The Assassin

  Wish Clarke mounted the Maxim, fed in a fresh ammunition belt, filled its barrel-cooling sleeve with horse trough water. After he cleared his line of fire by removing the empty windshield frame, he gave Bell a hand cranking the Peerlesses’ motors. One of the new ones started easily. The other was balky, but eventually Bell coaxed it alive. The car Wish had commandeered for the Maxim gun coughed and smoked. They unscrewed the spark plugs, cleaned the electrodes, and filed them to sharper points.

  Outside, bursts of gunfire grew loud. A woman screamed. The chauffeurs stared fearfully at the doors. A man wept. From the hotel came the sound of the pianist still playing.

  By one o’clock in the morning, they had all three Peerlesses fueled and oiled and provisions stowed. Bell spread a map on the hood of the lead car to show everyone their route from the Caspian Sea to the Black Sea. They were heading west across Transcaucasia, between Russia’s Greater Caucasus mountain range to the north and Persia’s Lesser Caucasus range to the south.

  Their sixty-mile slot of river valleys between the mountains comprised the restive regions of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia, “where,” the tall detective said, “they are actively trying to kill each other. First stop, Shemaha. About seventy-five miles. Any luck, we’ll make it before nightfall tomorrow.

  “Wish leads with the Maxim. I’ll cover the rear. Mr. Rockefeller, you drive the middle one.”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” said Rockefeller.

  “You don’t?”

  “I’ve only recently arranged to buy an auto. It will be delivered with a man to drive it.”

  “I know how to drive,” said Nellie.

  “You do?” asked Edna. “When did you learn?”

  “In California. A bunch of us realized that suffragists ought to know how to get themselves around. I must say, it’s a lot easier than your buckboard, not to mention my balloon.”

  Bell was dubious, to say the least, but had no choice and could only hope she wasn’t exaggerating her auto prowess. They needed all three cars to carry supplies and had to have a replacement if they lost one to a breakdown that he and Wish could not repair.

  “Nellie drives the middle car,” he said. “Edna sits in front, Mr. Rockefeller in back. Wish, do you have something to lend Mr. Rockefeller?”

  Wish Clarke pulled a pocket pistol from inside his coat and gave it to Rockefeller. The old man checked that it was loaded.

  Bell had already removed his derringer from his hat when no one was looking. He handed the two-shot pistol to Edna. “Ever shoot a derringer?”

  “Father taught us.”

  Bell was already wishing that they had Bill Matters with them, carrying the big Remington he had on the train. Thank the Lord for the Maxim. And thanks, too, for the assassin’s Savage in his carpetbag on the floor beside the steering wheel.

  “What about me?” asked Nellie. “Don’t I get a gun?”

  “You’ll have your hands full driving— Now listen, everyone. We will stay very close. No headlamps except for Wish. If you have any trouble with the auto, or something happens the others can’t see, honk on your horn.”

  “Isaac?”

  “What, Edna?”

  “Wouldn’t it be better if Mr. Rockefeller sat up front with Nellie and I sat in Wish’s car with the Maxim gun?”

  “Do you know how to fire a Maxim gun?”

  “I saw Mr. Rockefeller’s refinery police use them to frighten labor strikers. Anyone considering ambushing us will think twice if they see the gun manned—they won’t know I’m a woman.”

  She had a point, thought Bell, though he didn’t love it. Both women had caps pulled over their short hair and had changed into trousers when it was decided to run for it. But a bushwhacker just might shoot her from a distance to disable the Maxim. And yet she was right that a manned machine gun would look a lot more intimidating, which would forestall a lot of trouble before it started.

  “Wish, what do you say? Do you want her on your gun?”

  Wish didn’t love it either, Bell could see. Nonetheless, he said, “I’m afraid Edna’s right.”

  They shifted positions. Edna gave Bell’s derringer to Nellie and climbed in the back of the lead Peerless. “Try not to blow my head off,” Wish called over his shoulder.

  “Duck if you hear me shooting.”

  John D. Rockefeller climbed into the front of the middle car.

