The Cutthroat

43

Rumor ricocheted the length of the Jekyll & Hyde Special.

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

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

Bigger, much bigger, than their usual rows.

The Jekyll and Hyde tour was canceled.

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

The tour would be speeded up.

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

The tour was extended to include Los Angeles.

The tour was canceled.

Barrett and Buchanan had had a terrible fistfight.

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

Harry Warren thought the stage manager looked almost happy, not his usual appearance. He offered a smoke from a pack of Young’s favorite Turkish tobacco, Murads.

“Bless you, Quinn.”

The twitch in Young’s cheek that the regular stagehands said always jumped like a frog on closing days and opening days — when every stick of scenery and every stitch of costume had to be loaded onto the train the second the curtain came down — was barely pulsing.

They lit up. Warren said, “I overheard the boys saying you stand in for Barrett and Buchanan.”

“Who said that?”

“Couple of sceneshifters… Do you?”

“On occasion.”

“You must be one slick fencer to survive that Dream Duel.”

“So far, at least.”

“And a heck of an actor to make Mr. Hyde as evil as they do.”

Young smiled at the compliment. “Thank you, Quinn. It’s harder than dueling, I’ll tell you that.”

“Do folks in the audience ever complain?”

“No, bless them. They’ve been kind. I actually receive ovations. Often more sustained than Barrett’s or Buchanan’s.”

“Do the stars mind?”

“Green-eyed with jealousy?” asked Young, with another smile.

“For all your extra applause.”

“They’re too grateful for the chance to pull a disappearing act. And of course they’re not in the theater when I receive my applause. At least not the one I’m standing in for that night.”

“Where do they go on their disappearing acts?”

Henry Young shrugged. “Who knows. Mr. Barrett is probably off writing. He constantly tinkers with scripts.”

“Buchanan a writer, too?”

“Not that I’m aware of— What’s the time? I must go. Thanks for the smoke.”

“Anytime, Mr. Young. Say, what’s the news? Are we closing?”

“I honestly don’t know.”

Harry Warren reported to Isaac Bell in the privacy of a windblown platform between two cars. They were into Colorado now, and Bell could feel the engine begin to strain on the light but constant grade that presaged the Rocky Mountains.

“My gut said don’t push him any further. What do you think?”

“You nailed his leverage. Barrett and Buchanan are willing to overlook Young’s past because they can count on him to stand in for their ‘disappearing acts.’ How long do they disappear?”

“The news backstage is, Mr. Young fills in for one or two nights in a row.”

“How often?”

“Not often. Couple of times a month.”

“Mr. Buchanan probably disappears with his rich girlfriends. Where do you suppose Barrett goes to write?”

“I’ll ask around. Somebody’ll know.”

“What do you think about Mr. Young?” Bell asked.

“I don’t see how the stage manager would ever find the time to kill anybody.”

“Archie says the same. So does Helen.”

“How about you, Isaac?”

“I’m not so sure.”

The rumor that the Jekyll & Hyde Special would not stop for their scheduled performances in Denver was about to meet its test. The stage manager announced a full company meeting. Actors, musicians, sceneshifters, riggers, carpenters, wardrobe ladies, ticket sellers, and callboys crowded into the dining car and waited anxiously while stopped outside the city center in the 36th Street yard. Their locomotive took on water and their tender’s coal, and they waited some more when grocery trucks and butchers’ wagons parked beside the dining car. When the train was replenished, would it be shunted toward Union Station or onto the main line west across the Rockies?

John Buchanan looked relaxed and in charge.

Jackson Barrett, too, looked like he hadn’t a worry in the world.

Maybe the worst rumors weren’t true?

Are you kidding? Mr. Barrett and Mr. Buchanan are actors. Who knows what they’re thinking or how they feel?

“O.K.,” said Buchanan. “Is everyone here? We have our cast. We have our backstage people and our out-front people. We have our train crew. We have our stewards and cooks. We have our guests — the angelic Mr. Bell, the journalistic Mr. Smith, and the ‘filmalistic’ Mrs. Marion Morgan Bell — more about her in a moment. We even have the pilot of our Jekyll and Hyde billboard in the sky, and if Mrs. Bradford looks too young to fly a biplane, look again, for she is a married woman and the mother of two little girls almost as pretty as she is.”

“Get on with it,” Jackson Barrett muttered through an opaque smile.

“Hazel Bradford,” Bell whispered to Marion, “set speed and altitude records last year.”

Buchanan stepped back, and said, “Your turn.”

Jackson Barrett said, “The rumors you’ve heard are NOT true. Our tour is NOT over.”

Eighty people smiled.

“So don’t worry. Our play lives on. And will continue to live on as no Broadway play ever has before.”

Everyone leaned forward to hear what the devil that was supposed to mean.

“After Denver and San Francisco, we will immediately steam down to Hollywood, which is just outside Los Angeles, where Marion Morgan Bell will transform our play into a movie. Yes, you heard right. A movie.”

Buchanan said, “Our final performances will play to Marion Morgan Bell’s cameras rather than on the stage. We will continue salaries at their current rate. Anyone who absolutely must get back to New York, we understand, and will replace you.”

“But,” said Barrett, “we hope that everyone will make the time to be watched by movie audiences forever.”

Bell whispered to Marion, “Congratulations. You’ve got your four-reeler.”

“Your investment syndicate doesn’t exist. How am I going to pay for it?”

“I’ve already spoken with Uncle Andy that you’re coming straight from San Francisco to Los Angeles to set up a four-reeler of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.”

The formidable Andrew Rubenoff, a onetime banking colleague of Bell’s father and a friend of Bell’s, had shifted his assets from steel, coal, and railroads to autos, airplanes, and movies and moved to California.

Bell grinned. “He’s deeply impressed that you snagged Isabella. You have your syndicate, Rubenoff and Bell.”

With that, the tall detective strolled casually from the dining car, accepting congratulations from well-wishers. He kept smiling until he was alone in his private car at the back of the train, where he laid his long fingers on his telegraph key and pondered what to send.

