The Assassin

9

Hummbuuulll, Texas!” bawled the conductor. “Humble, Texas! Next stop, Humble, Texas!”

Isaac Bell was first at the vestibule door, ahead of a crowd of excited speculators jostling behind him. The still-speeding train leaned into a hard bend in the tracks, and he glimpsed something that made him open the corridor window to lean out in the humid heat. He saw hundreds of oil derricks surrounded by giant crude storage tanks. A sprawling boomtown of fresh-built barracks, boardinghouses, hotels, saloons, and a “ragtown” section of tents crowded both sides of the main line tracks. The sidings and railyards were black with rows of tank cars.

But what had caught the Van Dorn detective’s eye was floating in the smoke-stained sky above the town — Nellie Matters’ yellow balloon with the block lettering on the bulge of the gas envelope that read VOTES FOR WOMEN. Where had she come from? Bell wondered. More to the point, had her beautiful sister Edna come with her?

The ground shook suddenly at the very moment the Sunset Express pulled into the makeshift station with clanging bell and hissing air brakes. The tracks trembled and the Pullman cars rattled and everyone on the train ran to the windows. A fountain of oil spewed from the top of a derrick. The fountain rapidly thickened. Thundering out of the earth, the eruption blew the derrick to splinters and projected skyward nearly as high as Nellie Matters’ balloon.

Bell gave the roaring spouter and its greasy brown spray a wide berth, judging the wind by the direction Nellie’s balloon was tugging the rope that tethered it above the fairground. Most of that dusty field had been turned into a “ragtown” taken up by tents. In the small open space that remained, fifty women in white summer dresses were waving EQUAL SUFFRAGE LEAGUES OF HOUSTON AND HUMBLE banners at Nellie’s balloon.

Bell hurried past the fairground and cut down Main Street and into the Toppling Derrick, the boomtown’s biggest saloon. Waiting as promised at the bar was Texas Walt Hatfield, a tall, wiry, sun-blasted man with twin Colt six-shooters holstered in low-slung gun belts and a broad-brimmed J. B. Stetson hat. Beside him stood a feisty-looking gent with his arm in a sling and his neck swathed in bandages. His face wore the pallor of recent shock, but his eyes were bright.

“Howdy, Isaac,” said Hatfield, shaking hands as casually as if they had last worked together yesterday instead of a year ago. “This here’s Mr. C. C. Gustafson.”

“Craig Gustafson,” said the publisher, thrusting out his good hand.

“Isaac Bell. Congratulations on being alive.”

C. C. Gustafson proved to be as philosophical on the subject of getting shot as any Bell had met. “My little newspaper is just a fly nipping at the hide of Standard Oil. Fact is, I’m flattered they bothered to swat me.”

Bell asked, “Do we have reason to believe that’s who shot you?”

“I don’t know for sure this is true, but I have a vague memory forming in my mind that I was told that a Standard Oil Refinery Police chief arrived on the train the day before. That would have been Tuesday. I got shot on Wednesday.”

“Can you recall any local enemies here in town you might have provoked?”

“I haven’t stolen any horses and I haven’t burned any churches, and I can also eliminate angry husbands, since I don’t run around on my wife.”

Isaac Bell glanced at the barbed-wire-lean, hawk-nosed Texas Walt for confirmation.

The normally laconic former Ranger surprised him by drawling the longest sentence Bell had ever heard him speak: “Ah had the pleasure of meeting Janet Sue — that is to say, Mrs. C. C. Gustafson — at the hospital, and Ah can report that there ain’t a man in Texas who would entertain notions of running around on such a lady.”

“I have irritated Standard Oil for years,” said Gustafson, “and currently can claim some part of the effort in the Texas State House to ban the monopolistic vultures from doing business in our state.”

Bell asked, “What do you remember of the shooting?”

“Not a heck of a lot, as I was just telling Walt. It’s coming back, but slow.”

“Mr. Gustafson only woke up yesterday morning,” Hatfield told Bell.

“I’m surprised they let you out of the hospital so soon.”

“My wife has a theory that hospitals kill people, being full of sick people with infections. She marched me home the second I could walk.”

Bell turned to Hatfield. “Who’s the dead suspect the sheriff cleared?”

“Found facedown on top of a Springfield ’03 with his neck busted.”

“As if he fell while running to escape?”

“Until friends remarked that he was near blind without his glasses, which had got busted that morning in a poker table dispute.”

“Did you manage a look at the rifle?”

Hatfield said, “The sheriff cooperated. The rifle smelled recently fired. Four rounds still in the magazine, which holds five.”

“Telescope?”

“Nope.”

“Maybe that’s why the assassin missed.” Bell turned back to the newspaper publisher.

“Can you tell me what you remember?”

“The window broke. I was setting type for my editorial by the light of the window. All at once, the glass shattered.”

“What happened next?”

“I’m afraid my answer is not going to help you, Detective Bell. What happened next was I woke up in a strange bed with my wife holding a cool cloth to my brow. Looked around. Walt was standing nearby with his hands on his guns as if to discourage additional potshots.”

Bell asked, “Would you feel up to visiting your newspaper?”

“I was heading there when Walt suggested we have a snort, and then you walked in.”

They walked the long way to the Humble Clarion, taking back streets and alleys to skirt the mob collected around the gusher. The riggers were struggling to cap the new well, while ditchdiggers excavated a catch basin to contain the oil that was raining down like a monsoon. The train had gone. Most of the men aboard it had stayed.

The Clarion occupied the first floor of a corner building. C. C. Gustafson led them into the composing room where he set type. “It was that window,” he said. “My wife replaced the glass, and finished setting the editorial for me. After picking up all the type that went flying.”

Bell looked for bullet holes in the walls. He remarked that the office had been freshly painted.

“Janet Sue cleaned up the mess soon as the sheriff was done looking things over.”

“Did Mrs. Gustafson happen to mention how many bullet holes she plastered before painting?”

“She told me three.”

Bell looked to Hatfield. “How many rounds had been fired from the Springfield the sheriff found?”

“One.”

Isaac Bell stood in the window. It fronted on the side street. Across the street was a frame building under construction. Carpenters building the platform were hammering floorboards onto ground-floor joists. The otherwise-open lot allowed a long view over low-lying neighbors to the tall false front that topped the two-story Toppling Derrick saloon on the far side of Main Street three blocks away.

Averell Comstock walked at a remarkably brisk pace for a man his age thanks, he was quick to boast, to a regimen he had started when he first came to New York twenty years ago. He walked every midmorning from the office at 26 Broadway to the East River, where he could order oysters shucked fresh off the boat. He ignored the ketchup and crackers, preferring the briny taste of the bivalves unadulterated, and leaving room for coffee and cake from a food stall on Fulton Street, where he had fallen half in love with a middle-aged widow who had a hard face softened by beautiful blue eyes.

She stirred in the sugar for him. Just this week she had begun to insist on refilling his cup at no charge, stirring in more sugar with a pretty smile. What would she think, Comstock wondered, if she learned that the old man in the ancient coat was ten thousand times richer than any customer she had ever served?

“How are you feeling?” she asked.

“A little under the weather.” For several days he had felt not quite himself.

“I thought you looked pale. I hope you’ve not been eating oysters. They say there’s typhoid fever.”

“I eat only those from Staten Island,” he said. “It’s the Jamaica Bay oysters that carry the typhoid.”

“Well, I hope you feel better.”

“Well enough to walk down here,” he said. “That’s all I ask.”

He drained the second cup and hurried off. “Back to the salt mines. See you tomorrow.”

Mrs. McCloud put another sugar bowl on the counter and hid the one from which she had sweetened the old man’s coffee.

“Make sure you wash the spoon.”

Mrs. McCloud looked up. The man in the old-fashioned frock coat and fancy trilby hat was back, furtive and cold-eyed as a steerer who sends clients to a shyster lawyer.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“What do you care?”

She glanced up Fulton for another glimpse of the tall old man’s top hat bobbing slowly through the crowd that thronged the sidewalk. A street car blocked her view. “I couldn’t care less.”

Heading back to the office, Averell Comstock was surprised when he had to stop and rest halfway there, pale and trembling.

Isaac Bell and Texas Walt Hatfield looked for the assassin’s shooting hide on the roof behind the Toppling Derrick saloon’s false front. They agreed that the sight lines were there, an easy shot three hundred yards to the Clarion’s side window. With the roar of drinkers below celebrating new riches, it was doubtful anyone in the saloon would hear a shot, much less do anything about it. No other building looked down on the roof, ensuring privacy and time to draw a bead and wait.

Bell walked the perimeter. The roof sloped slightly to allow rainwater to spill off into a gutter. He saw a golden glint in the gutter, knelt down, pulled from the grit and hardened sediment that lined the wooden trough an empty cartridge shell.

“A wildcat,” said Bell, showing it to Hatfield. A standard factory-made Savage .303 brass case had been reshaped to accommodate customized powder and bullet loads for greater range and impact.

“Man’s loading his own,” said Hatfield.

“I’d expect that for his accuracy,” said Bell. A great marksman, which the assassin surely was, would use the so-called wildcat in conjunction with a finely machined chamber and a custom-made barrel. “But I’m surprised he didn’t scoop it up before he ran. It’s a heck of a telltale.”

“Maybe he knew he missed,” said Hatfield. “Got rattled.”

“Maybe… Odd, though. The .303 is made for the Savage 99.”

“Fine weapon. Though a mite light.”

“I wonder why he uses such a light gun. That 1903 Springfield would be more accurate.”

“But heavier.”

“His kill in Kansas was nearly seven hundred yards.”

“A man looks like a flyspeck at that range.”

“That’s why I assumed a Springfield.”

“Do you suppose he’s a little feller?” Hatfield wondered.

“Too small to hold a more accurate heavy gun? Might explain why he has to improve the Savage cartridge. Probably smithed his rifle to a farewell, too.” Bell pocketed the cartridge. “O.K. Let’s see where he went.”

Hatfield had been raised by Comanche Indians and was an expert tracker. Prowling the tar roof, he spotted a minute imprint of the corner of a bootheel, and found it repeated several yards into an alley. Step-by-step, mark by barely decipherable mark, in crusted mud, oil-soaked earth, and dried manure, they followed the sniper’s escape route down alleys and over a railroad track and into a stable’s corral, where they lost the trail in hoofprints.

“Mounted up here and rode off.”

The stable hands were vaqueros too old and lame to quit their jobs to get rich in the oil fields. Walt Hatfield addressed them in Spanish and translated for Bell. Two men had left quickly on horses they had boarded in the stable and had ordered saddled up an hour earlier.

“Two men?”

“One big, one little.”

“Were they carrying rifles?”

“No guns.”

Humble’s hotels were jam-packed, and the rooming houses were stifling, but Texas Walt had rustled up clean rooms above a stable. They sluiced off the dust of the long, hot day in horse troughs and headed back to the Toppling Derrick where, earlier, Bell had tipped generously to guarantee a table for supper.

They passed the fairground on the way. The suffragist rally had dispersed, and a crowd of the oil field hands camping there was carousing under tarpaulins that sheltered a board-on-barrels saloon. Off to one side, Bell spotted a familiar-looking wall tent pitched beside a buckboard wagon. A black iron pot was suspended over a cook fire.

“Walt, you may be dining alone.”

Drawing near the tent, he heard her typewriter clattering. He knocked on the post. She kept typing like a Gatling gun. But the canvas flew open and out stepped a slim young woman with short, wispy chestnut hair, bright eyes, and a brighter smile. Her voice rang.

“If you’re not Isaac Bell, my sister’s famed descriptive powers have deserted her.”

She thrust out her hand.

“Nellie Matters. I’ve been looking forward to meeting you.”

Bell swept his hat off his head, took her delicate fingers in his, and stepped close. When he had seen Nellie through binoculars, he had thought of her features as less fine than her sister’s. But with only inches between them, her resemblance to Edna was stronger. She had the same gray-green eyes, the same silken hair, the same beautiful nose. All that seemed magnified were her expressive eyebrows and fuller lips.

“I was hoping you would return to earth,” he said.

“Only briefly.”

The typing stopped. Edna called, “Invite him to supper.”

“Does he like varmint stew?”

“It’s not varmint stew. It’s jackrabbit.”

“I love jackrabbit,” said Bell. “One of you must be quite a shot.”

Nellie laughed. “Not exactly. Edna blasted them with her .410. We’ll be cracking teeth on buckshot.”

Edna emerged from the tent, and Bell’s first thought was that Nellie was gorgeous, an utterly beautiful woman, but there was something about Edna — her stillness and her steady gaze — that blocked the breath in his throat.

She said, “We’ll chew carefully. How are you, Mr. Bell?”

“Happy to see you. What brings you to Humble?”

“Same thing that brought you, I’d imagine. C. C. Gustafson.”

“Are you reporting for the Derrick?”

She did not answer directly, saying instead that C. C. Gustafson was a good friend and an important source for her research.

Nellie asked whether he was investigating the shooting.

“Mr. Gustafson doesn’t remember much.”

Edna said, “His memory is returning. He told me that the day before he was shot he had heard that Big Pete Straub arrived on the train.”

Nellie laughed. “Mr. Bell, you really ought to hire my sister to assist in your investigation.”

Bell kept to himself that Gustafson had already told him that and said, “I reckon Edna’s too busy — and far too expensive — but what a nice coincidence you find yourselves here together.”

“We often travel together,” said Nellie. “Particularly to places like this where a woman’s better off not alone.” A nod indicated the tarpaulin saloon, where the men were getting loud. “Two women are somewhat more formidable than one girl on her own, don’t you think?”

“Just ask those jackrabbits.”

“Will you stay to supper?”

“Let me run and find some wine.”

“In Humble? Good luck.”

Bell grinned. “What do you prefer with jackrabbit?”

Edna grinned. “A chilled Riesling, wouldn’t you say, Nellie?”

Nellie tossed Isaac Bell a second challenge. “On a hot night with a jackrabbit and a handsome gentleman, I’m in a mood for champagne!”

“I’ll be right back,” said Bell.

“Where are you going?” they chorused after him. “Houston?”

“New Orleans!” Bell called over his shoulder and kept going.

“Don’t be late.”

Bell went straight to the Toppling Derrick and asked Walt Hatfield, “Which did you say was the highest-class sporting house in town?”

“Things didn’t work out with the lady reporter?”

“I asked you a question.”

“Easy does it, old son. Just joshin’ you. The French Quarter was the one I mentioned. Around the corner and over a couple of streets.”

Bell found the French Quarter’s kitchen door down an alley and slipped the cook two twenty-dollar gold pieces. He returned to Edna’s tent with a whiskey keg under his arm. The barrelhead had been removed. The sisters peered in.

