Less happy news was contained in a long telegram from Research:
PLATOV UNMET UNSEEN UNKNOWN,
Grady Forrer had begun, confessing his failure to turn up anything about the Russian inventor Dmitri Platov beyond the reports from Belmont Park. The head of the Van Dorn Research Department added an intriguing slant that deepened the mystery:
THERMO ENGINE DEMONSTRATED AT PARIS INTERNATIONAL AERONAUTICAL SALON BY AUSTRALIAN INVENTOR/SHEEP DROVER ROB CONNOLLY.
NOT PLATOV.
AUSTRALIAN SOLD ENGINE AND WENT HOME.
CURRENTLY INCOMMUNICADO OUTBACK.
THERMO ENGINE BUYER UNKNOWN.
??? POSSIBLY PLATOV ???
Isaac Bell went looking for Dmitri Platov.
He found James Dashwood, whom he had assigned to watch the Russian, staring at the back of Steve Stevens’s support train. A perplexed expression clouded his face, and he ducked his head in embarrassment when he saw the chief investigator striding purposefully straight at him.
“I surmise,” Isaac Bell said sternly, “that you lost Platov.”
“Not only Platov. His entire shop car disappeared.”
It had been the last car on Stevens’s special. Now it was gone.
“It didn’t steam off on its own.”
“No, sir. The boys told me when they woke up this morning, it was uncoupled and gone.”
Bell surveyed the siding on which the Stevens special sat. The rails pitched slightly downhill. Uncoupled, Platov’s car would have rolled away. “Can’t have gotten far.”
But a switch was open at the back end of the yard, connecting the support train siding to a feeder line that disappeared among a cluster of factories and warehouses along the river.
“Go get a handcar, James.”
Dashwood returned, pumping a lightweight track inspector’s handcar. Bell jumped on, and they started down the factory siding. Bell lent this strength to the slim Dashwood’s effort, and they were soon rolling at nearly twenty miles per hour. Rounding a bend, they saw smoke ahead, the source hidden by clapboard-sided warehouses. Around the next twist in the rail, they saw oily smoke rising into the clear blue sky.
“Faster!”
They raced between a leatherworks and an odoriferous slaughterhouse, and saw that the smoke was billowing from Platov’s shop car, which had stopped against the bumper that blocked the end of the rails. Flames were spouting from its windows, doors, and roof hatch. In the seconds it took Bell and Dashwood to reach it, the entire car was completely engulfed.
“Poor Mr. Platov,” Dashwood cried. “All his tools . . . God, I hope he’s not inside.”
“Poor Mr. Platov,” Bell repeated grimly. A shop car filled with tanks of oil and gasoline burned hot and fast.
“Lucky the car wasn’t coupled to Mr. Stevens’s special,” said Dashwood.
“Very lucky,” Bell agreed.
“What is that smell?”
“Some poor devil roasting, I’m afraid.”
“Mr. Platov?”
“Who else?” asked Bell.
Horse-drawn fire engines came bouncing over the tracks. The firemen unrolled hoses to the river and engaged their steam pump. Powerful streams of water bored into the flames but to little effect. The fire quickly consumed the wooden sides and roof and floor of the rail car until there was nothing left but a mound of ash heaped between the steel trucks and iron wheels. When it was out, the fireman found the shriveled remains of a human body, its boots and clothes burned to a crisp.
Bell poked among the wet ashes.
Something gleaming caught his eye. He picked up a one-inch square of glass framed with brass. It was still warm. He turned it over his fingers. The brass had grooves on two edges. He showed it to Dashwood. “Faber-Castell engineering slide rule . . . or what’s left of it.”
“Here comes Steve Stevens.”
The fast-flying cotton farmer waddled up, planted his hands on his hips, and glowered at the ashes.
“If this don’t beat all! Ah got a socialist red unionist creepin’ up on me. Every sentimental fool in the country is rootin’ for Josephine just ’cause she’s a gal. And now my high-paid mechanician goes and barbecues hisself. Who the heck is goin’ to keep my poor machine runnin’?”
Bell suggested, “Why don’t you ask the mechanicians Dmitri helped?”
