The Race

  As the racers struggled west, smashes grew increasingly common. Machines faltered, winds sprang up with no warning, and birdmen made mistakes. Others suffered breakdowns that added hours to their time. Joe Mudd’s sturdy red Liberator was leaking so much oil that the entire front of the machine turned black. Then it nearly killed him when the oil caught fire over Buffalo. Mudd was luckier than Chet Bass. Bass’s Army Signal Corps Wright Flyer skidded sideways on landing at Erie, Pennsylvania, throwing him thirty feet across the grass.

  Bell listened closely to the heated discussions that followed. The fact Bass would lose two days in the hospital with a brain concussion prompted the birdmen and mechanicians to debate the value of installing belts to keep the drivers from falling off their machines. An Austrian aristocrat flying a Pischof monoplane ridiculed the “cowardly” idea of strapping in with a belt. Many agreed that belting on would be unmanly. But Billy Thomas, the race-car driver who had proven his bravery repeatedly on the raceways before learning how to fly the Vanderbilt syndicate’s big Curtiss Twin Pusher, announced that the Austrian could go to hell, he would wear a belt.

  The day he did, a Great Lakes gale blew his Curtiss against a railroad semaphore mast atop a signal tower on a depot building. The Curtiss ricocheted into twenty strands of telegraph wire and bounced back through the second-floor windows of the signal tower.

  Billy Thomas’s belt kept him in the wreckage, but he was nearly cut in half by the force of the sudden stop against the rigid leather. Internal organs ruptured, he was out of the race.

  Discussion that night at the Cleveland Fairgrounds shifted toward the concept of elastic belts. Mechanicians got busy tinkering with the thick rubber bands already on hand to spring the aeroplanes’ wheels.

  The Austrian aristocrat still scoffed. The next day, a gust heeled his Pischof sharply, and he fell off the monoplane a thousand feet over Toledo, Ohio.

  At the funeral, Eddison-Sydney-Martin announced that his wife insisted “vehemently” that he be strapped onto his aeroplane, wearing a broad belt fashioned from a horse sling.

  Josephine’s and Isaac Bell’s similar craft had them seated deeper within the fuselage, making falling off slightly less likely. Josephine ignored Preston Whiteway’s pleas that she wear a belt. Having survived a smash in a burning biplane, she explained, she was afraid of being trapped.

  Isaac Bell, at Marion Morgan’s suggestion, instructed Andy to anchor a wide motorcyclist’s belt to the Eagle with rubber bands. Sheathed next to one of the bands was a razor-sharp hunting knife.

  NOTHING WAS HEARD NOR SEEN of Harry Frost since he escaped from Isaac Bell under the Weehawken piers. Bell suspected that Frost was waiting for the race to reach Chicago. Chicago was where he had begun his meteoric rise to the criminal pinnacle from which he had launched his legitimate fortune. In no other city on the continent was Frost better established with gang associates and corrupt politicians. In no other city had he so deeply infiltrated the police.

  Try it, Bell thought grimly. The Van Dorn Detective Agency had started in Chicago, too. They, too, knew the city cold. When the race was stopped in Gary, Indiana, by lakeshore storms that the Weather Bureau predicted would last for days, he went ahead by train to scout the city.

  “We’ll beat him if he tries it here,” Bell vowed to Joseph Van Dorn while conferring by long-distance telephone from the agency’s Palmer House Chicago headquarters.

  Van Dorn, who was in Washington, reminded Bell that he had promised to keep a clear head.

  Bell changed the subject to sabotage. Van Dorn listened closely, then observed, “The weakness of that line of inquiry is that flying machines are perfectly capable of smashing without help from miscreants.”

  “Except,” Bell retorted, “in the cases of Eddison-Sydney-Martin and Renee Chevalier, and even Chet Bass, it’s the frontrunners who are smashing. Soon as a fellow pulls ahead of the pack, something goes wrong.”

  “Steve Stevens hasn’t smashed yet. I read here in the Washington Post that Stevens holds the lead.”

  “Josephine is catching up.”

  “How much have you bet on her?”

  “Enough to buy my own detective agency if I win,” Bell answered darkly.