“Ice? Where did you get ice?”

Bell said, “Forgive me, Edna, but Riesling proved impossible. Will you settle for a Chablis?”

Edna said, “I am devastated. But I’ll settle for Chablis. Just this once.”

“What about me?” Nellie cried. “Where’s my champagne?”

“Moët & Chandon?”

“Are you serious?”

Bell pulled dripping bottles from the ice.

Nellie said, “Edna, one of us should grab this fellow before he gets away. You are quite the provider, Mr. Bell.”

“Here’s my suggestion,” said Bell. “First we share champagne and save the Chablis for the jackrabbit.”

“But we have no champagne glasses.”

“Tin cups will do,” said Edna.

“No need,” called a familiar voice, and around the tent strode Archie Abbott with four champagne flutes in his hand.

“Where in blazes did you come from?” asked Bell.

“Train from Houston,” said Archie, smiling at the ladies. “In the nick of time. Saw you lugging a barrel of ice, put two and two together, and quickly got glasses. Miss Hock, lovely to see you again. And you, Miss Matters, of course, are the famous flying orator.”

He bowed over Nellie’s hand. “What a treat to observe you without getting a crick in my neck.”

“Will you join us for supper, Mr. Abbott?”

Bell said, “Don’t you have an appointment with a witness, Mr. Abbott?”

“Not on an empty stomach.”

“That would be too cruel,” said Nellie. “You must let him have a bite first, Mr. Bell.”

“Rabbit first,” said Edna. “Witness later.”

The champagne lasted until night was falling and it was nearly dark.

“If you boys will open the Chablis, Nellie and I will ladle out the rabbit.”

The sisters gathered around the fire. Bell got to work on the wine bottle.

“Two lovelies!” Archie said in a low voice. “Count ’em, two. Beautiful, intelligent, charming, accomplished, and single. An abundance of riches.”

“Hands off,” said Bell. “I haven’t made my mind up yet.”

“Fear not, Ma-ma is vetting prospective fiancées.”

The Abbotts of New York had lost their money back in the Panic of ’93. Archie was supposedly on a hunt to replenish the treasury, but Bell doubted it would happen. He was more likely to fall in love, and money would be the last thing on his mind.

“Funny,” said Archie, “how they keep turning up wherever you’re investigating.”

“Intelligent,” said Bell. “As you said.”

“Come and get it!” cried Nellie.

“Don’t mind if we do,” bawled a loud voice at the edge of the firelight.

Six or seven drunk cowhands and oil workers had wandered over from the board-on-barrels saloon.

“You mean the food or the gals?” yelled a rangy rigger.

“Both!” howled a cowboy.

Isaac Bell and Archie Abbott stood up.

“Good evening, gentlemen,” said Archie. “Go away.”

“Make me.”

Archie took a lightning step forward and threw an even faster left hook. The rigger tumbled backward into his friends. When they pounced at Archie, Bell was ready with a hard right that dropped the cowboy and a left cross for a burly roustabout.

The four drunks still standing were quickly joined by four more.

The two detectives stood shoulder to shoulder. Archie muttered, “Any more and I’m pulling a gun.”

“Too many folks around for gunplay,” said Bell.

“Bloody hell, you’re right about that.”

Nellie Matters laughed. “Go away! Our hearts are spoken for.”

If Nellie’s joke was designed to defang the mob, thought Bell, it had the opposite effect. She seemed oblivious to the danger. But Edna, Bell noticed, was coolly eyeing the tent flaps behind which was propped her shotgun.

He said, “Let’s take ’em, Archie.”

Archie said, “You’re on.”

The trick was to prevent being mobbed by a concerted rush.

The Van Dorns used their long reach and prize ring footwork to keep them at bay, darting in, dropping three more men with powerhouse punches, and backing lightly away. It looked as if five or six still standing were reconsidering their future when an enormous oil hand easily as big as Big Pete Straub lumbered up.

“Who wants it first?”

“Start with me,” said Isaac Bell, flashing forward, faking a left jab, and throwing a roundhouse right that flung the oil hand flat on his back. But as hard as he hit the ground, it seemed to have no effect. The giant shook his head like a dray horse annoyed by a fly, sprang to his feet, and charged. Bell took his measure, spotted his fists rise, which exposed his solar plexus, and lined up a straight left that would take advantage of the momentum.

Suddenly the man clutched his chest.

He lurched at Bell as if shoved from behind by a mighty force. The burst of unnatural speed caught Bell unaware. Before the tall detective could throw a punch or sidestep the charge, the giant slammed into him.

Three hundred pounds’ deadweight drove Isaac Bell to the ground.

Hot liquid splashed his face.

Rabbit stew, he thought in a crazy tenth of a second ended by a rifle shot. He heard a second shot. Lead whistled. A muzzle flash lit the night, and the sniper’s third shot clanged off Edna’s cook pot.

“Down!” he yelled.

Archie swept Nellie and Edna off their feet. Bell levered out from under the giant. The man did not try to hold him but flopped over with his chest spouting a fountain of heart blood that glittered in the firelight.

The dying brawler had jumped into the path of a bullet meant for Bell.

10

Take off your shoe,” said the assassin.

Big Pete Straub glared down the rifle barrel aimed at his head and weighed his chances of wrapping his mitts around the neck of this man who had played him for a sucker. Not good.

Slowly, he unlaced his boot, biding his time, gathering his enormous frame for an overwhelming rush, figuring to take a bullet or even two before he crushed the life out of him.

“And your sock.”

Straub tugged off a dirty sock and reached for his other boot. Bare feet? Why?

“Leave it on. One’s enough.”

“What in—”

“Put your hands behind your back. Lay down on them. All your weight. Close your eyes. Tight! Squeeze ’em tight!”

“Is this because I missed? I would have hit Bell if you let me use my own gun.”

“I knew you would miss.”

“Then why—”

“Open your mouth.”

“What—”

The assassin shoved the rifle between Big Pete’s teeth and touched the muzzle to the roof of his mouth. Big Pete felt it tickle the sensitive membrane.

“Ah don’t envy Humble’s sheriff,” drawled Texas Walt Hatfield.

Texas Walt and Archie Abbott and Isaac Bell were wolfing down the Toppling Derrick’s blue plate special breakfast of fried fatback and eggs.

“Ah mean every time the man turns around, someone’s shot, and whoever does the shooting gets clean away. Dumb luck last night, only one dead with all that lead flying, and thankfully none of the ladies. Good luck for you, though, Isaac.”

“Look out!”

A flicker of motion in the corner of Isaac Bell’s eye exploded into a rock shattering the window. Bell shoved Archie. The rock missed Abbott’s aristocratic nose by a half inch and broke the coffee cup Texas Walt was lifting to his lips.

The drunk who had thrown the rock — a middle-aged, unshaven cowhand in tattered shirt and bibless overalls, and one boot peeling off its sole — stood swaying in the middle of Main Street. His truculent expression froze in astonishment when three tall Van Dorn detectives boiled out the swinging doors with guns drawn. Isaac Bell covered the sidewalk to their left with his automatic pistol. Archie Abbott guarded their right with a city slicker’s snub-nosed revolver in one hand and a blackjack in the other.

Texas Walt stalked into the street and leveled two long-barrel Smith & Wessons at the rock thrower’s face. His voice was cold, his eyes colder. “You want to explain why you ruined my breakfast?”

The drunk trembled. “Looks like I bit off more than I can chew.”

“What in Sam Hill are you talking about?”

“Did you read the note?”

“Note? What note?”

“This note,” said Isaac Bell, who had picked up the rock on his way out the door. He slid a throwing knife from his boot, cut the twine that tied a sheet of paper around the rock, spread the paper, and read it.

“Who gave you this?”

“Feller with five bucks.”

“What did he look like?”

“Big.”

“Beard? Mustache?”

“Nope.”

“What color hair?”

“Yeller.”

Texas Walt interrupted to ask, “Do you want me to shoot him, Isaac?”

“Hold on a minute. When did the fellow give this note?”

“Couple of hours ago. I guess.”

“Why’d you wait to throw it?”

“Thought I’d have a snort first.”

“Got any money left?”

“Nope.”

“Here. Get yourself something to eat.” Bell shoved a gold piece in his dirty palm and went back to breakfast. Archie and Walt followed.

“Why’d you give that sorry fool money?” asked Walt.

“He did us a big favor.”

“Favor? Spilled coffee all over my best shirt.”

“The hostlers at the stable saw ‘two men.’ Remember?”

“What two men?” asked Archie.

“Mounted up and rode off after they shot Gustafson,” said Hatfield. “What favor, Isaac?”

“When his rock broke the window, I realized why there were two men. One fired first to break the window to give the sniper a clear shot at Mr. Gustafson.”

“He missed anyhow. Twice.”

“Only because Mr. Gustafson has lightning-fast reflexes. Most men would have stood gaping at the window. But it repeats a pattern.”

“What pattern?”

“Big Pete — type assistance. In Kansas he used him to throw off the scent. Here he used him to clear his shot. I’ll lay even money he used him, too, when he shot Albert Hill in Coffeyville and Riggs at Fort Scott.”

“What does the note say?” asked Archie.

Isaac Bell read it aloud: “‘You’ll find me at the I-Bar-O. Come and get me if you’re man enough.’”

“Someone’s been reading too many dime novels,” said Texas Walt. “Why’s he announcing ahead of time he’s going to bushwhack us?”

“Theatrical,” Bell agreed.

“Bad theater,” said Archie.

Bell spoke with the saloonkeeper who told him that the I-Bar-O ranch was north of Humble on a bend of the San Jacinto River. “That’s the old Owens place. Don’t know who you’ll find living there. Heard they pulled up stakes.”

“We’re getting set up for a wild-goose chase,” said Hatfield. “Long ride on a hot day.”

Bell said, “Get horses, saddlebags, and Winchesters. Pick me up at Mike’s Hardware.”

Twenty minutes later Archie and Walt trotted their horses up to the gleaming-new, three-story brick Mike’s Wholesale and Retail Hardware Company leading a big sorrel for Bell. Bell handed them slingshots from a gunnysack and swung into the saddle.

“You been chewing locoweed, Isaac? If it ain’t a wild-goose chase, the man has a rifle. So does his sidekick.”

Bell reached deeper in his sack and tossed them boxed matches and half sticks of dynamite with short fuses. “In case they’re barricaded.”

Winchesters in their scabbards, TNT in their saddlebags, the Van Dorn detectives headed out at a quick trot. They rode six or seven miles, perspiring in the thick, humid heat, passing several cattle outfits that had gone bust. There was a shortage of cowhands in East Texas, Walt explained. Young men flocked to the oil fields.

The I-Bar-O appeared to be another of the abandoned ranches.

No smoke rose from the cookhouse, and the paddocks were empty.

The Van Dorns spread out, dismounted, and approached cautiously, guns drawn, eyes raking windows, doorways, and rooftops. The main house, a low-slung single-story affair, was deserted. So was the cookhouse — stove cold, larder draped in spiderwebs, flypaper crusted with dried-up insects. The only animals left in the barns were hungry cats.

They converged on the bunkhouse, a flimsy building with an oft-patched roof, a few small windows, and a narrow veranda. Archie forged ahead onto the veranda and reached for the door.

“Wait.”

Isaac Bell pointed at a clot of mud on the veranda steps and motioned Archie from the door. The redhead pressed his back to the wall and peered in the nearest window. “Man on the floor. Can’t quite see. He’s got a rifle beside him, but he’s not holding it… In fact, if he’s not dead, he sure isn’t moving.”

Archie reached again for the door.

“Don’t!” chorused Bell and Walt. Neither questioned Archie’s courage, but his judgment was not seasoned to their liking. He had come late to the detective line — personally recruited by Bell, on the first case that Mr. Van Dorn had allowed him to form his own squad. As Mr. Van Dorn put it more than once, “It’s a miracle how a Protestant New York blue blood can get his Irish up as fast as Archibald Angell Abbott IV.”

“It’s O.K.,” said Archie. “He’s alone and he’s dead.”

Walt Hatfield cocked both his pistols. “Archie, if you touch that doorknob, I’ll shoot you.”

“Shoot me?”

“To prevent you from killing yourself. Stand aside and let Isaac show you how we do it in Texas.”

Isaac Bell gestured Walt to take cover, bounded onto and across the veranda, shouldered Archie aside, jammed his spine to the wall, and rammed his rifle backward to smash the door open with the butt.

The blast it triggered shook the earth.

11

A swath of buckshot wide as two men screeched through the doorway and splintered both sides of the jamb. Isaac Bell hurled himself into the bunkhouse before the assassin could reload.

Cavernous ten-gauge shotgun barrels stared him rock steady in the face. He dived sideways, hit the floor with a crash, and rolled into a crouch before he realized that the shotgun was lashed tightly to a post.

Ears ringing, Bell lowered his Winchester and looked around.

A horseshoe dangled from a rafter. It was swinging on a string that looped over several nails and down to the shotgun’s triggers. Opening the door had bumped the horseshoe off a nail. Its weight had fetched up the slack in the string and jerked the triggers, firing both barrels simultaneously.

Big Pete Straub lay on his back on the bunkhouse floor. His right foot was bare. Flies were darting in and out of a ragged three-inch hole in the top of his head. With one shoe off and one shoe on, the refinery police chief had killed himself by putting his rifle barrel in his mouth and pushing the trigger with his toe.

“So much for your assistance pattern, Isaac,” said Hatfield. “The man went out alone with a bang.”

“Almost took us with him,” said Archie.

“About that ‘almost,’ Archie?” said Hatfield, cocking an eyebrow that demanded an answer.

“Thank you, Walt. Thank you, Isaac.”

“You can thank us by remembering that criminals do the damnedest things.”

Bell was already kneeling by Straub’s gun. “Savage 99.”

Hatfield snapped a spent shell off the floor. “Another wildcat.”

The sleek, hammerless Savage felt remarkably light in Bell’s hands. He noticed an extension on the fore end of the chamber, as if a quarter-inch piece of metal had been added to it. A metal slide under the wooden end released it, revealing the underside of the barrel. A square stud projected from it. The wood had a corresponding hole. Bell fitted the wood to the barrel, held the chamber in the other hand, and twisted firmly. The barrel, which he expected to be compression-screwed into the chamber, rotated an easy quarter turn and pulled loose. He was suddenly holding two separate parts, each barely twenty inches long, short enough to conceal in a satchel, a sample case, or an innocent-looking carpetbag.

“Walt, did you ever see a breakdown Savage 99?”

“Ah don’t believe the company makes one.”

“Someone made this one with an interrupted screw.”

