“Pogromy?”
“Politicals. General Prince Amilakhvari dead. Hateful Russian. Oppressing all Caucasia. Russians bringing for priests to pray on. People protest. Social Democrats protest. Police shooting Social Democrats.”
“You want our gun to fight the police.”
Josef’s smile disappeared. “Not your business.”
“If he’s a translator,” muttered John D. Rockefeller, “I’m my old maid aunt Olymphia.”
—
The Social Democrat fighters led the way on foot. Wish Clarke covered them with the Maxim gun. Bell drove his Peerless. Rockefeller, Edna, and Nellie trailed in the second car. The wind continued high, buffeting them and blowing dust, and the sun grew hot.
They climbed a steep road up a mountain. When they finally reached a broad plateau—an open brown steppe bare of vegetation and baked brown by the sun—their guides met up with a pair of horse-drawn phaetons. The men squeezed into the wagons and started across the flatter ground on a dusty track. After about four miles there were signs of recent roadwork, surveyors’ stakes, and the cutting of streets as if the area was to be developed.
Quite suddenly the plateau ended at the rim of a cliff.
Tiflis lay below them, one thousand feet straight down.
Bell saw it was an ancient city growing large in modern times. An old town of church steeples, cathedral domes, and twisted streets hugged the curves of a river. A ruined fortress of jagged rock, abandoned walls, and ramshackle outbuildings crouched on a lower cliff. In the river floated what looked like mills, each with its waterwheel.
A new city spread out from the center on a square grid of streets. Smoke drew Bell’s eye a mile or so from a big open square at the center of the old city. It was the railroad station where two weeks ago they had holed up for the night on their way to Baku.
Beyond the station sprawled vast railyards with many rows of sidings. On every siding stood a train of black tank cars. Bell raked it with his field glasses. He saw no wreckage, none of the destruction they had encountered on the eastern stretches of the line. Switch engines and locomotives were expending the smoke that hung over the yard.
“Trains are running.”
“How are we getting down that cliff?”
“Good question.”
Just as suddenly as they had come upon the cliff, they saw the answer. Nellie was delighted by a perspective she would see normally only from a balloon. Her pretty face aglow, she erupted in a happy cry.
“Funicular!”
Two counterbalanced carriages, large enough to hold fifty people each and linked by a strong cable, rolled up and down a steep railroad between the top of the mountain that Bell and his people had just crossed and the city below. There was a bulge in the line halfway down the mountain, a way station where the tracks doubled to allow the two carriages to pass each other.
“Any steeper,” said Wish Clarke, “and it would be an elevator.”
Josef jumped down from his phaeton and strode toward them, gaze locked greedily on the Maxim gun. Wish kept his finger on the trigger.
Isaac Bell said, “Josef, order your men to place their weapons around that rock.”
Josef started to protest.
Bell cut him off. “The Maxim is ours until they lay down their guns and we drive to the funicular.”
Wish Clarke raised a water can in his free hand and called out in a friendly voice, “We just filled the barrel-cooling sleeve. Here’s more water when you need it.” He took a swig from the can and wiped his mouth. “You must remember to refill the sleeve every couple hundred rounds or the heat will steam it off and you’ll melt the barrel.”
“We are knowing gun.”
“I had an inkling you might.”
Wish jumped to the road, gathered the heavy weapon in his arms, heaved it off the Peerless, and laid it gently on the ground. He left the one remaining ammunition belt, then he got back behind the steering wheel and drove after Nellie’s car.
Bell watched with the Savage 99 braced against his shoulder. Before they reached the funicular station, Josef’s gang had pounced on the Maxim, loaded it into a phaeton, and whipped up their horses.
—
“What a pleasure,” said Wish. “The simple act of buying tickets compared to fighting across Azerbaijan and eastern Georgia while straying into stretches of Armenia.”
Isaac Bell was looking forward to buying more tickets: The train to Batum. The steamer to Constantinople. The Orient Express to Paris. And an ocean liner home.
The railway carriage from below climbed into the station. A smattering of tourists got off with curious looks for the road-weary, dust-caked travelers waiting to descend. Bell guided everyone into one of the passenger compartments and closed the door. The seats were pitched at an angle to keep them horizontal.
The carriage started rolling down the embankment.
“Isaac!” Nellie gripped his arm and pointed across the bare and rocky slope. With her sharp eye for terrain, she had spotted Josef’s phaetons struggling down a steep road a half mile away.
“You’ll regret giving them that gun,” said Rockefeller.
“We didn’t give it,” said Wish, “we traded it.”
It took six minutes to descend the funicular railway’s nine hundred feet to the lower station.
An electric tram waited at the bottom, which they rode through the old city to the big, central Erevan Square that Bell had seen from above. He sensed the instant he alighted that despite the presence of up-to-date shops, government buildings, and an enormous Russian bank, there was a palpable tension in the air. People walked hurriedly with their heads down and avoiding eye contact. There were many police and soldiers on patrol.
“The faster we’re out of here, the better,” he told Wish.
Rockefeller spotted a telegraph office. “I must send a cable.”
“Wait until we get to the train station.”
