The Cutthroat

The rain was driving Marion Morgan Bell to extreme measures. It would not stop. She had yet to film a scene out of doors, and her leading lady, who was even more compelling on the screen than on the stage, was threatening to jump on the Golden State Limited to Chicago and the 20th Century home to “civilization.”

She had already lost John Buchanan — but that to a great cause, the end of Jack the Ripper’s rampage, which she couldn’t wait to hear about when Isaac returned from wherever that chase had taken him. She still had a star, in Jackson Barrett, and a stand-in, in Mr. Young. But no female “Mr. Young” existed who could replace the Isabella Cook, the “Great and Beloved.”

Her only chance was to show Isabella a compelling scene to recapture her interest in the movie and keep her engaged. And so with the rough-and-ready ingenuity she had learned making topical films on the fly, Marion moved her Dream Duel scene indoors — deep indoors — inside a collapsed tunnel abandoned by an interurban streetcar company.

It was tailor-made for filming a sword fight — the rubble an illusion of an ancient castle. It was a hundred feet long from the mouth to the rocks that partially blocked the back end, ten feet high and twelve feet wide, and so far away from town that they’d never be found by gawking tourists. Like a castle, the long, narrow, high-ceilinged hall had nooks and crannies indented in the rough walls — where she could hide her cameras.

Marilyn Rennegal — Marion’s equally rough-and-ready Cooper Hewitt operator on The Iron Horse film — had festooned the rocky ceiling with mercury-vapor lamps and dangled them with hundreds of white silk ribbons for visual effect. A dynamo outside the tunnel generated electricity for the lights. It was powered by an ingenious system of drive belts turned by the same eight-cylinder airplane motor that spun Marion’s wind machine. From inside, that contraption looked like an airplane about to fly into the tunnel at the expense of its wings.

The ninety-horsepower V-8 Curtiss Pusher airplane engine drove an enormous pusher propeller at fourteen hundred revolutions per minute. The wooden propeller’s blade faces were carved with a reverse twist to push air in front of it. It stood taller than a man, and when spinning at top speed, the varnished blades disappeared in a lethal blur.

Marion had plastered warnings inside the tunnel and out:

STAND CLEAR

* * *

Isaac Bell had neither returned to Los Angeles alive nor had his body been found. Perhaps another “perfect crime”?

That Van Dorn detectives had arrested John Buchanan seemed to shout, “Yes! Perfect!” But to be on the safe side, the Cutthroat had cleared a path through the rubble at the back of the tunnel in order to escape, with a hostage, if he had to.

He could not have known that Bell was a detective, too. Their boss, no less. But it didn’t matter. Framing Buchanan for the Cleveland murder had worked as planned. Buchanan had no alibi. Not without naming the woman he sneaked off with that night. The philanderer had lost his heart to a pretty little airplane pilot who loved the children she would surely lose in a divorce. Love had made him honorable. Rather than betray her, the poor fool would rot in prison until they executed him.

Plan. Anticipate. Hope.

The Jekyll and Hyde movie had vaulted his usual optimism to stratospheric levels.

Marion Morgan Bell showed them pictures she had taken of the Dream Duel rehearsal.

“Immortal” was hardly the word. Seeing his face and his body in motion had a thousand times the impact of a photograph — ten thousand times — and it was easier than ever to believe that he would never die. And would sure as hell never be captured.

* * *

“Please take your places before we start the machines… Mr. Davidson? Mr. Blitzer?”

“Right here, Mrs. Bell,” said Davidson. He was standing beside her in the first cranny, twenty feet from the wind machine.

“Here,” Blitzer called from his nook on the other side of the tunnel, fifteen feet deeper in.

“Mrs. Rennegal, please get off that ladder and tend the dynamo.”

Rennegal adjusted one more Cooper Hewitt, descended the ladder reluctantly, and carried it out of the tunnel.

Kellan, Davidson’s assistant, hurried outside to run the wind machine.

“Mr. Barrett?”

Barrett saluted her with his saber. He was the image of a hallucinogenic swordsman, in a plumed musketeer’s hat, thigh-high black boots, and white shirt with puffed sleeves. Above his head, Rennegal’s ribbons stirred in the draft of air drifting from the back of the tunnel.

“Where’s Mr. Young?… Is Mr. Young making up at the hotel?”

“Hyde here! Sorry I’m late.”

Mr. Hyde squeezed past the wind machine, observed the various fencing weapons laid out on the prop table, noted that Barrett was holding a weapon with a flat blade and knuckle guard, perfect for thrusting and cutting actions, a dueling saber. He selected a weapon that felt as if it was born in his hand and took his place facing Dr. Jekyll.