The Race

17

ISAAC BELL DROVE HIS American Eagle monoplane a thousand feet above Belmont Park to watch for trouble when the race began. The winds were tricky this afternoon – the firing of the start cannon was twice delayed by strong gusts – and novice though he was, the tall detective took to heart the expert birdmen’s love of high flying. Josephine Josephs, Joe Mudd, Lt. Chet Bass, race-car driver Billy Thomas, cotton farmer Steve Stevens, and “Frenchie” Renee Chevalier all favored altitude for reasons put succinctly by Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin: “Falling from high, you can try to stop in time. Falling from low, you encounter the ground too soon.”

The altitude gave Bell a spectacular view of the Belmont Park Race Track. The bright green infield was speckled with aeroplanes of every color. Gangs of mechanicians, distinguished by their vests and white shirtsleeves, milled about them, adjusting wire stays, tuning motors, topping off gasoline tanks and radiators. Fifty thousand spectators waving white handkerchiefs packed the grandstand.

Good thing he had planned for traffic jams. Clouds of coal smoke were billowing over the rail yard. Support trains were backed up already, trying to depart Belmont Park for the Empire City Race Track in Yonkers. The tracks heading out were one long line of crawling trains, locomotive to caboose, slow and ponderous as a procession of circus elephants. Locomotives jockeyed for position at the switches, engineers yanked shrieking whistles, brakemen scurried, dispatchers shouted, and conductors tore their hair in a noisy, smoky ballet that would be danced every morning the aviators took off for the next field. Bell’s American Eagle hangar-car special was already in Yonkers, sent ahead at midnight with two Thomas Flyer touring autos.

The roofs of each and every boxcar and Pullman were painted with the racers’ colors and names. A racer could tell at a glance whether a locomotive and cars below him was his support train, a competitor’s, or merely an ordinary freight going about its business.

Josephine’s jaunty yellow string was pulled by a fast, high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2. Preston Whiteway’s palatial private car was coupled to the back, separated from her private sleeping car by the hangar car, diner, dormitory Pullmans for mechanicians, newspapermen, and detectives, and the roadster car with Whiteway’s Rolls-Royce. It was well in the lead. Bell had seen to that, ordering it to depart before dawn, leaving behind an electric GMC moving van with a second set of tools. If all went as planned, the Josephine Special would be waiting in Yonkers when she alighted. Hopefully in the lead, thought Bell, having rashly pressed another thousand dollars into Johnny Musto’s scented palm.

Ahead of the crawling trains he could see the smoke of New York City staining the blue sky ten miles to the west. The Wall Street skyscrapers, poking through the smoke, marked where Lower Manhattan thrust into the harbor, dividing the waters from which Harry Frost would attack.

Bell had deployed New York Van Dorns, led by Harry Warren and guided by Staten Island waterman Eddie Tobin, on the East River, the Upper Bay, and the Hudson River in three fast boats, one for each body of water. They would be assisted, thanks to lavishly dispensed tips, by the New York Police Department’s Harbor Patrol.

He was acutely aware that it was almost impossible to communicate with his widely scattered outfit. Were he ramrodding such an operation on the ground, he could issue orders and receive reports by telephone, telegraph, and motorcar. A Marconi radio, such as the U.S. Navy employed to communicate with battleships, would come in handy coordinating his far-flung, thinly spread forces. But a wireless telegraph weighed considerably more than the American Eagle and required an even heavier source of electricity, so he had to rely on the alertness and enterprising nature of the detectives on the ground and water.

The start cannon fired.

Isaac Bell did not hear it over the roar of the Gnome, but he saw a big white puff of gunpowder smoke.

They had drawn straws for start position. First to tear across the grass was cotton planter Steve Stevens, his enormous white biplane powered by twin pump-fed V-8 Antoinettes that were similar to the motor in Josephine’s machine only bigger. Dmitri Platov had installed them, joking with the other mechanicians that the Antoinettes’ high ratio of power to weight almost made up for the Southern cotton planter’s tonnage. It took over two hundred yards to get off the ground. Wobbling into a turn, it circled the start pylon, where its departure time was recorded by Weiner of Accounting. But when it headed west, it appeared to Bell to move at a surprising clip.

Army Lieutenant Chet Bass rose next in his orange Signal Corps Wright 1909 Military Flyer. Joe Mudd followed in his “Revolution Red” biplane. Moments after Mudd circled the start pylon, Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin passed him in his blue headless pusher. Machine after machine took to the air, had its time noted when it circled the start pylon, and headed for the Statue of Liberty.

Josephine had drawn the short straw. She rose last, leaping her Celere off the field in less than eighty yards, diving dangerously close to the ground to gain speed in the pylon turn, and whipped west as if fired from a slingshot. Bell flew above and slightly behind her, blessing Andy Moser for tuning the Gnome engine so finely that it could hold the pace of Josephine’s powerful Antoinette.

The immensity of his task struck hard, as the land swiftly changed from the open farm fields of Nassau to the rooftops of densely developed Brooklyn. He could see everything for miles ahead but nothing in detail. If Harry Frost opened fire, shielded by chimneys, pigeon coops, and clotheslines of flapping laundry, the first clue in the air would be lead ripping into Josephine’s machine.

Or his, Bell comforted himself grimly, since the two yellow craft looked so similar. Also of some relief, the aviatrix’s course was constantly altered by air currents and wind gusts. If Frost ended up a quarter mile to either side of it, the same objects screening him would block a clear shot. Which made it all the more likely that the savvy hunter would attack from the water.

Bell saw it gleaming up ahead ten minutes after Josephine took to the air.

New York Harbor was a huge swath of rivers and bays cluttered with tugs, fleets of ferries carrying people to watch the race, barges, steamers, black freighters billowing smoke, four-masted ships, fishing boats, oyster boats, rowboats, speedboats, and lighters. To his right, Bell saw the Brooklyn Bridge draped across the East River, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan Island. A white battleship surrounded by little tugboats was steaming toward the Navy Yard. Others, painted the new camouflage gray color, were moored pier side, being fitted with modern cage masts.

Dead ahead, Bell saw Brooklyn ending at Buttermilk Channel. Across that narrow strait lay Governors Island. A speedboat patrolled the middle of the strait, its deck marked with a white canvas V for Van Dorn. Beyond Governors Island, open water stretched nearly a mile to the Statue of Liberty.

The colossal copper green statue stood three hundred feet tall on a granite-clad pedestal set atop an ancient stone star-shaped fort on tiny Bedloe’s Island. The Van Dorn Agency had another V-marked launch cruising near Bedloe’s, weaving among the ferryboats, barges furnished with bleachers, and private yachts packed with spectators waving hats and handkerchiefs.

Bell saw that Steve Stevens’s white biplane had already circled the waypoint and was disappearing far to the north up the Hudson River. He was closely followed by Billy Thomas in the race-car driver’s green Curtiss Pusher. Four contestants trailed them. Joe Mudd’s red biplane was just completing its turn around the tall statue, and two fliers were close behind him. Missing from the field was Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue headless pusher, and Bell knew that Josephine had to be worried that the Englishman was so far ahead of Stevens that he was already sipping tea in Yonkers.

Bell took his left hand off the control wheel, gripped the field glasses suspended from his neck, and scanned the waters for small boats of the type Frost had supposedly hired. He noticed to the north a group of tugs, and two enormous ferries churning big wakes as they converged urgently toward a patch of water between Governors Island and the pier-bristled tip of Lower Manhattan. Bell swept the glasses ahead of them and saw a bright blue flying machine sinking in the water. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss had fallen into the bay. The lower wing and the fuselage were already submerged.

The Eagle lurched like an auto skidding toward a ditch. Bell let go of his glasses to use both hands. When he had coaxed her back on an even keel, he resumed flying with one hand, spun the focus wheel to narrow in on the wreckage, and found the Englishman with his field glasses. The baronet was kneeling on the pusher’s top wing. His goggles were askew, and he had lost his helmet, but he had somehow managed to light a cigarette. He greeted the first tug to arrive to fish him out of the water with a grateful wave of his smoke.

Before Bell could resume scrutinizing small boats with his field glasses, he ran into a patch of rough air that required both hands to control the American Eagle. It got rougher, roller-coastering him fiercely. He guessed that he had driven into the precise junction in the sky where opposing winds, blowing down the rivers and up New York Bay, butted heads violently. Whatever the cause, he felt them battering his monoplane, testing Di Vecchio’s wing design for weaknesses.

Suddenly the machine heeled on its side, turned to the right, and fell.

18

ISAAC BELL ACTED INSTINCTIVELY, quickly, and decisively, and tried to steer out of the turn with the rudder. As he turned the rudder, he pulled back on the wheel to raise the nose. Neither rudder nor elevator had any effect. The American Eagle turned tighter and heeled more sharply.

His instincts had betrayed him. His propeller pointed into empty sky, and the ships in the harbor were suddenly under his right shoulder. And then, before he could reckon what he was doing wrong, everything began to spin.

He glimpsed a blur of yellow in the corner of his eye. In a flash, it was huge. Josephine’s machine. He whizzed past it like an express train, missing her by yards, imagining Joe Van Dorn’s reaction when, in the course of protecting America’s Sweetheart of the Air, his chief investigator smashed into her in full view of a million spectators.

Speed! Josephine’s first answer whenever he posed a question about flying technique. Speed is your friend. Speed makes air strong.

Bell turned his rudder back to a neutral position, stopped pulling on the control post and shoved it forward. Then, as gently as if he were commanding a frightened horse, he tilted the post sideways, raising the alettone on his left wing, lowering the one on the right. The American Eagle straightened out of its heel, stopped falling sideways, dipped its nose, and accelerated.

He was out of it in seconds. The gusts were still knocking him about, but the Eagle felt more like an aeroplane now than a falling rock. Speed, he thought ruefully, as the machine settled down. Easy to know in theory when flying on an even keel, hard to remember in the heat of the moment.

The confluence of river and sea winds that had nearly undone him proved to be as determined as it was deadly. It spawned a second maelstrom, more vicious than the first, that slammed into Josephine.

Bell had been lucky, he realized. It had hit him with a glancing blow. The full force of a band of crazily twirling wind gusts struck Josephine’s Celere so hard that it knocked her out of the sky. Her machine flipped on its side. And, in an instant, the monoplane was falling in an uncontrollable flat spin.

As it plummeted under his machine, Bell saw a piece break off her left wing.

The broken piece trailed her, snared by control wires. He recognized an alettone, one of her hinged control flaps. Then the wires parted, and the flap blew away like a leaf in the wind. If Bell himself had not just battled the same gusts, he would have reckoned that Harry Frost had blasted the appendage with a heavy rifle slug. But this assault on Josephine was no criminal attack. This was Mother Nature at her worst. While not as malicious, the effect would be as deadly.

Josephine did not hesitate. Speed!

Bell saw her throw herself forward, thrusting all the weight of her slight frame to push her control wheel. She was trying to drop the nose, pushing the aeroplane to fall forward instead of sideways. At the same time, she was tilting her remaining alettone to turn against the spin.

Bell tensed every muscle, as if he could somehow help her machine survive by force of will. But it seemed certain that despite her cool courage, lightning reflexes, and vast experience, the power of the wind and the crippling loss of a control flap would smash her into the harbor.

He saw a blur of light ripple across the waters around the Statue of Liberty. Spectators on scores of boats were looking up at her falling craft, thousands of faces agape with horror.

Bell hit his blip switch, cutting off his motor, and put the monoplane into a steep volplane, dropping after Josephine’s machine at a sharp angle, trying to stay with her, in a desperate impulse to help that was as impetuous as it was futile. The wind humming in the wire stays rose in pitch, shrieking, as the Eagle increased speed.

One hundred feet above the water, Josephine’s aeroplane banked sharply into a turn that put her on a collision course with the colonnaded pedestal of the Statue of Liberty. Leveling off, her craft headed directly into the wind, which was blowing every flag in a stiff line from the south. It descended and wobbled left of the statue. She was attempting to alight, Bell realized with unexpected hope. She appeared to be aiming for a tiny patch of lawn beneath the stone walls of the star fort and the water.

The narrow space looked no bigger than a country vegetable garden, not more than sixty yards long and barely two wingspans wide. But as Bell leveled out of his glide and restarted the Gnome, he saw that that was all the room the aviatrix needed. Her wheels touched at the start of the green grass, and the monoplane bounced, skidded, and stopped a foot from the water’s edge at the tip of the island.

Josephine scrambled out of the nacelle. She stood, arms akimbo, inspecting the wing where the alettone had broken. Then, mirroring the colossal green statue, she raised her right arm like Lady Liberty lifting her torch of freedom and waved to the crowds on the spectator boats. The pasty ripple of horror-stricken faces exploded into the joyous flutter of thousands of handkerchiefs saluting her pluck and good fortune.

As soon as Isaac Bell saw a V-marked Van Dorn Agency steam launch speed to Bedloe’s Island, he whipped his flying machine past the Statue of Liberty’s stern Gallic nose and raced up the Hudson River at sixty miles an hour. Nature had lent a hand with her lethal wind gusts, and it was not a gift he would waste. Josephine was safely on the ground, soon to be protected by armed detectives, and if Harry Frost was lurking on the route ahead, Bell’s decoy was now the only yellow flying machine the killer would see to shoot at.

The tall detective did not have long to wait.

Four minutes later – four miles up the smoke-shrouded river, with Midtown Manhattan on his right and the Weehawken piers thrusting into the water on his left – a high-power rifle slug whistled past his head.

19

ANOTHER SLUG CRACKLED BY. A third slammed through the Eagle’s fuselage immediately behind Isaac Bell and shook the back of his seat. A fourth screeched off the tip of the triangular steel king post above the wing. Heavy bullets – Marlin.45-70s, Bell guessed – Frost’s favorite. A fifth shot banged his rudder so hard, it rattled the control post. The gunfire was coming from behind him now. He had overflown Frost’s position and was moving out of range.

Bell spun the American Eagle on a dime and roared back, searching the busy river for the boat from which the gunman had fired. He had been flying up the middle of the mile-wide Hudson when the shooting started, equidistant between the pier-lined shores of Manhattan Island and New Jersey. The resultant half-mile range was too far from land for Frost to have done such accurate shooting. He was directly under Bell, somewhere in the gloom of smoke and haze, screened by the moving traffic of tugs, barges, car floats, lighters, ferries, launches, and sailing vessels.

Bell spotted a short, wide, flat gray hull scooting between a triple-track car float carrying half a freight train, and a three-masted schooner under clouds of sail. He descended to investigate. It was an oyster scow moving at an unusual rate of speed, trailing a long white wake and blue exhaust from a straining gasoline engine. The helmsman was hunched over his tiller in the stern. Its mast had been unstepped and shipped flat on the deck. A passenger was sprawled on his back beside the mast. He was a big man, Harry Frost’s size, who appeared to have fallen. But as Bell’s aeroplane caught up with the scow, he saw the sun glint on a long rifle.

Bell grabbed the control wheel in his left hand, drew his pistol with his right, and shoved the control post forward. If Harry Frost wondered why his wife’s yellow monoplane had circled back, he was about to get the surprise of his life when he learned that he had mistaken a similar profile in an identical color for Josephine’s Celere.

The Eagle dove at the oyster scow. Bell braced the automatic on the hull of the aeroplane, found the supine figure in his sights, and pulled the trigger three times. He saw one of his shots send wood chips flying from the deck and another tear a long furrow in the mast. The aeroplane lurched on an air current, and his third shot went wild.

The Eagle flew over the boat so close that Bell could hear the full-throated answering roar of Frost’s rifle, three shots fired so fast that the closely spaced holes they stitched in the wing a yard from Bell’s shoulder tore the fabric like a cannonball. So much for the surprise effect of two yellow aeroplanes.

“And you can shoot,” Bell muttered. “I’ll give you that.”

He had flown over and past the oyster scow in a flash. When he got the Eagle turned around again and headed back, he saw the scow fleeing at high speed toward Weehawken. Seen from above, a great sprawl of railroad track fanned from a dozen piers into rail yards and a vast thirty-acre stockyard packed with milling cows, where, in the thousands, they were herded off trains coming in from the west, bound for cattle boats that would ferry them across the river to Manhattan slaughterhouses.

Bell swooped after him, coming up from behind, firing his pistol again and again. But at such a low altitude, the flying machine bounced and slid in the smoky surface wind, making it impossible to steady his aim, while Harry Frost, firing from the more stable platform of the oyster scow, was able to send another astonishingly accurate hail of lead straight at him. Bell saw another hole appear in his wing. A slug fanned his cheek.

Then a lucky shot hit a wing stay.

The wire broke with a loud bang, as tons of tension were suddenly released. Bell held his breath, expecting the entire wing to collapse from lack of support. Tight turns would increase the tension. But he had to turn, and turn quickly, to make another pass at the fleeing scow before it reached the piers. If Harry Frost managed to get ashore, he stood a good chance of getting away. Bell flew after the scow, firing his nearly useless pistol and vowing that, if he got out of this fix alive, he would order the mechanicians to fit the American Eagle with a swivel mount for an autoload rifle.

Frost’s helmsmen steered for a pier where a gaff-rigged schooner was moored on one side and a four-hundred-foot steel-hull nitrate clipper was unloading guano on the other. The sailing ships screened the pier with forests of masts and thickets of crosstrees. It was impossible for Bell to shoot at Frost, much less attempt to land on the pier.

The oyster scow stopped alongside a ladder. Frost climbed fast as a grizzly. When he attained the pier’s deck, he stood still for a long moment, watching Bell circle overhead. Then he waved a triumphant good-bye and bolted toward the shore. Two big men in slouch hats – railroad company detectives – blocked his path. Frost flattened both yard bulls without breaking stride.

Bell’s eyes roved urgently over the industrial ground. There was no grass field in sight, of course. The rail yard was crisscrossed with freight trains, and the stockyards were thick with steers. He chose the only option. Battling a crosswind and hoping for eighty yards of open space, he tried to bring his aeroplane down on the pier that paralleled the one on which Frost had disembarked. A switch engine obligingly pulled a string of boxcars off it toward the yards. But stevedores scuttled about with wheelbarrows, and a team of horses ventured onto the pier, hauling a freight wagon.

The noisy racket of Bell’s Gnome engine, blatting loudly as he blipped it on and off to slow down, spooked the horses. They stopped dead in their tracks. When they saw the bright yellow monoplane dropping out of the sky, they reared and backed up. The stevedores dove for cover, clearing a path except for the wheelbarrows they abandoned.

The pier was eighty feet wide. The American Eagle’s wings spread forty feet. Bell brought her in right down the middle on a smooth wooden deck between two railroad tracks. His rubber-sprung wheels took the first impact, which forced them up to let the skids act as brakes. But the timbers were smoother than turf, and the Eagle glided like a skier on snow, losing almost no speed until it hit a wheelbarrow. The barrow tangled in the skids and caused the Eagle to tip forward onto her propeller. The nine-foot polished walnut airscrew snapped like a matchstick.

Bell jumped from the aeroplane and hit the ground running, extracting the empty magazine from his pistol and shoving in a fresh one. The ships moored along the pier that Frost had mounted from the scow blocked his view of the fleeing man. Bell was almost to the shore before he glimpsed Harry Frost, already on solid ground, running full tilt toward the stockyards.

Another railroad cop made the mistake of attempting to stop him. Frost knocked him down and jerked a revolver from the yard bull’s waistband. A fourth rail cop shouted at him and pulled a gun. Frost stopped, took careful aim, and shot him down. Now he stood his ground, turning on his heel, slowly, deliberately, daring any man to try to stop him.

Bell was a hundred yards behind, an impossibly long pistol shot, even with his modified No. 2 Browning. Pumping his long legs, he put on a burst of speed. At a distance of seventy-five yards, he aimed for Frost’s head, assuming that the marauder was wearing his bulletproof vest. It was still extreme range. He braced his pistol on a rock-steady forearm, exhaled, and smoothly curled his trigger finger. He was rewarded with a howl of pain.

Frost’s hand flew to his ear. The howl deepened to an angry animal roar, and he emptied the rail dick’s revolver in Bell’s direction. As the bullets whistled past, Bell fired again. Frost threw down his empty gun and ran toward the stockyards. Wild-eyed steers edged away. Frost vaulted a rail fence into their midst, and the animals stampeded from him, smashing into one another.

A steer jumped over the back of another and landed on the fence, knocking over a section. As fencing fell, animals crowded through the opening, leveling another section and then another, streaming in every direction, into the rail yard, onto a road to Weehawken, and toward the piers behind Bell. In seconds, hundreds of beef cattle were milling between him and Frost. Frost shoved through them, shouting and firing a gun he had pulled from his coat.

Bell was surrounded by horn-clashing, galloping animals. He attempted to clear a space by firing in the air. But for every fear-maddened creature that shied from the gunfire, another charged straight at him. He slipped on the dung-slicked cobblestones. A heel went out from under him, and he almost lost his footing. If he went down, he would be trampled to a pulp. An enormous whiteface steer came at him – a Texas Longhorn – Hereford crossbreed he knew well from his years in the West. Ordinarily more docile than they looked, this one was knocking smaller cows out of its way like bowling pins.

Bell holstered his pistol to free his hands. Seeing nothing to lose and his life to gain if he could only get out of the herd, he jumped with lightning speed, grabbing the whiteface’s horns with both hands and twisting himself over its head and onto its back. He clamped his knees with all his strength, grabbed the shaggy tuft between its horns with a steel fist, whipped off his flying helmet, and waved it like a bronco rider’s.

The frightened bucking steer kicked its legs into a frantic gallop, shoved through the writhing mob, leaped a tumbled length of fence, and thundered back into the now empty stockyard. Bell tumbled off and staggered to his feet. Harry Frost was nowhere to be seen.

He scoured the acres of cobblestoned corrals for Frost’s trampled body, peered into sheds and under the elevated office. He had no illusions about his own escape: he had been extremely lucky, and it was highly unlikely that Frost had been as fortunate. But he found no body, or even a dropped weapon or a torn coat or a mangled hat. It was as if the murderer had taken wing.

He kept hunting, as the stockmen began returning from the piers, the rail yards, and the city of Weehawken, driving captured steers that shambled into the yards too exhausted to pose any threat. Evening shadows cast by the stone cliffs of the Palisades were growing long when the Van Dorn detective stumbled upon a curved brick structure a few inches below the cobblestones. It was a circle of brick and mortar a full six feet in diameter, partly covered by a thick cast-iron disk. He knelt to inspect the disk. It had a date in raised numbers: 1877.

A stockman came along, cracking a whip. “What is this?” Bell demanded.

“Old manhole cover.”

“I see that. What does it cover?”

“Old sewer, I guess. There’s a few of ’em around. They used to drain the manure. . Say, what the heck moved it? Must weigh a ton.”

