The Assassin

41

Nellie Matters’ runaway gas balloon shot skyward, lofting Isaac Bell toward the stratosphere where the air was too thin to breathe. The other colorful Flyover balloons, so enormous an instant ago, suddenly looked tiny, dotting the Sleepy Hollow field like a game of marbles. A white circle in the green grass marked the spot Nellie had dumped the sand.

Bell thought he saw her running to another partially inflated balloon. But with no ballast left to counteract the urgent lift of the lighter-than-air gas, he was too high up in another second to distinguish individual figures, so high he could see Rockefeller’s estate spread to the Hudson River. He heard a locomotive and realized that the only noises were from the ground; after the initial roar of extra gas, the balloon was ascending silently. A New York — bound passenger train, the crack Lakeshore Limited, was heading for the North Tarrytown railroad station towing two black cars. They would be chartered by Rockefeller, who was returning from Cleveland with his entire family, and Isaac Bell had the momentary satisfaction of knowing that whether or not he got out of this fix, he had at least stopped Nellie Matters from shooting the old man this morning.

The only way to stop his wild ascent was to release gas.

Bell traced the control lever wires. The ballast wire that went down through the bottom of the basket was useless, as Nellie had already dumped every grain of sand. Of the two that went up into the mouth of the giant gasbag, one connected to a “rip panel” at the top of the balloon. Nellie had explained more than once, while spinning her balloon tales, that pulling that lever would tear the fabric envelope wide open and release all the gas at once. It was an emergency device for instantly emptying the balloon when it was on the ground to keep high winds from dragging it into the trees or telegraph wires. To pull the rip panel lever at this height would be to fall like an anvil.

The wire broken by the bullet that had missed Nellie turned out to be the gas control. It had snapped inches above the lever. Looking up eighty feet, Bell could see the business end was still attached to the release flap in the dome at the top of the balloon. Parting while under tension, it had sprung up into the mouth. He could see it swinging inside the empty gasbag, tantalizingly near but infinitely far out of reach. There was no framework to climb inside the balloon — the gas pressing against the fabric envelope gave it shape — but even if it had a frame that he could improvise for a ladder, the gas would asphyxiate him before he climbed ten feet.

He jumped onto the rim of the rattan basket and shinnied up a bask rope to the steel load ring. Hanging by one hand, he caught ahold of the ropes that were woven into the enormous net that encased the bulging envelope like a giant spiderweb. Then he reached down for the knife snugged in his boot. He touched the blade to the straining fabric to slash an opening to vent gas.

He felt a breath of cool air for the first time in a week. The balloon had carried him above the heat wave into a cold current in the upper atmosphere, and he saw he hadn’t a moment to lose. The patchwork of farm fields far below appeared to be moving. The blue line of the Hudson River was receding behind him. Wind that Nellie had predicted was carrying him east over Connecticut.

But just as he braced to press down on the blade, it struck him forcibly that there were vital aeronautical reasons why both the regular gas release and the emergency rip panel were situated at the top of the balloon. He drove his hand between that rope and the fabric to overcome the pressure inside it and pulled himself higher up by the netting ropes until he could brace his feet on the load ring.

Like a celestial giant climbing from the earth’s South Pole to the North Pole, he worked his way up and out, hanging almost horizontally from the web, as the bulge of the globe-shaped balloon spread from the narrow mouth at the bottom toward the Equator.

He climbed some forty feet as it swelled wider and wider. Then he climbed gradually into a vertical stance as he crossed the Equator at the widest part of the balloon.

When he glanced down, he saw the silvery waters of the Long Island Sound riddled with white sails and streaked by steamer smoke. He glimpsed the sand bluffs of the North Shore of Long Island and realized that the balloon had risen up into a more powerful air current. In its grip, he was traveling rapidly. And the balloon was still climbing. The farms appeared smaller and smaller, and the clusters of towns gave the illusion of growing closer to one another as it gained altitude.

Past the equatorial bulge, he was able to move faster, scrambling to get to the top, tiring from the effort, but driven by an arresting sight: the balloon was now so high that he could see the green back of the twenty-mile-wide Long Island and, beyond it, the deep blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean. If he didn’t suffocate in the stratosphere, the ocean would be waiting below.

He reached the dome, the top of the gas envelope, drew his throwing knife from his boot, and plunged it into the fabric. In the strange silence, the hiss of gas escaping under enormous pressure was deafening. It blasted from the small slit he had cut. But he felt no effect, no indication that the balloon had ceased to climb, much less begun to sink. He dragged the sharp blade through more fabric, skipping over the netting, lengthening the slit, hunting the ideal size to reduce the lift of gas so the balloon would descend quickly but still float.

He felt light-headed. His foot slipped from the rope web. His hands were losing their grip. The knife started to slide from his fingers. The gas! He suddenly realized the gas was jetting past his face and he was inhaling it, breathing it into his lungs, slipping under the edge of consciousness. He ducked his face below the slit and held on with all his fading strength. It was getting worse. His head was spinning. He gathered his will and dropped down a row of rope netting and sucked in fresh air. When he could see straight again, he reached overhead with the knife and slashed more holes in the fabric.

