shook the dark-eyed beauty’s hand. “From what Marion’s told me you two had more fun in London than is usual at royal funerals.”
“We are kindred spirits. Marion, I have arranged for you and your handsome husband a special wedding gift to wish you happiness in your marriage.”
“What is it?”
“An entertainment.” She snapped her fingers and took command of a phalanx of saloon stewards, who marched into the crowded lounge carrying an Edison film projector and a screen improvised from a square of sailcloth.
“That is one energetic woman,” Bell whispered to Marion.
“A bit too energetic. She escaped Russia one step ahead of the secret police.”
“How did she annoy the Okhrana?”
“By making a film that the czarina deemed ‘risqué.’ I didn’t get the whole story, and it changed a little with each glass of wine, but she’s hoping to start over again in the movie business in New York.”
“Taking pictures?”
“Manufacturing. She told me, ‘Dis time I vill be boss.’”
“Have I told you that you look absolutely gorgeous in that dress?”
“Only twice since we were married.” She stepped closer to press her lips to his. “Isn’t it wonderful? Now people expect us to kiss in public— Oh my, Irina is giving us a Talking Pictures play.”
The stewards suspended the sailcloth beside the piano. Actors, two men and a woman, positioned themselves behind the cloth with an array of gongs, triangles, drumsticks, whistles, and washboards.
“Where did she find a Humanova Troupe in the middle of the ocean?” marveled Marion.
“I say, what is a Humanova Troupe?” asked Lord Strone. The British colonel had been hovering near Mademoiselle Viorets.
“Humanovas make sound for the movies,” Marion told Strone.
“Sound? In the cinema? Do you mean like the orchestra?”
“Much more than an orchestra. The actors speak lines of dialogue. And make effects.”
“Effects?”
“Gunshots, whistles, bells. Surely you’ve heard Humanovas in London. Or Actologues?”
“Rarely get to town anymore, m’dear. Retired, don’t you know?”
Bell concealed a smile at the sight of Archie’s red eyebrow cocked toward the skylight. Strone was laying it on with a trowel, but a flurry of marconigrams from Van Dorn informants in England had repeated, in guarded language, rumors that His Lordship was, as Bell suspected, attached to Great Britain’s newly formed Secret Service Bureau with offices at Whitehall in the center of London. He left London only to undermine England’s enemies abroad.
Urged on by Irina Viorets, the stewards arranged chairs facing the improvised screen, and within minutes the lounge had been transformed into a moving picture theater. Members of the ship’s orchestra gathered around the piano with violins and a trumpet. They struck a clarion chord.
The wedding guests took their seats. The lamps were lowered. The projector clattered and light flickered on the screen. From behind the screen, an actor read aloud the movie’s title card.
“Is This Seat Taken?”
“It’s a Biograph comic,” Marion whispered to Bell. “Florence Lawrence is in it.”
The scene was laid in a ten-cent moving picture theater just as the movie ended. A well-dressed audience applauded when a woman with a pistol arrested a villain, who was marched off by a policeman. The actors behind the sailcloth clapped their hands as the movie audience applauded. The next film on the ten-cent theater screen showed a conductor and piano player auditioning singers and dancers.
The actors behind the sailcloth sang and shuffled their feet on the washboards, and the ship’s piano played ragtime.
A lady looking very much like the woman with the pistol walked into the ten-cent theater wearing an enormous hat and looked for a seat. An actress called, repeatedly, “Is this seat taken?” Theater patrons refused to move, protesting that her hat would block their view of the screen.
The lady in the big hat was