The Race

10

ISAAC BELL YANKED HIS BROWNING PISTOL from his shoulder holster and ran full tilt up the middle of a double row of flying machines.

The sight of a tall man in a white suit running toward them with a gun in his hand scattered the mechanicians who were staring at the wreckage behind him. At the end of the path they cleared for him Bell saw Josephine with her back to him. In front of her, the red-haired Archie Abbott was shielding her with his own body. In front of Archie, six Van Dorn detectives fought shoulder to shoulder to block a flying wedge of thugs charging with fists, clubs, and lengths of sharpened bicycle chain.

Behind the attackers stood a dark green Doubleday, Page delivery van with its back doors open wide. Harry Frost leaped through the doors with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other.

A Van Dorn drew his gun. A bicycle chain snaked it out of his bloodied hand. A club to his skull sent him pinwheeling. A second detective was knocked to the trampled grass. The remaining four fought to hold the line, but they were overwhelmed by the flying wedge and flung aside, opening a clear path to Archie and Josephine. Harry Frost charged up it with the speed and power of a maddened rhino.

Isaac Bell triggered his Browning. It was a highly accurate weapon, but he was running at full speed so he aimed for the larger target of Frost’s body instead of his head. Bell’s bullet went home. He saw it pluck Frost’s coat, but it did not slow the big man’s charge. Nor did it prevent Frost from leveling his gun at Archie.

Bell was almost to them, close enough to recognize Frost’s gun as a Webley-Fosbery. Knowing Frost’s predilection for brutality, Bell feared that the weapon was loaded with the.455 “Manstopper” hollow-points.

Archie stood his ground and aimed his pistol at Frost. It was a small-scale 6.35mm Mauser pocket pistol, an experimental model that the factory owners had presented to him when his honeymoon took him through Germany. Bell had argued that it was too light to count on. But Archie had smiled, “It’s a keepsake of our honeymoon, and it doesn’t wrinkle my suit.”

Coolly, he let Frost close the range before he squeezed off three bullets.

Bell saw the bullets pierce Frost’s lapels. But Frost kept coming. Speed, weight, and momentum were stronger forces than three 6.35mm slugs. Archie’s well-aimed bullets would ultimately kill Harry Frost, but not before the charging man wreaked bloody destruction. Bell aimed for Frost’s head. Archie blocked his line of fire.

Cool as ice, the redheaded detective tipped up the barrel to place the coup de grâce between Frost’s eyes. Before he could fire, another of the attackers’ sharpened chains whistled through the air like a bullwhip and slashed the Mauser out of his hand.

Isaac Bell jinked to the left and fired over Archie’s shoulder. He was sure he had hit Frost again. But the angry red-faced giant triggered his own weapon point-blank at Archie Abbott. The Webley boomed like a cannon.

Archie staggered as the hollow-point bored a tunnel through his chest. His legs crumpled under him. Frost jammed his revolver in his pocket and switched the knife to his right hand, burning eyes locking on Josephine as he brushed past Archie.

Archie hurled a mighty left hook as he fell.

Bell knew that with his body shattered, the punch was born of all that Archie had left – his courage and his skill. It caught Frost square on the side of his jaw with such force that bone cracked. Frost’s eyes widened with shock. His fist convulsed open. The knife dropped.

Bell was almost on him. He couldn’t shoot. Josephine was in his way.

Frost whirled and ran.

Bell started to chase after him. But as he leaped across his fallen friend’s body he saw bright red blood frothing from Archie’s coat. Without hesitating, he dropped to the ground beside him.

“Doctors!” he shouted. “Get doctors!”

Bell opened Archie’s coat and shirt and pulled a razor-sharp throwing knife from his own boot to cut away Archie’s undershirt. Air was bubbling from the wound. Bell looked around. People were gaping. But one set of eyes was cool and ready to help.

“Josephine!”

He handed her the knife.

“Quick. Cut me a patch of wing fabric. Like this.”

He indicated the size with his hands.

“Doctors!” Bell shouted to those watching. “Get moving, you men! Find doctors!”

Josephine was back in seconds with a neatly cut square of yellow fabric.

Isaac Bell pressed it over the wound and held three sides of the square down tight to Archie’s skin. As Archie’s chest rose and fell, Bell let air escape from the wound but allowed no more air to be sucked in.

“Josephine!”

“I’m here.”

“I need cloth to tie this down.”

Without hesitation, she removed her heavy flying tunic and then her blouse, which she sliced into long strips.

“Help me slip it under him.”

Bell rolled Archie onto the side of the wound while Josephine worked the cloth under him. Bell tied the ends.

“Grab those shrouds to keep him warm. Doctors!”

A doctor ran up at last. He banged his bag down, knelt beside Archie, and felt for a pulse. “Good job,” he said of the patch. “Are you a physician?”

“I’ve seen it done,” Bell answered tersely. On his own chest, he could have added, when he was twenty-two years old, by Joseph Van Dorn, calmly trying to save his apprentice’s life while tears were soaking his whiskers.

“What put the hole in him?” asked the doctor.

“Hollow-point.455.”

The doctor looked at Bell. “Is he a friend?”

“He is my best friend.”

The doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. There’s a reason they call it a manstopper.”

“We need an ambulance.”

“One’s coming right now. The English birdman didn’t need it.”

WITHIN MINUTES ARCHIE was loaded into the ambulance and on his way to the hospital with two doctors riding with him. By then the Van Dorns had regrouped, and formed a powerful cordon around Josephine.

Harry Frost had escaped in the confusion.

Bell quickly organized a manhunt, which included alerting every hospital in the area.

“He’s carrying at least three slugs in him,” he said, “maybe four. And Archie broke his jaw.”

“We caught two of their crew, Isaac. Brooklyn toughs. I recognize one. He works for Rod Sweets, the opium king. What do we do with them?”

“See what you can get out of them before you hand them to the cops.” Bell had no doubt that Archie had romanced the local police when he first arrived at the racetrack. It was standard practice to cozy up and find who should be paid off to be friends in an emergency.

“They’re singing already. Frost paid them a hundred bucks a head. Gave them the dough up front so they could bank it with their girlfriends in case they got caught.”

“O.K. I doubt they’ll know anything useful about Frost. But see what you can learn. Then turn them in. Tell the cops Van Dorn will press charges. Give them a reason to hold them.”

Bell spoke briefly with Josephine to make sure she felt safe and to assure her that he had ordered up additional guards until they caught Frost. “Are you all right?”

“I’m going up,” she said.

“Now?”

“Flying clears my mind.”

“Don’t you have to replace the fabric you cut out of your airship?”

“I didn’t cut it from an essential surface.”

BELL HURRIED TO WHERE Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s biplane had struck the ground. It was a very odd coincidence that the Englishman’s accident had distracted everyone in Belmont Park, including his detectives, at the moment Harry Frost’s thugs attacked. In fact, it could not be a coincidence. Frost must have somehow engineered it.

Bell saw from a distance that the Farman had crashed nose first. Its fuselage was sticking straight up in the air like a monument, a tombstone, to poor Eddison-Sydney-Martin, who, if Bell’s suspicions were correct, was the victim of a murder, not an accident. The baronet’s wife was standing beside the wrecked biplane. A tall man in a flying helmet had his arm around her as if to comfort her. He was smoking a cigarette. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. She laughed.

Bell circled so he could see their faces. The man was Eddison-Sydney-Martin himself. He was dead white in the face, with a trickle of blood seeping from a bandage over his eye, and he was leaning heavily on Abby. But, miraculously, the Englishman was standing on his own two feet.

Bell looked again at the =wrecked Farman, and asked, “Who was driving your machine?”

Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin laughed. “I’m afraid I attended the entire adventure in person.”

“Something of a miracle.”

“The framework tends to absorb the impact – all that wood and bamboo collapses in a cushiony manner, if you know what I mean. So long as one doesn’t tumble out and snap one’s neck, or one’s motor doesn’t jump its moorings and crush one, one has a fair shot at surviving a smash. Not that a chap is not immensely grateful for whatever part luck plays, what?”

“I’m sorry to see you’re out of the race.”

“I’m not out of the race. But I do need another machine straightaway.”

Bell glanced at his wife, wondering whether, as she wrote checks, she would risk sending her husband up in the air again. Abby said, “Some clever folk in New Haven are experimenting with a sort of ‘headless’ Curtiss that has a lot of go.”

“They’ve a license from Breguet, who make an excellent machine,” her husband added.

“What went wrong?” Bell asked. “Why did she go down?”

“I heard a loud bang. Then a wire stay shrieked past my head. It would appear that a counterbracer parted. Unsupported, the wing collapsed.”

“Why did the counterbracing stay break?”

“That is something of a mystery. I mean, one never encounters shoddy construction on a Farman machine.” He shrugged. “My chaps are looking into it. But it’s all in the game, isn’t it? Accidents do happen.”

“Sometimes,” said Bell, even more convinced that the Englishman’s accident was no accident. He stepped closer to the wreck, where Lionel Ruggs, the Farman’s chief mechanician, was removing parts to be salvaged. “Did you find the wire that broke?” he asked.

“Bloody little that didn’t break,” Ruggs retorted. “She hit so hard, she’s mostly splinters.”

“I mean, the wire that broke that caused the accident. The baronet said he heard one let loose.”

“I’ve laid them all over there.” He pointed at a row of wires. “So far, I find none broken. It’s Roebling wire. Same as was spun into the cables that hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. Virtually indestructible.”

Bell went to look for himself. A helper, a boy no more than fourteen, came and went with more wire. He was puzzling over one end of a strand when Bell asked, “What do you have there, sonny?”

“Nothing.”

Bell took a shiny silver dollar from his pocket. “But you’re staring like something struck you – here.”

The boy grabbed the coin. “Thank you, sir.”

“Why don’t you show this to your boss?”

The boy dragged the wire to the chief mechanician. “Look at this, Mr. Ruggs.”

“Lay it out with the rest, laddie.”

“But, sir. Look at this, sir.”

Lionel Ruggs put on reading spectacles and held it to the light. “Bloody hell. . Bloody, bloody hell!”

Just then, Dmitri Platov came running up. He shook his head at the remains of the Farman. Then he looked at Eddison-Sydney-Martin, who was lighting a fresh smoke. “Is surviving? Is lucky.”

Bell asked, “What do you make of this, Mr. Platov?”

Platov took the fitting in his fingers and studied it, puzzlement growing on his face. “Is strange. Is very strange.”

Bell asked, “Why is it strange?”

“Is aluminum.”

Chief Mechanician Ruggs exploded, “What the bloody hell was it doing on our machine?”

“What do you mean?” asked Isaac Bell.

Platov said, “Is something should not be. Is – how you say – link-ed weak.”

“This anchor at the end of the wire is made of cast aluminum,” Ruggs seethed. “It should be steel. There’s tons of tension on those wires, tons more when the machine moves sharply. The anchor bolt should be as least as strong as the wire. Otherwise, like Mr. Platov says, it’s a weak link.”

“Where did it come from?” asked Bell.

“I’ve seen it used. But not on our machines, thank you very much.”

Bell turned to the Russian. “Have you seen aluminum used this way?”

“Aluminum lightweight. Aluminum on struts, aluminum on crossing members, aluminum on framing. But counterbracing anchor? Only fools.” He handed it back to Lionel Ruggs, his ordinarily cheery face stern. “Is person doing should being shot.”

“I’ll pull the trigger myself if I find the bloody bastard,” said the mechanician.

11

ISAAC BELL RAN TO THE RAIL YARD, where Archie had set up a field office in a corner of Josephine’s hangar car. He scanned the reports that were coming in by telegraph, telephone, and Van Dorn messenger. Harry Frost was still on the run despite his wounds.

Or to put it more accurately, Bell had to admit, Harry Frost had vanished.