He was running out of time. The show would be in and out of San Francisco and on the way to Los Angeles before he knew it. If he didn’t arrest the Cutthroat before Marion finished the movie, the murderer would have his “immortality” and nothing would stop him from murdering another girl the next day.

Closing night in Denver, while Marion roamed the Princess Theatre backstage scouting angles for her cameras, Isaac Bell watched Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde from an eighth-row house seat on the aisle. The fans and critics who raved about the famous Dream Duel when Jekyll’s potion triggered hallucinations had not been exaggerated. Bell was impressed.

He had fenced for Yale and still practiced religiously. At the Fencers Club on 45th Street, his best opponent was U.S. Navy saber champion Lieutenant Kenneth Ash, whenever both men found themselves in New York. Together, the detective and the naval attaché were developing a new attack — the “back shot”—which had judges scratching their heads and opponents bewildered.

In Jekyll and Hyde, the actors’ swordsmanship was miles above swordplay taught in drama schools. They were saber fighters of the first rank, Buchanan quick and powerful, Barrett possibly his superior, but not by much.

Where did I see you, Mrs. Bell?

The Cutthroat watched Marion Morgan Bell while she was deep in conversation with the head carpenter and the head rigger. The tall blonde was as beautiful as any actress yet seemed oblivious to the effect she had on the seasoned backstage hands. The men were following her around like a pair of puppies and vying with each other to capture her attention with the intricacies of moving the subway car and biplane out of the Princess Theatre and back on the train.

Where did I see you?

44

The Jekyll & Hyde Special was racing on the Nevada flats, whipping past telegraph poles at seventy miles per hour. But thanks to improvements in Thomas Edison’s electrostatic induction, Isaac Bell did not have to climb them to tap the lines. Edison’s “grasshopper telegraphy” did the job for him, jumping Bell’s orders from his private car to the wires beside the railroad tracks the instant he touched the key.

He sent three last-ditch messages in a swift hand.

Dashwood — whom Bell had ordered back to St. Louis to sit in on the postmortem examination of Rick Cox — received

Joseph Van Dorn was glad-handing Justice Department prosecutors in the agency’s Washington, D.C., field office in the New Willard Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue when he received

Van Dorn sent blistering wires to his men, who had turned up nothing but goose eggs in either of those investigations. Then he caught the B&O’s Royal Blue to New York, read the goose-egg reports word for word, and headed into the theater districts.

Joe Wallace’s message from Isaac Bell read

The Cutthroat was still on the train to San Francisco when he finally remembered where he had seen the woman.

Columbus, Ohio.

Last month, before Chicago, Cleveland, Toledo, and Detroit.

An evening performance.

The house manager was delaying the curtain, and he had peeked out at the audience to see why it was being held. Typically, a couple were taking their own sweet time strolling to their seats on the aisle — local luminaries, the usual richest man in town who had married the prettiest girl — an ordinary occurrence of which he had thought nothing at the time as he ducked back from the curtain to take his place. In fact, he had barely noticed them, for what had caught his eye was a woman directly behind them. She was walking alone, as poised as a duchess escorted by cavalry, into the theater to see him again onstage. Blond and perfect. His heart had soared. Emily.

No, not Emily, Mrs. Isaac Bell. Why were you in Columbus?

And who are you, Mr. Bell?

Are you the leader of the new faces?

I think you are. I think you command them. I think you are hunting me.

I don’t know why. I doubt you’re a copper. But I don’t care who you are, Mr. Bell. No dead man can lock me up.

You first. Then your lovely wife. Back-to-back.

A vital murder.

A joyous slaughter.

“May I join you?” Isaac Bell asked Henry Young, who was sitting with a cup of coffee in the dining car. The train was crawling up the Sierra Nevada pushed by two extra engines. The mountains, deep in spring snow, looked as remote as the far side of the moon, but soon the special would crest at Donner Pass — only five short hours from San Francisco.

“Of course, Mr. Bell.”

“It occurs to me, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you sitting down before.”

Young smiled. He looked ten years younger, and the twitch in his cheek had vanished.

“And you look very happy.”

“I am,” said the stage manager. “I had my best night’s sleep in a year.”

“You’re not troubled that the tour is almost over?”

“I am thrilled. I let The Boys talk me into this one against my better judgment. Touring is a young man’s game. Give me a Broadway play I load once instead of fifty times. Mind you, every stage manager should learn his trade on the road. Earn the right to stay home and then stay home.”

“I’ve heard you’re quite the fencer.”

Young replied with a modest shrug. “I’m a student fencer.”

“Who’s your teacher?”

“Mr. Barrett.”

“They say you can handle yourself.”

“Mr. Barrett is a gifted teacher. I had the advantage of being a dancer when I was a kid, which makes one fluid, shall we say. But I still give ninety per cent of the credit to Mr. Barrett’s instruction. Basics, like relaxing the grip for point control. Fluidity — as in dance.”

“Did he teach Mr. Buchanan, too?”

“I believe he ‘polished’ him. I gather Mr. Buchanan was adept to begin with.”

“You said you danced?”

“My aunts and uncles were hoofers. The Dancing Bookers.”

“Of course. Booker’s your middle name. Did you dance in England?”

“Canada.”

“Do you know what a ‘panto’ is?”

“Panto? Panto… Oh, the English pantomime. Christmas shows for children.”

“Do you have pantos in Canada?”

“No. Perhaps in some of the other British colonies, but not in Canada. You’re full of questions today, Mr. Bell.”

“Every day,” Isaac Bell shot back. “Every day with all of you on this train is a chance to learn a lot at once about the stage.”

Joseph Van Dorn stepped out of a Tenderloin District saloon that catered to actors and found the sidewalk blocked by a broad-shouldered hard case wearing a blue suit and a derby.

“Care to tell me why the founder of a private detective agency, with field offices in every city worth its name and foreign outposts in London, Paris, and Berlin, has spent two full days personally sleuthing around my precinct, asking about an actor manager who fell off a lady’s fire escape last October?”

