The Assassin

  “Is this logical?”

  “Imperative,” said Bell.

  “I have to send cables.”

  “Quickly.”

  Upstairs, he and Wish found Edna Matters with a carpetbag and her typewriter already at the door, and a large-scale map of the lands bordering the Caspian and Black Seas spread out on her bed.

  “Where’s Nellie?”

  “On the roof.”

  “What’s she doing on the roof?” asked Wish.

  “It’s the nearest thing to a balloon,” said Edna. “She’s checking the lay of the land.”

  “Go get her, Wish.”

  Bell turned to Edna’s map, which he had already been reviewing in his mind. The train to Tiflis and Batum and a Black Sea steamer would whisk them to Constantinople in four days. But it was too easy to stop a train where outlaws were the only law.

  Edna traced the Caspian Sea route north to Astrakhan and up the Volga River. “Tsaritsyn steamers connect with the Moscow train.”

  Bell said, “I don’t fancy getting trapped in the middle of a Russian revolution, if that’s what’s brewing.”

  “No one I’ve interviewed knows what will happen next,” said Edna.

  “Least of all, the Russians.”

  “Poor Father. I’m worried sick about him banished to Moscow.”

  Bell went to the window and looked down at the street. A trolley had stopped on its tracks. People lugging bags streamed off it and hurried toward the railroad station. He craned his head to try to see the station, but the angle was wrong. The sky looked red. Shadows leaped, thrown by muzzle flashes. Guns crackled and people ran in every direction. For whatever reason Rockefeller had sent Matters to Moscow, he was better off than they were at the moment.

  Nellie burst into the room, color high, eyes bright.

  Wish Clarke was right behind her, his expression grim. “Big gunfight on Millionnaya and a riot at the train station,” he reported. “Nellie spotted a way across Vokzalnaya if we want the harbor.”

  “We want it,” said Bell. “Let’s go.”

  —

  The Hotel de l’Europe was guarded by nervous plainclothes police. Europeans paced the lobby shouting at frightened staff. The hotel pianist began playing a Schubert serenade as if, Isaac Bell thought fleetingly, he hoped to help the world right itself. Bell ran to get his carpetbag. Rockefeller’s suite, adjoining his room, was empty. Bell searched it and ran back down to the lobby. Wish was standing on the stairs, where he could watch the doors. Edna and Nellie stood behind him. Both women were eerily calm.

  “Did you see Rockefeller?”

  “No.”

  “There!” said Edna.

  The oil magnate was exiting the hotel manager’s office. He looked like he was headed to a garden party in his dandy’s costume, but Edna had seen through the wig disguise in a flash. Bell saw her beautiful face harden. Her lips were pressed tightly, dots of color flushed on her cheekbones, and her eyes settled on Rockefeller with an intensity stoked by hatred.

  He glanced at Nellie. Every trace of the big smile usually ready on her lips had extinguished like a burning coal plunged in cold water. The color of her eyes, like Edna’s, shed every soft vestige of green and turned gray as ash.

  Wish muttered, as they plunged across the crowded lobby to intercept Rockefeller, “Are you still sure you want to run together? The young ladies are primed to claw his eyes out.”

  “Not my first choice,” said Bell. “But it’s our only choice.”

  Rockefeller saw them hurrying toward him and said, “There you are. I was just paying our hotel bill.”

  “Bill?” echoed Wish. “The town’s blowing up.”

  “I pay my debts.”

  The manager ran from his office and put the lie to that.

  “Envoy Stone! If they reply to your cables, where shall I forward the answers?”

  “New York.”

  “Envoy Stone!” Isaac Bell said with the ice of cold steel in his voice. “We’re going—now. Stick close.”

  —

  The situation on Vokzalnaya deteriorated radically before they were halfway to the harbor. Here, too, the trolley had stopped. Suddenly Tatars were running up the middle of the street shooting pistols at well-dressed Armenians huddled in groups.

  Russian Army soldiers wheeled up a Maxim gun on a heavy Sokolov mount. As the machine gunners propped it on its legs, the Tatars fled around the corner. The Armenians ran toward the station, mothers dragging children, young men and women helping their elders.

