The Race

  He kept hunting, as the stockmen began returning from the piers, the rail yards, and the city of Weehawken, driving captured steers that shambled into the yards too exhausted to pose any threat. Evening shadows cast by the stone cliffs of the Palisades were growing long when the Van Dorn detective stumbled upon a curved brick structure a few inches below the cobblestones. It was a circle of brick and mortar a full six feet in diameter, partly covered by a thick cast-iron disk. He knelt to inspect the disk. It had a date in raised numbers: 1877.

  A stockman came along, cracking a whip. “What is this?” Bell demanded.

  “Old manhole cover.”

  “I see that. What does it cover?”

  “Old sewer, I guess. There’s a few of ’em around. They used to drain the manure . . . Say, what the heck moved it? Must weigh a ton.”

  “A strong man,” Bell mused. He peered into the darkness under it. He could see a brick-lined shaft. “Does it drain to the river?”

  “Used to. Probably stops under one of them piers now. You see where they filled in the water and built the pier?”

  Bell ran in search of a flashlight and hurried back with one he bought from a railroad cop. He lowered himself into the shaft, hunched under the low brick ceiling, and started walking. The tunnel ran straight and sloped slightly. It smelled of cow dung and decades of damp. And as the stockman predicted, after nearly a quarter mile he found a timber bisecting it vertically. Judging by the broken-brick rubble scattered around it, Bell reckoned it was a piling unknowingly driven down through the long-forgotten disused sewer by the builders of the pier.

  The tall detective squeezed around it and walked toward the sound of rushing water. Now he could smell the river. The brick grew slippery, and the flashlight revealed streaks of moss, as if the walls were wetted twice daily when the tide rose. He passed another vertical timber and came abruptly to the mouth of the sewer. This would have been the end, underwater at high tide, originally extending into the river forty years ago before landfill extended the shore.

  At his feet, a torrent of ebbing saltwater tide and freshwater river current raced toward the sea. Overhead, he saw the shadows of a dense frame of piles and timbers—the underbelly of the pier. He stepped onto a final crumbling lip of brick and looked around.

  “What took you so long?” said a voice.

  Isaac Bell had a split second to train his light on a bearded face, slick with blood, before Harry Frost hurled a pile-driver punch.

  20

  WITH FOUR YEARS of college boxing and ten years as a Van Dorn agent, including an investigation in the Arizona Territory disguised as an itinerant prizefighter, and another as a lumberjack, Isaac Bell reacted by rolling with the punch.

  Memory speeded up, as if whirled in a turbine. He recalled events too fast to register as they had occurred. In memory, he could see Frost’s fist swinging at him. He could see that he had been caught flat-footed. If he went down at Frost’s feet, he was a dead man. His only chance to live was to make absolutely sure that Frost couldn’t follow up with another blow.

  Harry Frost had obliged Bell by knocking him backwards into the Hudson River.

  The current was swift, tide and river speeding toward the sea.

  Isaac Bell was barely conscious, with an aching jaw and a throbbing head.

  He saw Frost scrambling along the narrow shelf of mud that the falling tide had exposed on the shore under the piers. Dodging the pilings that marched from the land into the river, Frost tried to keep up with the current. He scampered like a dog wanting to jump in the water after a ball but afraid of drowning.

  The current slammed Bell against pilings in the water. Bell seized hold of one. Less than fifteen feet separated the detective and the murderer. “Frost,” he shouted, gripping the slimy wood, fighting the current. “Give it up!”

  To Bell’s surprise, Harry Frost laughed.

  Bell had expected howling curses. Instead, the murderer was laughing. Nor was it insane laughter. He sounded almost cheerful when he said, “Go to hell.”

  “It’s over,” Bell shouted. “You can’t get away from us.”

  Frost laughed again. “You won’t get me before I get Josephine.”

  “Killing your poor wife won’t do you any good, Harry. Give it up.”

  Frost stopped laughing. “Poor wife?” His bloodied face worked convulsively. “Poor wife?” He raised his voice in an angry cry: “You don’t know what they were up to!”

  “Who? What do you mean?”