“Keeping my hand in. How are you, Captain?”

The old friends shook hands warmly.

“How are you making out?”

“Better than your boys did in October.”

Honest Mike Coligney bristled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“The husband everybody said was chasing Mr. Medick claims he wasn’t.”

“What do you expect him to say? A man died. He didn’t want to get charged with manslaughter.”

“He also says he wasn’t cuckolded.”

“That’s not what he said last October.”

“He thought he’d been cuckolded at the time, but now he says he was set up. Some ‘friend’ sent him a letter: ‘Dear sir, I thought you should know that your wife is running around on you.’”

“Do you believe him?”

“His wife swore she never cheated on him.”

“Do you believe her?”

“She swore it on her deathbed.”

“What deathbed? She couldn’t be older than thirty-five.”

“TB. Gone in March.”

Mike Coligney crossed himself. “Mother Mary… So what was Medick doing on her fire escape?”

“He got a letter, too. Supposedly from the lady.”

“I remember the letter. Along the line of ‘Come up the fire escape, I’ll let you in my back window.’”

“She swore she never wrote it,” said Van Dorn. “Same deathbed.”

“Who did?”

“Whoever threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape.”

“Except for one thing,” said Coligney. “Detective Division matched that letter to a typewriter in the lady’s office where she worked.”

“There are two ways of looking at the typewriter,” said Joseph Van Dorn. “Either she lied on her deathbed… or the person who threw Mr. Medick off the fire escape typed the letter on that typewriter.”

Coligney knew that and changed the subject. “Medick was supposed to be afraid of heights. Where’d he get the nerve to climb four stories of fire escapes?”

Joseph Van Dorn rubbed his red whiskers, took off his hat, and ran a big hand over his bald scalp. He blinked, and his deep-set Celtic eyes grew dark with melancholy. “According to the lady’s poor devil of a husband, she was a woman worth taking chances for.”

“So Medick knew her.”

“Hoped to know her better,” said Van Dorn, “encouraged by a letter written by someone who knew his weakness for other men’s wives.”

“How come no witness ever saw that ‘someone’?”

“But they did see him,” said Van Dorn. “He just didn’t look like someone who could throw a fit young actor off a fire escape.”

“What are you talking about, Joe?”

“I spoke with three people who remember an old man hanging around her building. One thought he was a tramp, another a ragpicker, another just a drunk. They all believed he was harmless.”

Isaac Bell read Van Dorn’s wire the night that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde closed in San Francisco.

45

“In all my years on the stage,” groaned Isabella Cook, “I cannot recall a closing-night cast party the equal of last night’s. Nor a hangover more vicious. Oh, Isaac, what were we thinking?”

“Yours is not the only hangover on the train, if that’s any consolation.”

“How is yours?”

“About what I deserve,” Bell answered. In fact, with an awful sense he was running out of time, he had sipped dark cider in Manhattan cocktail glasses while he kept a clear, but ultimately fruitless, eye on Jackson Barrett, John Buchanan, and Henry Young.

“It’s your wife’s fault. The prospect of her movie obliterated closing-night blues. Everyone’s excited. I saw love affairs springing up all around me, and couples who had ceased to speak making cow eyes… Would someone tell the engineer to stop clattering the wheels?”

“We’re almost there.”

“I never thought I would be so happy to get off a train in Los Angeles…” She cast a dubious eye out the window. “Sunny Los Angeles? I see nothing but storm-swept orange groves and sodden cattle. Do you suppose this rain will follow us all the way to Hollywood?”

“Marion has rented a studio, just in case.”

When Bell spoke long-distance with her last night, she had ended her report with a grim, “But it’s still raining.”

No one had to light a fire under Joel Wallace.

Fourteen retired chorus girls — since Isaac Bell left London — fourteen strikeouts. Then all of a sudden, his new friend, Dolly, who he had met on this wild-goose chase, said that when her mother was in the chorus in Tra-la-la Tosca way back in 1891, she had known a girl who went with a boy named Spelvin.

Wallace waited for them in a tearoom on Piccadilly, around the corner from the Van Dorn field office. In they came, all spiffed-up for Central London. One look at her mother told Wallace that her daughter would age very nicely. Mother paused to reminisce with the tearoom manager, and Dolly forged ahead to Wallace’s table.

“I brought me mum, like you asked. She thinks you’re going to marry me.”

“Dolly, you know I’m not the marrying kind. I never lied, did I? Told you the night we met.”

“Well, you better not tell Mum that or she won’t talk to you.”

Joel Wallace’s cable found Isaac Bell in the rain-swept Los Angeles Arcade Depot rail yards, when Bell’s car rolled in on the back of the Jekyll & Hyde Special. It was a potent reminder that Joseph Van Dorn had tapped the right man to ramrod the London field office.

It was one thing to impersonate an Italian, thought Bell, the Whitechapel barber Davy Collins being a prime example. But quite another to teach fencing, as Mr. Barrett trained Mr. Young. Double that to teach the exquisite skill of Italian fencing.

Detective Eddie Tobin waited at the Chelsea Piers in a fast launch. Joseph Van Dorn clambered aboard. Tobin started up a pair of eight-cylinder Wolseley-Siddeley gasoline engines that Isaac Bell had had shipped over from England and thundered across the crowded, smoke-shrouded harbor toward Staten Island.

Tobin, whose misshapen face reflected a terrible Gopher Gang beating when he was a Van Dorn apprentice, lounged at the helm like a man who had been born in a cockpit, nonchalantly dodging tugs, coal barges, railcar floats, victualing lighters, sail and steam freighters, and liners, at thirty knots. Ordered by Chief Inspector Bell to look afresh at the Oppenheim yacht explosion, the young detective had found a witness.

“How come the cops never talked to him?” Mr. Van Dorn wanted to know.

“He doesn’t talk to cops. And he won’t talk to us either, at least not directly.”

