Danielle sneered, “Who do you think he stole that from?”
“Your father?”
“No. Marco copied the biplane from a brilliant student he befriended in Paris. At the École Supérieure des Techniques Aéronautiques et de Construction Automobile.”
“What was his name?”
“Sikorsky.”
“Russian?”
“And part Polish.”
“You knew him?”
“My father lectured at the École. We knew everyone.”
“Do you know Dmitri Platov?”
“No.”
“Did your father?”
“I never heard the name.”
Bell weighed another question. What more could he learn about her father’s suicide from her that might be worth the pain it might cause? Or should he rely on James Dashwood to ferret it out in San Francisco? Andy surprised him, stepping closer and muttering through tight lips, “Enough. Give her a break.”
“Danielle?” Bell asked.
“Yes, Mr. Bell?”
“Marco Celere convinced Josephine that he is the sole inventor of her aeroplane.”
Her nostrils flared and her eyes flashed. “Thief!”
“I wonder whether you could give me some . . . ammunition to convince her otherwise?”
“What does she care?”
“I sense disquiet. Doubt.”
“What does it matter to her?”
“At her core is something honest.”
“She is very ambitious, you know.”
“I wouldn’t believe everything I read in the papers. Preston Whiteway’s competitors have only just begun to support his race.”
Danielle gestured angrily at the wall. “I see no papers here. They say newspapers will confuse us.”
“Then how do you know Josephine is ambitious?”
“Marco told me.”
“When?”
“He was boasting when I stabbed. He said she was ambitious, but he was even more ambitious.”
“More ambitious? She wants to fly. What did he want? Money?”
“Power. Marco didn’t care about money. He would be a prince, or a king.” She tossed her head and laughed angrily, “King of the toads.”
“What is there about Josephine’s machine that is indisputably your father’s invention and not Marco Celere’s?”
“Why do you care?”
“I am driving a machine your father invented. I have a strong sense of your father’s genius and his skills and maybe his dreams. I don’t think they should be stolen from him, particularly as he is not here to defend himself. Can you give me something I can use to defend him?”
Danielle closed her eyes and knitted her brow. “I understand,” she said. “Let me think . . . You see, your monoplano, she was made later. After Marco made his copy. Marco is like a sponge. He remembers everything he ever sees but never has his own idea. So Marco’s monoplano has no improvements that my father made in yours.”
“Like what? What did he improve? What did he change?”
“Alettoni.”
“But they look exactly the same. I compared them.”
“Look again,” she said. “Closer.”
“At what?”
“Cardine. How do you say? Pivot. Hinge! Look how the alettoni hinge to your aeroplane. Then look at Josephine’s.”
Bell saw the startled expression on Andy Moser’s face. “What is it, Andy?”
“The boys were saying her flaps were lightly seated. The pintles were too small. That’s why the flap fell off.”
Bell nodded, thinking hard. “Thank you, Danielle,” he said. It had been a productive visit. “We have to go. Are they treating you well?”
“Better, grazie. And I have lawyer.” She turned to Andy and gave the mechanician a dazzling smile. “Thank you for visiting me, Andy.” She extended her hand. Andy grabbed it and shook it hard. Danielle rolled her eyes at Bell and said, “Andy, when a lady gives you her hand, it is sometimes better to kiss it than shake it.”
Bell said, “Andy, get the machine ready to start. I’ll be there in a minute.” He waited until Andy was out of earshot. “There is one other thing I must ask you, Danielle.”
“What is it?”
“Were you ever in love with Marco Celere?”
“Marco?” she laughed. “Mr. Bell, you can’t be serious.”
“I have never met the man.”
“I would love a sea urchin before I would love Marco Celere. A poisonous sea urchin. You have no idea how treacherous he is. He breathes lies as another man breathes air. He schemes, he pretends, he steals. He is truffatore.”
“What is truffatore?”
“Imbroglione.”
“What is imbroglione?”
“Impostore! Defraudatore!”
