The Race

  Bell breathed deeply of the air—an exhilarating mix of burnt oil, rubber, and gasoline—and felt instantly at home. It smelled like a race-car meet made all the richer by the scent of the fabric dope that the aviators varnished their machines with to seal the fabric covering the frames. The ground was alive with machines and men rushing about, like at an auto meet. But here at Belmont, all eyes were aimed at the sharp blue sky.

  Machines swept into the air, swooped and darted about—boundless as birds but a hundred times bigger. A vast variety of shapes and sizes sailed through the sky. Bell saw airships triple the length of racing cars lumber overhead on wings that spread forty feet, and smaller ones flitted by, some flimsy, some supple as dragonflies.

  The noise was as thrilling, each type of motor blasting its own unique sound: the Smack! Smack! of a radial three-cylinder Anzani, the harsh rumble of Curtiss and Wright four-cylinders, the smooth burble of the admirable Antoinette V-8s that Bell knew from speedboats, and the exuberant Blat! Blat! Blat! of the French-built rotary Gnome Omegas whose seven cylinders whirled improbably around a central crankshaft, spewing castor oil smoke that smelled like smoldering candle wax.

  He located Archie by making a beeline for an enormous tent of the same bright yellow as the banner he had seen on top of Whiteway’s Inquirer building, and they shook hands warmly. Archie Abbott was nearly as tall as Isaac Bell, redheaded, with compelling gray eyes and a sparkling smile. He was clean-shaven. Faint white lines of scar tissue on this aristocratic brow indicated experience in the prize ring. They had been best friends since college, when Archie boxed for Princeton and Bell had floored him for Yale.

  Bell saw that Archie had used his time here well. He was friendly with all the participants and officials. His detectives— those disguised as mechanicians, newspaper reporters, hot dog salesmen, and Cracker Jack vendors, and those patrolling in sack suits and derbies—appeared familiar with their territory and alert. But Archie could not tell Bell any more than he already knew about Josephine’s relationship with Marco Celere, which was little more than speculation.

  “Were they lovers?”

  Archie shrugged. “I can’t answer that. She does get a little misty-eyed when his name comes up. But what she’s really nuts about is that flying machine.”

  “Could it be that she’s misty-eyed for his mechanical expertise?”

  “Except that Josephine is a whiz of a mechanician herself. She can take that machine apart and put it back together on her own, if she has to. She told me that the places she’ll be flying won’t have a mechanician.”

  “I’m looking forward to meeting her. Where is she?”

  Archie pointed at the sky. “Up there.”

  The two friends scanned the blue, where a dozen flying machines were maneuvering. “I’d have thought that Whiteway would have painted her machine yellow.”

  “He did. Yellow as this tent.”

  “I don’t see her.”

  “She doesn’t circle around with the others. She flies off by herself.”

  “How long has she been gone?”

  Archie pulled out his watch. “One hour and ten minutes, this time,” he reported, clearly not happy to admit that the young woman whose safety and very life were his responsibility was nowhere in sight.

  Bell said, “How in heck can we watch over her if we can’t see her?”

  “If I had my way,” said Archie, “I’d ride in the machine with her. But it’s against the rules. If they carry a passenger, they’re disqualified. They have to fly alone. That Weiner accounting fellow explained that it wouldn’t be fair to the others if the passenger helped drive.”

  “We’ve got to find a better way to keep an eye on her,” said Bell. “Once the race starts, it will be a simple matter for Frost to lie in wait along the route.”

  “I plan to post men on the roof of the support train with field glasses and rifles.”

  Bell shook his head. “Have you seen all the support trains in the yard? You could get stuck behind a traffic jam of locomotives blocking the tracks.”

  “I’ve been considering a team of autoists to run ahead.”

  “That will help. Two autos, if I can find the men to drive them. Mr. Van Dorn’s already complaining that I’m gutting the agency. Who is on this machine approaching? The green pusher?”

  “Billy Thomas, the auto racer. The Vanderbilt syndicate hired him.”

  “That’s a Curtiss he’s driving.”

  “The syndicate bought three of them, so he can choose the fastest. Six thousand apiece. They really want to win. Here comes a Frenchman. Renee Chevalier.”

