Bell shoved the long-barreled Colt in his desk drawer. His hand flickered to his hat and descended holding his two-shot derringer. “Stick this in your pocket.”
“That’s O.K., Mr. Bell,” Dashwood grinned. He flexed his wrist in a jerky motion that caused a shiny new derringer to spit from his sleeve into his fingers.
Isaac Bell was impressed. “Pretty slick, Dash. Nice little gun, too.”
“Birthday present.”
“From your mother, I presume?”
“No, I met a girl who plays cards. Picked up the habit from her father. He plays cards, too.”
Bell nodded, glad the altar boy was stepping out. “Meet me back here when you’re done with Musto,” he said, and went looking for Dmitri Platov.
He found the Russian strolling down the ramp from Joe Mudd’s hangar car, wiping grease from his fingers with a gasoline-soaked rag.
“Good evening, Mr. Platov.”
“Good evening, Mr. Bell. Is hot in Peoria.”
“May I ask, sir, did you sell a thermo engine in Paris?”
Platov smiled. “May I asking why you asking?”
“I understand that an Italian flying-machine inventor named Prestogiacomo may have bought some sort of a ‘jet’ engine at the Paris air meet.”
“Not from me.”
“He might have been using a different name. He might have called himself Celere.”
“Again, not buying from me.”
“Did you ever meet Prestogiacomo?”
“No. In fact, I am never hearing of Prestogiacomo.”
“He must have made something of a splash. He sold a monoplane to the Italian Army.”
“I am not knowing Italians. Except one.”
“Marco Celere?”
“I am not knowing Celere.”
“But you know who I mean?”
“Of course, the Italian making Josephine’s machine and the big one I am working for Steve Stevens.”
Bell shifted gears deliberately. “What do you think of the Stevens machine?”
“It would not be fair for me discussing it.”
“Why not?”
“As you working for Josephine.”
“I protect Josephine. I don’t work for her. I only ask if you can tell me anything that might help me protect her.”
“I am not seeing what Stevens’s machine is doing with that.”
Bell changed tactics again, asking, “Did you ever encounter a Russian in Paris named Sikorsky?”
A huge smile separated Platov’s mutton-chop whiskers. “Countryman genius.”
“I understand vibration is a serious problem with more than one motor. Might Sikorsky want your thermo engine for his machines?”
“Maybe one day. Are excusing me, please? Duty calling.”
“Of course. Sorry to take so much of your time . . . Oh, Mr. Platov? May I ask one other question?”
“Yes?”
“Who was the one Italian you did know in Paris?”
“The professor. Di Vecchio. Great man. Not practical man, but great ideas. Couldn’t make real, but great ideas.”
“My Di Vecchio monoplane is a highflier,” said Bell, wondering why Danielle said she didn’t know of Platov. “I would call it an idea made real.”
Platov shrugged enigmatically.
“Did you know Di Vecchio well?”
“Not at all. Only listening to lecture.” Suddenly he looked around, as if confirming they were alone, and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial mutter. “About Stevens’s two-motor biplane? You are correct. Two-motor vibrations very rattling. Shaking to pieces. Excusing now, please.”
Isaac Bell watched the Russian parade across the infield, bowing to the ladies and kissing their hands. Platov, the tall detective thought, you are smoother than your thermo engine.
And he found it impossible to believe that the ladies’ man never introduced himself to Professor Di Vecchio’s beautiful daughter.
BELL CONTINUED STUDYING his topographic maps to pinpoint where Frost might attack. Dash returned, reporting he had spotted Johnny Musto, buying drinks for newspaper reporters.
“No law against that,” Bell observed. “Bookies live on information. Like detectives.”
“Yes, Mr. Bell. But I followed him back to the rail yard and saw him slipping the same reporters rolls of cash.”
“What do you make of it?”
“If he’s bribing them, what I can’t figure out is what they would do for him in return for the money.”
“I doubt he wants his name in the papers,” said Bell.
“Then what does he want?”
“Show me where he is.”