Bell put it back together by inserting the barrel into the chamber and turning a quarter turn. A metal slide underneath fit into a corresponding slot, locking the barrel in place. Thanks to the interrupted threads — an invention that had made possible the quick-sealing cannon breech — the rifle could be broken down or reassembled in two seconds.

But the question remained why such a light weapon for a man as big as Straub?

“No telescope.”

“Holes tapped for mounting one?” asked Walt.

Bell inspected the top of the frame. “Mounting holes tapped… You should have seen his shot in Kansas. Archie saw it.”

“Better part of a half a mile,” said Archie.

Walt said, “Mr. Straub must have had hawk eyes.”

The Springfield ’03 that the sheriff had found under the dead man in a Humble alley was fed ammunition by a removable straight magazine. The Savage had a rotary magazine. The indicator on the side of the chamber read “4.” Bell extracted one of the rounds. Instead of factory-made round noses, the bottleneck cartridges had been specially loaded with pointed, aerodynamic “spitzer” bullets.

Something about the weapon felt wrong to Bell. He unscrewed the barrel again, rethreaded it in a second, slid the wooden fore end back in place, locking the entire assembly. Then he carried the gun outside. The sorrel had wandered close. He tied its reins to the veranda railing in case shots spooked the animal, took a bead on a fence post a quarter mile away, and fired until the magazine was empty.

He rode the horse to the target and rode back.

“Hit anything?” Walt asked.

“Dead center twice, grazed it twice. It’s a good gun… But it’s hard to believe it’s the gun that killed Spike Hopewell.”

“Unless,” Hatfield grinned, “Mr. Straub was a better shot.”

“Doubt it.”

Archie said, “But we found a custom-made Savage shell.”

Texas Walt said, “Listen close, Archie. Isaac did not say that Spike Hopewell wasn’t killed by a Savage 99. All he’s saying is he don’t reckon this particular Savage 99 did the deed.”

“Telegram, Mr. Bell.”

Bell tipped the boy two bits and read the urgent wire he had been hoping for. Joseph Van Dorn had outdone himself in his constant effort to minimize expenses by reducing his message to a single word:

Bell told Archie Abbott to follow him when he was done helping Hatfield and sprinted to the station. He barely made the Sunset Express to New Orleans, where he transferred to the New York Limited.

He settled into a writing desk in the club car and was composing a report from his notebook when women’s voices chorused like music in his ear: “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Bell.”

Edna and Nellie Matters were headed to Washington, where Nellie was to address a suffragist delegation petitioning Congress. Her balloon was folded up in the express car. When the sisters said they were sleeping in upper and lower Pullman berths, Bell gave them his stateroom.

Edna protested. Nellie thanked him warmly. “How can we repay you?”

“Join me this evening in the dining car.”

At dinner, Nellie entertained him, and the surrounding tables, with tales of runaway balloons. Edna, who had clearly heard it all before, listened politely as Nellie rattled on. “Sideways, the wind blows you into trees and telegraph wires. Low on gas, you fall from the sky. Emergency! Quick! Emergency gas!—”

“Excuse me, young lady,” a clergyman interrupted from the table across the aisle. “I could not help but overhear. Where do you find emergency gas when you’re already flying in the air?”

“I have special steel containers installed in my basket,” Nellie answered. “Lots of balloons do. It’s very handy having extra hydrogen.”

“They must be heavy.”

“They beat falling,” she dismissed him and turned her green eyes back on Bell. “Where was I? Oh, yes. Too quick, too much emergency gas, you soar too high and suffocate. The air gets so thin, you run out of oxygen…”

Over the Neapolitan ice cream dessert, Bell echoed Archie’s earlier comment. “Strange how the three of us keep turning up together where crimes have occurred.”

Edna replied, “I’m beginning to suspect you, Mr. Bell.”

Nellie laughed. “I suspected him from the start.”

“May I ask you something?”

Nellie grinned at Edna. “Doesn’t he look suddenly serious?”

“Like a detective,” said Edna. “Go on, we shouldn’t be teasing you.”

“At least until he’s paid the dinner check,” said Nellie. “Actually, you really do look solemn. What is it?”

“Spike Hopewell told me that your brother ran off and you never heard from him. Is that true?”

Their mood changed in an instant. Nellie looked away. Edna nodded. “Yes. Actually, he was a Yale man, like you.”

“Really? What class?”

“You were probably several years ahead of him.”

“He didn’t go back after his freshman year,” said Nellie.

“Perhaps you knew him?” said Edna.

“I don’t recall anyone named Matters.”

“His name was Billy Hock.”

“Billy Hock?” Bell looked at her curiously.

“Yes,” said Edna. “He was my older brother.”

“And my older half brother,” said Nellie.

Isaac Bell said, “I never made the connection.”

“We did,” said Edna. “Or we wondered. Do you remember now?”

Bell nodded, recalling a slender, eager-to-please youngster, more a boy than a man. “Well, yes, I knew him, slightly…”

Billy Hock had big, bright gray-green eyes as bright as Edna’s and Nellie’s. “He enrolled as a freshman my senior year. He was very young, youngest of the boys entering.”

“Fifteen. He was small. Undersized.”

Nellie said, “He tried out for crew. He would have made a perfect coxswain, being so light. But he was terrified of water. He always had a phobia about it.”

“The crew rowers ragged him mercilessly,” said Edna.

Bell nodded.

“Until some upperclassman stepped in and put a stop to it.”

“Yes.”

“We wondered how.”

“He could not abide bullies,” said Bell.

“One boy against a team?” asked Nellie.

“He trained at boxing.”

Edna directed her level gaze into Bell’s eyes.

“When I watched you and Archie boxing those men, I suddenly wondered was it you who stood up for our brother. Wasn’t it?”

“I hadn’t realized the connection until this very moment. The different name. We didn’t discuss our families at college — unless our people were related — you must remember when you went off to college how we were all so glad to be away from home at that age.”

Both women nodded.

“So Billy Hock was the brother who ran away? Strange… I wondered at school how he would fare. When did he go?”

“That same summer, right after his freshman year,” said Edna.

“He was adventurous,” said Nellie. “Just like me — always running around and trying new things.”

“We never heard from him again,” said Edna.

Nellie said, “Sometimes I blame myself. I became a kind of model for him, even though I was younger. He saw me running around — one second I was entranced by balloons, then I was trying to be an actress, then I ran off to be an acrobat in the circus — remember, Edna?”

“I remember Father laughing when the ringmaster walked you home.”

“On a white horse! He said I was too young. I said, ‘O.K., take me home on a white horse!’… And he did… I gave Billy courage. I only hope it didn’t push him toward the Army.”

“No, it didn’t,” Edna said, laying a reassuring hand on her sister’s arm. “If anything, it gave him courage to go away to Yale. Father,” she explained, turning to Bell, “so wanted Billy to attend Yale because many ‘Oil Princes’ went to college there — Comstock’s son, Lapham’s son, Atkinson’s nephews.”

“Billy and I talked about joining the Army. The Spanish war was brewing — the papers were full of it — and boys were signing up.” Bell had tried, caught up in the excitement, but his father, a Civil War veteran, had intervened forcefully, arguing with unassailable logic that there were better causes to die for than “a war started by newspapers to sell newspapers.”

Edna said, “We guess that Billy enlisted under an assumed name. Lied about his age. We fear he was lost either in the swamps of Cuba or the Philippine jungle. We never heard. If he did join, he must have changed his name and lied about his family.”

“But we don’t really know what happened,” said Nellie. “Except that it nearly destroyed our poor father.”

“You cut it close,” said Joseph Van Dorn.

Isaac Bell lifted his gold watch from his pocket, sprang the lid, and let Van Dorn read the dial. Then he shook his head at the latest addition to the Boss’s Willard Hotel office, a modern, glass-cased table clock from Paris. “Your O’Keenan electric, imported at untold expense, is running fifty-seven seconds fast.”

“Sit down,” said Van Dorn. “He’s in my private waiting room. But brace yourself. The poor devil lost all his hair to some disease.”

“Alopecia totalis.”

“Even his eyebrows and mustache. I had a look through the peephole. He’s smooth as a cue ball.”

“Don’t worry,” said Bell, “it’s not catching… Now, sir, we need a plan.”

They spoke for two minutes, Van Dorn dubious, Bell prepared with persuasive answers. When the tall detective had prevailed, the Boss murmured into a voice tube and his visitor was ushered in from the private entrance.

12

Mr. Rockefeller.”

The retired president of the Standard Oil Corporation was a tall, sixty-six-year-old, two-hundred-pound man. He had piercing eyes that burned in an enormous hairless head, an icily quiet manner, and a powerful presence that reminded Isaac Bell of the long-reigning heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries.

John D. Rockefeller shook hands with Joseph Van Dorn and nodded to Bell when Van Dorn introduced him as “my top investigator.” He refused a chair and got straight to the point.

“An assassin is discrediting Standard Oil by attacking enemies of the trust. The public, inclined to believe the worst, gossips that Standard Oil is behind the attacks.”

“It’s the price for hitting the big time,” Van Dorn said sympathetically. “You get blamed for everything.”

“This outcry against us is wrong. The public cannot seem to understand that we are not monsters. We are merely efficient — enormously more efficient than our competitors. Oil is not the biggest business in America. Coal is bigger. Railroads are bigger. Steel is bigger. Yet, we own coal. We control railroads. We own steel. Why? Not because we’re monsters, but because they are chaotic, embroiled in murderous rivalry, each conducting his own business independently of the other and in sharp competition. We cooperate.”

Van Dorn glanced at Bell. Bell had been the Boss’s personal apprentice when he started at the agency straight out of college and Van Dorn had taught him the trade on Chicago’s West Side — as dangerous a city ward as could be found anywhere in the country. Like Apache braves who had stalked game and hunted enemies side by side since boyhood, they could communicate with signs known only to them.

“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” said Van Dorn, uncharacteristically blunt.

John D. Rockefeller fixed him with his cold gaze. “The next time someone tells you that Standard Oil is an octopus, Mr. Van Dorn, you may tell them for me that the ‘octopus’ keeps his books straight, his inventory in order, his bank accounts positive, and pays his debts when due. He is not hoodwinked by alluring prospects. He keeps his powder dry. The octopus is organized and disciplined and the rest of them… they are not.”

“If the octopus is ready to get down to brass tacks,” said Van Dorn, “let’s take up the business of this meeting.”

“I intend to hire the Van Dorn Detective Agency to catch the assassin and end the slander.”

“You’re too late,” said Isaac Bell. “The man committed suicide in Humble, Texas.”

“I have rarely heard anything so ridiculous,” said Rockefeller. “You have your facts wrong.”

“Not unless you know something that we don’t about Standard Oil policeman Big Pete Straub,” said Bell.

“I do,” Rockefeller said blandly.

“We are all ears,” said Van Dorn.

“Mr. Straub suffered a medical condition the doctors call foot drop. His nerves were damaged by an injury he sustained in the course of a labor dispute. The damage, which was irreparable, caused paralysis of the flexor muscles.”

“Right foot or left?” asked Bell.

“Mr. Straub could not move the toes of his right foot. Had he desired to trigger a rifle with his toe, he would have bared his other foot.”

Van Dorn scowled as if embarrassed his detective was found lacking.

Isaac Bell almost smiled. He felt oddly relieved. That light Savage rifle in that big man’s hands did not feel right. And their attempt to penetrate Standard Oil had just paid off in a totally unexpected bonus.

“Did your refinery police detectives tell you this?” asked Van Dorn.

“Straub’s superiors reported the condition when they read the accounts in the newspapers. Do you see how perfectly silly that verdict of suicide is?”

“Thank you, Mr. Rockefeller, I do,” said Isaac Bell. “He was murdered. The killing was made to look like suicide. Mr. Straub was not the assassin.”

Bell spoke coolly, but his head was spinning with questions. The lightweight gun. How to explain such extraordinary accuracy? A circus or Wild West Show performer, hardly likely. He was grasping at straws. The assassin could be an ordinary-size man with a penchant for the Savage 99 and the means and knowledge to have the factory weapon smithed to such a degree, it was custom-made. Like the weapon he had left with Straub’s body.

Rockefeller said, “Van Dorn, I want you to stop wasting your time with the investigation in Washington and put your firm’s full effort into catching the assassin.”

Isaac Bell and Joseph Van Dorn knew that Bell’s ploy to infiltrate Standard Oil had hooked their man. Now the job was to reel in the cagey president.

Van Dorn said, “You have your own private detective force. Why don’t you put them to work?”

“They’re not the men for this job. I want the best and I’ll pay for it.”

Bell and Van Dorn exchanged what appeared to be puzzled glances. “But we are already investigating you for the Corporations Commission,” Van Dorn protested. “As I’m sure you know.”

Rockefeller said, “You will recall my instructions that I enter your offices, unaccompanied, by a private entrance.”

Joseph Van Dorn’s grand roman nose wrinkled as if he smelled something unpleasant.

“Mr. Rockefeller, what does your method of arrival have to do with anything?”

“We do not have to inform the Corporations Commission that you’re working for me.”

Joseph Dorn’s mouth tightened. His nostrils flared. His cheeks turned red as his whiskers as he ceased to draw breath. His voice took on a low, steely note that left no doubt that were Rockefeller a younger man, he would drag him down the Willard Hotel’s grand staircase by the scruff of his neck and throw him out the door onto Pennsylvania Avenue.

“I have given my word to my client, the commission. My word is my bond. A sacred oath.”

“This is more urgent,” said Rockefeller.

Van Dorn started to retort.

Isaac Bell interrupted. “We should concentrate on the assassin. He is the clear and immediate danger.”

“No,” said Van Dorn. “The agency is honor-bound to do both.”

“I agree with Mr. Rockefeller,” Bell said staunchly. “This killer will murder again. Hanging a murderer is far more important — and more honorable — than parsing the intentions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, which the Supreme Court will probably overturn anyway.”

Van Dorn clenched his fists. “If you feel so strongly that the intentions of a shilly-shallying Congress and a vacillating court are more important than my agency’s honor, you are free to resign your position and join Mr. Rockefeller.”

Rockefeller turned on his heel and headed for the door. “I’ll be at my estate in Westchester, New York, Mr. Bell, where you can call on me.”

The assassin entered the Washington Monument carrying a carpetbag and joined a group of men and women waiting for the elevator to take them to the top of the memorial shaft. They returned the bright smile and hearty hello expected of fellow out-of-town visitors and made room when the car arrived. Piloted by a self-important operator, who seemed to take pleasure in opening and closing the door at a glacial pace, it climbed five hundred feet in twelve slow minutes, a heart-pounding eternity of grating cables, wheels, and rails made even longer by the endless din of tourist chatter and the sudden exclamations as they spotted among the memorial stones that decorated the interior walls lumps of rock from their own states. It gets easier every day to be a snob, thought the assassin.