There were thousands of cubic feet of lighter-than-air gas lifting the balloon. How much did he have to let out to make it sink? He recalled Nellie describing a fine line to calculate the balance between the weight to be lifted and the volume of gas. He heard a ripping sound and looked up. The fabric between the two slits he had cut was tearing, joining the slits, and suddenly the gas was rushing from the united fissure.

Bell’s stomach lurched. He thought for a moment that the gas was making him sick. Then he realized the balloon had lost all buoyancy and was plummeting back to earth.

With no way to control the release, Isaac Bell’s only hope was to climb down to the basket and throw everything over the side to reduce the weight dragging the balloon back to earth before it collapsed. Retracing his ascent, hand under hand, boot under boot, he slipped from cross rope to cross rope, down toward the middle bulge as fast as he could.

Was the bag less taut? No doubt about that. The fabric had ceased to press so hard against the net. He looked down. He saw the farms. He saw the silver Sound and Long Island shore. But the balloon had fallen so far that he was no longer high enough to see the ocean.

He lowered himself around the Equator and started the long horizontal climb down under the overhead curve of the globe-shaped envelope, hanging from the net, swinging hand over head, working his way into the vertical wall of the lowest part of the balloon, until he finally reached the load ring and slid down the bask ropes into the basket.

A farm spread under him, green fields speckled with black cows, a big sprawling house sheltered by shade trees, red barns, a pond, and round silos poking up at the sky like pencils standing on end. At the edge of the fields stood the darker green of trees, the wood lot. The Sound was no longer in sight.

Bell ripped the hoses from the steel hydrogen tanks and wrestled the heavy cylinders over the side, one after another, until they were gone. There wasn’t much else to throw, but he was still falling. He hurled the dragline out of the basket.

For a moment, he entertained the fantasy of landing in the woods, where springy treetops might slow him down. But the balloon was aiming at the farmhouse. The shade trees might slow him down, but it was soon apparent he was not on course for the shade trees either. Quite suddenly he was directly over a barn. In another instant, he was close enough to distinguish roof shingles. The weather vane on the peak was shaped like a rooster. The dragline touched. Did it slow him slightly? He grabbed the basket ropes and braced for the crash.

The basket hit the roof, splintering shingles, and blasted through them into the hayloft. Bales of hay had no effect on the impact. The loft floor collapsed. The basket hung up in the rafters and stopped, abruptly. In the still air, the near-empty gasbag settled down over the barn.

Isaac Bell dropped from the bottom of the basket to the floor.

He was reeling to his feet when a red-faced farmer burst into the barn.

Bell took out his wallet. “I will pay for your roof. May I use your telephone?”

“I don’t want women voting!” the farmer yelled.

“What?”

“My whole damned barn says Votes for Women.”

“Do you have a telephone?”

“No.”

“Rent me a horse that can make it to the nearest railroad station.”

Bell wired the New York field office

He caught a local train to New Haven and called the office on a Southern New England Company long-distance public telephone while he waited for an express. Nellie Matters, Grady Forrer reported, had escaped in another balloon.

“She can’t hide in a balloon.”

“Night is falling,” said Grady. “She can hide all night.”

“Guard Rockefeller,” Bell repeated.

“Rockefeller is safe. We’ve got an army around him.”

“I’ll be there soon as I can.”

Long before the express pulled into Grand Central, Isaac Bell had a very clear idea of what Nellie Matters believed John D. Rockefeller valued more than life. When he got to Manhattan, he rounded up every Van Dorn detective in the city and chartered steam launches to ferry them across the harbor to Constable Hook.

42

Hey, you!”

Nellie Matters closed her hand around the derringer in her pocket. She had almost made it home free to The Hook saloon.

“You! Stop right there!”

I belong here, she reminded herself. In the persona of her disguise, she had every right to be hurrying along this street that paralleled the chain-link refinery fence. But the man who shouted at her was sweating in the heavy blue, brass-buttoned uniform of a Constable Hook cop. She pitched her alto voice down to a range between a raspy tenor and a thin baritone.

“What’s up?”

The cop cast a sharp eye on her workman’s duds. Her wig, the finest money could buy, was a thick mop of curly brown hair barely contained by a flat cap. A narrow horsehide tool bag hung from her shoulder strap. A pair of nickel-plated side-cutting pliers protruding from an end pocket was supposed to be the finishing varnish coat on a portrait of a journeyman electrician. No one in the refinery city had challenged it until now.

“How old are you?”

I belong here! “How old am I?” she shot back. “Twenty-four next month. How old are you?”

The cop looked confused. She let go of the gun in her pocket and drew his attention to her tool bag by shifting it from her left shoulder to her right.

“Jeez. From behind, youse looked like a kid cutting school.”

“That’s a good one,” Nellie laughed. “I ain’t played hooky since they kicked me out of eighth grade.”

The cop laughed, too. “Sorry, bud. They stuck me on truant patrol.”

“Tell you what, pal. If your sergeant set a quota, I’m short enough to go in with you. But I can’t stay long. Gotta go to work.”

The cop laughed again. “You’re O.K.”

“I surely am,” she said to herself as the cop wandered off and she hurried to The Hook saloon. “I am O.K. as O.K. can be… And how are you, Isaac?”