Van Dorn assumed the witness was one of his cousins as the tight-lipped Tobin-Darbee-Richards-Gordon-and-Scott clan of Staten Island scowmen included oysters tongers, tugboat men, coal pirates, and smugglers.

“The problem is, Mr. Van Dorn, it’s going to be hearsay.”

“I’m not building a court case,” Van Dorn growled. “All Isaac needs is ammunition.”

Into the harbor at St. George, Tobin slowed just enough for two muscle-bound oyster tongers to jump on from a pier head. Van Dorn nodded coolly but shook hands. Jimmy Richards and Marvyn Gordon were in and out of jail regularly, but they were by and large larcenous, not vicious, for which he would cut them some slack. Tobin raced out into the Kill Van Kull, slowing a mile in and cutting the engines when Richards and Gordon pointed at an oyster scow anchored beside a derelict schooner. A pretty, dark-haired girl stepped out of the low cabin. Van Dorn figured she was about fourteen.

“Molly, this is Mr. Van Dorn, who I told you about.”

Molly extended her hand to shake Van Dorn’s solemnly but invited no one aboard her boat.

Tobin said, “Molly’s father told her what he saw. She’s going to tell you.”

Molly said, “An old Italian greengrocer with a big hooked nose hired Father to take him to the yacht.”

“The Oppenheim yacht?”

“The one that blew up. He delivered crates of lettuce. The water was rough, and he got sick on the way back. Seasick. Sweating and throwing up. When Father helped him up to the dock, his nose fell off.”

“His nose—”

“And his big black mustache. The Italian kind.”

Van Dorn wired Isaac Bell in Los Angeles.

“Now we know that he doesn’t kill only for twisted pleasure,” Bell confided in Marion, whom he had been consoling with a late supper after another day of rain had forced her to take her cameras indoors. “He kills for profit, too.”

“He killed to get control of the show.”

The Cleveland field office was not thrilled to have an investigation reviewed by a detective as young as James Dashwood. That Dashwood reported directly to Chief Investigator Isaac Bell did not make the Cleveland boys love him more.

“Interesting,” Dashwood commented politely after a painstaking examination of photographs from the morgue.

“Yeah, what’s interesting?”

“Well, that you could conclude that the murderer did not carve crescent shapes on the victim’s arms.”

“Which we did.”

“On the other hand, these marks on her legs could be interpreted as crescent-shaped.”

“They could also be interpreted as stab wounds inflicted during their struggle.”

“What struggle? The coroner concluded that death was rapid, if not instantaneous, due to this wound in her throat, or this separation of vertebrae C3 and C4…”

The Cleveland chief concealed a longing to march Dashwood off a Lake Erie pier. “Is there anything else?”

“There is something odd about this theater program that Mr. Buchanan inscribed to the lady.”

“My pleasure,” John Buchanan had written over his name in the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde cast list. And under it, his signature. Both flowed in a clear, bold English round hand, decorated with beautiful hooks and dramatic flourishes.

“What about it?”

“You did a remarkable job of documenting their ‘visits’ with each other.”

“Rich folk don’t go to a lot of trouble to hide it. If the lady’s husband didn’t notice, or didn’t want to notice, who’s going to call them on it?”

“And it was genius discovering the husband’s girlfriend.”

“Thank you, sonny.”

“But what is it about this program? It’s driving me nuts— May I keep it, please?”

“You’ll have to sign a receipt.”

“My pleasure,” said Dashwood.

The Cutthroat had waited too long.

The rain had slowed everything to a maddening crawl.

It was time — long past time — to attack.

A vital murder.

A joyous slaughter.

46

Joel Wallace outdid himself with his second cable to Isaac Bell:

With little hope for more than a list culled from old newspapers, and even less for a quick answer as to where the murderer had gone next twenty years ago, Bell wired the New Orleans field office:

A letter arrived at the railcar. The envelope was addressed to Isaac Bell, c/o the Arcade Depot, where the Jekyll & Hyde Special was parked.

The letter inside read

“Twenty-to-one, it’s a hoax,” he told Archie Abbott.

“You going anyway?”

“Have to.”

“Alone?”

“Like the man says.”

Bell recognized the handwriting as similar to the “My funny little games” letter that Jack the Ripper wrote to the Central News Agency in 1888—which Scotland Yard had thought authentic and put up on posters in the fruitless hope someone who knew him would recognize the handwriting.

A crescent was inked under Jack the Ripper’s signature, which anyone could have picked up reading the papers. But “Dear Boss” was more intriguing, as that first letter to the Yard had also been directed to “Dear Boss.”

“What the heck is ‘Mile 342. SP’?” asked Archie Abbott.

Bell showed him a map.

“The Southern Pacific Railroad counts track miles from San Francisco. That puts Milepost 342 a hundred and twenty miles up the coast from Los Angeles, between Gaviota and El Capitan.”

The tracks hugged the Santa Barbara Channel shore.

“Middle of nowhere,” said Archie.

“Nothing but a water tank.”

“What if he pulls something?”

“If he doesn’t, I’ll be mighty disappointed.”

“Why don’t I just tag along a ways back?” Abbott asked.

“He’ll be looking for you.”

Abbott knew his friend too well. Because he blamed himself for Anna’s death, Isaac Bell would go alone — rather than risk frightening him off — fight alone, and come back alone with a captive or a body — or alone in a coffin — and no force on earth could stop him.

“Twenty-to-one, it’s a hoax,” Bell repeated.

“By whom?”

“My old friend Abbington-Westlake is ‘having me on,’ as the Britons say. His forgers could imitate the Ripper’s handwriting. But they made a mistake with this word.”

“‘Immortal’?”

“The Ripper wrote slang: ‘Fix me’ and ‘buckled’ for ‘arrest’; ‘codding’ for ‘playing jokes’; ‘work’ and ‘job’ for ‘murder.’ Calling me Boss, they got right. But not ‘immortal.’ More to the point, he’s never sent a letter since he left London. Scotland Yard did him a huge favor claiming he was dead, and he’s kept it that way.”