Dash pointed the way, saying, “There’s a boxcar over by the river where the fellows are shooting dice. Musto’s taking bets.”
“Stick close enough to hear, but don’t let him see you with me.”
Bell smelled the Brooklyn gambler before he heard him when a powerful scent of gardenia penetrated the thicker odors of railroad ties and locomotive smoke. Then he heard his hoarsely whispered “Bets, gentlemen. Place your bets.”
Bell rounded the solitary boxcar in a dark corner of the yard.
A marble-eyed thug nudged Musto.
“Why, if it ain’t one of my best customers. Never too late to increase your investment, sir. How much shall we add to yer three thousand on Miss Josephine? Gotta warn youse, though, de odds is shifting. The goil commands fifteen-to-one, since some bettors are notin’ that she’s pullin’ up on Stevens.”
Bell’s smile was more affable than his voice. “I’m a bettor who’s wondering if gamblers are conspiring to throw the race.”
“Me?”
“We’re a long way from Brooklyn, Johnny. What are you doing here?”
Musto objected mightily. “I don’t have to throw no race. Win, lose, draw, all de same to me. Youse a bettin’ man, Mr. Bell. And a man of the woild, if I don’t mistake youse. Youse know the bookie never loses.”
“Not so,” said Bell. “Sometimes bookies do lose.”
Musto exchanged astonished glances with his bodyguards. “Yeah? When?”
“When they get greedy.”
“What do youse mean by dat? Who’s greedy?”
“You’re bribing newspaper reporters.”
“Dat’s ridiculous. What could dos poor hack writers do for me?”
“Tout one flying machine over another to millions of readers placing bets,” said Isaac Bell. “In other words, skew the odds.”
“Oh yeah? And what machine would I happen to be toutin’?”
“Same one you’ve been touting all along: Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless pusher.”
“The Coitus is a flying machine of real class,” Musto protested. “It don’t need no help from Johnny Musto.”
“But it’s getting a lot of help from Johnny Musto regardless.”
“Hey, it’s not like I’m fixin’ the race. I’m passin’ out information. A public service, youse might call it.”
“I would call that a confession.”
“You can’t prove nothin’.”
Isaac Bell’s smile had vanished. He fixed the gambler with a cold eye. “I believe you know Harry Warren?”
“Harry Warren?” Johnny Musto stroked his double chin. “Harry Warren? Harry Warren? Lemme think. Oh yeah! Ain’t he de New York Van Dorn who spies on the gangs?”
“Harry Warren is going to wire me in two days that you reported to him at Van Dorn headquarters at the Knickerbocker Hotel at Forty-second Street and Broadway in New York City. If he doesn’t, I’m coming after you—personally—with all four feet.”
Musto’s bodyguards glowered.
Bell ignored them. “Johnny, I want you to pass the word: betting fair and square on the race is fine with me, throwing it is not.”
“Not my fault what other gamblers do.”
“Pass the word.”
“What good’ll that do youse?”
“They can’t say they weren’t warned. Have a pleasant
journey home.”
Musto looked sad. “How’m I goin’ ta get back ta New York in two days?”
Isaac tugged his heavy gold watch chain from his vest pocket, opened the lid, and showed Musto the time. “Run quick and you can catch the milk train to Chicago.”
“Johnny Musto don’t ride no milk train.”
“When you get to Chicago, treat yourself to the Twentieth Century Limited.”
“What about da race?”
“Two days. New York.”
The gambler and his bodyguards hurried off, muttering indignantly.
James Dashwood climbed down from his listening post on the roof of the boxcar.
Bell winked. “There’s one out of the way. But he’s not the only high-rolling tinhorn following the race, so I want you to keep an eye on the others. You’re authorized to place just enough bets to make your presence welcome.”
“Do you think Musto will show up again?” Dash asked.
“He’s not stupid. Unfortunately, the damage is done.”
“How do you mean, Mr. Bell?”
“The reporters he bribed have already wired their stories. If, as I suspect, there’s a saboteur trying to derail the front-runners, then bookie Musto has put Eddison-Sydney-Martin in his crosshairs.”
