He looked Edna in the eyes and saw a healthy mix of fear and determination. Nellie, by contrast, showed no fear. When he gauged Rockefeller’s ability to take the chance, the magnate said sternly, “I am counting on you, Mr. Bell, that one day I may relate this incident to disbelieving great-grandchildren.”
The locomotive disappeared around the bend in the tracks.
“Go!” Bell said to Edna.
30
Edna Matters scrambled up the embankment. Nellie followed, overtaking her and reaching back to help her up. They clasped hands, attained the flat roadbed, and ran along the crossties beside the moving train.
Isaac Bell took John D. Rockefeller’s arm. “Wish and I have you, sir. Just do what we tell you to.”
The Van Dorn detectives heaved the two-hundred-pound Rockefeller between them like a scarecrow stuffed with straw and sprang up the embankment.
Nellie Matters vaulted nimbly onto the flatbed of the rolling car. She grabbed a strut that braced the tank and, as Edna jumped, reached to join hands with her. Edna stumbled. For a second she dangled from Nellie’s hand, her feet frantically trying to push off as she ran along the stone ballast and wooden ties. She planted one foot and tried to jump again. Bell saw his two-shot derringer fall from her pocket and bounce on a crosstie and under a wheel.
Nellie screamed with effort and lifted her aboard. The women rolled under the tank, out of sight, which was Bell and Wish’s signal to hoist Rockefeller onto the next car.
Wish, with two working arms, went first.
—
The train had come down from the final mountain pass to a switching yard, where they stopped to uncouple the pusher engine, and Bell began to believe their luck would hold all the way to Batum when a lone brakeman walked slowly beside the car, shining a bull’s-eye lantern at the trucks. They had, all five, shifted by then to one car, the second back from the tender. Suddenly the brakeman straightened up with a cry and began stomping at the ground. He stopped, breathing hard, and picked up a dead snake in his glove. He tossed it away and his lantern beam hit John D. Rockefeller full in the face.
Isaac Bell and Wish Clarke reached toward him with both hands. Each held a pistol in one and gold in the other.
The brakeman blinked. Then he jerked off his heavy glove, snatched the coins, and ran into the dark.
Wish held tight to his gun. “Think he’ll come back?”
“Not if he’s an honest man,” Bell answered, still holding his. They waited, ears straining for the sound of the brakeman coming back with reinforcements and praying for the train to start. The locomotive whistled. Then it huffed. It was moving. The couplers clanked as the cars took up the slack. Suddenly they heard footsteps pounding, overtaking them, as the train began to roll.
The brakeman ran alongside, spotted them again. His face lit with a triumphant grin. He was carrying something and he thrust it at them. It quivered like something alive. For a second Bell thought it was an animal or a baby. Wish Clarke recognized it for what it was and held on tight. “Gracias, amigo!” he called to the Georgian.
He held it up for the rest to see. “Wineskin!”
Down from the mountains at last, the oil train raced west, stopping only once for fuel and water. The day dawned bright and sunny. The air grew humid as the train descended toward the river delta from which had been carved the harbor of Batum. Wish, who had put a sizable dent in the wineskin, thrust it at Rockefeller. “Have a snort?”
“I don’t drink.”
“You’ll love it,” said Wish. “They sealed the skin with naphtha. The wine tastes like oil.”
Bell leaned out from the tank car to look ahead. He spotted the Black Sea.
—
The Constantinople steamer blew its whistle as Bell herded his people out of their phaetons.
“There’s Father,” cried Nellie.
Bill Matters was on the dock, heading for the gangway. When he saw his daughters, his grim features melted in a smile of relief and he scooped Edna and Nellie into his big arms like they were little girls.
“How did you make out in Moscow?” Rockefeller greeted him.
Matters’ expression hardened. “I was doing fine until they suddenly clammed up. Next day, they refused to see me at all. I pressed an official I had given a lot of money to. He claimed they were angry. They told him they had been betrayed—by you, Mr. Rockefeller.”