Isaac Bell sealed off the Constable Hook oil refinery with armed Protective Services operators commanded by Van Dorn detectives. He put white-haired Kansas City Eddie Edwards in charge because Edwards specialized in locking out the slum gang train robbers who plagued many a city’s railroad yards. The company cops, whom the Van Dorns regarded as strikebreaking thugs in dirty uniforms, resented the invasion and resisted mightily until word from the Eleventh Floor of 26 Broadway reverberated across the harbor like a naval broadside.

“Mr. Rockefeller expects every refinery police officer to do his duty by assisting the Van Dorn Detective Agency to protect Standard Oil property.”

Even before Rockefeller knocked the refinery cops in line, Eddie Edwards was glad-handing the chiefs of the Constable Hook Police Department, the refinery’s private fire department, and the city’s volunteer fire department. These savvy, by-the-book moves bore immediate fruit. Cops were assigned to guard every high point in the city where a sniper might set up shop. Standard Oil transferred battalions of extra firemen from other refineries. The ranks of the Constable Hook volunteers were swelled by volunteers from every town in New Jersey. Standard Oil tugboats from its Brooklyn and Long Island City yards arrived equipped with fire nozzles and were soon joined by Pennsylvania Railroad and New Jersey Central Railroad tugs and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s fleet from St. George. Then a beat cop assigned to the high school truant squad reported encountering a short, slight, youthful electrician who fit one of the Van Dorn Agency descriptions of how the assassin might look disguised as a man.

“In the city,” Eddie Edwards told Isaac Bell. “So short and skinny, the cop thought he was a kid. Near the fence. Not inside.”

“Yet,” said Bell.

Bell questioned the cop personally and came away fairly certain he had seen Nellie. Her breakdown 99 would fit easily in the electrician’s horsehide tool bag the cop described. He wondered for the twentieth time whether she had gotten her hands on any of Beitel’s exploding bullets. A few well-placed shots would set six hundred acres ablaze. Her presence confirmed exactly what she had told him. She was out to avenge her father by destroying what Rockefeller loved most. More than life, more than money, the magnate loved what he had built, and the Constable Hook refinery was the biggest thing he had ever built.

“Isaac!” It was Wally Kisley, out of breath. “Found a duck.”

The cops exchanged baffled looks.

Bell and Wally headed into the refinery on the run. The Van Dorns blanketing the place under explosives expert Wally’s guidance had discovered the shooting gallery target on a twenty-thousand-gallon naphtha tank.

“She’s here,” said Isaac Bell. “This nails it.”

“With her sense of humor intact,” said Wally.

The duck was high up on the huge tank, near the top. This one was painted red and stuck to the metal wall with a magnet. Electrical wire attached to its rail bracket ran down the tank. Nellie had concealed the wire artfully by snugging it against the heavy copper cable that grounded the tank’s lightning rod.

“Can you disarm it without blowing us up?”

“I’ll answer that after I find what she hooked to the other end of this wire.”

The two detectives traced it down the side of the tank to its concrete footing. Wally said, “Nice job hiding the wire. Doubt our guys would have noticed if the duck weren’t bright red.”

“She’s showing off.”

The wire snaked halfway around the bottom of the tank, hugging its edges, and still paralleling the lightning rod ground wire until it veered across the oil-soaked ground and disappeared down a storm drain. Bell snapped his fingers. A husky Van Dorn Protective Services operative lumbered over with a toolbox.

“Lift the grate. Don’t disturb the wire.”

The P.S. man inserted a crowbar in a drain slot and pried the cast-iron grate out of its seat. It was very heavy. Bell gave him a hand tipping it out of the way while Wally held the wire.

Bell wrinkled his nose. “What’s that smell?” he asked.

“Oil fumes.” The blistering-hot weather caused oil, kerosene, and naphtha to vaporize. The air reeked of flammable gases.

“No, it’s worse.”

“You’re right. Like something’s rotting.”

Bell said, “I wonder how a hundred-pound woman picked up this grate. Wally, give that wire a tug.”

“I don’t know what it’s attached to yet.”

“I do. And it won’t explode.”

“Then you tug it.” He stepped away and made a show of covering his ears.

Bell hauled on the wire. It pulled easily from the storm drain. “There’s what stinks.”

The wire was wrapped around a raw chicken leg that was putrefying in the heat. Pinned to the meat was a sheet of paper. Nellie had written, “Hello, Wally. Give my regards to Isaac.”

“The lunatic is taunting you, Isaac.”

Bell looked up at the sky and pondered Wally’s remark. Dark, anvil-topped thunderheads were marching out of the west, as they had every afternoon of the heat wave. “Nellie is a lunatic,” he agreed, “but she is one smart lunatic. If she’s taunting me, she has a plan. I just don’t know what it is yet.” Eyes still on the sky, Bell recalled Edna asking what he meant by a “madman,” never realizing the assassin was a “madwoman.” His answer to her was his answer to Wally now.

“Unpredictable.”

How to catch her? Be unpredictable, too? But there was the rub. What did Nellie Matters expect?

The infernal heat was finally her friend.