“A strong man,” Bell mused. He peered into the darkness under it. He could see a brick-lined shaft. “Does it drain to the river?”

“Used to. Probably stops under one of them piers now. You see where they filled in the water and built the pier?”

Bell ran in search of a flashlight and hurried back with one he bought from a railroad cop. He lowered himself into the shaft, hunched under the low brick ceiling, and started walking. The tunnel ran straight and sloped slightly. It smelled of cow dung and decades of damp. And as the stockman predicted, after nearly a quarter mile he found a timber bisecting it vertically. Judging by the broken-brick rubble scattered around it, Bell reckoned it was a piling unknowingly driven down through the long-forgotten disused sewer by the builders of the pier.

The tall detective squeezed around it and walked toward the sound of rushing water. Now he could smell the river. The brick grew slippery, and the flashlight revealed streaks of moss, as if the walls were wetted twice daily when the tide rose. He passed another vertical timber and came abruptly to the mouth of the sewer. This would have been the end, underwater at high tide, originally extending into the river forty years ago before landfill extended the shore.

At his feet, a torrent of ebbing saltwater tide and freshwater river current raced toward the sea. Overhead, he saw the shadows of a dense frame of piles and timbers – the underbelly of the pier. He stepped onto a final crumbling lip of brick and looked around.

“What took you so long?” said a voice.

Isaac Bell had a split second to train his light on a bearded face, slick with blood, before Harry Frost hurled a pile-driver punch.

20

WITH FOUR YEARS of college boxing and ten years as a Van Dorn agent, including an investigation in the Arizona Territory disguised as an itinerant prizefighter, and another as a lumberjack, Isaac Bell reacted by rolling with the punch.

Memory speeded up, as if whirled in a turbine. He recalled events too fast to register as they had occurred. In memory, he could see Frost’s fist swinging at him. He could see that he had been caught flat-footed. If he went down at Frost’s feet, he was a dead man. His only chance to live was to make absolutely sure that Frost couldn’t follow up with another blow.

Harry Frost had obliged Bell by knocking him backwards into the Hudson River.

The current was swift, tide and river speeding toward the sea.

Isaac Bell was barely conscious, with an aching jaw and a throbbing head.

He saw Frost scrambling along the narrow shelf of mud that the falling tide had exposed on the shore under the piers. Dodging the pilings that marched from the land into the river, Frost tried to keep up with the current. He scampered like a dog wanting to jump in the water after a ball but afraid of drowning.

The current slammed Bell against pilings in the water. Bell seized hold of one. Less than fifteen feet separated the detective and the murderer. “Frost,” he shouted, gripping the slimy wood, fighting the current. “Give it up!”

To Bell’s surprise, Harry Frost laughed.

Bell had expected howling curses. Instead, the murderer was laughing. Nor was it insane laughter. He sounded almost cheerful when he said, “Go to hell.”

“It’s over,” Bell shouted. “You can’t get away from us.”

Frost laughed again. “You won’t get me before I get Josephine.”

“Killing your poor wife won’t do you any good, Harry. Give it up.”

Frost stopped laughing. “Poor wife?” His bloodied face worked convulsively. “Poor wife?” He raised his voice in an angry cry: “You don’t know what they were up to!”

“Who? What do you mean?”

Frost stared at him across the rushing tide. “You don’t know nothing,” he said bitterly. He shrugged his massive shoulders. An odd smile flickered across his mouth before his expression hardened like a death mask. “Say, look it this.”

Harry Frost bent down and pawed in the mud. He straightened up, holding Bell’s Browning.

“You dropped this when you ran away by jumpin’ in the water. Here you go!” He flung the pistol in Bell’s face.

Bell caught it on the fly. He juggled the muddy grip into his palm and flicked off the safety. “Elevate! Hands up!”

Harry Frost turned his back on the detective, clinging to the piling in the water, and stalked upstream against the flow of the tide.

“Hands up!”

“I’m not afraid of you,” Frost called over his shoulder, taunting. “You are nothing. You couldn’t even take one punch. You ran away.”

“Stop right there.”

“If you didn’t have the belly to take another punch, you sure as hell don’t have the nerve to shoot me in the back.”

Bell aimed for Harry Frost’s legs, intending to slow the man, climb out of the water, and get him. But he was numb with cold. His head was reeling from the punch. It took an act of will to steady the barrel, another to force his finger to curl smoothly around the trigger so he wouldn’t miss.

The gun felt heavy.

“You don’t have the guts to pull the trigger,” Frost flung over his shoulder.

Strangely heavy. Was he losing consciousness? No. It was too heavy. Why did Frost throw it instead of simply shooting him? Why was he daring him to shoot? Bell let go the trigger, engaged the safety, turned the weapon around, and looked at the muzzle. It was cram-packed with mud.

Frost had jammed it into the river mud when he picked it up, deliberately tamping it into the barrel so it would blow up in Bell’s hand. Characteristic Harry Frost. Like the bent horseshoes thrown through victims’ windows to terrorize them, the chief investigator’s maimed hand would warn every Van Dorn detective: Don’t mess with Harry Frost.

Bell dunked the gun in the water and slammed it back and forth, sluicing out the mud. With any luck, it would fire a shot or two. But when he looked for his target, Harry Frost had melted into the shadows. Bell called, “Frost!” All he heard in response was laughter echoing under a distant pier.

“WHERE IS JOSEPHINE?” Isaac Bell shouted into the stockyard office telephone.

“Are you O.K., Isaac?” asked Joseph Van Dorn.

“Where is Josephine?”

“Camped out on Bedloe’s Island, fixing her flying machine. Where are you?”

“Who’s watching her?”

“Six of my best detectives and twenty-seven newspaper reporters. Not to mention Mr. Preston Whiteway, circling on a steam yacht, beaming searchlights for your fiancée to shoot moving pictures by. Are you O.K.?”

“Tip-top, soon as I get a propeller, a new wing stay, and a Remington autoload.”

“I’ll send word to Marion you’re O.K. Where are you, Isaac?”

“Weehawken stockyards. Frost got away.”

“Seems to be making a habit of that,” the boss observed coolly. “Did you wing him at least?”

“I took off one of his ears.”

“That’s a start.”

“But it didn’t stop him.”

“Where’s he headed?”

“I don’t know,” Bell admitted. His head ached, and his jaw felt like he’d been chewing thornbushes.

“Do you think he’ll try again?”

“He assured me he will not stop trying until he kills her.”

“You spoke?” The tone of Van Dorn’s voice suggested that if Bell could somehow see through telephone wire, he would be facing sharply raised eyebrows.

“Briefly.”

“What’s his state of mind?”

Isaac Bell had thought of little else since he swam ashore.

“Harry Frost is not insane,” he said. “In fact, in a strange way he’s enjoying himself. As I warned Whiteway in San Francisco, Frost knows he’s been dealt his last hand. He’s not going to fold his cards until he sets the casino on fire.”

Joseph Van Dorn said, “Nonetheless, the lengths he’s going to to avenge his wife’s supposed seduction would fit most folks’ definition of insane.”

“Let me ask you something, Joe. Why do you suppose Frost didn’t kill Josephine when they were still together?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why did Frost shoot Marco instead?”

“Put an end to the affair, hoping she’d come back.”

“Yes. Except for one thing. Having killed Marco – assuming he is dead-”

“He is,” Van Dorn interrupted. “We’ve been down that road.”

“Having killed, or tried to kill, Marco,” Bell replied evenly, “why is Frost now trying to kill Josephine?”

“He either is insane or just plain old-fashioned crazed with jealousy. The man was known for his temper.”

“Why didn’t he kill Josephine first?”

“You’re asking me to explain the order of a madman’s killings?”

“Do you know what he said to me?”

“I wasn’t there when he escaped, Isaac,” Van Dorn said pointedly.

Isaac Bell was too involved in his line of inquiry to countenance Van Dorn’s jibe. “Harry Frost said to me, ‘You don’t know what they were up to.’”

“Up to? Marco and Josephine were running off together, that’s what they were up to – or so Frost suspected.”

“No. He didn’t sound like he meant only a love affair. He indicated they were scheming. It was as if he had discovered that they had perpetuated some sort of betrayal worse than seduction.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. But I’m beginning to suspect that we are fighting something more complicated than we took on.”

“We took on protecting Josephine from getting killed,” Van Dorn retorted firmly. “So far, that’s been complicated enough for two detective agencies. If what you’re suggesting now has any bottom to it, we should call in a third.”

“Send me that Remington autoload.”

VAN DORN DISPATCHED an apprentice across on the Weehawken Ferry with the rifle and dry clothes from Bell’s room at the Yale Club. Andy Moser arrived in one of the roadsters an hour later, with tools, stay wires, and a shiny new nine-foot propeller strapped to the fenders.

“Good thing you’re rich, Mr. Bell. This baby cost a hundred bucks.”

“Let’s get to work. I want this machine flying by dawn. I already removed this broken stay.”

Andy Moser whistled. “Wow! I’ve never seen Roebling wire snap.”

“It had help from Harry Frost.”

“It’s amazing the wing didn’t fall off.”

Bell said, “The machine is resilient. These other stays, here and here, took up the slack.”

“I always say, Mr. Di Vecchio built ’em to last.”

They replaced the propeller and the broken stay and patched the holes Frost had shot in the wing fabric. Then Bell sawed twelve inches off the wooden stock of the Remington autoloading rifle, and Andy jury-rigged a swivel mount, promising to construct a more permanent installation “with a stop so you don’t shoot your own propeller” when he got back to his shop in the hangar car. Next time Harry Frost fired at him he would discover that the Eagle had grown teeth.

21

FOUR MILES DOWNRIVER, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Josephine was trying to fix her flying machine. Blinded by the searchlights glaring from Preston Whiteway’s steam yacht, choking on its coal smoke, and harried by reporters shouting puddingheaded questions, she and her Van Dorn detective-mechanicians, who had finally come over on a boat, addressed the mangled wing. But the damage was beyond their skills and the few tools they had with them, and the young aviatrix had begun to lose hope when help suddenly appeared in the last person she would have expected.

Dmitri Platov hopped off a Harbor Patrol launch from Manhattan Island, shook hands with the policemen who had given him a ride, and saluted her with a jaunty wave of his slide rule. Everyone said that the handsome Russian was the best mechanician in the race, but he had never come near her machine or offered his services. She was pretty sure she knew why.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

He tipped his straw boater. “Platov come helping.”

“Isn’t Steve Stevens afraid I’ll beat him if you help me?”

“Steve Stevens eating victory meal in Yonkers,” Platov answered, flashing white teeth in his whiskers. “Platov own man.”

“I need a savior, Mr. Platov. The damage is much worse than I thought.”

“We are fixing, no fearing,” said Platov.

“I don’t know. You see, this sleeve – here, bring those lights!”

The Van Dorns hopped to obey, angling electric lights they had hooked up to the Statue of Liberty’s dynamo.

“You see? The sleeve that holds the pintle for the alettone is not strong enough. Nor is it solidly seated in the frame. It’s even worse on the other wing. Dumb luck that that one didn’t fall off, too.”

Platov felt the sleeve with his fingers, like a vet examining a calf. He turned to the nearest mechanician. “Please, you are bringing second tool bag from boat?”

The Van Dorn hurried to the dock.

Platov addressed the other detective. “Please, you bringing more lights.”

Josephine said, “I can’t believe my eyes. It’s an amateurish design. The man who built the machine didn’t seem to understand the stress on this part.”

Dmitri Platov looked Josephine full in the face and stepped very close to her.

She was taken aback. Having never stood within twenty yards of him until this moment, she had never noticed how thoroughly his dark springy hair and mutton chops covered his brow, cheeks, chin, and lips, nor how brightly his eyes burned within that curly nest. She felt herself drawn to his eyes. There was something strangely familiar about them.

“Poor design?” he asked in straightforward, unaccented English. “I take that as a personal insult.”

Josephine stared back in utter amazement.

She covered her mouth with her greasy glove, staining her cheek. Marco Celere’s voice – the voice he had used only when they were alone – the faintest Italian accent, speaking the British phrases he had learned as a teenager apprenticed to a Birmingham machinist.

“Marco,” she whispered. “Oh, my Marco, you’re alive.”

Marco Celere gave her the tiniest wink. “Shall I send our audience packing?” he murmured.

She nodded, still pressing her glove to her mouth.

Marco raised his voice and addressed the Van Dorn mechanicians in his familiar Dmitri Platov Russian accent. “Gentles-mens, de idea is dat too many cooks making cold soup. Let Platov being alone genius fixing Josephine aviatrix machine.”

Josephine saw the detective-mechanicians exchange glances.

“Josephine being helper,” Platov added.

The detectives were staring uncomfortably, Josephine thought. Did they suspect? Thank God, Isaac wasn’t here. Chief Investigator Bell would question the shock on her face. These younger, less experienced operators sensed something out of kilter. But were they clever enough to challenge the mechanician-machinist who everyone in the race knew as “the crazy Russian” Platov?

“It’s O.K.,” said Josephine. “I’ll be his helper.”

The head Van Dorn nodded his assent. After all, she was a better mechanician than any of them. They retreated to the ropes they had strung to hold the newspaper reporters at bay. “We’ll be right over here if you need us, Josephine.”

Marco said, “Are passing Platov monkeying wrench, Josephine.”

She fumbled for the tool. She could barely believe her senses. And yet she felt as if she had awakened from a nightmare that had started the week she married Harry Frost when she saw him punch and kick a man nearly to death for smiling at her. Her husband had never hurt her, but she had known from that moment on that he would one day, suddenly, without warning. What a fearful price she had paid for her aeroplanes, waiting, on tenterhooks, even as Harry applauded her passion for flying and bought her machines – until last autumn, when he grew suspicious of Marco.

He had moved like lightning. First, he cut her out of his will. Then he roared in her face that he would kill her if she ever dared ask him for a divorce. Having trapped her thoroughly, he refused to pay off Marco’s debts on the machine they needed to compete for the Whiteway Cup. When he invited Marco to go hunting, she feared the worst. It was a trick to take Marco out in the woods and kill him in a “hunting accident.”

But Marco had a plan to save them both and enter the race – a brilliant plan to fake his own murder and frame Harry for the crime.

He had jimmied the telescopic sight on Harry’s hunting rifle so it would shoot high. He positioned himself so he could jump to a narrow ledge right below the rim of the cliff when Harry fired. Josephine would fly over, witnessing the shooting, so that Harry Frost would run. Marco would pretend to be dead, his body swept away by the North River. Josephine’s violent, murderous husband would be permanently locked back in the insane asylum, where he belonged. And Josephine would be free to charm the wealthy San Francisco newspaper publisher Preston Whiteway into sponsoring her in the Atlantic – Pacific air race in a new Celere Monoplano. Later, after Harry was safely locked up, Marco would wander out of the Adirondack woods pretending amnesia, remembering nothing except being wounded by Harry Frost.

But things had gone badly wrong. Harry had actually shot Marco – she had seen him blasted off the cliff with her own eyes – and Harry was never caught.

Fearing Marco was dead, Josephine had felt punished for what was, she had to admit in retrospect, an evil plan. She had begun to wish she had not let Marco talk her into it. Just as now part of her regretted following through with their plan to make Whiteway her champion in the race. It had simply never occurred to her that the rich, handsome publisher would fall in love with a tomboy farm girl.

Some women might rate the opportunity to become the legal wife of a newspaper magnate as better luck than she deserved, but Josephine did not want any part of it. She loved Marco and she had grieved for him. And now, suddenly, unexpectedly, he was back, alive and well, like an unexpected Christmas gift delivered late.

“Marco?” she whispered. “Marco? What happened?”

“What happened?” Marco murmured, softly as he continued to appraise the monoplane’s battered wing. “Your husband missed, but by not as much as we had hoped. That bloody.45-70 nearly blew my head off.”

“I knew we should have used blanks. Changing the sights was too risky.”

“Harry Frost was too smart for blanks. I told you that already. He’d have felt a lesser recoil, heard a lesser report. It had to be a real bullet. But I underestimated how canny he is. He sensed something was wrong with the sights in one shot. So bloody sharp that he compensated for the gun firing high on the second shot. Next I knew, I was flying off the cliff.”

“I saw.”

“Was I convincing?” Marco asked with another, almost imperceptible wink.

“I thought you were dead – Oh, my darling.” It was all she could do to keep from hugging and kissing him.

A smile twitched his whiskers. “So did I. I fell on the ledge, like I was supposed to, but I passed out. It was dark when I woke. I was freezing. My head was splitting. I couldn’t move my arm. All I knew was, I was still alive, and by some miracle Harry hadn’t found me for the coup de grâce.”

“That was because he knew I saw him shoot you. He ran.”

“Just as we planned.”

“But you weren’t supposed to die. Or even be hurt.”

Marco shrugged. “A minor detail. Nonetheless, the plan worked. Sort of. Harry’s on the run. Unfortunately, he’s overplaying his part – he should have been caught and locked up by now, or shot dead. But you have a wonderful aeroplano in the race, just as we planned.”

“What about you, Marco?”

Marco didn’t seem to hear her. He said, “You will win the greatest race in the world.”

“Win? I’m a day behind already, and it just started.”

“You will win. I will see that you win. Don’t you worry. No one will stay ahead of you.”

He sounded so sure, she thought. How could he be so sure? “But what about you, Marco?”

Again, he didn’t seem to hear her question, saying, “And you have a suitor.”

“What do you mean?”

“Every one at Belmont Park said that Preston Whiteway has fallen in love with you.”

“That’s ridiculous. It’s just a crush.”

“He had your marriage annulled.”

“I didn’t ask him to. He just went ahead and did it.”

“You were supposed to charm him into buying you an aeroplane. But when you ask, ‘What about you, Marco?’ you seem to have already answered your own question.”

“What do you mean?”

“It doesn’t sound like there is anyplace in your scheme for Marco.”

“It’s not my scheme. I just wanted your aeroplane. Like we planned.”

“You got more than we originally planned.”

Josephine felt hot tears spring to her eyes. “Marco, you can’t believe that I would prefer Whiteway to you.”

“How can I blame you? You thought I was dead. He is rich. I am a poor aeroplane inventor.”

“He could never replace you,” she protested. “And now that you’re back, we can-”

“What?” Marco asked bleakly. “Be together? How long would Whiteway let you fly my monoplano if he saw you with me?”

“Is that why you pretended you were dead?”

“I pretended I was dead for several important reasons. One, I was badly injured. If I stayed in North River, Harry would have killed me in my hospital bed.”

“But how-”

“I rode a freight train to Canada. A kind farm family took me in and nursed me all winter. When I learned that you were with Whiteway and in the race and that Harry was still free, I decided to tag along, in disguise, keeping an eye on things, before miraculously walking out of the woods as Marco, as we planned.”

“When will you?”

“After you win.”

“Why wait so long?”

“I just told you, Whiteway would be as jealous of me as Harry. Maybe not as violent, but angry enough to cut you off and take his aeroplane. He does own it, doesn’t he? Or did he give you the title?”

“No. He owns it.”

“Too bad you didn’t ask for the title.”

She hung her head. “I didn’t know how I could. He’s paying for everything. Even my clothes.”

“The rich are often kind, never generous.”

“I don’t know how long I can bear looking at you and pretending you’re not you.”

“Concentrate on my hairy disguise.”

“But your eyes, your lips. .” She pictured him as he had looked, his sleek black hair, noble forehead, elegant mustache, deep-set dark eyes.

“Lips do not bear thinking about until you win the race,” he said. “Drive my airplane. Win the race. And don’t forget, when you win the race, Josephine, America’s Sweetheart of the Air will be a made woman with heaps of money. And Marco, the inventor of the winning Celere Monoplano, will be a made man, with Italian Army contracts to build hundreds of aeroplanes.”

“What has it been like for you to look at me all this time?”

“What is it like? Like it has always been from the first day I set eyes on you. Like an ocean of joy that fills my heart. Now, let’s get your machine fixed.”

ISAAC BELL TRIED TO SLEEP in a blanket roll under the monoplane, but his mind kept seizing on Harry Frost’s strange statement. Suddenly he sat up, galvanized by an entirely different and even stranger thought. He had been struck by his aeroplane’s resilience – and grateful for it saving his life – even before Andy Moser’s admiring remark that Di Vecchio “built ’em to last.”

Bell pulled on his boots and ran to the rail-yard dispatch shack, where they had a telegraph. The peculiar strength of the American Eagle stemmed from multiple braces and redundant control links. Not only had its inventor used all the best materials, he had anticipated structural failure and designed to prevent catastrophe.

Such an inventor who built to last did not seem to be the sort of man to kill himself over a bankruptcy. Such a man, Bell thought, would rise above failure, seeing a bankruptcy as nothing worse than a temporary setback.

“Van Dorn,” he told the New York Central Railroad dispatcher. He had a letter of introduction signed by the president of the line. But the dispatcher was delighted to help anyone in the air race.

“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“I want to send a telegraph.”

The dispatcher’s hand poised over the brass key. “To whom?”

“James Dashwood. Van Dorn Agency. San Francisco.”

“Message?”

Bell listened to the dispatcher tap the letters of his message into the Morse alphabet.

INVESTIGATE DI VECCHIO SUICIDE.

SPEED CELERE INVESTIGATION.

ON THE JUMP!

22

“LOOK AT HER GO!”

Throttle full, Antoinette engine discharging a high-pitched snarl that sounded like ripping canvas, Josephine’s yellow monoplane streaked past Weehawken, New Jersey, at first light.

“Spin her over!”

Isaac Bell was already at the Eagle’s controls, having learned by telephone that Dmitri Platov and the Van Dorn mechanicians had worked all night to replace Josephine’s alettone and its wind-mangled mounts. The aviatrix had just taken off from Bedloe’s Island. Bell had his Eagle positioned at the head of the pier he had landed on the day before to take off over the river. His Gnome rotary was already warm and ready to fly. It blatted to life on one pull of the propeller.

“Chocks!”

They yanked the chocks from the wheels, and the monoplane started rolling. Andy and his helper ran beside the wings, steadying them, as Bell raced across the smooth boards between the railroad tracks and soared after Josephine.

He stayed close behind her as they flew up the middle of the Hudson River, eyeing the ships and boats for signs of Harry Frost, rehearsing flying with one hand and swiveling the rifle with the other. After fifteen miles, the two yellow aeroplanes veered toward the New York side, where the city of Yonkers stained the sky with smoke.

Although Bell was following Josephine’s aeroplane, he practiced navigating by a race map sketched with pertinent landmarks. With the stiff paper strapped to his leg, he traced the oval Empire City Race Track, which grew visible a couple of miles inland beside a huge pit of mud where steam shovels were digging a new reservoir for New York City.

