“But what is he doing with your father’s machine?”
“My father took it with him from Italy. His creditors can’t touch it here. It is his legacy. My inheritance. That boy helped my father in America. He is eccellente meccanico!”
“Not artista?” Bell asked, testing her reaction with a smile. He could not be sure, but she seemed as sane as he was.
“Artists are rare, Mr. Bell. I’m sure you know that. He wrote that he was coming. I thought he was dreaming.” She jumped up and waved out the window, but it was unlikely that he could see her. Bell passed her the hem of the white curtain. “Wave this. Maybe he’ll see it.” She did. But he did not respond, his gaze likely on the myriad barred windows.
She slumped down on the window seat. “He’s still dreaming. Does he imagine I can just walk out of here?”
“What is his name?” Bell asked.
“Andy. Andy Moser. My father liked him very much.”
Isaac Bell was struck by a wonderful possibility. He asked, “How fast is your father’s monoplane?”
“Very fast. Father believed that only speed would overcome winds. The more speedy the aeroplano, the safer in bad weather, Father said.”
“Faster than sixty miles per hour?”
“Father hoped for seventy.”
“Miss Di Vecchio, I have a proposition for you.”
13
“MR. MOSER, YOUR SITUATION is about to improve vastly,” Isaac Bell said to the sad-faced mechanician who was grilling a frankfurter on a fire he had built a safe distance from the crated American Eagle monoplane.
“How do you know my name?”
“Read this!”
Bell thrust a fine parchment-paper envelope he had lifted from Dr. Ryder’s writing desk into Moser’s grease-stained hand.
“Open it.”
Andy Moser slid a finger under the seal, unfolded a sheet of writing paper covered in an elegant Florentine cursive script, and read slowly, moving his lips.
Isaac Bell had seized an opportunity to help the beautiful Italian woman while helping himself solve the vexing problem he had warned Archie about. The field of competitors vying for the Whiteway Cup was growing so large that too many support trains would be jockeying for the same railroad tracks. Keeping up with Josephine’s flying machine to guard her life would be a nightmare even with the help of the auto patrols that Archie had envisioned.
But what, Bell had asked himself, if he took “the high ground”? With his own airship, he could ride herd on the race. He could watch Josephine in the air while he stationed men ahead at the racetracks and fairgrounds that would provide infields to alight on.
Danielle Di Vecchio needed money to plead her case to get out of Ryder’s asylum.
Isaac Bell needed a speedy airship. He bought hers.
“Danielle says I’m supposed to go with you, Mr. Bell.”
“And bring my flying machine,” said Bell, grinning at the wagon. Disassembled and folded up for travel, it looked like a dragonfly in a cage.
“And teach you how to drive it?”
“As soon as I set you up in a first-class hangar car.”
“But I don’t know how to fly it. I’m only a mechanician.”
“Don’t worry about that. Just get her running, and show me the controls. How long will it take to put it back together?”
“A day, with a good helper. Have you ever driven a flying machine?”
“I drive a one-hundred-mile-an-hour Locomobile. I have driven a V-Twin Indian racer motorcycle, a 4-6-2 Pacific locomotive, and a fifty-knot steel-hulled turbine yacht built by Sir Charles Algernon Parsons himself. I imagine I’ll pick it up.”
“Locomotives and steel yachts don’t leave the ground, Mr. Bell.”
“That’s why I’m so fired up! Finish your lunch and wave good-bye to Danielle. She’s watching from the fourteenth window from the left, second from the bottom. She can’t wave through the bars, but she can see you.”
Moser gazed sadly down the hill. “I hate leaving her behind, but she says you’re going to help get her out.”
“Don’t you worry, we’ll get her out. And in the meantime, Dr. Ryder has promised that her treatment will improve, dramatically. Will your truck make it to Albany?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll go ahead and charter a train. It will be waiting in the Albany yards, steam up for Belmont Park. Mechanicians will be standing by to help you reassemble the American Eagle the second you arrive.”
“Belmont Park? Are you intending to enter the American Eagle in the cross-country race?”