All hospitals had been alerted to look out for the wounded man. None had responded. Frost could be dying in a ditch or dead already. He could be hiding in the farmland around the racetrack. Or he could have made his way to Brooklyn, where gangsters would take him in, for a price, and provide midwives and crooked pharmacists to treat his wounds. He could have run east into rural Nassau and Suffolk counties. Or north to the vast, thinly populated Long Island hunt country, where the owners of great American fortunes rode to the hounds.

Bell telephoned the New York office. He ordered more agents sent out from Manhattan, and others to double the watch on the railroad and subway stations and the ferries. And he dispatched apprentices to hospitals with stern instructions not to engage but to call for help. When he had done all he could to encourage the manhunt, Bell left a dozen detectives with orders to stick close to Josephine and raced his borrowed Pierce to the Nassau Hospital in Mineola, where they had taken Archie.

Archie’s beautiful wife, Lillian, a young blond-haired woman of nineteen, was standing outside the operating room in a long duster, having driven from New York. Her astonishingly pale blue eyes were dry and alert, but her face was a mask of dread.

Bell took her in his arms. He had introduced her to Archie, sensing that the high-spirited only child of a widowed “shirtsleeve” railroad tycoon would bring particular joy to his friend’s life. He had been more than right. They adored each other. He had persuaded her crusty father to see Archie for the man he was and not a fortune hunter. You changed my life, Archie had thanked him simply at the wedding where Bell was best man. Ironically, years earlier, he had already changed Archie’s life when he proposed that Archie become a Van Dorn detective. If only he hadn’t.

Bell watched over the top of her head as a surgeon came out of the operating room, his expression grave. When he saw Bell holding Lillian, relief flickered in his eyes as if the fact that a friend was comforting her would make it easier to tell her that her husband had died.

“The doctor is here,” Bell whispered.

She turned to the doctor. “Tell me.”

The doctor hesitated. To Isaac Bell, Lillian Osgood Abbott was the little sister he had never had. He could forget that she was so exquisitely beautiful that most men found it very difficult to speak to her on first meeting. In this awful instance, Bell guessed that the doctor could not bear to utter any word that would cause tears to track her cheeks or her brave mouth to crumble.

“Tell me,” she repeated, and took the doctor’s hand. Her firm touch gave the man courage.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Abbott. The bullet did much damage, barely missed the heart and shattered two ribs.”

Bell felt a cavern open in his own heart. “Is he dead?”

“No!. . Not yet.”

“Is it hopeless?” Lillian asked.

“I wish I could. .”

Bell held tighter as she sagged in his arms.

He said, “Is there nothing that can be done?”

“I. . nothing I can do.”

“Is there anyone who can save him?” Isaac Bell demanded.

The doctor gave a deep sigh and stared sightlessly back at him. “There is only one man who could even attempt to operate. The surgeon S. D. Nuland-Novicki. In the Boer War, he developed new procedures for treating gunshot wounds. Unfortunately, Dr. Nuland-Novicki-”

“Get him!” cried Lillian.

“He is away. He’s lecturing in Chicago.”

Isaac Bell and Lillian Osgood Abbott locked eyes in sudden hope.

The doctor said, “But even if Nuland-Novicki could board the Twentieth Century Limited in time, your husband will never last the eighteen hours it will take to get here. Nineteen, with the extra time from here to Long Island. We can’t move him to New York.”

“How long does he have?”

“Twelve or fourteen hours at most.”

“Take us to a telephone,” Bell demanded.

The doctor led them at a dead run through echoing halls to the hospital’s central telephone station. “Thank God, Father’s at home,” said Lillian. “New York,” she told the operator. “Murray Hill four-four-four.”

The connection was made to Osgood Hennessy’s limestone mansion on Park Avenue. The butler summoned Hennessy to the telephone.

“Father. Listen to me. Archie’s been shot. . Yes, he is desperately wounded. There is a surgeon in Chicago. I need him here in twelve hours.”

The doctor shook his head, and said to Bell, “The Twentieth Century and the Broadway Limited take eighteen hours. What train could possibly make it from Chicago to New York faster than those crack fliers?”

Isaac Bell allowed himself a hopeful smile. “A special steaming on tracks cleared by a railroad baron who loves his daughter.”

“COMMISSIONER BAKER’S ENEMIES call him a lightweight,” growled Osgood Hennessy, referring to New York City’s recently appointed police commissioner. “I call him a damned good fellow.”

Six Traffic Squad touring cars and a motorcycle that the department was testing with a view to forming a motorcycle squad were racing their engines outside Grand Central Terminal, prepared to escort Hennessy’s limousine at the highest possible speed over the Manhattan Bridge, across Brooklyn, and into Nassau County. The streets were dark, dawn a faint hint of pink in the eastern sky.

“Here they are!” cried Lillian.

Isaac Bell exploded from the railroad terminal, running hard, with his hand locked on the arm of a youthful, fit-looking Nuland-Novicki, who was scampering alongside like an eager schnauzer.

Engines roared, sirens howled, and in seconds the limousine was tearing down Park Avenue. Lillian handed Nuland-Novicki the latest wire from the hospital. He read it, nodding his head. “The patient is a strong man,” he said reassuringly. “That always helps.”

AT BELMONT PARK that same pink hint of dawn reflected on the shiny steel rail down which Dmitri Platov’s revolutionary thermo engine was scheduled to speed on its final test run. The freshening sky gave urgency to the task of a man crouched under it. If he stayed much longer, early risers would see him loosening bolts with a monkey wrench. Already, he smelled breakfast. The breeze traveling across the infield carried whiffs of bacon frying on the support trains in the yards on the other side of the grandstand.

Mechanicians would appear any minute. But sabotage was slow work. He had to wait before he turned each nut to sluice the threads with penetrating oil to prevent the loud screech of rusty metal. Then he had to mop the drips that would be noticed by sharp eyes performing the last earthbound tests before experimenting on Steve Stevens’s biplane, which was waiting near the rail under canvas.

He would have finished by now, except that the detectives guarding Josephine Josephs’s flying machine made a habit of sweeping the infield. Silent, unpredictable, they would appear out of nowhere shining flashlights, then vanish just as suddenly, leaving him to wonder when they were coming next and from which direction. Twice he had crouched, nervously rubbing his arm, while he waited for them to move on.

His final step, when he had loosened the fishtail that held two abutting ends of rail, was to work matchsticks into the space he had opened. If anyone tested the joint, it would not feel loose. But when assaulted by the enormous forces unleashed by the thermo engine, the rails would part and the joint burst open. Its effect would be like a railroad switch opened to shunt a train from one track to another. The difference was, this was a single rail, and the “train,” Platov’s miracle engine, would have no track to shunt onto but would fly through the air like a self-propelled cannonball. And God help anyone who got in its way.

12

“HARRY FROST IS NOT DEAD,” said Isaac Bell.

“By all accounts,” said Joseph Van Dorn, “Harry Frost was shot twice by you and three times by poor Archie. He’s got more lead in him than a tinsmith.”

“Not enough to kill him.”

“We’ve not seen hide nor hair of him. No hospital has heard of him. No doctor has reported treating a broken jaw accompanied by unexplained gunshot wounds.”

“Outlaw doctors charge extra not to report gunshot wounds.”

“Nor have we received proof of any sightings by the public.”

“We received numerous tips,” said Bell.

“None panned out.”

“That doesn’t mean he’s dead.”

“At least he’s out of commission.”

“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Isaac Bell.

Joseph Van Dorn smacked a strong hand on his desk. “Now, listen to me, Isaac. We’ve been down this road repeatedly. I would love that Harry Frost were not dead. It would be good for business. Preston Whiteway would continue paying a fortune for cross-country protection of our Sweetheart of the Air. Happily, he’s willing to pay us to find Frost’s corpse. But I cannot in good conscience continue to bill him for a dozen agents around the clock.”

“There is no corpse,” Bell replied.

The boss asked, “What evidence do you have that he is not dead?”

Bell jumped up and paced long-leggedly around the Hotel Knickerbocker suite that Van Dorn commandeered for his private office on the occasions he was in New York. “Sir,” he addressed him formally, “you have been a detective longer than I.”

“A lot longer.”

“As such, you know that a so-called hunch by an experienced investigator is bedded in reality. A hunch does not come from nothing.”

“Next you’ll be defending sixth senses,” Van Dorn retorted.

“I don’t have to defend sixth senses,” Bell shot back, “because you know better than I, from your long experience, that sixth senses are the same as hunches. Both are inspired by observations of things and events that we’re not yet aware we have seen.”

“Do you have any idea what you observed that provokes your hunch?”

“Sarcasm is the boss’s privilege, sir,” Bell answered. “Perhaps I observed how agilely Frost carried himself when he ran, sir. Or that shock registered on his face only when Archie broke his jaw, sir. Not when we shot him, sir.”

“Will you please stop calling me sir?”

“Yes, sir,” Bell grinned.

“You’re darned chipper today.”

“I am so relieved that Archie has a fighting chance. Dr. Nuland-Novicki said the most important thing was getting through the first twenty-four hours, and he has.”

“When can I visit him?” asked Van Dorn.

“Not yet. Lillian’s the only one they’ll allow in his room. Even Archie’s mother is cooling her heels in the hallway. The other reason I’m chipper is, Marion arrives any day from San Francisco. She’s hired on with Whiteway to take moving pictures of the race.”

Van Dorn fell silent for a moment, reflecting on their exchange. When he spoke again, it was soberly. “What you say is true about hunches – or, if not entirely true, is certainly agreed upon by experienced fieldmen.”

“The unrecognized observation is a compelling phenomenon.”

“But,” said Van Dorn, raising a meaty finger for emphasis, “experienced fieldmen also agree that hunches and sixth senses have enriched bookmakers since the first horse race in human history. This morning I learned that you’ve doubled your bets, summoning to Belmont Park some of my best men who are already thinly dispersed about the continent.”

“‘Texas’ Walt Hatfield,” Bell answered boldly and without apology. “Eddie Edwards from Kansas City. Arthur Curtis from Denver. James Dashwood from San Francisco.”

“I wouldn’t put Dashwood in that company.”

“I’ve worked with the kid in California,” said Bell. “What Dash lacks in experience he makes up in doggedness. He is also the finest pistol shot in the agency. He would have drilled Harry Frost a third eye in his forehead.”

“Be that as it may, it costs money to move men around. Not to mention the danger of derailing cases they’re working on.”

“I conversed with their field office managers before I summoned them.”

“You should have conversed with me. I can tell you right now that I am sending Texas Walt straight back to Texas to finish his San Antone train robbery case and Arthur Curtis to Europe to open the Berlin office. Archie Abbott turned up some good locals. Arthur’s the man to run them, as he speaks German.”

“I need the best, too, Joe. I’m juggling four jobs: protecting Josephine, protecting the cross-country air race, hunting Frost, and investigating what exactly happened to Marco Celere.”

“There, too, evidence points squarely at dead.”

“There, too, we’re short a corpse.”

“I exchanged wires with Preston Whiteway last night. He’ll settle for either body: Celere’s so we can convict Frost or Frost’s so we can bury him.”

“Frost dead, is my vote, too,” said Bell. “Josephine would be safe, and I could hunt for Celere at my leisure.”

“Why bother if Frost is dead?”

“I don’t like murders without bodies. Something is off-kilter.”

“Another hunch?”

“Do you like murders without bodies, Joe?”

“No. You’re right. Something’s off.”

There was a quiet, tentative knock at the door. Van Dorn barked, “Enter!”

An apprentice scuttled in with a telegram for Isaac Bell.

Bell read it, his expression darkening, and he told the apprentice, who was balanced on his toes poised to flee, “Wire them that I want a darned good explanation for why it took so long to get those wanted posters into that bank.”

The apprentice ran out. Van Dorn asked, “What’s up?”

“Frost is not dead.”

“Another hunch?”