  “Chevalier navigated that machine across the English Channel.”

  Bell’s eye had already been drawn to the graceful Blériot monoplane. The single-wing craft looked light as a dragonfly. An open girder of strut work connected the cloth-covered wings to the tailpiece of rudder and elevators. Chevalier sat behind the wing, partially enclosed in a boxlike compartment that shielded him nearly to his chest. He was switching his Gnome rotary engine on and off to slow it as he landed.

  “I’m buying one of those when this job is over.”

  “I envy you,” said Archie. “I’d love to take a crack at flying.”

  “Do it. We’ll learn together.”

  “I can’t. It’s different when you’re married.”

  “What are you talking about? Lillian wouldn’t mind. She drives race cars. In fact she’ll want one, too.”

  “Things are changing,” Archie said gravely.

  “What do you mean?”

  Archie glanced around and lowered his voice. “We haven’t wanted to tell anyone until we’re sure everything’s O.K. But I’m not about to start a dangerous new hobby now that it looks like we’re going to have children.”

  Isaac Bell grabbed Archie underneath the arms and lifted him joyfully off the ground. “Wonderful! Congratulations.”

  “Thank you,” said Archie. “You can put me down now.” People were staring. It was not often they saw a tall man raise another high in the air and shake him like a terrier.

  Isaac Bell was beside himself with happiness. “Wait ’til Marion hears! She’ll be so happy for you. What are you going to name it?”

  “We’ll wait ’til we see what sort of ‘it’ it is.”

  “You can get a flying machine soon as it’s in school. By then flying will be even less dangerous than it is now.”

  Another machine was approaching the grass.

  “Who’s driving that blue Farman?”

  The Farman, another French-built airship, was a single-propeller pusher biplane. It looked extremely stable, descending as steadily as if it were gliding down a track.

  “Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin.”

  “He could be a winner. He’s won all of England’s cross-country races, flying the best machines.”

  “Poor as a church mouse,” Archie noted, “but married well.”

  The socially prominent Archibald Angel Abbott IV, whose ancestors included the earliest rulers of New Amsterdam, could gossip as knowledgeably about Germans, Frenchmen, and Britons as about New York blue bloods, thanks to a long honeymoon in Europe—sanctioned by Joe Van Dorn in exchange for scouting overseas branches for the agency.

  “The baronet’s wife’s father is a wealthy Connecticut physician. She buys the machines and looks after him. He’s extremely shy. Look there, speaking of having a wealthy benefactor, here comes Uncle Sam’s—U.S. Army Lieutenant Chet Bass.”

  “That’s the Signal Corps Wright he’s driving.”

  “I knew Chet at school. When he starts in on the future of aerial bombs and torpedoes, you’ll have to shoot him to shut him up. Though he has a point. With the constant war talk in Europe, Army officers haunt the aviation meets.”

  “Is that red one another Wright?” Bell asked, puzzled by an odd mix of similarities and differences. “No, it can’t be,” he said as it drew nearer. “The propeller’s in front. It’s a tractor biplane.”

  “T
hat’s the ‘workingman’s’ entry, Joe Mudd driving. It started out as a Wright, ’til it collided with an oak tree. Some labor unionists trying to improve their reputation bought the wreck and cobbled it together out of spare parts. They call it the ‘American Liberator.’”

  “Which unions?”

  “Bricklayers, Masons and Plasterers teamed up with the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen. It’s a good little machine, considering that they’re operating on a shoestring. Whiteway’s trying to bar them.”

  “On what grounds?” Bell asked.

  “‘If workingmen find themselves with excess funds,’” Archie mimicked Whiteway’s pompous delivery, “‘they should contribute them to the Anti-Saloon League.’”

  “Temperance? I’ve seen Preston Whiteway drunk as a lord.”

  “On champagne, not beer. Drink is a privilege, to his way of thinking, which should be reserved for those who can afford it. Needless to say, when he had Josephine’s flying machine painted ‘Whiteway Yellow,’ Joe Mudd and the boys varnished theirs ‘Revolution Red.’”

  Bell searched the sky for her. “Where is our girl?”