“No,” Bell laughed. “But it’s going to help me keep an eye on Josephine Josephs.”
Andy Moser looked incredulous. Of all he had read and heard since Isaac raced up in his Model K Ford, this took the cake. “You know the Sweetheart of the Air?”
“I am a private detective. Josephine’s husband is trying to kill her. The American Eagle is going to help me save her life.”
After Bell chartered his support train in Albany, he wired San Francisco to alert Dashwood to the fact that Marco Celere’s original name was Marco Prestogiacomo. He might well have still been Prestogiacomo when he landed in San Francisco, and Bell hoped that this new information would speed up Dashwood’s unusually slow progress.
“I’M NOT GOING TO WASTE flying time watching Dmitri Platov demonstrate his thermo engine,” Josephine told Isaac Bell a day later. “I doubt it will work. And even if it does, that horrible Steve Stevens is too fat to drive a flying machine, even one of Marco’s.”
“One of Marco’s? What do you mean?”
“It’s a biplane he invented for heavy lifting, to carry a bunch of passengers.”
Bell said, “I wasn’t aware that Marco had another machine in the race.”
“Steve Stevens bought it from his creditors. Lucky him. It’s the only machine in the world that will lift him. He paid twenty cents on the dollar. Poor Marco got nothing.”
Bell escorted her to her monoplane. Van Dorn mechanicians spun her propeller, and when the blue smoke of her motor turned white, she tore down the field and took to the sky for yet another of her long-distance practice runs.
Bell watched her dwindle to a yellow dot, secure in the thought that soon he would be flying beside her. The Eagle had arrived late last night on a four-car special train that Bell had chartered for the duration. Andy Moser and a Van Dorn crew were already trundling the pieces from the rail yard to the infield.
Then, thought Bell, all he had to do was learn to drive the thing before the race started. Or at least well enough to keep learning on the job, as he tracked Josephine across the country. By the time the race ended in San Francisco, he’d have gotten pretty good at it, and the first thing he would do was take Marion Morgan for a ride. The Eagle’s motor had plenty of extra power, Andy had told him, to carry a passenger. Marion could even bring a moving-picture camera. And wouldn’t that adventure be a wedding gift?
He watched Josephine disappear in the east. “All right, boys,” he told the Van Dorns, “stay here and wait for Josephine to come back. Stick close to her. If you need me, I’ll be over at the thermo engine.”
“Do you think Frost will attack here like he did before? He knows we’re primed.”
“He’s surprised us before. Stick close. I’ll come back before she lands.”
Bell walked across the infield to the three-hundred-foot-long steel rail on which Platov had promised his engine would race in a final experiment before they installed it in Steve Stevens’s biplane.
The enormously fat Stevens, bulging in a white planter’s suit and glowering impatiently, sat at a breakfast table that his elderly servants had set with linen and silver. Platov and Stevens’s chief mechanician were tinkering with the still-silent jet motor, the mechanician setting valves and switches while Platov consulted his slide rule. Stevens was venting his restlessness by upbraiding his servants. His coffee was cold, he was complaining. His sweet rolls were stale, and there weren??
?t enough of them. The docile old men attending the cotton planter looked terrified.
Stevens’s arrogant gaze fell on Bell’s white suit.
“Surely Southern blood courses in your veins, suh,” he drawled in dulcet Southern tones. “Ah have never laid eyes on a Yankee who could do justice to the pure white duds of the Old South.”
“My father spent time in the Old South.”
“And taught you to dress like a gentleman. Do Ah presume correctly that he was buyin’ cotton for New England mills?”
“He was a Union Army intelligence officer, carrying out President Lincoln’s order to free the slaves.”
“Ready, sirs,” Dmitri Platov called out.
The Russian inventor’s springy mutton-chop whiskers were quivering with excitement and his dark eyes were flashing.
“Thermo engine ready.”
Stevens glared at his chief mechanician. “Is it, Judd?”
Judd muttered, “Ready as it ever will be, Mr. Stevens.”
“About time. Ah’ve had just about enough sittin’ and waitin’ . . . Now, where you goin’?”
