“You drowned him.”
“He was a hopeless coward.”
“You drowned him.”
“Let’s just say the chloral hydrate created an opportunity.”
“Was that how you drugged the old man who fell from the Washington Monument? Slipped him knockout drops?”
“Chloroform.”
“What did you feed Comstock?”
“Arsenic.”
“Where did you learn—?”
“I worked as a pharmacist once. I’ve done lots of things, Isaac. I love different things. I was an actress for a bit. Every time I ran away, I found a fascinating job. I went back to the circus and became an acrobat. For a while. I was a medical student, one of the first girls at Johns Hopkins. I didn’t stay long.”
“Long enough to know your poisons.”
“And anatomy,” she smiled, reaching to touch the back of her neck.
Bell’s hat flew from his head. Before it touched his shoulder his derringer filled his right hand, the barrel aimed at her face. He saw shock in Nellie’s eyes but no fear even though she knew he would fire before she could. Still, she was lightning fast.
—
There was a part of Isaac Bell, the part that beat deepest in his soul, that held innocents sacred. Until this moment, that part could never have imagined triggering a gun at a woman. He knew full well that Nellie Matters was no innocent but a cold-blooded murderer trying to kill him. He pulled the trigger. He was not entirely surprised when his bullet missed her head by a full inch and broke a control wire that parted with a musical twang.
The close call caused Nellie to flinch and her shot whizzed past Bell’s ear.
For a microsecond that stretched like an eternity, they stared at each other. His gun was empty. Her two-shot had one bullet left. He gathered himself to charge, reasoning that a wild shot would more likely wound than kill him. Nellie aimed the derringer directly at his face. Then she gave him a big “Nellie smile.”
“I guess you missed because Van Dorn detectives bring their suspects in alive? Or are you just a lousy shot?”
“You missed, too,” said Bell. “Again. So if you can’t shoot me and I’m not about to swallow poison for you, how will you stop me from taking that gun away from you?”
“Gas!”
She jerked the red emergency lever and held tight. The tanks spewed their compressed loads of hydrogen. The gas roared up the mouth of the already full envelope and the balloon lurched like a rogue elephant breaking its chains. Then Nellie pulled the ballast lever, releasing the total weight of the sand all at once, and somersaulted backward to the grass.
Isaac Bell sprang to his feet. Halfway out of the basket, he saw the ground vanish beneath him as if he were suddenly peering down the wrong end of a telescope.
The balloon was fifty feet in the air, five stories high, too high to jump, and soaring toward the clouds.
BOOK FOUR
THUNDERBOLT
OCTOBER 1905
CONSTABLE HOOK
41
Nellie Matters’ runaway gas balloon shot skyward, lofting Isaac Bell toward the stratosphere where the air was too thin to breathe. The other colorful Flyover balloons, so enormous an instant ago, suddenly looked tiny, dotting the Sleepy Hollow field like a game of marbles. A white circle in the green grass marked the spot Nellie had dumped the sand.
Bell thought he saw her running to another partially inflated balloon. But with no ballast left to counteract the urgent lift of the lighter-than-air gas, he was too high up in another second to distinguish individual figures, so high he could see Rockefeller’s estate spread to the Hudson River. He heard a locomotive and realized that the only noises were from the ground; after the initial roar of extra gas, the balloon was ascending silently. A New York–bound passenger train, the crack Lakeshore Limited, was heading for the North Tarrytown railroad station towing two black cars. They would be chartered by Rockefeller, who was returning from Cleveland with his entire family, and Isaac Bell had the momentary satisfaction of knowing that whether or not he got out of this fix, he had at least stopped Nellie Matters from shooting the old man this morning.
The only way to stop his wild ascent was to release gas.