  “She’ll be back,” Archie assured him, peering anxiously. “She’ll run out of gas soon. She’ll have to come back.”

  A scream at a high pitch suddenly pierced the air like a pneumatic siren.

  Bell looked for the source. It sounded loud enough to rouse a sleeping firehouse. Oddly, none of the mechancians and birdmen in the infield paid it any mind. The noise ceased as suddenly as it had begun.

  “What was that?”

  “Platov’s thermo engine,” said Archie. “A crazy Russian. He’s invented a new kind of aeroplane motor.”

  Still watching the sky for Josephine, Bell let Archie lead him to a three hundred length of rail at the beginning of which perched a strange mechanism. Mechanicians were assembling a large white biplane beside it.

  “There’s Platov.”

  Women in long white summer dresses and elaborate Merry Widow hats were gazing spellbound upon the handsome Russian inventor, whose thick, curly dark hair, springy as a heap of steel shavings, spilled from a straw boater with a bright red hatband, and tumbled down his cheeks in equally curly mutton-chop whiskers.

  “Seems to have a way with the ladies,” said Bell.

  Archie explained that they were competitors’ wives, girlfriends, and mothers traveling aboard the support trains.

  Platov was gesturing energetically with an engineering slide rule, and Bell noted the gleam in his dark eyes of the “mad scientist.” Though in Platov’s case, the Russian appeared less dangerous than eccentric, particularly as he was busy romancing his admirers.

  “He’s prospecting for investors,” Archie said, “hoping some fliers will try it in the race. So far, no one’s ready to give up propellers. But his luck might have changed. That fat fellow in white is a Mississippi cotton farmer with more money than brains. He’s paying to test the motor on a real flying machine. Mr. Platov? Come tell my friend Mr. Bell how your contraption works.”

  The inventor touched his lips to several of the ladies’ gloves, tipped his boater, and bustled over. He shook Bell’s hand, bowed, and clicked his heels. “Dmitri Platov. De idea is dat superior motor-powering fly machine Platov is demonstrating.”

  Bell listened closely. The “thermo engine” used a small automobile motor to power a compressor. The compressor forced liquid kerosene through a nozzle. An electric spark ignited the volatile spray, creating thrust.

  “Is making jet! Jet is pushing.”

  Bell noticed that the voluble Russian appeared to be well liked. His fractured English provoked snickers among the grease-stained mechanicians who gathered to watch, but Bell overheard them discussing the new engine with respect. Just like mechanicians at an automobile race, they were tinkerers, always on the lookout for ways to make machines faster and stronger.

  If it worked, they were saying, the thermo engine had a good chance of winning because it tackled head-on the three biggest problems holding back flying machines: excess weight, insufficient power, and the vibration that threatened to shake their flimsy frames to pieces. So far, it was tethered to a rail, down which it had “flown” repeatedly at a high rate of speed. The real test would come when the artificers finished assembling the cotton farmer’s airship.

  “De idea is dat no pistons is shaking, no propeller is breaking.”

  Again Bell overheard agreement among the gathering of flying-machine workmen. Platov’s engine could be, in theory at least, as smooth as a turbine, unlike most gasoline engines, which rattled an airman’s molars loose. Another mechanician ran up. “Mr. Platov! Mr. Platov! Could you please come quickly to our hangar car?”

  Platov grabbed a leather tool bag and hurried after him.

  “What was that about?” asked Bell.

  “He’s a tip-top machinist,” said Archie. “Supports himself working freelance, fashioning parts. The hangar cars have lathes, drill presses, hones, and gear shapers. If all of a sudden they need a part, Platov can make it faster than the factory can ship it.”

  “Here comes our girl!” said Isaac Bell.

  “At last,” said Archie, clearly relieved despite his earlier assurances.

  Bell watched the yellow speck that his sharp eyes had spotted on the horizon. It grew larger rapidly. Sooner than Bell expected, it was close enough to present the shape of a sleek monoplane. He could hear the motor make an authoritative smooth burble.

  Archie said, “That’s the Celere that Preston Whiteway bought back from Marco’s creditors.”