“That’s the dumbest idea Ah ever heard. Even if that damn-fool Russian couldn’t synchronize my motors, nobody else knows how to fix my flying machine like him. Poor old machine might as well have burned up with him. He knew it inside and out. Without him, Ah’ll be lucky to make it across the New Mexico Territory.”
“It’s not a dumb idea,” said Josephine. Bell had noticed her glide up silently behind them on a bicycle she had borrowed somewhere. Stevens had not.
The startled fat man whirled around. “Where the heck did you come from? How long have you been listenin’?”
“Since you said they’re rooting for me because I’m a girl.”
“Well, darn it, it’s true, and you know it’s true.”
Josephine stared into the smoldering ruins of Platov’s shop car. “But Isaac is right. With Dmitri . . . gone . . . you need help.”
“Ah’ll get on fine. Don’t count me out ’cause I lost one mechanician.”
Josephine shook her head. “Mr. Stevens, I have ears. I hear those motors chewing your machine to bits every time you take to the air. Do you want me to have a look at them?”
“Well, Ah’m not sure—”
Bell interrupted. “I’ll ask Andy Moser if he would look them over with Josephine.”
“In case you think I’m going to sabotage your machine when you’re not looking,” Josephine grinned at Stevens.
“Ah didn’t say that.”
“You were thinking it. Let me and Andy lend you a hand.” Her grin got wider, and she teased, “Isaac will tell Andy to watch me like a hawk, so I don’t ‘accidentally’ bust anything.”
“All right, all right. Can’t hurt to have a look.”
Josephine pedaled back toward the rail yard.
“Hop on,” Bell told Stevens, and pumped the handcar after her. Stevens was silent until after they passed the slaughterhouse and the factories. Then he said, “’Preciate yer tryin’ to help, Bell.”
“Appreciate Josephine.”
“She took me by surprise.”
“I think it’s dawning on both of you that you’re all in this together.”
“Now you sound like that fool Red.”
“Mudd is in with you, too,” said Bell.
“Damned unionist.”
But the best intentions could not overcome the stress of running rough for three thousand miles. Josephine and Andy tried their wizardry on Stevens’s two motors all afternoon before they admitted defeat.
Josephine took Bell aside and spoke urgently: “I doubt Stevens will listen to me, but maybe if he hears it from Andy he might listen.”
“Listen to what?”
“That machine will never make it to San Francisco. If he tries to force it, it’ll kill him.”
Bell beckoned Andy. Andy said, “Best I could do was synchronize’em for a few minutes before they started running haywire again. But even if we could keep ’em synchronized, the motors are shot. He won’t make it over the mountains.”
“Tell him.”
“Would you come with me, Mr. Bell? In case he gets mad.”
Bell stood by as Andy explained the situation to Steve Stevens.
Stevens planted his hands on his hips and turned red in the face.
Andy said, “I’m real sorry, Mr. Stevens. But I’m just telling you what’s true. Those motors will kill you.”
Stevens said, “Boy, there is no way Ah’m goin’ home to Mississippi with my tail between my legs. Ah’m goin’ home with the Whiteway Cup or Ah ain’t goin’.” He looked at Bell. “Go ahead, speak your piece. You think Ah’m crazy.”
“I think,” said Bell, “there’s a difference between bravery and
foolishness.”
“And now you’re goin’ to tell me what that difference is?”
“I won’t do that for another man,” said Bell.
Stevens stared at his big white biplane.
“Was you ever fat, Bell, when you was a little boy?”
“Not that I recall.”
“You would,” Stevens chuckled bleakly. “It’s not somethin’ you’d ever forget . . . Ah been a fat man my whole life. And a fat boy before that.”
He walked in front of the biplane, trailed a plump hand over the taut fabric and stroked one of the big propellers.
“My daddy used to tell me no one will ever love a fat man. Turned out, he was right as rain . . .” Stevens swallowed hard. “Ah know damned well when Ah go home, they still won’t love me. But they’re sure as hell goin’ to respect me.”