The door opened at last to the smell of turpentine and paint.

The so-called Lincoln Memorial was nothing more than a mud patch, and Clyde Lapham was having a hard time concentrating on the do-gooder’s speech. His eye kept wandering toward an exposed tree root that reminded him of a snake slithering up an Allegheny riverbank. The old man remembered the snake so vividly from his boyhood that he could smell the water and hear the flies buzzing around his head. He swore he saw its fast tongue exploring the air with expectant flickers.

“‘The Great Emancipator,’” the do-gooder droned in his ear. “‘Savior of the Union’… Fitting to rise opposite the monument to our first president, don’t you think, sir?”

“That snake…”

“Beg your pardon, Mr. Lapham?”

“You see that snake…” Lapham’s voice trailed off as he lost interest in whether the do-gooder raising money to build the Lincoln Memorial could see the snake. He could see the snake.

The do-gooder pointed at the Washington Monument. It was taller than a New York City skyscraper. Unlike New York skyscrapers, it stood alone. Far, far away. And far behind it, the dome of the Capitol rose into the sky like… like… he didn’t care what it was like. But here, in the mud, the snake.

He tried to remember why he was here instead of back in New York. The do-gooder wanted money from the Standard, and the boys at Number 26 had given him the job of riding the train down to Washington to reckon if it was the kind of thing Mr. Rockefeller would want to write a check to. Or so they said. Lapham had his suspicions. They just wanted him out of the office so they could cut him out of another private deal.

“How much money are you begging for?”

“Begging? May I quote Mr. Rockefeller himself on the subject of philanthropy? ‘I am proud,’ he said, ‘of my ability to beg money for the good of mankind.’”

“How much would this thing cost?”

“Well, sir, if Congress won’t act, it’s up to patriotic men of means like yourself and Mr. Rockefeller. As Mr. Rockefeller has undertaken to support many fine causes in his retirement—”

“Retirement?” Clyde Lapham snorted. “Rockefeller retired? You must be kidding…” His voice trailed off. He had just remembered they weren’t ever supposed to say that. He corrected himself. “Retirement. You’re right. He’s retiring. Retired. Retired. Goddamned-sure retired.”

The do-gooder, a churchman, recoiled at the sound of an oath.

“How much will this thing cost?” Lapham repeated.

“Well…” The do-gooder rubbed his hands. “Wouldn’t that depend, sir — Mr. Lapham — on the size of the monument?”

“Big as that one?” Lapham asked, pointing at the five-hundred-fifty-five-foot, four-sided obelisk erected to the memory of George Washington. He stared at it. His eye fixed on a barely visible square hole near the top. As the tree root reminded him of the snake, that square hole made him think of a wagon riding up the sheer wall of the pillar. He could even see the horses pulling it in the patterns of the marble building blocks.

“What’s that up there?”

“The monument?” asked the minister, who was beginning to realize that old Lapham was confused, to put it mildly. Too confused to contribute to his private Lincoln Memorial fund? Or confused in a way that might embrace the fund with open arms.

“Let us remember that magnificent edifice owes its existence to the private effort of the Washington Monument Society when good men like the good men of the Standard raised the funds that Congress failed to provide.”

“That square thing near the top… What the devil is that?”

“Oh, that’s one of the windows.”

“Windows?”

“People looking out that window will see the Lincoln Memorial right down here.”

“They better have good eyes,” said Lapham. He had lost sight of the wagon, but he could see a clear shot straight from that window to where he stood. “That’s the best part of a mile.”

“When Americans climb the stairs to honor President Washington, they will rush back down them to visit the Standard’s gift memorializing President Lincoln.”

“Damned fools should take the elevator.”

The assassin detached from the clot of tourists when the elevator door opened and they were shunted past a canvas curtain toward the observation windows that faced east, south, and north. The assassin slipped behind the curtain and put the carpetbag beneath the window that faced west. Stout metal bars had been installed in the window to stop suicides from launching themselves from it. They were set deep in the masonry six inches apart.

The window looked over the Mall, a grass-covered flat land that stretched almost to the Potomac River. At the far end, just before the river, was a stretch of raw mud where a Brooklyn minister — inspired by a previous generation’s Brooklyn Abolitionists — was attempting to collect contributions to build a memorial to Abraham Lincoln.

It was a thankless task that the Lincoln Memorial Association had been trying with no success since 1867. His target today, Clyde Lapham, could pay for the entire thing, being a charter member of the Standard Oil Gang. If he could only remember where he had left his checkbook.

Clyde Lapham forgot the snake in the mud and forgot the wagon on top of the Washington Monument. He was mesmerized now by the tip of the obelisk, a shiny point that was a different color than the marble. The marble was turning darker as it was silhouetted against the setting sun. But the tip glowed with an unearthly light.

The do-gooder churchman was rattling on again.

Lapham interrupted.

“Explain why the tip of the Washington Monument is a different color than the bottom?”

“It is made of aluminum,” said the churchman.

“Are you building something similar for President Lincoln?”

I’ve snagged a live one, thought the minister. If I can only land him.

“We have no design yet, sir. Congress fails to fund the memorial, so the money has not been allocated to pay for any proposed designs, and won’t be until private citizens step up and take charge.”

A closed carriage pulled up nearby. Two men stepped out and walked toward them. One carried a physician’s medical bag. He addressed Lapham, speaking slowly and loudly, “Good afternoon, Mr. Lapham. How are we feeling today?”

“Who the devil are you?”

To the minister’s astonishment, they seized Clyde Lapham by his arms and marched him forcefully toward the carriage.

The minister hurried after them. “You there! Stop. What are you doing?”

“I’m his doctor. It is time for him to come home.”

The minister was not about to let this opportunity be marched away. “Now, hold on!”

The doctor turned abruptly and blocked the minister’s path while his companion walked Lapham out of earshot. “You are disturbing my patient.”

“He’s not ill.”

The doctor pulled a pistol from his bag. He pointed it in the minister’s face. “Turn around. Walk away.”

“Where are you taking—”

The doctor cocked the pistol. The minister turned around and walked away, head swimming, until the carriage clattered off.

The assassin had demanded double canvas curtains to shield the monument’s west window just in case some tourist got nosy. Sure enough, through the curtains came a querulous demand: “What’s going on in there?”

“It’s a painter,” answered one of the Army privates responsible for guiding visitors. “He’s making pictures of the view.”

“Why’s he walled in?”

“So no one bothers him.”

“What if I want to see out that window?”

“Come back another day, sir.”

“See here! I’m from Virginia. I came especially to view Virginia from this great height.”

The assassin waited.

A new voice, the smooth-talking sergeant in charge of the detail who had been tipped lavishly: “I invite you, sir, to view Maryland and the District of Columbia today and return next week to devote your full attention to Virginia. It will be my personal pleasure to issue you a free pass to the elevator.”

The assassin took a well-lubricated cast-iron screw jack from the carpetbag and inserted it sideways in the window, holding the base against one bar and the load pad against the other and rotating the lever arm that turned the lifting screw. The jack was powerful enough to raise the corner of a barn. Employed sideways, it spread the vertical bars as if they were made of macaroni.

Clyde Lapham’s captors timed their arrival at the Washington Monument to coincide with the elevator’s final ascent of the day. The man with the physician’s bag stepped ahead to speak privately with the soldier at the door, palming a gold piece into his hand as he explained, “The old gent has been asking all day to come up and now that we’re here he’s a little apprehensive. I wonder if we could just scoot him aboard quickly. My resident will distract him until we get to the top… Who is he? Wealthy donor to my hospital, just as generous a man as you’ll ever meet. A titan of industry, in his day…”

The private’s nose wrinkled at the smell of chloroform on the doctor’s frock coat. The rich old guy was reeling on his feet. The resident was holding tight.

“Don’t worry, he won’t cause any trouble. He’s just nervous — it will mean so much to him.”

The private ushered them into the elevator and whispered to the other tourists not to trouble the old man.

They let the others off first and, when no one saw, they stepped behind the canvas.

The assassin pointed at the window. One of the bars had snapped. The other was bent. There was plenty of room between them. Lapham’s eyes were rolling in his head. “What’s that stink?”

“Chloroform.”

“Thought so. What are we doing here?”

“Flying,” said the assassin. At his signal, the two men lifted Lapham off his feet and threw him headfirst out the window.

Startled by the wind rushing past his head, Clyde Lapham soon found his attention fixed placidly on the granite blocks racing by like a long gray train of railroad cars. He had always liked trains.

In the passenger hall of the Baltimore & Ohio Depot, the public telephone operator signaled a successful long-distance connection to New York.

The assassin closed the door of the soundproofed booth.

“I have accomplished the mission.”

“Mission?” asked Bill Matters. “This is a weak line. I can’t hear you.”

“I have accomplished the mission.”

“What mission?”

“When the New York papers get the news, they’ll flood the streets with extras.”

Even through a weak connection, Matters heard the overblown exuberance that could mean trouble. “What news?”

“Clyde Lapham leaped to his death from the Washington Monument.”

“What?”

“As you requested, his death will seem innocent.”

“No.”

“The poor man was deranged. He jumped from the top of the Washington Monument.”

“No!”

“You could tell that he planned it a long time. He brought a barn jack to force open the bars wide enough to slip through. He arranged for the window to be blocked off from public view. He anticipated every detail. Apparently, an artist was painting views for the Army — the Army runs the monument, you know. Dementia is a strange affliction, isn’t it? That a man could be simultaneously so confused and so precise.”

“No! No! No!”

“What’s wrong?”

Bill Matters raged. He clamored he still had use for Lapham. He had not ordered him killed. He was so angry that he shouted things he could not mean. “Are you insane?”

The assassin hooked the earpiece back on the telephone, paid the clerk at the operator’s desk, and strolled out of the station and up New Jersey Avenue until the incident was forgotten.

13

Isaac Bell walked across E Street, peering into shopwindows, and turned down 7th, where he propped a boot on a horse trough and mimed tying a nonexistent shoelace. Then he continued along Pennsylvania Avenue, skirted the Capitol, and turned down New Jersey. Ahead stood the Baltimore & Ohio Depot.

The clock tower was ringing his train.

He collected a ticket he had reserved for the Royal Blue passenger flier to New York. The clerk warned that it was leaving in five minutes. Bell hurried across the station hall, only to pull up short when an ancient beggar in rags, a torn slouch hat, and white beard deeply frosted with age shuffled into his path and extended a filthy hand.

Bell fumbled in his pocket, searching for a coin.

“Rockefeller’s detectives are still on your tail,” the beggar muttered.

“Skinny gent in a frock coat,” said Bell without looking back. “He took over from a tall, wide fellow on 7th Street. Any more?”

Joseph Van Dorn scratched his powder-whitened beard and pretended to extract a louse. “They put a man on the train dressed as a priest. Good luck, Isaac. You’re almost in.”

“Did the boys manage to follow Mr. Rockefeller?”

Van Dorn’s proud grin nearly undid his disguise.

“Right up to the back door of the Persian embassy.”

“Persia?” Edna called Rockefeller the master of the unexpected. She had that right. “What does he want with Persia?”

“Play your cards right and you’ll be in a position to find out.”

Bell dropped a coin in Van Dorn’s hand. “Here you go, old-timer. Do your friends a favor, spend it at a bathhouse.”

He showed his ticket and headed out on the platform, hurried the length of the blue-and-gold train, peering through the gleaming leaded-glass windows, and boarded the Royal Blue’s first car. Then he worked his way swiftly through the cars. The locomotive, a rocket-fast, high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2, whistled the double ahead signal.

Four cars back, he spotted the Standard Oil detective dressed like a priest. He clamped a powerful hand around his dog collar. The locomotive huffed steam, gently for a smooth start, and the drivers began turning. Bell lifted the priest out of his seat by the scruff of his neck. Passengers stared. Bell marched him off the train.

“Tell Mr. Rockefeller he’s wasting his money and my time shadowing me with amateurs.”

“What are you talking about?” the detective blustered. “How dare you assault a man of the cloth.”

The train was rolling, the side of a coach brushing Bell’s shoulder. “Tell the thin man in the frock coat and his fat friend in the derby next time they follow me, I’ll punch both their noses.”

Bell ran to catch up with the Royal Blue.

“And that goes double for the clergy.”

Voices were raised when Isaac Bell walked into the club car looking for a well-earned cocktail. The loudest belonged to a red-faced United States senator in a dark sack suit, a florid necktie of the type President Roosevelt was making popular, and a hawser-thick gold watch chain draped across his ample belly. He was hectoring the only woman in the car, Nellie Matters, who was wearing a white shirt, a broad belt around her slim waist, a straight skirt to her ankles, and a plain straw hat adorned with a red ribbon.

Bell ordered a Manhattan and asked the perspiring bartender, “What is going on?”

“The suffragette started it.”

“Suffragist,” Bell corrected. “Seems to be enjoying herself.” Her eyes were bright, and she had dots of high color in her cheeks. Bell thought he had never seen her quite so pretty before.

“They were debating enfranchisement, hammer and tongs, before we even got rolling.” The bartender filled his glass. “We don’t often see a lady in the club car, it being a bastion, shall we say, of ‘manliness.’”

“The gents appear willing to make an exception for a looker.”

“But the senator prefers an audience to a looker.”

“Yet another reason not to trust a man who enters politics,” said Isaac Bell.

The senator loosed a blast of indignation. “I read in the newspapers, Miss Matters, you intended to fly your balloon over the Capitol and drop torpedoes on the Congress! And would have dropped them if the wind had not blown your balloon the other way!”

“I made a terrible mistake,” said Nellie Matters, her clear voice carrying the length of the car.

“Mistake?”

“I forgot to read the weather report. A balloonist must always keep track of which way the wind blows.”

“Good lord, woman, you admit you intended to bomb Congress?”

“Nonsense!” Nellie’s eyes flashed. She tossed her head, and every man in the club car leaned in to hear her answer. “I would never harm a soul — not even a senator.” She turned and opened her arms wide as if to take everyone in the car into her confidence. “My only purpose in soaring over the Congress was to expose the members for the idiots they are.”

That drew chuckles and catcalls.

Isaac Bell raised his voice in a strong baritone: “How could flying your balloon over senators and congressmen do that?”

Nellie flashed him a smile that said Hello, Mr. Bell, thanks for setting up my next line: “My balloon soars on gas or hot air. I had no fear of running out of either in their vicinity.”

The car erupted in laughter. Business men pounded their palms pink. Salesmen slapped their thighs. From every direction, dyed-in-the-wool anti-woman-voters vied to buy her a glass of wine.