  In fact, the newspapers were starting to take notice that a birdman heavier than the rotund President Taft was flying faster than five men who tipped the scales at half his weight and a woman who barely weighed a third.

  “According to the Post,” Van Dorn chuckled, “the dark horse is the heaviest horse.”

  Bell had seen similar headlines in Cleveland.

  SEVEN DAYS FROM NEW YORK TO CHICAGO?

  the Plain Dealer speculated breathlessly, before the weather gods put the brakes on overoptimism.

  MIRACLE FLIGHT. HEAVYWEIGHT COTTON FARMER STILL IN LEAD.

  “You’ve got to hand it to Whiteway,” Van Dorn said. “He’s pulling a regular P. T. Barnum. The whole country’s talking about the race. Now that the other papers have no choice but to cover it, they’re backing favorites and smearing rivals. And everyone’s got an opinion. The sportswriters say that Josephine couldn’t possibly win because women have no endurance.”

  “The bookmakers agree with them.”

  “Republican papers say that labor should not rise above its station, much less fly. Socialist papers demand aristocrats stay on the ground, as the air belongs to all. They’re all calling your friend Eddison-Sydney-Martin the ‘lucky British cat’ for his nine-lives habit of surviving smashes.”

  “As Whiteway told us, they love the underdog.”

  “I’ll grab a train,” said Van Dorn. “I’ll catch up in Chicago. Meantime, Isaac, keep in mind, sabotage or no, our first job is protecting Josephine.”

  “I’m going back to Gary. The weather ought to break soon.”

  Bell rang off with much to ponder. While keeping the clear head he promised, he could not ignore the evidence that more was afoot than Harry Frost’s murderous attacks on Josephine. Something else was going on, something perhaps bigger, more complicated, than one angry man trying to kill his wife. There was a second job to do, another crime to solve, before it wrecked the race. Not only did he have to stop Harry Frost, he had to solve a crime that he did not yet know what it was, or would be.

  24

  ISAAC BELL WIRED DASHWOOD IN SAN FRANCISCO, repeating his earlier order to investigate Di Vecchio’s suicide. In addition, he wanted to know what Marco Celere had done when he first arrived from Italy.

  His telegraph caught Dashwood at a rare moment when the dogged young investigator was not out in the field. Dashwood wired back immediately.

  APOLOGIZE DELAY. DI VECCHIO SUICIDE COMPLICATED.

  MARCO CELERE ARRIVED SAN FRANCISCO. TRANSLATOR FOR

  ROMAN NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT TOURING CALIFORNIA.

  Isaac Bell read the telegram twice.

  “Translator?”

  Josephine told him it had been difficult to communicate with Marco Celere. She couldn’t understand his accent.

  Miss Josephine? Bell smiled to himself. What are you up to? Were you trying to throw off suspicion about cheating on Harry Frost? Were you assuring your new benefactor Preston Whiteway and his censorious mother that your heart was pure? Or were you covering for Marco Celere?

  WHEN DETECTIVE JAMES DASHWOOD heard the opening notes of the opera aria “Celeste Aida” pierce the fog on San Francisco Bay, he told the nuns he had brought with him, “They’re coming.”

  “Why are the fishermen singing Verdi?” asked Mother Superior, gripping tightly the arm of a beautiful young novitiate who spoke Italian.

  Dashwood had led them onto the new Fisherman’s Wharf, where they were surrounded by water they could not see. The cold murk coiled around them, chilling their lungs and wetting their cheeks.

  “The fishermen sing to identify their boats in the fog,” the slim, boyish Dashwood answered. “So I am told, though I personally have a theory that they navigate by listening to their voices echo from the shore.”

>   Finding an Italian translator in San Francisco had not been difficult. The city was filled with Italian immigrants fleeing their poor and crowded homeland. But finding one that clannish, frightened old-world fishermen would talk to had thus far been impossible. Schoolteachers, olive oil and cheese importers, even a fellow from the chocolate factory next to the wharf, had encountered a wall of silence. This time would be different, Dashwood hoped. It had taken a warm introduction from the abbot of a wealthy monastery down the coast with whom he had dealings in the course of the Wrecker investigation, plus his own promise of an extortionate contribution to the convent’s poor box, to persuade Mother Superior to bring the girl to Fisherman’s Wharf to translate his questions and the fishermen’s answers.