Bell traced the control lever wires. The ballast wire that went down through the bottom of the basket was useless, as Nellie had already dumped every grain of sand. Of the two that went up into the mouth of the giant gasbag, one connected to a “rip panel” at the top of the balloon. Nellie had explained more than once, while spinning her balloon tales, that pulling that lever would tear the fabric envelope wide open and release all the gas at once. It was an emergency device for instantly emptying the balloon when it was on the ground to keep high winds from dragging it into the trees or telegraph wires. To pull the rip panel lever at this height would be to fall like an anvil.
The wire broken by the bullet that had missed Nellie turned out to be the gas control. It had snapped inches above the lever. Looking up eighty feet, Bell could see the business end was still attached to the release flap in the dome at the top of the balloon. Parting while under tension, it had sprung up into the mouth. He could see it swinging inside the empty gasbag, tantalizingly near but infinitely far out of reach. There was no framework to climb inside the balloon—the gas pressing against the fabric envelope gave it shape—but even if it had a frame that he could improvise for a ladder, the gas would asphyxiate him before he climbed ten feet.
He jumped onto the rim of the rattan basket and shinnied up a bask rope to the steel load ring. Hanging by one hand, he caught ahold of the ropes that were woven into the enormous net that encased the bulging envelope like a giant spiderweb. Then he reached down for the knife snugged in his boot. He touched the blade to the straining fabric to slash an opening to vent gas.
He felt a breath of cool air for the first time in a week. The balloon had carried him above the heat wave into a cold current in the upper atmosphere, and he saw he hadn’t a moment to lose. The patchwork of farm fields far below appeared to be moving. The blue line of the Hudson River was receding behind him. Wind that Nellie had predicted was carrying him east over Connecticut.
But just as he braced to press down on the blade, it struck him forcibly that there were vital aeronautical reasons why both the regular gas release and the emergency rip panel were situated at the top of the balloon. He drove his hand between that rope and the fabric to overcome the pressure inside it and pulled himself higher up by the netting ropes until he could brace his feet on the load ring.
Like a celestial giant climbing from the earth’s South Pole to the North Pole, he worked his way up and out, hanging almost horizontally from the web, as the bulge of the globe-shaped balloon spread from the narrow mouth at the bottom toward the Equator.
He climbed some forty feet as it swelled wider and wider. Then he climbed gradually into a vertical stance as he crossed the Equator at the widest part of the balloon.
When he glanced down, he saw the silvery waters of the Long Island Sound riddled with white sails and streaked by steamer smoke. He glimpsed the sand bluffs of the North Shore of Long Island and realized that the balloon had risen up into a more powerful air current. In its grip, he was traveling rapidly. And the balloon was still climbing. The farms appeared smaller and smaller, and the clusters of towns gave the illusion of growing closer to one another as it gained altitude.
Past the equatorial bulge, he was able to move faster, scrambling to get to the top, tiring from the effort, but driven by an arresting sight: the balloon was now so high that he could see the green back of the twenty-mile-wide Long Island and, beyond it, the deep blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean. If he didn’t suffocate in the stratosphere, the ocean would be waiting below.
He reached the dome, the top of the gas envelope, drew his throwing knife from his boot, and plunged it into the fabric. In the stran
ge silence, the hiss of gas escaping under enormous pressure was deafening. It blasted from the small slit he had cut. But he felt no effect, no indication that the balloon had ceased to climb, much less begun to sink. He dragged the sharp blade through more fabric, skipping over the netting, lengthening the slit, hunting the ideal size to reduce the lift of gas so the balloon would descend quickly but still float.
He felt light-headed. His foot slipped from the rope web. His hands were losing their grip. The knife started to slide from his fingers. The gas! He suddenly realized the gas was jetting past his face and he was inhaling it, breathing it into his lungs, slipping under the edge of consciousness. He ducked his face below the slit and held on with all his fading strength. It was getting worse. His head was spinning. He gathered his will and dropped down a row of rope netting and sucked in fresh air. When he could see straight again, he reached overhead with the knife and slashed more holes in the fabric.
