His only fear was that his bulk would give him away. The middle-aged professor in the beard and tinted glasses filled as much space as the Newsstand King. More, even, because his dark sack suit was a veritable tent of loosely cut wool, deliberately chosen to conceal his weapons and “bulletproof” vest. He had no intention of being stopped from killing Josephine, much less locked up for murdering a woman who deserved it. His firearms included a highly accurate Browning pistol for covering his escape, a pocket pistol and derringer for emergencies, and a powerful Webley-Fosbery automatic revolver. He had sawed four inches off the barrel to hide it in his pocket and loaded it with the “man-stopper” hollow-point expanding bullets.
A Chicago priest had manufactured the bulletproof vest of multiple layers of silk specially woven in Austria. Frost had invested secretly in the enterprise and owned shares in the company formed to market the inch-thick garment. The Army had rejected it for being too heavy and too hot. Frost’s weighed thirty-six pounds, a negligible burden for a man of his size and strength. But it was undeniably hot. On the short walk from the train he was wiping his brow with a handkerchief. But it was worth the discomfort, as it would stop modern high-velocity, smokeless-powder slugs fired from revolvers and pistols.
He had been disappointed when he shot at Marco Celere long-range. He had missed seeing the betrayer’s fear as he died. Didn’t even get to see the body. He’d do it up close, this time, and squeeze the life out of Josephine with his bare hands.
He stayed within the crowd lining up to buy tickets, then shuffled among them toward the grandstand. He knew she was here because the incessantly buzzing, droning motors overhead told him they were practicing today. The wind was light, so a dozen machines were up in the sky. Josephine would be either flying or in the infield adjusting and tuning the machine that Preston Whiteway had bought for her.
He had to hand it to the race organizers, they knew their business. With weeks to go before the starting day, they had convinced fifty thousand people to ride out to Nassau County and pay twenty-five cents each to watch the birdmen practice. The aviators weren’t racing around pylons or trying to set altitude records—none of the usual exhibitions of soaring, diving, and altitude climbing expected at flying fairs—just buzzing about in the air when they felt like it. But the stands were noisy with men and women cheering their heads off, and Frost could tell by the awe on their faces and their ceaseless “ooohhhs” and “aaahhhs” why they paid their quarters. The sight of enormous machines held up by invisible forces took the breath away. They weren’t as fast as locomotives and racing cars, but it didn’t matter. Big as they were, they hung in the blue like they belonged there.
Suddenly he saw her!
Josephine came streaking down from the sky like a yellow sword. There was no mistaking her machine. It was painted that same damned Whiteway Yellow that the born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth sissy boy had trademarked.
Harry Frost had accompanied his wife to many an air meet to buy her aeroplanes, and he watched this one with a knowledgeable eye. He was impressed. The Italian’s final invention was a hell of a machine, as different from the last aeroplane Frost had bought for Josephine as a hawk was from a pigeon. The previous, the one from which Josephine had seen him shoot the bastard, had been a sturdy biplane. This was a mono, with a single wing, and even after it stopped rolling across the infield it still looked fast and nimble just sitting there.
His jaw tightened as he focused his horse-racing field glasses. There she was, jumping off, with the big grin she got on her face when she really liked an aeroplane. She didn’t look like she was mourning her boyfriend, and she didn’t look like she was missing her husband, either. He felt the blood flush hot under his beard. He mopped his brow. Time to do the deed.
He started down from the grandstand. The guard at the gate stopped him. He showed the infield entry badge he had bought the night before from a drunken track official in a Hempstead saloon, and the guard let him pass. He walked across the horse track and stopped dead, rocked by the sight of his own face on a poster nailed to the inside rail.
WANTED
Murder Suspect
HARRY FROST
REWARD
*** $5,000 ***
(Armed and Dangerous—Do Not Approach!!! )
Wire or Telephone
VAN DORN DETECTIVE AGENCY
“We Never Give Up. Never.”