Nellie Matters was stymied by the combined presence of the Van Dorns, the Standard Oil cops, and the city police. Isaac — of course he rallied them, who else? — had robbed her of the high ground, every tower, every cupola, every hilltop she could use for a shooting blind. Her first choice, the remote fire department watchtower on top of the highest hill on Constable Hook, had cops guarding the ladder. So much for climbing with a pretty smile and a bullet for the lone fireman on duty.

Her alternate choice, the widow’s walk on The Hook saloon, offered short-range shots at storage tanks above the city and the oil docks below. Close shots were doubly tempting with the heat cooking crazy, flight-bending thermals. But the widow’s walk would be suicide. With a score of cops and detectives congregating at the nearby refinery gates, she could not escape.

The heat was her friend. Hot weather caused oil to vaporize. It charged the air with volatile gases. So what if Isaac Bell had stolen her high ground? Nellie Matters would play fast and loose. Get ready for the unexpected, Isaac. A surprise is lurking under you. Flamboyant, theatrical, showy Nellie Matters will take the low ground.

The heat boiled thunderstorms. Thunderstorms hurled lightning.

Lightning ignited the volatile gases that collected in the tops of oil tanks. Every tank at Constable Hook bristled with lightning rods because Rockefeller’s ultramodern enterprise obeyed the laws of physics that stated that lightning blew unprotected oil tanks to Kingdom Come. Those who challenged the law were directed next door to Bayonne, where lightning strikes a few years back had ignited fires that burned for three days and left the operation a shadow of its former self.

Nellie walked down wooden stairs deep into The Hook saloon’s cellar. The walls were rough-hewn stone. Round tree trunks formed the beams that had supported the upper floors for two hundred years. The original brick sewer, disused now except to carry rainwater from the building’s gutters, led under Constable Street into the storm drains that riddled the refinery hillside.

She was not prone to reflection, much less self-examination, but she knew that something different resided in her makeup that refused to be afraid. Which wasn’t to say there weren’t things she disliked, primary among them any threat of being restrained. To crawl into a three-foot-diameter drainpipe was to be restrained in the extreme. But she had no choice.

She climbed into it with her nickel-plated side-cutting pliers and the end of the cable she had had delivered on a spool. It unrolled freely as she dragged it through the sewer. She knew she was inside the refinery fence when the brick-walled sewer connected with the modern concrete drainpipe.

Dull light poured down from a drain. She had to pass another. The third was her goal, beside the twenty-thousand-gallon naphtha tank where she had left Isaac a target duck and a rotten chicken leg. The cable grew heavy as it got longer and dragged on the concrete. As she crawled under the second drain she heard thunder. There were two things she did not want to imagine: a sudden rainstorm that would drown her or a bolt of lightning striking the cable. She reminded herself that being electrocuted by lightning was much less likely than being drowned by rain because she had wisely waited to attach the cable to a lightning rod — four lightning rods, in fact — until the end was aimed at the tank and she was out of the drainpipe. The third grate appeared. Almost there. She heard another peal of thunder, closer this time. She crawled directly under the grate. Raindrops wet her face. She lifted the end of the cable to the grate and used the pliers to fasten it to the cast iron with a twist of wire.

Then she turned around in the cramped space and started crawling back to the saloon as fast as she could. The last thing she wanted was to be wiring the other end of the copper cable to The Hook saloon’s ground wire when a thunderbolt struck the harpoon lightning rods on the roof of the widow’s walk.

Isaac Bell was making the rounds of his men guarding the oil docks — the huge piers on the Kill Van Kull where the refinery was loading tank ships with kerosene, gasoline, and naphtha — when a puff of icy air announced another squall sizzling in from the Upper Bay. In the middle of the tight little storm he saw one of his chartered steam launches heading for the dock. Its bow was weighted down by Grady Forrer, who stood gripping a coiled line and ignoring the rain.

Bell stepped forward, Forrer threw the line skillfully, and in a moment they were conversing in the partial shelter of a loading shed. “One of my boys was rereading the assassin reports,” Forrer bellowed over the wind, the falling rain, and the huffing of several steam engines. “He reminded me that we learned that Bill Matters was moving up the ladder when he was invited to join a Standard Oil Gang private venture.”

Thunder echoed down the tank-covered hills. A bolt of lightning lit the rooftops of the city. Another bolt blazed over the tanks above the city and landed harmlessly on a lightning rod.

“It made him one of the boys to partner up with Averell Comstock and Clyde Lapham, even though it was a sort of joke subsidiary.”

“What kind of joke?”

“Shares in a Constable Hook saloon.”

“Here?”

“Across from the front gate. They named it The Hook.”

Bell bolted into the storm.

Forrer raced alongside him, slipping and sliding on the oily path. “Comstock and Lapham are dead. Matters is in jail.”

“Leaving Nellie to ‘inherit.’”

Nellie Matters was finishing connecting the copper cable she had strung from the naphtha tank to the heavy wire that grounded the saloon’s lightning rod. The thunderstorm raging outside was the biggest in days. The sooner she could let go of the highly conductive cable, the better.

“Hey, what are you doing?”

One of the bartenders had come down the stairs they’d been specifically ordered not to.

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

“What are you, an electrician?”