“He can’t resist playing his games — like the crescent code — now he’s playing games with you.”

“I hope you’re right,” said Isaac Bell.

“Isaac, let me come with you.”

“I want you here with Marion.”

“O.K. Of course. I’ll watch her. Listen, it’s still raining. I lifted a cowboy slicker from Wardrobe. You take it.”

Bell went to the Southern Pacific freight yards. The rain that had plagued Marion since they arrived in Los Angeles was falling steadier than ever, and he was glad of Archie’s full-length waterproof oilskin. He bribed a yard bull with a ten-dollar gold piece to put him into an empty freight car headed up the California coast. Six hours later, he jumped down when the slow-moving train shunted onto the Mile 342 water siding.

Dusk was gathering and the rain had thickened. Fair-size waves were breaking on the sandy shore, and the cold fog drifting off the water bore the icy breath of the Pacific Ocean, which the channel joined a few miles to the west. He lost sight of the red caboose lantern when the freight train trundled back onto the main line and crossed the trestle bridge that spanned the canyon.

He had four hours before midnight to ferret out surprises.

The water tank, which had a huge pivot spout to replenish steam engines’ boilers, was raised high above the tracks on legs. The single main line track paralleled the channel. The water siding ran just inland of it. Inland of the siding was a sandy path for maintenance carts. Just beyond the switch where the water siding rejoined the main line, the land dropped into a canyon. The rain-swollen arroyo that had scoured the canyon with eons of floodwater rushed thirty feet under a trestle bridge. Bell climbed down and confirmed that no one was hiding in the undersupports.

Thunder began rumbling. The rain fell harder.

The open area under the water tank offered shelter. But after inspecting it and climbing a side ladder to the roof of the tank to make sure he was alone, Bell chose to button up his slicker and conceal himself within girders of the trestle. From that forest of steel, he watched the tank and the tracks in both directions. If the letter was not fake, the Cutthroat would arrive as Bell had, on a train that stopped for water, or in a wagon or auto or on horseback on the cart path.

Several trains did pull in, watered, and steamed away. Others steamed past without stopping, and passenger Limiteds with locomotives and tenders designed to go longer distances roared by at seventy miles an hour, their golden windows glowing warm through the rain and fog.

Five hours later, at one in the morning, the Cutthroat had not shown up. The rain poured, lightning bolts split the black sky, and Bell surmised he had indeed been set up by Abbington-Westlake. A southbound freight pulled onto the siding. No one but the brakeman got off, and as it huffed slowly from the tank, Bell considered running after it to hop a ride back to Los Angeles. He decided to stick it out until dawn.

It was still pitch-dark when the rain stopped abruptly. The wind shifted north — crisp and chill. The fresh weather swept the clouds from the sky, and Bell saw his first stars since they crossed the Rocky Mountains. A million of them shone so brightly that they lighted whitecaps on the Santa Barbara Channel, a quarter-mile stretch of the railroad in both directions, and penetrated the dark within the trestle.

Bell sprinted to the black shadow under the water tank.

The starlight revealed something moving on the siding, about a hundred yards away at the switch where it linked to the main line. It was coming toward Bell very slowly. Long minutes passed before it hardened into a bent figure plodding on the rails. It drew within twenty yards, close enough for Bell to see that he was an elderly tramp, hobbling on a crooked staff.

Bell unbuttoned his slicker and loosened the Colt in his shoulder holster.

The tramp began to sing. He had a weak, reedy voice.

At first, Bell heard only faint snatches of a lyric:

At twenty yards, he recognized the Stephen Foster lament.

At ten yards, Bell could smell him.

The tramp reeked like death, the homeless man’s unwashed stench of months of filth accumulated deep in the fibers of his rain-drenched shirt and overalls. He had the long white beard of a Civil War veteran, which would make him a very old man in his seventies or eighties — as old as Bell’s father, whose Old Soldier beard was as white. Bell stepped out from under the tank, out of the shadows, and let the starlight fall on his face. The tramp did not acknowledge him but veered warily to avoid him, staggering across the siding and onto the main line. Starlight gleamed on steel; he had a hook for a left hand. One eye was covered by a patch. His slouch hat drooped, as soaked through as his clothes, and he had strapped his possessions around his shoulders in a ragged rucksack. Bell thought of his father, sleeping warm and dry in his Greek Revival town house on Louisburg Square.

Safe on the main line, the tramp resumed his song:

Just before he reached the trestle, he stopped and faced the sea and stared as if mesmerized by the stars glistening on the wild water. He turned and gazed at the trestle. He looked back at the sea and down in the canyon. The wind carried another whiff of his deathly smell, and Bell suddenly realized this was no masquerade. It was the end of the line. The old man was staring at the sea as if to say good-bye to beauty before he jumped from the trestle.

Suddenly Bell heard a train. It was coming from the west, and in the starlight he saw a locomotive rounding the curve with a string of low-slung flatcars, another slow-moving freight. The old man saw it, too, and plodded onto the trestle.

Many would have let him seek the respite he would never find in life. Godspeed! But there was something stern and hopeful in Isaac Bell that would not give up hope on the most hopeless. A hot bath, clean clothes, and a square meal could change everything, and if the Ripper letter was a hoax, at least it had put him here on the railroad tracks at a moment that called for action.

“Hold on, old-timer!”

The veteran heard him. His head turned slightly, but instead of stopping, he pushed along with his staff to go faster. The locomotive’s dull headlight angled in from the curve, which made the beam bounce among the girders. No whistle. The engineer saw nothing amiss in the crazy leaping shadows. The old man opened his arms wide, embracing the end.

Bell ran full tilt after him, shouting over the rumble of the locomotive, “Hold on, sir! Let me help.”

He halved the distance between them, and halved it again. He thought he might make it — the engineer still didn’t see them, but the train had slowed for the curve. He put on a burst of speed and was reaching for the old man’s shoulder when he heard the sizzle of steel unsheathed.