“No thank you! I don’t drink.” She cast Bell a glance that clearly said Except, of course, when dining on jackrabbit in Texas. “But, gentlemen, in lieu of your glasses of wine, I will accept contributions to the New Woman’s Flyover.”

“New Woman’s Flyover?”

“What’s that?”

“The New Woman’s Flyover is a stunt when a fleet of red, white, and blue balloons full of suffragists take to the sky to boom an amendment to the Constitution enfranchising women voters.”

“Never heard of it.”

“I just thought it up! And you gentlemen are going to make the first contributions, aren’t you?”

“Open your carpetbag, Miss Matters,” Isaac Bell called. “I’ll pass the hat.”

He whipped his hat off his head, deftly palmed the derringer holstered within, and walked the length of the club car like a deacon until it was brimful with contributions. Nellie opened her carpetbag wide. Bell poured the money in.

Nellie called, “Thank you, gentlemen! Every suffragist in the nation will thank you, and your wives will welcome you home warmly.”

“Another coincidental meeting?” Bell asked. “But no crime this time. At least none yet.”

“It’s no coincidence.”

“Then how do we happen to be on the same train?”

“I asked the clerk at the Willard Hotel for your forwarding address. The Yale Club of New York City.”

“Were you planning a trip to New York?”

“I decided to visit my father.”

“Spur-of-the-moment?”

“Whenever I like,” she smiled back.

Bell said, “I would like to meet your father.”

“How should I introduce you?” Nellie asked. “Father will not cotton to a private detective investigating his corporation.”

“I’m not on the commission case anymore.”

“Why not?”

“It’s a long story,” said Bell.

“We have time for a long story. It’s six hours to New York.”

“Let’s just say it won’t be an official visit,” Isaac Bell lied.

Only part a lie. The chance to observe Spike Hopewell’s former partner in his own home would be absolutely official, but it would not require much pretense to act the part of a man who desired to visit Bill Matters’ daughter. Either daughter.

“Why don’t you introduce me as a gentleman caller?”

“Father won’t believe you. He knows I am not the sort of woman who sits at home waiting for gentleman callers.”

“Then tell him I’m a man hoping for a ride in your balloon.”

“You can ride in my balloon anytime you’ll make a speech for women’s votes.”

“Actually, I rode in a balloon once, in the circus. Is that where you discovered balloons? In the circus?”

“I prefer theaters to circuses. They’re more fantastical.”

“I don’t agree. I ran away to a circus when I was a boy.”

“You must tell me about the circus sometime.”

“How about now?”

“Spur-of-the-moment?”

“Whatever you like.”

“I would like to eat dinner,” said Nellie Matters. “I’m hungry, and it’s my turn to take you.”

At Central Station, the twelve-year-old boys peddling the Washington Post Late Extra Edition were shrill as a flock of jays.

“Tourist falls from Washington Monument.”

“Extra! Extra! Tourist falls!”

Archie Abbott tossed pennies for the paper and ran to the horse cabs. Mr. Van Dorn had sent a wire care of the Danville, Virginia, stationmaster ordering him to report the instant his train pulled into Washington. Top hands like Isaac Bell took direct summons from the Boss for granted, but this was his first one ever.

“Willard Hotel. Fast as you can.”

Upon arrival, he dashed up the stairs into the Van Dorn offices.

“The Boss wired my train at Danville. Said to come right over.”

The front desk man spoke calmly into a voice tube. A blasé apprentice walked Archie into Joseph Van Dorn’s office. With his coat off and his sleeves rolled up his bulging forearms, Van Dorn, Archie thought, looked less the company proprietor than a prosperous bricklayer.

“Abbott, you’re a Princeton man.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ve got something right up your alley.”

“How can I help, sir?”

Van Dorn nodded at the extra edition that Archie had tucked under his arm. “The ‘tourist’ who fell from the memorial shaft was not a tourist, and I don’t believe he fell. The papers don’t have it yet, but it was Clyde Lapham.”

“Standard Oil?”

“Rumor has it, he jumped. If he did, I want to know why. If he didn’t jump, I want to know who helped him out the window.”

“May I ask, sir, what makes you think he didn’t jump?”

“Our investigation has established that not one of the Standard Oil Gang has a guilty bone in his body. On the remote chance that one was ever stricken with remorse, it wouldn’t be Clyde Lapham. He had no doubt that making money was his divine right. Something’s fishy. That’s where you come in.”

“Yes, sir,” Archie said, wondering what it had to do with being a Princeton graduate.

“They won’t let our men near the monument. Were it a Navy facility, I would have no trouble gaining access. But I am not so well connected with the Army, and I’ve run head-on into a snob of a Colonel Dan Egan, who looks down on private detectives as not worthy of his exalted friendship. Do you get my drift?”

Archie was suddenly on firm ground, with intimate knowledge of the fine distinctions of the social order. “Yes, sir. Army officers are more likely to be ill-bred and have chips on their shoulders than their Navy counterparts.”

“This particular officer is carrying a chip bigger than a redwood. Fortunately, I’ve learned he has a son attending Princeton. I’m betting he’ll be mightily impressed by the fact that you matriculated, as well as by your manner, which is less that of a private detective than a privileged layabout. Not that I’m suggesting you lay about, necessarily, but I suspect you can act the part.”

“I’ll rehearse,” Archie said drily.

“You don’t have time,” Van Dorn shot back. “Colonel Egan is at the monument right now, in the middle of the night, leading what the Army optimistically calls an inquiry. Get over there and sweet-talk your way in before they trample the evidence and insert words in the mouths of witnesses.”

Archie doubted he’d make much headway walking up to a full colonel and saying he went to Princeton. He ventured, “This might require more than ‘sweet talking,’ Mr. Van Dorn.”

The Boss stared, his eyes suddenly hard. “The agency pays you handsomely to do ‘more than sweet talking.’”

“I’ll do my best.”

“See that you do.”

14

Joseph Van Dorn was still at his desk when Archie reported back, shortly before midnight.

“Suicide or murder?”

“It’s more complicated than you might expect, Mr. Van Dorn.”

The glower Van Dorn leveled at him reminded Archie Abbott of an encounter on safari with an East African rhinoceros. “Let me decide what I expect. In a word, ‘suicide’ or ‘murder’?”

“In a word,” said Archie, “the Army was ‘hoodwinked.’”

Joseph Van Dorn, so wintery a moment earlier, broke into a delighted smile — as Archie knew he would. Beaming at his old U.S. Marine Corps NCO sword, which hung from his coat tree, the Boss asked, “What did the Army fall for this time?”

Isaac Bell doubted there was room in Nellie Matters’ exciting life for a boyfriend. She was great company at dinner in the Royal’s beautiful dining car, entertaining him, and eavesdroppers at nearby tables, with tales of her suffragist travels, balloon mishaps, and rivalries with suffragettes—“the dread Amanda Faire”—while spinning like cotton candy her newly invented New Woman’s Flyover. By the time they got off the train in Jersey City, the suffragist’s publicity stunt details were in place. All that remained was to raise the money for a hundred balloons, a prospect she thought not at all daunting.

But on the railroad ferry across the Hudson to New York City, Bell sensed a sudden shift toward the romantic. He credited the beautiful lights of the downtown skyscrapers and the chill wind they braved on deck. He wrapped his arm around her shoulder and Nellie huddled close. Just as the boat landed, she curled deeper in his arm. “I don’t usually meet men I like. I don’t mean to say that I dislike men. But I just don’t find most of them that likeable. Do you know what I mean?”

“No,” said Isaac Bell. “What is it you don’t find likeable?”

“Is that a detective trait to always ask questions?”

“Yes.”

“You’re as bad as my sister the reporter.”

A hansom cab whisked them across town. She held his hand, and, all too soon, the cab pulled up to the Matters town house in Gramercy Park, a quiet oasis of a neighborhood that predated the Civil War. Just across the narrow park was one of Archie Abbott’s clubs, The Players. The cab clattered off. Bell walked Nellie to the front door. The house was made of brick with gleaming black shutters.

“What a handsome house.”

“We moved up in the world with the Standard,” Nellie replied as she slipped a key in the door. She whirled around suddenly and faced him. “Come back tomorrow evening to meet Father.”

“As aspiring balloonist or gentleman caller?”

Nellie Matters gave Isaac Bell her biggest smile. “Both.”

She disappeared behind the door.

He lingered on the sidewalk. He had to admit that he was more than a little dazzled by the vibrant and witty young woman.

Suddenly he was alert, seeing movement from the corner of his eye. A slight figure, a woman in a cloak, materialized from the shadows of Gramercy Park. Lamplight crossed her face.

“Edna?” he asked, caught off base by how happy he was to see her.

“I was just coming home,” she answered. “I didn’t want to interrupt you and Nellie.”

She seemed upset.

“Are you all right?”

Edna Matters paused to consider her answer. “Not entirely. I mean, I’m in a bit of a quandary.”

“Good or bad?”

“If I knew, it wouldn’t be a quandary, would it?”

“Tell me what it is,” said Bell. “I’m a fair hand, sometimes, at sorting good from bad. Come on, we’ll take a walk.”

The hour was late and the well-dressed couple might have drawn the attention of thieves who would attempt to separate them from their money. That is until a closer inspection revealed a gent light on his feet and cold of eye. They walked until the lights grew brighter on Broadway, its sidewalks crowded with people bustling in and out of hotels, restaurants, and vaudeville theaters.

“I grew up with oil derricks,” Edna said suddenly. “Pipe lines and breakout tanks. And a father beaten repeatedly by the Standard.”

“Is that how you came to write the History of Under-handed?”

“Do you think I had a choice?”

“I don’t know,” said Bell. “Nellie didn’t respond to your father’s losses by becoming a reporter.”

“Wouldn’t you say that pursuing justice for women is the other side of the same coin?”

“How?”

“Of trying to make things right.”

“No,” said Bell. “Enfranchisement is a cause, a worthy cause. Writing the truth is more like a calling. So maybe you’re right. Maybe you had no choice.”

“You’re not making this easier.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what your quandary is. Not making what easier?”

She fell silent again. Bell tried to reengage her. “What about Nellie? Did she take your father’s losses as hard as you did?”

Edna thought a moment. “Nellie loves him as fiercely as I do. But she wasn’t around for as much of it. She’s traveled ever since she put her teens and pinafores behind her. Here today, gone tomorrow.”

“Maybe she was trying to get away from them.”

“I don’t know. She’s always on the road — and at home wherever she alights.”

“You travel, too.”

“Like a hermit crab. I carry my home with me. No matter where I land at the end of the day, I’m at my typewriter. I thought it was time to stop writing, my crusade over.”

“Is there a purpose to stop your writing?”

“I thought I was ready to stop. But the new oil strikes make it a new story. And now the unrest in Baku threatens shortages that could upend the petroleum industry all over the world. Imagine what must be going through Mr. Rockefeller’s mind at a moment like this.”

“What is in Baku for him?”

“Half the world’s oil. And a well-established route to the customers. If they burn the Baku fields, who will supply the Russians’ and the Nobels’ and the Rothschilds’ markets? JDR, that’s who, even if it’s true he retired, which I never believed… Listen to me! I’m too obsessed with JDR to stop reporting on him. Just when I think I’m done, I learn something new.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve heard rumors — speculation, really — that Rockefeller uses his publicists to communicate secretly with his partners. They plant a story. It gets printed and reprinted in every paper in the world, and those who know his code get his message… Boy!”

She gave two pennies to a passing newsboy hawking the early-morning edition of the Sun and scanned the paper in the blazing window of a lobster palace. “Here! I’ve traced this one back to last January. It’s supposedly a letter he wrote to his Sunday school class from his vacation to France. ‘Delightful breezes. I enjoy watching the fishermen with their nets on the beach, and gazing upon the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea. The days pass pleasantly and profitably.’”

Bell said, “It sounds perfectly ordinary. So ordinary, you wonder why the papers print it.”

“Any pronouncement the richest man in America makes is automatically news. They change details to keep it up to date. After he returned from Europe they added the introductory ‘I recall, when I was in France,’ et cetera. Recently they added ‘the sun rising.’ I’m sure it’s a message. Maybe it doesn’t matter — except it might, and I can’t stop writing about him…” She leafed through the paper. “Here’s another I’ve been following in the social sections. I cannot for the life of me figure it out, but it has to be code.” She read, “‘Monmouth County Hounds, Lakewood. First Drag Hunt of the season. John D. Rockefeller in his automobile was in line at the start, but soon dropped out.’ And this, supposedly about him playing golf. ‘Standard Oil President Rockefeller was gleeful over his foursome victory. Dominated the links with long sweeping drives—’ Why are you staring at me, Mr. Bell?”

“You should see your face. You’re on fire. Congratulations!”

“For what?’”

“An excellent decision not to retire.”

Suddenly a ragged chorus of young voices piped, “Extra! Extra!”

Gangs of newsboys galloped out of the Times building. They scattered up and down Broadway and Seventh Avenue, waving extra editions and shouting the story.

“Rich old man jumps off Washington Monument.”

Bell bought a paper. He and Edna leaned over the headline

and raced down the column and onto the second page.

“Why do you think he did it?” asked Bell. “Guilt?”

Edna Matters shook her head. “Clyde Lapham would have to look up ‘guilt’ in the dictionary to get even a murky idea of its meaning.”

“Maybe he felt the government closing in,” said Bell, knowing the Van Dorn investigation had yet to turn up enough evidence to please a prosecutor.

“If he jumped,” said Edna, “because he felt the government breathing down his neck, then his last living thought must have been I should have taken Rockefeller with me.” She cupped Bell’s cheek in her hand. “Isaac, I must go home. I have to look into this… I bet you do, too.”

At the Yale Club on 44th Street, where Isaac Bell lodged when in New York, Matthew, the night hall porter, ushered him inside.

“Mr. Forrer telephoned ahead and asked that I slip him in privately by the service door. I put him in the lounge.”

Bell bounded up the stairs.

The Main Lounge, a high-ceilinged room of couches and armchairs, was deserted at this late hour but for the chief of Van Dorn Research, who occupied most of a couch. Forrer wore wire-rimmed spectacles, as befit his station as a scholar. Scholarly he was, but a very large man, as tall as Bell and twice as wide. Bell had seen him disperse rioters by strolling among them.

“The Boss and I have been burning up the wires. All hell’s broken loose on the Corporations Commission case.”

“I just read the Lapham story. Do we know for sure he killed himself?”

“No. All we know is what Archie Abbott learned when he wormed his way into the official investigation. Mr. Van Dorn was impressed, which he isn’t always with Archie.”

“What did Archie learn?”