Her bag was open. The Savage and its telescope were in the bottom, still wrapped in their horse blanket. But tools were out. She said, “You’re not supposed to be down here.”

He finally recognized her as “Eddie,” the nephew of the new owner.

“Sorry, Eddie. Where’s your uncle? Haven’t seen him around.”

“Went to Atlantic City to get away from this heat.”

“What are you doing?”

“My uncle wants this wired here.”

“What for?”

“Why don’t you ask him when he gets back?”

“Something fishy’s going on.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I had a job as an electrician’s helper. That’s a ground wire you’re messing with.”

He grabbed her arm. “Man, you’re skinny.”

Isaac Bell left Grady Forrer far behind as he ran full tilt up the refinery hill, through the front gates, and across Constable Street. He had noticed The Hook saloon. It looked like an old sea captain’s house with a widow’s walk on the roof. He shoved through the swinging doors.

The barroom was empty except for a floor manager, who shouted from behind the bar, “We’re closed!”

“Where are the cops watching the widow’s walk?”

“Home,” said the floor manager. “We don’t pay off cops to hang around— Hey, where you going?”

Bell paused at the foot of the stairs only long enough to turn the full force of his eyes on the man. “Stay there, you won’t get hurt.”

He bounded up three full stories, then into a sweltering attic, and up steep stairs onto the widow’s walk fully expecting to find the assassin aiming her rifle. But the room was empty. Nellie was not in it. Thunder pealed. He stalked to the windows and glared out at the refinery. He knew with every fiber in his being that he was close. But she was not here.

A derringer slug in the shoulder had knocked the fight and the curiosity out of the nosy bartender. Nellie pointed the gun in his face, fished steel handcuffs from the bottom of her tool bag, and tossed them to him. “Put one on your wrist.”

Stunned and disbelieving, he did as he was told.

“The other on the cable. Above, there, where it’s nailed to the wall.”

“Hey, wait. It’s lightning outside! It’ll electrocute me.”

“Better odds than this bullet,” she said. “Who knows if lightning will strike?”

“It hit yesterday. Twice last week.”

Nellie laughed. “Didn’t anybody ever tell you? Lightning can’t strike twice.”

“It’s the highest building on the street, higher than the tanks. It gets hit all the time. Why do you think they have four separate rods?”

“Bullet?”

He gave a terrified groan and clicked the manacle around the cable.

Isaac Bell racked his brain, trying to figure out what Nellie was up to now. Having the house right next to the refinery was a powerful opportunity. How would she use it if not to shoot from this brilliantly situated observatory?

Leaning a hand on the window frame as he gazed upon the storm, he felt a thick, rounded ridge on the sash. It looked and felt like it had been painted over and over for decades. But it was not made of wood like the rest of the room. Rope? No, cable. Metal cable. Still trying to winkle out Nellie’s deranged thoughts, he picked at it idly with his boot knife and saw a gleam of brass or copper. He traced it up to the ceiling, out the wall, under the gutter, and onto the roof. He flung open the window, thrust head and torso into the rain, and swung gracefully onto the sill. There he stood to his full height with his back to the four-story drop and traced the cable onto the flat roof, where it split into four separate strands. The strands went to the four corners. On each corner was a full-size bronze replica of a whaler’s harpoon.

“Nellie,” he whispered, “I underestimated you.”

Thunder pealed. Bell looked down and, as if he had conjured her with his voice, saw a slight figure hurry across Constable Street. It was her, carrying a tool bag long enough for her gun. Lightning flashed. Nellie stopped and looked up at the widow’s walk. Their eyes met.

Bell shouted with all the power in his lungs to the Van Dorns at the gate, “Get her!” A thunderclap drowned out his voice. Nellie blew him a kiss, and a bolt of lightning wider than a man plunged from the heart of the sky.

43

Ten million volts of electricity stormed down the ground wire, electrocuted the bartender manacled to it, and raged out the sewer and under Constable Street. Fumes from spilled oil were trapped in the refinery storm drains. These the lightning ignited. Fireballs shot from the drain grates. At the far end of the cable Nellie Matters had strung, the electricity jumped through the air and drilled a hole in the steel wall of a naphtha tank.

Isaac Bell heard the Standard Oil fire whistles chorus ghostly screams.

He staggered to his feet, vaguely aware that a thunderbolt had slammed him back through the windows. He had landed on the widow’s walk floor. He knew he hadn’t taken a direct hit; neither his skin nor his clothing was burned. But his heart was pounding, as if the immense surge of electricity passing so near had almost stopped it. His lungs felt half-paralyzed, hardly able to pump air, until he collected his spirit and demanded they get back on the job.

His vision cleared. He saw columns of flame fringed with black smoke.

In the refinery yard, fireballs danced jigs among the tanks.

Bell scanned the chaos below for signs of Nellie and quickly realized that what looked like chaos was orderly chaos. Thanks to the Van Dorn advance warning, the men running up and down Constable Street and dashing in and out of the refinery gates were moving with purpose. The company’s firemen hurried through the yards, ringing bells and dragging hose. Blazing oil overflowed from a burning tank. Workmen moved swiftly to pump oil from tanks near the fire to distant empty tanks and into barges on the waterfront. Others dug trenches to divert burning oil from vulnerable tanks.