There were thousands of cubic feet of lighter-than-air gas lifting the balloon. How much did he have to let out to make it sink? He recalled Nellie describing a fine line to calculate the balance between the weight to be lifted and the volume of gas. He heard a ripping sound and looked up. The fabric between the two slits he had cut was tearing, joining the slits, and suddenly the gas was rushing from the united fissure.
Bell’s stomach lurched. He thought for a moment that the gas was making him sick. Then he realized the balloon had lost all buoyancy and was plummeting back to earth.
—
With no way to control the release, Isaac Bell’s only hope was to climb down to the basket and throw everything over the side to reduce the weight dragging the balloon back to earth before it collapsed. Retracing his ascent, hand under hand, boot under boot, he slipped from cross rope to cross rope, down toward the middle bulge as fast as he could.
Was the bag less taut? No doubt about that. The fabric had ceased to press so hard against the net. He looked down. He saw the farms. He saw the silver Sound and Long Island shore. But the balloon had fallen so far that he was no longer high enough to see the ocean.
He lowered himself around the Equator and started the long horizontal climb down under the overhead curve of the globe-shaped envelope, hanging from the net, swinging hand over head, working his way into the vertical wall of the lowest part of the balloon, until he finally reached the load ring and slid down the bask ropes into the basket.
A farm spread under him, green fields speckled with black cows, a big sprawling house sheltered by shade trees, red barns, a pond, and round silos poking up at the sky like pencils standing on end. At the edge of the fields stood the darker green of trees, the wood lot. The Sound was no longer in sight.
Bell ripped the hoses from the steel hydrogen tanks and wrestled the heavy cylinders over the side, one after another, until they were gone. There wasn’t much else to throw, but he was still falling. He hurled the dragline out of the basket.
For a moment, he entertained the fantasy of landing in the woods, where springy treetops might slow him down. But the balloon was aiming at the farmhouse. The shade trees might slow him down, but it was soon apparent he was not on course for the shade trees either. Quite suddenly he was directly over a barn. In another instant, he was close enough to distinguish roof shingles. The weather vane on the peak was shaped like a rooster. The dragline touched. Did it slow him slightly? He grabbed the basket ropes and braced for the crash.
The basket hit the roof, splintering shingles, and blasted through them into the hayloft. Bales of hay had no effect on the impact. The loft floor collapsed. The basket hung up in the rafters and stopped, abruptly. In the still air, the near-empty gasbag settled down over the barn.
Isaac Bell dropped from the bottom of the basket to the floor.
He was reeling to his feet when a red-faced farmer burst into the barn.
Bell took out his wallet. “I will pay for your roof. May I use your telephone?”
“I don’t want women voting!” the farmer yelled.
“What?”
“My whole damned barn says Votes for Women.”
“Do you have a telephone?”
“No.”
“Rent me a horse that can make it to the nearest railroad station.”
—
Bell wired the New York field office
FIND NELLIE MATTERS?
GUARD ROCKEFELLER.
He caught a local train to New Haven and called the office on a Southern New England Company long-distance public telephone while he waited for an express. Nellie Matters, Grady Forrer reported, had escaped in another balloon.
“She can’t hide in a balloon.”
“Night is falling,” said Grady. “She can hide all night.”
“Guard Rockefeller,” Bell repeated.
“Rockefeller is safe. We’ve got an army around him.”
“I’ll be there soon as I can.”
Long before the express pulled into Grand Central, Isaac Bell had a very clear idea of what Nellie Matters believed John D. Rockefeller valued more than life. When he got to Manhattan, he rounded up every Van Dorn detective in the city and chartered steam launches to ferry them across the harbor to Constable Hook.
42
Hey, you!”
Nellie Matters closed her hand around the derringer in her pocket. She had almost made it home free to The Hook saloon.
“You! Stop right there!”
I belong here, she reminded herself. In the persona of her disguise, she had every right to be hurrying along this street that paralleled the chain-link refinery fence. But the man who shouted at her was sweating in the heavy blue, brass-buttoned uniform of a Constable Hook cop. She pitched her alto voice down to a range between a raspy tenor and a thin baritone.