Frost’s brain started racing. Why were Van Dorns hunting him with wanted posters? What did Van Dorns care about him killing Marco Celere? What the hell was going on?
His printed face glared back at him.
It was the standard Van Dorn poster. Frost remembered it well from his Chicago days, when the private detectives were careening around the city trying to stop him by arresting the people who worked for him. When that failed, they had tried to get people to inform on him. A few dead informants put a stop to that, he recalled, grunting a laugh.
We Never Give Up?
Never?
Oh yeah? You gave up on me, pal.
He laughed again because the drawing they had mocked up of his face looked pretty much like he used to before he grew his beard. Frost was only vaguely aware that laughing to himself out loud drew the attention of others heading to the infield. None, however, connected his bearded face to the beardless poster.
Suddenly the laughter turned sour on his tongue.
Another wanted poster blared from the rail—same as the first—“WANTED / Murder Suspect / HARRY FROST / REWARD / *** $5,000 *** / (Armed and Dangerous—Do Not Approach!!! ) / Wire or Telephone / VAN DORN DETECTIVE AGENCY / ‘We Never Give Up. Never’”—except this one had a picture that showed what they guessed he would look like if he had grown a beard.
A cold shiver traveled up his spine. The artist had come damned close. It wasn’t quite like looking in the mirror, and it didn’t show his glasses, but the face looked familiar. He stopped to study the poster, angrily shrugging off people who bumped into him, ignoring their complaints, which died on their lips when they took in the size of him. Finally, he stood taller, and strolled slowly on, deciding that it was unlikely that people would link even the bearded face on the poster to his. Not in these crowds. Besides, anyone who knew his name would not dare turn him in.
To hell with the Van Dorns. He beat them ten years ago, and he would beat them again.
He walked among the flying machines, inhaling the familiar smells of gasoline and oil, rubber and canvas, and doping varnish, and worked his way circuitously toward her yellow machine. When he got within fifty feet, he plunged his hands into his pockets, caressing the sawed-off Webley with his right while his left gripped the haft of a spring-loaded dagger, which offered the option of dispatching a protector quietly.
Josephine had her back to him. She was standing on a soapbox, with her head buried in the motor. Frost closed in on her. His heart was pounding with anticipation. His face felt hot, his hands were sweating. He gripped his weapons harder.
Abruptly, he stopped.
He didn’t like the look of Josephine’s mechanicians. He hid beside a Wright Model A biplane and observed them through the front rudders. It did not take long to confirm his suspicions.
They wore the right clothes, the typical vests, bow ties, shirtsleeves, and flat caps. And they were a younger bunch, as he expected of men who tinkered with flying machines. But they were watching the crowds more than they were watching Josephine’s machine. Van Dorns! The mechanicians were detectives.
His brain raced again. Not only were Van Dorns hunting him with wanted posters, they were guarding Josephine. Why?
Whiteway! It had to be Whiteway. Buying the Italian’s flying machine out of hock would have cost a pretty penny. So would that yellow support train. But it would pay in spades by using Josephine to boom the race and sell newspapers. Preston Whiteway had hired the detectives to protect his investment in Josephine.
Or was it more than protecting his investment?
Frost’s skul
l suddenly felt like it would explode.
Was Whiteway sweet on her?
Machines were roaring on the ground and buzzing in the air. Everywhere he looked, everything was moving—loud machines, drivers, Van Dorns. He had to get a grip on himself. Deal with Whiteway later. First, Josephine.
But the Van Dorns guarding Josephine would carry those wanted posters in their memories. Her guards would stop anyone who looked even slightly like either picture.
He noticed that their eyes kept shifting toward a tall redheaded man standing nearby in a sack suit and bowler. A suspect? Did they think that Harry Frost had dyed his hair red, lost seventy pounds, and gained two inches? The fellow looked like a Fifth Avenue swell. But he had thin white lines of a boxer’s scarring on his brow. And his eyes were busy, looking everywhere even as he pretended not to.