47

Blade high, the Cutthroat whirled in a lightning pivot.

Isaac Bell’s right arm stretched forward and whipped the loose tail of his slicker at it. The Cutthroat’s blade sliced the oilcloth like tissue paper, and for one precious instant he had startled the Cutthroat, throwing the murderer off balance. His first blow missed Bell’s arm. The Cutthroat slashed again, slicing the slicker to shreds.

Bell pulled his gun and was yanking the slide to cock his first shot when the Cutthroat lunged. His blade leaped in a sudden rapier thrust. Bell parried it with his gun barrel, deflecting all but the lightest touch. It barely pierced his upper arm, but the needle point seemed to strike a nerve, and he felt his hand convulse as if jolted by an electric shock. It popped his fingers open. The pistol fell.

The Cutthroat whipped his blade high.

Bell, in a lightning move, caught the falling gun out of the air with his left hand, forced his right to close around the slide, and cocked it. The locomotive passed them in the instant he fired. Its main rod, which connected the piston to the drive wheels, brushed Bell’s shoulder like a steel fist. It banged him against a trestle girder. The girder kept him from falling into the canyon. But his shot went wild, his gun flew under the flatcars trundling past, and the Cutthroat slashed downward.

The killing blow plunged squarely into the crown of Isaac Bell’s hat.

The Cutthroat delivered his coup de grâce—a skin-flaying slash.

The tall detective was toppling backwards between two girders. He raised the shredded remains of his slicker as if it were a shield.

This time, the Cutthroat was ready. Nothing could distract him.

But to his astonishment, even as Isaac Bell fell backwards, even locked in the remorseless grip of gravity, he evaded the blade with a twist of fluid grace, took cool, deliberate aim, and flicked his left arm violently. The strip of oilcloth cracked into the Cutthroat’s face like a bullwhip.

A metal button seared the tender flesh beneath his eye.

Roaring in rage that Bell had marked him, he wheeled beside the moving train, vaulted onto a flatcar, and caught hold before it rolled him off. His last glimpse of Isaac Bell had been of the man falling backwards. Now he was rewarded by the sight of an empty trestle.

His spirits soared.

We’ll never know, Mr. Bell: Did my singing fool you? Or the stench?

By a miracle, his rucksack had stayed on his back. It reeked of its contents, a rotting length of a human leg. Thank you, Beatrice.

By now, Isaac Bell’s corpse was tumbling down the flooded arroyo.

The worst the Cutthroat suffered was a black eye.

48

Archie, thought Isaac Bell, I owe you a drink.

The alloy-steel derringer rack inside the crown of his hat had saved his skull, but the oilskin cowboy slicker that Archie had lifted from Wardrobe had served him three times — distracting the Cutthroat while he drew his gun, parrying a sword thrust with a counterpunch to the Cutthroat’s eye, and now acting as a lifeline.

The shreds of it had caught in the thicket of beams under the trestle. Dangling above the rushing arroyo, he swung in among the supports and hauled himself up onto the tracks.

The freight train’s red lights were fading toward Los Angeles.

Bell started after them at a dead run. He would never catch it, but dawn was graying fresh rain clouds, and morning trains would soon crowd the line to the city.

Isaac Bell jumped off an express from Santa Barbara and telephoned the Van Dorn railcar from a coin telephone. Harry Warren answered, sounding jubilant.

“We nailed him, Isaac. John Buchanan.”

“Buchanan? How?”

“Dashwood did it. He found a Jekyll and Hyde program that Buchanan inscribed to one of his rich ladies — the banker’s wife he killed in Cleveland.”

“But he must inscribe programs to all of his rich ladies.”

“This one was for the Cincinnati show.”

“She was killed before Cincinnati.”

“That’s what Dashwood tumbled to! It was printed ahead of time. Only Buchanan could have given it to her. Here’s the best part: Buchanan’s got no alibi. He did one of his ‘disappearing acts’ that night. Young stood in for him. Buchanan claims he was sick and slept on the train. Train crew says no. They saw him leave. Buchanan refuses to say where he went.”

“Does he have a black eye?”

“What?”

“Does he have a black eye?”

“Who knows? He’s slathered with makeup. We got him in Glendale on his way to Marion’s movie.”

“Where’d you put him?”

“We got him right here in the car.”

“Scrub him off!”

“What?”

“Remove his makeup! On the jump!”

Bell waited, drumming his fingers, depositing more nickels when the operator asked for them. Harry Warren came back on the telephone. “No black eye. What’s the big idea?”

“Where are Jackson Barrett and Henry Young?”

“Taking pictures.”

“With Marion?”

Harry Warren laughed. “Nothing stops that wife of yours. The minute we grabbed Buchanan, she telephoned Young to stand in for him.”

“Who’s with her?”

“Barrett, Young, couple of camera guys, and that lights lady — Rennegal.”

“That’s all?”

“It’s raining. She gave the rest of the company the day off.”

“Hang on to Buchanan. Don’t give him to the cops ’til you hear from me.”

“Where are you going?”

“Glendale.”

49

Making up as fast as he could in a tiny hotel room on the outskirts of Glendale, eight miles from Los Angeles, Henry Young dabbed spirit gum on his nose. While it dried, he lighted a candle, kneaded some toupee paste into a soft lump, and melted the surface in the flame. He worked the thick paste onto his nose, altering the shape to make it appear broad and flat. A bushy wig already heightened his brow and had the grotesque effect of making his head look extremely wide.

Just as he was finishing his new nose with a bluish greasepaint that would turn his face a ghastly pale white for the camera, the door swung open so hard, it banged against the wall. Through it strode Isaac Bell.

“That’s a sensational effect, Mr. Young. I doubt your own mother would recognize you face-to-face.”

“What? What are you doing here?”

“Catching up. What are you doing?”

“Your wife asked me to stand in for Mr. Buchanan. He seems to have gotten arrested.”

“I have a question for you: How’s your eye feel?”

“My eye? Fine.”

“Show me.”