“What’s up?”
The cop cast a sharp eye on her workman’s duds. Her wig, the finest money could buy, was a thick mop of curly brown hair barely contained by a flat cap. A narrow horsehide tool bag hung from her shoulder strap. A pair of nickel-plated side-cutting pliers protruding from an end pocket was supposed to be the finishing varnish coat on a portrait of a journeyman electrician. No one in the refinery city had challenged it until now.
“How old are you?”
I belong here! “How old am I?” she shot back. “Twenty-four next month. How old are you?”
The cop looked confused. She let go of the gun in her pocket and drew his attention to her tool bag by shifting it from her left shoulder to her right.
“Jeez. From behind, youse looked like a kid cutting school.”
“That’s a good one,” Nellie laughed. “I ain’t played hooky since they kicked me out of eighth grade.”
The cop laughed, too. “Sorry, bud. They stuck me on truant patrol.”
“Tell you what, pal. If your sergeant set a quota, I’m short enough to go in with you. But I can’t stay long. Gotta go to work.”
The cop laughed again. “You’re O.K.”
“I surely am,” she said to herself as the cop wandered off and she hurried to The Hook saloon. “I am O.K. as O.K. can be . . . And how are you, Isaac?”
—
Isaac Bell sealed off the Constable Hook oil refinery with armed Protective Services operators commanded by Van Dorn detectives. He put white-haired Kansas City Eddie Edwards in charge because Edwards specialized in locking out the slum gang train robbers who plagued many a city’s railroad yards. The company cops, whom the Van Dorns regarded as strikebreaking thugs in dirty uniforms, resented the invasion and resisted mightily until word from the Eleventh Floor of 26 Broadway reverberated across the harbor like a naval broadside.
“Mr. Rockefeller expects every refinery police officer to do his duty by assisting the Van Dorn Detective Agency to protect Standard Oil property.”
Even before Rockefeller knocked the refinery cops in line, Eddie Edwar
ds was glad-handing the chiefs of the Constable Hook Police Department, the refinery’s private fire department, and the city’s volunteer fire department. These savvy, by-the-book moves bore immediate fruit. Cops were assigned to guard every high point in the city where a sniper might set up shop. Standard Oil transferred battalions of extra firemen from other refineries. The ranks of the Constable Hook volunteers were swelled by volunteers from every town in New Jersey. Standard Oil tugboats from its Brooklyn and Long Island City yards arrived equipped with fire nozzles and were soon joined by Pennsylvania Railroad and New Jersey Central Railroad tugs and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad’s fleet from St. George. Then a beat cop assigned to the high school truant squad reported encountering a short, slight, youthful electrician who fit one of the Van Dorn Agency descriptions of how the assassin might look disguised as a man.
“In the city,” Eddie Edwards told Isaac Bell. “So short and skinny, the cop thought he was a kid. Near the fence. Not inside.”
“Yet,” said Bell.
Bell questioned the cop personally and came away fairly certain he had seen Nellie. Her breakdown 99 would fit easily in the electrician’s horsehide tool bag the cop described. He wondered for the twentieth time whether she had gotten her hands on any of Beitel’s exploding bullets. A few well-placed shots would set six hundred acres ablaze. Her presence confirmed exactly what she had told him. She was out to avenge her father by destroying what Rockefeller loved most. More than life, more than money, the magnate loved what he had built, and the Constable Hook refinery was the biggest thing he had ever built.
“Isaac!” It was Wally Kisley, out of breath. “Found a duck.”
The cops exchanged baffled looks.
Bell and Wally headed into the refinery on the run. The Van Dorns blanketing the place under explosives expert Wally’s guidance had discovered the shooting gallery target on a twenty-thousand-gallon naphtha tank.
“She’s here,” said Isaac Bell. “This nails it.”