“A con man,” said Bell.
“What is con man?” she asked.
“A confidence trickster. A thief who pretends to be your friend.”
“Yes! That is Marco Celere. A thief who pretends to be your friend.”
Isaac Bell’s quick mind raced into high gear. A murdered thief whose body was never found was one sort of mystery. A murdered confidence man whose body disappeared was quite another. Particularly when Harry Frost had cried in bewildered anguish, “You don’t know what they were up to.”
Nor did you, Harry Frost, thought Bell. Not until after you tried to kill Marco Celere. That’s why you didn’t kill Josephine first. You didn’t intend to kill her at all. That twisted desire came later, only after you learned something about them that you thought was even worse than seduction.
Bell was elated. It had been a most productive visit indeed. Although he still did not know what Marco and Josephine had been up to, he was sure now that Harry Frost was not merely raving.
He said, “Josephine told me that you wept that Marco stole your heart.”
He was not surprised when Danielle answered, “Marco must have told her that lie. I’ve never met the girl.”
Danielle helped Bell and Andy roll the Eagle to the far end of the asylum lawn and turned it into the wind. She gripped the cane tail skid, as Andy spun the propeller, and held fast, retarding its forward motion while he struggled to hold it back and scramble aboard at the same time. She was strong, Bell noticed, and when it came to flying machines she knew her business.
Bell cleared the asylum wall and followed the rail line to its connector to the New York Central line and followed the tracks to the Castleton-on-Hudson railroad station. Passing high over the main street, he saw white horses pulling fire engines and a close formation of brass horns and tubas gleaming in the sunlight.
A fire department marching band was heading up the street, leading a horde of people, in the direction of the hayfield where Josephine’s machine was being repaired. They passed a brick schoolhouse, and the doors flew open and hundreds of children streamed out to join the parade. The word had gotten around, Bell realized. The whole town was coming to welcome her, and there were more people in the parade than would fit on the field.
Bell raced the mile to the hayfield, put down on it, and ran to warn his detectives. “The whole town’s coming to greet Josephine. They let the kids out of school. We’ll be stuck here all night if we don’t go now.”
23
JOSEPHINE WAS FRANTIC, “Hurry it up!” she cried to the mechanicians.
“I’ll drive you down the road,” said Bell. “Give them a speech. Let them see you so they won’t mob the field.”
“No,” she said. “They don’t want to see me, they want to touch the machine. I saw it happen in California last year. They wrote their names on the wings and poked pencils in the fabric.”
“Their parents are coming, too.”
“The parents were worse. They were tearing off parts for souvenirs.”
“I’ll block,” said Bell.
He sent the Rolls-Royce roadster and the Thomas to try to intercept the parade on the road, a temporary solution, at best, as the excited townsp
eople would simply stream around the autos. He ran his Eagle on the ground to the head of the field to further distract them.
Small boys, who had run ahead of the parade, jumped the ditch that separated the road from the hayfield. Bell saw there would be no stopping the children, who had no concept of the danger of whirling propellers before they got in her way.
Just when it seemed they would block her path, everyone looked up.
Bell heard the unmistakably authoritative roar of a six-cylinder Curtiss. Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s bright blue headless pusher, which Bell had last seen floating in New York Harbor, sailed overhead, making a beeline for Albany.
“That man,” said Andy, “has nine lives.”
Josephine dropped the wrench and jumped aboard her Celere.
The boys stopped running and stood stock-still, staring at the sky. Two yellow monoplanes on the ground had seemed the epitome of excitement. But the sight of a flying machine actually in the air was more remarkable, and less likely than July Fourth at Christmas.
“Spin her over!” Josephine shouted.
Her Antoinette howled. The wing runners turned her around into the wind, and she raced across the cut hay and into the sky. Isaac Bell was right behind her, one step ahead of the welcoming committee.