“Harry Frost just withdrew ten thousand dollars from the First National Bank of Cincinnati. Shortly after he left, our office there finally managed to drop off the special banks-only wanted posters, warning that Frost might come in looking for money. By the time the bank manager called us, he was gone.”

“A long shot that paid off, those posters,” said Van Dorn. “Well done.”

“It would have been a lot better done if someone did their job properly in Cincinnati.”

“I’ve been considering cleaning house in Cincinnati. This tears it. Did they say anything about Frost’s wounds?”

“No.” Bell stood up. “Joe, I have to ask you to personally oversee the Josephine squad until I get back.”

“Where are you going?”

“Massachusetts, east of Albany.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Young Dashwood unearthed an interesting fact. I had asked him to look into Marco Celere’s background. Turns out Frost wasn’t the only one who wanted to kill him.”

Van Dorn shot his chief investigator an inquiring glance. “I’m intrigued when more than one person wants to kill a man. Who is it?”

“A deranged Italian woman – Danielle Di Vecchio – stabbed Celere, screaming, ‘Ladro! Ladro!’ Ladro means ‘thief’ in Italian.”

“Any idea what set her off?”

“None at all. They locked her up in a private insane asylum. I’m going up to see what I can learn from her.”

“Word to the wise, Isaac: these private asylum fellows can be difficult. They hold such sway over patients, they become little Napoleons – Ironic, since many of their patients think they’re Napoleon.”

“I’ll ask Grady to research a chink in his armor.”

“Just make sure you’re back before the race starts. You younger fellows are better suited to chasing flying machines around the countryside and sleeping out of doors. Don’t worry about Josephine. I’ll look after her personally.”

BELL CAUGHT the Empire State Express to Albany, rented a powerful Ford Model K, and sped east on twenty miles of dirt roads into a thinly populated section of northwestern Massachusetts. It was hilly country, with scattered farms separated by dense stands of forest. Twice he stopped to ask directions. The second time, he got them from a mournful-looking young truck driver who was changing a flat tire by the side of the dusty road. A wagon in tow contained a disassembled flying machine with its wings folded.

“Ryder Private Asylum for the Insane?” the driver echoed Bell’s question.

“Do you know where it is?”

“I should think I do. Just over that hill. You’ll see it from the top.”

The driver’s costume – flat cap, vest, bow tie, and banded shirtsleeves – told Bell that he was likely the aeroplane’s mechanician. “Where are you taking the flying machine?”

“Nowhere,” he answered with a woebegone finality that brooked no further questions.

Bell drove the Model K to the crest of the hill and saw below a dark red brick building hulking in the shadows of a narrow valley. Fortresslike crenellations and towers at either end did nothing to lighten the aura of despair. The windows were small and, Bell saw as he drew near, barred like a penitentiary’s. A high wall of the same bleak-colored brick surrounded the grounds. He had to stop the auto at an iron gate, where he pressed a bell button that eventually drew the attention of a surly guard with a billy club dangling from his belt.

“I am Isaac Bell. I have an appointment with Dr. Ryder.”

“You can’t bring that in here,” he said, pointing at the car.

Bell parked the Ford on the side of the driveway. The guard let him through the gate. “I ain’t responsible for what happens to that auto out there,” he smirked. “All the loonies ain’t inside.”

Bell stepped closer and gave him a cold smile. “Consider that auto your primary responsibility until I return.”

“What did you say?”

“If anything happens to that auto, I will take it out of your hide. Do you believe me? Good. Now, take me to Dr. Ryder.”

The owner of the asylum was a trim, precise, exquisitely dressed man in his forties. He looked, Bell thought, like a fussy sort, overly pleased with a situation that gave him total control over the lives of hundreds of patients. He was glad he had heeded Joe Van Dorn’s warning about little Napoleons.

“I don’t know that it will be convenient for you to visit Miss Di Vecchio this afternoon,” said Dr. Ryder.

“You and I spoke by long-distance telephone this morning,” Bell reminded him. “You agreed to a meeting with Miss Di Vecchio.”

“The lunatic patient’s state of mind does not always concur with an outsider’s convenience. An untimely encounter could be distressing for both of you.”

“I’m willing to risk it,” said Bell.

“Ah, but what of the patient?”

Isaac Bell looked Dr. Ryder in the eye. “Does the name Andrew Rubenoff ring a bell?”

“Sounds like a Jew.”

“In fact, he is a Jew,” Bell answered with a dangerous flash in his eye. He would never abide bigotry, which was going to make taking Ryder down a peg even more satisfying. “And a fine Jew he is. Heck of a piano player, too.”

“I am afraid I have not met the, ah, gentleman.”

“Mr. Rubenoff is a banker. He’s an old friend of my father’s. Practically an uncle to me.”

“I have no banker named Rubenoff. And now if you’ll excuse-”

“I am not surprised that you don’t know Mr. Rubenoff. His clients tend toward up-and-coming lines like automobile manufacture and moving pictures. But, out of sentiment, he allows his holding companies to retain their grip on some smaller, more conventional banks, and even buy another now and then. In fact, ‘Uncle Andrew’ asked me would I pay a visit on his behalf to one nearby while I was in your neighborhood. I believe it’s called the First Farmers Bank of Pittsfield.”

Dr. Ryder turned white.

Bell said, “The Van Dorn Detective Agency’s Research boys root up the darnedest information. First Farmers of Pittsfield holds your mortgage, Dr. Ryder, the terms of which allow the bank to call in your loan if the value of the collateral plummets – as it has for most private asylums, including the Ryder Private Asylum for the Insane, as the new state-run institutions siphon off patients. I will meet with Miss Di Vecchio in a clean, pleasant, well-lighted room. Your personal quarters, which I understand are on the top floor of the turret, will be ideal.”

DANIELLE DI VECCHIO took Bell’s breath away. She entered Ryder’s cozy apartment tentatively, a little fearful – understandably, Bell thought – but also curious, a tall, well-built, very beautiful woman in a shabby white dress. She had long black hair and enormous dark eyes.

Bell removed his hat and gestured for the matron to leave them and close the door. He offered his hand. “Miss Di Vecchio. Thank you for coming to see me. I am Isaac Bell.”

He spoke softly and gently, mindful that she had been incarcerated under court order for slashing a man with a knife. Her eyes, which were darting around the room, drinking in furniture, carpets, paintings, and books, settled on him.

“Who are you?” Her accent was Italian, her English pronunciation clear.

“I am a private detective. I am investigating the shooting of Marco Celere.”

“Ladro!”

“Yes. Why do you call him a thief?”

“He stole,” she answered simply. Her eyes roamed to the window, and the way her face lit up told Isaac Bell that she had not been out of doors for a long time and probably not seen green trees and grass and blue sky even from a distance.

“Why don’t we sit in this window seat?” Bell asked, moving slowly toward it. She followed him carefully, warily as a cat yet aching to be caressed by the breeze that stirred the curtains. Bell positioned himself so he could stop her if she tried to jump out the window.

“Can you tell me what Marco Celere stole?”

“Is he dead from this shooting?”

“Probably,” answered Bell.

“Good,” she said, then crossed herself.

“Why did you make the sign of the cross?”

“I’m glad he’s dead. But I’m glad it wasn’t me who took life. That is God’s work.”

Doubting that God had deputized Harry Frost, Isaac Bell took a chance on Di Vecchio’s mental state. “But you tried to kill him, didn’t you?”

“And failed,” she answered. She looked Bell in the face. “I have had months to think about it. I believe that a part of my soul held back. I don’t remember everything that happened that day, but I do recall that when the knife missed his neck it carved a long cut in his arm. Here. .” She ran her fingers in an electric glide down the inside of Bell’s forearm.

“I was glad. But I can’t remember whether I was glad because I drew blood or glad because I didn’t kill.”

“What did Marco steal?”

“My father’s work.”

“What work was that?”

“My father was aeroplano cervellone-how do you say? – brain. Genius!”

“Your father invented flying machines?”

“Yes! Bella monoplano. He named it Aquila. Aquila means ‘eagle’ in American. When he brought his Aquila to America, he was so proud to immigrate to your country that he named her American Eagle.”

She began talking a mile a minute. Marco Celere had worked for her father in Italy as a mechanician, helping him build the aeroplanes he invented. “Back in Italy. Before he made his name short.”

“Marco changed his name? What was it?”

“Prestogiacomo.”

“Prestogiacomo,” Bell imitated the sound that rolled off her tongue. He asked her to spell it and wrote it in his notebook.

“When Marco came here, he said it was too long for Americans. But that was a lie. Everyone knew Prestogiacomo was ladro. Here, his new name, Celere, only means ‘quick.’ No one knew the kind of man he really was.”

“What did he steal from your father?”

What Marco Celere had stolen, Di Vecchio claimed, were new methods of wing strengthening and roll control.

“Can you explain what you mean by roll control?” Bell asked, still testing her lucidity.

She gestured, using her long graceful arms like wings. “When the aeroplano tilts this way, the conduttore – pilota-changes the shape of wing to make it tilt that way so to be straight.”

Recalling his first conversation with Josephine, Bell asked, “Did your father happen to invent alettoni?”

“Yes! Si! Si! That’s what I am telling you. Alettoni.”

“Little wings.”

“My father,” she said, tapping her chest proudly, “my wonderful babbo. Instead of warping the whole wing, he moved only small parts of it. Much better.”

Bell passed his notepad to her and handed over his Waterman fountain pen. “Can you show me?”

She sketched a monoplane, and depicted the movable hinged parts at the back of the outer edges of the wings. It looked very much like the yellow machine that Josephine was flying.

“Alettoni-hinged little wings – is what Marco stole from your father?”

“Not only. He stole strength, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“My father learned how wings act to make them strong.”

In a fresh torrent of English peppered with Italian and illustrated with another sketch, Danielle explained that monoplanes had a habit of crashing when their wings suddenly collapsed in flight, unlike biplanes, whose double wings were structurally more sound. Bell nodded his understanding. He had heard this repeatedly in the Belmont Park infield. Monoplanes were slightly faster than biplanes because they presented less wind resistance and weighed less. Biplanes were stronger – one of the reasons they were all surprised when Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s Farman had broken up. According to Danielle Di Vecchio, Marco Celere had proposed that the monoplane’s weakness came not from the “flying wire” stays underneath the wings but the “landing wires” above them.

“Marco tested his monoplano with sandbags to make like the strain of flying – what is your word?”

“Simulate?” “Si. Simulate the strain of flying. My father said a static test was too simplistic. Marco was pretending the wings do not move. He pretended that forces on them do not change. But wings do move in flight! Don’t you see, Mr. Bell? Forces of wind gusts and strains of the machine’s maneuvers-carico dinamico-attack its wings from many directions and not only push but twist the wings. Marco’s silly tests took no account of these,” she said scornfully. “He made his wings too stiff. He is meccanico, not artista!”

She handed Bell the drawings.

Bell saw a strong similarity to the machine that Josephine had persuaded Preston Whiteway to buy back from Marco Celere’s creditors. “Is Marco’s monoplane dangerous?” he asked.

“The one he made in San Francisco? It would be dangerous if he had not stolen my father’s design.”

Bell said, “I heard a rumor that a monoplane Marco sold to the Italian Army broke a wing.”

“Si!” she said angrily. “That’s the one that made all the trouble. His too-stiff monoplano-the one he tested with sandbags back in Italy – smashed.”

“But why couldn’t your father sell his Eagle monoplano to the Italian Army if it was better than Marco’s?”

“Marco ruined the market. He poisoned the generals’ minds against all monoplano. My father’s monoplano factory went bankrupt.”

“Interesting,” said Bell, watching her reaction. “Both your father and Marco had to leave Italy.”