Bell saw Thoroughbreds cantering around the track on their morning workouts, but the racetrack’s infield was deserted of flying machines, and the only hangar train in the rail yard was the long yellow Josephine Special. He learned upon alighting behind Josephine that every other flying machine still in the race had already taken off for Albany.

While the mechanicians poured gasoline, oil, and water in Josephine’s tanks, and gasoline and castor oil in Bell’s, they reported that even though Steve Stevens’s double Antoinette twin-propellered tractor biplane had turned in the best time from Belmont Park to Yonkers, the cotton planter was mad as hell at Dmitri Platov for helping Josephine fix her plane at the Statue of Liberty.

“De idea is dat,” they mimicked Platov affectionately, “every peoples racing together.”

“So Mr. Stevens yelled at poor Dmitri,” the mimics went on, switching to a Southern drawl, “Y’all is a socialist.”

Bell noticed that Josephine did not join in the laughter. Her face was tight with tension. He assumed that she was deeply upset to be so far behind this early in the race. Ordinarily polite and pleasant to everyone, she was railing at her mechanicians to “Hurry it up!” as they made further repairs to her whirlwind-damaged wing.

“Don’t worry,” Bell said gently, “you’ll catch up.”

The tall detective motioned one of the Van Dorns on her support train to join him. “Any idea why that flap fell off the wing?”

“She got caught in a pocket tornado.”

“I know that. But could the hinge have been weakened beforehand?”

“Sabotage? First thing I looked for, Mr. Bell. Fact is, that machine’s never been out of our sight on the ground. Mr. Abbott made that darned clear. We watched like hawks for sabotage. We slept next to it at Belmont. With one man always awake.”

Andy and his helper arrived in a Thomas Flyer via a ferry from the Palisades of New Jersey before Josephine’s mechanicians were finished. They drove it up the ramp into the American Eagle Special, and Bell sent the train ahead.

It was noon before Josephine could take to the sky.

She circled the grandstand for Weiner of Accounting’s deputy to record her departure time, climbed to a thousand feet, and headed north. Isaac Bell flew a little above and a quarter mile behind. His race map said it was a hundred and forty miles to Albany’s Altamont Fair Grounds. The route was easy to follow, the New York Central Railroad tracks hugging the east bank of the river, until, above the city of Hudson, he saw a number of short lines merge in from the east. At that confusing junction, the race stewards had marked the correct tracks to follow with long white canvas arrows.

The two monoplanes proceeded north without incident, eventually overtaking Bell’s white-roofed Eagle Special train, which was loafing along waiting for them to catch up. The fireman shoveled on a little more coal to keep pace with the flying machines.

Suddenly, ten miles short of Albany, Bell saw Josephine drop in a steep volplane.

Isaac Bell followed her down in a longer series of descending loops and was still high up when she alighted on a freshly mown hayfield outside the village of Castleton-on-Hudson. Through his field glasses, he could see why she had found a place to land. Steam was gushing from the Antoinette. Something had gone wrong with the motor’s water cooling.

Bell swung back toward the New York Central tracks. He flew low over the Eagle Special and pointed where he’d come from, and then spotted the yellow-roofed Josephine Special, which was highballing to catch up. He swooped in front of the locomotive and turned in the direction where Josephine was. The train stopped at the next siding, where the Van Dorn had already parked. Brakemen jumped down, waving a red flag in back and throwing a switch in front so the special could pull off the main line.

Bell alighted beside Josephine and told her that help was on the way. It came aboard two roadsters, Preston Whiteway’s Rolls-Royce, with two detective-mechanicians, who got straight to work on her machine, and Bell’s Model 35 Thomas Flyer, with Andy Moser, who replenished gas and castor oil and adjusted the Gnome. Josephine’s problem turned out to be more complicated than a broken water hose. The entire water pump was shot. The Thomas Flyer raced back to the train to get the new part.

“Mr. Bell,” said Andy, “it’s going to take them two hours at least.”

“Looks that way.”

“Could I ask you a favor?”

“Of course,” said Bell, hand deep in his pocket, thinking Andy needed a loan. “What do you need?”

“Take me up.”

“Flying?” Bell said, puzzled, because Andy was terrified of heights and never wanted to fly. “Are you sure, Andy?”

“Don’t you realize where we are?”

“Ten miles short of Albany.”

“Twenty miles west of Danielle. I was wondering could we fly over that Ryder Asylum, and you waggle the wings and maybe Danielle will see us?”

“It’s the least we can do. Spin her over and hop on. We’ll buzz by real close.”

Bell was not surprised that Andy had a map. The lovesick mechanician had even marked the asylum with a red heart. They found a rail line they could follow into the closest town and took off, Andy squeezed in behind him, reading the map. At sixty miles per hour and boosted by a west wind, Bell was in sight of the gloomy red brick building in less than twenty minutes. He circled it repeatedly. A face appeared at every barred window. One of them had to be Danielle’s. A flying machine was a startling sight for the vast majority of people outside a big city who had never seen one. The halls were probably alive with inmates, nurses, and guards, gawking, exclaiming. The Gnome’s distinctive exhaust sound would surely alert Danielle that it was her father’s machine even if she could not see it.

Poor Andy’s face expressed a jumble of joy and sadness, excitement and frustration.

“I’m sure she hears us!” Bell shouted.

Andy nodded, understanding Bell was only trying to help. Bell descended deeper into the valley and circled close over the turret where he had interviewed Danielle in Ryder’s private rooms. He checked the railroad watch he had hung from the king post. Plenty of time and fuel, he thought. Why not kill two birds with one stone: give poor Andy a break, and ask Danielle about the death of her father.

The lawn was broad inside the wall. He put the Eagle down easily. Guards came running, urged on by Dr. Ryder, who glued a smile to his face at the unwelcome sight of Isaac Bell.

“Quite an entrance, Mr. Bell.”

“We’ve come to visit Miss Di Vecchio.”

“Of course, Mr. Bell. She’ll need a moment to get ready.”

“Bring her out here. I imagine she will enjoy a breath of fresh air.”

“As you wish. I’ll bring her shortly.”

Andy was staring at the bleak structure, with its small barred windows. “That man doesn’t like you,” he observed.

“No, he doesn’t.”

“But he obeys you.”

“He has no choice. He knows that I know his banker. And he knows that if he ever harms a hair on Danielle’s head, I will paste him in the snoot.”

The first thing Bell noticed about Danielle was that her white patient’s dress was brand-new. The second was that she regarded Andy Moser more like a kid brother than a boyfriend. He backed away to let them have a moment together. Andy was tongue-tied. Bell called, “Andy, why don’t you show Danielle what you’ve done to her father’s machine?”

Andy fell to the task eagerly, and Danielle walked around it with him, oohing and ahhing, and stroking the canvas with her fingertips. “Many improvements,” she announced at last. “Is she still temperamental, Mr. Bell?”

“Andy’s turned her into a lamb,” said Bell. “She’s rescued me more than once.”

“I never realized you already knew how to fly.”

“He’s still learning,” Andy said grimly.

“Your father built a real sweetheart,” said Bell. “She’s amazingly strong. The other day, a stay was damaged, and the others held together for it.”

“Elastico!” said Danielle.

“Was your father elastico?” Bell asked gently.

Her big eyes lighted in happy memory. “Like biglia. India-rubber ball. Rimbalzare! He bounced.”

“Were you shocked how he died?”

“That he killed himself? No. If you stretch banda too much, too many times, it breaks. A man breaks when too much goes bad. But before, he was rimbalzare. Is Josephine piloting Celere’s monoplano in the race?”

“Yes.”

“How does she fare?”

“Behind by a full day.”

“Brava!” Danielle smiled.

“I was surprised to learn that Marco had another machine in the race. A big biplane with two motors.”

Danielle sneered, “Who do you think he stole that from?”

“Your father?”

“No. Marco copied the biplane from a brilliant student he befriended in Paris. At the École Supérieure des Techniques Aéronautiques et de Construction Automobile.”

“What was his name?”

“Sikorsky.”

“Russian?”

“And part Polish.”

“You knew him?”

“My father lectured at the École. We knew everyone.”

“Do you know Dmitri Platov?”

“No.”

“Did your father?”

“I never heard the name.”

Bell weighed another question. What more could he learn about her father’s suicide from her that might be worth the pain it might cause? Or should he rely on James Dashwood to ferret it out in San Francisco? Andy surprised him, stepping closer and muttering through tight lips, “Enough. Give her a break.”

“Danielle?” Bell asked.

“Yes, Mr. Bell?”

“Marco Celere convinced Josephine that he is the sole inventor of her aeroplane.”

Her nostrils flared and her eyes flashed. “Thief!”

“I wonder whether you could give me some. . ammunition to convince her otherwise?”

“What does she care?”

“I sense disquiet. Doubt.”

“What does it matter to her?”

“At her core is something honest.”

“She is very ambitious, you know.”

“I wouldn’t believe everything I read in the papers. Preston Whiteway’s competitors have only just begun to support his race.”

Danielle gestured angrily at the wall. “I see no papers here. They say newspapers will confuse us.”

“Then how do you know Josephine is ambitious?”

“Marco told me.”

“When?”

“He was boasting when I stabbed. He said she was ambitious, but he was even more ambitious.”

“More ambitious? She wants to fly. What did he want? Money?”

“Power. Marco didn’t care about money. He would be a prince, or a king.” She tossed her head and laughed angrily, “King of the toads.”

“What is there about Josephine’s machine that is indisputably your father’s invention and not Marco Celere’s?”

“Why do you care?”

“I am driving a machine your father invented. I have a strong sense of your father’s genius and his skills and maybe his dreams. I don’t think they should be stolen from him, particularly as he is not here to defend himself. Can you give me something I can use to defend him?”

Danielle closed her eyes and knitted her brow. “I understand,” she said. “Let me think. . You see, your monoplano, she was made later. After Marco made his copy. Marco is like a sponge. He remembers everything he ever sees but never has his own idea. So Marco’s monoplano has no improvements that my father made in yours.”

“Like what? What did he improve? What did he change?”

“Alettoni.”

“But they look exactly the same. I compared them.”

“Look again,” she said. “Closer.”

“At what?”

“Cardine. How do you say? Pivot. Hinge! Look how the alettoni hinge to your aeroplane. Then look at Josephine’s.”

Bell saw the startled expression on Andy Moser’s face. “What is it, Andy?”

“The boys were saying her flaps were lightly seated. The pintles were too small. That’s why the flap fell off.”

Bell nodded, thinking hard. “Thank you, Danielle,” he said. It had been a productive visit. “We have to go. Are they treating you well?”

“Better, grazie. And I have lawyer.” She turned to Andy and gave the mechanician a dazzling smile. “Thank you for visiting me, Andy.” She extended her hand. Andy grabbed it and shook it hard. Danielle rolled her eyes at Bell and said, “Andy, when a lady gives you her hand, it is sometimes better to kiss it than shake it.”

Bell said, “Andy, get the machine ready to start. I’ll be there in a minute.” He waited until Andy was out of earshot. “There is one other thing I must ask you, Danielle.”

“What is it?”

“Were you ever in love with Marco Celere?”

“Marco?” she laughed. “Mr. Bell, you can’t be serious.”

“I have never met the man.”

“I would love a sea urchin before I would love Marco Celere. A poisonous sea urchin. You have no idea how treacherous he is. He breathes lies as another man breathes air. He schemes, he pretends, he steals. He is truffatore.”

“What is truffatore?”

“Imbroglione.”

“What is imbroglione?”

“Impostore! Defraudatore!”

“A con man,” said Bell.

“What is con man?” she asked.

“A confidence trickster. A thief who pretends to be your friend.”

“Yes! That is Marco Celere. A thief who pretends to be your friend.”

Isaac Bell’s quick mind raced into high gear. A murdered thief whose body was never found was one sort of mystery. A murdered confidence man whose body disappeared was quite another. Particularly when Harry Frost had cried in bewildered anguish, “You don’t know what they were up to.”

Nor did you, Harry Frost, thought Bell. Not until after you tried to kill Marco Celere. That’s why you didn’t kill Josephine first. You didn’t intend to kill her at all. That twisted desire came later, only after you learned something about them that you thought was even worse than seduction.

Bell was elated. It had been a most productive visit indeed. Although he still did not know what Marco and Josephine had been up to, he was sure now that Harry Frost was not merely raving.

He said, “Josephine told me that you wept that Marco stole your heart.”

He was not surprised when Danielle answered, “Marco must have told her that lie. I’ve never met the girl.”

Danielle helped Bell and Andy roll the Eagle to the far end of the asylum lawn and turned it into the wind. She gripped the cane tail skid, as Andy spun the propeller, and held fast, retarding its forward motion while he struggled to hold it back and scramble aboard at the same time. She was strong, Bell noticed, and when it came to flying machines she knew her business.

Bell cleared the asylum wall and followed the rail line to its connector to the New York Central line and followed the tracks to the Castleton-on-Hudson railroad station. Passing high over the main street, he saw white horses pulling fire engines and a close formation of brass horns and tubas gleaming in the sunlight.

A fire department marching band was heading up the street, leading a horde of people, in the direction of the hayfield where Josephine’s machine was being repaired. They passed a brick schoolhouse, and the doors flew open and hundreds of children streamed out to join the parade. The word had gotten around, Bell realized. The whole town was coming to welcome her, and there were more people in the parade than would fit on the field.

Bell raced the mile to the hayfield, put down on it, and ran to warn his detectives. “The whole town’s coming to greet Josephine. They let the kids out of school. We’ll be stuck here all night if we don’t go now.”

23

JOSEPHINE WAS FRANTIC, “Hurry it up!” she cried to the mechanicians.

“I’ll drive you down the road,” said Bell. “Give them a speech. Let them see you so they won’t mob the field.”

“No,” she said. “They don’t want to see me, they want to touch the machine. I saw it happen in California last year. They wrote their names on the wings and poked pencils in the fabric.”

“Their parents are coming, too.”

“The parents were worse. They were tearing off parts for souvenirs.”

“I’ll block,” said Bell.

He sent the Rolls-Royce roadster and the Thomas to try to intercept the parade on the road, a temporary solution, at best, as the excited townspeople would simply stream around the autos. He ran his Eagle on the ground to the head of the field to further distract them.

Small boys, who had run ahead of the parade, jumped the ditch that separated the road from the hayfield. Bell saw there would be no stopping the children, who had no concept of the danger of whirling propellers before they got in her way.

Just when it seemed they would block her path, everyone looked up.

Bell heard the unmistakably authoritative roar of a six-cylinder Curtiss. Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s bright blue headless pusher, which Bell had last seen floating in New York Harbor, sailed overhead, making a beeline for Albany.

“That man,” said Andy, “has nine lives.”

Josephine dropped the wrench and jumped aboard her Celere.

The boys stopped running and stood stock-still, staring at the sky. Two yellow monoplanes on the ground had seemed the epitome of excitement. But the sight of a flying machine actually in the air was more remarkable, and less likely than July Fourth at Christmas.

“Spin her over!” Josephine shouted.

Her Antoinette howled. The wing runners turned her around into the wind, and she raced across the cut hay and into the sky. Isaac Bell was right behind her, one step ahead of the welcoming committee.

BELL FOUND ALBANY’S ALTAMONT Fairground buzzing with rumors of sabotage. The mechanicians tending the machines in the racecourse infield were debating whether the wings of Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss Pusher had been deliberately weakened. Bell went looking for the Englishman. He found him and his wife, Abby, at a party in a yellow tent that had been pitched beside Preston Whiteway’s private railroad car.

The newspaper publisher intercepted Bell and whispered urgently, “I don’t like these rumors. Strange as it may seem, they suggest the presence of a second lunatic, someone other than Harry Frost. I want you to investigate whether there is a murderer among us, or if Frost is lashing out at everyone.”

“I’ve already started,” said Bell.

“I want constant reports, Bell. Constant reports.”

Bell glanced around for something to distract Whiteway. “Who is that handsome Frenchman talking to Josephine?”

“Frenchman? Which Frenchman?”

“The dashing one.”

Whiteway plowed through his guests to plant himself proprietorially next to Josephine and glower at the Blériot driver, Renee Chevalier, who had gotten her to smile despite her poor showing.

Bell joined Eddison-Sydney-Martin, congratulated him on his survival, and asked how his headless pusher had come to fall in the harbor.

“One of my chaps claims he found a hole drilled clean through the strut that snapped, causing the wing to collapse.”

“Sabotage?”

“Rubbish.”

“Why do you say rubbish?”

“I say it was a knothole in a timber selected poorly by the builder, though they’ll never admit to it.”

“Could I see it?”

“I’m afraid it floated off while she was extricated from the water. We lost several pieces plucking her onto the barge.”

Bell located the mechanician working on the blue pusher, an American from the Curtiss Company, who scoffed at the knot explanation.

“If it wasn’t a knot,” Bell asked, “could someone have accidentally drilled a hole and covered it over to hide the mistake?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“No flying-machine maker would take the chance. They’d own up to their mistake and replace the part even if it came out of their own pocket. Look, Mr. Bell, say a house carpenter mistakenly bores a hole in a board. He can plug it up, caulk it, paint it over, and no one’s the wiser. But a flying-machine strut is a whole ’nother story. We all know that if something breaks up there, down she goes.”

“Down she went,” said Bell.

“Could have been murder. The Englishman’s darned lucky they fished him out of the drink in one piece.”

“Why do you suppose he insists it was a knothole?”

“The baronet is a babe in the woods. He can’t imagine anyone doing him harm to win the race, just like he can’t imagine a birdman wanting to win it to collect the fifty thousand bucks. He’s always saying ‘the winning is prize enough,’ at least when he’s not saying ‘the race is the prize.’ Drives the boys nuts. He’s, like, above it all, if you know what I mean, having a title and a rich wife. But the thing is, it’s not fair to Mr. Curtiss. Glenn Hammond Curtiss would never let a patch job leave the factory.”

“Was the pusher left unattended the night before the race started?”

“Along with all the others at Belmont Park. Your ‘aviatrix’ was the only one who had guards, but that’s ’cause of the husband, I hear.”

“So if neither a knothole nor a mistakenly drilled hole would ever get out of the Curtiss factory, how do you think that hole got in that broken strut?”

“Sabotage,” said the mechanician. “Like everyone says. Bore a hole where we wouldn’t see it. Where fabric lapped over it or a fitting concealed it. It happened to his Farman, too, didn’t it? And look what happened to the Platov engine. Those were sabotage, right?”

“They were sabotage,” Bell agreed.

“Excepting I don’t see what none of them smashes had to do with Josephine’s crazy husband. Do you, Mr. Bell?”

Bell pressed two dollars into the mechanician’s hand. “Here, buy the boys a drink.”

“Not ’til we reach San Francisco. We’re sleeping stone-cold sober under our pusher from now on. One man awake all night.”

Bell put his mind to the unsettling thought that of three acts of sabotage, only one could be connected to Harry Frost. Three acts of sabotage since the racers gathered at Belmont Park. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin twice a victim, Platov and poor Judd the mechanician the third.

Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s first smash had been so clearly a distraction engineered by Harry Frost to kill Josephine.

But how could he blame the second attack on Eddison-Sydney-Martin on Harry Frost? What would Frost get out of Eddison-Sydney-Martin smashing? Just as he had wondered back at Belmont, what would Harry Frost get out of Dmitri Platov’s engine jumping the track and killing a mechanician? Was Frost attacking the entire race instead of concentrating on killing his wife? That didn’t make sense at this stage. Frost was too single-minded to spread himself thin. He would concentrate on killing his wife first, a crime which, if successful, would have the collateral effect of besmirching Preston Whiteway’s race as well.

But to what purpose had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? And to what purpose had the headless pusher been made to smash?

To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the likeliest answer.

Who would gain? Three possibilities hovered in Bell’s mind, two likely, one odd but not entirely unlikely. The saboteur could be a competitor – one of the birdmen – eliminating his strongest rivals. Or the saboteur could be a gambler trying to throw the race by getting rid of front-runners. Or, oddly, it could be the race sponsor himself trying to generate publicity.

The likeliest was a competitor trying to gain an edge by eliminating his strongest rivals. Fifty thousand dollars was a huge prize, more money than a workingman would earn in a lifetime.

But the money wagered as the race progressed across the country would be even more than could be made by fixing a horse race. High rollers like Johnny Musto could rake it in.

Preston Whiteway presented a third, strange possibility. Bell could not forget that the publisher had stated unabashedly that the best thing that could happen to keep people excited about the race would be half the male contestants smashing to the ground before Chicago. “A natural winnowing of the field,” as he had put it coldly, “will turn it into a contest that pits only the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine.”

Too far-fetched? But was Preston Whiteway above engineering aeroplane smashes to sell newspapers? Truth, facts, and moral decency hadn’t stopped him from trying to start a war with Japan over the Great White Fleet. Nor had they restrained him from using the sinking of the battleship Maine to incite the Spanish-American War.

JOSEPHINE JOSEPHS FELL farther behind on the one-hundred-forty-five-mile leg from Albany to Syracuse when the hastily repaired alettone seized up, and its entire mounting had to be replaced. Then she lost half a day between Syracuse and Buffalo when the Antoinette blew a cylinder.

Isaac Bell reminded her that she was not the only competitor running into difficulty. Three aeroplanes were already out of the race. A big Voisin tangled terminally with a pasture fence, a fast Ambroise Goupy biplane broke apart when a down current dropped it into a stand of trees short of the field where it was attempting to alight, and the formidable Renee Chevalier splashed into the Erie Canal, reducing his Blériot to matchwood, and nearly drowned in the shallow water, unable to stand or swim having broken both legs.

Josephine, whom Bell had noticed had become rather standoffish ever since they left Belmont, surprised him with one of her exuberant grins that made her look much more herself. “Thanks for the thought, Isaac. I guess I should be grateful I haven’t broken any bones yet.”

Bell hired a third mechanician – a skillful Chicago boy named Eustace Weed, who had lost his job on the ruined Voisin – to keep his Eagle running. That gave Andy spare time to investigate the mechanical cause of each of the smashes, with an eye to pinning down evidence of sabotage. The meticulous policeman’s son gathered evidence carefully, and reported that since Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s smash into New York Harbor most accidents had a legitimate mechanical explanation for what went wrong. The possible exception was Chevalier’s, but key parts of his machine were on the bottom of the Erie Canal.

Bell followed up by questioning the mechanicians. Who was near the machine? Who was in your hangar car? Any strangers? None they remembered. Sometimes the mechanicians found evidence to show the Van Dorns – a broken strut, a crushed fuel line, a kinked stay wire – sometimes there was none.

Preston Whiteway kept railing at Bell that there was “a murderer among us.” Bell kept his counsel, knowing that Whiteway could be him – not a murderer in the strictest sense but a cold-blooded saboteur with little regard for the fate of the drivers when they smashed.