Not a suspect, Frost surmised. Another goddamned Van Dorn—the chief of their squad, from the way the others were looking to him. Suddenly Frost realized who the swell was—Archibald Angel Abbott IV. No wonder they hadn’t bothered disguising him as a mechanician.
Archibald Angel Abbott IV was too well known to work covertly. He had always been a big deal in the blue-blooded society set—New York’s most eligible bachelor. Then the newspapers had made him famous when he married the daughter of the railroad tycoon Osgood Hennessy. She stood to inherit it all. Frost wondered why the hell Abbott hadn’t traded his guns in for golf clubs.
That question pierced Harry Frost’s seething skull like a lightning bolt.
Archibald Abbott had the right idea, continuing to work for the Van Dorn Detective Agency for a measly few bucks after he married rich. Retiring was a mug’s game. Harry Frost had learned that too late. He had lost his edge. From the time he was eight years old, Harry Frost had dreamed of not having to work to survive. He had achieved his dream. And what did it get him? Being made a monkey of. That was how he had been taken by Josephine and Marco—bunco artists he would have smoked in a flash in the old days.
Frost fingered his weapons. Josephine still had her head in the motor. He could seize her by the throat, let her see that it was him, then cut her heart out. But the awful truth was that he could not get near her. There were too many Van Dorns masquerading as mechanicians. He couldn’t kill them all. They would gun him down first. He was not afraid to die. But he was damned if he would die in vain.
He needed help.
He hurried back to the train terminal and boarded an electric to Flatbush, where he entered a Brooklyn savings bank. Fleeing poverty, riding the rails as a child, begging for pennies for food, he had vowed never to be caught short anywhere ever again. As he flourished—as he plowed the profits of the distribution empire into stocks that returned fortunes—he had banked money in states across the continent.
He withdrew three thousand dollars from an account that held twenty. The bank manager counted it out personally in his private office. After Frost picked it up, the banker casually laid on his desk a wanted poster similar to those Frost had seen at the racetrack.
This poster was tailored to bankers. It warned them to be on the lookout for Harry Frost, or someone who looked like Harry Frost, drawing from his account. Frost acknowledged the banker’s loyalty with a brusque nod. They both knew that it was the least the banker could do. If Frost hadn’t covered his losses on an ill-advised scheme involving other men’s money, the banker would be serving time in Sing Sing.
A trolley took him to the waterfront.
He walked to a Pennsylvania Railroad stockyard pier. Tugboats were shoving car floats alongside. Trainloads of cows, sheep, and pigs were herded from the freight cars into cattle pens. Frost headed for the pier building and pushed through a door that said “No Admittance.” Thugs masquerading as railroad police tried to stop him. Frost knocked both men down with his open hand and pushed through another door at the back of the building into a stable. A dozen beef cattle, each with a distinctive Mexican brand burned on its flank, were tethered to posts set in the floor.
There were two men with the cows. One was seated at a table on which were scattered cow horns. The other was removing a horn from one of the tethered animals by turning it in his hands, unscrewing it from a threaded rod that had been drilled in the base of the horn. Rod Sweets, the man at the table, didn’t recognize Harry Frost in his beard. He pulled a pocket pistol.
“Don’t,” said Frost. “It’s me.”
Sweets stared. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You will be if you don’t put that gun away.”
Sweets shoved it hastily back his vest. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a taste for dope.”
The cow horns—sawn from the steers in Mexico, hollowed out, and fitted with threads—had been stuffed with Hong Kong opium before being screwed back on. Sweets smuggled hundreds of pounds of raw opium yearly into New York in this manner and presided over a vast refining and distribution network that supplied morphine to thousands of druggists and physicians. Protecting such an enterprise took an army.
“No dope,” said Frost. “I want to hire a crew.”
Rod Sweets’s men would not care that he hated Josephine for buncoing him nor that he hated Preston Whiteway for seducing her. Money was all they cared for. And money, he had plenty of.