“How?”
“They wouldn’t tell me. Any idea why?”
“None at all,” said Rockefeller.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. Don’t you understand? They threw dust in your eyes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You gave up. You left Moscow too soon.”
“Do you want me to go back?”
“Wait until the disturbances settle down. For now, we’re going home.”
31
At Budapest, Isaac Bell surprised the party and he hoped the assassin, if he were nearby, by unexpectedly transferring everyone onto the Orient Express’s new section to Berlin.
“Berlin? You’re taking us the long way to Paris,” complained Rockefeller, who had insisted again on carrying his own bags to save European luggage fees when they boarded the Orient Express in Constantinople.
Bell took the heaviest from him. “We are not going to Paris. We’re joining SS Kaiser Wilhelm II at Bremen. There’s a boat train in Berlin.”
“Much better,” said Rockefeller, happily mollified. The North German Lloyd passenger liner held the Blue Riband for the fastest time across the Atlantic Ocean.
—
The boat train to Bremen steamed out of the German capital on Monday night, gathered speed through the suburbs, and highballed into the dark at sixty miles an hour.
Isaac Bell, Wish Clarke, Edna and Nellie Matters, and John D. Rockefeller gathered in the dining room that occupied the front half of the observation car. They were studying menus and discussing, longingly, the prospect of soon eating American food again when Bill Matters burst into the car. He stormed past the club chairs and stopped short at their tables. His eyes were wild, his jaw clenched.
Bell saw he had crumpled a yellow telegram in his fist.
“Father!” said Nellie. “We wondered where you had gotten to.”
Edna asked, “Are you quite well?”
Matters ignored them both. “Mr. Rockefeller! We must speak.” He lowered his voice. “In private.”
“It is rather late to discuss business. Why don’t you sit down and have some supper with the rest of us?”
Matters said, “It is not too late to discuss the Peerless autos you brought for the shah.”
Rockefeller rose silently from the table and led Matters out of the dining car.
Isaac Bell watched them disappear through the vestibule door. His suspicion that Matters had not known about the bribes was proved correct. Then, according to Rockefeller, Matters had been elsewhere on “other business” during the all-important meeting with the Persians that Bell had eavesdropped on at the Hotel Astoria. Matters had not heard Rockefeller promise to pay off the shah’s loan from the czar. Shortly after Rockefeller had sent him to Moscow.
Clearly, John D. Rockefeller had gone to Baku with one purpose only: to strike a bargain to pay off the debt in exchange for a license to build Matters’ pipe line across Persia. The cables he’d been so desperate to send while escaping Russia must have completed the deal and cut Matters out of it.
Bell sprang to his feet and strode to the vestibule door. He pushed through it onto the gangway, where the observation car and the sleeping car behind it were coupled. The eight-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long space was enclosed by flexible leather-and-canvas gangway connectors. While they muffled the noise of the speeding train, it was still louder than inside the cars.
Matters was shouting, gesticula
ting, and waving the telegram.
“You knew! You knew all along.”
Rockefeller stood still as a stork, head inclined as if straining to listen over the rumble of the wheels and the rushing wind of the boat train’s passage.
“Knew what, Mr. Matters?”
“You knew when you sent me to Moscow. That’s why you sent me. To get me out of the way.”
“Knew what?” Rockefeller repeated more sharply now. Neither man seemed to take notice of Isaac Bell who stood by, boots balanced lightly on the swaying floor plate, his eye on Matters, who looked angry enough to strike the older man.
“You knew that you were closing a private deal for the pipe line,” Matters yelled.
“How I choose to negotiate for Standard Oil is my affair, Mr. Matters,” Rockefeller answered in a firm voice that cut through the racket. “It was my judgment that one man speaking for the company rather than two would do a better job of cutting through heathen mendacity.”
“We had an agreement!” Matters yelled. “The Persia pipe line was not for Standard Oil—it was for us. We would then sell it to Standard Oil.”