29
ILLINOIS THUNDERSTORMS STRUCK AGAIN, cutting the race in half. The trailing fliers, those who had gotten a late start from Peoria due to mechanic failures and mistakes made by tiring birdmen, put down in Springfield. But the leaders, Steve Stevens and Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin, defied the black clouds towering in the west and forged on, hoping to reach the racetrack at Columbia before the storms blew them out of the sky.
Josephine, midway between the leaders and the trailers, pushed ahead. Isaac Bell stuck with her, eyes raking the ground for Harry Frost.
The leaders’ support trains steamed along with them, then shoveled on the coal to race ahead to greet them at the track with canvas shrouds to protect the aeroplanes from the rain and tent stakes and ropes to anchor them against the wind.
Marco Celere played his kind and helpful Dmitri Platov role to the hilt, directing Steve Stevens’s huge retinue of mechanicians, assistants, and servants in the securing of the big white biplane. Then he scooped up three oilskin slickers and ran to help tie down Josephine’s and Bell’s machines as they dropped from a sky suddenly seared by bolts of lightning.
The twin yellow monoplanes bounced to a stop seconds ahead of a downpour.
Celere tossed a slicker to Josephine and another to Bell, who said, “Thanks, Platov,” then shouted, “Come on, Josephine. The boys’ll tie it down.” He threw a long arm over her shoulder and dragged her away, saying to Platov, “Imagine reporting to Mr. Van Dorn that America’s Sweetheart of the Air got struck by lightning.”
“Here helping, not worrying.” Platov pulled on his own slicker. Enormous raindrops started kicking up dust. For a moment they sizzled in the blazing heat. Then the sky turned black as night, and an icy wind blasted rain across the infield. The last of the spectators ran to the hotel attached to the grandstand.
Bell’s men—Andy Moser and his helpers—dragged canvas over the Eagle.
Eustace Weed, the new mechanician Bell had hired in Buffalo, said, “That’s O.K., Mr. Platov. We’ve got it.”
Celere ran to help Josephine’s ham-handed detective-mechanicians tie down hers and he was reminded how frustrating it was not to be able to work on Josephine’s aeroplane—his aeroplane—to keep it flying at its best. Josephine was good, but not that good. He may be a truffatore confidence man, but if there was one skill he truly possessed, he was a fine mechanician.
Celere waited until the machines were covered and tied down and he was sure that Isaac Bell was not coming back from escorting Josephine to her private car. Then he ran through the pouring rain to where Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless pusher was tied down. He made a show of checking the ropes, though it was not likely anyone could see him through the dark and watery haze. The baronet and his mechanicians had fled to their train. It was an opportunity to do mischief. But he had to work fast and do something unexpected.
Thunder pealed. Lightning struck the grandstand roof, and green Saint Elmo’s fire trickled along the gutters and down the leaders. The next bolt struck in the center of the infield, and Marco Celere began to see the wisdom of Bell’s retreat from Mother Nature. He ran for the nearest cover, a temporary wooden shed erected to supply the flying machines with gasoline, oil, and water.
Someone was sheltering in it ahead of him. Too late to turn away, he saw that it was the Englishman Lionel Ruggs, the baronet’s chief mechanician and the chief reason why he had steered clear of the headless pusher, other than surreptitiously drilling a hole in its wing strut back at Belmont Park.
“Whatcha doin’ to the guv’s machine?”
“Just checking its ropes.”
“Spent a long time checkin’ ropes.”
Celere ducked his head as if he were embarrassed. “O.K., you are catching me. I was looking at competition.”
“Lookin’ or doin’?” Ruggs asked coldly.
“Doing? What would I be doing?”
Lionel Ruggs stepped very close to him. He was taller than Celere, and bigger in the chest. He stared inquiringly into Celere’s eyes. Then he cracked a mirthless smile.
“Jimmy Quick. I thought that was you hidin’ in those curls.”