“Marco fled!” she answered defiantly. “He took my father’s drawing to San Francisco, where he sold machines to that rich woman Josephine. My father emigrated to New York. He had high hopes of selling his Aquila monoplano in New York. Wall Street bankers would invest in a new factory. Before he could interest them, creditors seized everything in Italy. He was ruined. So ruined that he killed himself. With gas, in a cheap San Francisco hotel room.”

“San Francisco? You said he came to New York.”

“Marco lured him there, promising money for his inventions. But all he wanted was my father to fix his machines. He died all alone. Not even a priest. That is why I tried to kill Marco Celere.”

She crossed her shapely arms and looked Bell in the eye. “I am angry. Not insane.”

“I can see that,” said Isaac Bell.

“But I am locked with insane.”

“Are you treated well?”

She shrugged. Her long graceful fingers picked at her dress, which a hundred launderings had turned gray. “When I am angry, they lock me alone.”

“I will take Dr. Ryder aside and have a word with him.” Firmly aside, by the scruff of his neck, with his face jammed against a wall.

“I have no money for lawyers. No money for ‘medical experts’ to tell the court I am not lunatic.”

“May I ask why your father could not find other buyers for his Eagle flying machine?”

“My father’s monoplano is so much better, so fresh and new, that some of it is still – how do you say? – innato. Tempestuous.”

“Temperamental?”

“Yes. She is not yet tamed.”

“Is your father’s flying machine dangerous?”

“Shall we say ‘interesting’?” Danielle Di Vecchio replied with an elegant smile. And at that moment, thought the tall detective, they could be thousands of miles from Massachusetts, flirting in a Roman salon.

“Where is it?” he asked.

The Italian woman’s dark-eyed gaze drifted past Bell, out the window, and locked on the hilltop. Her face lighted in a broad smile. “There,” she said.

Bell looked out the window. What on earth was she imagining?

The truck with the flat tire had towed its wagon to the crest of the hill. “A boy,” she explained. “A nice boy. He loves me.”

“But what is he doing with your father’s machine?”

“My father took it with him from Italy. His creditors can’t touch it here. It is his legacy. My inheritance. That boy helped my father in America. He is eccellente meccanico!”

“Not artista?” Bell asked, testing her reaction with a smile. He could not be sure, but she seemed as sane as he was.

“Artists are rare, Mr. Bell. I’m sure you know that. He wrote that he was coming. I thought he was dreaming.” She jumped up and waved out the window, but it was unlikely that he could see her. Bell passed her the hem of the white curtain. “Wave this. Maybe he’ll see it.” She did. But he did not respond, his gaze likely on the myriad barred windows.

She slumped down on the window seat. “He’s still dreaming. Does he imagine I can just walk out of here?”

“What is his name?” Bell asked.

“Andy. Andy Moser. My father liked him very much.”

Isaac Bell was struck by a wonderful possibility. He asked, “How fast is your father’s monoplane?”

“Very fast. Father believed that only speed would overcome winds. The more speedy the aeroplano, the safer in bad weather, Father said.”

“Faster than sixty miles per hour?”

“Father hoped for seventy.”

“Miss Di Vecchio, I have a proposition for you.”

13

“MR. MOSER, YOUR SITUATION is about to improve vastly,” Isaac Bell said to the sad-faced mechanician who was grilling a frankfurter on a fire he had built a safe distance from the crated American Eagle monoplane.

“How do you know my name?”

“Read this!”

Bell thrust a fine parchment-paper envelope he had lifted from Dr. Ryder’s writing desk into Moser’s grease-stained hand.

“Open it.”

Andy Moser slid a finger under the seal, unfolded a sheet of writing paper covered in an elegant Florentine cursive script, and read slowly, moving his lips.

Isaac Bell had seized an opportunity to help the beautiful Italian woman while helping himself solve the vexing problem he had warned Archie about. The field of competitors vying for the Whiteway Cup was growing so large that too many support trains would be jockeying for the same railroad tracks. Keeping up with Josephine’s flying machine to guard her life would be a nightmare even with the help of the auto patrols that Archie had envisioned.

But what, Bell had asked himself, if he took “the high ground”? With his own airship, he could ride herd on the race. He could watch Josephine in the air while he stationed men ahead at the racetracks and fairgrounds that would provide infields to alight on.

Danielle Di Vecchio needed money to plead her case to get out of Ryder’s asylum.

Isaac Bell needed a speedy airship. He bought hers.

“Danielle says I’m supposed to go with you, Mr. Bell.”

“And bring my flying machine,” said Bell, grinning at the wagon. Disassembled and folded up for travel, it looked like a dragonfly in a cage.

“And teach you how to drive it?”

“As soon as I set you up in a first-class hangar car.”

“But I don’t know how to fly it. I’m only a mechanician.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just get her running, and show me the controls. How long will it take to put it back together?”

“A day, with a good helper. Have you ever driven a flying machine?”

“I drive a one-hundred-mile-an-hour Locomobile. I have driven a V-Twin Indian racer motorcycle, a 4-6-2 Pacific locomotive, and a fifty-knot steel-hulled turbine yacht built by Sir Charles Algernon Parsons himself. I imagine I’ll pick it up.”

“Locomotives and steel yachts don’t leave the ground, Mr. Bell.”

“That’s why I’m so fired up! Finish your lunch and wave good-bye to Danielle. She’s watching from the fourteenth window from the left, second from the bottom. She can’t wave through the bars, but she can see you.”

Moser gazed sadly down the hill. “I hate leaving her behind, but she says you’re going to help get her out.”

“Don’t you worry, we’ll get her out. And in the meantime, Dr. Ryder has promised that her treatment will improve, dramatically. Will your truck make it to Albany?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll go ahead and charter a train. It will be waiting in the Albany yards, steam up for Belmont Park. Mechanicians will be standing by to help you reassemble the American Eagle the second you arrive.”

“Belmont Park? Are you intending to enter the American Eagle in the cross-country race?”

“No,” Bell laughed. “But it’s going to help me keep an eye on Josephine Josephs.”

Andy Moser looked incredulous. Of all he had read and heard since Isaac raced up in his Model K Ford, this took the cake. “You know the Sweetheart of the Air?”

“I am a private detective. Josephine’s husband is trying to kill her. The American Eagle is going to help me save her life.”

After Bell chartered his support train in Albany, he wired San Francisco to alert Dashwood to the fact that Marco Celere’s original name was Marco Prestogiacomo. He might well have still been Prestogiacomo when he landed in San Francisco, and Bell hoped that this new information would speed up Dashwood’s unusually slow progress.

“I’M NOT GOING TO WASTE flying time watching Dmitri Platov demonstrate his thermo engine,” Josephine told Isaac Bell a day later. “I doubt it will work. And even if it does, that horrible Steve Stevens is too fat to drive a flying machine, even one of Marco’s.”

“One of Marco’s? What do you mean?”

“It’s a biplane he invented for heavy lifting, to carry a bunch of passengers.”

Bell said, “I wasn’t aware that Marco had another machine in the race.”

“Steve Stevens bought it from his creditors. Lucky him. It’s the only machine in the world that will lift him. He paid twenty cents on the dollar. Poor Marco got nothing.”

Bell escorted her to her monoplane. Van Dorn mechanicians spun her propeller, and when the blue smoke of her motor turned white, she tore down the field and took to the sky for yet another of her long-distance practice runs.

Bell watched her dwindle to a yellow dot, secure in the thought that soon he would be flying beside her. The Eagle had arrived late last night on a four-car special train that Bell had chartered for the duration. Andy Moser and a Van Dorn crew were already trundling the pieces from the rail yard to the infield.

Then, thought Bell, all he had to do was learn to drive the thing before the race started. Or at least well enough to keep learning on the job, as he tracked Josephine across the country. By the time the race ended in San Francisco, he’d have gotten pretty good at it, and the first thing he would do was take Marion Morgan for a ride. The Eagle’s motor had plenty of extra power, Andy had told him, to carry a passenger. Marion could even bring a moving-picture camera. And wouldn’t that adventure be a wedding gift?

He watched Josephine disappear in the east. “All right, boys,” he told the Van Dorns, “stay here and wait for Josephine to come back. Stick close to her. If you need me, I’ll be over at the thermo engine.”

“Do you think Frost will attack here like he did before? He knows we’re primed.”

“He’s surprised us before. Stick close. I’ll come back before she lands.”

Bell walked across the infield to the three-hundred-foot-long steel rail on which Platov had promised his engine would race in a final experiment before they installed it in Steve Stevens’s biplane.

The enormously fat Stevens, bulging in a white planter’s suit and glowering impatiently, sat at a breakfast table that his elderly servants had set with linen and silver. Platov and Stevens’s chief mechanician were tinkering with the still-silent jet motor, the mechanician setting valves and switches while Platov consulted his slide rule. Stevens was venting his restlessness by upbraiding his servants. His coffee was cold, he was complaining. His sweet rolls were stale, and there weren’t enough of them. The docile old men attending the cotton planter looked terrified.

Stevens’s arrogant gaze fell on Bell’s white suit.

“Surely Southern blood courses in your veins, suh,” he drawled in dulcet Southern tones. “Ah have never laid eyes on a Yankee who could do justice to the pure white duds of the Old South.”

“My father spent time in the Old South.”

“And taught you to dress like a gentleman. Do Ah presume correctly that he was buyin’ cotton for New England mills?”

“He was a Union Army intelligence officer, carrying out President Lincoln’s order to free the slaves.”

“Ready, sirs,” Dmitri Platov called out.

The Russian inventor’s springy mutton-chop whiskers were quivering with excitement and his dark eyes were flashing.

“Thermo engine ready.”

Stevens glared at his chief mechanician. “Is it, Judd?”

Judd muttered, “Ready as it ever will be, Mr. Stevens.”

“About time. Ah’ve had just about enough sittin’ and waitin’. . Now, where you goin’?”

Judd had picked up a baseball bat and started walking along the rail. “I gotta whack the stop switch as she’s nearing the end to shut the motor off.”

“Is that how you’re goin’ to stop the motor on my flyin’ machine? Are you-all fixin’ to stand in front of me with a baseball bat?”

“No worry!” cried Platov. “Automatic switch in machine. This only test. See?” He pointed at the thermo engine, resting on the rail. “Big switch. Just touch with bat as engine go by.”

“All right, get on with it, for God’s sake. The rest of the race’ll be across the Mississippi before Ah take to the sky.”

Judd ran two hundred feet down the rail and positioned himself. Bell thought he looked as unhappy as a long-ball hitter ordered to bunt.

“Is action!” cried Platov.

The thermo engine ignited with a low whine that soared to an earsplitting shriek. Bell covered his ears to protect his acute hearing and watched the motor begin to shake with awesome power. No wonder the mechanicians all respected Platov. That steel box he had invented was smaller than a steamer trunk, but it seemed to contain the amazing energy of a modern locomotive.

Platov jerked the release lever, and the latches holding it back opened.

The thermo engine shot down the rail.

Bell could scarcely believe his eyes. In one instant, it was throbbing next to him. In the next, it reached the man with the bat. It really worked, and the speed was phenomenal. Then all hell broke loose. Just as Judd was about to bunt the bat against the stop switch, the thermo engine jumped the rail.

It smashed through the chief mechanician as if he were a paper target, knocked what little remained of his body to the ground, and flew a hundred yards, crashing through Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s brand-new New Haven Curtiss parked on the grass and tearing the tail off a Blériot, before it came to rest inside a truck owned by the Vanderbilt syndicate, where it burst into flames.

Isaac Bell ran to the fallen Judd and saw immediately that there was nothing to be done for the man. Then while others ran to the destroyed New Haven and the burning truck, Bell inspected the rail where the engine had escaped.

Dmitri Platov was wringing his hands. “Was so good, ’til then. So good. Oh, that poor man. Look at that poor man.”

Steve Stevens waddled up. “If this don’t beat all! My head mechanician’s been killed, and Ah got no jet engine for my machine. How in hell am Ah supposed to run a race?”