Nellie was gone. But Bell was convinced that she would not run from the fires she had set. She would stay and finish what she had started. She would not find it easy. Prepared for the battle, the Constable Hook refinery she was trying to destroy was the best defended in the world. It was fighting for its life but not yet desperate.

If Bell knew Nellie, that would not discourage her. The question was how would one woman alone continue to attack? He stayed on his widow’s walk vantage point to find the answer.

A tank roof blew. Thick crude oil bubbled out. The side walls collapsed and a river of crude rushed down the hill. The black torrent split where the slope flattened. Some of it collected, forming a half-acre black lake. Shimmering in the heat, it roared spontaneously into flames. Globs of flaming tar flew in the air and landed on tank roofs. Firemen climbed the tanks with shovels and hoses. They extinguished the fires on all but one. It ignited with a roar and gushed smoke that the flames sucked in and flung at the sky.

The crude that continued to rush down the hill was flowing toward the waterfront. The river split again suddenly and the main branch rampaged onto the docks, caught fire, and ignited stacks of case oil. Mooring lines and tug hawsers were set alight, and as the flames consumed them, they parted, sending ships and workboats adrift on a tide of burning oil. The ships caught fire and burned swiftly. Flames leaped up rigging faster than sailors could climb. Tugboats raced to the rescue and batted flames down with torrents from their fire nozzles.

The second stream of oil veered below the docks and splashed against a three-story hotel and restaurant on a pier in the Kill with a roof board that read:

The oil ignited. Flame flashed up the restaurant’s wooden walls. A man and woman in cook whites ran out lugging a cash register and a glass case of cigars. The burning oil encircled the building and closed in on the couple from both sides. They ran toward the water on a path swiftly narrowing. The fire chased them onto the dock to the water’s edge, where they teetered, clutching their rescued treasures.

If I hadn’t missed my shot at Nellie Matters, Bell thought, these people would be safe.

A B&O railroad tugboat swooped against the dock. Deckhands pulled them aboard. But the burning oil chasing them splashed off the dock onto the water. Floating, still burning, it surrounded the tugboat with a ring of fire. Six tugs steamed to its aid, fire nozzles pumping water to confine the burning oil while their stricken sister steamed away and wetting down one another’s wheelhouses to cool paint bubbling in the heat. The tugs formed a cordon, spraying to prevent the fire from spreading on the water to nearby ships and piers.

After Isaac Bell saw the burning oil encircle the restaurant, and then the couple, and then the tug, he suddenly realized how Nellie Matters would attack next. He turned around and looked up the hill. The slope was a shallow incline and The Hook saloon was tall. He climbed out the window again and onto the roof of the widow’s walk. From that vantage he could see over the city’s tenement roofs. The swiftly expanding oil refinery had continued building higher up the hill. Tank yards and kerosene and gasoline stills were everywhere, below, around, and up behind the city.

Now he saw Constable Hook as Nellie saw it. He had dubbed her “heiress” to The Hook saloon, but, in fact, she was also heiress to her father’s dream of building on a hilly cape an ultramodern gravity-fed refinery with access to the sea. The refinery that her father had envisioned and the boomtown that sprang up with it were one in her mind. If Bill Matters couldn’t have the refinery, having lost it to Rockefeller, he would destroy it. Since he was locked in a jail cell, Nellie Matters would destroy it for him. By their way of thinking, the city it had nurtured and ultimately surrounded did not exist.

He swung back in the window and raced down the stairs and across the street to the gates. Wally Kisley was there. “Did you see Nellie?” Bell asked.

“No. I was just looking for you. You O.K.?”

“We forced her hand,” Bell said. “This wasn’t her first choice, setting it off down here.”

“It’s gonna be a record breaker anyway. Good thing the company doubled up on firemen.”

“If we hadn’t blocked the high ground, she’d have attacked from up there. You can’t see from here, but I saw it from the roof. A mammoth crude oil tank above the city.”

Wally nodded. “Number 14. The first of the new crude storage tanks to feed the stills below. One hundred thousand gallons.”

“That’s her goal — a Johnstown Flood of burning oil.”

Wally Kisley was incredulous. “Why attack the city?”

“There is a deranged logic to her scheme,” said Bell. “While everyone’s trying to protect the city, she can concentrate on the refinery.”

He borrowed a police sergeant and a squad of local cops from Eddie Edwards’ headquarters at the refinery gates. The cops led him and Wally on a shortcut past twisted ruins of burned-out tanks and through tank yards and stills. Firemen were deluging them with hose water to cool them. They entered the city streets, passing a school from which the children had been sent home and a hospital into which injured firefighters were stumbling.

Bell spotted Edna Matters, somber in black. She had an Evening Sun press card in her hatband and was taking down in shorthand the words of the rail-thin, harried-looking chief of Constable Hook’s volunteer firefighters. “Gossip that we refused to fight Standard Oil’s fire is bunk. We are protecting twenty thousand people in our city — families, friends, and neighbors.”

“Can you speak to the rumor that water is running so low that you won’t have enough pressure to fill your hoses?”

“Bunk! We get our water direct from the Hackensack River and the Hackensack is wet yet.”