As the racers struggled west, smashes grew increasingly common. Machines faltered, winds sprang up with no warning, and birdmen made mistakes. Others suffered breakdowns that added hours to their time. Joe Mudd’s sturdy red Liberator was leaking so much oil that the entire front of the machine turned black. Then it nearly killed him when the oil caught fire over Buffalo. Mudd was luckier than Chet Bass. Bass’s Army Signal Corps Wright Flyer skidded sideways on landing at Erie, Pennsylvania, throwing him thirty feet across the grass.

Bell listened closely to the heated discussions that followed. The fact Bass would lose two days in the hospital with a brain concussion prompted the birdmen and mechanicians to debate the value of installing belts to keep the drivers from falling off their machines. An Austrian aristocrat flying a Pischof monoplane ridiculed the “cowardly” idea of strapping in with a belt. Many agreed that belting on would be unmanly. But Billy Thomas, the race-car driver who had proven his bravery repeatedly on the raceways before learning how to fly the Vanderbilt syndicate’s big Curtiss Twin Pusher, announced that the Austrian could go to hell, he would wear a belt.

The day he did, a Great Lakes gale blew his Curtiss against a railroad semaphore mast atop a signal tower on a depot building. The Curtiss ricocheted into twenty strands of telegraph wire and bounced back through the second-floor windows of the signal tower.

Billy Thomas’s belt kept him in the wreckage, but he was nearly cut in half by the force of the sudden stop against the rigid leather. Internal organs ruptured, he was out of the race.

Discussion that night at the Cleveland Fairgrounds shifted toward the concept of elastic belts. Mechanicians got busy tinkering with the thick rubber bands already on hand to spring the aeroplanes’ wheels.

The Austrian aristocrat still scoffed. The next day, a gust heeled his Pischof sharply, and he fell off the monoplane a thousand feet over Toledo, Ohio.

At the funeral, Eddison-Sydney-Martin announced that his wife insisted “vehemently” that he be strapped onto his aeroplane, wearing a broad belt fashioned from a horse sling.

Josephine’s and Isaac Bell’s similar craft had them seated deeper within the fuselage, making falling off slightly less likely. Josephine ignored Preston Whiteway’s pleas that she wear a belt. Having survived a smash in a burning biplane, she explained, she was afraid of being trapped.

Isaac Bell, at Marion Morgan’s suggestion, instructed Andy to anchor a wide motorcyclist’s belt to the Eagle with rubber bands. Sheathed next to one of the bands was a razor-sharp hunting knife.

NOTHING WAS HEARD NOR SEEN of Harry Frost since he escaped from Isaac Bell under the Weehawken piers. Bell suspected that Frost was waiting for the race to reach Chicago. Chicago was where he had begun his meteoric rise to the criminal pinnacle from which he had launched his legitimate fortune. In no other city on the continent was Frost better established with gang associates and corrupt politicians. In no other city had he so deeply infiltrated the police.

Try it, Bell thought grimly. The Van Dorn Detective Agency had started in Chicago, too. They, too, knew the city cold. When the race was stopped in Gary, Indiana, by lakeshore storms that the Weather Bureau predicted would last for days, he went ahead by train to scout the city.

“We’ll beat him if he tries it here,” Bell vowed to Joseph Van Dorn while conferring by long-distance telephone from the agency’s Palmer House Chicago headquarters.

Van Dorn, who was in Washington, reminded Bell that he had promised to keep a clear head.

Bell changed the subject to sabotage. Van Dorn listened closely, then observed, “The weakness of that line of inquiry is that flying machines are perfectly capable of smashing without help from miscreants.”

“Except,” Bell retorted, “in the cases of Eddison-Sydney-Martin and Renee Chevalier, and even Chet Bass, it’s the frontrunners who are smashing. Soon as a fellow pulls ahead of the pack, something goes wrong.”

“Steve Stevens hasn’t smashed yet. I read here in the Washington Post that Stevens holds the lead.”

“Josephine is catching up.”

“How much have you bet on her?”

“Enough to buy my own detective agency if I win,” Bell answered darkly.

In fact, the newspapers were starting to take notice that a birdman heavier than the rotund President Taft was flying faster than five men who tipped the scales at half his weight and a woman who barely weighed a third.

“According to the Post,” Van Dorn chuckled, “the dark horse is the heaviest horse.”

Bell had seen similar headlines in Cleveland.

SEVEN DAYS FROM NEW YORK TO CHICAGO?

the Plain Dealer speculated breathlessly, before the weather gods put the brakes on overoptimism.

MIRACLE FLIGHT. HEAVYWEIGHT COTTON FARMER STILL IN LEAD.

“You’ve got to hand it to Whiteway,” Van Dorn said. “He’s pulling a regular P. T. Barnum. The whole country’s talking about the race. Now that the other papers have no choice but to cover it, they’re backing favorites and smearing rivals. And everyone’s got an opinion. The sportswriters say that Josephine couldn’t possibly win because women have no endurance.”

“The bookmakers agree with them.”

“Republican papers say that labor should not rise above its station, much less fly. Socialist papers demand aristocrats stay on the ground, as the air belongs to all. They’re all calling your friend Eddison-Sydney-Martin the ‘lucky British cat’ for his nine-lives habit of surviving smashes.”

“As Whiteway told us, they love the underdog.”

“I’ll grab a train,” said Van Dorn. “I’ll catch up in Chicago. Meantime, Isaac, keep in mind, sabotage or no, our first job is protecting Josephine.”

“I’m going back to Gary. The weather ought to break soon.”

Bell rang off with much to ponder. While keeping the clear head he promised, he could not ignore the evidence that more was afoot than Harry Frost’s murderous attacks on Josephine. Something else was going on, something perhaps bigger, more complicated, than one angry man trying to kill his wife. There was a second job to do, another crime to solve, before it wrecked the race. Not only did he have to stop Harry Frost, he had to solve a crime that he did not yet know what it was, or would be.

24

ISAAC BELL WIRED DASHWOOD IN SAN FRANCISCO, repeating his earlier order to investigate Di Vecchio’s suicide. In addition, he wanted to know what Marco Celere had done when he first arrived from Italy.

His telegraph caught Dashwood at a rare moment when the dogged young investigator was not out in the field. Dashwood wired back immediately.

APOLOGIZE DELAY. DI VECCHIO SUICIDE COMPLICATED.

MARCO CELERE ARRIVED SAN FRANCISCO. TRANSLATOR FOR

ROMAN NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT TOURING CALIFORNIA.

Isaac Bell read the telegram twice.

“Translator?”

Josephine told him it had been difficult to communicate with Marco Celere. She couldn’t understand his accent.

Miss Josephine? Bell smiled to himself. What are you up to? Were you trying to throw off suspicion about cheating on Harry Frost? Were you assuring your new benefactor Preston Whiteway and his censorious mother that your heart was pure? Or were you covering for Marco Celere?

WHEN DETECTIVE JAMES DASHWOOD heard the opening notes of the opera aria “Celeste Aida” pierce the fog on San Francisco Bay, he told the nuns he had brought with him, “They’re coming.”

“Why are the fishermen singing Verdi?” asked Mother Superior, gripping tightly the arm of a beautiful young novitiate who spoke Italian.

Dashwood had led them onto the new Fisherman’s Wharf, where they were surrounded by water they could not see. The cold murk coiled around them, chilling their lungs and wetting their cheeks.

“The fishermen sing to identify their boats in the fog,” the slim, boyish Dashwood answered. “So I am told, though I personally have a theory that they navigate by listening to their voices echo from the shore.”

Finding an Italian translator in San Francisco had not been difficult. The city was filled with Italian immigrants fleeing their poor and crowded homeland. But finding one that clannish, frightened old-world fishermen would talk to had thus far been impossible. Schoolteachers, olive oil and cheese importers, even a fellow from the chocolate factory next to the wharf, had encountered a wall of silence. This time would be different, Dashwood hoped. It had taken a warm introduction from the abbot of a wealthy monastery down the coast with whom he had dealings in the course of the Wrecker investigation, plus his own promise of an extortionate contribution to the convent’s poor box, to persuade Mother Superior to bring the girl to Fisherman’s Wharf to translate his questions and the fishermen’s answers.

The singing grew louder. Ship horns resonated deep bass counterpoint, and tug whistles piped, as unseen vessels made their cautious way about the invisible harbor. The fog thinned and thickened in shifting patches. The long black hull of a four-masted ship materialized suddenly and just as suddenly disappeared. A tall steamer passed, transparent as a ghost, and vanished. A tiny green boat under a lateen sail took form.

“Here they come,” said Dashwood. “Pietro and Giuseppe.”

“Which has one arm?” asked Mother Superior.

“Giuseppe. He lost it to a shark, I was told. Or a devilfish.”

The beautiful Maria made the sign of the cross. Dashwood said soothingly, “That’s what they call the octopus.”

Giuseppe scowled when he saw the detective who had visited Fisherman’s Wharf so often, some thought he was buying fish for a wholesaler. But when his sea-crinkled eyes fell on the nuns’ black habits, he crossed himself and nudged Pietro, who was preparing to throw a line around a cleat, and Pietro crossed himself, too.

Better, thought Dashwood. At least they weren’t throwing fish heads at him, which was how his previous visit had ended.

“What do you want Maria to inquire of them?” Mother Superior asked.

“First, is it true they overheard an argument in the street outside their rooming house between two inventors of flying machines?”

“And if they did?”

“Oh, they did, for sure. The trick will be to convince them that I mean no harm and am merely trying to right a wrong, and that it has nothing to do with them nor will it cause them any trouble.”

Mother Superior – a straight-talking Irishwoman who had led her convent through the recent earthquake and fires and taken in refugees like Maria from displaced orders whose motherhouses had tumbled down – said, “Maria will have her hands full convincing them of half that, Detective Dashwood.”

AFTER WAITING OUT THREE DAYS of wind and rain in a muddy Gary, Indiana, fairground, the Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race took to the air in hopes of reaching Chicago’s Illinois National Guard Armory ahead of another storm. In the bleachers erected along the broad avenue that served as the armory’s parade ground, the impatient spectators were read a telegraph message that said thunder and lightning had driven the aviators back to the ground at Hammond.

The National Guard’s fifty-piece brass marching band played to soothe the crowd. Then local aviators took to the air in early-model Wright Fliers to entertain them by attempting to drop plaster “bombs” on a “battleship” drawn in chalk in the middle of the avenue. The cobblestones were splotched with broken plaster when, finally, another message echoed from the megaphone.

The sky over Hammond had cleared. The racers were off the ground again.

An hour later, a shout went up.

“They’re here!”

All eyes fixed on the sky.

One by one, the flying machines straggled in. Steve Stevens’s white biplane was in the lead. It circled the parapet of the fortress-like armory, descended to the broad avenue, and bounced along the cobbles, its twin propellers blowing clouds of plaster dust. A company of soldiers in dress uniforms saluted, and an honor guard presented arms.

TWO VAN DORN PROTECTIVE SERVICES operators guarding the roof of the armory were leaning in the notches of the parapet, gazing at the sky. Behind them, a broad-shouldered, heavyset figure emerged silently from the penthouse that covered the stairs, circled a skylight and another penthouse that enclosed the elevator machinery, and crept close.

“If I were Harry Frost coming up the stairs I just climbed,” his voice grated like a coal chute, “you boyos would be dead men.”

The PS operators whirled around to see “Himself,” the grim-visaged Mr. Joseph Van Dorn.

“And the murdering swine would be free to kill the lady birdman the agency is being paid good money to protect.”

“Sorry, Mr. Van Dorn.” Milago ducked his head contritely.

Lewis had an excuse. “We thought the National Guard soldiers guarded their own stairs.”

“The Sunday soldiers of the National Guard,” the livid Van Dorn growled sarcastically, “emerge from their mamas’ homes to defend the city of Chicago against rioting labor strikers and foreign invaders from Canada. They wouldn’t recognize Harry Frost if they met him in an alley. Nor would they know how to conduct their business in an alley. That’s why you’re here.”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn,” they chorused.

“Do you have your posters?”

They whipped out Harry Frost wanted posters, with and without a beard.

“Do you have your pistols?”

They opened their coats to show holstered revolvers.

“Stay sharp. Watch the stairs.”

DOWN ON THE PARADE GROUND, Marco Celere – disguised as Dmitri Platov – stood shoulder to shoulder with the mechanicians who had come ahead on their support trains. The mechanicians were anxiously scanning the sky for signs of more bad weather.

Celere clapped enthusiastically when Steve Stevens landed first – the least Platov would be expected to do. But all the while that he was smiling and clapping, he imagined fleets of flying machines mowing down the soldiers with machine guns and demolishing their red brick armory by raining dynamite from the sky.

25

THE SLAUGHTER FROM THE HEAVENS that Marco Celere dreamed of would demand flying machines not yet built. Such warships of the sky would have two or three, even four, motors on enormous wings and carry many bombs for long distances. Smaller, nimble escort machines would protect them from counterattack.

Celere was fully aware that his was not a new idea. Visionary artists and cold-blooded soldiers had long imagined speedy airships capable of carrying many passengers, or many bombs. But other men’s ideas were his lifeblood. He was a sponge, as Danielle Di Vecchio had screamed at him. A thief and a sponge.

So what if Dmitri Platov, the fictional Russian aeroplane mechanician, machinist, and thermo engine designer, was his only original invention? An Italian proverb said it all: Necessity is the mother of invention. Marco Celere needed to destroy his competitors’ flying machines to guarantee that Josephine won the race with his machine. Who better to sabotage them than helpful, kindly “Platov”?

Celere was truly an expert toolmaker, with a peculiar talent for picturing the finished product at the outset. The gift had set him above common machinists and mechanicians when he apprenticed at age twelve in a Birmingham machine shop – a position that his father, an immigrant restaurant waiter, had procured by seducing the owner’s wife. When metal stock was put on a lathe to be turned into parts, the other boys saw a solid block of metal. But Marco could visualize the finished part even before the stock started spinning. It was as if he could see what waited inside. Releasing the part waiting inside was a simple matter of chiseling away the excess.

It worked in life, too. He had seen inside Di Vecchio’s first monoplane a vision of Marco Celere himself winning contracts to build warplanes to defeat Italy’s archenemy, Turkey, and seize the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s colonies in North Africa.

Soon after the machine he copied had smashed, he saw vindication “waiting inside” a luxurious special train that rolled into San Francisco’s First California Aerial Meet. Off stepped Harry Frost and his child bride. The fabulously wealthy couple – the heavy bomber and the nimble escort – richer by far than the King of Italy – had given him a second chance to sell futuritial war machines.

Josephine, desperate to fly aeroplanes and starved for affection, was seduced without difficulty. Remarkably observant, decisive, and brave in the air, she was easily led down on earth, where decisiveness turned impulsive, and where she seemed curiously unable to predict the consequences of her actions.

Along had come the Whiteway Cup Cross-Country Air Race to prove his aeroplanes were the best. They had to be. He had copied only the best. He had no doubt that Josephine would win with her flying skill and with him sabotaging the competition. Winning would vindicate him in the eyes of the Italian Army. Past smashes would be forgotten when his warplanes vanquished Turkey, and Italy took Turkey’s colonies in North Africa.

Two yellow specks appeared in the distance: Josephine, with Isaac Bell right behind and above, following like a shepherd. The crowd began cheering “Josephine! Josephine!” Whiteway was a genius, Celere thought. They truly loved their Sweetheart of the Air. When she won the cup, everyone in the world would know her name. And every general in the world would know whose flying machine had carried her to victory.

If Steve Stevens managed to finish, all the better – Celere would sell the Army heavy bombers as well as nimble escorts. But that was a very big if. Uncontrollable vibration, due to a failure to synchronize the twin engines, was shaking it to pieces. If Stevens smashed before he finished, Celere could blame it on the farmer’s weight and poor flying. He had to admit that, by now, young Igor Sikorsky would have solved the vibration problem, but it was beyond Celere’s talents. And it was too late in the game to steal those ideas even if Sikorsky were here instead of in Russia. If only the thermo engine he had bought in Paris had worked out, but that, too, had been beyond his talents.

THE VAN DORN PROTECTIVE SERVICES operators guarding the roof of the armory had kept a sharp eye on the door from the stairs, as instructed by Joseph Van Dorn, though every cheer that went up had drawn their attention to the parade ground and bleachers below and the next machine descending from the sky.

Now they lay unconscious at Harry Frost’s feet, surprised by hammer blows of his fists after he sprang not from the stairs’ penthouse but from the elevator’s, where he had hidden since dawn.

Frost steadied a Marlin rifle on a square stone between two notches in the parapet and waited patiently for Josephine’s head to completely fill the circle of his telescopic sight. She was coming straight at him, preparing to circle the armory as required by the rules, and he could see her through the blur of her propeller. This might not be as satisfying a kill as strangling her, but the Van Dorns had left him no opportunity to get close. And there were times a man did best to take what he could get. Besides, the telescope made it seem as if they were facing each other across the dinner table.

THE INSTANT ISAAC BELL saw the stone notches in the armory’s crenellated parapet, he rammed his control wheel forward as hard as he could and made the Eagle dive. That roof was precisely where he would lay an ambush. The rules of the race guaranteed that Frost’s victim would have to fly so close, he could hit her with a rock.

Driving with his right hand, he swiveled his Remington autoload rifle with his left. He saw a startled expression on Josephine’s face as he hurtled past her. Ahead, among the stone notches, he saw the sun glint on steel. Behind the flash, half hidden in shadow, the bulky silhouette of Harry Frost was drawing a bead on Josephine’s yellow machine.

Then Frost saw the American Eagle plummeting toward him.

He swung his barrel in Bell’s direction and opened fire. Braced on the solid roof of the armory, he was even more accurate than he had been from the oyster boat. Two slugs stitched through the fuselage directly behind the controls, and Bell knew that only the extraordinary speed of his dive had saved him when Frost underestimated how swiftly he would pass.

Now it was his turn. Waiting until his spinning propeller was clear of the field of fire, the tall detective triggered his Remington. Stone chips flew in Frost’s face, and he dropped his rifle and fell backwards.

Isaac Bell turned the Eagle sharply – too sharply – felt it start to spin, corrected before he lost control, and swept back at the armory. Frost was scrambling across the roof, leaping over the bodies of two fallen detectives. He had left his rifle where he had dropped it and was holding a hand to his eye. Bell fired twice. One shot shattered glass in the structure that housed the elevator machinery. The other nicked the heel of Frost’s boot. The impact of the powerful centerfire.35 caliber slug knocked the big man off his feet.

Bell wrenched the Eagle around again, ignoring the protesting shriek of wind in the stays and an ominous grinding sound that vibrated through the controls, and raced back at the red brick building to finish him off. Across the roof, the door of the stair house flew open. Soldiers with long, clumsy rifles tumbled through it and fanned out, forcing Bell to hold his fire to avoid hitting them. Frost ducked behind the elevator house. As Bell roared past, he saw the killer open a door and slip inside.

He looked down at the avenue in front of the building, saw that Josephine had alighted and that there was space for him. Down he went, blipping his motor. He hit the cobblestones hard, spun half around, recovered, and, when the tail skid had slowed him nearly to a stop, jumped down and ran up the front steps of the armory, drawing his pistol.

An honor guard of soldiers in dress uniforms holding rifles at port arms blocked his way.

“Van Dorn!” Bell addressed their sergeant, a decorated man of action whose chestful of battle ribbons included the blue-and-yellow Spanish-American War Marine Corps Spanish Campaign Service Medal. “There’s a murderer in the elevator house. Follow me!”

The old veteran sprang into action, running after the tall detective and calling upon his men. The inside of the armory was an enormous cathedral-like drill space as wide as the building and half as deep. The coffered ceiling rose as high as the roof. Bell raced to the elevator and stair shafts. The elevator doors were closed, and the brass arrow that indicated its location showed that the car was at the top of the shaft.

“Two men here!” he ordered. “Don’t let him out if the car descends. The rest, follow me.”

He bounded up four flights of stairs, with the soldiers clattering behind, reached the roof, and stepped outside just as Joe Mudd’s red Liberator roared around the building, yards ahead of Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue Curtiss Pusher.

Bell ran to the elevator house. The door was locked.

“Shoot it open.”

The soldiers looked to their sergeant.

“Do it!” he ordered. Six men pumped three rounds of rifle fire into the door, bursting it open. Bell bounded in first, pistol in hand. The machine room was empty. He looked through the steel grate floor. He could see into the open, unroofed car, which was still at the top of the shaft immediately under him. It, too, was empty. Harry Frost had disappeared.

“Where is he?” shouted the sergeant. “I don’t see anyone. Are you sure you saw him in here?”

Isaac Bell pointed at an open trapdoor in the floor of the car.

“He lowered himself down the traction rope.”

“Impossible. There’s no way a man could hold on to that greasy cable.”

Bell dropped into the elevator car and looked down through the trap. His sharp eyes spotted twin grooves in the grease that thickly coated the braided steel wire that formed the traction rope. He showed the sergeant.

“Where the heck did he get a cable brake?”

“He came prepared,” said Bell, climbing up the side of the car to run for the stairs.

“Any idea who he was?”

“Harry Frost.”

Fear flickered across the old soldier’s face. “We were chasing Harry Frost?”

“Don’t worry. He won’t get far.”

“Chicago’s his town, mister.”

“It’s our town, too, and Van Dorns never give up.”

26

THAT EVENING, Isaac Bell parked a big Packard Model 30 within pistol shot of the three-story mansion on Dearborn Street that housed the Everleigh Club, the most luxurious bordello in Chicago. He kept the bill of a chauffeur’s cap low over his eyes and watched two heavyset Van Dorns climb the front steps. Out-of-town men who would not be recognized by the doorman and floor managers, they were dressed in evening clothes to appear to be customers wealthy enough to patronize the establishment. They rang the bell. The massive oak door swung open, the detectives were ushered in, and it swung shut behind them.

Bell watched the sidewalks for cops and gangsters.

Stealthy movement beside a pool of streetlamp light caught his attention. A slight figure, a young man in a wrinkled sack suit and bowler hat, eased past the light, then veered across the sidewalk on a route that took him close enough to the Packard for Bell to recognize him.

“Dash!”

“Hello, Mr. Bell.”

“Where the devil did you come from?”

“Mr. Bronson gave me permission to report in person. Got me a free ride guarding the Overland Limited’s express car.”

“You’re just in time. Do you have your revolver?”

James Dashwood drew from a shoulder holster a long-barreled Colt that had been smithed to a fare-thee-well. “Right here, Mr. Bell.”

“Do you see those French doors on the third-floor balcony?”

“Third floor.”

“Those stairs lead up from the balcony to the roof. I’d prefer not to engage in a public gun battle with anyone trying to escape from that room through those doors. Do you see the knob?”

Dashwood’s keen eyes penetrated the shadows to focus on the barely visible two-inch bronze knob. “Got it.”