Platov wept. He tore at his thick black hair and beat his hands on his chest. “What terrible thing I have done. Did he have wife?”

“Who the hell would marry Judd?”

“Is terrible, is terrible.”

Isaac Bell stood up from where he was crouching beneath the rail, brushed Stevens out of his way, and placed a firm hand on Platov’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t blame myself, if I were you, Mr. Platov.”

“Is me. Is captain of ship. Is my machine. Is my error. I have killed a man.”

“But you didn’t intend to. Nor did your amazing machine. It had some help.”

“What the devil are you talkin’ about?” said Stevens.

“The rail broke. That’s what made the machine jump it.”

“That’s Platov’s rail,” shouted Stevens. “That’s his responsibility. He’s the one who put it there. He’s the one responsible for it breakin’. Ah’m callin’ my lawyers. We’re goin’ to sue.”

“Look at this joint,” said Bell. He led Platov to the point where two lengths of rail had parted. Platov crouched beside him, lips pursed tighter and tighter. “Is bolts loosen-ed,” he said angrily.

“Loose?” howled Stevens. “’Cause you-all didn’t make it tight. . What are you doin’, sir?” he said, recoiling, as Bell shoved his fingers under his nose.

“Smell that and shut up.”

“I smell oil. So what?”

“Penetrating oil, to make it easier to unscrew the bolts.”

“No squeak,” Platov said miserably. “No noise.”

“The rail was sabotaged,” said Isaac Bell. “The fishtail bolts were loosened just enough to let the rail slip under pressure.”

“No!” said Platov. “I check rail every test. I check this morning.”

“Ah,” said Bell, “that’s what those are.” He knelt down and picked up some oil-soaked matchsticks. “That’s how he did it,” he mused. “Jammed these into the crack to damp the motion when you tested it. But they would have fallen out when the rail started vibrating as the thermo engine approached. Diabolical.”

“Rail move,” said Platov. “Thermo engine fly away. . But why!”

“Do you have enemies, Mr. Platov?”

“Platov likes. Platov like-ed.”

“Perhaps back in Russia?” asked Bell, aware that Russian immigrants of every political stripe from radical to reactionary had fled their restive land.

“No. I leave friends, family. I send money home.”

“Then who’d do such a thing?” demanded Steve Stevens.

Isaac Bell said, “Could it be that someone didn’t want you to win the race with Mr. Platov’s amazing motor?”

“Ah’ll show ’em! Platov, make me a new motor!”

“Not possible. Take time. I am being sorry. You need to find ordinary gasoline motor. In fact, you need two motors, mounted on lower wings.”

“Two! What for?”

Platov spread his arms wide as if measuring Stevens’s girth. “For lifting heaviness. Powering equal to thermo engine. Two motors, mounted on lower wing.”

“Well, how the hell am Ah goin’ to find two motors, and who the hell is goin’ to install ’em, with Judd dead?”

“Judd’s assistants.”

“Farm boys, tractor hands. Fine doin’ what Judd told them to do, but they’re not real mechanicians.” Stevens jammed plump fists on his broad hips and glared around the infield. “If this don’t beat all. Here, Ah got my machine. Ah got money to buy new motors, but no hands to install ’em. Say, how ’bout you, Platov? Want a job?”

“No thank you. I am having new thermo engine to manufacture.”

“But Ah seen you runnin’ around takin’ jobs for money. Ah’ll pay top dollar.”

“My thermo engine come first.”

“Tell you what. When you’re not workin’ on my flyin’ machine, you can work on your thermo engine.”

“Could your train tow my shop car?”

“Sure thing. Glad to have your tools along.”

“And can I still being freelance machinist to make money for new thermo engine?”

“Just as long as my machine comes first.” Stevens beckoned his servants. “Tom! You, there, Tom. Fetch Mr. Platov some breakfast. Can’t expect a top hand to work hard on an empty stomach.”

Platov looked at Isaac Bell as if to ask what he should do.

Bell said, “It looks like you’re back in the race.”

He saw Josephine returning and hurried toward the open stretch where she would come down. His brow was furrowed. He was thinking hard about coincidences. The Englishman’s accident occurring simultaneously with Frost’s attack was no coincidence. It had been deliberate sabotage to create a distraction to support the attack.

But what was the distraction, this time? There had been no attack. Josephine was high in the sky, and Bell had seen nothing amiss on the ground. When last heard of, Harry Frost was in Cincinnati. It was possible he could have returned to New York. But it seemed unlikely that he would attack again at Belmont Park in broad daylight, particularly since Bell had assigned Van Dorns, backed up by local police, to check the loads inside every closed van and wagon that entered the infield. It was logical to assume that Frost reckoned he would do better to lie in wait and spring from ambush.

Bell found Josephine’s Van Dorn mechanicians watching her yellow monoplane spiral-dipping down toward the infield in a series of steep dives and sharp turns. “Have you boys seen anything out of order?”

“Not a thing, Mr. Bell. Except that thermo engine running wild.”

Was this sabotage a genuine coincidence? Had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? Not by the saboteur who caused the Farman to lose a wing but by another, operating on his own? For what purpose? To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the only answer.

“Did you say something, Mr. Bell?”

Isaac Bell repeated through gritted teeth what he had just growled under his breath. “I hate coincidences.”

“Yes, sir! First thing they taught me when I joined the Van Dorns.”

“YOUR FLYING MACHINE IS BEAUTIFUL!” Josephine exclaimed delightedly. “And look at you, Mr. Bell! You look happy as a jaybird in a cherry tree.”

Bell was grinning. Andy Moser and the mechanicians Bell had hired to help him were tightening the flying and landing wires that braced the wing. They still had work to do on the tail and the control links, and the motor was scattered in small pieces in their spick-and-span hangar car, but with the wing spreading across the fuselage, it was beginning to look like something that would fly.

“I must say, I’ve never in my life bought anything I’ve liked as much.”

Josephine kept striding around it, eyeing it professionally.

Bell watched for her reaction as he said, “Andy Moser tells me that Di Vecchio licensed the controlling system from Breguet.”

“So I see.”

“That wheel turns it like an automobile. Turn left to make the rudder turn you left. Tilt the wheel post left, and it warps the wings by moving the alettoni to bank left into the turn. Push the wheel post, and she’ll go down. Pull it, and the elevators make her go up.”

“You can drive it with only one hand, when you get good at it,” said Josephine.

Leaving a hand free for a pistol, which meant that Bell could counterpunch if someone attacked Josephine in her flying machine. He said, “It works just like yours.”

“It’s the up-to-date thing.”

“It ought to make it easier to learn to fly,” said Bell.

“You bought yourself a beauty, Mr. Bell. But I’ll warn you, she’s going to be a handful. The trouble with going fast is you land fast. And that Gnome motor makes it even worse, since you won’t have a real throttle like my Antoinette’s.”

While the similarities were striking, Bell had to admit that, when it came to their French-made power plants, the Celere and Di Vecchio monoplanes were radically different. Josephine’s Celere was powered by a conventional water-cooled V-8 Antoinette, a strong, lightweight motor, whereas Di Vecchio had installed the new and revolutionary air-cooled rotary Gnome Omega in his. With its cylinders spinning around a central crankshaft, the Gnome offered smooth running and superior cooling at the expense of fuel consumption, ticklish maintenance, and a primitive carburetor that made it almost impossible to run the motor at any speed but wide open.

“Can you give me some tips on slowing down to land like I’ve seen you do?”

Josephine leveled a stern finger at the control wheel. “Before you get fancy, practice blipping your magneto on and off with that coupe button.”

Bell shook his head. Switching the ignition on and off, interrupting electricity to the spark plug, was a means, of sorts, to slow the motor. “Andy Moser says to go easy on the coupe button or I’ll burn up the valves.”

“Better the valves than you, Mr. Bell,” Josephine grinned. “I need my protector alive. And don’t worry about stalling the motor, it’s got plenty of inertia to keep it spinning.” Her face fell. “I’m sorry, that was really stupid of me about needing you alive. How is Archie?”

“He’s hanging on. They let me see him this morning. His eyes were open, and I believe he recognized me. . Josephine, I have to ask you something.”

“What?”

“Look at the wing stays.”

“What about them?”

“Do you notice how they converge at these triangular king posts, top and bottom?”

“Of course.”

“Do you notice how the triangles form in essence single lightweight steel struts? The point thrusting above the wing is actually the top of the broad base that extends below the wing.”

“Of course. It’s very strong, that way.”

“And do you see how ingeniously it’s braced by the chassis?” She crouched down beside him, and they studied the strong X-braced support that connected the body of the aeroplane to its skids and wheels.

“It’s the same system as on your Celere, isn’t it?” Bell asked.

“It looks similar,” she admitted.

“I haven’t seen anything like it on any other monoplane. I have to ask you, is it possible that Marco Celere, shall we say, ‘borrowed’ his wing-strengthening innovation from Di Vecchio?”

“Absolutely not!” Josephine said vehemently.

Bell observed that the ordinarily exuberant aviatrix seemed troubled by his blunt accusation. She jumped to her feet. Her grin had gone out like a light, and a flush was gathering on her cheeks. Did she suspect, even fear, that it was true?

“Or, perhaps, could Marco have unconsciously copied it?” he asked gently.

“No.”

“Did Marco ever tell you he worked for Di Vecchio?”

“No.”

Then, oddly, she was smiling again. Smugly, Bell thought. And he wondered why. The tension had left her slim frame, and she stood in her usual pert manner, as if about to spring into motion.

“Did Marco never mention that he worked for Di Vecchio?”

“Di Vecchio worked for Marco,” she retorted, which explained her peaceful smile. “Until Marco had to fire him.”

“I heard it was the other way around.”

“You heard wrong.”

“Perhaps I misunderstood. Did Marco tell you that Di Vecchio’s daughter stabbed him last year?”

“That crazy woman almost killed him. She left a terrible scar on his arm.”

“Did Marco tell you why?”

“Of course. She was jealous. She wanted to marry him. But Marco wasn’t interested. In fact, he told me that her father was pushing her into it, hoping that Marco would rehire him.”

“Did Marco tell you that she accused him of being a thief?”

Josephine said, “That poor lunatic. All that talk about ‘stealing her heart’? She’s insane. That’s why they locked her up. It was all in her head.”

“I see,” said Bell.

“Marco had no feelings for her. He never did. Never. I can guarantee you that, Mr. Bell.”

Isaac Bell thought quickly. He did not believe her, but in order to protect her life he needed Josephine to trust him.

“Josephine,” he smiled warmly, “you are a very polite young lady, but we’re going to be working very closely. Don’t you think it’s time you call me Isaac?”

“Sure thing, Isaac. If you like.” She studied the detective’s face as if seeing him for the first time. “Do you have a girl, Isaac?”

“Yes. I am engaged to be married.”

She gave him a flirtatious grin. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

“Miss Marion Morgan of San Francisco.”

“Oh! Mr. Whiteway mentioned her. Isn’t she the lady who will be taking moving pictures?”

“Yes, she’ll be here soon.”

“So will Mr. Whiteway.”

Josephine glanced at the ladies’ watch she wore sewn to her flying jacket sleeve.

“Which reminds me, I’ve got to get back to the train. He’s sent a dress designer and a seamstress with another flying costume I’m supposed to wear for the newspaper reporters.” She raised her pretty eyes longingly to the sky. It was the soft blue color of the warm and windless early afternoons before strong sea breezes swept across Belmont Park and made it dangerous to fly.

“You look like you’d rather go flying,” said Bell.

“I sure as heck would. I don’t need a special costume. Did you see that white getup he made me wear the other day? Didn’t stay white long when we pulled the head off the Antoinette. This is all I need,” she said, indicating her worn flared leather gloves, wool jacket belted at her tiny waist, jodhpurs tucked into high laced boots. “Now Mr. Whiteway wants me to pose in a purple silk flying costume. And at night I’m supposed to wear long white dresses and black silk gloves.”