Judd had picked up a baseball bat and started walking along the rail. “I gotta whack the stop switch as she’s nearing the end to shut the motor off.”
“Is that how you’re goin’ to stop the motor on my flyin’ machine? Are you-all fixin’ to stand in front of me with a baseball bat?”
“No worry!” cried Platov. “Automatic switch in machine. This only test. See?” He pointed at the thermo engine, resting on the rail. “Big switch. Just touch with bat as engine go by.”
“All right, get on with it, for God’s sake. The rest of the race’ll be across the Mississippi before Ah take to the sky.”
Judd ran two hundred feet down the rail and positioned himself. Bell thought he looked as unhappy as a long-ball hitter ordered to bunt.
“Is action!” cried Platov.
The thermo engine ignited with a low whine that soared to an earsplitting shriek. Bell covered his ears to protect his acute hearing and watched the motor begin to shake with awesome power. No wonder the mechanicians all respected Platov. That steel box he had invented was smaller than a steamer trunk, but it seemed to contain the amazing energy of a modern locomotive.
Platov jerked the release lever, and the latches holding it back opened.
The thermo engine shot down the rail.
Bell could scarcely believe his eyes. In one instant, it was throbbing next to him. In the next, it reached the man with the bat. It really worked, and the speed was phenomenal. Then all hell broke loose. Just as Judd was about to bunt the bat against the stop switch, the thermo engine jumped the rail.
It smashed through the chief mechanician as if he were a paper target, knocked what little remained of his body to the ground, and flew a hundred yards, crashing through Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s brand-new New Haven Curtiss parked on the grass and tearing the tail off a Blériot, before it came to rest inside a truck owned by the Vanderbilt syndicate, where it burst into flames.
Isaac Bell ran to the fallen Judd and saw immediately that there was nothing to be done for the man. Then while others ran to the destroyed New Haven and the burning truck, Bell inspected the rail where the engine had escaped.
Dmitri Platov was wringing his hands. “Was so good, ’til then. So good. Oh, that poor man. Look at that poor man.”
Steve Stevens waddled up. “If this don’t beat all! My head mechanician’s been killed, and Ah got no jet engine for my machine. How in hell am Ah supposed to run a race?”
Platov wept. He tore at his thick black hair and beat his hands on his chest. “What terrible thing I have done. Did he have wife?”
“Who the hell would marry Judd?”
“Is terrible, is terrible.”
Isaac Bell stood up from where he was crouching beneath the rail, brushed Stevens out of his way, and placed a firm hand on Platov’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t blame myself, if I were you, Mr. Platov.”
“Is me. Is captain of ship. Is my machine. Is my error. I have killed a man.”
“But you didn’t intend to. Nor did your amazing machine. It had some help.”
“What the devil are you talkin’ about?” said Stevens.
“The rail broke. That’s what made the machine jump it.”
“That’s Platov’s rail,” shouted Stevens. “That’s his responsibility. He’s the one who put it there. He’s the one responsible for it breakin’. Ah’m callin’ my lawyers. We’re goin’ to sue.”
“Look at this joint,” said Bell. He led Platov to the point where two lengths of rail had parted. Platov crouched beside him, lips pursed tighter and tighter. “Is bolts loosen-ed,” he said angrily.
“Loose?” howled Stevens. “’Cause you-all didn’t make it tight . . . What are you doin’, sir?” he said, recoiling, as Bell shoved his fingers under his nose.
“Smell that and shut up.”
“I smell oil. So what?”
“Penetrating oil, to make it easier to unscrew the bolts.”
“No squeak,” Platov said miserably. “No noise.”
“The rail was sabotaged,” said Isaac Bell. “The fishtail bolts were loosened just enough to let the rail slip under pressure.”
“No!” said Platov. “I check rail every test. I check this morning.”
“Ah,” said Bell, “that’s what those are.” He knelt down and picked up some oil-soaked matchsticks. “That’s how he did it,” he mused. “Jammed these into the crack to damp the motion when you tested it. But they would have fallen out when the rail started vibrating as the thermo engine approached. Diabolical.”