“If it moves, shoot it.”

Bell tugged his gold watch from its pocket and traced the second hand. “In twenty seconds, our boys will knock on the hall door.”

Twenty-three seconds later, the knob turned. Dashwood, who had been trained by his mother – a former shootist with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – fired once. The knob flew from the door.

“Hop in,” said Bell. “Let’s hear what this fellow has to tell us.”

Moments later, the heavyset Van Dorns exited the front of the bordello, balancing a man between them like friends helping a drunk. Bell eased the Packard along the curb, and they bundled the man into the backseat.

“Do you realize who I am?” he blustered.

“You are Alderman William T. Foley, formerly known as ‘Brothel Bill,’ less for your handsome mug than for your managemental prowess in the vice trade.”

“I’ll have you arrested.”

“You’re running for reelection on the reform ticket.”

“The alderman was carrying these,” said one of the detectives, presenting Bell with two pocket pistols, a dagger, and a sap.

“Where is Harry Frost?”

“Who?” Bill Foley asked innocently. Like any successful Chicago criminal who had graduated to public office, Foley could recognize Van Dorn detectives when seated between them in the back of a Packard. He was emboldened by the knowledge that they were less likely to shoot him in an alley or drown him in Lake Michigan than certain other parties in town. “Harry Frost? Never heard of him.”

“You were spending his money tonight in the most expensive sporting house in Chicago. Money he paid you this afternoon to cash a five-thousand-dollar check at the First Trust and Savings Bank. Where is he?”

“He didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

“Too bad for you.”

“What are you going to do, turn me in to the sheriff? Who happens to be my wife’s uncle.”

“You’re running for reelection on the reform ticket. Our client publishes a newspaper in this town that you would not want as your enemy.”

“I’m not afraid of Whiteway’s papers,” Foley sneered. “Nobody in Chicago gives a hang for that California pup who-”

Bell cut him off. “The people of Chicago may continue to put up with your bribery and corruption a bit longer, but they will draw the line at even a hint that Alderman William T. Foley would endanger the life of Miss Josephine Josephs, America’s Sweetheart of the Air.”

Foley wet his lips.

“Where,” Bell repeated, “is Harry Frost?”

“Left town.”

“Alderman Foley, do not try my patience.”

“No, I ain’t kidding. He left. I saw him leave.”

“On what train?”

“In an auto.”

“What kind?”

“Thomas Flyer.”

Bell exchanged a glance with James Dashwood. The Thomas was a rugged cross-country auto, which was why Bell had chosen them for his support train. Such a vehicle – capable of traversing bad roads and open prairie, and even straddling railroad tracks when washouts and broken ground made all else impassable – would make Frost dangerously mobile.

“Which way did he go?”

“West.”

“Saint Louis?”

Alderman Foley shrugged. “I got the impression more like Kansas City – where your air race is going, if I can believe what I read in the newspapers.”

“Is he alone?”

“He had a mechanician and a driver.”

Bell exchanged another look with Dash. There was five hundred miles of increasingly open country between Chicago and Kansas City, and Frost was prepared for the long haul.

“Both are gunmen,” Foley added.

“Names?”

“Mike Stotts and Dave Mayhew. Stotts’s the driver. Mayhew’s the mechanician. Used to be a telegrapher ’til they caught him selling horse-race results to the bookies. Telegraphers are sworn to secrecy, you know.”

“What I don’t know,” said Bell, frowning curiously at Foley, “is why you’ve turned unusually talkative all of a sudden, Alderman. Are you making this up as we go along?”

“Nope. I just know Harry ain’t coming back. I done him his last favor.”

“How do you know Frost isn’t coming back?”

“Never thought I’d see the day, but you damned Van Dorns ran him out of town.”

ISAAC BELL LED JAMES DASHWOOD into a chophouse to feed him supper while the kid reported what he had discovered in San Francisco.

“Last you wired me, Dash, you found that Celere and Di Vecchio were both in San Francisco last summer. Celere had arrived earlier, working as a translator, then built a biplane he subsequently sold to Harry Frost, who shipped it back to the Adirondacks and hired Celere to work on Josephine’s flying machines at their camp. Both Celere and Di Vecchio had fled Italy one step ahead of their creditors. Di Vecchio killed himself. What new do we know?”

“They got in a fight.”

Two immigrant Italian fishermen, Dashwood explained, had overheard a long and angry shouting match in the street outside their boardinghouse. Di Vecchio accused Marco Celere of stealing his wing-strengthening design.

“I already know that,” said Bell. “Celere would claim it was the other way around. What else?”

“Di Vecchio started it, shouting that Celere copied his entire machine. Celere shouted back that if that was true, why had the Italian Army bought his machines and not Di Vecchio’s?”

“What did Di Vecchio answer?”

“He said that Celere had poisoned the market.”

Bell nodded impatiently. This, too, he had already heard from Danielle. “Then what?”

“Then he started yelling that Celere better keep his hands off his daughter. Her name is-”

“Danielle!” said Bell. “What did keeping his hands off his daughter have to do with the Italian Army buying his aeroplane design?”

“Di Vecchio shouted, ‘Find another woman to do your dirty work.’”

“What dirty work?”

“He used a word that my translators found very hard to repeat.”

“A technical word. Alettone?”

“Not technical. The girl knew what it meant, but she was afraid to say it in front of Mother Superior.”

“Mother Superior?” Bell echoed, fixing his protégé with a wintery eye. “Dash, what have you been up to?”

“They were nuns.”

“Nuns?”

“You always told me people want to talk. But you have to make them comfortable. The girl was the only Italian translator I could get the fishermen to talk to. Once they started telling the story, they wouldn’t shut up. I think because the nun was so beautiful.”

Isaac Bell reached across the tablecloth to slap Dashwood on the shoulder. “Well done!”

“But finding her was what took me so long. Anyway, she was translating great guns until that word stopped her dead. I pleaded with them. I even offered to pray with them, and she finally whispered, ‘Gigolo.’”

“Di Vecchio accused Marco Celere of being a gigolo?”

Bell was hardly surprised, recalling that soon after Josephine and Harry Frost appeared in San Francisco the young bride had persuaded her husband to buy Celere’s biplane. “Did he mention any specifics?”

“Di Vecchio said that Celere persuaded an Italian Army general’s daughter to get him to buy his machine. From what they heard, the fisherman thought it wasn’t the first time he’d gotten women to make deals for him.”

“Did he accuse Celere of taking money from women?”

“There was some sort of engine he bought at a Paris air meet. It sounded like a woman put up the money. But in San Francisco, he was broke again. I think the Army deal fell through.”

“The machine smashed with the general on it.”

“That’s why Di Vecchio kept yelling that Celere sold them a lousy flying machine and ruined it for other inventors.”

“Did Di Vecchio accuse Celere of trying a gigolo stunt with Danielle?”

“That’s what Di Vecchio was warning him off about. ‘Don’t touch my daughter.’”

“Sounds like your fishermen stumbled onto a heck of a shout fest.”

“They didn’t exactly stumble. They lived there, too.”

Bell watched the young detective’s face closely. “You’ve turned up a lot of information, Dash, maybe enough to make it worth the wait. Did you get a lucky break or did you know what you were looking for?”

“Well, that’s the thing, Mr. Bell. Don’t you see? They were arguing outside the hotel where Di Vecchio died. The night he died.”

27

ISAAC BELL FIXED HIS PROTÉGÉ with an intense gaze, his mind leaping to the possibility that an angry argument had ended in murder. “The same night?”

“The same night,” answered James Dashwood. “In the same house where Di Vecchio asphyxiated himself by blowing out a gaslight and leaving the gas on.”

“Are you certain he killed himself?”

“I looked into the possibility. That’s why I thought I should report face-to-face, to explain why I’m thinking what I’m thinking.”

“Go on,” Bell urged.

“I was already investigating the suicide, like you ordered, when I heard about the shouting match. You told me about Marco Celere’s original name being Prestogiacomo. I discovered he was staying there under that name. You always say you hate coincidences, so I reckoned there had to be a connection. I spoke with the San Francisco coroner. He admitted that they don’t do much investigating into how an Italian immigrant happens to die in San Francisco. There’s a lot of them in the city, but they keep to themselves. So I wondered, what if I pretended that the dead man wasn’t Italian but American? And pretended he wasn’t poor but earning three thousand dollars a year, and had a house and maids and a cook? What questions would I ask when that fellow got gassed in a hotel room?”

Bell concealed a proud smile, and asked sternly, “What do you conclude?”

“Gas is a heck of a way to get away with killing someone.”

“Did you turn up any clues that would support such speculation?”

“Di Vecchio had a big bump on his head, the night clerk told me, like he fell out of bed when he passed out. Could have woke up groggy, tried to get up, and fell. Or he could have been conked on the head by the same fellow who turned on the gas. Trouble is, we’ll never know.”

“Probably not,” Bell agreed.

“Could I ask you something, Mr. Bell?”

“Shoot.”

“Why did you ask me to investigate his suicide?”

“I’m driving the last flying machine Di Vecchio built. It does not operate like a machine made by a man who would kill himself. It is unusually sturdy, and it flies like a machine made by a man who loved making machines and was looking forward to making many more. But that is merely an odd feeling, not evidence.”

“But if you add your odd feeling to the odd bump on Di Vecchio’s head, together they’re sort of like a coincidence, aren’t they?”

“In an odd way,” Bell smiled.

“But like you say, Mr. Bell, we’ll never know. Di Vecchio’s dead, and so’s the fellow who might have conked him.”

“Maybe. .” said Isaac Bell, thinking hard. “Dash? This engine in the Paris air meet that Di Vecchio said Celere bought with a woman’s money. You said some sort of engine. What did you mean by ‘some sort of engine’?”

Dashwood grinned. “That confused the heck out of the poor nuns. Threw them for a loop.”

“Why?”

“The fishermen called it polpo. Polpo means ‘octopus.’”

“What kind of engine is like an octopus?” asked Bell. “Eight-cylinder Antoinette, maybe.”

“Well, they also call the octopus a devilfish. Only that doesn’t make sense when it comes to engines.”

Bell asked, “What happened when the nuns got confused?”

“The fishermen tried another word. Calamaro.”

“What is that? Squid?”

“That’s what Maria said it meant. Maria was the pretty nun.”

“An engine like a squid or an octopus? They’re quite different, actually: squid long and narrow with tentacles in back, octopus round and squat with eight arms. Dash, I want you to go to the library. Find out what Mr. Squid and Mr. Octopus have in common.”

EUSTACE WEED, Andy Moser’s Chicago-born helper who Isaac Bell had hired so Andy could spend time investigating the mechanical causes of the racers’ smashes, asked for the evening off to say good-bye to his girl, who lived on the South Side.

“Just get back before sunrise,” Andy told him. “If the weather holds, they’ll be starting out for Peoria.”

Eustace promised he’d be back in plenty of time – a promise he knew he would keep if only because Daisy’s mother would be sitting on the other side of the parlor door. His worst fears proved true. At nine p.m., Mrs. Ramsey called from the other room, “Daisy? Say good night to Mr. Weed. It’s time for bed.”

Eustace and the beautiful red-haired Daisy locked eyes, each certain it would be a better time for bed if Mother weren’t there. But Mother was, so Eustace called, politely, “Good night, Mrs. Ramsey,” and received a firm “Good night” through the closed door. In an unexpected flash of insight, Eustace realized that Mrs. Ramsey was not as coldheartedly unromantic as he had assumed. He took Daisy in his arms for a proper good-bye kiss.

“How long before you’re back?’ she whispered when they came up for air.

“We’ll be racing three more weeks, if all goes well, maybe four. I hope I’ll be home in a month.”

“That’s so long,” Daisy groaned. Then out of nowhere she asked, “Is Josephine pretty?”

In his second wise flash of insight that evening, Eustace answered, “I didn’t notice.”

Daisy kissed him hard on the mouth and pressed her body against his until her mother called through the door, “Good night!”

Eustace Weed stumbled down the stairs, his head reeling and his heart full.

Two toughs were blocking the sidewalk, West Side boys.

It looked to Eustace like he had a fight on his hands, and one he wasn’t likely to win. Running for it seemed the better idea. He was tall and thin and could probably leave them in the dust. But before he could move, they spread out and, to his astonishment and sudden fear, flashed open flick-knives.

“The boss wants to see you,” one said. “You gonna come quiet?”

Eustace looked at the knives and nodded his head. “What’s this about?”

“You’ll find out.”

They fell in on either side and walked him a couple of blocks to a street of saloons, where they entered a dimly lighted establishment and led him through the smoky barroom to a back-room office. The saloonkeeper, a barrel-bellied man in a bowler hat, vest, and necktie, sat behind a desk. On it, heated by a candle, bubbled a little cast-iron pot of boiling paraffin. It gave off a smell similar to the burnt castor scent of Gnome engine exhaust. Beside the pot was a short length of copper pipe, a water pitcher with a narrow spout, a leather sack a little longer than the pipe, and a vicious-looking blackjack with a flexible handle and a thick head.

“Shut the door.”

The toughs did and stood by it. The saloonkeeper beckoned Eustace to approach his desk. “Your name is Eustace Weed. Your girl is Daisy Ramsey. She’s a looker. Do you want to keep her that way?”

“What do you-”

The saloonkeeper picked up the blackjack and dangled the heavy end so that it swung side to side like a pendulum. “Or do you want to come home from the air race to find her face beaten to a pulp?”

In his first flush of panic, Eustace figured it was mistaken identity. They were thinking he owed gambling debts, which of course he didn’t because he never gambled except when shooting pool, and he was too good at it to call it gambling. Then he realized it wasn’t mistaken identity. They knew he was working on the air race. Which meant they also knew that he was working on the flying machine owned by the chief investigator of the Van Dorn Detective Agency. And they knew about Daisy.

Eustace started to ask, “Why-” He was thinking this had to do with Harry Frost, the madman trying to kill Josephine.

Before he could finish his question, the saloonkeeper interrupted in a silky voice. He had eyes that reflected the light as if they were as hard and polished as ball bearings. “Why are we threatening you? Because you’re going to do something for us. If you do it, you will come home to Chicago and find your girl Daisy just like you left her. You got my promise, the word goes out tonight: anybody so much as whistles at her, he’s dragged in here to answer to me. If you don’t do what we ask, well. . I’ll let you guess. Actually, you don’t have to guess. I’ve already told you. Understand?”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to tell me that you understand before we go on to what we want.”

Eustace saw no way out of this mess other than to say, “I understand.”

“Do you understand that if you go to the cops, you’ll never know which cops are our cops.”

Eustace had grown up in Chicago. He knew about cops and gangsters, and he’d heard the old stories about Harry Frost. He nodded that he understood. The saloonkeeper raised an inquiring eyebrow and waited until Eustace repeated out loud, “I understand.”

“Good. Then you and Daisy will live happily ever after.”

“When will you tell me what you want?”

“Right now. Do you see this here pot?”

“Yes.”

“Do you see what’s in there boiling?”

“It smells like paraffin.”

“That’s what it is. It’s paraffin wax. Do you see this?” he held up the three-inch length of three-quarter-inch copper tubing.

“Yes.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“It’s a length of copper pipe.”

“Blow out the candle.”

Eustace looked puzzled.

The saloonkeeper said, “Lean down here and blow out the candle so the paraffin wax stops boiling.”

Eustace leaned down, wondering if it was a trick, and they were going hit him or throw the boiling wax in his face. The back of his neck tingled as he blew out the candle. No one hit him. No one threw hot wax in his face.

“Good. Now we’ll wait a moment for it to cool.”

The saloonkeeper sat in complete silence. The toughs at the door shifted on their feet. Eustace heard a murmur of conversation from the saloon and a bark of laughter.

“Pick up the copper tube.”

Eustace picked it up, more curious now than afraid.

“Dip one end in the paraffin. Careful, don’t burn your fingers on the pot. Still hot.”

Eustace dipped the tube in the paraffin, which was congealing and growing solid as it cooled.

“Hold it there. .” After sixty seconds the saloonkeeper said, “Take it out. Good. Dip it in that water pitcher to cool it. . Hold it there. All right, now you gotta move quick. Turn it over so the wax plug is down. . That’s a plug you made, you see, the wax plugs that end of the tube. Do you see?”

“The bottom is plugged.”

“Now take the pitcher and pour the water into the tube. Careful, it doesn’t take much. What would you say that is, two tablespoons?”

“Just about,” Eustace agreed.

“Now, holding it upright, not spilling it, take your finger of your other hand and dip it in the wax. . Don’t worry, it won’t burn you. . Still warm, might sting a little, is all.”

Eustace dipped his index finger into the warm, pliable wax.

“Almost done,” said the saloonkeeper. “Scoop up some wax on your finger and use it to plug the other end of the tube.”

Eustace did as he was told, working the wax into the opening and smoothing the edges.

“Do it again, work it in a little more, make sure it is sealed watertight-absolutely watertight. Do you understand?”

“I understand.”

“O.K., turn it over. Let’s see if no water drips out.”

Eustace turned it over tentatively and held it out the way he used to present A+ projects in shop class.

The saloonkeeper took it from his hand and shook it hard. The plugs held. No water escaped. He dropped it in the leather sack, tugged the drawstrings tight, and returned it to Eustace Weed. “Don’t let it get so warm it melts the wax.”

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Keep it out of sight ’til somebody tells you where to put it. Then put it where he tells you.”

Utterly mystified, Eustace Weed weighed the sack in his hand and asked, “Is that all?”

“All? Your girl’s name is Daisy Ramsey.” The short, round saloonkeeper picked up the sap and slammed it on his desk so hard the pot jumped. “That is all.”

“I understand.” Eustace blurted quickly, though he understood very little, starting with why the saloonkeeper went through the whole rigmarole with the wax pot. Why didn’t he just hand him the wax-sealed tube in the sack?

The man looked hard at him, then he smiled. “You wonder why all this?” He indicated the pot.

“Yes, sir.”

“So if you lose that which I gave you, you got no excuse. You know how to make another. You’re a flying-machine mechanician, top of the trade. You can make anything. So when someone tells you where to put it, you’ll be ready to put it where he tells you when he tells you. Understand?”

“I understand.”

“O.K., get outta here!”

He signaled the toughs.

“They’ll see you safe out of the neighborhood. You’re a valuable man now, we don’t want folks wondering why you got bruises. But don’t forget, don’t let nobody see that there tube of water. Anybody starts asking questions, and the city of Chicago loses a pretty face.”

They started him out the door. The saloonkeeper called, “By the way, if you’re wondering what it is and how it’ll work, don’t. And if you happen to figure it out and you don’t like it, remember Daisy’s pretty little nose. And her eyes.”

ISAAC BELL DROPPED DASHWOOD around the corner from the Palmer House at a small hotel that gave out-of-town Van Dorns a discount. Then he drove to the Levee District and parked on a street that hadn’t changed much in a decade. Motortrucks lined up at the newspaper depot instead of wagons, but the gutter was still paved with greasy cobbles, and the ramshackle buildings still housed saloons, brothels, lodging houses, and pawnshops.

By the dim light of widely scattered streetlamps, he could make out the intersection of old and new brick where Harry Frost’s dynamite had demolished the depot walls. A man was sleeping in the doorway the frightened newsboys had huddled in. A streetwalker emerged from the narrow alley. She spotted the Packard and approached with a hopeful smile.

Bell smiled back, looked her in the eye, and pressed a ten-dollar gold piece into her hand. “Go home. Take the night off.”

He did not believe for one minute that the Van Dorn Detective Agency had run Harry Frost out of Chicago. The criminal mastermind had left town under his own steam for his own reasons. For it was chillingly clear to Bell that Harry Frost was as adaptable as he was unpredictable. Roving in that Thomas Flyer, the city gangster would take deadly, free-ranging command of the Midwest’s prairies and the vast plain beyond the Mississippi while the politicians and bankers and crooks in his Chicago organization covered his back, wired money, and executed his orders.

Bringing a telegrapher in the Thomas was a stroke of warped genius. Harry Frost could send Dave Mayhew climbing up railroad telegraph poles to tap into the wires, eavesdrop on the Morse alphabet, and tell him what the stationmasters were reporting about the progress of the race. Diabolical, thought Bell. Frost had drafted hundreds of dedicated assistants to track Josephine for him.

A drunk rounded the corner, smashed his bottle in the gutter, and burst into song.

“Come Josephine, in my flying machine. .

“Up, up, a little bit higher

“Oh! My! The moon is on fire. .”

28

JAMES DASHWOOD CAUGHT UP with Isaac Bell one hundred and seventy miles west of Chicago in a rail yard near the Peoria Fairgrounds on the bank of the Illinois River. It was a sweltering, humid evening – typical of the Midwestern states, Bell informed the young Californian – and the smell of coal smoke and steam, creosote ties, and the mechanicians’ suppers frying, hung heavy in the air.

The support trains were parked cheek by jowl on parallel sidings reserved for the race. Bell’s was nearest the main line but for one other, a four-car special, varnished green and trimmed with gold, owned by a timber magnate who had invested in the Vanderbilt syndicate and had announced that he saw no reason not to ride along with the rolling party just because his entry smashed into a signal tower. After all, Billy Thomas was recuperating nicely, and was a true sportsman who would insist the show go on without him.

Whiteway’s yellow six-car Josephine Special was on the other side of the Eagle Special, and Bell had had his engineer stop his train so that the two flying-machine support cars stood next to each other. Both had their auto ramps down for their roadsters, which were off foraging for parts in Peoria hardware stores or scouting the route ahead. Laughter and the ring of crystal could be heard from a dinner party that Preston Whiteway was hosting.

Dashwood found Bell poring over large-scale topographic maps of the terrain across Illinois and Missouri to Kansas City, which he had rolled down from his hangar-car ceiling.

“What have you got, Dash?”

“I found a marine zoology book called Report on the Cephalopods. Squid and octopuses are cephalopods.”

“So I recall,” said Bell. “What do they have in common?”

“Propulsion.”

Bell whirled from the map. “Of course. They both move by spurting water in the opposite direction.”

“Squid more than octopus, who tend more toward walking and oozing.”

“They jet along.”

“But what sort of motor would my fishermen be comparing them to?”

“Platov’s thermo engine. He used the word ‘jet.’” Bell thought on that. “So your fishermen overheard Di Vecchio accuse Celere of a being a gigolo because he took money from a woman to buy some sort of engine at a Paris air meet. A jet motor. Sounds like Platov’s thermo engine.”

A heavy hand knocked on the side of the hangar car, and a man stood perspiring copiously at the top of the ramp. “Chief Investigator Bell? I’m Asbury, Central Illinois contract man.”

“Yes, of course. Come on in, Asbury.” The contractor was a retired peace officer who covered the Peoria region on a part-time basis, usually for bank robbery cases. Bell offered his hand, introduced “Detective Dashwood from San Francisco,” then asked Asbury, “What have you got?”