36
JOSEPHINE WAS SPOOKED BY THE MOUNTAIN AIR. It felt thin, particularly in the hottest part of the day, and not as strong as she was used to even at speed. She watched her barometer, hardly believing her eyes, as she circled in the bluest sky she had ever seen, trying to work on altitude above the railroad city of Deming, New Mexico Territory. The makeshift altimeter seemed stuck. She tapped it hard with her finger, but the needle didn’t move. When she looked down, the Union Depot and its Harvey’s Restaurant, which sat between the parallel Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe and Southern Pacific tracks, appeared no smaller, and she realized that her machine was climbing as slowly as the instrument indicated.
Steve Stevens and Joe Mudd were far below her, and she could only wonder how they were faring. She at least had mountain experience, flying in the Adirondacks. Though, to tell the truth, it wasn’t much help when Wild West crosscurrents grabbed her wings, updrafts kicked like a mule, and the same air that knocked her down seemed unwilling to pick her up again. She looked over her shoulder. Isaac’s Eagle, on faithful station above and behind her, was bouncing up and down like it was on an elastic string.
At last she worked up to three thousand feet, gave up on any more, and headed for Lordsburg, hoping to keep climbing high enough to clear the mountains. She followed the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks and soon overtook an express train that had left Deming thirty minutes ahead of her. The locomotive was spewing smoke straight up, slowly climbing a heavy grade, clear warning that the land was still rising, and she had to climb with it.
Grim thoughts of Marco suddenly wrenched at her concentration.
She did not fear that he had actually died in Platov guise. He had warned her in Fort Worth that he would “disappear.” But when he reappeared in whatever form he conjured next time, the first question she had to ask was, who had died in the fire in his place? It was a terrible question. She could not think of an answer she could accept. Thank goodness, she had her hands full for now, trying to get over the Continental Divide, and she had to shove all of that out of her mind.
Ahead she saw the rails enter a pass between two mountain peaks. Despite the pure blue sky everywhere else, a thick cloud bank hung over the pass. It looked like someone had stuffed cotton between the mountains and railroad-tunneled through it. She had to climb even higher to stay above the clouds. If she got inside them, she would get lost and have no clue where the peaks were until she ran into one.
But hard as she tried manipulating her elevator and alettoni, and coaxing effort out of her straining Antoinette, she found herself enveloped by cold mist. Sometimes it was so thick that she couldn’t see the propeller. Then, for a moment, it thinned. She spotted the peaks, corrected her course, and braced for the next blinding. All the way, she had to coax the monoplane to climb. Again the mist thinned. She saw that she had steered to the right, not even realizing it. She corrected hastily. The cloud closed around her. She was blind again. But, at the same time, she felt something in the cloud that made the air stronger.
Suddenly she was above it all, higher than the pass, higher than the cloud, even higher than the peaks, and the sky was as blue as she had ever seen in her whole life in every direction.
“Good girl, Elsie!”
For a crazy moment, she thought she could see the Pacific Ocean. But that was still seven hundred miles ahead. She looked back. Isaac Bell was above her, and she swore that when she won the race the first dollar she would spend of the prize money would be to buy a Gnome rotary.
Farther back, Joe Mudd’s sturdy red tractor biplane was flying in circles as he patiently fought for altitude before tackling the pass. Steve Stevens soared under Mudd, passed him, and shot for the pass, using the power of his two engines to force his machine higher. It dove into the cloud bank straight in line with the railroad tracks. Josephine looked back repeatedly to see him emerge.
But instead of the white biplane suddenly boring out of the cloud, a bright red flower of fire suddenly erupted from the bank. She heard no explosion over the roar of her engine, and it took her a moment to realize what had happened. Josephine’s breath caught in her throat. Steve Stevens had smashed into the mountain. His biplane was burning, and he was dead.
Two terrible thoughts pierced her heart.
Stevens’s twin-motor speedster—Marco’s amazing big and fast heavy-lifting machine—was out of the race, leaving Joe Mudd’s slow Liberator her only competition. She hated herself for thinking that way; not only was it uncharitable and unworthy but she realized that even though she disliked Stevens, he had been part of her tiny band of cross-country aviators.
Her second terrible thought was harder to bear. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin would probably have won if Marco hadn’t caused damage to his Curtiss Pusher.