“I signed no such agreement.”
“You led me to believe—”
“You believed what you wanted to.”
Face contorting, Matters sucked great gulps of air. Suddenly he shouted, “You busted up my pipes.”
Bell saw that Rockefeller knew instantly what Matters meant. “Is that what is troubling you? You’re blaming me, unfairly, for some event that occurred back in 1899?”
“You stole the Hook.”
Rockefeller turned to Isaac Bell as if the three were golfers strolling to the next tee and explained offhandedly, “Constable Hook. The refinery we just finished building next to Bayonne. It’s our largest—the most efficient in the world.”
“You stole it from me and Spike.”
“I paid you.”
“Pennies!”
“I paid you in Standard Oil stock. I made you rich. You ride around in a fancy private car. Even I don’t go to that expense.” Again he turned to Bell as if in a threesome. “I’m quite content to charter cars when the need arises.”
“You busted up my business,” Matters shouted.
“Right there!” Rockefeller rounded on him. “I thought you were not one of those who are controlled by the insane idea to destroy the Standard Oil Company. Clearly, I was wrong. You are a miserable failure who will go to your grave an unhappy man.”
Matters lunged at Rockefeller with the speed and power of a Komodo dragon.
Bell seized his wrists. But by then Matters’ big hands were clamped to John D. Rockefeller’s throat. He yanked Rockefeller’s two hundred pounds off the platform and rammed him toward the connector curtain. Unable to break his grip, Bell let go and sank his fists into Matters’ kidneys with a hard left and a harder right.
The crazed Matters gasped. His hands opened convulsively. He let go of the struggling Rockefeller. But Bell’s powerhouse blows didn’t stop him, only slowed him, and he shoved his back into the tall detective, smashing him with all his weight against the opposite gangway connection. Bell bounced off the springy curtain and hurled himself on Matters as Matters lunged at Rockefeller again.
Too late, he saw that Matters’ explosion of rage was not as impromptu as it had seemed. Before he stormed into the diner, he had removed the vertical pins that locked the adjoining cars’ gangway connectors. Then he had lured the old man onto the gangway to throw him off the train.
The connectors parted like a theater curtain. The black night thundered past at sixty miles per hour. John D. Rockefeller tumbled backward through the opening.
Isaac Bell rammed past Bill Matters and jumped.
32
Isaac Bell had a single instant to wonder whether his injured arm had the strength to save their lives. By then he was committed to the lightning move, with his good hand gripping Rockefeller’s belt and the other clamped on the steel-rimmed edge of the observation car’s gangway connector. He was hanging off the rear end of the car. Pain lanced from his shoulder to his fingertips. If he lost his grip, they would fall under the wheels of the sleeper behind it.
The slipstream beating the side of the train slammed them flat against the connectors. Bell tried to take advantage of the rushing air with a Herculean twist of his entire body. Combining his every muscle with the power of the slipstream, he hauled Rockefeller close and swung him back through the narrow opening into the train.
Bill Matters was waiting on the gangway.
Isaac Bell saw an instance of indecision flicker on the angry man’s face. Who would he attack first? His enemy, the old man sprawled at his feet? Or his enemy’s bodyguard, who was barely hanging on to the side of the car? He chose Bell, braced himself with both hands, and cocked a foot to kick the fingers Bell had clamped around the connector. Bell was already in motion.
A gunshot—a clean, sharp Crack!—cut through the thunder of wheels and wind. Matters fell back with an expression of astonishment that Bell had somehow managed to draw his revolver and fire. Hanging by one arm as he triggered the Bisley, Bell missed his shot. He fired again; another went wild. Matters whirled away and fled toward the back of the train.