  Isaac Bell eyed it appreciatively. “Marco’s last effort makes most of these others look like box kites.”

  “It’s a speedster, all right,” Archie agreed. “But the talk around the infield is it’s not as strongly constructed as the biplanes. And there are rumors that that’s how Marco went broke.”

  “What rumors?”

  “Back in Italy, they say, Marco sold a machine to the Italian Army, borrowed against future royalties, and immigrated to America and built a couple of standard biplanes he sold to Josephine’s husband. Then he borrowed more money to build that one she’s flying on now. Unfortunately, they say, back in Italy a wing fell off the one he sold to the Italian Army, and a general broke both legs in the smash. The Army canceled the contract, and Marco was however you say persona non grata in Italian. True story or not, the mechanicians agree that monoplanes aren’t as strong as biplanes.”

  “But all that biplane strength comes at the expense of speed.”

  “Maybe so, but the birdmen and mechanicians I talked to all say that just getting to San Francisco is going to be the hard part. Machines that strive only for speed can’t stay the whole race.”

  Bell nodded. “The sixty-horsepower, four-cylinder Model 35 Thomas Flyer that won the New York–to–Paris automobile race probably wasn’t the fastest, but it was the strongest. Let’s hope that Preston didn’t buy our client a death trap.”

  “Considering the flocks of telegrams Whiteway sends her every day, you can bet he had that machine examined from stem to stern before he bought it. Whiteway wouldn’t take chances with her life. The man’s in love.”

  “What does Josephine think of Preston?” Bell asked.

  It was not an idle question. If anyone knew her state of mind regarding Whiteway, it would be Archie. Before he became the most happily married detective in America, Archibald Angel Abbott IV had enjoyed many years as New York City’s most avidly pursued eligible bachelor.

  “In my opinion,” Archie smiled knowingly, “Josephine admires the aeroplane that Preston bought her very much.”

  “No one has ever accused Preston Whiteway of exercising intelligence in his personal affairs.”

  “Didn’t he once carry a torch for Marion?”

  “Blithely unaware that he was risking life and limb,” Bell said grimly. “My point exactly.”

  He started toward the open section of infield where the machines were alighting. Joe Mudd
’s sturdy red tractor biplane had taken to the sky while Bell was listening to Platov and was approaching to land ahead of the yellow monoplane. While Josephine circled around to let it go first, the red biplane floated to the grass and rolled along for a hundred yards to a stop.

  Josephine’s machine came down to earth at a steeper angle and a much higher rate of speed. It was traveling so swiftly that it seemed that she had somehow lost control of it and was falling out of the sky.

  7

  CONVERSATIONS CEASED.

  Men put down tools and stared.

  The yellow aeroplane was mere yards from smashing into the grass when Josephine hauled back on a lever that raised small flaps on the back of her wings and the elevator on her tailpiece. The airship leveled out, slowed, bounced on the grass, and rolled to a gentle stop.

  There was a long moment of stunned silence. Then, from one end of the infield to the other, mechanicians and airmen whistled, clapped, and cheered her stunt, for it was clear that she had come down exactly as she had intended, relying on her skill to thumb her nose at gravity.

  And when a slight figure dressed head to toe in white climbed out of her compartment behind the wing, a roar of approval thundered from spectators in the grandstand. She waved to the crowd and flashed a gleaming smile.

  “Well done!” said Isaac Bell. “Preston Whiteway may be an idiot in his personal affairs, but he can spot a winner.”

  He strode to the yellow machine, pulling ahead of the long-legged Archie. A burly detective dressed as a mechanician blocked his way. “Where you going, mister?”

  “I am Van Dorn Chief Investigator Isaac Bell.”

  The man stepped back, though he still eyed him carefully. “Sorry, I didn’t know you, Mr. Bell. Tom LaGuardia, Saint Louis office. I just got shifted here. I saw you talking to Mr. Abbott. I should have assumed you were on the level.”

  “You did the right thing. Never assume when your client’s life is at risk. If you stop the wrong person, you can always apologize. If you don’t stop the right person, you can’t apologize to a dead client.”

  Archie caught up. “Good job, Tom. I’ll vouch for him.”