Surrounded by saber-wielding horsemen, the car’s rate of speed was limited to a brisk trot. At the same time, the glittering Cossacks pinpointed the exact location of the Peerless—itself a visual extravaganza of red enamel and polished brass—for a revolutionary with a pistol or a sniper drawing a bead.
Bell was not particularly concerned about a revolutionary getting past the Cossacks, and even if one managed to, the scuffle would give him plenty of time to blow the attacker’s head off with his Colt automatic. A sniper was a grimmer story, and Bell watched anxiously for a glint of smoke-darkened sunlight on a distant rifle. He could be stationed on a roof or in an attic window, at any height that presented a line of fire above the tall horsemen.
They moved out of the hotel and embassy districts, past Armenian neighborhoods of shuttered houses, and through slums where the Tatars, distinguished by their blue tunics, darker skin, and round faces, stared sullenly. The Cossacks’ faces hardened, their tension betrayed by stiffened backs and darting eyes.
Bell had befriended the chauffeur, Josef, a Georgian with a tall pompadour of wavy black hair and the furtive flicker in his coal-dark eyes of a police spy assigned to eavesdrop on the Americans. Josef explained in halting English that the Cossacks had new orders to stop the pogromy, to which they had been turning an officially sanctioned blind eye. Now they were the Tatars’ enemy. “Tatar shoot Cossack,” the Georgian flung cheerfully over his shoulder to Bell in the backseat. “Cossack shoot Tatar. Make peace.”
Bell glanced at Rockefeller beside him. The old man was looking everywhere with big eyes. “What splendid horses!” He seemed happy, almost joyful. Bell speculated that he was delighted that his Special Envoy disguise allowed him for the first time in decades to move about in public. Tatars were glowering at his police escort, not at the “most hated man in America.”
Whereas Bill Matters sat rigidly in the front seat next to the chauffeur, uncomfortable as he always appeared to be in Rockefeller’s presence. He did not appear nervous, although he was hardly at ease.
Bell was not quite sure what to make of him. As brusque and tough as he had found Edna and Nellie Matters’ father on first meeting, he had not seen real indications of the “hard as adamantine” that Spike Hopewell had characterized. Granted, the man had kept a cool head during the train attack. He was clearly accustomed to command. And it seemed that the former independent had effected a successful transition to what Rockefeller referred to as a “valuable executive.” But regardless of the high level of Standard Oil director or head of department the president had permitted him to rise to, Bell did not believe that Bill Matters had yet become “one of the boys” who ran the secretive trust.
The smoke grew thicker in the suburbs, the sky blacker.
They headed southeast toward the Bibi-Eibat oil field and Black Town refineries.
The slow-moving auto and clattering horses crept into an enormous field of refinery tanks. Beyond the tanks were countless refining pots, each with a squat chimney belching smoke. A sharpshooter could crouch on the climbing rungs on one of the chimneys, though he would be taking a big risk of being seen. The more likely sniping position, like the roost that the assassin had climbed up to in Kansas, would be in the virtual skyscraper city of a thousand oil derricks that marched in close-packed ranks to the edge of the Caspian Sea.
A Tatar plumber working on the roof of one of the refinery tanks dropped a monkey wrench. The tool banged resoundingly against the metal side. The noise startled a horse. It reared so suddenly that its rider nearly slid off his saddle. For a moment, there was consternation, angry shouts, and milling horses. The chauffeur had to slam on his brakes. The Peerless stopped abruptly, jostling Matters against the windshield, the chauffeur into his wheel, and Rockefeller half off his seat until caught and held firmly in place by Isaac Bell.
In that same instant, Bell heard the crack of a high-velocity rifle slug split the air inches from the back of his seat. He grabbed Rockefeller’s arm to drag him down out of the line of fire. A second bullet struck the tall detective like a bolt of lightning.