BELL FOUND ALBANY’S ALTAMONT Fairground buzzing with rumors of sabotage. The mechanicians tending the machines in the racecourse infield were debating whether the wings of Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss Pusher had been deliberately weakened. Bell went looking for the Englishman. He found him and his wife, Abby, at a party in a yellow tent that had been pitched beside Preston Whiteway’s private railroad car.
The newspaper publisher intercepted Bell and whispered urgently, “I don’t like these rumors. Strange as it may seem, they suggest the presence of a second lunatic, someone other than Harry Frost. I want you to investigate whether there is a murderer among us, or if Frost is lashing out at everyone.”
“I’ve already started,” said Bell.
“I want constant reports, Bell. Constant reports.”
Bell glanced around for something to distract Whiteway. “Who is that handsome Frenchman talking to Josephine?”
“Frenchman? Which Frenchman?”
“The dashing one.”
Whiteway plowed through his guests to plant himself proprietorially next to Josephine and glower at the Blériot driver, Renee Chevalier, who had gotten her to smile despite her poor showing.
Bell joined Eddison-Sydney-Martin, congratulated him on his survival, and asked how his headless pusher had come to fall in the harbor.
“One of my chaps claims he found a hole drilled clean through the strut that snapped, causing the wing to collapse.”
“Sabotage?”
“Rubbish.”
“Why do you say rubbish?”
“I say it was a knothole in a timber selected poorly by the builder, though they’ll never admit to it.”
“Could I see it?”
“I’m afraid it floated off while she was extricated from the water. We lost several pieces plucking her onto the barge.”
Bell located the mechanician working on the blue pusher, an American from the Curtiss Company, who scoffed at the knot explanation.
“If it wasn’t a knot,” Bell asked, “could someone have accidentally drilled a hole and covered it over to hide the mistake?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No flying-machine maker would take the chance. They’d own up to their mistake and replace the part even if it came out of their own pocket. Look, Mr. Bell, say a house carpenter mistakenly bores a hole in a board. He can plug it up, caulk it, paint it over, and no one’s the wiser. But a flying-machine strut is a whole ’nother story. We all know that if something breaks up there, down she goes.”
“Down she went,” said Bell.
“Could have been murder. The Englishman’s darned lucky they fished him out of the drink in one piece.”
“Why do you suppose he insists it was a knothole?”
“The baronet is a babe in the woods. He can’t imagine anyone doing him harm to win the race, just like he can’t imagine a birdman wanting to win it to collect the fifty thousand bucks. He’s always saying ‘the winning is prize enough,’ at least when he’s not saying ‘the race is the prize.’ Drives the boys nuts. He’s, like, above it all, if you know what I mean, having a title and a rich wife. But the thing is, it’s not fair to Mr. Curtiss. Glenn Hammond Curtiss would never let a patch job leave the factory.”
“Was the pusher left unattended the night before the race started?”
“Along with all the others at Belmont Park. Your ‘aviatrix’ was the only one who had guards, but that’s ’cause of the husband, I hear.”
“So if neither a knothole nor a mistakenly drilled hole would ever get out of the Curtiss factory, how do you think that hole got in that broken strut?”
“Sabotage,” said the mechanician. “Like everyone says. Bore a hole where we wouldn’t see it. Where fabric lapped over it or a fitting concealed it. It happened to his Farman, too, didn’t it? And look what happened to the Platov engine. Those were sabotage, right?”
“They were sabotage,” Bell agreed.
“Excepting I don’t see what none of them smashes had to do with Josephine’s crazy husband. Do you, Mr. Bell?”
Bell pressed two dollars into the mechanician’s hand. “Here, buy the boys a drink.”
“Not ’til we reach San Francisco. We’re sleeping stone-cold sober under our pusher from now on. One man awake all night.”
Bell put his mind to the unsettling thought that of three acts of sabotage, only one could be connected to Harry Frost. Three acts of sabotage since the racers gathered at Belmont Park. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin twice a victim, Platov and poor Judd the mechanician the third.
Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s first smash had been so clearly a distraction engineered by Harry Frost to kill Josephine.
But how could he blame the second attack on Eddison-Sydney-Martin on Harry Frost? What would Frost get out of Eddison-Sydney-Martin smashing? Just as he had wondered back at Belmont, what would Harry Frost get out of Dmitri Platov’s engine jumping the track and killing a mechanician? Was Frost attacking the entire race instead of concentrating on killing his wife? That didn’t make sense at this stage. Frost was too single-minded to spread himself thin. He would concentrate on killing his wife first, a crime which, if successful, would have the collateral effect of besmirching Preston Whiteway’s race as well.
But to what purpose had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? And to what purpose had the headless pusher been made to smash?
To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the likeliest answer.
Who would gain? Three possibilities hovered in Bell’s mind, two likely, one odd but not entirely unlikely. The saboteur could be a competitor—one of the birdmen—eliminating his strongest rivals. Or the saboteur could be a gambler trying to throw the race by getting rid of front-runners. Or, oddly, it could be the race sponsor himself trying to generate publicity.
The likeliest was a competitor trying to gain an edge by eliminating his strongest rivals. Fifty thousand dollars was a huge prize, more money than a workingman would earn in a lifetime.
But the money wagered as the race progressed across the country would be even more than could be made by fixing a horse race. High rollers like Johnny Musto could rake it in.
Preston Whiteway presented a third, strange possibility. Bell could not forget that the publisher had stated unabashedly that the best thing that could happen to keep people excited about the race would be half the male contestants smashing to the ground before Chicago. “A natural winnowing of the field,” as he had put it coldly, “will turn it into a contest that pits only the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine.”
Too far-fetched? But was Preston Whiteway above engineering aeroplane smashes to sell news
papers? Truth, facts, and moral decency hadn’t stopped him from trying to start a war with Japan over the Great White Fleet. Nor had they restrained him from using the sinking of the battleship Maine to incite the Spanish-American War.
JOSEPHINE JOSEPHS FELL farther behind on the one-hundred-forty-five-mile leg from Albany to Syracuse when the hastily repaired alettone seized up, and its entire mounting had to be replaced. Then she lost half a day between Syracuse and Buffalo when the Antoinette blew a cylinder.
Isaac Bell reminded her that she was not the only competitor running into difficulty. Three aeroplanes were already out of the race. A big Voisin tangled terminally with a pasture fence, a fast Ambroise Goupy biplane broke apart when a down current dropped it into a stand of trees short of the field where it was attempting to alight, and the formidable Renee Chevalier splashed into the Erie Canal, reducing his Blériot to matchwood, and nearly drowned in the shallow water, unable to stand or swim having broken both legs.
Josephine, whom Bell had noticed had become rather standoffish ever since they left Belmont, surprised him with one of her exuberant grins that made her look much more herself. “Thanks for the thought, Isaac. I guess I should be grateful I haven’t broken any bones yet.”
Bell hired a third mechanician—a skillful Chicago boy named Eustace Weed, who had lost his job on the ruined Voisin—to keep his Eagle running. That gave Andy spare time to investigate the mechanical cause of each of the smashes, with an eye to pinning down evidence of sabotage. The meticulous policeman’s son gathered evidence carefully, and reported that since Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s smash into New York Harbor most accidents had a legitimate mechanical explanation for what went wrong. The possible exception was Chevalier’s, but key parts of his machine were on the bottom of the Erie Canal.
Bell followed up by questioning the mechanicians. Who was near the machine? Who was in your hangar car? Any strangers? None they remembered. Sometimes the mechanicians found evidence to show the Van Dorns—a broken strut, a crushed fuel line, a kinked stay wire—sometimes there was none.
Preston Whiteway kept railing at Bell that there was “a murderer among us.” Bell kept his counsel, knowing that Whiteway could be him—not a murderer in the strictest sense but a cold-blooded saboteur with little regard for the fate of the drivers when they smashed.