Three fire horses galloped past pulling a steamer pump engine and the chief jumped on the back. Edna closed her notebook. “Hello, Isaac. Thank you for letting me see my father the other day.”

“Have you seen Nellie?”

“Of course not. If I had, I would have turned her in. What could make her do…” Her voice trailed off. “Whatever made Father do it, I suppose.”

Bell said, “Be careful here, Edna. Don’t let the fire get above you.”

The city streets ended abruptly at a shiny new chain-link fence. It had a gate manned by two cops. On the slope above the gate loomed Tank 14, which was painted white to reflect the heat of the sun.

“How could she miss?” said Wally. “Big as the battleship Maine and twice as explosive.”

Freshly poured concrete footings were laid on both sides of the tank. Sheets of steel were stacked next to them, awaiting assembly.

“I need twenty strong men,” Bell told the sergeant.

“There ain’t a man in The Hook not fighting the fire.”

“O.K. Take four armed men, empty the jail, bring the prisoners here.”

“I don’t think I’m allowed—”

Bell cut him. “A champion sniper with a gun that fires exploding bullets is going to blast a hole in that tank by hitting it repeatedly in the same spot until one of them ignites a crude oil fire that will drown your city in flames. I need your prisoners to erect a barricade. Now!”

The sergeant took off at a dead run. Bell removed his coat and said to the others, “Let’s get to work.”

Wally asked him quietly, “You’re just guessing about those bullets, aren’t you? Who knows if the smith actually made them.”

“I know,” said Bell. “I found one in his shop. It looked like he had set up to run a batch of them. My only guess is that Nellie got the first batch. Knowing her, she probably did.”

“You found one? Where is it?”

“In my rifle.”

When night fell, the fires lighted Constable Hook bright as day, from Tank 14 on its highest hill to the Kill Van Kull waterfront, where flames were eating through the piers, consuming the sheds, and burning the pilings down to the waterline. An entire warehouse of case oil was fueling a pillar of flames visible from every point of New York Harbor, and a burning barge of oil barrels glared at Staten Island like vaudeville limelights.

Isaac Bell had still not seen a trace of Nellie Matters. But Tank 14 was shielded on all four sides by a hastily erected barrier of sheet steel. “Now she can’t pierce the tank by hitting it repeatedly in the same spot,” Bell told Joseph Van Dorn. “And since it’s on the top of the hill, there is no vantage point on the Hook — no hill, no building, no tree — high enough to shoot through the roof.”

“She’ll shoot other tanks,” said Van Dorn.

“She’ll start fires. We’ll put them out. Eventually, she’ll run out of ammunition and strength.”

44

Amanda Faire was bitterly disappointed.

The redheaded keynote speaker for the Staten Island Suffragette Convocation at the Cunard estate on Grymes Hill had expected her usual packed house rapturously chanting her catchy watchword “Women’s votes are only Faire.” But despite her appearance being advertised in all the New York newspapers, and her arrival heralded by a magnificent scarlet balloon tethered on the lawn, half the chairs in the lecture tent were empty.

“I’m afraid we lost some of our gentlemen to the firebug tourists,” apologized her mortified hostess. She gestured helplessly at the smoke-stained western sky. “New York, Jersey City, Newark, and the Oranges are all flocking to see the conflagration.”

“Well,” Amanda said, bravely, “those who took the trouble to come deserve to hear me.”

“I’ll introduce you.”

“I’ll make my own introduction, thank you.” That was all she needed, a windbag driving the rest of the audience to the fire.

Amanda, who had positioned her podium so that her balloon created a striking backdrop directly behind her, stood to thin applause. As she opened her mouth to begin her speech, she could not help but notice a restive stir in the seats. Now what?

They were staring at her. Past her. Mouths were dropping open.

A woman cried, “There goes your balloon.”

Nellie Matters never doubted the wind would be in her favor. Things always worked out that way. Just when she needed it, it had shifted south, blowing the red balloon north the short two miles from the Grymes Hill estate to Tank 14. From a thousand feet in the air, she could see what had burned in Constable Hook and what remained to burn. She was dismayed. The fires were going out. There was so much left untouched.

On the bright side, the Savage’s magazine indicator read “5.” Five of Beitel’s exploding bullets. Her exploding bullets. She had thought them up. She was their creator. The gunsmith had only made them.

Tank 14 would finish the job.

She spotted it easily, a huge white circle on the top of the highest hill on Constable Hook at the point where the cape met the mainland, smack in the middle of Isaac Bell’s shield. Clever Isaac. But the thin roof of the tank was hers. She aimed dead center, adjusted for the balloon’s swaying, and fired. Through the telescope she saw the bullet explode in a red flash. It didn’t pierce the roof, but it must have weakened it. One or two more shots striking that precise spot should do the trick, and the little red flash would detonate the flammable gas in the top of the tank, which would ignite the ocean of oil below.

She fired again.

Bull’s-eye! It hit the scar from her first shot. The powerful telescope showed a crack emanating from the scar. The next would do it. Isaac, where are you?

She looked about.

There you are!