“Someone — if not Lapham, then presumably our assassin — pulled an elaborate fast one on the Army, who operate the monument. So elaborate that it can only be characterized as baroque.”

“‘Baroque’? What do you mean, baroque? Complicated?”

“More than complicated. Bizarre. Whimsical as an elaborate prank, except a man died. It’s hard to imagine they pulled it off. Harder to reckon why they went to such trouble to kill one old man.”

“How could he fit out the window?” asked Bell. “They barred them up after that lunatic Anti-Saloon Leaguer tried to jump with a banner.”

“The bars were forced open with a barn jack.”

“It takes time to crank a barn jack. Why didn’t anyone stop him?”

“No one saw. The window on the west had been cordoned off from the observation area with canvas drapes to ensure the privacy of an artist painting the view.”

“Where was the artist?”

“No one is exactly sure they ever saw the artist. He left behind his paint box and his easel but no painting. According to Archie, it’s not clear he did more than set up his easel. And before you ask his name, it was very likely a false name.”

“What was it?”

“This is where things turn complicated. I’ll get to his name in a moment.”

“I’ve had a very long day, Grady. What is going on?”

“I don’t know. Other than to say that the Army — or at least the U.S. Army colonel in command of the Washington Monument, whom Archie interviewed — gave the artist permission to paint the view privately behind canvas curtains because permission was requested as a personal favor by a famous Army sharpshooter.”

15

He won the President’s Medal in 1902.”

Isaac Bell sank in his armchair to ponder that. “In other words, he’s the best.”

“The most accurate marksman in 1902.”

“They shoot up to a thousand yards,” said Bell. “What’s his name?”

“Private Billy Jones.”

“People who are legitimately named Jones and Smith should be issued special identifying cards to prove they didn’t make it up.”

“Private Billy ‘Jones’ deserted the First Regiment of Newark, New Jersey National Guard, shortly after he won his medal.”

“Why did the Army give permission to paint in the monument? Why didn’t they just arrest him?”

“He didn’t ask the entire Army. He asked the idiot colonel in command of the monument. Mailed him a letter. The damned fool had not heard the news that their champion sharpshooter deserted. It happened three years ago and it’s likely the Army covered it up, being embarrassed.”

“Not to mention terrified to tell TR,” said Bell.

A smile lit Forrer’s solemn expression. “Grim thought, Isaac. Teddy is not a president that a career officer would want to disappoint.”

“So no one saw the bars jacked open behind the canvas erected for an artist no one saw. Therefore, no one saw whether old Lapham jumped or was thrown.”

“Two men brought him there. Doctors.”

“Then we’ll start with the doctors.”

“Unfortunately, no.”

“Now what?” asked Bell.

“The Army hasn’t informed the police yet, so the news reporters don’t know, but Archie’s friend the half-wit colonel admitted the doctors vanished, and no one knows if they really were doctors or merely carrying medical bags.”

“Further suggesting it was murder,” said Bell.

Forrer repeated a saying Bell had heard from him often: “The job of the chief of Van Dorn Research is to sort fact from assumption.”

“You are provoking me toward sarcasm, Grady. If it wasn’t murder, then the men pretending to be doctors who delivered Lapham to the top of the monument carried a barn jack in their medical bag and left it with Lapham, who used it to jack open the bars so he could jump out the window.”

“Seen that way, it does suggest murder,” Forrer admitted.

“But like you just said, why go to so much trouble to kill one old guy? You could pop him on the head and say he fell off his chair… In fact, it’s less complicated than showy.”

“Did our assassin use the name of a famous sharpshooter, gambling that the colonel didn’t know he was a deserter?”

“Or is our assassin the deserter himself? He’s proven himself a champion marksman.” Bell shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would he draw such attention to himself if he’s been safely disappeared for three years?”

It struck Isaac Bell that the assassin’s remarkable shooting was merely a means. He had been thinking about him as a sniper. Now he had to think about him as a murderer who would use various means to kill.

“You were going to tell me the supposed artist’s name.”

Forrer nodded. “At this point, it moves into the realm of the bizarre. The artist called himself Isaac Bell.”

“What?”

“He knows you’re working up the case, Isaac.”

Isaac Bell stood out of his chair and stalked through the empty lounge to the tall windows that overlooked West 44th Street. A thin smile formed on his lips.

“He’s calling you out!” said Forrer, who had grown up in the Deep South where calling a man out meant parking yourself on his front lawn with a gun in your hand until he came out shooting.

“Sounds that way.” Bell stared down at 44th Street. Carriages and motor limousines were returning for the night to the many stables and garages on the block.

Suddenly he stared unseeing out the window. “At last.”

“At last what?” Forrer asked.

“At last he’s made a mistake.”

“Thinking he can take you?”

“That, too.”

The tall detective turned abruptly and crossed the big room in several strides, his face alight with energy. “We’re finally getting something. Let’s find out who this champion really is.”

Forrer climbed out of his chair and rose to his full height. “I’ll go back to the office.” He kept a cot there, and Bell knew that after a short nap he would dive into his files. Assistants and apprentices arriving for work early would find their boss deep in newspapers and magazines and telegrams from the agency’s private wires.

Bell walked him down to the front door.

“There’s something else I want you to look into.”

“What’s that?”

“Edna Matters has an interesting theory.” He told him Edna’s theory about John D. Rockefeller’s newspaper code.

Forrer was intrigued by the idea of far-flung Rockefeller operatives reading the newspapers for his instructions. “Not to mention those hundreds of ‘correspondents’ spying for Standard Oil around the world, reading the papers and realizing what he wants information on.”

“Can you crack it?”

“It isn’t only what he says,” Forrer explained, “but when he says it. He’s referring to things they already know, telling them now we wait, now we get ready, now we move.”

“Check your files back to January when Rockefeller was in Cannes.”

“I’ll start earlier.”

“The phrase about watching children digging in the sand appears only in recent weeks.”

“I’ll pay particular attention to it. What do you want me to tell Mr. Van Dorn?”

“Tell him the assassin is not quite as professional as he thinks he is.”

“He’s going to ask me what you mean. I’d like to have an answer ready.”

“Tell him the assassin is a show-off.”

“What do you suppose he’ll make of that?”

“He’ll make of it what he taught me: Show-offs trip themselves up when they forget to watch where they’re going.”

“And where are you going, Isaac?”

“Westchester.”

“To see the great man?”

“To see what makes him tick… Here’s another thought for Mr. Van Dorn. If our assassin is willing to throw people out windows instead of shooting them, then he’s even less predictable than a professional sniper.”

They shook hands.

“Wait a minute! Do we know why Clyde Lapham was in Washington?”

Forrer said, “I assume—”

“I thought the Research Department never assumes.”

“I’ll get right on it… Hey, where are you going?”

Isaac Bell was striding into the street, waving a fistful of money at a chauffeur about to garage an Acme Opera Limousine. “Grady!” he called over his shoulder. “Do me a favor and send wires in my name to Nellie Matters and John D. Rockefeller. Apologize for breaking tomorrow’s appointments and ask would it be convenient to reschedule for the day after.”

“Now where are you going?”

“Back to Washington.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I’ll make the Congressional Express.” He paid the yawning chauffeur to speed him to the railroad ferry at 42nd Street.

The one a.m. express was fully booked. Even his railroad pass couldn’t get him a berth. He whipped out his Van Dorn badge and sprinted to the fortified express car at the head of the train. There would be no berth with crisp sheets there, either, nor even a comfortable chair. But the express messenger, responsible for jewels, gold, bearer bonds, and banknotes, was glad to have the company of another armed guard. Bell waited until the train was safely rolling at sixty miles an hour, then made his bed on canvas sacks stuffed with a hundred thousand in National Bank notes. He awakened to stand watch, pistol drawn, at station stops in Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore.

“Greek fire saved Constantinople from the Arab navies, Mrs. McCloud.”

The widow who owned the coffee stand on Fulton Street was tied to a kitchen chair with a gag in her mouth. Bill Matters watched from the doorway.

The assassin, who was perched on the rim of the bathtub that shared the tiny space with the chair, a table, and a cookstove, loosened the gag and asked, “Who else did you tell?”

The woman was brave. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Oh, I will know… Greek fire burned on water. In fact, it continues to burn even when you splash water on it. Which the invading Arabs discovered when it incinerated their ships. It was made by a secret formula as closely guarded as the workings of the Standard Oil Company. The recipe is long lost. But every guess of its ingredients includes naphtha.”

The assassin held up a gallon tin of naphtha, a familiar solvent sold in hardware stores, and punched holes in the top with a pocketknife.

“You’ll find naphtha in the Bible, Mrs. McCloud, a word to describe burning liquid. It’s mentioned in the Old Testament. The name meant ‘purification.’ Assyrians dipped their arrows in naphtha to shoot fire at their enemies.”

“You think you scare me?”

The assassin tightened the gag.

“Today in our modern, gentler age, we use naphtha to clean clothes and dissolve grease and paint. But since the auto became popular, it is especially important to give gasoline its kick. Have you ever seen gasoline catch fire? Imagine the leaps of flame that naphtha produces. Who, Mrs. McCloud? Who else did you tell that I gave you the powder that you fed to the old man?”

She shook her head. She was watching the tin, but there was still more contempt than fear in her eyes.

The assassin upended the tin and poured the naphtha on her head, soaking her hair and her shabby housedress, then loosened the gag and asked again in the same quiet, persistent voice, “Who else did you tell that I gave you powder to put in Mr. Comstock’s coffee?”

The assassin signaled that it was now Matters’ turn. Steeling himself to act, Matters scraped a kitchen match on the cookstove’s grate. Flame flared in a burst of pungent smoke.

“Who else?”

“No one. I swear it.”

“No one but the messenger you sent to blackmail me,” said Matters.

“I didn’t tell him everything. Just enough to scare you to make you pay.”

“You did that all right.”

“Where is he?” she asked, eyes locked on the flame.

“Who? Your blackmail messenger? He died. After he told us where to find you.” Matters turned to the assassin, who was watching intently. “She believes me, and now I believe her.”

Mrs. McCloud’s entire body sagged with despair, and she whispered, “My son.”

“Ask her,” said the assassin, “how she traced me to you.”

Bill Matters said to Mrs. McCloud, “You heard the question. What made you think I was the one to blackmail?”

The widow suddenly looked twenty years older and had tears in her eyes. She whispered, “My son followed the old man to his office. He saw you together. He saw you meet every day in a tearoom. Like you had secrets away from the office.”

“Your son was a good guesser.” To the assassin he said, “I believe her. Do you?”

The assassin stepped closer and stared into Mrs. McCloud’s eyes.

“Say it again: No one else.”

“No one else. I swear it.”

“Do you believe her?” Matters asked again.

“I told you, I believe her.”

“All right.”

“But,” said the assassin, “she will never leave you in peace until she dies.”

Bill Matters pondered in silence. Suddenly he heard his own voice babbling foolishness. “What could she say? Who would believe her?”

The assassin said, “They will dig Comstock up and administer the Marsh test. What do you suppose they will find in his remains?”

Matters shook his head, though he knew of course.

“Poudre de succession! That is French, you poor man, for ‘inheritance powder,’ which is a euphemism for ‘arsenic.’ In other words, they will hang you for poisoning Averell Comstock.”

“I won’t tell a soul,” said Mrs. McCloud. “I promise.”

Bill Matters kept shaking his head. He could not abide the woman’s fear. Mary McCloud’s scornful contempt had underscored the deadly threat of blackmail. But her fear pried open his heart. He did not doubt that most men were his enemies. But not women. Twice widowed, father of daughters given to him by women he loved, he heard himself whisper a coward’s confession.

“I don’t know if I can do this.”

“That’s what you have me for,” said the assassin.

16

When Isaac Bell got back from Washington, D.C., he borrowed a Stanley Steamer from a good friend of Archie Abbott, a well-off New Yorker who, as Archie put it, “passed his days in a quiet, blameless, clubable way.” He drove north of Manhattan into Westchester, passing through Spuyten Duyvil, Yonkers, and Dobbs Ferry. The road, paved with concrete in some sections, asphalted in others, graveled here and there, and along a few stretches still dirt, passed country clubs, prosperous farms, and taverns catering to automobilists from the city. He arrived in North Tarrytown in a traffic jam of farm wagons, gasoline trucks, and autos all packed with workmen.

It was Election Day, the town constable explained. The wagons, trucks, and autos were ferrying three hundred of John D. Rockefeller’s estate gardeners, masons, road builders, laborers, and house servants to the North Tarrytown polls to vote for Rockefeller’s choices of trustees.

“Will he win?” Bell asked.

“He always does,” said the constable, who surely owed his job to the incumbents. “But, this year, the butcher is waging a mighty campaign.”

He pointed Bell in the direction of the Rockefeller estate. Soon the bustle of the town was forgotten, dwarfed by vast building improvements — grading new roads, damming rivers, digging lakes, erecting stables and guesthouses, and laying out a golf course — that appeared to absorb the surrounding farms and entire villages. Rounding a blind bend, he saw an old tavern that stood alone in the sea of mud. A sign on the roof named it

Bell swerved off the road and stopped in front with a strong hunch that the proprietor of the Sleepy Hollow Roadhouse would be more than willing to tell him a thing or two about Rockefeller’s local activities. He ordered a glass of beer and got an earful.

“Retired, the man is lethal,” said the very angry tavern owner. “If the nation thinks that Standard Oil is an octopus, they should see him operate in Pocantico Hills — where, just so you know, my family logged and fished, and farmed those fields across the road, for two hundred years before that sanctimonious pirate pulled up stakes in Cleveland to foist himself on New York and, by extension, our small hamlet.”

Mine host paused for breath. Isaac Bell asked, “What makes him sanctimonious?”

“He’s a teetotaler. It galls the heck out of him that I’m selling drinks right outside his front gate. He put my competitor out of business by buying up every house in the hamlet that supplied his customers. But he can’t do that to me because my customers drive their autos up from the city like you.”

“So it’s a standoff.”

“As much as one man can stand off against an octopus. Who knows which way he’ll come at me next.”

“Is he here often?”

“Too often. Here all the time, now that he’s built his own golf course.”

“How big is the estate?” said Bell.

“Three thousand acres and counting. The man can drive for days on his own roads and never use the same one twice.”

Isaac Bell found the gates open and unmanned. The driveway swept through dense forest, open hayfield, and mowed lawns as green as any he had seen in England. Bridle paths, and carriage roads of crushed slate, crisscrossed the drive and disappeared under shade trees. Clearings at bends in the driveway offered sudden, startling vistas of the Hudson River.