Frost made arrangements with Sweets quickly. Then he hurried to the Red Hook saloon where could be found the brothers George and Peter Jonas, who specialized in tampering with the brakes and gasoline tanks of newspaper-delivery trucks. Again, money was all that was needed, and the saboteurs were falling all over themselves trying to persuade him that it was even easier to smash a flying machine than a motortruck.
“It’s all in the wires that hold ’em together,” said George, and Peter finished his brother’s thought: “A wire lets go, the wing falls off, down she goes.”
Harry Frost had spent many a long hour watching his wife at air meets. “The birdmen know that. They check their wires every time they go up.”
The brothers exchanged a quick glance. They didn’t know much about flying machines, but they knew the logic of machines in general, which was all they really had to know to break one.
“Sure, they check ’em,” said George. “They look for nicks, for kinks, for weak spots.”
Peter said, “So, like you says, Mr. Frost, we’re not going to sneak up on ’em with a hacksaw.”
“But,” said George, “they don’t always check the fittings that anchor the wire to the wing.” He glanced at his brother, who said, “We pull a steel anchor bolt.”
“We replace it with a cast-aluminum anchor bolt that looks just the same but ain’t so strong.”
“They don’t see it.”
“They go up.”
“They jerk hard in the air.”
“The anchor lets go.”
“The wing falls off.”
“They’re flying a cinder block.”
FROST TOOK A TROLLEY BACK TO FLATBUSH.
He felt an unexpected sense of well-being.
Back in harness. He’d been idle too long. For the first time since the nightmare of Josephine’s betrayal, he felt restored, alive again, even as he hid in the dark. The important thing, as always, was to move quickly, move before anyone knew what he was doing, and never do what they expected.
He rode an electric Long Island Rail Road train to Jamaica in the borough of Queens. At an auto rental, he hired the most expensive car they had—a Pierce. He drove it through truck and dairy farms across the Nassau county line to Garden City, and swept under the porte-cochere of the Garden City Hotel. It was a grand place. Before Josephine, before the chauffeur and the asylum, he had rubbed shoulders with Schuylers, Astors, and Vanderbilts here.
The staff did not recognize him behind his gray beard. He paid for a large suite on the top floor, where he ordered dinner served in his room. He drank a bottle of wine with it and turned in for a fitful sleep haunted by strange dreams.
He sat bolt upright at dawn, thunderstruck by the clatter of thres
hing machines. His heart pounded, as he listened for the squealing of the wheels when the guards rolled the morning breakfast slop down the corridor and the clanging of the ladle striking the cauldron. The same morning racket he still remembered from the orphanage. Only, gradually, did he begin to notice things. The bed was soft and the room was quiet. He glanced at the open windows, where white curtains fluttered in a warm breeze. There were no bars. He wasn’t in the bughouse. They hadn’t dragged him back to the orphanage. A smile crept across Harry Frost’s face. Not threshing machines. Flying machines. Morning practice at Belmont Park.
He had breakfast in bed, three short miles from the racetrack where Josephine and her new admirers were tuning their airships for the race.
6
“WHERE’S JOSEPHINE?” Isaac Bell inquired of the Van Dorn detectives guarding the gate to the Belmont Park Race Track infield.
“In the air, Mr. Bell.”
“Where’s Archie Abbott?”
“Over by the yellow tent.”
Bell had driven out to Belmont in a borrowed Pierce-Arrow to interview Josephine about her husband’s habits and the associates he might recruit. As the only person who had spent time with him in his reclusive years, she might even have an idea of where he would hide.
Bell saw right off that Whiteway had chosen a perfect place to start the air race. The Belmont infield was enormous. Encompassed by the longest racetrack in the country, a mile and a half, it was the size of a small farm. Nearly fifty acres of flat grass inside the track were overlooked by a grandstand that could seat thousands of paying spectators. It offered numerous two-hundred-yard stretches of grass on which the machines could gather speed to take to the sky and return to the ground, as well as room for tents, temporary wooden aeroplane hangars, trucks, and autos. The rail yard for the support trains was just on the other side of the stands.