They found another electric tram, which took them across the river and up through newer parts of the city to the Central Railroad Station.
—
Mobs of Georgians, Armenians, and Russians milled in the concourse.
Rockefeller spotted the telegraph office and strode through them like a heavy cruiser parting the waves.
Bell said, “Wish, keep an eye on him. We’ll be at the ticket windows.”
The lines were long. Travelers shouted and gesticulated. Ticket agents shouted back and shook their fists.
“Five one-way tickets to Batum.”
“No trains.”
“What do you mean, no trains? The yard is booming.”
“No passenger trains.”
Bell already had money in his hand. He slipped it across the counter. The agent wet his lips. It equaled a month’s pay. “Go to booking office. Ask for Dmitri Ermakov. Tell him I sent you. It will cost.”
The booking office was next to the telegraph. Wish was at the door. “He’s still at it.”
“We’ll be in here.”
Dmitri Ermakov made them wait twenty minutes, by which time scores of people had stormed in and out of the office. At last Bell was ushered in. He held out three times as much money as he had given the ticket agent. “I need five tickets to Batum.”
Ermakov took the money. “You must understand, sir, there are no passenger trains. Only oil trains.”
“There must be one or you wouldn’t be talking to me.”
“When fighting was feared to break out in Baku, Baku send many oil trains.”
The result, Chief Agent Ermakov explained, was that so many oil trains had rushed out of Baku when trouble started that they were carrying more oil than the Batum refineries could cook and had to be held in Tiflis. Then revolutionaries cut the pipe line and suddenly stocks were running low in the refineries and shipping piers.
“Now every train west is oil train. But one special train tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. Show papers.”
“What papers?”
“You need special pass. Government train visas.”
“Where do I get them?”
“You get issued by my friend Feltsman, high official. Russian. You must pay him.”
“Where is Feltsman?”
“Government building. Erevan Square.”
“Where in Erevan Square? Which building?”
“Next to Russian State Bank.”
Isaac Bell stood to his full height and stared down at the Russian train official. Then he opened his coat just enough to allow a glimpse of the Bisley nestled in his shoulder holster. “If I can’t find the government building—or if I can’t find Mr. Feltsman—I do know where to find you . . . Is there anything else you want to tell me before I go back to Erevan Square?”
“I am remembering,” said the chief agent, reaching for his telephone, “that it would be best if I personally telephoned Feltsman to tell him to expect you. That way he would not be out to lunch or somewhere when you arrive.”
“A wise precaution,” said Isaac Bell. He waited for the call to be completed and left somewhat surer now that the papers would be forthcoming, but considerably less certain that tomorrow’s special passenger train would materialize in the chaos.
—
“Hold it!” said Isaac Bell.
They had just stepped down from the tram to Erevan Square and were hurrying across the busy plaza toward the government building next to the Russian State Bank when Bell saw the gleaming black pompadour that crowned the Social Democrat Josef.
“Is that who I think it is skulking at the tram stop?” asked Wish.
“Josef.”
With a furtive glance over his shoulder, revealing beyond a doubt that it was he, Josef ran to jump on the tram leaving for the railroad station.
“What’s he up to?” said Wish.
Rockefeller started to make a beeline for the telegraph.
“Grab him, Wish.”
Wish snared the plutocrat.
“What? What?”
“Just wait,” said Wish. “Something’s up . . . What is it, Isaac?”
Bell had spotted three or four workmen in the crowds whom he might possibly have seen with Josef earlier on the road. Aware that he was sensing more than seeing, he looked up and scanned the tops of the two- and three-story buildings that bordered the open space. He could feel stress in the air, almost as if every person bustling about his business was about to stop breathing.
Suddenly two enormous carriages raced into the square. Thundering alongside them, Cossack outriders brandished lances and rifles. Heavy as freight wagons yet high-wheeled and fast, they were pulled by teams of ten horses. Their coachmen, enormous three-hundred-pound men in greatcoats, hauled back on their reins and the carriages and outriders came to a banging, clashing halt in front of the elaborately decorated stone edifice that housed the Russian State Bank.
Bell motioned urgently to Wish.
Moving as one, they backed their people away.
The Cossacks looked formidable and others in the crowds retreated, too. But the men Bell had noticed a moment earlier edged closer. Others, dressed in urban working garb, converged on the carriages. Bell looked up again. Now he saw men on the roofs.
“Isaac!” said Wish.
“I see them,” said Bell. “It’s a bank robbery.”
29
Expropriation,” said Wish Clarke, “is the word favored in the revolutionary lexicon.”
“Bank robbers!” said John D. Rockefeller. “We must inform the police . . . Officer!” He stepped into the street, waving at a Cossack.
“No,” said Isaac Bell, blocking him and forcing his arm down. “They’ve got twenty men around the square and on the roofs. The cops can’t stop it. They’ll only make it bloodier.”
“You should not have given them that gun.”
“It would appear that way,” Wish said serenely.
“Speaking of the devil . . .” said Bell.
The tall detective drew his revolver and herded Edna, Nellie, and Rockefeller toward the nearest street out of the square as Wish forged ahead, clearing a path for their retreat.
“Here he comes.”
A two-horse phaeton charged into the square.