—
Bill Matters raced down the first sleeping car’s corridor, burst out the end door, through the gangway and into the second. Near the end of the car was his tiny stateroom. He locked the door, put on his coat, grabbed a bag, already packed with several thousand in gold, British ten-pound notes, and German marks, and his Remington pistol. Then he opened the window on the locomotive’s smoke and thunder and reached high in the corner of the cabin where the emergency communication cord swayed with the train’s motion and yanked its red handle.
The communication cord activated the boat train’s air brakes. From the locomotive on back, curved steel shoes slammed down hard on every wheel of every car. The effect was swift and violent.
Matters kept his feet by ramming his shoulder against his stateroom’s front partition to brace for the impact. From the compartments ahead and behind his came the thud of passengers crashing into bulkheads, the clatter of flying luggage, cries of pain, and frightened screams. Steel shrieked on steel under the hurtling car as the brake shoes bit and locked wheels slid on the rails.
The train bucked like a giant animal. The cars banged couplers into couplers. The speed dropped from sixty to fifty in an instant, and dropped as quickly to forty. Matters squeezed through the window, dragged his bag after him, and tried to gauge a safe landing by the beam of the locomotive headlamp. He could see in the distance four cars ahead, the beam flickering through a forest that hugged the tracks. To jump would be to run headlong into a tree.
Suddenly the headlamp disappeared.
For a second, Matters was baffled. Then the train whistle gave a strangely hollow, muffled shriek, and he realized that the locomotive had entered a tunnel. The car he was clinging to would be next into the narrow opening after smashing him against the stonework that rimmed it. He heard a crash. His stateroom door flew open. Isaac Bell blasted through it, revolver in hand, eyes locked on the window.
In the most decisive move of his entire life, Bill Matters dropped off the train.
—
Isaac Bell thrust head and shoulders and gun out the stateroom window and looked behind the train. The night was black, the spill of window light negligible, and he could not see where Matters had landed. The train whistle sounded oddly muffled. Bell started to turn his head toward it when he sensed something immense hurtling at him. He shoved back inside Matters’ stateroom, and the next second saw smoke-blackened masonry inches from the window.
The boat train screeched to a stop inside a tunnel.
Bell bolted from the stateroom and out the back of the sleeper car, past shaken passengers in pajamas and dressing gowns, through the last car, and
jumped off the back of the train onto the crossties. A brakeman was running frantically with a red lantern to alert the next train that the boat train was blocking the tracks.
Bell followed him out the tunnel and along the railbed, searching for Matters and fully expecting to find his body smashed against a tree. Instead, one hundred yards from the tunnel portal he found a break in the forest. It looked like a meadow, but at that moment the clouds parted and he saw moonlight gleam on water.
—
“Good-bye,” said Edna. “We’ll see you in New York.”
“Good-bye?” asked Bell. “We’re on the same ship.”
“We’re sailing Second Class. You’re in First.”
“No. Stay with me. I’ll pay the difference.”
“We will not sit in the same dining room as that man,” said Nellie, turning away without another word to walk briskly to the Second Class gangway.
Edna said, “We can barely stand to be on the same ship. But it’s the fastest way home. I’ve promised a full report to the Sun, and Nellie has got to take command of the New Woman’s Flyover before a certain suffragette tries to steal it. Apparently, Amanda Faire’s husband bought her a balloon.” She lowered her voice, though her sister was far beyond earshot. “Nellie is so distraught about Father. I’ve got to get her home and busy.”
Bell said, “I hope you understand that I’m terribly sorry about your father.”
“You cannot be as sorry as we are,” said Edna. “We’ve lived in fear of this day and now it has happened.”
“You expected him to attack Mr. Rockefeller?”
“We expected him to hurt himself. Since the day Rockefeller broke up his business and stole the pieces. We expected him to kill himself. What you call an attack, Isaac, had exactly the same effect.”
“It is highly likely,” said Bell, “that your father is still alive.”
The German police had dragged the pond beside the tracks and searched the forest with hunting dogs and found no body. They had visited every farm within twenty miles and canvassed doctors and hospitals. Bill Matters had thoroughly disappeared.