“Rail move,” said Platov. “Thermo engine fly away . . . But why!”
“Do you have enemies, Mr. Platov?”
“Platov likes. Platov like-ed.”
“Perhaps back in Russia?” asked Bell, aware that Russian immigrants of every political stripe from radical to reactionary had fled their restive land.
“No. I leave friends, family. I send money home.”
“Then who’d do such a thing?” demanded Steve Stevens.
Isaac Bell said, “Could it be that someone didn’t want you to win the race with Mr. Platov’s amazing motor?”
“Ah’ll show ’em! Platov, make me a new motor!”
“Not possible. Take time. I am being sorry. You need to find ordinary gasoline motor. In fact, you need two motors, mounted on lower wings.”
“Two! What for?”
Platov spread his arms wide as if measuring Stevens’s girth. “For lifting heaviness. Powering equal to thermo engine. Two motors, mounted on lower wing.”
“Well, how the hell am Ah goin’ to find two motors, and who the hell is goin’ to install ’em, with Judd dead?”
“Judd’s assistants.”
“Farm boys, tractor hands. Fine doin’ what Judd told them to do, but they’re not real mechanicians.” Stevens jammed plump fists on his broad hips and glared around the infield. “If this don’t beat all. Here, Ah got my machine. Ah got money to buy new motors, but no hands to install ’em. Say, how ’bout you, Platov? Want a job?”
“No thank you. I am having new thermo engine to manufacture.”
“But Ah seen you runnin’ around takin’ jobs for money. Ah’ll pay top dollar.”
“My thermo engine come first.”
“Tell you what. When you’re not workin’ on my flyin’ machine, you can work on your thermo engine.”
“Could your train tow my shop car?”
“Sure thing. Glad to have your tools along.”
“And can I still being freelance machinist to make money for new thermo engine?”
“Just as long as my machine comes first.” Stevens beckoned his servants. “Tom! You, there, Tom. Fetch Mr. Platov some breakfast. Can’t expect a top hand to work hard on an empty stomach.”
Platov looked at Isaac Bell as if to ask what he should do.
Bell said, “It looks like you’re back in the race.”
He saw Josephine returning and hurried toward the open stretch where she would come down. His brow was furrowed. He was thinking hard about coincidences. The Englishman’s accident occurring simultaneously with Frost’s attack was no coincidence. It had been deliberate sabotage to create a distraction to support the attack.
But what was the distraction, this time? There had been no attack. Josephine was high in the sky, and Bell had seen nothing amiss on the ground. When last heard of, Harry Frost was in Cincinnati. It was possible he could have returned to New York. But it seemed unlikely that he would attack again at Belmont Park in broad daylight, particularly since Bell had assigned Van Dorns, backed up by local police, to check the loads inside every closed van and wagon that entered the infield. It was logical to assume that Frost reckoned he would do better to lie in wait and spring from ambush.
Bell found Josephine’s Van Dorn mechanicians watching her yellow monoplane spiral-dipping down toward the infield in a series of steep dives and sharp turns. “Have you boys seen anything out of order?”
“Not a thing, Mr. Bell. Except that thermo engine running wild.”
Was this sabotage a genuine coincidence? Had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? Not by the saboteur who caused the Farman to lose a wing but by another, operating on his own? For what purpose? To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the only answer.
“Did you say something, Mr. Bell?”
Isaac Bell repeated through gritted teeth what he had just growled under his breath. “I hate coincidences.”
“Yes, sir! First thing they taught me when I joined the Van Dorns.”
“YOUR FLYING MACHINE IS BEAUTIFUL!” Josephine exclaimed delightedly. “And look at you, Mr. Bell! You look happy as a jaybird in a cherry tree.”
Bell was grinning. Andy Moser and the mechanicians Bell had hired to help him were tightening the flying and landing wires that braced the wing. They still had work to do on the tail and the control links, and the motor was scattered in small pieces in their spick-and-span hangar car, but with the wing spreading across the fuselage, it was beginning to look like something that would fly.