He was leaning on the shield and pointing a rifle at her. Poor Isaac. I can’t shoot you. But you can’t shoot me either. What a pair we make. You better get away from the tank because it is about to explode.

As if he had heard her thoughts, he suddenly ran, crouched low, clutching his rifle. No, he hadn’t heard her. The balloon was moving and he had to shift his field of fire.

“What’s the use?” she whispered as she lined up her final shot. “We could never shoot each other.”

Isaac Bell had one exploding bullet. He doubted that the impact of striking the balloon’s thin fabric skin would detonate the gas. Nor would passing through the gas and the fabric as it flew out. If the shell could be set off that lightly, what would have kept it from exploding in his fingers when he loaded the rifle?

The only solid object on the balloon was the steel load ring at its mouth.

He found it in the telescope. It was almost too easy. The telescope was so powerful and the rifle was so finely balanced and the balloon so steady in the light breeze. He could not miss even if he wanted to.

He saw a red flash where the bullet exploded. In the next instant, thousands of cubic feet of gas billowed into flames above Nellie’s head. The balloon’s skin melted, but it did not fall, as if the heat of the burning gas somehow pinned it to the sky.

Nellie looked up. Bell saw her whole body stiffen with terror.

The burning gas snaked tentacles of flame down into the basket.

He would not let her die that way.

He found her beautiful face in the telescope. He exhaled lightly to steady his hand.

He caressed the trigger.

45

Archie Abbott barely made the train, running like crazy to answer a last-minute invitation from Isaac Bell:

“I’ll buy you breakfast on the Empire.”

When he entered the diner, Bell was already seated next to an exquisitely dressed gent about their age. Bell jumped up and intercepted him before he reached the table. “Thanks for coming.”

“Of course I came. I’ve been worried. It’s been a while. Since… well, you know what since. How are you, Isaac?”

“Keeping busy,” said Bell. “Best thing when you have a lot on your mind.”

“Where’ve you been all month?”

“Back and forth to Chicago. Practically living on the 20th Century. Would you do me a favor?”

“Sure.”

“I’m stopping at Croton — appointment at Pocantico Hills. Would you help that gentleman onto the Ossining train?”

“What’s wrong with him? He looks fit.”

Bell handed Archie a key. “You’ll have to unlock him from the table.”

“Oh. Ossining. Sing Sing. Who are you taking to jail?”

“Laurence Rosania.”

“Rosania?”

Upon hearing his name shouted the length of the car, the Chicago jewel thief tossed Archie Abbott an elegant salute.

“Come on,” said Bell, “I’ll introduce you. High time you met.”

“Isaac! He was mine. I almost had him.”

“I just couldn’t think of a better way to keep busy than to catch a jewel thief.”

“Of all the terrible accusations voiced against you,” Isaac Bell told John D. Rockefeller, “I have never heard it said that you don’t pay your debts.”

“You’re implying I owe you something?” the old man said coldly.

“You owe me your life. Twice. Bill Matters in Germany and his daughter in Westchester. Not to mention most of your refinery.”

“I am disappointed in you,” said Rockefeller. “You never struck me as the sort of man who would try to cash in on saving my life.”

“I’m saving another life.”

“What will this ‘debt’ cost me?”

“You will pay me in full by granting Edna Matters an exclusive interview.”

“I never submit to interviews.”

“Speak to her openly and freely for as long as it takes and you and I will be even.”

Rockefeller sat silently for a time.

When he spoke he said, “I’m told Miss Matters is in bad shape.”

“Very bad shape,” said Bell. “She lost her father and she lost her sister. She loved them both.”

“A bitter man and a lunatic.”

“But still her father and still her sister. She is beside herself with grief and guilt and confusion.”

“Is interviewing me supposed to be some sort of rest cure?”

“It is my last hope.”

“That’s all you ask?”

“That’s all I demand.”

“I never submit to interviews,” Rockefeller repeated. “You are demanding a lot.”

“She is worth it,” said Isaac Bell.

Isaac Bell drove Edna Matters to Rockefeller’s Westchester estate.

They were building a fence around Pocantico. The man at the gatehouse said that a six-foot-high iron barrier twenty miles long would surround the entire property. There was talk of moving the railroad. Gunfire echoed in the woods. The gamekeepers had orders to shoot stray dogs.

The fence caught Edna’s attention. “What happened?” she asked Bell. “Has JDR gone mad?”

“He’s afraid.”

“He should be afraid. He should hide in terror. He drove my poor father mad.”

The house where Rockefeller was living while work continued on the main mansion came into view.

“Stop your auto!” Edna cried.

Bell stopped the Locomobile. She was deeply upset.

“I don’t know if I can do this,” Edna said. “In fact, I know I can’t. Take me back to New York.”

Bell held her hands in his and looked her in the eye. “Why not?”

“I never suspected my father. I never suspected my sister. My own blood. Some ‘woman newspaperman’ I am. How can I trust my judgment?”

“The richest, most powerful business man in the history of the world is offering a unique opportunity to a wonderful writer. No one else can do it but you. You owe it to history.”

“How did you talk him into it?”

Isaac Bell took Edna in his arms. He held her close for a long time. Then he whispered, “I told Mr. Rockefeller that he would never get a better chance to leave an honest account of himself.”