“Well. .” Asbury mopped his dripping face with a red handkerchief as he composed his answer. “The race has brought a slew of strangers into town. But I’ve seen none the size of Harry Frost.”

“Did any pique your interest?” Bell asked patiently. As he moved west with the race, he expected to encounter private detectives and law officers so laconic that they would judge the closemouthed Constable Hodge of North River to be recklessly loquacious.

“There’s a big-shot gambler from New York. Has a couple of toughs with him. Made me out to be the Law right off.”

“Broad-in-the-beam middle-aged fellow in a checkerboard suit? Smells like a barbershop?”

“I’ll say. Flies were swarming his perfume like bats at sunset.”

“Johnny Musto, out of Brooklyn.”

“What’s he doing all the way to Peoria?”

“I doubt he came for the waters. Thank you, Asbury. If you go to the galley car on Mr. Whiteway’s train, tell them I said to rustle up some supper for you. . Dash, go size up Musto. Any luck, he won’t make you for a Van Dorn. You not being from New York,” Bell added, although in fact Dashwood’s best disguise was his altar boy innocence. “Give me your revolver. He’ll spot the bulge in your coat.”

Bell shoved the long-barreled Colt in his desk drawer. His hand flickered to his hat and descended holding his two-shot derringer. “Stick this in your pocket.”

“That’s O.K., Mr. Bell,” Dashwood grinned. He flexed his wrist in a jerky motion that caused a shiny new derringer to spit from his sleeve into his fingers.

Isaac Bell was impressed. “Pretty slick, Dash. Nice little gun, too.”

“Birthday present.”

“From your mother, I presume?”

“No, I met a girl who plays cards. Picked up the habit from her father. He plays cards, too.”

Bell nodded, glad the altar boy was stepping out. “Meet me back here when you’re done with Musto,” he said, and went looking for Dmitri Platov.

He found the Russian strolling down the ramp from Joe Mudd’s hangar car, wiping grease from his fingers with a gasoline-soaked rag.

“Good evening, Mr. Platov.”

“Good evening, Mr. Bell. Is hot in Peoria.”

“May I ask, sir, did you sell a thermo engine in Paris?”

Platov smiled. “May I asking why you asking?”

“I understand that an Italian flying-machine inventor named Prestogiacomo may have bought some sort of a ‘jet’ engine at the Paris air meet.”

“Not from me.”

“He might have been using a different name. He might have called himself Celere.”

“Again, not buying from me.”

“Did you ever meet Prestogiacomo?”

“No. In fact, I am never hearing of Prestogiacomo.”

“He must have made something of a splash. He sold a monoplane to the Italian Army.”

“I am not knowing Italians. Except one.”

“Marco Celere?”

“I am not knowing Celere.”

“But you know who I mean?”

“Of course, the Italian making Josephine’s machine and the big one I am working for Steve Stevens.”

Bell shifted gears deliberately. “What do you think of the Stevens machine?”

“It would not be fair for me discussing it.”

“Why not?”

“As you working for Josephine.”

“I protect Josephine. I don’t work for her. I only ask if you can tell me anything that might help me protect her.”

“I am not seeing what Stevens’s machine is doing with that.”

Bell changed tactics again, asking, “Did you ever encounter a Russian in Paris named Sikorsky?”

A huge smile separated Platov’s mutton-chop whiskers. “Countryman genius.”

“I understand vibration is a serious problem with more than one motor. Might Sikorsky want your thermo engine for his machines?”

“Maybe one day. Are excusing me, please? Duty calling.”

“Of course. Sorry to take so much of your time. . Oh, Mr. Platov? May I ask one other question?”

“Yes?”

“Who was the one Italian you did know in Paris?”

“The professor. Di Vecchio. Great man. Not practical man, but great ideas. Couldn’t make real, but great ideas.”

“My Di Vecchio monoplane is a highflier,” said Bell, wondering why Danielle said she didn’t know of Platov. “I would call it an idea made real.”

Platov shrugged enigmatically.

“Did you know Di Vecchio well?”

“Not at all. Only listening to lecture.” Suddenly he looked around, as if confirming they were alone, and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial mutter. “About Stevens’s two-motor biplane? You are correct. Two-motor vibrations very rattling. Shaking to pieces. Excusing now, please.”

Isaac Bell watched the Russian parade across the infield, bowing to the ladies and kissing their hands. Platov, the tall detective thought, you are smoother than your thermo engine.

And he found it impossible to believe that the ladies’ man never introduced himself to Professor Di Vecchio’s beautiful daughter.

BELL CONTINUED STUDYING his topographic maps to pinpoint where Frost might attack. Dash returned, reporting he had spotted Johnny Musto, buying drinks for newspaper reporters.

“No law against that,” Bell observed. “Bookies live on information. Like detectives.”

“Yes, Mr. Bell. But I followed him back to the rail yard and saw him slipping the same reporters rolls of cash.”

“What do you make of it?”

“If he’s bribing them, what I can’t figure out is what they would do for him in return for the money.”

“I doubt he wants his name in the papers,” said Bell.

“Then what does he want?”

“Show me where he is.”

Dash pointed the way, saying, “There’s a boxcar over by the river where the fellows are shooting dice. Musto’s taking bets.”

“Stick close enough to hear, but don’t let him see you with me.”

Bell smelled the Brooklyn gambler before he heard him when a powerful scent of gardenia penetrated the thicker odors of railroad ties and locomotive smoke. Then he heard his hoarsely whispered “Bets, gentlemen. Place your bets.”

Bell rounded the solitary boxcar in a dark corner of the yard.

A marble-eyed thug nudged Musto.

“Why, if it ain’t one of my best customers. Never too late to increase your investment, sir. How much shall we add to yer three thousand on Miss Josephine? Gotta warn youse, though, de odds is shifting. The goil commands fifteen-to-one, since some bettors are notin’ that she’s pullin’ up on Stevens.”

Bell’s smile was more affable than his voice. “I’m a bettor who’s wondering if gamblers are conspiring to throw the race.”

“Me?”

“We’re a long way from Brooklyn, Johnny. What are you doing here?”

Musto objected mightily. “I don’t have to throw no race. Win, lose, draw, all de same to me. Youse a bettin’ man, Mr. Bell. And a man of the woild, if I don’t mistake youse. Youse know the bookie never loses.”

“Not so,” said Bell. “Sometimes bookies do lose.”

Musto exchanged astonished glances with his bodyguards. “Yeah? When?”

“When they get greedy.”

“What do youse mean by dat? Who’s greedy?”

“You’re bribing newspaper reporters.”

“Dat’s ridiculous. What could dos poor hack writers do for me?”

“Tout one flying machine over another to millions of readers placing bets,” said Isaac Bell. “In other words, skew the odds.”

“Oh yeah? And what machine would I happen to be toutin’?”

“Same one you’ve been touting all along: Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless pusher.”

“The Coitus is a flying machine of real class,” Musto protested. “It don’t need no help from Johnny Musto.”

“But it’s getting a lot of help from Johnny Musto regardless.”

“Hey, it’s not like I’m fixin’ the race. I’m passin’ out information. A public service, youse might call it.”

“I would call that a confession.”

“You can’t prove nothin’.”

Isaac Bell’s smile had vanished. He fixed the gambler with a cold eye. “I believe you know Harry Warren?”

“Harry Warren?” Johnny Musto stroked his double chin. “Harry Warren? Harry Warren? Lemme think. Oh yeah! Ain’t he de New York Van Dorn who spies on the gangs?”

“Harry Warren is going to wire me in two days that you reported to him at Van Dorn headquarters at the Knickerbocker Hotel at Forty-second Street and Broadway in New York City. If he doesn’t, I’m coming after you – personally – with all four feet.”

Musto’s bodyguards glowered.

Bell ignored them. “Johnny, I want you to pass the word: betting fair and square on the race is fine with me, throwing it is not.”

“Not my fault what other gamblers do.”

“Pass the word.”

“What good’ll that do youse?”

“They can’t say they weren’t warned. Have a pleasant journey home.”

Musto looked sad. “How’m I goin’ ta get back ta New York in two days?”

Isaac tugged his heavy gold watch chain from his vest pocket, opened the lid, and showed Musto the time. “Run quick and you can catch the milk train to Chicago.”

“Johnny Musto don’t ride no milk train.”

“When you get to Chicago, treat yourself to the Twentieth Century Limited.”

“What about da race?”

“Two days. New York.”

The gambler and his bodyguards hurried off, muttering indignantly.

James Dashwood climbed down from his listening post on the roof of the boxcar.

Bell winked. “There’s one out of the way. But he’s not the only high-rolling tinhorn following the race, so I want you to keep an eye on the others. You’re authorized to place just enough bets to make your presence welcome.”

“Do you think Musto will show up again?” Dash asked.

“He’s not stupid. Unfortunately, the damage is done.”

“How do you mean, Mr. Bell?”

“The reporters he bribed have already wired their stories. If, as I suspect, there’s a saboteur trying to derail the front-runners, then bookie Musto has put Eddison-Sydney-Martin in his crosshairs.”

29

ILLINOIS THUNDERSTORMS STRUCK AGAIN, cutting the race in half. The trailing fliers, those who had gotten a late start from Peoria due to mechanic failures and mistakes made by tiring birdmen, put down in Springfield. But the leaders, Steve Stevens and Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin, defied the black clouds towering in the west and forged on, hoping to reach the racetrack at Columbia before the storms blew them out of the sky.

Josephine, midway between the leaders and the trailers, pushed ahead. Isaac Bell stuck with her, eyes raking the ground for Harry Frost.

The leaders’ support trains steamed along with them, then shoveled on the coal to race ahead to greet them at the track with canvas shrouds to protect the aeroplanes from the rain and tent stakes and ropes to anchor them against the wind.

Marco Celere played his kind and helpful Dmitri Platov role to the hilt, directing Steve Stevens’s huge retinue of mechanicians, assistants, and servants in the securing of the big white biplane. Then he scooped up three oilskin slickers and ran to help tie down Josephine’s and Bell’s machines as they dropped from a sky suddenly seared by bolts of lightning.

The twin yellow monoplanes bounced to a stop seconds ahead of a downpour.

Celere tossed a slicker to Josephine and another to Bell, who said, “Thanks, Platov,” then shouted, “Come on, Josephine. The boys’ll tie it down.” He threw a long arm over her shoulder and dragged her away, saying to Platov, “Imagine reporting to Mr. Van Dorn that America’s Sweetheart of the Air got struck by lightning.”

“Here helping, not worrying.” Platov pulled on his own slicker. Enormous raindrops started kicking up dust. For a moment they sizzled in the blazing heat. Then the sky turned black as night, and an icy wind blasted rain across the infield. The last of the spectators ran to the hotel attached to the grandstand.

Bell’s men – Andy Moser and his helpers – dragged canvas over the Eagle.

Eustace Weed, the new mechanician Bell had hired in Buffalo, said, “That’s O.K., Mr. Platov. We’ve got it.”

Celere ran to help Josephine’s ham-handed detective-mechanicians tie down hers and he was reminded how frustrating it was not to be able to work on Josephine’s aeroplane – his aeroplane – to keep it flying at its best. Josephine was good, but not that good. He may be a truffatore confidence man, but if there was one skill he truly possessed, he was a fine mechanician.

Celere waited until the machines were covered and tied down and he was sure that Isaac Bell was not coming back from escorting Josephine to her private car. Then he ran through the pouring rain to where Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless pusher was tied down. He made a show of checking the ropes, though it was not likely anyone could see him through the dark and watery haze. The baronet and his mechanicians had fled to their train. It was an opportunity to do mischief. But he had to work fast and do something unexpected.

Thunder pealed. Lightning struck the grandstand roof, and green Saint Elmo’s fire trickled along the gutters and down the leaders. The next bolt struck in the center of the infield, and Marco Celere began to see the wisdom of Bell’s retreat from Mother Nature. He ran for the nearest cover, a temporary wooden shed erected to supply the flying machines with gasoline, oil, and water.

Someone was sheltering in it ahead of him. Too late to turn away, he saw that it was the Englishman Lionel Ruggs, the baronet’s chief mechanician and the chief reason why he had steered clear of the headless pusher, other than surreptitiously drilling a hole in its wing strut back at Belmont Park.

“Whatcha doin’ to the guv’s machine?”

“Just checking its ropes.”

“Spent a long time checkin’ ropes.”

Celere ducked his head as if he were embarrassed. “O.K., you are catching me. I was looking at competition.”

“Lookin’ or doin’?” Ruggs asked coldly.

“Doing? What would I be doing?”

Lionel Ruggs stepped very close to him. He was taller than Celere, and bigger in the chest. He stared inquiringly into Celere’s eyes. Then he cracked a mirthless smile.

“Jimmy Quick. I thought that was you hidin’ in those curls.”

Marco Celere knew there was no denying it. Ruggs had him dead to rights. It had been fifteen years, but they’d worked side by side in the same machine shop from ages fourteen to eighteen and shared a room under the eaves of the owner’s house. Celere had always feared that he would bump into his past sooner or later. How many flying-machine mechanicians were there in the small, tight-knit new world of flying machines?

Jimmy Quick had been his English nickname, a good-natured play on Prestogiacomo that the English found so hard to pronounce. He had recognized Ruggs from a distance and stayed out of his way. Now he had stumbled, face-to-face, into him in a thunderstorm.

“What’s this Russian getup?” Ruggs demanded. “I bet you been caught stealin’ somethin’, like you was in Birmingham. Doin’ the old man’s daughter was one thing – more power to you – but stealin’ his machine tool design he worked on his whole life, that was low. That old man treated us good.”

Celere looked around. They were alone. No one was near the shed. He said, “The old man’s dream didn’t quite work. It was a bust.”

Ruggs turned red. “A bust because you stole it before he perfected it. . It was you, wasn’t it, drilled our wing strut?”

“Not me.”

“I don’t believe you, Jimmy.”

“I don’t care if you believe me or not.”

Lionel Ruggs pounded his chest. “I care. The guv’s a good man. He may be an aristocrat, but he’s a good man, and he deserves to win, fair and square. He don’t deserve to die in a smash caused by a schemin’ little bludger like you.”

Marco Celere looked around again and confirmed they were still alone. The rain was coming down harder, pounding the tin roof. He couldn’t see six feet from the shed. He said, “You’re forgetting I make machine tools.”

“How could I forget that? That’s what the old man taught us to do. Gave us a roof over our heads. Gave us breakfast, lunch, and tea. Gave us a good-paying trade. You paid him back by stealin’ his dream. And you ruined it ’cause you were too damned lazy and impatient to make it right.”

Celere reached under his slicker and took a slide rule from his coat. “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s the slide rule you wave around with your disguise.”

“Do you believe that my slide rule is only a slide rule?”

“I seen you wavin’ it around. What of it?”

“Let me show you.”

Celere raised the instrument to the thin light in the open door. Ruggs followed it with his eyes, and Celere whipped it back toward him like a violin bow. Ruggs gasped and clutched his throat, trying to hold in the blood.

“This one’s a razor, not the one ‘Dmitri Platov’ waves around. A razor – just in case – and you are the case.”

Ruggs went bug-eyed. He let go his throat and grabbed Celere. But there was no strength left in his hand, and he collapsed, spraying blood on the Italian.

Celere watched him dying at his feet. It was only the second time he had killed a man and it did not get easier, even if the effect was worthwhile. His hands were shaking, and he felt panic flood his body and threaten to squeeze his brain into a lump that could not think or act. He had to run. There was no place to get rid of the body, no place to hide it. The rain would stop, and he would be caught. He tried to form a picture of running. The rain would wash the blood that sprayed all over his slicker. But they would still chase him. He looked at the razor, and he suddenly pictured it cutting cloth.

Swiftly, he knelt and slashed at Ruggs’s pockets, taking from them coin and a roll of paper money and a leather wallet with more paper money in it. He stuffed them in his pockets, slashed Ruggs’s vest, and took his cheap nickel pocket watch. He looked over the body, saw gold, and took Ruggs’s wedding ring. Then he ran into the rain.

There was no time for sabotage. If by a miracle he got away with murder, he would come back and try again.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES from Columbia, Illinois, but still short of the Mississippi River, the westbound passenger train slowed down and pulled onto a siding. Marco Celere prayed they were only stopping for water. In his panicked run, he had clung to a groundless hope that if he could somehow get across the Mississippi, they couldn’t catch him. Praying it was only a water siding, he pressed his face to the window and craned his neck for a view of the jerkwater tank. But why would they stop so close to the next town?

Two businessmen seated across the aisle of the luxurious extra-fare chair car that Celere had reckoned would be safer to flee in rather than an ordinary day coach seemed to be staring at him. There was a commotion at the vestibule. Celere fully expected to see a burly sheriff with a tin star on his coat and a pistol in his hand.

Instead, a newsboy sprang aboard and ran up the aisle, crying, “Great air race coming our way!”

Marco Celere bought a copy of the Hannibal Courier-Post and scanned it fearfully for a murder story that included his description.

The race occupied half the front page. Preston Whiteway, described as “a shrewd, wide-awake businessman,” was quoted in boldface print, saying, “Sad as the recent death of Mark Twain- Hannibal’s own bard – sadder still that Mr. Twain did not live to see the flying machines in the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup alight in his beloved hometown of Hannibal, Missouri.”

Celere looked for the short out-of-town stories that these local newspapers plucked from the telegraph. The first he saw was an interview with a “prominent aviation specialist” who said that Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss Pusher was the aeroplane to beat. “Far and away the sturdiest and fastest, its motor is being improved every day.”

It would improve less rapidly with Ruggs out of the picture, Celere thought. But the famous high-flying baronet would have no trouble attracting top mechanicians eager to join up with a winner. The headless pusher was still the machine that posed the worst threat to Josephine.

Celere thumbed deeper into the paper, looking for his description. The state militia was being called out. His heart skipped a beat until he read that it was to quell a labor strike at Hannibal’s cement plant. The strike was blamed on “foreigners,” egged on by “Italians,” who were seeking protection from the Italian consulate in St. Louis. Thank God he was disguised as a Russian, Celere thought, only to look up at the grim-faced businessmen lowering their newspapers to stare at him from across the aisle. He did not look Italian in his Platov getup, but there was no denying it made him look like the most foreign passenger in the chair car. Or had they already seen a story about the murder and a description of his curly hair and mutton chops, his ever-present slide rule, and his snappy straw boater with its stylish red hatband?

The nearest leaned across the aisle. “Hey, there!” he addressed him bluntly. “You. . mister?”

“Are you speaking to me, sir?”

“You a labor striker?”

Celere weighed the risk of being a foreign agitator versus a murderer on the run and chose to deal with the more immediate threat. “I am being aviation mechanician in Whiteway Cup Cross-Country Air Race.”

Their suspicious expressions brightened like sunshine.

“You in the race? Put ’er there, feller!”

Soft pink palms thrust across the aisle, and they shook his hand vigorously.

“When are all you getting to Hannibal?”

“After thunderstorming over.”

“Let’s hope we don’t get tornadoes.”

“Say, if you was a bettin’ man, who would you put your money on to win?”

Celere held up the newspaper. “Is saying here that Englishman pusher is best.”

“Yeah, I read that in Chicago, too. But you’re right there in the thick of it. What about Josephine? That little gal still behind?”

Celere froze. His eye had fallen on a telegraphed story down the page.

MURDER AND THEFT IN SHADOW OF STORM

“Josephine still behind?”

“Is catching up,” Celere mumbled, reading as fast as he could:

An air race mechanician was found diabolically murdered at the Columbia fairground with his throat slashed, the victim of a robbery. According to Sheriff Lydem, the murderer could well be a labor agitator on the run from the cement strike in Missouri, and willing to stop at nothing to facilitate his escape. The victim’s body was not discovered for many hours due to the violence of last night’s storm.

Marco Celere looked up with a broad smile for the businessmen.

“Josephine is catching up,” he repeated.

The train trundled loudly onto an iron-girder bridge, and the sky suddenly spread wide over a broad river.

“Here’s the Mississippi. I read birdmen wear cork vests when they fly over bodies of water. Is that so?”

“Is good for floating,” said Celere, gazing through the girders at the famed waterway. Brown and rain-swollen, flecked with dirty whitecaps, it rolled sullenly past the town of Hannibal, whose frame houses perched on the far side.

“I thought was wider,” he said.

“Wide enough, you try crossing it without this here bridge. But you want to see real wide, you get down below Saint Louis where it meets up with the Missouri.”

“And if you want to see really, really wide, wide as the ocean, you take a look where the Ohio comes in. Say, mister, what are you doing on the train when the race is back in Illinois?”

Suddenly they were staring again, suspecting they’d been hoodwinked.

“Scouting route,” Celere answered smoothly. “Am getting off train in Hannibal and going back to race.”

“Well, I sure do envy you, sir. Judging by the smile on your face, you are one lucky man to be part of that air race.”

“Happy being,” Celere replied. “Very happy being.”

A good plan always made him happy. And he had just come up with a beauty. Kindly, bighearted, crazy Russian Platov would volunteer to help the baronet’s mechanicians by filling in for poor murdered Chief Mechanician Ruggs.

Steve Stevens would complain, but the hell with the fat fool. Dmitri Platov would help and help and help until he had finished the job on Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s infernal headless pusher once and for all.

30

ISAAC BELL SAID, “Eustace, I’ve been watching you and you don’t look happy. Are you homesick?”

They were getting the machine ready to take off from Topeka, Kansas. The Chicago kid he had hired to help Andy Moser was pouring gasoline through layers of cheesecloth to strain out any water that may have contaminated the supply. It was a daily ritual performed before mixing in the castor oil that lubricated the Gnome engine.

“No, sir, Mr. Bell,” Weed answered hastily. But judging by the expression knitting his brow and pursing his lips, Bell thought something was very much wrong.

“Miss your girl?”

“Yes, sir,” he blurted. “I sure do. But. . You know.”

“I do know,” Bell said sincerely. “I’m often away from my fiancée. I’m lucky on this case, as she’s around filming the race for Mr. Whiteway, so I get to see her now and then. What’s your girl’s name?”

“Daisy.”

“Pretty name. What’s her last name?”

“Ramsey.”

“Daisy Ramsey. There’s a mouthful. . But wait. If you marry, she’ll be Daisy Weed.” Bell said it with a grin that coaxed a wan smile out of the boy.

“Oh, yes. We kid about that.” The smile faded.

Bell said, “If something is troubling you, son, is there anything I can do to help?”

“No, thank you, sir, I’m O.K.”

Eddie Edwards, the white-haired head of the Kansas City office, approached Bell, muttering, “We got trouble.”

Bell hurried to the hangar car with him.