“I saw your outfit last night. Very becoming.”

“Thank you,” she said with another flirtatious grin. “But just between us chickens, Isaac, I couldn’t wait to get back into my overalls and help the boys fixing my machine. I’m not complaining. I know that Mr. Whiteway is anxious for me to draw any publicity I can to help the race.”

Bell walked her to the train yard. “Hasn’t he asked you to call him Preston instead of Mr. Whiteway?”

“All the time. But I don’t want him to get the wrong idea, using first names.”

After Bell got her safely aboard the bright yellow Josephine Special and in the care of the dress designer and the Van Dorn who guarded her train, he hurried to the headquarters car, which had a telegraph key linked to the detective agency’s private system.

“Anything yet from San Francisco?” he asked the duty officer.

“Sorry, Mr. Bell. Not yet.”

“Wire James Dashwood again.”

The young man reached for the key. “Ready, sir.”

“NEED CELERE AND PRESTOGIACOMO INFORMATION SOONEST.”

Bell paused. The widely divergent opinions of Marco Celere held by Danielle Di Vecchio and Josephine Josephs Frost would raise interesting questions about any murder victim, but they were particularly interesting when the victim had disappeared.

“Is that it, sir? Shall I send it?”

“Continue: ‘PARTIAL STORY BETTER THAN NONE.’

“And then add: ‘ON THE JUMP.’

“In fact, add ‘ON THE JUMP’ twice.”

“There it is, sir. Shall I send it?”

Bell considered. If only it were possible to telephone long-distance all the way to San Francisco, he could query the usually reliable Dashwood as to what was taking him so long and impress upon him the urgency he felt.

“Add another ‘ON THE JUMP’!”

14

“I HEAR THE WRIGHT BROTHERS started a flying school, Mr. Bell,” Andy Moser called from the front of the Eagle when Isaac Bell ordered him to spin the propeller to start the sleek machine.

“I don’t have time to go to Ohio. The race starts next week. Besides, how many teachers have driven flying machines for more than a year? Most aviators pick it up on their own, just like Josephine. Spin her over.”

It was a perfect day for flying, a sunny late-spring morning at Belmont Park with a light west wind. Andy and the mechanicians who Bell had hired to assist him had rolled the Eagle to a distant stretch of grass far from the main activity of the infield. They had chocked the wheels, and when they heard Bell order Andy to start the motor, they grabbed the chocks’ ropes and prepared to steady the machine as wing runners.

Bell was seated behind the wing, with his head, shoulders, and chest exposed. The motor was ahead of him – the safest place for it, Eddison-Sydney-Martin insisted, where it wouldn’t crush the driver in a smash. Ahead of the motor gleamed a nine-foot, two-bladed propeller of polished walnut – the most expensive place for it, Joe Mudd had noted. “If you come down hard on the nose, it’ll cost you a hundred bucks for a new one.”

Bell tilted the wheel post and watched the effect on the wings. Out at the tips, eighteen feet to his right and left, the alettoni hinged up and down. He looked back along the slim fuselage, whose booms and struts were covered in tightly drawn silk fabric to reduce drag, and turned the wheel. The rudder moved left and right. He pulled the wheel toward him. The elevators hinged to the horizontal tail keel tilted. In theory, when he did that in the air, the machine would go up.

“Spin her over!”

“A hundred fliers have died in accidents,” Andy reminded him for the third time that morning.

“More mountain climbers die falling off cliffs. Spin her over!”

Moser crossed his arms over his chest. He was one of the stubbornest men Bell had met. His father was a policeman, and Moser had the policeman’s wall-like resistance to anything he didn’t like. This resistance was stiffened by an unshakable belief in machinery. He knew machinery, loved it, and swore by it.

“I know the machine is ready to fly because I put it together with my own hands. I know we walked around it and tested every moving part and every brace. And I know the motor is ready to fly because I pulled the cylinder heads off to tune the timing and the pressure. The only thing I do not know is ready to fly is the driver, Mr. Bell.”

Isaac Bell fixed his overanxious mechanician with a no-nonsense eye.

“If you’re going to help me protect Josephine, you better get used to the idea that Van Dorn operators go about their business promptly. I have observed how aviators take to the air since I first arrived at Belmont Park. When I purchased my American Eagle, I questioned both Josephine Josephs and Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin on their techniques. I have also grilled Joe Mudd, whose navigation of his Liberator indicates an especially steady hand in the flying line. All agree that these Breguet controls make it a lot easier to learn. Last, but not least,” Bell smiled, “I have read every issue of both Aeronautics and Flight since those magazines were first published-I know what I’m doing.”

Bell’s smile vanished like a shotgunned searchlight. His eyes turned dark as December. “Spin! Her! Over!”

“Yes, sir!”

Bell opened the gasoline valve and moved the air valve to the idle setting. On the Gnome rotary engine, he had learned, the driver was the carburetor.

Andy Moser turned the propeller repeatedly, drawing fuel into the motor. Bell moved the magneto switch.

“Contact!”

Andy clutched the propeller with both hands, threw his long, lean back into a powerful tug, and jumped back before it cut him in half. The motor caught, chugged, and spewed pale blue smoke. Bell let it warm. When it sounded ready, he opened the air valve fully. The smoke thinned. The gleaming nickel-steel cylinders and the shiny propeller begin to blur as they spun toward top speed with a powerful-sounding Blat! Blat! Blat! He had never felt a motor spin so smoothly. At twelve hundred rpms, it ran slick as a turbine.

He glanced down at Andy.

“Ready!”

Andy nodded agreement and signaled the mechanicians to pull the chocks and run alongside to steady the wings in case of a crosswind. The Eagle began to roll, bouncing on pneumatic tires that were connected to the chassis’s skids with springy bands of rubber, and swiftly picked up speed. The wing runners dropped behind. Bell felt a smooth, muscular impulse as the tail lifted from the ground.

He had a hundred yards of open space ahead of him before the grass ended at the rail that separated the infield from the racetrack. He could blip the magneto button to slow the motor so he could practice rolling on the ground. Or he could pull back on the wheel and try the air.

Isaac Bell pulled back on the wheel and tried the air.

In a heartbeat, the Eagle stopped bouncing. The grass was five feet under him. Unlike trains and autos that shook as they went faster, when the machine left the ground Bell felt like it was floating on glassy water. But he was not floating. He was hurtling straight at the white wooden rail that separated the field from the racetrack.

He was barely off the ground. His wheels would not clear it. He tugged a little harder on the wheel to go higher. Too hard. He felt the machine tip upward sharply. In the next instant, he felt a sudden void open up under him, and the Eagle started to fall.

He had been in comparable fixes in autos and motorcycles, and even on boats and horseback.

The solution was always the same.

Stop thinking.

He allowed his hands to ease the wheel forward a hair. He felt a shove from below. The propeller bit the air. Suddenly the railing was safely below his wheels, and the sky looked immense.

A pylon was suddenly standing in front of him, one of the hundred-foot-tall racecourse markers around which they timed the speed trials. Just as Andy and Josephine had warned him, the gyroscopic force exerted by the spinning weight of the rotary engine had dragged him to the right. Bell turned the wheel to the left. The Eagle rolled sideways and drifted left. He straightened up, banked too far right, compensated again, compensated repeatedly, and gradually worked her onto an even keel.

It was like sailing, he realized in a flash of insight that made everything clearer. Even though he had to counteract the engine pull, the Eagle would point where he wanted it to as long as he knew where the wind was coming from. The wind – the air – was his to use, keeping in mind that, with his propeller pulling him through the air, most of the wind he encountered he was producing himself.

He drew back on the wheel to climb. The same principle seemed to hold. He climbed in stages, stepping into the sky as if going up stairs, leveling off when it felt too slow, angling up when he picked up speed. Speed made air stronger, Josephine had told him.

Belmont Park grew small beneath him, as if he were gazing through the wrong end of a telescope. Farms and villages spread below. To his left he saw the deep dark blue of the Atlantic Ocean. Smoke ahead and scores and scores of converging rail and trolley tracks pointed toward New York City.

A rational thought rambled through his mind, surprising him. He let go of the wheel with one hand to pull his watch chain. He tugged his gold watch from its pocket and deftly thumbed it open. It had occurred to him that this was so much fun that he had better check the time. Andy Moser had poured enough gas and castor oil into the tanks to run the motor for an hour. All by himself, in the middle of the sky, Isaac Bell laughed out loud. He had a strong feeling that he had changed his life forever and might never return to earth.

“A BANDAGE,” said Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin, applying one to Isaac Bell’s forehead, “tends to unsettle my wife less than an open wound. I imagine you’ll find the same holds true with your fiancée.”

“It’s just a scratch,” said Bell. “My poor flying machine suffered a lot worse.”

“Only your wheels and skids,” said the baronet. “Your chassis seems intact, although I must say your mechanician appears put out.”

Bell glanced at Andy Moser, who was stalking circles around the machine and shouting at his helper. Eddison-Sydney-Martin stepped back to survey his handiwork.

“All done, and the bleeding has stopped. In fact, by the look of you, I expect you’re more in need of courage for reporting to your fiancée than when you took to the air. Be brave, old chap. I’m told Miss Morgan is a remarkable woman.”

Bell drove to the Garden City Hotel to meet Marion, who was arriving from San Francisco that afternoon. The instant he walked into the hotel he knew that Marion was there ahead of him. Gentlemen seated in the lobby were staring over the tops of unread newspapers, bellboys eager to be summoned were lined up like tin soldiers, and the Palm Court maître d’ was personally pouring Marion’s tea.

Bell paused a moment to gaze upon the tall, willowy blond beauty of thirty who had taken his heart. She was still in her traveling clothes, an ankle-length pleated mauve skirt with a matching vest and high-collared blouse cinched at her narrow waist and a stylish hat with a high crown and down-swept brim. Her coral-sea green eyes outshone the emerald engagement ring on her finger.

Bell swept her into his arms and kissed her. “I have never seen you looking lovelier.”

“Fisticuffs?” she inquired of the bandage.

“My first flying lesson. I discovered an aeronautical phenomenon called ground effect, which made bringing the Eagle back down to earth something of a challenge. Andy and his helper will be up half the night fixing the wheels.”

“Was your instructor put out?”

Bell squared his broad shoulders. “Actually,” he admitted, “I taught myself.”

Marion raised one exquisite eyebrow and regarded him with the collected gaze of a woman who had graduated with the first class at Stanford Law School and worked in banking before flourishing in the new trade of moving pictures. She said, “I understand that Orville and Wilbur Wright learned the same way. Of course, they were busy inventing the aeroplane.”

“I had the advantage of advice from seasoned aviators. . You are regarding me with a strange look.”

“Your eyes are as bright as I’ve ever seen them, and you’re grinning ear to ear. You look like you’re still flying.”

Isaac Bell laughed. “I suppose I am. I suppose I always will be. Though what you’re seeing at the moment is also the effect of being so very happy to see you.”

“I am overjoyed to see you, too, my dear, and glad of a ‘love effect.’ It’s been too long.” She stood up from her chair.

“What are you doing?”

“I am standing up to kiss you again.”

Bell kissed her back until she said, “The house detective will be coming over to ask what we’re doing in public.”

“No worry there,” said Bell. “The Garden City Hotel just signed a contract with Van Dorn Protective Services. Our man took over house detective duties this very morning.”

“So,” she said, sitting back down, “tell me about the bump on your noggin. And this ‘ground effect.’”

“Ground effect prevents you from alighting when a cushion of air develops between your wings and the ground. Air turns out to be strong – stronger than you’d imagine. Essentially, the machine does not want to stop flying, and you have to somehow persuade it – like when a horse takes the bit in its teeth.”

“A flying horse,” Marion remarked.