  Nellie Matters said, “This should be interesting.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sitting side by side with the devil incarnate.”

  “You don’t seem that bad to me,” said Rockefeller.

  It was the kind of joke that Nellie Matters loved, and Bell expected her to let loose one of her big laughs, but all Rockefeller got was an angry glare. He looked at her sister, hunched over the Maxim behind him, and saw that Edna, too, had not even cracked a smile.

  “Looking on the bright side,” said Wish Clarke, “we’re driving brand-new, rock-solid, Cleveland-built machines.”

  “Turn left on the main road,” said Bell, attempting to fold the map with one hand. Failing that, he worked his arm out of the sling and stuffed it in his pocket. “Let’s go.”

  He opened the stable doors.

  The three red cars rumbled through the cobblestone yard and out the driveway onto streets nearly light as day. House fires nearby and oil fields and refineries burning far off lit the sky. They turned away from the fires, west, out of the city on roads clogged with refugees riding in carriages, work wagons, and rich men’s autos and plodding on foot.

  Isaac Bell saw that his one-day timetable to Shemaha had been wildly optimistic. They’d be lucky to make that first town in two days. Then seven or eight more towns and four hundred eighty miles to go.

  27

  Of the six longest, hottest days and freezing cold nights ever endured,” wrote Edna Matters, typing up her shorthand notes as she did every night when the autos finally stopped rolling, “today was the longest yet, and I’m afraid it is not over.

  This afternoon’s shoot-out, our third since escaping Baku, ended inconclusively. Those who were shooting at us are still out there. Neither IB nor WC are ceasing their vigilance. Neither has slept more than a catnap. The autos are circled, as tightly as the narrow cliffside clearing will allow, like a latter-day wagon train besieged by Indians, and we are watching the steep slopes and the fast-falling darkness.

  She looked around her. When they left the hotel stable in Baku, the Peerless autos’ tires had been white as snow. They were black now, blackened by the oily streets before they were even off the Absheron Peninsula, caked with road dust and marred by the pries used to work them on and off their rims to patch punctures. Wish Clarke was fixing one now. Nellie was helping him. JDR was stretched across a backseat, sound asleep. The plutocrat was the envy of all; he could sleep through anything. Isaac was draped over the Maxim gun, as still and watchful as a cat, the bag in which he carried his rifle in easy reach, as always.

  She typed.

  The roads are abysmal, verging on the nonexistent, except for the occasional better-graded stretch, which IB identifies as forty-year-old Russian military roads built to subdue the region. There are fortresses and barracks, some abandoned, some occupied by soldiers disinclined to venture out. Occasionally we trundle across handsome iron bridges the Army built over rushing rivers. The road often snakes beside the railroad tracks, on which we have not seen a single train moving, though we did pass a smoldering line of blackened oil tank cars set afire.

  IB, reading over EMH’s shoulder, was just informed by EMH that nothing in our agreement says I cannot reveal Envoy Stone for the louse JDR is, so long as I don’t reveal his true identity. Although if IB were not so exhausted from his wonderfully successful efforts to keep us alive, he might have read further to see that I gave Envoy Stone his due, albeit grudgingly, admitting t
hat Stone actually believes, truly believes, that he and his ilk deal, in his own oft-repeated phrase, ‘fairly and squarely and aboveboard.’ I base this conclusion on an interview granted by sister Nellie, who’s been stuck driving his Peerless all this time and arguing incessantly to no effect. Sister Nellie feels, as does this reporter, that the trouble comes by how differently we estimate the location of that board he purports to be above.

  For example, in the midst of today’s running gun battles—first with renegade Cossacks bent on relieving us of our vehicles, then gangs of Social Democrat revolutionaries who probably want our Maxim gun—the ‘envoy’ suddenly scampered into a railroad telegrapher’s hut. He was not trying to hide, not running from the fight, but trying to send another business cable to America. No one denies his bravery. (He gave his borrowed pistol to sister Nellie before running a gauntlet of bullets in his abortive attempt to communicate God-knows-what.)