He passed stables and a coach barn, guest cottages, gardens, both sunken and walled, a teahouse, and a conservatory under construction, its graceful framework awaiting glass. A powerhouse was hidden behind a stone outcropping with its chimney disguised by a clump of tall cedars. The drive climbed a gentle slope to a plateau that looked out on the river and circled a large mansion in the early stage of construction. Masons swarmed on scaffolds, buttressing deep cellar holes with stonework.

Bell was wondering in which of the older or newly built smaller buildings Rockefeller actually lived when he noticed below the plateau a canyon-like cut through a stone hill. He drove into it along a flat roadbed. Drill marks in the vine-tangled stone sides, ballast crunching under his tires, and chunks of coal glittering in the sun indicated it was an old railroad cut abandoned decades earlier. He emerged on the far side of the hill beside a cluster of weathered cow barns that appeared to be the remnants of a dairy farm subsumed by the estate.

Sturdy poles carried strands of telegraph, telephone, and electric wire into the biggest barn. Isaac Bell parked the Steamer and pressed a button at the door. A buzzer sounded inside.

John D. Rockefeller himself opened the door. He was dressed as he had been when Bell saw him last in Joseph Van Dorn’s office, in elegantly tailored broadcloth, winged collar and four-in-hand necktie, a silk handkerchief in his breast pocket and gold cuff links. His eyes were bleak.

“What exactly happened to Clyde Lapham?”

“You can answer that better than I,” said Bell.

“What do you mean?”

“Tell me why you sent Clyde Lapham to Washington.”

“What makes you think I did?”

“I know you did. I want you to tell me why.”

“How could you possibly know that I sent Clyde Lapham to Washington?”

“Van Dorn detectives make friends with local cops.”

“I thought you resigned your position.”

“Word of my resignation hasn’t reached my friends in the Washington police. Why did you send Clyde Lapham to Washington?”

“To give the poor man something to do.”

“Poor man?”

“Clyde Lapham was the brightest, widest-awake, most progressive business man. But he was beginning to go down the hill. It finally became apparent that he had had his day because he was losing his mind to dementia.”

“Why did you send him?”

“You apparently know already. Why this charade?”

“I don’t know if I can trust you, sir. I want to hear it from you.”

The old man didn’t like hearing that, and Bell half expected to be escorted off the property. Instead, Rockefeller said, “I asked Clyde Lapham to discuss a contribution of money to a minister who is raising funds to build a monument to President Abraham Lincoln.”

“Thank you,” said Bell. For a moment, he debated asking why Rockefeller paid a secret visit to the Persian embassy, but that would definitely get him thrown out on his ear. He had learned nothing more of it on his quick return to Washington and had left Archie Abbott in charge of probing his friends in the State Department.

“To answer your question,” Bell said, “Clyde Lapham was murdered.”

Rockefeller’s expression did not change, but his shoulders sagged perceptibly. He stepped back, indicating Bell should enter, and without a word led the way through a foyer into a high-ceilinged drawing loft. Draftsmen in vests and shirtsleeves were bent over drawing boards, working in the pure glow of north-facing skylights. Bell saw building plans and landscape designs taking shape. Finished blueprints were spread on worktables, where civil engineers and architects were guiding foremen through the intricacies of upcoming work. Rockefeller paused at a table where a draftsman was drawing the steel frame for a stone bridge, traced a line with his finger, and politely ordered a correction.

He continued down a hallway of shut doors. Not visible until they had rounded a corner was a door with frosted glass in the upper panel. Bell followed him through it and saw instantly that the supposedly retired president of Standard Oil was leading a double life at Pocantico Hills, actively managing vast improvements of his new estate while continuing to command his industrial enterprise.

The frosted-glass door opened on a business office as modern as any on Wall Street, staffed by secretaries and bookkeepers, and equipped with private telegraph, overseas cable, telephone lines, and ticker tape machines. Rockefeller led Bell through the din into his private office, closed the door, and stood behind his desk.

“That you’re here,” he said, “tells me you’ve come to do what I asked: stop the assassin and end the slander of Standard Oil.”

Bell said, “I will concentrate on the assassin and leave the slander to you.”

“How do you know that Clyde Lapham was murdered?”

Bell related the events at the Washington Monument step-by-step.

“Byzantine,” said Rockefeller. “In your experience, have you ever seen a murder as elaborately conceived?”

“Three murders,” said Bell.

“Three?” Rockefeller blinked.

“And an attempted murder. And an elaborate act of arson.”

“What are you talking about?”

“As ‘byzantine,’ to use your word, as the killing of Clyde Lapham was, it was merely an exaggerated version of his earlier crimes.” He described for Rockefeller the deaths of the independent Kansas refiners Reed Riggs and Albert Hill, the elaborate and highly effective duck-target explosion and burning of Spike Hopewell’s refinery, the attempt to shotgun him, Texas Walt, and Archie Abbott. Finally, he reminded Rockefeller of the faked suicide of Big Pete Straub. “By those lights, sniping Hopewell and C. C. Gustafson are his only ‘normal’ crimes.”

“What motivates such complication?”

“I don’t know yet,” said Isaac Bell. “The effect of the straightforward killings is the slander you want to stop, the blaming of Standard Oil. The killings that were masked as accidents don’t appear to fall into that category. Perhaps those people were killed for other reasons.”

A secretary knocked and entered and murmured in Rockefeller’s ear. Rockefeller picked up a telephone, listened, then put the phone down, shaking his head. He sat silent awhile, then said to Bell, “My father used to read aloud to us. He liked the Fireside Poets. Do you know them?”

“My grandfather read them,” said Bell. “Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell.”

“Lowell was Father’s favorite…” He shook his head again. “I’ve just learned that Averell Comstock, one of my oldest partners, is dying… ‘O Death, thou ever roaming shark…’”

Rockefeller looked at Bell, his fathomless eyes suddenly bright with pain.

Bell completed the stanza for him—“‘… Ingulf me in eternal dark!’”—wondering whether the old man remembered it was from a humorous poem about a perch with a toothache who was hoodwinked by a lobster.

“Averell became a warm, close, personal friend of mine in the course of business. I will miss him.”

“I’m sorry,” said Bell. “Had he been ill?”

“Briefly. The price of getting old, Mr. Bell. My partners are dying right and left. Most were older than I… They go so quickly. One week ago, Comstock was full of vim and push.”

He stood up, laid a big hand on the telephone, and stared across the desk as if the room had no walls and he could see all the way to New York City.

“When poor Lapham began losing his mind, there was time to get used to the idea that he would go. But Averell was a titan. I figured him for another twenty years.”

He’s afraid of dying, thought Bell and suddenly felt sympathy for the old man. But he could not ignore the opportunity to investigate from even deeper inside the heart of Standard Oil.

“Are you afraid the assassin will strike at you?”

“Most people hate me,” Rockefeller replied matter-of-factly. “The chances are, he hates me, too.”

“He strikes me as professional, without emotion.” True of his shooting, thought Bell. True of his deep-laid groundwork. Not true of his impulse to show off.

“Then he’s paid by someone who hates me,” said Rockefeller.

“A trigger finger that won’t shake with personal hatred makes him all the more dangerous.”

Rockefeller changed the subject abruptly. “Can I assume that having broken with the Van Dorn Agency, you are free to travel on short notice?”

“Where?” asked Bell.

“Wherever I say.”

Isaac Bell threw down a bold challenge calculated to impress the oil titan. If it worked, the lordly Rockefeller might open up to him as he would to an equal rather than a lowly detective.

“Where ‘children dig in the sand’?”

Rockefeller returned a fathomless stare. Bell gazed back noncommittally, as he would in the highest-stakes poker game — neither averting his eyes nor staring — while Rockefeller reassessed him. He said nothing, though the silence between them stretched and stretched. The old man spoke at last.

“You appear to have studied my habits.”

“As would an assassin.”

“I may go abroad.”

“Baku?” said Bell.

Violence flared in the hooded eyes. “You know too much, Mr. Bell. Are you a spy?”

“I am imagining how an assassin stalks a man of many secrets — a victim like you. Baku is obvious: The newspapers are full of Russia’s troubles, and E. M. Hock’s History of the Oil Monopoly catalogs the territories in Europe and Asia that you’ve lost to Rothschild and the Nobels and Sir Marcus Samuel.”

“Are you a spy?” Rockefeller repeated. But he was, Bell guessed, assessing him carefully, and he strove to answer in a manner that would instill confidence and project the picture of a valuable man, seasoned in his craft, alert, observant, and deadly when challenged. A man John D. Rockefeller could trust to guard his life.

“I don’t have to be a spy to know that ‘the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean’ rises in the east — Russian oil in Baku and the Chinese and Indian refined oil markets you’re determined to dominate. If I were a spy, I would know the secret meaning of ‘children digging in the sand.’ I don’t. But the assassin has had more time to investigate and probably does know all about children digging in the sand. Would you feel safer if I accompany you as your bodyguard?”

“Name your salary.”

“I won’t work on salary. I’ve decided to start my own detective agency,” said Bell, embellishing the lie he had concocted with Joseph Van Dorn.

“I applaud your initiative,” said Rockefeller. “We’ll send you a contract.”

Isaac Bell drew a slim envelope from his coat. “I brought my own.”

“Presumptuous of you.”

“Not at all. I am modeling my business on yours.”

“I am an old man and beyond the influence of flattery. But I do wonder how you would compare a gumshoe to an oil man?”

“E. M. Hock wrote that you achieved your great success in the oil business by being ruthlessly efficient. I heard with my own ears your boast of efficiency to Mr. Van Dorn. In order to be the best ‘gumshoe’ in the private detective business, I had better be efficient.”

Rockefeller replied without a hint of expression, and Bell could not for the life of him tell if the man had a sense of humor. “You’ll know you’re efficient, Detective Bell, when they call you a monster.”

Bell said, “I will make the travel arrangements.”

“I have a man who handles them.”

“Not on this trip. I will decide the safest route.”

Rockefeller nodded agreement. “Of course, none of this is to be repeated. I want no one to know I have business in Baku. We must travel in the utmost secrecy.”

“That will make my job a lot easier,” said Bell. “When do you want to arrive?”

At Grand Central Station, which was being simultaneously demolished and expanded into an electrified Grand Central Terminal, the sidings reserved for private railcars offered connections to city telephone systems.

“I need another rifle,” said the assassin.

“Another 99?” asked the gunsmith.

“Have you anything better?”

“I always make you the best.”

“Then more of the best! 99 it is.”

“With telescope?”

“Only the mounting. But I want different bullets.”

“Is there a problem with my loads?”

Picturing the gunsmith’s fussy hands and the desperate-to-please eyes of a genius who didn’t believe he was a genius, the assassin reassured him, “Your loads are wonderfully consistent. I trust my life with them. But I’ve been thinking, have you ever made a bullet that explodes?”

“A dumdum bullet?”

“No. Not a hollow-point. A bullet that detonates on impact.”

“Like an artillery shell?”

“Precisely. A miniature artillery shell.”

“It’s hard to imagine stuffing an impact fuse and explosive into such a small projectile.”

“But you have a wonderful imagination.”

“I am intrigued,” said the gunsmith. “You are as stimulating as ever.”

17

Back from Pocantico Hills, Isaac Bell wired Joseph Van Dorn in agency cipher:

And with very little time to set the murder and Corporations Commission investigations in productive motion before he was stuck incommunicado on the high seas, he fired off three more telegrams.

To Detective Archie Abbott in Washington:

To Detective Wally Kisley and Detective Mack Fulton still in Kansas:

To Detective Aloysius “Wish” Clarke, who was about to receive the plummiest assignment of his checkered career:

Bell himself went to the Sage Gun Company on West 43rd Street.

He walked in carrying a carpetbag and shook hands with Dave McCoart, a hard-muscled gunsmith with long, thin fingers and a ruddy Irish complexion.

“I was just thinking about you,” McCoart greeted him. “Are you familiar with the FN outfit in Belgium?”

“Fabrique Nationale. Firearms manufacturer in the Liège district.”

“Mr. Browning gave FN a contract to manufacture a 9mm variant of a new design. I am told it’s a beautiful pistol. I’m thinking I can modify it with a chamber bushing to fire an American .380 caliber cartridge. It would be considerably lighter than that brick in your shoulder holster.”

“I like my gun’s stopping power. It’s served me well.”

“What the Number 2 lacks in stopping power — and you are right to be concerned — will be made up with outstanding accuracy.”

“How outstanding?”

“Compared to your Colt? Like a rifle.”

“O.K., make me one. Now, I have a question. Have you ever seen a breakdown model of a Savage 99?”

“No.”

“Could you convert a factory piece to a breakdown?”

“I could.”

“How many gunsmiths could do such a conversion?”

McCoart grinned. “That depends on whether the accuracy of the weapon is high on your list of expectations.”

“At the top.”

“Then I would shop very carefully to get the right man. Look for one who has a top-notch machine shop and several pints of artist in his bloodstream.”

“How many such men do you know?”

“With a top-notch machine shop?”

“Or access to one.”

“… A few, I suppose.”

“How many more would be out there that you don’t know personally?”

“Around the country? Quite a few.”

“How many would be known to gunsmiths who you know?”

“There are cities where the best congregate. They settle near where they learned the craft and can turn to each other to make specialty items. Around the Winchester works in New Haven, Connecticut, or Savage’s factory upstate in Utica. Springfield in Springfield, Massachusetts. Remington in Bridgeport, Colt in Hartford. Do you mind me asking what the rifle is used for?”

“I was about to warn you. It’s being used for murder.”

“Reckoned as much.”

“So ask carefully. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of this guy.”

McCoart asked, “Do you suppose the smith knows what his customer is up to?”

It was a good question, and Bell thought on it before he answered. “The smith could believe his customer is a target shooter.”

Dave McCoart shot a hole in that theory. “He wouldn’t think it long if the guy weren’t actively competing. He would want to know how his gun did.”

Bell opened his carpetbag. “What do you think of this one?”

McCoart weighed the parts in his big hands, examined them in the light, then screwed them together. “Nice. Very, very nice work. The barrel and chamber lock like they’re welded.”

“Recognize it?”

“No. Other than it narrows the field considerably. There aren’t that many smiths of this caliber. Like I said, an artist. Did you shoot it?”

“I hit a fence post at a quarter mile twice and winged it twice.”

“Could have been the wind. Could have been the loads. Could have been knocked around since it was last sighted in. Would you like me to bench-sight it?”

“And load me some cartridges.”

“Where’s the telescope?”

“It wasn’t on it.”

“Why do you suppose he left such a beautiful piece behind?”

“To throw me off the scent.”

“Saving money on the telescope. Good ones don’t come cheap.”

“Or,” said Bell, seeing another way to backtrack the assassin, “maybe the telescope is even rarer than the gun.”