22
The impact of the high-velocity slug threw Isaac Bell against the side door, breaking its latch. It flew open. He tumbled out of the Peerless, ricocheted off the running board, and sprawled on the oil-soaked road. Still gripping Rockefeller’s arm, he found himself vaguely aware that he somehow landed underneath the two-hundred-pound magnate. A bullet shattered the windshield. Bills Matters and the chauffeur jumped for their lives.
Bell heard his own voice. He sounded as if he were calling to John D. Rockefeller from a passing train. “Are you O.K.?”
The old man straightened his wig.
“My, my! Mr. Bell, your coat is drenched in blood.”
From Bell’s neck to his elbow, his white suit jacket was soaked ruby red.
His shoulder felt on fire.
The shooting had stopped. Now the danger was the steel-shod hoofs of the panicked horses plunging and rearing as their riders looked everywhere at once for the source of the gunfire.
Again his voice drifted from a distance. “We better stand up, Mr. Stone. Before we get trampled.”
He struggled to his feet, used his working arm to help Rockefeller to his, then found himself holding on to the old man to keep his balance.
“There!” Bell shouted, pointing at the derricks, the likeliest place the assassin fired from.
The Cossacks drew swords and galloped in the opposite direction.
A Tatar work gang was caught in their path. The Cossacks began slashing and shooting indiscriminately. The Moslems fled from the horses, leaving behind crumpled dead and squirming wounded and some hastily discarded sidearms.
Isaac Bell was surprised to see John D. Rockefeller standing over him, staring down with a concerned expression. “Mr. Bell, you’ve fallen down again. You are wounded.”
Bell started to stand again.
Rockefeller admonished him with an imperious gesture. “Right there! As I have been saying, you are wounded.” He raised his voice. “A doctor! Fetch a doctor!”
It finally struck Isaac Bell that it was not a good idea to stand and he lay back and let his mind fix on his memory of the shooting. He was sure it was the assassin. He was also fairly sure that the bullet had been aimed at him, not at Rockefeller. The car stopping suddenly had thrown off the first shot. That was the one he heard crackle over the seat back. He had taken the second. A terrible thought pierced his whirling thoughts. Was he drawing fire at the man he was supposed to protect?
Bell motioned to Bill Matters, one of the faces hovering over him.
“Get Mr. R—Envoy Stone—under cover. I’ll catch up.”
“You O.K., Bell?”
Bell took inventory. Bloody as he was, there were no arteries spurting or he’d have bled to death by now. He tried to move his arm. That made his shoulder hurt worse. But he could move it. No bones fractured. The whirling in his head and a general air of confusion he blamed on the shock of impact from a high-velocity bullet.
“Tip-top,” he said. “Get Envoy Stone under cover! Now!”
Matters knelt to speak privately. “He says he won’t leave you here.”
“Tell him I said to get under cover before he gets killed and I lose my only client. Explain to him that I don’t know what’s going on and I can’t help him at this moment.”
They were still shouting for a doctor.
One appeared, a sturdy, barrel-chested young man in a threadbare coat, who knelt beside him, opened his bag, and took out a pair of scissors. He cut away Bell’s blood-soaked coat and shirtsleeves, exposing a ragged tear through the flesh of his upper biceps. He reached for a bottle of carbolic acid and muttered something in Russian.
“What?” asked Bell.
“Is hurting. But important.”
“Beats infection,” Bell agreed. He braced for the fiery disi
nfectant. For a long moment, the sky turned dark. Afterwards the doctor bandaged the wound, then took a hypodermic needle from its nest in a box padded with red velvet.
“What’s in that?” asked Bell.
“Morphine. You are feeling nothing.”
“Save it for the next guy— What are those Cossacks shouting?”
“What?”
“Doctor, you speak English.”
“I study at Edinburgh.”
“I will pay you twenty rubles a day to be my translator. What are those Cossacks shouting?”
The doctor’s eyes widened. On January’s Bloody Sunday, the workers gunned down at the Winter Palace had been demanding their pay be raised to a daily salary of one ruble.
“What is your name?” asked Bell.
“Alexey Irineivoich Virovets.”
“Dr. Virovets, what are those Cossacks shouting?”
“They are recognizing the captured guns as being looted from armory.”