Andy Moser, who had been working nearby, tightening the Eagle’s wing-stay turnbuckles, said, “You sure you’re O.K., Eustace? Mr. Bell seems concerned about you.”

“His eyes go through you like iced lightning.”

“He’s just looking out for you.”

Eustace Weed prayed that Andy was right. Because what Isaac Bell had spotted on his face was his sudden horrified realization of what they would force him to do with the copper tube of water sealed with paraffin wax.

He had been hoping that the criminals threatening Daisy had changed their minds. No one approached him in Peoria or Columbia, or Hannibal, Missouri, to tell him what to do with it. After Hannibal, where the race crossed the Mississippi River, he assumed it would happen in Kansas City. It was the only real city on the map since Chicago, and he had developed a picture in his mind of big-city saloonkeepers knowing one another but disdaining their counterparts in small towns. So he had dreaded Kansas City.

But no one had approached him there, either, nor when the race pulled up on the far side of the Missouri River. There had even been a letter from Daisy waiting for him, and she sounded fine. This very morning, camped by the Kansas River outside Topeka, preparing Mr. Bell’s machine to head south and west over the empty plains toward Wichita, the terrified mechanician had begun to wonder, would the whole nightmare simply go away? Trouble was, he couldn’t stop thinking about it. And just now, while Mr. Bell watched him strain the gas before mixing the fuel, Eustace Weed suddenly knew that Harry Frost’s man would order him to drop the tube in Isaac Bell’s flying-machine fuel tank.

He had figured out how that little copper tube would make Bell’s flying machine smash. It was as ingenious as it was horrific. The Eagle’s Gnome rotary engine was fuel lubricated. It had no oil reservoir, no crankcase, no pump to maintain oil pressure – in fact, no oil at all. The castor oil suspended in the gasoline did the job of oil, greasing the passage of the piston through each of the cylinders. It mixed in readily because castor oil dissolved in gasoline.

Like paraffin. The paraffin wax that plugged the copper tube would also dissolve in gasoline. When the gas melted the plugs, in an hour or so, the water would leak out and contaminate the fuel. Two tablespoons of water in a flying-machine gas tank was more than enough to stop Isaac Bell’s engine dead. Were he flying high at the time, he might manage to volplane down safely. But if he was taking off, or attempting to alight, or making a tight turn low to the ground, he would smash.

ISAAC BELL LISTENED WITH DEEP CONCERN, but not much surprise, as Eddie Edwards reported grim news he had just learned from a contact in the United States Army. Someone had executed a daring raid on the arsenal at Fort Riley, Kansas.

“The Army’s hushed it up,” Eddie explained, “criminals busting into their arsenal not being the sort of event they want to read in the newspaper.”

“What did they get?”

“Two air-cooled, belt-fed Colt-Browning M1895 machine guns.”

“Had to be Frost,” said Bell, picturing in his mind the four-hundred-and-fifty-rounds-per-minute weapons enveloping Josephine’s monoplane in blizzards of flying lead.

“You gotta hand it to him, that man’s got nerve. Right under the nose of the U.S. Army.”

“How’d he break in?” Bell asked.

“The usual way. Bribed a quartermaster.”

“I find it hard to imagine that even a quartermaster more larcenous than most his ilk would risk the Army not noticing missing machine guns.”

“Frost tricked him into thinking he was stealing surplus uniforms. Said he was selling them in Mexico, or some cock-and-bull story the quartermaster believed. Or wanted to believe. A drinking man, needless to say. Anyhow, he got the surprise of his life when he woke up in the stockade. But by then the guns were long gone.”

“When did this happen?”

“Three days ago.”

Bell pulled the topographic map of Kansas down from the hangar-car ceiling. “Plenty of time for Frost to get between us and Wichita.”

“That’s why I said we have trouble. Though I do wonder how he’ll fit two machine guns in a Thomas Flyer. Much less hide them. Takes three men to mount one of those guns. They weigh nearly four hundred pounds with their landing carriage.”

“He’s strong enough to pick one up himself. Besides, he has two helpers in that Thomas.”

Bell traced on the map the rail line they would follow to Wichita. Then he traced those converging at Junction City, the nearest town to Fort Riley. “He’ll move the guns by train, then freight wagon or motortruck.”

“So he can attack anywhere between Kansas and California.”

Bell had already concluded that. “We know by now that he doesn’t think small. He’ll hire more men for the second gun and spread them apart on either side of the railroad track we’re flying along. They’ll rake her coming and going from both sides.”

Bell did some quick calculations in his head, and added darkly, “They’ll open up at a mile. If she somehow makes it past them, they’ll whirl the guns around and keep firing. As she’s coming down the line at sixty miles per hour, they will be able to fire accurately for two full minutes.”

STEVE STEVENS SHOOK a copy of the Wichita Eagle under Preston Whiteway’s nose and roared indignantly, “They’re quoting your San Francisco Inquirer quoting me saying I’m glad that crazy Russian is helping that English feller because everyone’s in the race together, like we’re all one big family.”

“Yes, I read that,” Whiteway said mildly. “It didn’t sound like you.”

“Darned right, it don’t sound like me. Why’d you print it?”

“If you read it carefully, you will see that my reporters quoted Mr. Platov, who quoted you saying that the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup and fifty thousand dollars is for everyone, and we’re all one big family.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You might as well have. Everyone believes it now.”

Stevens hopped angrily from foot to foot. His belly bounced, his jowls shook and turned red. “That crazy Russian put those words in my mouth. I didn’t say-”

“What’s the trouble? Everyone thinks you’re a good man.”

“I don’t give a hoot about being a good man. I want to win the race. And there’s Platov sashaying off to help Eddison-Highfalutin-Sydney-Whatever when my own machine is rattling to smithereens.”

“You have my sympathy,” said Preston Whiteway, smiling at Stevens’s confirmation of happy rumors his spies had reported: the fast-flying farmer might not go the distance. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, sir, I want to see my own entry – which is not rattling to smithereens, thank you very much – take to the air in the capable hands of Josephine, America’s Sweetheart of the Air, who will win the race.”

“Is that so? Well, let me tell you, Mr. Fancy-Pants Newspaperman, I hear tell folks is losing interest in your race now that we’re so far west there’s no one to watch it but jackrabbits, Indians, and coyotes.”

Preston Whiteway arched a disdainful eyebrow at the rotund cotton farmer who was very rich but not as rich as he was. “Keep reading, Mr. Stevens. Events reported soon will surprise even you and keep ordinary folk on the edge of their seats.”

ISAAC BELL FLICKED the blip switch on his control post to slow the Gnome. Andy Moser had tuned the motor so finely that he was unintentionally overtaking Josephine’s Celere monoplane while riding herd above and behind her. Ironically, as her Celere began to suffer the wear and tear of the long race, his American Eagle seemed to get stronger. Andy kept repeating that Danielle’s father “built ’em to last.”

They were navigating by the railroad tracks.

Two thousand feet below, Kansas’s winter wheat crop spread dark yellow to the horizons on either side of the rails. The flat, empty country was broken now and then by a lonely farmhouse, in a cluster of barns and silos, and the occasional ribbon of trees lining a creek or river. It was from one of those ribbons that Bell expected Frost would rake Josephine’s aeroplane with machine-gun fire, and he had persuaded her to fly a quarter mile to the right of the tracks, to increase the range, and to steer clear of clumps of trees. If Frost did attack, Bell instructed her to veer away while he would descend in steep spiral dips, firing his mounted rifle.

They had just crossed a railroad junction helpfully marked with canvas arrows when Bell sensed motion behind him. He was not surprised to see Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue headless pusher overtaking them. The baronet’s new Curtiss motor just kept on getting faster. Andy Moser credited “the crazy Russian” with its performance. Bell was not so sure about that. A conversation with Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s regular mechanicians led him to believe that the six-cylinder engine was the real hero, being not only more powerful but smoother than the other flyers’ fours. They certainly were not inclined to credit the Russian volunteer with more than helping out.

“The six might not be so smooth as your rotary Gnome, Mr. Bell,” they said, “but it’s considerably easier to keep tuned. Lucky for you you’ve got Andy Moser to keep it running.”

The blue pusher sailed past Bell, and then Josephine, with a jaunty wave to each from the baronet. Bell saw Josephine reach up to fiddle with her gravity-feed gas tank. Her speed increased, but at the expense of gray smoke pouring from her motor. Eddison-Sydney-Martin continued to pull ahead, and was several hundred yards past her, when Bell saw something dark suddenly fly back in the Englishman’s wake.

It looked like he had hit a bird.

But when the Curtiss staggered in the air, Bell realized that the dark object falling behind Eddison-Sydney-Martin was not a bird but his propeller.

Suddenly without power, forced to volplane, Eddison-Sydney-Martin tried to dip his elevator. But before the pusher could descend in a controlled glide, a piece flew from the tail. It was followed by another, and another, and Bell saw that the departing propeller had chopped parts of the tail as it flew away, still spinning like a buzz saw.

The biplane’s elevator broke loose and trailed in blue shreds. The vertical tail with its rudder went next. A thousand feet above the ground, the baronet’s swift headless pusher fell like a stone.

31

“CAT RAN OUT OF LIVES.”

“Don’t say that!” Josephine rounded on the mechanician who had muttered what they all feared. She ran to Abby, who was weeping. But when she tried to hold her, the baronet’s wife pulled back and held herself stiff as a marble statue.

All Josephine could think of was Marco promising her, “You will win. I will see that you win. Don’t you worry. No one will stay ahead of you.”

What had he done?

They were gathered on the banks of a wide creek twenty miles southwest of Topeka, she and Isaac Bell, who had both alighted on a dirt road beside the tracks, and Abby and all the mechanicians, who had seen the smash from their support train. The blue pusher – what was left of it – was floating in the creek, caught on a snag halfway across.

Had Marco sabotaged Abby’s husband’s machine so that she could win? There he was, in his crazy Russian disguise. She was the only one who knew who he really was and the only one who suspected he had done something terrible. But she was afraid to ask.

I must, she thought. I have to ask him. And if it is true, then I have to admit everything, all the lies. She walked up to Marco. He was waving his Dmitri slide rule, and he looked as distraught as the others, but she realized with a terrible sense of lost trust that she could not be sure he wasn’t pretending. She said, in a low voice, “I have to talk to you.”

“Oh, poor Josephine!” he cried in full Platov mode. “You are seeing all happening in front of eyes.”

“I have to ask you.”

“What?”

Before she could speak, she heard a scream. Abby was screaming. Then, miraculously, a cheer from every throat. She whirled toward the creek. Everyone was looking downstream. Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin was limping unsteadily along the bank, soaking wet, covered in mud and fumbling with a cigarette he could not light.

BELL TOLD ANDY MOSER that he was certain that he had seen Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s propeller fall off. “Is it common?”

“It happens,” said Andy.

“What would cause it?”

“Lots of things. A crack in the hub.”

“But he inspected the machine every time he flew. He walked around it and checked mounts and stays and everything. Just like all of us do. So did his mechanicians, just like you do for me.”

“Could have hit a rock bouncing on the field.”

“He would have noticed, felt it, heard it.”

“He’d notice if it shattered the propeller,” said Andy. “But if a rock hit right on the hub at the same moment he had his hands full just getting her into the air and his motor was straining loudly, maybe he didn’t. Couple of months ago I heard about a propeller getting unstable because it was stored standing up. Moisture sunk into the bottom blade.”

“His was brand-new and used nearly every day since he got it.”

“Yeah, but you get these cracks.”

“That’s why it was painted silver,” countered Bell, “so little cracks would show.” That was standard procedure on pushers. His own propeller was not because a silver propeller spinning in front of the driver would dazzle him.

“I know, Mr. Bell. And obviously it wasn’t around long enough to rot, either.” Moser looked up at the tall detective. “If you’re asking me was it sabotage, I’d say it sure as heck could have been.”

“How? If you wanted a fellow’s propeller to fly off, what would you do?”

“Anything I could to throw it out of kilter. When the propeller is off balance, it vibrates. Vibrations will break it or rattle the hub loose, or even shake the motor right off its mounts.”

“But you wouldn’t want it shaking that much because the fellow you’re trying kill would notice and stop his motor and volplane down as fast as he could.”

“You’re right about that,” Andy said gravely. “The saboteur would have to really know his business.”

But that, Isaac Bell had to admit, was true of every mechanician in the race, with the possible exceptions of Josephine’s disguised detectives. Another truth he could not ignore was that Preston Whiteway had gotten the wish he had so unabashedly hoped for back in San Francisco. He had had to wait long past Chicago and halfway across Kansas, but a “winnowing of the field” had indeed turned the race into a contest that pitted the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine.

Eddison-Sydney-Martin had probably been the best – and his winnowing by sabotage had hardly been natural. But steady Joe Mudd was proving himself to be no slouch, while the thoroughly unpleasant but undeniably courageous Steve Stevens was a fast flier who pushed ahead unintimidated by the vibrations endangering his machine.

Bell had no way of knowing who the saboteur would try to attack next. In fact, the only thing that the tall detective knew absolutely for sure was that his first job was still what it had always been: keep Harry Frost from killing Josephine.

BELL WONDERED WHETHER the machine-gun raid at Fort Riley could have been an elaborate feint by Harry Frost, a distraction to lull Josephine’s protectors into loosening the cordon they kept around her each night at the fairgrounds and rail yards. With that possibility in mind, Bell laid an ambush. He waited for dark – after sad good-byes with the Eddison-Sydney-Martins, whose support train steamed out of the tiny Morris County Fairgrounds rail yard back to Chicago – and climbed onto the roof of Josephine’s private car. For hours, he lay in wait, scanning the trains parked on the other side of Whiteway’s special and listening for the crunch of boots on gravel ballast.

It was a hot night. Windows, skylights, and roof hatches were open. Murmured conversations and occasional bursts of laughter mingled with a quiet sighing of locomotives bedded down with banked fires producing just enough steam to power lights and warm water.

Around midnight, he heard someone knock at Josephine’s rear vestibule. Whoever it was, he must have come through the train, as Bell had seen or heard no one on the ballast. Nonetheless, Bell drew his Browning and aimed it through an open roof hatch at the door. He heard Josephine call sleepily from her stateroom, “Who is it?”

“Preston.”

“Mr. Whiteway, it’s kind of late.”

“I must speak with you, Josephine.”

Josephine padded into the front parlor, wearing a simple dressing gown over cotton pajamas, and opened the door.

Whiteway was dressed in a suit with a silk necktie, and his hair was combed in grand golden waves. “I want you to know that I’ve put a lot of thought in what I am about to say to you,” he said, and began pacing about the narrow parlor. “Odd. I feel a little tongue-tied.”

Josephine curled up in an overstuffed chair, tucked her bare feet under her, and watched him warily. “I hope you are not changing your mind,” she said. “I’m doing much better. My times are improving. I’ve been catching up. And now that the poor baronet is out of the race, I have a very good chance.”

“Of course you have!”

“Joe Mudd isn’t as fast. And Steve Stevens can’t keep going much longer.”

“You’re going to win. I’m sure of it.”

Josephine grinned. “That’s a relief. You looked so nervous, I thought you were dropping me. . But what are you trying to say?”

Whiteway stood to his full height, thrust out his chest and belly, and blurted, “Marry me!”

“What?”

“I’ll make a wonderful husband, and you’ll be rich, and you can fly aeroplanes every day until we have children. . What do you say?”

After a long silence, Josephine said, “I don’t know what to say. I mean, it’s very nice of you to offer, but-”

“But what? What could be better?”

Josephine took a deep breath and climbed to her feet. Whiteway opened his arms to embrace her.

“THEN WHAT HAPPENED?” whispered Marion when Bell reported to her at breakfast in the Josephine Special’s lavish dining car. Her enormous coral-sea green eyes were wide and so beautiful that for a long moment Bell lost his train of thought.

“Did she say yes?” Marion prompted.

“No.”

“Good. Preston is too in love with himself to be a loving husband. If she’s as sweet a girl as I read in the newspapers, she deserves better.”

“You’ve seen more of her than the newspaper readers.”

“We’ve only said hello in passing. But I would have thought she would have answered ‘Maybe.’”

“Why?” Bell asked.

Marion thought on that. “She strikes me as someone who gets what she wants.”

“It was a sort-of maybe. She said she had to think about it.”

“I suspect she has no one to talk to. I’ll give her an ear. And an opinion, if she wants one.”

“I was hoping you would say that,” said Bell. “In fact, I was hoping you would put your mind to what Harry Frost meant when he said that she and Celere were up to something.”

Marion glanced out the window. A stiff wind was spinning miniature tornadoes of coal smoke, wheat chaff, and cinders around the trains. “No flying today. I will do it right now.”

“I WANT TO BE LIKE YOU WHEN I GROW UP,” Josephine grinned at Marion. They were alone in the front parlor of Josephine’s private car, curled up in facing armchairs. Coffee cups sat between them untouched.

“I hope I don’t seem that old. Besides, you are grown up. You’re driving a flying machine across the continent.”

“That’s not the same. I want to be a straight shooter like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You told me straight off that Isaac overheard Preston asking me to marry him.”

Marion said, “I also told you that I’m very curious what you think of his proposal.”

“I don’t know. I mean, what does he want to marry me for?” She gave Marion one of her big open grins. “I’m just a silly girl two seconds off the farm.”

“Men are strange creatures,” Marion smiled back. “Most of them. Maybe he loves you.”

“He didn’t say he loved me.”

“Well, Preston is not very bright in many ways. On the other hand, he is handsome.”

“I suppose.”

“And very, very wealthy.”

“So was Harry.”

“Unlike Harry, Preston, for all his many, many faults, is no brute.”

“Yes, but he’s big like Harry.”

“And getting bigger,” laughed Marion. “If he isn’t careful, he’ll end up like President Taft.”

“Or Steve Stevens.”

They both laughed. Marion watched her closely, and asked, “Are you considering it at all?”

“Not at all. I don’t love him. I mean, I know he’d buy me aeroplanes. He said he’d buy me aeroplanes at least until we have children. Then wants me to stop flying.”

“Good Lord,” said Marion, “Preston is even a bigger fool than I thought.”

“You don’t think I should marry him. . do you?”

Marion said, “I can’t tell you that. You have to know what you want to do.”

“You see, if I win the fifty thousand dollars, I’ll have my own money. I’ll buy my own aeroplanes.”

Marion said, “Dear, if you win the cross-country race, they’ll be lining up to give you aeroplanes.”

“Really?”

“I am sure of it. They know that customers will buy aeroplanes you fly. So marrying Preston really has nothing to do with aeroplanes, does it?”

“If I win.”

“Isaac says you have no doubt you’ll win. And,” she added with another laugh, “he has no doubt you’ll win. He’s bet three thousand dollars on you.”

Josephine nodded distractedly and looked out her railcar window. The wind was still rattling the glass. She closed her eyes and started to form words with her lips, then pressed her lips tightly together. She was aching to talk, Marion thought. It seemed as if Preston’s proposal was forcing to her think about things she would prefer not to.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s really troubling you?”

Josephine pursed her lips and exhaled sharply. “Can you keep a secret?” Her hazel eyes bored pleadingly into Marion’s.

“No,” Marion answered, “I can’t. Not from Isaac.”

Josephine rolled her eyes. “Why are you so honest, Marion?”

“I prefer to be,” said Marion. “What do you want to tell me?”

“Nothing. . When I saw Marco shot, I was so surprised.”

“I would think so.”

“It was the last thing I expected.”

“AND THEN,” Marion Morgan confessed to Isaac Bell, “I blundered. Instead of keeping my silly mouth shut while she completed her thought, I said something imbecilic like ‘Who would expect to see one’s husband shoot one’s friend?’ and Josephine shut up tight as a clam.”

“The last thing she expected,” Bell mused, “implying she expected something else to happen. As if she was ‘up to something,’ just like Harry Frost said. . Is she going to marry Preston?”

“She finally said, no, absolutely not.”

“Will she change her mind?”

“Only if she were to fear that she would definitely not win the race.”

“Because she wouldn’t win the fifty thousand dollars, and Preston is rich?”

“You should have seen her eyes light up when I told her that if she wins inventors will give her aeroplanes. I don’t think she ever thought of that before. It’s like she doesn’t think very far ahead. She’ll do anything she has to to keep herself in flying machines. Including marrying Preston. But only for the machines. She’s not the kind of girl who wants a bunch of kids, jewels, and houses.”

“Which reminds me,” asked Isaac Bell, taking Marion in his arms, “when are you going to marry me?”

Marion looked at the emerald on her finger. Then she smiled into his eyes. She traced his golden mustache with the tip of her finger and kissed him firmly on his lips. “The moment you absolutely insist. You know I would do anything for you. But until then, I am very, very happy and totally content to be your fiancée.”

THE KANSAN WIND howled all that day and through the night and into the next morning.

With no one flying anywhere, Andy Moser took the opportunity to completely disassemble Bell’s Gnome and put it back together, cleaned, polished, tuned, and tweaked.

Joe Mudd’s bricklayers, masons, plasterers, and locomotive firemen tore the Liberator’s engine down into small pieces and finally isolated the cracked copper tube that was the source of the oil leak which kept turning the red machine black.

Russian Dmitri Platov directed Steve Stevens’s mechanicians in another futile effort to permanently synchronize the biplane’s twin motors. When Stevens complained rudely and threatened to dock everyone’s salary, the usually easygoing thermo engine inventor stalked away to help Josephine take the head off her Antoinette to replace a leaky gasket.

Isaac Bell watched them. Platov kept talking to her in an urgent, low voice. Bell wondered whether she was discussing Whiteway’s proposal with the Russian – an odd thought, but their conversation seemed so intense. Whenever he drifted close to overhear, they stopped talking.

“ WHY IS DETECTIVE BELL LURKING?” asked Marco Celere, giving Bell a friendly wave with his Dmitri Platov slide rule.

“He’s looking out for me.”

“Surely he is not afraid for your safety in the presence of kindly Platov?”

“I doubt he’s afraid of anything,” said Josephine.

Celere began chiseling the old head gasket off Josephine’s engine block. “You are somewhat prickly today, my dear.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve got a lot on my mind.”

“Starting with Mr. Whiteway’s proposal?”

“What do you think?” she retorted sullenly.

“I think you should marry him.”

“Marco!”

“I’m serious.”

“Marco, that’s disgusting. How could you want me to marry another man?”

“He’s more than ‘another man.’ He’s the richest newspaper publisher in America. He, and his money, could be very helpful to you. And me.”

“What good will it do us if I’m married to him?”

“You would leave him for me, when the time is right.”

“Marco, it makes me sick to think you would want me to be with him.”

“Well, I’d expect you to postpone the honeymoon until after the race. Surely you could plead the necessity to concentrate on winning.”

“What about the wedding night?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll think of something.”