Henry Young wet his lips and looked around nervously. “I don’t understand, Mr. Bell.”

Bell snapped up a small bottle of olive oil.

“Wipe off that makeup and we both will.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Marion had plastered warnings inside the tunnel and out:

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

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

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

Plan. Anticipate. Hope.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Mr. Barrett?”

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

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

“Hyde here! Sorry I’m late.”

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

Head to toe, his costume was black, his shirt and trousers as tight-fitting as a dancer’s, his hat, helmet-like and unadorned, a stark frame for his grotesquely bloated face mask. He wore a cape that came below his knees.

Marion picked up the megaphone she would need when the wind machine crackled and whirled into action.

“Ready, Mrs. Bell!”

“Lights!”

“Dynamo ready!” Rennegal called.

“Kellan, start the motor!”

“Contact!”

Mrs. Rennegal threw an electrical switch placed well out of range of the propeller. Its violent whirlwind yet to come.

Young Kellan gave the propeller a couple of turns, and when he reached a compression-resistance point, tugged up hard. Two more pulls and the Curtiss clattered to life, pistons popping, valves rattling, propeller building a stiff breeze. Even at idling speed, the silk strips danced and Jekyll’s and Hyde’s capes fluttered.

“Lights!”

Mrs. Rennegal engaged the belt drive powering the dynamo. The Cooper Hewitts flooded a harsh blue-green glare on Jekyll and Hyde.

“Cameras!”

Davidson and Blitzer began to crank slowly.

Marion shouted, “Mr. Barrett, Mr. Young: Good and evil battle to the death. Be ferocious — just please don’t accidentally kill each other, because we have a lot more film to make — if it ever stops raining.”

Jekyll and Hyde poised for engagement.

“Speed!”

Davidson and Blitzer cranked their cameras to take twenty frames per second.

Jekyll and Hyde saluted each other as a gesture of respect by raising the blades in front of their faces. The scenario, adapted loosely from the play, called for their first exchange to be aggressive. No hallucinogenic flouncing about, but good and evil tested severely. The hard beats of saber on saber rang loudly.

Jackson Barrett was still getting used to the idea that the audience in a movie would not hear the actual steely battle clang of the sabers, but the orchestra’s sound effects. On the other hand, the fact that they would not hear any words the actors spoke made for a rather fun game.

“Are you up for a fencing lesson, Mr. Young?”

In answer, the stage manager attacked without engaging in any feint, and Barrett was stunned to see Young use a counterbeat that swept under Barrett’s blade.

“The cameras are making you bold. Slow down.”

Hyde’s next lightning thrust actually forced Barrett to retreat.

His anger mounting, he snarled, “I’m putting a halt to this before I hurt you, and hurt you badly.”

He advanced to attack.

The stage manager surprised him with a sharp parry, then disengaged and executed his own attack with a sudden leap.

“Your moves are inventive,” said Barrett, with a quick parry. “You must have been practicing since the last time we were onstage.”

The stage manager had yet to speak. It was as if he were devoting himself to every move far in advance. Seeing Young display his sudden skills stunned Marion and the crew. They knew this was unlike any previous movie duel, as he handled a saber with unbelievable agility that was never there before.

“Mr. Young, if you try that again, I shall make you very sorry. Now, follow my lead. I will attack and you will retreat.”

Barrett tested him with a couple of hard beats, striking steel to steel, feinted with a hard beat, and lunged into a calculated move to show the audience the evil Mr. Hyde as if he were a rat scurrying down a dark alley.

It was becoming clear that Young was more adept than Buchanan with a saber. Barrett soon realized he was against one as good, if not better, with a sword than himself.

The stage manager made a direct riposte that ended in a thrust with no feints but with a total circle around Barrett’s blade. Barrett was half a second too quick to disengage and avoid Young’s offensive action.

Everyone on the set stood mesmerized, not certain if the fight had really become a vicious battle or only staged action for the movie.

Hyde waited to parry until Jekyll’s sword arm was fully extended and the point of his saber was only one inch from piercing his shoulder. His riposte pierced the sleeve on Barrett’s out-thrust and carved a deep cut in his forearm.

“A late parry, Mr. Hyde? You have neither the sense of distance nor the point control with your tight grip to put one over. How did you do that?”

Hyde gave no answer, and Barrett began to use tactics he hadn’t used in years. He deflected Hyde’s next attack with a straight, smooth line without wavering to attract a reaction — a swift, strong, clean parry without him seemingly noticing the blood flowing from his forearm.

Hyde did not immediately reengage Barrett but stepped back, gave his opponent a grotesque grin through his makeup, and spoke loudly so his voice carried to the crew over the wind machine.

“Jack Spelvin, my name is Isaac Bell, I am an investigator with the Van Dorn Detective Agency. I arrest you for the murder of Anna Waterbury and only God knows how many other women.”

50

Barrett shouted, “Are you crazy? Your fellow detectives arrested Buchanan. He’s the Ripper.”

Blitzer the cameraman yelled over the exhaust roar of the wind machine. “Keep fighting, keep fighting. We’re still running the cameras.”

Bell, keeping a surly eye on Barrett, ignored the crew, their voices mixing with the wind machine and echoing in chorus throughout the cavern.

“Don’t bother attempting to escape, Barrett, or Spelvin,” said Bell. “Or whatever your name is. We found your little escape passage in the rear of the tunnel and it’s guarded by two heavily armed agents.”

“Playing the role of a shrewd detective?” warned Barrett. “It’s still your wife’s movie. I wonder which one of us will see the ending.”

“It won’t be you,” said Bell, with ice in his tone. “Now, wipe the makeup off your left eye. Buchanan did it. So did Henry Young.”

“What did that prove?”

“Neither is Jack the Ripper.”

“Why are you mucking about with a saber? If you really intend to arrest me, where’s your gun?”

“I lost it in a canyon.” Bell spread his arms. There was no room in his skintight costume for a gun. “If you resist arrest, I will slice you worse than you sliced women in your maniacal murder spree.”