  Pistol fire rained down on the Russian soldiers from above. The gunners tilted the water-jacketed barrel upward. The Maxim churned, and a stream of slugs blasted second-story windows.

  From one of those windows flew a baseball-size sphere with a glittering tail of a burning fuse. Still in the air, it exploded with a flash and a sharp bang, and the street and sidewalks were suddenly littered with bodies. Wounded were reeling away when a second bomb exploded prematurely still inside the window. No one remained alive in the circle of the two explosions, not the Tatars, Armenians, or the Russian gun crew sprawled around the Maxim.

  Isaac Bell and Aloysius Clarke charged straight at it. A Maxim gun and a thousand .303 rounds in trained hands would be their ticket aboard any ship running from the harbor. Wish heaved one hundred forty pounds of Maxim and Sokolov mount over his shoulder. Bell scooped up four canvas ammunition belts in his good arm and looped them around his neck.

  “Go!”

  They staggered toward the harbor, closely trailed by Nellie and Edna and Rockefeller. At the foot of Vokzalnaya, a mob of people was storming the passenger steamer pier fighting to get up the gangway of the one remaining ship. Ships that had already fled were far across the bay, lights fading in the sand haze as they steamed for the safety of the open sea.

  “Mr. Bell!” cried Rockefeller. “Is that the Nobel lubricating oil refinery afire?”

  The Standard Oil president’s eyes locked on the sight of a huge fire miles up the coast at Black Town. From the white-hot heart of it, flames leaped a thousand feet into the air.

  “Looks like it,” said Bell, who was scanning the finger piers for a likely ship. They had toured that Russian refinery yesterday. Rockefeller was scheming to buy it, but the Moscow-based branch of the Nobel dynamite family had no intention of selling. Now the prize had gone up in smoke.

  “Tramp freighter,” said Wish, swinging his shoulder to point the Maxim up the waterfront toward a steamer so old it still had masts. “They won’t be fighting to get on that one.”

  Bell saw that the tramp was billowing smoke from its single stack. “He’s raising steam.”

  They herded their charges toward it. But as they got close they saw Wish had been wrong. Crowds converging on its pier had forced their way onboard. Overloaded, the ship was heeling at a dangerous angle.

  “Wait, there’s one coming in.”

  A small ship showing no lights slipped out of the dark. It looked like salvation. Then they saw the Tatars. They were crowded on deck, as they had been on the schooner that landed earlier, a packed mass of angry men bristling with weapons.

  “Where’s Mr. Rockefeller?”

  The old man had disappeared.

  “He was with us a second ago.”

  Bell hurried along a row of shuttered storefronts, businesses that catered to the steamship passengers, past postcard shops, a fruitier, a milliner, souvenirs, Kodak cameras, and shoved through the door of a telegraph office. A frightened telegrapher had his coat and hat on and was eyeing the door as he pounded his key.

  “I’ll be right there, Mr. Bell,” Rockefeller said without looking up. “I am sending an important cable.”

  “We agreed our lives were more important. Let’s go.” Bell took his arm. Rockefeller tried to shrug him off. The tall detective squeezed hard and explode
d angrily, “What the devil is more important than the lives of two women depending on us?”

  “Nobel’s lubricating oil factory is destroyed. The low specific gravity of Baku crude makes Russian lubricating oil the best in the world, so the Nobels had a nice melon to cut all these years. The best we’ve got is refined at the Winfield plant in Humble, Texas. Not as good as the Russian lubricating oil, but a lot better than no lubricating oil.”

  Clearly, thought Bell, John D. Rockefeller could keep his head when all others were losing theirs. Juggling two balls in the air—the Baku refineries and the Persian pipe line—suddenly he tossed up a third, seizing his chance to profit by the fires. But as Spike Hopewell had said about his old partner Bill Matters, somewhere along the line he had gotten his moral trolley wires crossed.

  Isaac Bell shook the magnate like a terrier. “You are risking our lives to cable New York to buy the Winfield refinery?”

  “Russia will never get that market back from me.”