“Apparently the effect is strongest on a monoplane because-”

“You must tell me,” Marion interrupted, “what did you see when you were up there?”

“Speed looks different in the air. The land didn’t appear to blur as it does beside a train or my Locomobile. It seemed to flow under me, more slowly the higher I went.”

“How high did you go?”

“High enough to see the Hudson River. When I saw it, I knew I had to fly to it.”

Marion’s beautiful eyes widened. “You flew all the way to the Hudson River?”

Bell laughed. “It seemed safer than flying over the ocean – I could see that, too.”

Marion marveled, “At the same time you saw the Hudson River, you saw the Atlantic Ocean? Then surely you saw the skyscrapers of New York.”

“Like spikes in the smoke.”

“You must take me up to shoot moving pictures.”

“You will love it,” Bell answered. “I saw a giant sturgeon swimming on the bottom of the river.”

“When are we going?” she asked as excitement rose in her voice.

“Well, umm, flying is perfectly safe, of course. But not yet safe with me.”

Isaac Bell was reminded that his beloved could be as single-minded as Josephine when she asked with a challenging smile, “I wonder if Preston Whiteway would hire an aviator to take me up?”

“Let me practice first. By the end of the race I’ll have the hang of it.”

“Wonderful! We’ll do it over San Francisco. I can’t wait! But you will be careful while you learn?”

“Promise,” said Bell.

“I refuse to worry about gun battles and knife fights. But flying? You’re out of your element.”

“Not for long. Next time I see the wind has shifted, I’ll land accordingly.”

“How could you tell the direction of the wind when you yourself were in it? Did you see a flag blowing?”

“I watched the cows.”

“Cows?”

“There are dairy farms around the park, and Josephine taught me that cows always graze facing upwind. They point true as a weather vane and are easier to see from above.”

“What else has America’s Sweetheart of the Air taught you?”

“Keep an eye peeled for emergency landing spaces. But steer clear of bright green fields. They’re too wet to land on.” Bell left out Josephine’s warning to avoid extreme movements that would cause his wings to collapse. Neither would he repeat Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s dry “I’d avoid blundering into flat spins if I were you, old chap,” or Joe Mudd’s blunt “Don’t get fancy before you know your business.”

Marion said, “By all accounts, including Preston’s fulsome praise of her, Josephine sounds like an interesting character.”

“Josephine’s a character, all right, and I could use your help reading her. In the meantime, I would not mind another kiss. Shall I instruct the house detective to erect a barricade of Chinese screens and potted palms?”

“I have a better idea. By now, the maids have unpacked my bags. Let me get out of my traveling things and into a bath. And perhaps you’ll come up and join me for supper, or something.”

“Shall I order champagne?”

“I already have.”

“SERIOUSLY, DARLING, why did you decide not to take flying lessons?” Marion asked later upstairs. Bathed, perfumed, and arrayed in a long emerald green peignoir, she patted the chaise longue. Bell brought their glasses and sat beside her.

“No time. The race starts next week, and I’ve got my hands full, with Harry Frost trying to murder Josephine and a saboteur wrecking flying machines.”

“I thought Archie shot Frost.”

“Three times, with that little German pistol he insisted on carrying.” Bell shook his head in dismay. “I thought I shot Frost, too. He’s wounded but definitely not out of action. A Cincinnati banker reported that Frost’s jaw was swollen and that he was slurring his speech, but otherwise he was healthy, which hardly sounds like a man carrying a bunch of lead in him.”

“Maybe you missed?”

“Not with my Browning. It doesn’t miss. And I know I saw Archie pepper him point-blank. He couldn’t have missed. But Frost is a big man. If the slugs missed his vitals, who knows? Still, it’s something of a mystery.”

It was Isaac Bell’s habit to discuss his cases with Marion. She was an educated woman, with a quick and insightful mind, and always brought a new perspective to a problem. He said, “Speaking of mysterious misses, Frost himself apparently missed one of his shots at Marco Celere. An easy shot no hunter would fluff. I discovered that the rifle he probably used had a damaged telescopic sight. Yet another reason why I want to see Celere’s remains.”

“Could Harry Frost have worn some sort of armor when he attacked?”

“Armor won’t deflect bullets. That’s why gunpowder put the knights out of business.”

“Chain mail?”

“That’s an interesting thought because with modern alloy steel perhaps you could manufacture chain mail strong enough to stop a bullet. Lord knows what it would weigh. Some years ago the Army was testing so-called bulletproof vests. But they were too hot and heavy to be practical. . Interesting thought, my dear. I’ll have Grady Forrer sic his Research boys on it first thing in the morning.”

Marion stretched luxuriously. “Are there any other mysteries I can solve for you?”

“Several.”

“Starting with?”

“Where is Marco Celere’s body?”

“Any others?”

“Why does the Italian lady I bought my aeroplane from insist that Marco Celere stole her father’s secrets while Josephine insists that Miss Di Vecchio’s father worked for Celere and therefore had no secrets to steal?”

“What is Miss Di Vecchio like?”

“Startlingly attractive.”

“Really?”

“In fact, so attractive that it is hard to believe that Marco Celere, or any man, would turn his back on her.”

“How did you escape?”

Bell touched his glass to hers. “I’m immune.”

“Blind to beauty?” she teased.

“I am in love with Marion Morgan, and she has spoken for my heart.”

Marion returned his smile. “Maybe Marco had his eye on Josephine.”

“Josephine is cute as a button but hardly in Miss Di Vecchio’s class. She’s a pretty little thing, pert and flirtatious, but more farm girl than femme fatale.

“But ambitious? At least about flying,” Bell said, “and very skilled navigating flying machines. There are men who are drawn to accomplished women.”

“Well, love is strange, isn’t it?”

“If Marco and Josephine were lovers at all. Archie thinks she was in love with Marco’s flying machines. And as you know Archie has a pretty good eye for that sort of thing.”

Marion asked, “What does your eye tell you?”

“Frankly, I don’t know. Except she vehemently defends Marco on the question of who stole whose invention.”

“Could it be that Josephine is defending her flying machine more than she’s defending her lover?”

“That is very possible,” said Bell. “While Marco, I suspect, was in love with a girl who could afford to buy his flying machines.”

“Then everyone got what they wanted.”

“Except Harry Frost.” Bell’s eyes grew bleak, then hot with anger. “Poor Archie. Frost did such a terrible thing. How a man would load such monstrous ammunition into a weapon is beyond me.”

Marion took his hand. “I spoke with Lillian on the telephone. I’ll see her at the hospital tomorrow.”

“How did she sound?”

“Tired and hopeful. Poor thing. It’s a nightmare – both of our nightmares – only I’m older and have loved you longer, and I don’t worry in that same way. Lillian admitted to me that since Archie returned to work after their honeymoon, she was afraid every day until he came home safe. Darling, are you taking such chances learning to fly because you’re worried about Archie? Or trying to make up for what happened to him?”

“I’ve always been keen to fly.”

“But are you keen to fly for the wrong reasons? Isaac, you know I never trouble you with worrying about your safety. But this seems unusually risky. What can you possibly do up in the air if Frost shoots at her?”

“Shoot back, and finish Harry Frost once and for all.”

“Who will fly the aeroplane while you’re busy shooting?”

“I can drive it with one hand. . Well, actually, to be perfectly honest,” he admitted with a rueful smile, “I will be able to drive with one hand soon. Today, I was hanging on tight with both.”

Marion extended her arms. “Can you demonstrate that?”

15

“WOULD YOU GIVE ME SOME ADVICE on that straightening-up-fast stunt just before you touch the ground?” Isaac Bell asked Josephine. The race was starting in three days, and he had scheduled a certification test to get an official pilot’s license from the Aero Club.

“Don’t!” Josephine grinned, “is the best advice I can give you. Practice blipping your magneto instead, and don’t try stunts your machine isn’t up to.”

“My alettoni are the same as yours.”

“No, they’re not,” she retorted, her grin fading.

“The wing bracing is the same.”

“Similar.”

“Just as strong.”

“I wouldn’t count on that,” she said seriously.

The subject always turned her prickly, but Bell noticed that she no longer repeated her earlier assertion that Danielle’s father had worked for Marco Celere. It was almost as if she suspected that the opposite was true.

Gently he said, “Maybe you mean I’m not up to it.”

She smiled, as if grateful Bell had let her off the hook. “You will be. I’ve been watching you. You have the touch – that’s the important thing.”

“Glad to hear it,” said Bell. “I can’t fall too far behind you if I’m going to protect you.”

In fact, Bell had devised a defense in which he was only one element. Van Dorn riflemen would spell one another on the roof of the support car, easily climbing to their gun perch through a hatch in the roof. Two roadsters in a boxcar with a ramp would be ready to light out after her if for any reason Josephine strayed from the railroad tracks. And every day detectives would take their places in advance at the next scheduled stop.

A commotion broke out at the hangar door.

Bell glided in front of Josephine as he drew the Browning from his coat.

“Josephine! Josephine! Where is that woman?”

“Oh my God,” said Josephine. “It’s Preston Whiteway.”

“Josephine! Josephine!” Whiteway barreled in. “There you are! I bring good news! Great news!”

Bell holstered his weapon. The best news he could think of was that Van Dorns had arrested Harry Frost.

“My lawyers,” shouted Whiteway, “have persuaded the court to annul your marriage to Harry Frost on the grounds that the madman tried to kill you!”

“Annulled?”

“You are free. . Free!”

Isaac Bell observed the meeting between Josephine and Whiteway long enough to form an opinion of its nature, then slipped out the door.

“Cut!” he heard Marion Morgan order sharply. Her camera operator – hunched over a large machine on a strong tripod – stopped cranking as if a hawk had swooped down and seized his arm. It was well known among Miss Morgan’s operators that Mr. Bell did not want his picture taken.

“My darling, how wonderful to see you.” He thought she looked lovely in her working outfit, a shirtwaist and long skirt, with her hair gathered high to be out of her way when she looked through the camera lens.

She explained that she and her crew had been trailing Preston Whiteway all morning to shoot scenes for the title card that would read

The Race Sponsor’s Arrival!!!!

Bell took her into his arms. “What a treat. Can we have lunch?”

“No, I’ve got to shoot all of this.” She lowered her voice. “How did Josephine take the news?”

“I got the impression she was trying to dampen Whiteway’s excitement over the prospect of her being ‘Free! Free!’”

“I imagine that Preston’s working around to asking her to marry him.”

“The signs are all there,” Bell agreed. “He’s beaming like bonfire. He’s wearing a fine new suit of clothes. And he shines like he’s been barbered within an inch of his life.”

MARION HAD HER CREW IN PLACE, cranking their camera, when Preston Whiteway lured the New York press to Josephine’s big yellow tent in the infield with the promise of an important change in the race. Bell kept a close eye on the gathering, accompanied by Harry Warren, Van Dorn’s New York gang expert, who Bell had asked to take over the Belmont Park squad for the wounded Archie.

Bell saw that Whiteway had gotten his fondest wish: other newspapers could no longer ignore the Whiteway Cup. The aerial race was the biggest story in the country. But his rivals did not love him for it, and the questioning, two days before the race was to start, was openly hostile. Forty newspapermen were shouting questions, egged on by Van Dorn detective Scudder Smith, who had once been an actual newspaper reporter, or so he said.

“If that detective has imbibed as excessively as it appears,” Isaac Bell told Harry Warren, “suspend him for a week, and dock his pay for a month.”

“Scudder’s O.K.,” Harry assured him. “That’s just part of his disguise.”

“Disguised as what?”

“A drunken newspaper reporter.”

“He’s fooling me.”

“Can you deny, Mr. Whiteway,” a reporter from the Telegram howled aggrievedly, “that the extremely short hop from Belmont Park to Empire City Race Track in Yonkers is a ploy to charge more paying spectators from New York City?”