That night in Willcox, Arizona Territory, having stopped in Lordsburg only long enough for gas and oil, Josephine overheard Marion tell Isaac Bell, “Whiteway is pleased as punch.”
“He’s gotten what he wanted,” Isaac replied. “A neck and neck flying race between America’s plucky Sweetheart of the Air and a union man on a slow machine.”
EUSTACE WEED’S WORST NIGHTMARE came true in Tucson. The race was held up by a ferocious sandstorm that half buried the machines. After they got them dug out and cleaned up, Andy Moser gave him the afternoon off to shoot pool downtown. There, Eustace encountered a Yaqui Indian, who tried to take his money shooting eight-ball. The Indian was good, very good indeed, and it took Eustace Weed most of the afternoon to take the Yaqui’s money and that of his friends, who were laying side bets that the Tucson Indian would beat the kid from Chicago. When Eustace left the pool hall at suppertime, the Yaqui named him “the Chicago Kid,” and he felt like he was on top of the world until a fellow waiting on the sidewalk said, “You’re on, kid.”
“What do you mean?”
“Still got what we gave you in Chicago?”
“What?”
“Did you lose it?”
“No.”
“Let me see it.”
Reluctantly, Eustace Weed produced the little leather sack. The guy shook out the copper tube, inspected that the seals were intact, and handed it back. “We’ll be touch . . . soon.”
Eustace Weed said, “Do you understand what this will do to a flying machine?”
“You tell me.”
“It’s not like your motor quitting in your auto. He’s up in the sky.”
“That makes sense, it being a flying machine.”
“Water in the gas will stop a motor dead. If that happens when he’s way high up, the driver might be able to volplane down safely. Might. But if his motor stops dead when he’s lower down, his machine will smash, and he will die.”
“Do you understand what will happen to Daisy Ramsey if you don’t do what you’re told?”
Eustace Weed could not meet the guy’s eye. He looked down. “Yes.”
“Enough said.”
Eustace Weed said nothing.
“Understand?”
“I understand.”
37
“TEXAS” WALT HATFIELD showed up suddenly on a thundery morning in Yuma, Arizona Territory. The town sat on the
banks of the recently dammed Colorado River. Across the wide water lay California. The racers were itching to make Palm Springs by nightfall. But it was thunderstorm season in California, and the locals advised waiting a few hours for the risk of lightning strikes and torrential rains to diminish. The machines were tied down under canvas, and the support trains were still in the rail yard.
“Does Mr. Van Dorn know you’re here?” Bell asked, knowing the Texan’s penchant for bulling off on his own.
“The range boss ordered me to hightail it here and report in person.”
“You have something on Frost?”
Texas Walt shoved his J.B. back on this head. “Ran down his Thomas Flyer outside of Tuscon. How the heck he drove it that far, I don’t know. But neither hide nor hair of him or his boys. I had a strong inkling they caught a train. Found out yesterday they rode out in style, having reserved a stateroom on the Limited.”
“Which way?”
“California.”
“So why did Mr. Van Dorn send you here?”
Texas Walt grinned, a blaze of startling white teeth in a stern countenance as sun-browned as a saddle. “’Cause he had every reason to. Isaac, old son, wait ’til you clap eyes on who I brung with me.”
“There’s only two men I want to clap eyes on: Harry Frost. Or Marco Celere, back from the dead.”
“Damn! You are always one step ahead. How in heck did you know?”
“Know what?”
“I brung Marco Celere.”
“Alive?”
“Darned tootin’, alive. Got him from some Southern Pacific rail dicks I’m acquainted with. They caught a hobo hopping off a freight who swore up, down, and sideways that he’s part of the air race. Claimed to know Josephine personally and demanded to see the Van Dorn detectives guarding her. As that information is not printed in the newspapers, the boys believed him enough to wire me.”
“Where is he?”
“Got him right in the cookhouse. The man’s starving.”
Isaac Bell charged into the galley car and saw a ragged stranger, forking eggs and bacon off a plate with one hand and stuffing bread in his mouth with the other. He had greasy black hair, parted by a red scar that traveled from his brow across the crown of his skull, another red scar on his forearm, and intensely bright eyes.