The Cutthroat Clive Cussler (summer books txt) 📖

girl through the storm in Central Park, she will fashion a wind machine to buffet the trees. And you will fight your Dream Duel in a hurricane.”

“I, for one, will send my understudy,” said Buchanan.

“Me, too,” Barrett grinned. “Poor Mr. Young will have his hands full standing in for both of us.”

“Is Mr. Young a fencer, too?” asked Bell.

“Enough of one to spell us on occasion.”

Barrett said, “But, seriously, if for some reason your wife can’t—”

Isaac Bell answered firmly, “If Marion Morgan Bell can’t make the movie, we won’t pay for it. And we won’t release the rights.”

“Then it will behoove us to be most persuasive. When can we meet her?”

“Soon as we get to Denver. Let’s say lunch tomorrow at the Brown Palace, if we can round up Miss Cook and your stage manager.”

“Henry Young is not a principal.”

“My wife will have questions of a technical nature best addressed to the stage manager.”

42

The Cutthroat dreamed he was a boy in London.

The boy found a broken sword. He polished the rust with sand and honed both edges like a Roman gladius. He stole a file and shaped the broken end to a needle point.

He dreamed they chased him through narrow streets.

He fled to a seaport that reeked of salt and grease and smoke.

He sprawled, seasick, retching his guts out on a splintered deck. The ship finally stopped moving in a hot Southern city where the girls spoke French.

He killed them and fled up the Mississippi River on a steamboat. No—the dream went backwards and started over. The steamboat was behind him. He was on an immense raft, a floating theater, pushed by a steamboat. Up the wide, wide river from New Orleans, day and night, day and night, day and night, Memphis, past Cairo, up the Ohio River. Off the raft at Louisville, on again, and up the river, and off at Cincinnati. Safe at last.

Suddenly he was an animal sleeping in his den.

He was a wolf. Something paced at the mouth of the cave.

He opened his eyes.

He lay still, adrenaline overflowing his arteries, heart thundering, every sense aware.

His dream wolf had felt a presence.

He steadied his breath and stilled his heart. What did it mean?

Eighty men and women were sleeping on the train. This late at night, the only sounds he heard were mechanical—the huff of switch engines, wheels grinding on rails, the muffled clash of couplers, the hoot-hoot of engine signals, the clank of bells, the urgent hiss of locomotives bleeding steam, and the long, long whistle of a train leaving for the West—this train, this special bound for Denver—rumbling out of the yards, thumping through switches, then smooth on the main line, swaying as it picked up speed, whistle howling, drive wheels thundering.

What had his instincts latched onto? What had he noticed? It was there, almost beside him, something close, which he could not quite touch yet. He had to let his mind drift . . . The broken sword had started his dream. He remembered it well. He had found it when the tide exposed the muddy Thames bank. It took an edge beautifully. A razor’s edge. It was eventually too light, for he had taken on size and developed hard muscle as he grew older. The double-edged Roman short sword was a better fit, and he had used a variety of them—gladius, the longer spatha, the short puglio dagger—choosing one over the other on whim, enjoying one or the other, before moving on to thinner, whippier blades he could hide in a cane.

He sat up in bed, his mind clamoring.

Change plagued touring companies. Every imaginable mishap felled actors. They got sick. They got drunk. They got pregnant. They couldn’t remember lines anymore. They were arrested for debt, locked up for bigamy. They married. They divorced. They even got homesick. Or they simply vanished. But whatever the mishap, the company had to replace them, and backstage people, too—carpenters, riggers, electricians, wardrobe. So regular turnover was typical of a road show. But he could not recall as many new faces as he saw in the Jekyll and Hyde company—all at once, back in Cincinnati.

Two actors: the new Mr. Pool, Archibald Abbott; the new maid, Helen Mills; a replacement stagehand named Quinn, just hired away from Jimmy Valentine. Then there was the newspaper reporter who had talked his way into the publicist’s good graces, Scudder Smith; and the Hartford angel, Isaac Bell; and now Bell’s wife, Marion Morgan Bell, who had looked familiar, though they had never met before the movie meeting the day before.

The wolf of my dream knows that his den has been invaded.

I am no longer safe when I sleep.

ACT FOUR

HOLLYWOOD

43

DENVER

Rumor ricocheted the length of the Jekyll & Hyde Special.

They were steaming on the High Plains, and from the locomotive to Isaac Bell’s private car and back again. Scrambled in the crowded Pullman dormitory cars, and simultaneously denied and amplified in the dining car, guesses, gossip and speculation, confused players, stagehands, carpenters, electricians, clerks, publicists, advance men, and musicians, and set all on edge.

Mr. Barrett and Mr. Buchanan had had a huge blowup.

Bigger, much bigger, than their usual rows.

The Jekyll and Hyde tour was canceled.

Because the crazy writer killed himself? Cox. They found him in the suburbs.

The tour would be speeded up.

They would skip Denver . . . But what a great theater town.

The tour was extended to include Los Angeles.

The tour was canceled.

Barrett and Buchanan had had a terrible fistfight.

Mr. Young had tried to stop it. The poor stage manager had to throw himself between them. The reward for his pains? He had been beaten bloody. The sight of Mr. Young drinking coffee in the dining car without a mark on him only added to the confusion.

Harry Warren thought the stage manager looked almost happy, not his usual appearance.