A gunner and a belt feeder hunched over the Maxim gun. They had perched the Sokolov mount up on the high back bench where the driver ordinarily sat. The revolutionary handling the reins had shifted to the lower front bench.
The gunner triggered the weapon with an unearthly roar.
Shooting over the driver and horses’ heads, he tried to aim at the bank carriage. People ran from the noise, which was amplified and echoed by the buildings, and fled the galloping horses, whose iron shoes threw sparks from the cobblestones.
The phaeton leaned into a sharp turn, tall wheels skidding. Bell hoped the weight of the machine gun would capsize the inherently unstable vehicle. But just as it seemed it would spill the attackers to the ground, the wheels slid on the cobbles and it righted itself.
A bomb sailed from a roof, trailing the smoke of a fuse. It detonated in the air with a flash and a loud bang that scattered the Cossacks on rearing mounts. A second bomb flew from a roof. It landed on the cobblestones, bounced under the team pulling the lead money carriage, and exploded, blowing open the doors of the carriage.
Men, women, and animals screamed.
The revolutionaries dove into the maelstrom. Firing pistols, they ran to the carriage. One man leaped into it and threw bulging bank sacks to his partners. The Maxim gun kept firing.
The phaeton lurched and skidded and the gunner and belt feeder held on by clinging to the weapon. Bullets aimed at the bank carriage raked the rooftops instead. Then the driver got his animals under control and pulled up short. Still firing—the weapon had never ceased roaring since they entered the square—the gunner lowered his barrel. The torrent of flying lead stitched a path down the building’s stone walls.
The Maxim exploded with a thunderous Boom! and a ball of fire.
“Darn,” smiled Wish Clarke.
Sheets of flame enveloped the gunner and the belt feeder, the driver and the phaeton itself. The horses bolted. The burning wagon raced across the square and tipped over suddenly. The traces parted. The horses galloped away.
“What happened?” shouted Rockefeller.
“Their gun blew up,” said Wish Clarke. The detective shook his head in mock dismay. “The medicos keep telling me that demon rum plays havoc with one’s powers of memory. I hate to admit they’re right, but it appears that when I filled the Maxim’s cooling sleeve, I must have mixed up the cans of water and gasoline.”
“Railyards,” said Isaac Bell. “Now!”
“But there is no train until tomorrow,” Rockefeller protested.
Bell gripped his arm. “Social Democrat revolutionaries just tried to rob a Russian State Bank. Soldiers were injured. The revolutionaries escaped. The authorities will surround the city and close the roads to capture the criminals and recover the money.”
“But there is no train—”
“We’re taking a different train.”
—
“Never, never, never jump on the back of a moving railcar,” said Isaac Bell. “Always hop the front of the car.”
“Why?” asked Edna.
They laid flat on a ballast embankment beside the train tracks a mile west of the Tiflis yards, waiting for an oil train. Bell had chosen the spot for the sharp curve in the tracks that would shield them, though only briefly, from the sight of the engineer and fireman in the locomotive and the brakemen in the caboose. Behind them, a neighborhood of tenements and small factories baked in the sun. No one had ventured out to take an interest in them so far. But they coul
d not count on that, as the police were fanning out from Erevan Square.
“If you slip and fall from the front of a car while trying to hop on,” Bell explained, “you’ll fall to the side of the train. If you fall from the back of a car, you will fall under the wheels of the next car, which will run you over.”
“A memorable thought,” said Nellie.
“Nellie and Edna, you two will go first. I’m afraid you’re on your own. Wish and I will take care of the old man. If either of you can’t get on, the other jumps off again. We stay together. Wish and I won’t make our move until we see you’re both safely on. Nellie, you’ve still got Wish’s gun?”
“Yes.”
“Edna, you’ve got my derringer.”
Edna patted a pocket.
“It appears to be a well-run line, so the brakemen very likely will walk beside the train whenever they stop to inspect their trucks and air hoses. The locomotives I’ve seen are up-to-date Baldwin ten-wheelers with oil-burning fireboxes. They’ll stretch their water stops to about every hundred miles and fuel and relief crews to two hundred. But they’ll have to stop in the mountains to couple on extra pusher engines. Whenever they stop, stay out of sight.”
Wish came running from the head of the bend. “Train coming.”
—
The locomotive hauling the oil train to Batum rounded the curve under a massive crown of thick black smoke. She was an oil burner, all right—no self-respecting fireman would allow such smoke from a coal furnace—a modern, ten-drive-wheeled, Pennsylvania-built “decapod,” moving faster than Bell would have liked for the first attempt by novice hobos. But they weren’t likely to get a second chance to hop a freight before the authorities started searching even oil trains for the bank robbers and the money.
The powerful Baldwin approached where they hid on the ballast slope, accelerating as it threw off the eight-hundred-ton inertia of thirty heavily laden tank cars. The locomotive passed them, trailed by its fuel-and-water tender. Then came the first car, which was comprised of a long, cylindrical, six-thousand-gallon tank laid horizontally on a flatbed. Bell pointed out the niches where the tube-shaped tank was braced on the flatbed and shouted over the thunder, “Get inside that brace where they can’t see you.”