Bell levered himself onto his good elbow. He saw pistols heaped on a horse blanket but no sharpshooter’s weapons.
“Now what’s he saying?” A Cossack officer was reporting loudly to a civilian dressed in top hat and frock coat. Bell pegged him for the governor’s representative or an Okhrana operative.
“He blames the attack on revolutionaries,” said Virovets.
“Help me up. We’re going for a walk.”
“I am not recommending—”
“Your objection is noted.”
Twenty minutes later, with his arm in a sling, the sturdy Dr. Virovets at his side, and anxious oil company officials trailing them, Isaac Bell walked beside the Caspian surf breaking at the feet of the derricks until he found one that had been abandoned. As much as he wanted to climb to its parapet, he doubted he could with one working arm and a spinning head.
The doctor climbed for him and reported back that he could see the Cossacks still clustered where the bullets had rained down on the Peerless. Bell was not surprised. Forging ahead before the others trampled the beach, he had spotted a single set of footprints in the sand that had approached the ladder from one direction and left in another.
But it was puzzling. The derrick was less than five hundred yards from where the auto had been. How could the assassin have missed twice? The sudden stop could explain the first bullet going awry. But why hadn’t the second or third hit him in the head? Or the assassin’s favorite target, the neck?
23
Isaac Bell woke up stiff and sore the next morning to a slew of cipher cablegrams from New York. The first was from Grady Forrer, who continued to substitute as directing head of the case in his absence.
FIVE POINTERS BLAME GOPHERS.
Bell took that to mean that Van Dorn detectives had discovered that Anthony McCloud’s fellow Five Points gangsters did not believe he had fallen drunk into the East River but had been murdered. They naturally blamed their rivals the Gopher Gang. But whoever had killed him, and whatever the motive, it was a heck of a coincidence it happened the day of the fire that killed his mother.
Bell cabled back
INFORM NEW YORK CORONER.
entertaining a slim hope that the city’s medical examiner could be persuaded to dig up Averell Comstock’s body to investigate for a cause of death other than old age.
A cable that read
HOPEWELL OFTEN NEW YORK.
told Bell that Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton were grasping at straws about Spike Hopewell’s “tricks up his sleeve” inference. Any independent trying to build a refinery and pipe line would have to travel regularly to New York City to romance his Wall Street bankers.
But the information that Forrer passed along from Dave McCoart resonated with hope of a breakthrough on the gunsmith front—clues that Joseph Van Dorn believed could lead them to the craftsman who smithed the assassin’s deadly weapon.
THREE POSSIBLES.
TWO HARTFORD.
ONE BRIDGEPORT.
BOSS AUTHORIZED DETECTIVES.
Archie Abbott, on the other hand, still had nothing to report about sharpshooter Billy Jones.
ARMY UNFRIENDLY.
PURSUING FRIENDSHIP BRIGADIER GENERAL DAUGHTER.
IS SUPREME SACRIFICE AUTHORIZED?
Bell had just written in encipher on the cablegram blank
AUTHORIZED ON THE JUMP.
when Doctor Virovets arrived to change his bandage. The wound was clean, with no sign of infection, but they agreed on another dose of carbolic acid to be on the safe side. For distraction, Bell asked about the variety of languages he heard spoken in the streets. “Tatar,” the doctor explained, “Georgian and Russian.”
“May I borrow your stethoscope?” Bell asked as the doctor was leaving.
John D. Rockefeller walked in carrying a tray of milk and pryaniki, the Russian spice cookies of which Bell had grown fond.
“I’m surprised to see you dressed, Mr. Bell. I presumed I would venture out alone today.”
“I could use the fresh air.”
A Renault limousine was waiting with its curtains drawn. At Bell’s insistence, the Cossacks had been replaced by plainclothes police detectives on foot. Some trotted alongside, huffing and puffing, as they pulled onto the avenue. Others rode behind them in an identical Renault, Bell having convinced the cops that similar limousines would confuse a sniper.