  His elastic ethics don’t trouble him at all. He bald-facedly insisted to this reporter that because he was unable to send his cable, as the wires were cut, the contents do not fall under the terms of our agreement and therefore he does not have to admit them to me. It would take a herd of expensive lawyers to get around that one. Which, of course, has always been his specialty. He said, incidentally, that before the wires were cut the telegrapher had received reports of bigger fires, continued looting, and hundreds more murdered in Baku.

  Suddenly Edna heard what sounded like thunder and felt the ground shake. She stopped typing and looked up. Then she resumed typing, faster than ever, as if something was chasing her fingers.

  A boulder just rolled down the hill . . .

  Here comes another . . . They’ve started shooting again. IB can’t see them. He has abandoned the Maxim gun and is running up the road with his rifle . . .

  IB is shouting at EMH to close up her typewriter and take cover behind our “rock-solid, Cleveland-built machines.” EMH keeps typing because it beats being terrified. IB appears prepared to shoot EMH if she doesn’t close up her machine. But she can’t stop. She just keeps typing. She is not exactly hysterical. In fact, not at all. She’s typing because, against all logic, it feels like it makes her bulletproof.

  Isaac is retreating from the curve in the road where he was trying to see who was shooting. He is running back to the Maxim gun. Bullets pluck his sleeve.

  —

  Isaac Bell dodged rifle fire and a blizzard of stone splinters to vault into Wish Clarke’s Peerless so he could feed the belt into the Maxim gun. But Wish was pinned down under another car, from where he was shooting back with his pistol. Bell slid behind the Maxim, cocked it, and jerked the trigger, grinding out ten shots before the belt caught on the tripod.

  He untangled it and fired ten more at a flicker of movement atop the ridge that stared down at them. Three riflemen leaped up and fired back. Bell triggered the Maxim, trying to hit them before the belt caught. Eight shots, ten shots, and this time the belt did not hang up on anything. The pounding machine gun had cleared the top of the ridge before he realized why. Edna Matters had jumped in beside him and was feeding the belt as smoothly as a veteran of the Zulu Wars.

  “You could get killed doing this,” he said.

  “Beats getting killed doing nothing.”

  She stood up, thinking the fight was over. Feeding the belt into the gun had made her even more bulletproof than typing. She did not want to listen to the low voice in the back of her mind that nothing made anyone bulletproof except no bullets.

  “Look out!”

  Suddenly Isaac was roaring in her ear, “Down! Down! Get down!”

  28

  An immense boulder, triple the size of the others, flew at the auto.

  Isaac shoved Edna down. It cleared their heads by inches and hit the guard wall that stood between the edge of the road and a sheer drop. It smashed through the wall, scattering stones, and tumbled into the ravine. Shouts of triumph from the top of the slope announced another rolling at them.

  —

  “IB was both right and wrong last night,” Edna Matters typed in the morning.

  The air was bitter cold. A strong wind was blowing and the sky was full of dust clouds. Wish Clarke sat behind the Maxim gun. He was covering the ridge at the top of the slope. Isaac Bell was starting to climb it with field glasses around his neck and a revolver in his hand. He was hoping to spot Tiflis and a route on which they could make a run for the capital city.

  Thanks to taking cover under an overhang of rock. WC and Envoy Stone and sister Nellie were not flattened by giant boulders. IB and I were also extremely lucky where we shivered all the long, cold night. But the last boulder that thundered down the hill before it was too dark for our enemies to aim another smashed us dead center.

  We are down to two Peerlesses. We managed to rescue some of the water before the wreck fell into the ravine and was swept downstream in a furious torrent. But we could save none of the tinned food and none of the extra gasoline, which presents a serious difficulty as we very likely do not have enough gasoline left to reach Tiflis even though we believe it is close, just over the hills that we somehow got on the wrong side of when we got lost yesterday.