  “Done, sir,” said the telegrapher, jumping from the key.

  Wish and the Matters sisters pushed in the door as the telegrapher ran out, and Rockefeller shut his mouth like a bear trap. Wish dropped the heavy Maxim on the telegraph counter and the women put down their bags. Though still calm, they looked frightened, a tribute, thought Bell, to their common sense.

  Wish coolly shifted the gun muzzle toward the door and drew his revolver.

  “Isaac, old son. We need a plan.”

  “First,” said Bell, addressing Rockefeller, “get this straight. I am running this like a military operation. There is one leader. Me. Wish is second-in-command. Whatever we say, goes. Is that clear, Mr. Rockefeller? No more dashing off on your own. You’ll get us all killed.”

  “O.K.,” said the richest man in America. “I accept your terms. But not before we resolve another question.” He leveled a long finger at Edna. “I will not allow this woman newspaperman to report my business like public news.”

  Edna Matters answered in a voice as cold as it was determined.

  “John D. Rockefeller controls half the oil in the world. He is trapped in the burning city of Baku, which produces the other half. That is extraordinary news. This ‘woman newspaperman’ reports the news.”

  “I have news for both of you,” said Isaac Bell.

  26

  Our only hope of getting out of this city alive is to pull together. I am not asking you to team up. I am laying down rules. The first rule is, Mr. Rockefeller is not here.”

  “Not here?” Edna looked at him, eyes wide and angry. “What do you mean, not here?”

  “You can report on anything that happens, provided we survive. But not his presence.”

  “I cannot agree to that.”

  “You must. To make it out of here alive, we have to pull together.”

  “How will you stop me?”

  “I will ask for your word.”

  “And if I don’t give you my word?”

  “Looters are robbing shops,” Isaac Bell answered without the trace of a smile. “I will join them. I will steal a Persian carpet and roll you up in it. I will unroll you when I have delivered you safely back to Newspaper Row.”

  “How Cleopatric!” said Nellie.

  To Bell’s immense relief, her joke made Edna smile. She looked at the others who were watching closely. “O.K.! If Mr. Rockefeller promises not to slow us down stopping to cable orders to his head office, I promise not to write about him.”

  “Done,” said Rockefeller.

  “But when he breaks that promise—which he surely will—he must tell me the contents of the cable.” She extended her hand to Rockefeller. “I give you my word. Is it a deal?”

  “You’re a good negotiator, young lady. It’s a deal.”

  She turned to Isaac Bell. “You, sir, will find some way to make this up to me.”

  “It’s a deal.”

  A bullet ricocheted off a lamppost and smashed a window.

  “The question remains,” said Wish Clarke, “how are we getting out of here if we can’t take a ship or a train?”

  “We can drive by auto back to Batum,” Rockefeller ventured. “Then a Black Sea steamer to Constantinople.”

  “What auto?” asked Bell, intending to get Rockefeller to reveal how the Peerlesses he had hidden in the hotel stables served his scheme.

  “My Peerless Tonneau car.”

  “Impossible. Batum is six hundred miles over hard country.”

  “Tiflis is halfway to Batum, and trains are safer in Georgia.”

  Bell shook his head emphatically. “We can barely all squeeze in the car, much less stow the gasoline, oil, food, water, tools, and spares for crossing open country.”

  “And let us not forget Mr. Maxim,” said Wish, patting the weapon he had propped on the telegrapher’s desk, “without whom no one in their right mind would venture on the so-called roads to Tiflis.”

  “We would need three autos as sturdy as a Peerless,” said Bell.

  “We have three,” said Rockefeller.

  “Three?”

  “I had three Peerless Tonneau cars shipped ahead.”

  “Why?”

  Rockefeller hesitated before he answered, “Gifts.”

  “For whom?” Bell pressed.

  Rockefeller clamped his mouth shut.

  Bell said, “Mr. Rockefeller, Miss Matters agreed not to reveal your business. You, in turn, agreed—fairly and squarely and aboveboard, sir—that we’re all in this together.”

  Rockefeller’s jaw worked. His piercing eyes, rarely readable, turned opaque.