He and Rockefeller sat in near darkness behind the curtains. Bell watched the streets through a split in the cloth, wondering whether a sense of shared danger might incline the reticent Rockefeller to open up further to him. He tested the waters with a joke.
“I guess we can’t blame the assassin for slandering Standard Oil if he shoots at the president.”
“He wasn’t shooting at me,” said Rockefeller. “He was shooting at you.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“You are the one with his arm in a sling, not I.”
“Isn’t it possible he hit me when he missed you?”
“The first report you filed when you came to work for me stated that he has missed his shot on rare occasions. And never by much. He was shooting at you.”
“Sounds like you no longer need a bodyguard.”
“Don’t worry, your job is not at risk. Baku is teeming with angry people primed to kill for every imaginable reason. I’m glad to have you with us.”
“Are you free to tell me who we are calling on?”
“In confidence. Please bear in mind this is not to be repeated. We are meeting a representative of the Shah of Persia.”
“Has Mr. Matters gone ahead?”
“Mr. Matters has other business.”
“May I ask—?”
Rockefeller’s eyes cut through the dimly lit passenger cabin like locomotive headlamps. “You have many questions today, Mr. Bell.”
“Getting shot makes me curious about what to expect next. I was about to ask whether you are meeting this representative as Commercial Envoy Stone or as the president of Standard Oil.”
“I am the retired president,” Rockefeller shot back.
“I keep forgetting,” said Bell.
That drew a stony silence. But minutes later, Rockefeller dropped his voice to a half whisper and confided, “I cannot answer your question, because I have not yet decided. I keep hearing a proverb in Baku. Perhaps you’ve heard it, too. ‘In Persia no man believes another.’”
“They love insults,” said Bell. “Armenians are sharpers; Georgians are drunkards; Tatars simultaneously violent, unintelligent, and kindly; Germans dull, Cossacks vicious, Russians petty. All agree that Persians are liars. Which shouldn’t come as a surprise after centuries of tyranny and misgovernment.”
Rockefeller favored Bell’s observation with a thin smile and the further confidence that the detective was angling for. “I don’t know yet whether I am
dealing with liars. All I know is that I will begin as Envoy Stone. Whether I become Mr. Rockefeller will depend upon how much noise they make and how much dust they throw in the air.”
The Renault stopped at a side entrance to the Astoria, one of the lavish new hotels near City Hall. They slipped in quietly, skirted the lobby, guided by a hotel functionary, to a service elevator that took them to a penthouse kitchen. A Persian secretary greeted Rockefeller in flawless English. “It is my pleasure to report, sir, that no one has marked your arrival. We are prepared for the private meeting you requested.”
“You requested the meeting,” Rockefeller corrected him, politely but firmly. “I requested privacy.”
“Then we are both happy, sir.” The Persian was slim and lithe as a cat, and as graceful, with large eyes in a narrow face.
Rockefeller turned to Bell. “Wait here.”
“I have to inspect the room where you are going,” said Bell.
“It is perfectly safe,” said the secretary.
“I still want to see it,” said Bell.
“It is all right,” said Rockefeller, “I trust our hosts.”
Bell said, “If I cannot see where you are going, I must insist that I wait directly outside. At the door in the next room.”
“Insist?” The secretary’s eyebrows arched above a mocking smile.
Bell ignored him. To Rockefeller he said, “By the terms of our contract, our agreement is voided if, in my opinion, you place me in a position that I cannot protect you. Under those conditions, the severance fee is calculated on the time it will take me to return to New York. The purpose of that clause is to make you think twice about straying too far from my protection.”
“I recall,” said Rockefeller. He addressed the secretary, “Take us to the room where we are to meet. Mr. Bell will wait outside the door.”
They put him in the foyer, which was exactly where Isaac Bell wanted to be. He waited until he was alone, closed the outer door, pulled a rubber stop from his pocket, and wedged it under the door. Then he untangled the stethoscope he had borrowed from Dr. Alexey Irineivoich Virovets, inserted the ear tubes, and pressed the chest piece against the thinnest of the wooden panels.