  Frost stared at him across the rushing tide. “You don’t know nothing,” he said bitterly. He shrugged his massive shoulders. An odd smile flickered across his mouth before his expression hardened like a death mask. “Say, look it this.”

  Harry Frost bent down and pawed in the mud. He straightened up, holding Bell’s Browning.

  “You dropped this when you ran away by jumpin’ in the water. Here you go!” He flung the pistol in Bell’s face.

  Bell caught it on the fly. He juggled the muddy grip into his palm and flicked off the safety. “Elevate! Hands up!”

  Harry Frost turned his back on the detective, clinging to the piling in the water, and stalked upstream against the flow of the tide.

  “Hands up!”

  “I’m not afraid of you,” Frost called over his shoulder, taunting. “You are nothing. You couldn’t even take one punch. You ran away.”

  “Stop right there.”

  “If you didn’t have the belly to take another punch, you sure as hell don’t have the nerve to shoot me in the back.”

  Bell aimed for Harry Frost’s legs, intending to slow the man, climb out of the water, and get him. But he was numb with cold. His head was reeling from the punch. It took an act of will to steady the barrel, another to force his finger to curl smoothly around the trigger so he wouldn’t miss.

  The gun felt heavy.

  “You don’t have the guts to pull the trigger,” Frost flung over his shoulder.

  Strangely heavy. Was he losing consciousness? No. It was too heavy. Why did Frost throw it instead of simply shooting him? Why was he daring him to shoot? Bell let go the trigger, engaged the safety, turned the weapon around, and looked at the muzzle. It was cram-packed with mud.

  Frost had jammed it into the river mud when he picked it up, deliberately tamping it into the barrel so it would blow up in Bell’s hand. Characteristic Harry Frost. Like the bent horseshoes thrown through victims’ windows to terrorize them, the chief investigator’s maimed hand would warn every Van Dorn detective: Don’t mess with Harry Frost.

  Bell dunked the gun in the water and slammed it back and forth, sluicing out the mud. With any luck, it would fire a shot or two. But when he looked for his target, Harry Frost had melted into the shadows. Bell called, “Frost!” All he heard in response was laughter echoing under a distant pier.

  “WHERE IS JOSEPHINE?” Isaac Bell shouted into the stockyard office telephone.

  “Are you O.K., Isaac?” asked Joseph Van Dorn.

  “Where is Josephine?”

  “Camped out on Bedloe’s Island, fixing her flying machine. Where are you?”

  “Who’s watching her?”

  “Six of my best detectives and twenty-seven newspaper reporters. Not to mention Mr. Preston Whiteway, circling on a steam yacht, beaming searchlights for your fiancée to shoot moving pictures by. Are you O.K.?”

  “Tip-top, soon as I get a propeller, a new wing stay, and a Remington autoload.”

  “I’ll send word to Marion you’re O.K. Where are you, Isaac?”

  “Weehawken stockyards. Frost got away.”

  “Seems to be making a habit of that,” the boss observed coolly. “Did you wing him at least?”

  “I took off one of his ears.”

  “That’s a start.”

  “But it didn’t stop him.”

  “Where’s he headed?”

  “I don’t know,” Bell admitted. His head ached, and his jaw felt like he’d been chewing thornbushes.

&nb
sp; “Do you think he’ll try again?”

  “He assured me he will not stop trying until he kills her.”

  “You spoke?” The tone of Van Dorn’s voice suggested that if Bell could somehow see through telephone wire, he would be facing sharply raised eyebrows.

  “Briefly.”

  “What’s his state of mind?”

  Isaac Bell had thought of little else since he swam ashore.

  “Harry Frost is not insane,” he said. “In fact, in a strange way he’s enjoying himself. As I warned Whiteway in San Francisco, Frost knows he’s been dealt his last hand. He’s not going to fold his cards until he sets the casino on fire.”

  Joseph Van Dorn said, “Nonetheless, the lengths he’s going to to avenge his wife’s supposed seduction would fit most folks’ definition of insane.”

  “Let me ask you something, Joe. Why do you suppose Frost didn’t kill Josephine when they were still together?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why did Frost shoot Marco instead?”