  Gunfire roared, and it did the trick.

  “Very well! The English presented the Shah of Persia with gifts of autos. I would outdo their gifts with solid, Cleveland-built American autos. Show him who needs Rolls-Royce? Who needs England? Who needs Russia?”

  Isaac Bell exchanged a fast grin with Edna Matters and another with Nellie: yet another reminder that John D. Rockefeller heard the rumors first. The secretive magnate had planned far ahead for his journey toward “the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean Sea” where “the days pass pleasantly and profitably.”

  “Where are they?”

  “In our hotel stables.”

  “Let’s see if they’re not on fire yet.”

  —

  At a fast pace in tight single file, they headed back to the Baku Hotel.

  Bell led, with the ammunition belts draped around his neck and his Bisley in his good hand. He put Rockefeller between Edna and Nellie so the fit young women could keep an eye on the much-older man. Wish marched rear guard, with his Maxim gun over his shoulder and a single-action Colt Army revolver in his fist.

  The many who might have wished them harm gave them a wide berth, perhaps unaware that the Maxim, ordinarily manned by a crew of four, would be a cumbersome handful for two, or were afraid to test how cumbersome. The hotel was not on fire, the Tatars having concentrated their fury on the nearby neighborhood of the Armenians, whose burning mansions were lighting the night sky.

  Bell led his people past the hotel and down the driveway to the stables. The watchmen, who were gripping old Russian Army rifles, recognized him and “Envoy Stone.” Bell tipped them lavishly and closed the barn doors. It was not much quieter. Despite thick stone walls and the surrounding buildings, they could still hear the shooting in the streets, while, inside, nervous horses were banging in their stalls.

  Equally nervous chauffeurs watched the new arrivals warily. A few were tinkering with limousine motors. Most were slumped behind their steering wheels with hopeless expressions as if dreading orders to drive to their employers’ mansions and brave the mobs.

  Bell looked for Josef, the English-speaking chauffeur who had driven the Peerless and who could be valuable as a relief driver, mechanic, and translator. When he didn
’t see him, he asked the other chauffeurs if he was around.

  “No, sir.”

  “No, sir.”

  They muttered among themselves. One man who spoke a little English whispered, “Revolutionary.”

  “Josef?”

  “Maybe revolutionary. Maybe police.”

  “Police?”

  The chauffeur shook his head. “Agent.”

  “Provocateur?”

  “Informer.”

  That Josef was a police spy, Bell had guessed. But a revolutionary, too? On the verge of hiring this man as driver and translator, Bell changed his mind and decided to trust no one. Better to go it alone.

  —

  The bullet-smashed windshield of the Peerless attacked at the Black Town refinery had not been replaced. The missing glass offered a clear field of fire, and Wish Clarke got busy mounting the Maxim gun on the Peerless’s backseat.

  The other two autos were as Bell had seen them last, still in wooden crates.

  “Hammers and bars,” said Bell, wrenching boards loose with his hand.

  Edna Matters returned with a blacksmith’s hammer. John D. Rockefeller found a crowbar. Nellie Matters pried boards loose skillfully with it, saying to Bell, “Don’t look surprised. Who do you think fixes balloons in the air?”

  Rockefeller swung the hammer like a man who had grown up chopping wood on a farm.

  Edna said, “I can’t fix anything. What shall I do?”

  Bell sent her in search of gasoline and oil and cans to carry it in. He gave her money to buy any cans and tools the chauffeurs would sell her. She came back with cans and tools and several maps.

  As the packing crates fell away, Bell was glad to see the autos were equipped with straight-side tires on detachable rims. Stony, wagon-rutted roads and camel tracks guaranteed many punctures. Up-to-date straight-side tires were easily removed from the wheel, reducing the holdup for patching them from an hour to a few minutes.

  Edna Matters had gathered cans to hold one hundred fifty gallons of gasoline and oil. Bell sent her, accompanied by Rockefeller and Nellie, across the stable yard to the hotel kitchen to buy tinned food and bottled water. He checked that the cars’ crankcases were filled with oil and poured gasoline into their tanks.