To add to the horror of the moment, Jack the Ripper, alias Barrett, removed his makeup with his cape, revealing a bruised eye, and uttered a loud, nauseating laugh that echoed throughout the tunnel above the exhaust from the wind machine.

There were no niceties, no respectful salutes. Like a bolt of lightning, the Ripper attacked like an ancient predator. Bell was prepared. He knew Barrett’s intent by a slight shift in his footwork. It came as an advance lunge. Bell parried and deflected the encounter with a sharp feint.

“Thank you,” said Isaac Bell. “I was hoping you’d resist.”

The production crew watched the engagement in awe. As the fight progressed, it gained momentum. The contact between blades seemed to come in microseconds, as the speed of the sabers flashed under the Cooper Hewitt lights. It became obvious to the crew that the two duelists were in a brutal fight to kill one or the other.

Bell drove the Ripper back into the tunnel, past the second camera and beyond the weird gleam of the lights. Visually, it was stunning, because the wind machine had kicked up a small cloud of dust that swirled under the lights.

Concerned when Bell was out of sight, Marion used her megaphone to amplify her voice over the roar of the wind machine. “Isaac!” she shouted. “Come back! You’re out of the light.”

The Ripper recovered the initiative and fought back hard, using speed, strength, and extraordinary point control to put the tall detective on the defensive.

Bell used his retreat to discover the Ripper’s methods, his skills and tricks. They both fought as though they were fighting for their souls.

Jack the Ripper had developed the precision of hand that Italy’s masters were famous for. But, in actual fact, he was more predictable than any Italian. The monster enjoyed butchering his victims, favoring to shed blood than land internal wounds. To lose to him would be to suffer a slow death. But the open blows that he delivered in his desire to cut were also an invitation for an opponent to run him through.

Jack the Ripper fell back, but the tall, blond detective had to battle for every foot gained. The Ripper left no opening untested. In a parry-thrust, he wounded Bell by a cut in the bicep. Luckily, it barely broke the skin, but blood trickled down his arm, threatening to wet his weapon’s grip and make it slippery. Bell squeezed his shirtsleeve to absorb it.

Now Bell realized how Jack the Ripper could overwhelm the women he killed and startle them into defending themselves in ways he could predict.

The way to beat him was to be unpredictable. And no attack was more unpredictable than the back attack Bell devised with his naval friend.

Isaac Bell struck the Ripper’s thrust aside and lunged past. Inside the arc of his saber, Bell suddenly switched it to his opposite hand and plunged the tip all the way across his stomach and around the back of his waist toward the Ripper’s left lung. He felt it scrape a rib that kept the saber from going deep.

Now ten feet from the whirling propeller, warned by the increased strength of the wind against his costume, Jack the Ripper exploded in a counterattack. He started with a feint rather than a thrust. Then a fake thrust, and a fake feint.

Bell parried and retreated past Marion, who was on the right side of the cave, where rocks had been piled. In the split second he saw her, the Ripper feinted left, spun around and grabbed Marion with his free hand, using her as a shield by wrapping his arm around her body and pulling her close to his chest. Bell’s eyes went wild.

“You sewer scum, don’t even think of hurting her,” he roared like a lion that took a bullet to save his mate.

“I’m leaving,” said the Ripper. “And your talented wife is coming with me.”

“Take your bloody hands off her.”

“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t,” the Ripper said with hideous malignity.

The Ripper again felt the force of the wind on his back and began to advance. Bell could do nothing but retreat, knowing he could not put Marion in any worse danger. But while the two men were distracted with each other, Marion lifted her foot off the ground and stomped with all her strength on the Ripper’s toes. In almost the same instant, she rammed both her elbows into his ribs and twisted free of his grasp. Bell dropped his sword and took hold of Marion, as they watched Barrett struggle. The cameraman, Davidson, who had long since stopped filming, had followed Marion as she had closed the gap with the duelists.

Stunned and thrown off balance, the Ripper stumbled. His balance and sense of direction lost for a brief instant, he backed away from Bell and closer to the wind machine. The propeller caught the Ripper’s cape, his hand was thrown up and his sword swallowed by the blade as it pulled him into the wind machine. His cape and shirt ripped from him as he was thrown forward. Multiple crescents carved deeply in his back. His saber lost, the Ripper, wild-eyed, in pain and fear, turned and ran toward the tunnel opening past the wind machine.

Davidson took Marion by the hand. Bell leapt forward, following the Ripper out of the tunnel. Just as Bell rounded the outside of the propeller, he tackled the Ripper and took him down. The Ripper twisted out from under Bell and, as Bell recovered, the Ripper kicked out at him. Bell grabbed his boot and twisted the Ripper. Bell was able to stand quickly and square off with Barrett. The force of the air being pulled into the blades made it difficult to keep their balance, but Bell got off three jabs to Barrett’s wounded chest and then an upper cut that sent the Ripper reeling backwards. The wind machine’s turbulent slipstream that sucked into the tunnel was too much. Generated by the tremendous torque of the huge propeller, it seized Jack the Ripper. He grabbed on to the engine and screamed in agony when the red-hot aluminum exhaust manifold seared his hands.

With nothing to hold on to, he shrieked in despair.

In less than two seconds, Jack the Ripper disappeared before Isaac Bell’s eyes. Chunks of flesh and bone flew into the rear of the tunnel as a fine mist of blood sprayed the walls.

Marion, unable to see who had been cut to pieces, in panic started to run to the tunnel opening. Davidson reached her and restrained her. Desperate, she lamented in a pitched wail, “Isaac!”

Alone, with the roar of the engine and the horror of the moment, Bell threw the switch. As the propeller blades started to slow, Isaac made his way around the wind machine and saw Marion running toward him, tears flooding her cheeks. He reached out and held her tight in his arms. She was trembling, shivering, as if frozen in a wintry wind.

“I thought you’d died!”

Bell kissed her lightly on the forehead, and said softly, “Not yet. Not for another fifty years.”