  “Put an end to the affair, hoping she’d come back.”

  “Yes. Except for one thing. Having killed Marco—assuming he is dead—”

  “He is,” Van Dorn interrupted. “We’ve been down that road.”

  “Having killed, or tried to kill, Marco,” Bell replied evenly, “why is Frost now trying to kill Josephine?”

  “He either is insane or just plain old-fashioned crazed with jealousy. The man was known for his temper.”

  “Why didn’t he kill Josephine first?”

  “You’re asking me to explain the order of a madman’s killings?”

  “Do you know what he said to me?”

  “I wasn’t there when he escaped, Isaac,” Van Dorn said pointedly.

  Isaac Bell was too involved in his line of inquiry to countenance Van Dorn’s jibe. “Harry Frost said to me, ‘You don’t know what they were up to.’”

  “Up to? Marco and Josephine were running off together, that’s what they were up to—or so Frost suspected.”

  “No. He didn’t sound like he meant only a love affair. He indicated they were scheming. It was as if he had discovered that they had perpetuated some sort of betrayal worse than seduction.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. But I’m beginning to suspect that we are fighting something more complicated than we took on.”

  “We took on protecting Josephine from getting killed,” Van Dorn retorted firmly. “So far, that’s been complicated enough for two detective agencies. If what you’re suggesting now has any bottom to it, we should call in a third.”

  “Send me that Remington autoload.”

  VAN DORN DISPATCHED an apprentice across on the Weehawken Ferry with the rifle and dry clothes from Bell’s room at the Yale Club. Andy Moser arrived in one of the roadsters an hour later, with tools, stay wires, and a shiny new nine-foot propeller strapped to the fenders.

  “Good thing you’re rich, Mr. Bell. This baby cost a hundred bucks.”

  “Let’s get to work. I want this machine flying by dawn. I already removed this broken stay.”

  Andy Moser whistled. “Wow! I’ve never seen Roebling wire snap.”

  “It had help from Harry Frost.”

  “It’s amazing the wing didn’t fall off.”

  Bell said, “The machine is resilient. These other stays, here and here, took up the slack.”

  “I always say, Mr. Di Vecchio built ’em to last.”

  They replaced the propeller and the broken stay and patched the holes Frost had shot in the wing fabric. Then Bell sawed twelve inches off the wooden stock of the Remington autoloading rifle, and Andy jury-rigged a swivel mount, promising to construct a more permanent installation “with a stop so you don’t shoot your own propeller” when he got back to his shop in the hangar car. Next time Harry Frost fired at him he would discover that the Eagle had grown teeth.

  21

  FOUR MILES DOWNRIVER, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Josephine was trying to fix her flying machine. Blinded by the searchlights glaring from Preston Whiteway’s steam yacht, choking on its coal smoke, and harried by reporters shouting puddingheaded questions, she and her Van Dorn detective-mechanicians, who had finally come over on a boat, addressed the mangled wing. But the damage was beyond their skills and the few tools they had with them, and the young aviatrix had begun to lose hope when help suddenly appeared in the last person she would have expected.

  Dmitri Platov hopped off a Harbor Patrol launch from Manhattan Island, shook hands with the policemen who had given him a ride, and saluted her with a jaunty wave of his slide rule. Everyone said that the handsome Russian was the best mechanician in the race, but he had never come near her machine or offered his services. She was pretty sure she knew why.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  He tipped his straw boater. “Platov come helping.”

  “Isn’t Steve Stevens afraid I’ll beat him if you help me?”

  “Steve Stevens eating victory meal in Yonkers,” Platov answered, flashing white teeth in his whiskers. “Platov own man.”

  “I need a savior, Mr. Platov. The damage is much worse than I thought.”

  “We are fixing, no fearing,” said Platov.

  “I don’t know. You see, this sleeve—here, bring those lights!”

  The Van Dorns hopped to obey, angling electric lights they had hooked up to the Statue of Liberty’s dynamo.

  “You see? The sleeve that holds the pintle for the alettone is not strong enough. Nor is it solidly seated in the frame. It’s even worse on the other wing. Dumb luck that that one didn’t fall off, too.”