  The singing grew louder. Ship horns resonated deep bass counterpoint, and tug whistles piped, as unseen vessels made their cautious way about the invisible harbor. The fog thinned and thickened in shifting patches. The long black hull of a four-masted ship materialized suddenly and just as suddenly disappeared. A tall steamer passed, transparent as a ghost, and vanished. A tiny green boat under a lateen sail took form.

  “Here they come,” said Dashwood. “Pietro and Giuseppe.”

  “Which has one arm?” asked Mother Superior.

  “Giuseppe. He lost it to a shark, I was told. Or a devilfish.”

  The beautiful Maria made the sign of the cross. Dashwood said soothingly, “That’s what they call the octopus.”

  Giuseppe scowled when he saw the detective who had visited Fisherman’s Wharf so often, some thought he was buying fish for a wholesaler. But when his sea-crinkled eyes fell on the nuns’ black habits, he crossed himself and nudged Pietro, who was preparing to throw a line around a cleat, and Pietro crossed himself, too.

  Better, thought Dashwood. At least they weren’t throwing fish heads at him, which was how his previous visit had ended.

  “What do you want Maria to inquire of them?” Mother Superior asked.

  “First, is it true they overheard an argument in the street outside their rooming house between two inventors of flying machines?”

  “And if they did?”

  “Oh, they did, for sure. The trick will be to convince them that I mean no harm and am merely trying to right a wrong, and that it has nothing to do with them nor will it cause them any trouble.”

  Mother Superior—a straight-talking Irishwoman who had led her convent through the recent earthquake and fires and taken in refugees like Maria from displaced orders whose motherhouses had tumbled down—said, “Maria will have her hands full convincing them of half that, Detective Dashwood.”

  AFTER WAITING OUT THREE DAYS of wind and rain in a muddy Gary, Indiana, fairground, the Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race took to the air in hopes of reaching Chicago’s Illinois National Guard Armory ahead of another storm. In the bleachers erected along the broad avenue that served as the armory’s parade ground, the impatient spectators were read a telegraph message that said thunder and lightning had driven the aviators back to the ground at Hammond.

  The National Guard’s fifty-piece brass marching band played to soothe the crowd. Then local aviators took to the air in early-model Wright Fliers to entertain them by attempting to drop plaster “bombs” on a “battleship” drawn in chalk in the middle of the avenue. The cobblestones were splotched with broken plaster when, finally, another message echoed from the megaphone.

  The sky over Hammond had cleared. The racers were off the ground again.

  An hour later, a shout went up.

  “They’re here!”

  All eyes fixed on the sky.

  One by one, the flying machines straggled in. Steve Stevens’s white biplane was in the lead. It circled the parapet of the fortress-like armory, descended to the broad avenue, and bounced along the cobbles, its twin propellers blowing clouds of plaster dust. A company of soldiers in dress uniforms saluted, and an honor guard presented arms.

  TWO VAN DORN PROTECTIVE SERVICES operators guarding the roof of the armory were leaning in the notches of the parapet, gazing at the sky. Behind them, a broad-shouldered, heavyset figure emerged silently from the penthouse that covered the stairs, circled a skylight and another penthouse that enclosed the elevator machinery, and crept close.

  “If I were Harry Frost coming up the stairs I just climbed,” his voice grated like a coal chute, “you boyos would be dead men.”

  The PS operators whirled around to see “Himself,” the grim-visaged Mr. Joseph Van Dorn.

  “And the murdering swine would be free to kill the lady birdman the agency is being paid good money to protect.”

  “Sorry, Mr. Van Dorn.” Milago ducked his head contritely.

  Lewis had an excuse. “We thought the National Guard soldiers guarded their own stairs.”

  “The Sunday soldiers of the National Guard,” the livid Van Dorn growled sarcastically, “emerge from their mamas’ homes to defend the city of Chicago against rioting labor strikers and foreign invaders from Canada. They wouldn’t recognize Harry Frost if they met him in an alley. Nor would they know how to conduct their business in an alley. That’s why you’re here.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Van Dorn,” they chorused.

  “Do you have your posters?”

  They whipped out Harry Frost wanted posters, with and without a beard.

