page, on which he had written
In a fire
, and Isaac Bell’s admiration went up a notch. The penniless young scientist was choreographing his conversation with the richest, most famous inventor in the world.

Edison glanced at Bell. Whatever the expression in his eyes, it was lost in the shadow of his brow, but Bell sensed a shift in his attitude. “Mr. Bell,” he said briskly, suddenly all business, “I suspect that the purely scientific conversation we are about to embark on will bore you. I’ve arranged a tour of my laboratories for your enjoyment while Mr. Lynds and I pursue what makes his talking pictures different from all the others.”

“Thoughtful of you,” said Bell, rising to his feet. “I’m curious to see your operation.” Clearly, Edison wanted to get rid of him. But just as clearly, Bell concluded, Clyde could take care of himself. Besides, they had made a pact that Clyde would sign no papers without Van Dorn attorneys reading them first.

The functionary sprang into the room as if he had had his ear pressed to the door, and Isaac Bell allowed him to walk him through a standard canned tour of the Edison laboratory. He saw the chemical plant, machine shops, laboratories. At the storeroom he watched a clerk dispense a length of manatee skin, which would be fashioned into belt drives, his guide told him. From a gallery Bell could look down at Mr. Edison’s two-story, book-lined office. The functionary pointed out Edison’s marble statue of an angel shining an electric lightbulb on a heap of broken oil lamps.

“What’s that?” Bell asked. They were passing a door marked “Kinetophone Laboratory,” and through the top glass he could see an older bearded man hunched over a cat’s cradle of wires and pulleys that linked a moving picture projector to a phonograph. Joe Van Dorn, Bell recalled, had been disappointed by a Kinetophone. “I said, ‘What’s that?’”

“Just an experiment.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“It’s not ready to be seen.”

“I don’t mind,” said Bell, and pushed through the door, ignoring his guide’s protests. The bearded old man looked up, blinking in surprise, as if unaccustomed to visitors.

“We should not be in here, Mr. Bell,” said the functionary. “This experiment is very important to Mr. Edison. Much is riding on it.”

“Go ask Mr. Edison’s permission,” said Bell. “I’ll wait here. Go on!”

The functionary scuttled out. Bell said to the old man, “A fellow I know saw one of these in Cincinnati. Is this one that you’re repairing?”

“Repairing? Don’t make me laugh. God Himself couldn’t repair this piece of trash.”

“What’s wrong with it? Why is it trash?”

“Listen.” He moved an electric switch, and the machine projected on the wall a moving picture of a woman singing. At the same time, the phonograph cylinder began spinning. The wires connecting the two machines whirred, their pulleys clattered, and the woman’s voice emerged from the phonograph horn, thin, harsh, and grating, as Van Dorn had said. Within ten seconds her voice had fallen behind the movement of her lips.

“She doesn’t sound synchronized with her picture,” said Bell.

“And never will be,” said the old man.

The song ended, but the woman appeared to keep on singing. Her mouth opened wide, holding a note, while from the horn a male voice said, “What a fine voice you have.” Five seconds later a man appeared, mouthing the words he had spoken earlier and clapping silently as an invisible violin played. At last the violinist appeared.

“That’s rather funny,” said Bell.

“It is supposed to be a drama.”

“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.”

T
HOMAS
E
DISON 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.”

“D
ON’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.