THE WINDS DROPPED. The Weather Bureau published reports that it might be calm for a few hours. Late in the afternoon, the racers swarmed off the Morris County Fairgrounds. Before dark, all alighted safely in Wichita, where Preston Whiteway strode dramatically into the glare of Marion Morgan’s Picture World Cooper-Hewitt mercury-arc lamps.

Marion’s operators were cranking two movie cameras, the second being an expense Whiteway had refused to bear until now despite Marion’s insistence that two cameras would create exciting shifts of view that would draw bigger audiences. She had one camera aimed at the publisher, the other trained to capture the reactions of the newspaper reporters.

Tomorrow, Whiteway announced, would be an official off day. It would not count against the fifty-day limit because, “Tomorrow I am going to throw the biggest party the state of Kansas has ever seen to celebrate my engagement to Miss Josephine Josephs – America’s Sweetheart of the Air.”

Marion Morgan looked up from her station between the cameras to lock astonished gazes with Isaac Bell. Bell shook his head in disbelief.

A San Francisco Inquirer correspondent had been primed to call out, “When’s the wedding, Mr. Whiteway, sir?” Other Whiteway employees chorused, as they had been instructed to, “Do we have to wait until the race is over?”

“Josephine wouldn’t hear of it,” Whiteway boomed back heartily. “At my beautiful bride’s special request we’re having a Texas-sized wedding in the great city of Fort Worth’s North Side Coliseum, which is known far and wide as ‘the most opulent and dynamic pavilion in the entire Western Hemisphere.’ We’ll be married the moment the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup and fifty thousand dollars flies into Fort Worth, Texas.”

Marion flashed Bell a private grin and mouthed the word “Shameless.”

Bell grinned back, “Unabashedly.”

But there was no denying that when “booming” his air race, Preston Whiteway could lather up the public hotter than P. T. Barnum, Florenz Ziegfeld, and Mark Twain combined.

The only question was, why had Josephine changed her mind? Her times were improving, often surpassing the others. And her flying machine was running beautifully. She had no reason to fear she couldn’t win the race.

32

INVESTIGATE DMITRI PLATOV,

Isaac Bell wired Van Dorn researchers in Chicago and New York. He was sure that the Russian inventor had somehow influenced Josephine to marry Preston Whiteway. Why Platov would want her to marry Whiteway was an enigma. But what intrigued the tall detective as much was how Platov had the power to change Josephine’s mind about a decision as deeply important and intensely personal as marriage.

Bell could not ignore such mystery about a man who had the run of the air race infields and was welcomed in every hangar car. Particularly since Dmitri Platov had volunteered to fill in for Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s murdered mechanician days before the Englishman’s propeller broke loose and smashed him into a Kansas creek. And if there was any one mechanician in the race who knew his business, it was Platov.

The researchers’ preliminary report, wired back in half a day, was baffling.

The only information on Dmitri Platov was found in Van Dorn files that contained newspaper clippings about the Whiteway Cup preparations at Belmont Park, and Isaac Bell’s own reports from the infield. Similarly, newspaper reporters had described, with varying degrees of accuracy, Platov’s revolutionary thermo engine, but only in articles about its destruction in the accident that had killed Steve Stevens’s chief mechanician.

Bell pondered the meaning of such a lack of information. It jibed with Danielle Di Vecchio’s assertion that she had never met Platov at the International Aeronautical Salon in Paris nor even heard his name there.

Was it possible that Platov had never been at the Paris air meet? But if he had not been in Paris, then from whom had Marco Celere bought his so-called jet engine?

Bell wired Research:

CONCENTRATE ON THERMO ENGINE.

ON THE JUMP!

Then he called Dashwood into his headquarters car. “I’m taking you off the gamblers. Watch Dmitri Platov. Don’t let him know, but stick to him like his shadow.”

“What am I looking for?”

“He’s making me uncomfortable,” said Bell. “He could be as innocent as he looks. But he had the opportunity to sabotage the Englishman’s pusher.”

“Could he be Harry Frost’s inside man?” asked Dashwood.

“He could be anything.”

ISAAC BELL HALED the few Van Dorns in the Southwest he could get his hands on to defend Josephine’s wedding from Harry Frost’s Colt machine guns. As the private detectives hurried into Fort Worth and reported aboard the Eagle Special, he drummed in his strategy: “Make it impossible for Harry Frost to sneak close enough to do damage. Ransack your contacts. There are darned few of us, but if we pool our links to lawmen, railroad police, informers, gamblers, and criminals beholden to us, we can try to establish a perimeter equal to the Colts’ range and keep him outside it.”

The stolen Colts’ long range was the threat. The machine guns were deadly up to a mile. But Frost could nearly treble the threat by elevating the barrels to loft indirect “plunging fire,” where bullets would rain down on the party indiscriminately from a distance as great as four thousand five hundred yards – the better part of three miles.

“Not as tough as it sounds,” Bell assured the Van Dorns. “Fort Worth’s sheriff is kindly lending a hand with a whole passel of temporary deputies, including ranch hands in the immediate area. They’ll recognize strangers. And we’re getting railroad dicks. The Texas amp; Pacific line and the Fort Worth amp; Denver are cooperating.”

“What if Harry Frost gets the same idea and hires his own locals?” asked a Los Angeles detective who had just stepped off the train, wearing a cream-colored bowler hat and a pink necktie.

Bell said, “What do you say to that, Walt?” nodding to his old friend “Texas” Walt Hatfield, who had arrived on horseback.

Lean as a steel rail and considerably tougher, the former Texas Ranger turned Van Dorn detective squinted under the brim of his J. B. Stetson at the California dandy. “Nothin’ to stop Frost from roundin’ up a salty bunch,” he drawled. “But he can’t drive them into town, as they would be types well known by peace officers. However, Isaac,” he said to Bell, “spottin’ Harry Frost ain’t stoppin’ him. I reckon from readin’ reports of your adventures thus far, Frost ain’t scairt of nothin’. He’d charge Hell with a bucket of water.”

Bell shook his head. “Don’t count on Frost acting rashly. We’ll see no reckless attack, no hopeless charge. He told me straight, he’s not afraid of dying. But only after he kills Josephine.”

HAVING SET UP HER CAMERAS and Cooper-Hewitt lamps in the North Side Coliseum, Marion Morgan joined Isaac Bell in his Van Dorn headquarters car. Bell complimented her new split riding skirt, which she had discovered in a Fort Worth department store that catered to wealthy ranchers’ wives, then asked, “How does the wedding venue look?” Preoccupied with establishing the perimeter, he had yet to inspect the inside of the coliseum.

Marion laughed. “Do you recall how Preston described it?”

“‘The most opulent and dynamic pavilion in the entire Western Hemisphere’?”

“He left out one word: ‘livestock.’ The opulent and dynamic livestock pavilion is where they hold their National Feeders and Breeders cattle show. Josephine laughed so hard, she started crying.”

“She’s a dairy farmer’s daughter.”

“She said, ‘I’m getting married in a cow barn.’ In actual fact, it’s a grand building. Plenty of light for my cameras. Skylights in the roof, and electricity for my lamps. I’ll do fine. How about you?”

“Indoors makes it easier to guard,” said Bell.

When he did inspect it, he discovered it was indeed a wise choice, with enormous rail yards for the support trains and wedding guests’ specials, and easily dismantled corrals to make airfield space for the flying machines.

AFTER A THOUSAND-MILE RUN from Chicago on awful roads, Harry Frost’s sixty-horsepower, four-cylinder Model 35 Thomas Flyer touring car was caked in mud, gray with dust, and festooned with towropes and chains, extra gas and oil cans, and repeatedly patched spare tires. But it was running like a top, and Frost felt a kind of freedom he never experienced on a railroad, even steaming on his own special. Like Josephine used to prattle on about flying in the air-on the air, she called it, insisting that air was almost solid – in or on, a man could auto anywhere he pleased.

Thirty miles from Fort Worth, a meatpacking city that was smudging the sky with smoke, Frost ordered a halt on a low rise. He scanned the scrub-strewn prairie with powerful German field glasses he had bought for African safaris. A mile off was the railroad. A freight car sat all by itself on a remote siding that had once served a town since wiped from the map by a tornado.

“Go!”

Mike Stotts, Frost’s mechanician, cranked the Thomas’s motor. Three hours later, twenty-five miles on, they stopped again. Frost sent Stotts ahead on a bicycle, which they had stolen in Wichita Falls, to scout the territory and establish contact with Frost’s men in Fort Worth.

“You want I should go with him?” asked Dave Mayhew, Frost’s telegrapher.

“You stay here.” He could always get another mechanician, but a telegrapher who was also handy with firearms was a rare animal. Stotts was back sooner than Frost had expected. “What’s going on?”

“Picket line. They’ve got men on horses patrolling.”

“You sure they weren’t ranch hands?”

“I didn’t see any cows.”

“What about in the city?”

“Police everywhere. Half the men I saw were wearing deputy stars. And a fair portion of those who weren’t looked like detectives.”

“Did you see any rail dicks?”

“About a hundred.”

Frost ruminated in silence. Clearly, Isaac Bell was operating under the assumption that the Colt machine guns stolen from Fort Riley were in his possession.

There were other ways to skin a cat. Frost sent Mayhew up a pole to wire a Texas amp; Pacific Railway dispatcher in his employ, then headed west, skirting Fort Worth.

After dark, the Thomas Flyer climbed the embankment onto the railroad, straddled the tracks, and continued west. Frost ordered the mechanician to watch behind them for locomotive headlamps. He and the telegrapher watched ahead. Five times in the night, they pulled off the tracks to let a train pass.

HALFWAY TO ABILENE late the next day, Harry Frost watched through his field glasses as a large chuck wagon, drawn by six powerful mules, stopped next to a freight car parked on a remote Texas amp; Pacific Railway siding. The siding served an enormous ranch ten miles away that was owned by a Wall Street investment combine in which Frost held a controlling interest. Six gunmen dressed like cowboys were riding with the wagon. They dismounted, unlocked a padlock, slid open the boxcar door, and wrestled heavy crates stenciled HOLIAN PLOW WORKS SANDY HOOK CONN into the wagon.

Frost raked the endless empty miles of brush and grass with the field glasses, checking as he had repeatedly that there was no one in sight to interfere. Prairie speckled with brown clumps of mesquite grass rolled to the horizon. Clouds, or perhaps low hills, rose in the west. He spied, eight or ten miles north, a single spindly structure that could be either a windmill to pump water or a derrick to drill for oil. The tracks gleamed in a straight line east and west, edged by a ragged ribbon of telegraph wire strung along weathered poles.

They finished loading the chuck wagon. It trundled west on the rutted dirt track that paralleled the railroad, guarded by the men on horses. The Thomas caught up two miles from the siding. Up close, the appearance of the horsemen would cause any peace officer worth his salt to draw his guns for they looked less like cowboys than bank robbers. Their hands lacked the calluses and scars of range work. They wore six-guns in double holsters low on the hips and packed Winchester rifles in saddle scabbards. Surveying the three men in the Thomas, the hard-bitten gang turned expectantly to a tall man in their midst. Harry Frost had already spotted him as the leader with whom he had communicated through an intermediary he trusted from the old days.

Frost asked, “Which of you was in the Spanish War?”

Four men in campaign hats nodded.

“Did you fire the Colt?”

They nodded again, eyes still shifting toward their leader.

“Follow me. There’s a creek bed where we can mount the guns.”

No one moved.

“Herbert?” Frost said amiably. “My fellows in Chicago tell me you’re one tough outlaw. Can’t help but notice that everyone’s looking at you like you’re about to impart some wisdom. What’s on your mind?”

Herbert answered by drawling, “We was debatin’ why instead of shootin’ at flyin’ machines we oughtn’t to take your money now, and your auto, and your machine guns, and if you don’t give us no trouble, allow you all to hop a freight back to Chicago – you bein’ only three, us bein’ six.”

Gripping the stock in one powerful hand, Harry Frost raised a sawed-off double-barreled ten-gauge from between his boots.

The outlaw looked fearlessly down the twin muzzles. “Ah don’t cotton to a man drawin’ a bead on me. Particularly with a coach gun.”

“I’m not drawing a bead on you, Mr. Herbert,” Harry Frost replied. “I’m blowing your head off.” He jerked both triggers. The shotgun thundered like a cannon, and a swath of double-ought buckshot threw Herbert out of his saddle.

There was no echo on the open range, just a single blast of thunder and the neighing of frightened horses. When the dead man’s gang got their mounts under control, Stotts and Mayhew were pointing revolvers in both hands, and Harry Frost himself had reloaded. His face was red with righteous anger.

“Who else?”

They uncrated the guns, mounts, ammunition boxes, and landing carriages in the meager shade of the scrub brush and low trees that grew beside the creek. They disassembled and cleaned the guns and mounted them on the two-wheeled landing carriages. The weapons weighed nearly four hundred pounds, including the ammunition boxes. Cursing the weight, they rolled them up and down the dry creek bed, which was deep and narrow as a military slit trench. Positioned two hundred yards apart and elevated on their carriages, the Colts commanded the railroad tracks that the aeroplanes would follow to Abilene.

To ensure the guns were in working order, they fed the canvas cartridge belts into the breeches and fired fifty rounds from each, killing some cows grazing half a mile away.

Harry Frost handed Stotts his hunting knife. “Go slice off some supper. Better cut enough for breakfast. We’ll be here awhile.”

He ordered Mayhew to climb a pole and tap into the wires.

The telegrapher strung wire down to the ground, connected it to a key, sat propped against the pole with the key in his lap, and translated the messages that railroad dispatchers were transmitting between their distant stations. Several times, he warned that a train was coming. They hid under the trestle that spanned the creek bed until the train had thundered overhead. Most of the telegraph traffic was about shunting extra trains – rich men’s specials and newspapers’ charters – into Fort Worth for the big wedding.

33

ISAAC BELL WAS SURPRISED when Preston Whiteway asked him to be his best man until he realized that the only people the newspaper magnate ever spent time with were people who worked for him, and the high-handed manner in which he treated employees guaranteed they would never be friends.

“I would be honored,” Bell said, glad to stand near Josephine to protect her personally if Harry Frost somehow pulled a fast one and breached the outer defense lines. He was not as pleased when Josephine asked Marion to be her maid of honor. It put his fiancée directly in the line of fire, but Marion made it clear there was no saying no to such a request from Josephine, who was thousands of miles from her family and the only woman in the race.

In answer to Joseph Van Dorn’s queries from Washington about “wedding hoopla,” Isaac Bell wired back:

PRESTON PREEMINENT PROMOTER.

Hundreds of invited guests and hordes of spectators converged on Fort Worth in automobiles, buckboard wagons, carriages, and on horseback. Packed trains steamed in from Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The Northern Texas Traction Company ran extra trolleys from Dallas. A company of state militia was called up to control the crowds and protect the flying machines. Additional companies were under orders at Tyler and Texarkana. Marion Morgan’s camera operators were trampled by legions of newspaper sketch artists and photographers until Whiteway himself stepped in to remind them that, as owner of Picture World, he would not take kindly to his cameras being jostled.

The ceremony itself was delayed by every hitch imaginable.

The North Side Coliseum, which Whiteway had furnished with church pews and an altar shipped in from St. Louis, had been designed more for the movement of cattle than people, so it took a very long time to get everyone seated. Then summer thunderheads blackened the western sky, and every mechanician and birdman in the race, including the bride, ran out to the field to tie down their machines and shroud wings and fuselages with canvas.

Thunder shook the coliseum. Fierce winds swept in from the prairie. Steve Stevens’s biplane tore its anchors. The bride, though widely known to despise the obese cotton farmer, led another charge outdoors to save his machine. They got it nailed down, but not before torrential rain struck.

Josephine was dried off by her ladies-in-waiting – a rough-and-tumble crowd of Fort Worth society matrons who had volunteered to fill in for the famous aviatrix’s faraway family. The Bishop of San Francisco’s stand-in – the Right Reverend himself pleaded prior responsibilities raising funds to erect a cathedral on earthquake-ravished Nob Hill – had just reassembled the flock in front of the temporarily consecrated altar when the floor was set to shaking by a colossal jet-black 2-8-2 Mikado locomotive rumbling into the yard. With deep fireboxes, superheated boilers, and eight drive wheels, the powerful Mikados usually sped immense strings of boxcars at sixty miles per hour. This one towed a single long black private car, which it parked beside a cattle chute that led directly into the building.

“Good God,” whispered Preston Whiteway, “it’s Mother.”

From the private car, swathed head to toe in black silk and crowned with raven feathers, stalked the Widow Whiteway.

The newspaper publisher turned beseechingly to the Van Dorn Agency’s chief investigator. “I thought she was in France,” he whispered. “Bell, you’re best man. It’s your job to do something. Please.”

The tall, golden-haired detective squared his shoulders and strode to the cattle chute. Scion of an ancient Boston banking family, polished at boarding school and educated at Yale, Isaac Bell was steeped in the tradition of best men saving the day, whether by locating lost rings or defusing inebriated former fiancées, but this was as far beyond his ken, as if he were a Texas cowhand asked to rope a rhinoceros.

He offered his hand and a princely bow.

“At last,” he greeted the groom’s uninvited mother, “the ceremony can begin.”

“Who are you?”

“I am Isaac Bell, Preston’s best man and a devoted reader of your columns in the Sunday supplements.”

“If you’ve read them, you know I cannot abide divorce.”

“Neither can Josephine. Were her unfortunate marriage not properly annulled, she would never marry again. Here she is now.” Josephine was hurrying from the altar with an open smile.

Mrs. Whiteway muttered, “She’s braver than my son. Look at him, afraid of his own mother.”

“He’s mortified, madam. He thought you were in France.”

“He hoped I was in France. What do think of this girl, Mr. Bell?”

“I admire her pluck.”

Josephine approached, eyes warm, extending both hands. “I’m so glad you made it, Mrs. Whiteway. My own mother couldn’t, and I felt all alone until now.”

Mrs. Whiteway looked Josephine up and down. “Aren’t you the plain Jane?” she announced. “Pretty enough, but no beauty, thank goodness. Beauty spoils a woman, turns her head. . Who is that woman in maid-of-honor costume directing those men to point moving-picture cameras at me?”

“My fiancée,” said Bell, who had already stepped out of the line of focus, “Miss Marion Morgan.”

“Well, there may be exceptions to what I said about beautiful women,” Mrs. Whiteway harrumphed. “Young lady, do you love my son?”

The aviatrix looked her in the eye. “I like him.”

“Why?”

“He gets things done.”

“That is the one good trait he inherited from my husband.” She took Josephine’s hand and said, “Let’s get on with this,” and walked her back to the altar.

Mrs. Whiteway was settled in the front pew, and the bishop’s stand-in was repeating for the third time “We are gathered here today. .” when through the skylight above Josephine and Preston the heavens suddenly glowed a steely green.

“Twisters!” cried the Texas plains dwellers who knew that weirdly tinted sky could only mean tornadoes.

Fort Worthians fled to storm cellars, inviting as many guests as they could squeeze in. Visitors who had steamed in on special trains retired to their dubious shelters. Those without cellars or trains found saloons.

The tornados roamed the rangeland until long after dark, roaring like runaway freights, hurling cattle and bunkhouses to the skies. They spared the city, but it was past midnight before a grateful congregation finally smelled the wedding feast cooking and at last heard the words “I now pronounce you man and wife.”

Preston Whiteway, flushed from reciprocating multiple toasts to the bridegroom, planted a kiss on Josephine’s lips. Maid of Honor Marion Morgan assured all who asked that, from her close vantage, she had observed that Josephine returned it gamely.

A roar of “Let’s eat” drove hundreds to the tables.

Whiteway raised his glass high. “A toast to my beautiful bride, America’s Sweetheart of the Air. May she fly ever higher and faster in my arms and-”

However Whiteway intended to continue his toast was drowned out by the distinctive grinding clatter of two pump-driven, eight-cylinder Antoinette motors clawing Steve Stevens’s overburdened biplane into the night air.

JOSEPHINE JUMPED from the bridal party’s table and ran full tilt through a canvas flap that covered a cattle chute leading to the flying field. Spitting fire from both motors, Stevens’s machine cleared a fence and Mrs. Whiteway’s locomotive, headed straight at a line of telegraph wires, cleared them by inches, lurched over a barn, and disappeared into the night.

Marco Celere was standing with the chocks he had pulled from its wheels at his feet, waving good-bye with his Platov’s slide rule and his red-banded straw boater.

“I told you I’d think of something for your wedding night.”

“Where’s he going?”

“Abilene.”

“That sneaky, fat. .”

“I convinced him to go ahead so we’d have time to work on the motors.”

“How can he see where he’s flying?”

“Stars and moon on shiny tracks.”

Josephine yelled for her mechanicians to pour gas and oil into her flying machine and spin it over. Marco raced after her as she ran to it, dragging her wedding dress like a cloud of white smoke. He pulled the canvas off the monoplane’s wings while she knelt by tent pegs to release the tie-downs.

“I have to warn you. .” he whispered urgently.

“What?” She loosened a taut-line hitch, tugged the rope off the strut, and knelt to loosen another.

“If something were to happen to ‘Dmitri Platov,’ don’t worry.”

“What do you mean?. . Hurry it up! ” she shouted to her detective-mechanicians, who were tipping cans of gas and oil into the tanks. “What are you talking about? You’re Dmitri Platov.”

“‘Dmitri Platov’ is being watched by Bell’s detectives. He may have to suddenly disappear.”

Josephine untied the last tie-down, jumped up on the soapbox, and scrambled onto her machine, desperate to get up in the air. The train of her wedding dress tangled in a stay. “Knife!” she yelled to a detective-mechanician, who flicked open a sharpened blade and slashed the train off her dress.

“Keep it out of the propeller!” she ordered, and the mechanician dragged it away. Marco was still standing on the soapbox, his whiskered face inches from hers. “What about you?” she asked.

“I’ll be back. Don’t worry.”

She plunged her control post forward and pulled it back and tilted it sideways, checking that her elevator, rudder, and alettoni moved properly. “O.K., I won’t. Get out of my way. . Contact!”

She raced off the ground ten minutes behind Stevens.

Isaac Bell was already circling the field, having instructed Andy Moser to keep the motor warm and gas and castor oil topped off. From high in the air, he saw the North Side Coliseum, and all of Fort Worth, as a dull glow lost in the infinite sea of darkness that was the night-blackened Texas rangeland.

Josephine raced west, following the railroad tracks by the light of the moon.

The tall detective was right behind her, tracking the aviatrix by the pinprick of fire that marked her Antoinette’s exhaust. For the first ten miles, he kept slowing his engine so as not to overtake her. But when the glow of Fort Worth had completely disappeared, and the ground was as dark behind as it was ahead, he fixed his eyes on the double line of moonlit steel, took his finger off the blip switch, and let the Eagle fly.