  Looking on the bright side, as Detective WC is wont to say, the renegade Cossacks, or Social Democrat revolutionaries, appear to have been thoroughly routed. Though whether that is true, we don’t really know, as the night had turned dark as a coal mine by the time the boulders stopped hurtling and the shooting had stopped. I am absolutely certain that this reporter is not the first from the civilized world to say, ‘Thank God for the Maxim gun.’

  Additional credit goes to IB, WC, and sister Nellie, who had refused to return Envoy Stone’s pistol. As we prepared to get under way in our remaining two autos, IB read over my shoulder and demanded edits. He asked me to write the following, which embarrasses me in its immodesty. He demanded I write that EMH was a dependable belt feeder who allowed him to employ our Maxim gun to great advantage.

  IB then demanded I change the word ‘dependable’ to ‘superlative.’ Everyone’s an editor. But to be fair, poor Isaac is reeling on his feet.

  My sister Nellie has fallen in love with him.

  Edna Matters stared at the page.

  Who had written that? If a typewriter could blurt, the machine had blurted it out.

  She glanced over her shoulder. Isaac had started up the slope. Suddenly he stopped. Something up the road had caught his attention. She raised her fingers to the keys and typed slowly.

  Nellie is not the easiest person to read. In fact, she is often a cipher, a blank slate behind her smile. But in this case, I can see that she has fallen hard for IB.

  Which creates quite a quandary as I have, too. Starting the night in New York he helped me through my other quandary. Which I believe means I fell first . . . However, being first on line won’t help me one bit. My dear Isaac is falling for her. He doesn’t know it yet. But I can tell. I wouldn’t call it love. But he is fascinated and, being a man, probably doesn’t know the difference—

  She stopped typing and cocked her ear to listen. Someone was shouting down the slope in broken English.

  —

  “They’re waving a white flag,” Isaac Bell called down to Wish Clarke.

  It looked like a dirty shirt tied by its sleeve to a rifle. The man waving stepped warily into view and Isaac Bell immediately recognized the black, wavy pompadour hair. It was Josef the Georgian chauffeur he had befriended in Baku. The one that the other chauffeurs claimed was an informer for the secret police.

  “What’s he yelling?” asked Wish.

  Isaac Bell strained his keen hearing to its utmost and heard, “You give gun. We let go.”

  He ran down the slope and joined Wish in the lead auto. “They want our Maxim.”

  “I would, too, in their position,” said Wish.

  “They’re welcome to i
t,” said Bell.

  “What?”

  “We’ll trade it for a cease-fire and directions to Tiflis.”

  “They’ll kill us,” said Rockefeller.

  “That thought occurred to me,” said Bell. He looked at Wish.

  Wish said, “Isaac, why don’t you talk to him? I’ll get the gun ready to travel.”

  Bell cupped his hands and shouted very slowly and clearly, “Tell your friends to come out where we can see them. All of them.”

  Josef shouted over his shoulder.

  Twelve men started down the slope. They were dressed in workmen’s clothes and they looked very sure of themselves. Bell counted only three rifles. The rest carried pistols. They descended to the road and started toward the autos, fanning out and covering one another with military discipline.

  “That’s close enough,” Bell called, stopping them at fifty feet.

  “You act suspicious,” said Josef.

  “I don’t like people who roll boulders at me.”

  “Not us. Cossacks. We chase them.”

  “So did we,” said Bell. From what he had seen, heavily armed Cossacks were not easily chased. If what the chauffeurs in the Hotel de L’Europe’s stables told him was true, then an Okhrana informer could arrange for the Cossacks to be called off or driven off by loyal troops if they were renegades. How had Josef found them here in the middle of nowhere? How had he known about the machine gun?

  “Who are you, Josef? Who are these men?”

  “Social Democrats.”

  “Aren’t they illegal?”

  Josef flashed his cheerful smile. “Reason we are wanting gun.”

  “Are you their leader?”

  “No, no, no. They ask me translating.”

  “But you just said ‘we.’”

  “Mistaking translating.”

  “Translate this: Guide us to a road to Tiflis. When we see the town, the gun is yours.”

  “Tiflis no safe. Much unrest.”