“Is it not true that you could fly from Belmont Park to Yonkers in a glider?” shouted the man from the Tribune.

“Ten miles, Mr. Whiteway?” asked the Times. “Could not the aviators simply walk?”

“Or ride bicycles?” chimed in Detective Smith.

Bell had to admire how cleverly Whiteway let his rivals’ reporters have their fun before he fired back with both barrels. In fact, he suspected Whiteway had probably planned the change all along to draw the other papers into his trap.

“It is my pleasure to fulfill your expectation of some new sensation by announcing a last-minute change in the course. The first leg to Empire City Race Track in Yonkers will entail the competitors flying a full eighteen miles west from Belmont Park to the Statue of Liberty. Upon arriving at America’s symbol of freedom, the aviators competing for the gold Whiteway Cup will circle the statue, for hundreds of thousands to see from riverbanks and spectator vessels, and then steer their machines another twenty-two miles north to Yonkers, for a grand total the first day of forty miles. These brave fliers will use the opportunity to ‘work the kinks out’ while crossing two bodies of water – the treacherous East River and the broad Upper Bay – then fly up the middle of the wide Hudson River to alight safely, God willing, in the infield of the Empire City Race Track, where an excellent aviation field is offered by the racing course. . Thank you, gentlemen. I am sure that your editors anxiously await your stories to put extras on the street ahead of the competition.”

He might have added that the Whiteway papers’ “EXTRA”s were already in the hands of every newsboy in the city. But he didn’t have to. The reporters were stampeding to the racetrack telephones, cursing that they had been hoodwinked and that the editors would take it out of their hides.

“I HATE THAT DAMNED STATUE,” Harry Frost told Gene Weeks.

Weeks, a grizzled Staten Island waterman, was leaning on the tiller of his oyster scow, which was tied to a muddy bank of the Kill Van Kull. The boat, twenty-three feet long and nearly ten wide, looked like many of its type, but its peeling paint and faded decks concealed the existence of an oversize gasoline engine that made it go much faster than oyster scows engaged in legitimate trade.

“Why’s that, mister?”

“Damned statue attracts foreigners. We got too many immigrants, we don’t need no more mongrel blood.”

Gene Weeks, whose family had emigrated from England before Frost’s had stepped off the Mayflower, let the lunatic rant. Frost was flashing money for a ride on Weeks’s boat. A lot of money. In his younger days, Weeks would have taken it away from him and tossed him overboard. Or tried, he admitted on second thought. The lunatic was a big fellow, and the bulges in his coat were probably not a flask and lunch. So if he wanted the lunatic’s dough, he would have to earn it.

“Where’d you say you want me to take you, mister?”

Frost unfolded a newspaper, an EXTRA edition, and spread it on the salt-crusted bench beside Weeks’s tiller. Mumbling cusswords at the harbor breeze that plucked at it, he showed Weeks a map of the first leg of the Whiteway Cup Cross-Country Air Race. “See how they’re going to circle that damned statue and head up the river?”

“Yup.”

The big fellow had penciled an X on the map.

“I want to be here, with the sun behind me.”

16

“HAVE THE ODDS CHANGED FOR JOSEPHINE?” Isaac Bell asked the bookie Johnny Musto two nights before the race.

“Still holding at twenty-to-one, sir. A thousand dollars on the Sweetheart of the Air will pay youse twenty thousand.”

“I’ve already bet two thousand.”

“Indeed you have, sir. Admiring your brave sporting instincts, I’m speculating upon the potential value of increasing your initial investment. If the little gal wins, youse can buy yerself a roadster, and a country estate to drive it to.”

Enveloped in clouds of violet cologne, and attended by marble-eyed thugs pocketing the cash and watching for the cops, Johnny Musto was strolling the infield, muttering, “Place yer bets, gentlemen, place yer bets! Odds? Name ’em, they’re yers. One hundred dollars will earn youse fifty if Sir Eddison-Sydney-Thingamajig’s brand-new Curtiss Pusher clocks the best time to San Francisco. Same holds for Frenchie Chevalier driving his Blériot. One-to-two, gents, one-to-two on Chevalier. But if Billy Thomas flies faster for the Vanderbilt syndicate, one hundred will receive one hundred back.”

“How about Joe Mudd? What are the odds on Mudd?” asked a sporting man with a large cigar.

Johnny Musto smiled happily. Clearly, Bell thought, a man blessed by fortune.

“The workingman’s flying machine offers a rare opportunity to win big – three-to-one. Three hundred dollars for a hundred ventured on Joe Mudd. But if you’re looking for a sure thing, bet one hundred dollars on Sir Eddison – So-and-So – Thingamajig and win fifty bucks to take your goil to Atlantic City. . Hold on! What’s that?” A man dressed in mechanician’s vest and flat cap was whispering in his ear. “Gents! The odds on Sir Eddison – So-and-So – Thingamajig are changing. One hundred will win you forty.”

“Why?” howled a bettor, disappointed to see his potential winnings diminish.

“His chances of beating everybody just got better. His mechanicians chopped the canard off the front of his machine. They found out they don’t need a front elevator, already got one in the back. Sir-Eddison – So-and-So – Thingamajig’s Curtiss Pusher is racing headless. Nobody can beat him now.”

THAT SAME NIGHT, the saboteur who had set the thermo engine on its murderously destructive final flight, killing Judd and laying waste to several aeroplanes, stood nervously rubbing his arm as he watched Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s mechanicians make final adjustments on the Englishman’s newly headless Curtiss. Removing the front elevator had made the pusher look very trim.

The saboteur had studied it earlier while they were flying it in the last of the evening light, and he had agreed with all in the infield who knew their business that the Curtiss was flying considerably better than before, and somewhat faster. The bookmakers, who were already enamored of the Curtiss Motor Company’s new ninety-horsepower, six-cylinder engine – a reliable “power unit,” by all accounts – led the stampede to declare that the headless Curtiss Pusher was the aeroplane to beat, particularly in the hands of a champion cross-country aviator like the English baronet.

At last the mechanicians covered the machine in canvas shrouds, turned off the generator powering their work lights, and trooped home to their bunks in the train yard. Keeping a sharp eye peeled for roving Van Dorn detectives, the saboteur took a carpenter’s brace and bit from his tool bag and went to work.

“YOUR CERTIFYING EXAMINATION was scheduled to start five minutes ago, Mr. Bell.”

The representative of the Aero Club, waiting beside Bell’s machine, gestured impatiently with his clipboard.

Bell vaulted into the American Eagle’s driving seat, tossed his hat to a wing runner, and pulled on his goggles and helmet. “All set!”

He had just finished hammering out last-minute tactics with Harry Warren. Andy and the boys had the monoplane waiting on a grass strip, with the motor warmed and chocks holding the wheels.

“In order to qualify for your pilot’s license, Mr. Bell, you are required to ascend to one hundred feet and fly around the pylon-marked course. Then you will ascend to five hundred feet and remain there ten minutes. Then you will demonstrate three methods of descent: a safe volplane in a series of circles, a gradual ocean-wave downward coast, and a sharper spiral dip. Is that clear?”

Bell grinned. “Is it O.K. if I keep moving while remaining at five hundred feet for ten minutes?”

“Of course. You have to keep moving. Otherwise, the machine will fall. Off you go! I haven’t all day.”

But no sooner had Bell’s motor blatted to noisy life than the rotund Grady Forrer, Van Dorn’s head of Research, galloped through the castor oil smoke, shouting for Isaac to wait.

Bell held down his blip switch. The Gnome sputtered to a grudging stop. Andy Moser brought the soapbox used to climb up to the monoplane. Grady heaved himself on it, saying, “Found out how Frost survived getting shot by you and Archie.”

“Well done! How?”

“Remember I told you that ten years ago a Chicago priest manufactured a so-called bulletproof vest of multiple layers of a particularly tight silk cloth specially woven in Austria?”

“But the Army rejected it. It weighed forty pounds and was hot as Hades.”

“Guess who invested in their manufacture anyway?”

“Chicago,” said Bell. “Of course. Exactly the sort of thing Harry Frost would have gotten a line on and seen its potential. To be bulletproof is a criminal’s dream.”

“And a fellow his size could carry that weight.”

“So the only wound Harry Frost suffered was the jaw Archie broke as he went down.”

“Next time,” said Grady Forrer, “bring a cannon.”

Bell ordered Grady to pass the word to every man on the case. Sidearms – knives, revolvers, and automatics – would not pierce it. Bring rifles. And shoot for the head, just to be on the safe side.

“All right, sir,” he called to the Aero Club certifier. “I’m ready for my test.”

Andy reached to spin the propeller. Bell touched his blip switch. About to shout, “Contact!” he said instead, “Wait!”

“Now what?” exclaimed the Aero Club official.

From the corner of his eye, Bell saw running toward him a hideously scarred young Van Dorn agent from the New York office. Bell signaled Andy, who was reaching to spin the propeller. Andy replaced the wooden soapbox. Eddie Tobin jumped on it and leaned in close so only Bell could hear.

“Looks like they spotted Harry Frost at Saint George.”

St. George, on Staten Island, was a resort town where the Kill Van Kull met the Upper Bay. It was home to grand hotels with beautiful views of New York’s harbor. The busy waterfront served ferries, tugs, coal barges, steam yachts, fishing boats, and oyster scows.

“How sure are you it was Frost?”

“You know some of my folks are in the oyster business.”

“I do,” said Bell without further comment.

For certain Staten Island families, the oyster business extended into realms of activity that the New York Police Department’s Harbor Patrol dubbed piracy. Little Eddie was straight as they came, and Bell would trust the kid with his life. But blood was thick, which made Eddie Tobin an unusually well-informed private detective when it came to the dark side of maritime traffic in the Port of New York.

“A feller who looked a lot like Harry Frost – big, red-faced, gray beard – was flashing money to hire a boat.”

“What kind of boat?”

“He said it had to be steady – wide like an oyster scow. And fast. Faster than the Harbor Patrol.”

“Did he find one?”

“A couple of really fast ones kinda disappeared since then. Both run by fellers who’ll do it for the dough. Frost – if it was Frost – was flashing plenty.”

Isaac Bell slapped his shoulder. “Good work, Eddie.”

The apprentice detective’s face, branded by a brutal gang beating that had nearly killed him, shifted into a lopsided smile. His eyes had survived, though one was partly shaded by a drooping lid, and they glowed with pride at the chief investigator’s compliment.

“Can I ask you what do you think it means, Mr. Bell?”

“If it was Frost – and not some crook trying to smuggle something off a ship or bust his pal out of jail and spirit him off to a friendlier jurisdiction – it means Harry Frost wants a stable gun platform and a fast getaway.”

Bell extracted his long legs from the Eagle’s driving nacelle and leaped out, landing on the grass like an acrobat. “Andy! On the jump!”

“Hold on!” the Aero Club certifier cried. “Where are you going, Mr. Bell? We haven’t even started the test.”

“Sorry,” said Bell. “We’ll have to complete this another time.”

“But you must hold your certificate to enter the race. It’s in the rules.”

“I’m not in the race. Andy! Paint her yellow.”

“Yellow?”

“Whiteway Yellow. The same yellow as Josephine’s. Tell her boys I said to give you as much dope as you need and to lend a hand with the brushes. I want my machine yellow by morning.”

“How are people going to tell you apart? Your machines look near the same already. It’s going to be very confusing.”

“That’s the idea.” said Isaac Bell. “I’m not making this easy for Harry Frost.”

“Yeah, but what if he shoots at you thinking you’re her?”

“If he shoots, he’ll reveal his position. Then he’s all mine.”

“What if he hits you?”

Isaac Bell didn’t answer. He was already beckoning his detectives and addressing them urgently. “Young Eddie’s turned up a heck of a clue. Station riflemen on boats on the East River and the Upper Bay and up the Hudson all the way to Yonkers. We’ve got Harry Frost where we want him.”