“What are your prospects, Mr. Bell?” Bill Matters asked bluntly when Isaac Bell called at Matters’ Gramercy Park town house.

Bell reckoned he should not be surprised by how young, vigorous, and tough Edna and Nellie’s father was. “Hard as adamantine,” Spike Hopewell had dubbed him. “Choirboys don’t last in the oil business.”

Still, he had expected a smoother company man version of Spike Hopewell. Instead, he found a man fifteen years younger than Spike. He had a hard mouth, and harder eyes, and seemed inordinately protective of his accomplished, independent daughters.

“Father,” said Nellie before Bell could answer, “Mr. Bell just walked in the door,” and Edna, who had descended the stairs with Nellie and was now seated beside her on a green silk-covered settee that highlighted the color of their eyes, said, “This role of vigilant father, Father, does not become you.”

Matters did not smile. Nor would he be derailed. “I want to know what his prospects are if he’s calling on my daughters. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

Edna started to protest.

Bell interrupted.

“Thank you, ladies. I will speak for myself. To answer your question, sir, I enjoyed steady advancement in the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Now I’m striking out on my own. I intend to start my own firm, and I will work hard to make a go of it.”

“How much will you earn?”

“Sufficient for my needs.”

“Sufficient to support a family?”

“Pregnancy,” said Nellie, “has not come under discussion. Yet.”

Matters glowered.

Edna said, “I believe that Mr. Bell is a Boston Bell, Father. The bankers. He does not need to ‘marry well.’”

“American States Bank? Is that true, Bell?”

Bell looked from Edna to Nellie and addressed his answer to their father’s questions to both of them. “I would rather marry happily than ‘well.’”

Bill Matters barked a laugh that did nothing to soften his eyes. “Hear! Hear! Well said! O.K., you won’t be a detective for long. Take over the bank when your old man retires.”

“I will remain a detective,” said Bell. He did not elaborate upon the deep contestation with his father on that issue, nor that his grandfather had interceded with a legacy that made him financially independent. Neither was Matters’ business, beautiful daughters notwithstanding.

“Have it your way. Sit down. Girls, let’s give Mr. Bell something to drink.”

Matters’ butler appeared in the doorway. The man wore a tailcoat and white gloves, and his face was remarkably smooth, but Bell pegged his stance and light-footed gait as that of an ex-prizefighter who had retired before he lost a match.

“What is it, Rivers?”

“Telephone, sir.”

Matters hurried off without a word. Edna rose. “I’ll leave you two to it.”

“Where are you going?” asked Nellie.

“Mr. Bell is calling on you, not me.”

“Don’t be absurd. He’s calling on both of us. Aren’t you?”

Isaac Bell said, “Considering we’ve dined together, traveled together, been set upon by drunks and shot at together, I feel less like a caller than an old friend catching up.”

“Do you want me to stay?” asked Edna.

“Of course,” Bell and Nellie chorused.

Edna was still hesitating when Bill Matters returned to the drawing room, his face set in a grave mask.

“What is it?” asked Edna, resuming her seat.

“Old Comstock died.”

“Another bites the dust,” said Nellie. “That’s two in a week.”

“You won’t mourn him, will you?” asked Edna.

“I won’t speak ill of the dead,” said Bill Matters. “But you know I won’t miss his badgering.” To Isaac Bell he explained, “Averell Comstock treated me like some sort of interloper. He made it hard to do business, and hard to advance in the firm.”

“What did he die of?”

“God knows. Even a simple cold will kill at his age… The upshot is, Mr. Bell, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in weeks to come.”

“How is that, sir?”

“That was Mr. Rockefeller on the telephone. With Comstock gone, the president has asked me to accompany him in his travels. He mentioned you will be his bodyguard.”

“You poor things,” said Nellie. “I would rather die than be stuck all summer in Cleveland. The heat! The humidity! The neighbors!”

“Mr. Rockefeller summers at his estate in Cleveland,” Edna explained to Bell.

Matters gave Bell a significant look. “I suspect we’ll create the impression he’s in Cleveland than range farther afield. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Bell?”

“I cannot say, sir,” Bell replied stiffly. “As his bodyguard, if Mr. Rockefeller confided our destination, it would be indiscreet, not to mention reckless, to repeat to anyone where we are going.”

The First Regiment of Newark was billeted in a sturdy National Guard armory, four stories of slab-sided brick walls, relieved only slightly by rounded turrets, and crowned with a parapet. The sentries guarding the arched Jay Street portal remembered Billy Jones warmly but expressed bafflement when Isaac Bell asked why the champion marksman had deserted right after winning the President’s Medal.

“Happy guys don’t take French leave,” the corporal put it.

“Big fellow?” Bell asked.

“Skinny little guy,” said the private.

“Any guess where he lit out to?”

“No. No one figured him for lighting out. Kept to himself except for one pal, Nate Wildwood.”

“Is Nate around?” asked Bell.

“Nate got killed,” said the private.

“In the Spanish war?”

“Never made it to the war,” the corporal answered. “Poor Nate fell under a train. Before Billy lit out.”

“Really? Tell me something. How short was Billy?”

“I don’t know. Maybe five-three?”

“Little guy,” said the private. “Short.”

“What color was his hair?”

“Brown.”

“What color were his eyes?”

“Green.”

“Not really green,” said the corporal. “Gray-green.”

The private reconsidered. “Yeah, you could say gray-green. They got kind of dead colored, sometimes.”

“Dead?” scoffed the corporal. “What do you mean dead?”

“I mean dead. I was next to him on the firing line more than once. When he started shooting, his eyes looked dead.” The young soldier turned to Bell and explained earnestly, “What I mean is, after I saw that, I never wondered how Billy Jones could be such a great shot. It was like he could stop every thought in his brain when he pulled the trigger.”

The private reflected for a long moment. “It was like nothing else mattered. Like he didn’t care about nothing. Except the target.”

Isaac Bell took the train back to the ferry. Before he got on the boat, he sent another wire to Archie Abbott.

18

When Walter L. Hawley, chief political reporter of the Evening Sun, spotted Isaac Bell striding to his desk, he stopped typing to clasp the detective’s hand hello.

“You’re looking prosperous.”

“You’re looking ink-stained.”

“How’s the big guy?” Hawley and Joseph Van Dorn had met back in the early ’90s when the reporter covered police headquarters and Van Dorn had chased a Chicago arsonist to New York.

“Fired me,” said Bell. “Or I quit, depending on who shot first.”

“Welcome to Newspaper Row. Multitudes who have failed in all attempts at every occupation turn to journalism to find a stopgap between mediocrity and professional begging.”

“Actually, I did come to discuss a job.”

Hawley looked alarmed.

“Easy does it,” said Bell, “not for me. What do you make of the situation in Russia?”

“It resembles the bedlam of unchecked human emotion. My beat is City Hall, so maybe I’m not qualified to predict a gloomy future for the czar. But they’ve had a bad year and it’s only June.

“It could blow the Baku oil business to Kingdom Come.”

Hawley said, “I won’t ask a private detective, assuming you are still one, what that has to do with you. But I will ask, what does that have to do with me? When I need oil, I get it from John D. Rockefeller.”

“E. M. Hock would jump at a freelance assignment to report on the threat to the oil industry in Baku.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wonderful!.. Except, I’ve always thought the rumors were true. She’s a woman, isn’t she?”

“Very much so.”

Hawley shook his head. “I’ll tell you, Isaac, I would jump at a chance to hire such a good writer. So would my publisher. He’d approve in a flash. But we would be strongly hesitant to send a woman among heathens. Russians and Moslems, and I believe they’ve even got some Persians, they’re next door, aren’t they?”

Bell said, “When I met Edna Matters in Kansas, she had just driven up from Indian Territory in a buckboard wagon. Her sister was her traveling companion. I imagine Nellie Matters would go along to Russia.”

“Nellie Matters? The Insufferable Suffragette?”

“I find Nellie Matters anything but insufferable.”

“I don’t mean to disparage the lady,” the newspaperman said hastily. “Certainly lovely to look at, and a fiery orator. She’ll really make her mark with that New Woman’s Flyover.”

“What do you say?” asked Bell. “Will you hire E. M. Hock?”

“But now you’re suggesting sending two women among the heathens. If something happened to them in wherever that godforsaken place is — the Caspian Sea? — Joe Pulitzer and Bill Hearst and Preston Whiteway would yellow-journal us into our graves. They would incite mobs to tear us limb from limb. Newsies who tried to sell the Sun would be hung from lampposts.”

“I’ll arrange for the best private detective in the business to stand watch over them.”

“That could get expensive.”

“I’ll pay for the detective, you pay Miss Matters’ fee.”

“Sounds like you have a wealthy client, Isaac, if you’re not working for Van Dorn anymore.”

“I will pay for the detective,” Bell repeated.

Hawley said, “That’s right. You’re rich. I forgot. O.K. It’s a deal! And thanks, Isaac. If she’ll take the job, she’ll set a new standard for our overpaid hacks.”

They shook on it. Bell said, “But don’t tell her — or anyone — that I have anything to do with this. No one!”

Walter Hawley winked. “Mind me asking which sister you’re sweet on?”

Isaac Bell delivered the grin that a married man expected from a bachelor.

“Let’s just say that with this arrangement, I can keep my eye on both of them.”

Archie Abbott came through with a wire to the Yale Club. His friends in the State Department reported strong rumors that the Shah of Persia was negotiating a monster loan from the Russian czar. Archie speculated that maybe such a loan would explain Rockefeller’s clandestine visit to the Persian embassy.

Maybe.

Bell had packed and was just leaving the club to walk to Grand Central, intending to board the train well ahead of Rockefeller, when the day hall porter said, “There’s a street urchin asking for you.”

“Where?”

“He snuck in through the kitchen.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“He claims he’s a probationary Van Dorn apprentice. I figured if he were, he’d know you don’t work there anymore.”

Bell hurried downstairs to the kitchen. A boy who looked like a cleaned-up, dressed-up street rat was standing quietly in a corner. Scarcely into his teens, his eyes alert, his manner so diffident, he was almost invisible.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Tobin, sir. Eddie Tobin.”

“Who do you apprentice under?”

“Mr. Warren.”

Of course. The Van Dorn street gang expert. If Eddie Tobin was good enough for Harry Warren, he was good enough for Bell.

“How old are you?”

“Not old enough to apprentice. I’m only probationary.”

“I asked how old?” Bell growled.

“Fifteen.”

“How old?”

“Fourteen.”

“When I was fourteen, I ran away to the circus. Did Mr. Warren send you?”

“Mr. Forrer. Mr. Warren said it was O.K.”

“What do you have there?”

The kid had an envelope of newspaper clippings.

Bell had read the top one already:

The second clipping reported that Averell Comstock had left ten thousand dollars to a Mrs. Mary McCloud who had a coffee stand that the oil magnate had frequented on Fulton Street.

The last clipping reported that a Mrs. Mary McCloud had died in a tenement fire in Chatham Square.

Forrer had typed a note.

“Come with me, Tobin.” John D. Rockefeller’s train was leaving in three hours. If Bell didn’t have enough time, the kid could follow up and wait for reinforcements.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bell!”

They raced downtown on the Elevated.

Before descending to the street, Bell scanned the squalid neighborhood from the vantage of the Chatham Square El station. Walt Hawley and the Evening Sun and most of the big New York dailies occupied the clean, modern Newspaper Row section of Park Row less than a half mile downtown. This was the upper section of Park Row, a slum that had been a slum for most of the city’s long history.

He spotted a burned-out tenement and led Tobin down the stairs, three at a bound.

Sawhorses blocked the sidewalk. The buildings that flanked it had burned, too. Rain had fallen since, and the odor of wet charred wood hung heavily in the air. Settlement House workers were helping families who lost their homes load bedclothes and furniture that had survived the fire.

“Maybe this will help,” said Bell. He pressed two twenty-dollar gold pieces, two months’ sweatshop earnings, into the hands of the startled woman in charge.

“God bless you, sir.”

“Did anyone here know Mrs. McCloud?” he asked.

None did, but one said she thought Mrs. McCloud had worked on Fulton Street. Bell and Tobin hurried downtown and across Fulton toward the East River. At the waterfront, carts and temporary stalls had set up business selling refreshments.

“I hope those aren’t Jamaica Bay oysters,” said Tobin.

“Why’s that?”

“Jamaica Bay’s polluted with the typhoid.”

“We’re looking for coffee stands,” said Bell. They found a row of them selling coffee and cake and pastries. One space was empty. Bell paid for coffee and cake for the apprentice. The kid tore into it hungrily but paid close attention as Bell questioned the woman who poured.

“Where is Mrs. McCloud?”

“Gone.”

“When did she leave?”

“She didn’t leave. She died. She was killed in a fire.”

“That is terrible,” said Bell. “Did you know her well?”

“Not as well as Mrs. Campbell. The shop on the other side. Kate!” she called across the empty stand. “Gentleman here is asking about Mrs. McCloud.”

Bell crossed over and ordered a slab of pound cake. “Mrs. Campbell? I’m Jethro Smith. I just heard. I had no idea. I didn’t know her well, but I stop by when I’m downtown. What happened?”

“Poor Mrs. McCloud. Widowed young. All she had was her boy and he died. Now this. Are you a newspaperman?”

“No, ma’am. I’m in the insurance line. Why do you ask?”

“Newspapermen came around. They said that Mary inherited ten thousand dollars. And never knew it! Died without knowing it.”

“Did you say her son died, too?” Bell asked.

“Drowned in the river.”

“When?”

“The same time as the fire — not that anybody was surprised. Anthony ran with the Five Points Gang. I pray she never knew he drowned.”

“Let us hope,” said Bell. “Ten thousand! That is a lot of money. Who left her the ten thousand?”

“An old man. He used to come every day. I teased her. He was sweet on her. Every day like clockwork. First he’d eat his oysters on the pier, then he’d come round the corner and drink Mary’s coffee. I used to say don’t give him so much sugar in his coffee. You’ll kill his appetite. He won’t order cake. I guess I was wrong about that. Ten thousand!”

Bell checked his watch, motioned to Tobin, and passed him the cake. “I have to catch a train. Have a look-see at whichever oyster stand the old man frequented.”

“Yes, Mr. Bell. Is there anything special you want me to look for?”

Bell paused for a moment. It was a smart question from a kid just starting out. No wonder Harry Warren had tapped him. Tobin just might be a natural.

“Start with where that stand gets its oysters. Let’s make sure Mr. Comstock didn’t die of that Jamaica Bay typhus you mentioned. Soon as you sort that out, report to Mr. Forrer. Then tell Mr. Warren I asked would he give you a hand to look into a Five Pointer named Anthony McCloud drowning in the East River.”