  Platov felt the sleeve with his fingers, like a vet examining a calf. He turned to the nearest mechanician. “Please, you are bringing second tool bag from boat?”

  The Van Dorn hurried to the dock.

  Platov addressed the other detective. “Please, you bringing more lights.”

  Josephine said, “I can’t believe my eyes. It’s an amateurish design. The man who built the machine didn’t seem to understand the stress on this part.”

  Dmitri Platov looked Josephine full in the face and stepped very close to her.

  She was taken aback. Having never stood within twenty yards of him until this moment, she had never noticed how thoroughly his dark springy hair and mutton chops covered his brow, cheeks, chin, and lips, nor how brightly his eyes burned within that curly nest. She felt herself drawn to his eyes. There was something strangely familiar about them.

  “Poor design?” he asked in straightforward, unaccented English. “I take that as a personal insult.”

  Josephine stared back in utter amazement.

  She covered her mouth with her greasy glove, staining her cheek. Marco Celere’s voice—the voice he had used only when they were alone—the faintest Italian accent, speaking the British phrases he had learned as a teenager apprenticed to a Birmingham machinist.

  “Marco,” she whispered. “Oh, my Marco, you’re alive.”

  Marco Celere gave her the tiniest wink. “Shall I send our audience packing?” he murmured.

  She nodded, still pressing her glove to her mouth.

  Marco raised his voice and addressed the Van Dorn mechanicians in his familiar Dmitri Platov Russian accent. “Gentles-mens, de idea is dat too many cooks making cold soup. Let Platov being alone genius fixing Josephine aviatrix machine.”

  Josephine saw the detective-mechanicians exchange glances.

  “Josephine being helper,” Platov added.

  The detectives were staring uncomfortably, Josephine thought. Did they suspect? Thank God, Isaac wasn’t here. Chief Investigator Bell would question the shock on her face. These younger, less experienced operators sensed something out of kilter. But were they clever enough to challenge the mechanician-machinist who everyone in the race knew as “the crazy Russian” Platov?

  “It’s O.K.,” said Josephine. “I’ll be his helper.”

  The head Van D
orn nodded his assent. After all, she was a better mechanician than any of them. They retreated to the ropes they had strung to hold the newspaper reporters at bay. “We’ll be right over here if you need us, Josephine.”

  Marco said, “Are passing Platov monkeying wrench, Josephine.”

  She fumbled for the tool. She could barely believe her senses. And yet she felt as if she had awakened from a nightmare that had started the week she married Harry Frost when she saw him punch and kick a man nearly to death for smiling at her. Her husband had never hurt her, but she had known from that moment on that he would one day, suddenly, without warning. What a fearful price she had paid for her aeroplanes, waiting, on tenterhooks, even as Harry applauded her passion for flying and bought her machines—until last autumn, when he grew suspicious of Marco.

  He had moved like lightning. First, he cut her out of his will. Then he roared in her face that he would kill her if she ever dared ask him for a divorce. Having trapped her thoroughly, he refused to pay off Marco’s debts on the machine they needed to compete for the Whiteway Cup. When he invited Marco to go hunting, she feared the worst. It was a trick to take Marco out in the woods and kill him in a “hunting accident.”

  But Marco had a plan to save them both and enter the race—a brilliant plan to fake his own murder and frame Harry for the crime.

  He had jimmied the telescopic sight on Harry’s hunting rifle so it would shoot high. He positioned himself so he could jump to a narrow ledge right below the rim of the cliff when Harry fired. Josephine would fly over, witnessing the shooting, so that Harry Frost would run. Marco would pretend to be dead, his body swept away by the North River. Josephine’s violent, murderous husband would be permanently locked back in the insane asylum, where he belonged. And Josephine would be free to charm the wealthy San Francisco newspaper publisher Preston Whiteway into sponsoring her in the Atlantic–Pacific air race in a new Celere Monoplano. Later, after Harry was safely locked up, Marco would wander out of the Adirondack woods pretending amnesia, remembering nothing except being wounded by Harry Frost.