  “Do you have your pistols?”

  They opened their coats to show holstered revolvers.

  “Stay sharp. Watch the stairs.”

  DOWN ON THE PARADE GROUND, Marco Celere—disguised as Dmitri Platov—stood shoulder to shoulder with the mechanicians who had come ahead on their support trains. The mechanicians were anxiously scanning the sky for signs of more bad weather.

  Celere clapped enthusiastically when Steve Stevens landed first—the least Platov would be expected to do. But all the while that he was smiling and clapping, he imagined fleets of flying machines mowing down the soldiers with machine guns and demolishing their red brick armory by raining dynamite from the sky.

  25

  THE SLAUGHTER FROM THE HEAVENS that Marco Celere dreamed of would demand flying machines not yet built. Such warships of the sky would have two or three, even four, motors on enormous wings and carry many bombs for long distances. Smaller, nimble escort machines would protect them from counterattack.

  Celere was fully aware that his was not a new idea. Visionary artists and cold-blooded soldiers had long imagined speedy airships capable of carrying many passengers, or many bombs. But other men’s ideas were his lifeblood. He was a sponge, as Danielle Di Vecchio had screamed at him. A thief and a sponge.

  So what if Dmitri Platov, the fictional Russian aeroplane mechanician, machinist, and thermo engine designer, was his only original invention? An Italian proverb said it all: Necessity is the mother of invention. Marco Celere needed to destroy his competitors’ flying machines to guarantee that Josephine won the race with his machine. Who better to sabotage them than helpful, kindly “Platov”?

  Celere was truly an expert toolmaker, with a peculiar talent for picturing the finished product at the outset. The gift had set him above common machinists and mechanicians when he apprenticed at age twelve in a Birmingham machine shop—a position that his father, an immigrant restaurant waiter, had procured by seducing the owner’s wife. When metal stock was put on a lathe to be turned into parts, the other boys saw a solid block of metal. But Marco could visualize the finished part even before the stock started spinning. It was as if he could see what waited inside. Releasing the part waiting inside was a simple matter of chiseling away the excess.

  It worked in life, too. He had seen inside Di Vecchio’s first monoplane a vision of Marco Celere himself winning contracts to build warplanes to defeat Italy’s archenemy, Turkey, and seize the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s colonies in North Africa.

  Soon after the machine he copied had smashed, he saw vindication “waiting inside” a luxurious special train that rolled into San Francisco’s First Californi
a Aerial Meet. Off stepped Harry Frost and his child bride. The fabulously wealthy couple—the heavy bomber and the nimble escort—richer by far than the King of Italy—had given him a second chance to sell futuritial war machines.

  Josephine, desperate to fly aeroplanes and starved for affection, was seduced without difficulty. Remarkably observant, decisive, and brave in the air, she was easily led down on earth, where decisiveness turned impulsive, and where she seemed curiously unable to predict the consequences of her actions.

  Along had come the Whiteway Cup Cross-Country Air Race to prove his aeroplanes were the best. They had to be. He had copied only the best. He had no doubt that Josephine would win with her flying skill and with him sabotaging the competition. Winning would vindicate him in the eyes of the Italian Army. Past smashes would be forgotten when his warplanes vanquished Turkey, and Italy took Turkey’s colonies in North Africa.

  Two yellow specks appeared in the distance: Josephine, with Isaac Bell right behind and above, following like a shepherd. The crowd began cheering “Josephine! Josephine!” Whiteway was a genius, Celere thought. They truly loved their Sweetheart of the Air. When she won the cup, everyone in the world would know her name. And every general in the world would know whose flying machine had carried her to victory.

  If Steve Stevens managed to finish, all the better—Celere would sell the Army heavy bombers as well as nimble escorts. But that was a very big if. Uncontrollable vibration, due to a failure to synchronize the twin engines, was shaking it to pieces. If Stevens smashed before he finished, Celere could blame it on the farmer’s weight and poor flying. He had to admit that, by now, young Igor Sikorsky would have solved the vibration problem, but it was beyond Celere’s talents. And it was too late in the game to steal those ideas even if Sikorsky were here instead of in Russia. If only the thermo engine he had bought in Paris had worked out, but that, too, had been beyond his talents.