Marco Celere knew there was no denying it. Ruggs had him dead to rights. It had been fifteen years, but they’d worked side by side in the same machine shop from ages fourteen to eighteen and shared a room under the eaves of the owner’s house. Celere had always feared that he would bump into his past sooner or later. How many flying-machine mechanicians were there in the small, tight-knit new world of flying machines?
Jimmy Quick had been his English nickname, a good-natured play on Prestogiacomo that the English found so hard to pronounce. He had recognized Ruggs from a distance and stayed out of his way. Now he had stumbled, face-to-face, into him in a thunderstorm.
“What’s this Russian getup?” Ruggs demanded. “I bet you been caught stealin’ somethin’, like you was in Birmingham. Doin’ the old man’s daughter was one thing—more power to you—but stealin’ his machine tool design he worked on his whole life, that was low. That old man treated us good.”
Celere looked around. They were alone. No one was near the shed. He said, “The old man’s dream didn’t quite work. It was a bust.”
Ruggs turned red. “A bust because you stole it before he perfected it . . . It was you, wasn’t it, drilled our wing strut?”
“Not me.”
“I don’t believe you, Jimmy.”
“I don’t care if you believe me or not.”
Lionel Ruggs pounded his chest. “I care. The guv’s a good man. He may be an aristocrat, but he’s a good man, and he deserves to win, fair and square. He don’t deserve to die in a smash caused by a schemin’ little bludger like you.”
Marco Celere looked around again and confirmed they were still alone. The rain was coming down harder, pounding the tin roof. He couldn’t see six feet from the shed. He said, “You’re forgetting I make machine tools.”
“How could I forget that? That’s what the old man taught us to do. Gave us a roof over our heads. Gave us breakfast, lunch, and tea. Gave us a good-paying trade. You paid him back by stealin’ his dream. And you ruined it ’cause you were too damned lazy and impatient to make it right.”
Celere reached under his slicker and took a slide rule from his coat. “Do you know what this is?”
“It’s the slide rule you wave around with your disguise.”
“Do you believe that my slide rule is only a slide rule?”
“I seen you wavin’ it around. What of it?”
“Let me show you.”
Celere raised the instrument to the thin light in the open door. Ruggs followed it with his eyes, and Celere whipped it back toward him like a violin bow. Ruggs gasped and c
lutched his throat, trying to hold in the blood.
“This one’s a razor, not the one ‘Dmitri Platov’ waves around. A razor—just in case—and you are the case.”
Ruggs went bug-eyed. He let go his throat and grabbed Celere. But there was no strength left in his hand, and he collapsed, spraying blood on the Italian.
Celere watched him dying at his feet. It was only the second time he had killed a man and it did not get easier, even if the effect was worthwhile. His hands were shaking, and he felt panic flood his body and threaten to squeeze his brain into a lump that could not think or act. He had to run. There was no place to get rid of the body, no place to hide it. The rain would stop, and he would be caught. He tried to form a picture of running. The rain would wash the blood that sprayed all over his slicker. But they would still chase him. He looked at the razor, and he suddenly pictured it cutting cloth.
Swiftly, he knelt and slashed at Ruggs’s pockets, taking from them coin and a roll of paper money and a leather wallet with more paper money in it. He stuffed them in his pockets, slashed Ruggs’s vest, and took his cheap nickel pocket watch. He looked over the body, saw gold, and took Ruggs’s wedding ring. Then he ran into the rain.
There was no time for sabotage. If by a miracle he got away with murder, he would come back and try again.
ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES from Columbia, Illinois, but still short of the Mississippi River, the westbound passenger train slowed down and pulled onto a siding. Marco Celere prayed they were only stopping for water. In his panicked run, he had clung to a groundless hope that if he could somehow get across the Mississippi, they couldn’t catch him. Praying it was only a water siding, he pressed his face to the window and craned his neck for a view of the jerkwater tank. But why would they stop so close to the next town?
Two businessmen seated across the aisle of the luxurious extra-fare chair car that Celere had reckoned would be safer to flee in rather than an ordinary day coach seemed to be staring at him. There was a commotion at the vestibule. Celere fully expected to see a burly sheriff with a tin star on his coat and a pistol in his hand.