The Race ib-4 Read online

  The Race

  ( Isaac Bell - 4 )

  Clive Cussler

  Clive Cussler

  The Race

  (Isaac Bell – 4)

  PROLOGUE

  "the moon is on fire"

  Chicago

  1899

  A TALL DRUNK DANCED ALONE IN THE GUTTER, singing a Stephen Foster song loved by the Anti-Saloon League. The melody was mournful, reminiscent of Scottish pipes, the tempo a slow waltz. His voice, a warm baritone, rang with heartfelt regret for promises broken.

  “Oh! comrades, fill no glass for me

  “To drown my soul in liquid flame. .”

  He had a golden head of hair, and a fine, strong profile. His extreme youth – he could not have been more than twenty – made his condition even sadder. His clothes looked slept in, matted with straw, and short in the arms and legs, like handouts from a church basement or lifted from a clothesline. His linen collar was askew, his shirt was missing a cuff, and he had no hat despite the cold. Of gentleman’s treasures to sell for drink, made-to-order calfskin boots were all he had left.

  He bumped into a lamppost and lost the thread of the lyric. Still humming the poignant tune, still trying to waltz, he dodged a potter’s field morgue wagon pulling up at the curb. The driver tied his horses and bounded through the swinging doors of the nearest of the many saloons spilling yellow light on the cobblestones.

  The drunken youth reeled against the somber black wagon and held on tight.

  He studied the saloon. Was it one where he would be welcomed? Or had he already been thrown out? He patted empty pockets. He shrugged sadly. His eyes roved the storefronts: five-cent lodging houses, brothels, pawnbrokers. He considered his boots. Then he lifted his gaze to the newspaper dealer’s depot on the corner, where press wagons were delivering Chicago’s early editions.

  Could he beg a few pennies’ work unloading the bundled newspapers? He squared his shoulders and commenced a slow waltz toward the depot.

  “When I was young I felt the tide

  “Of aspiration undefiled.

  “But manhood’s years have wronged the pride

  “My parents centered in their child.”

  The newsboys lining up to buy their papers were street-toughened twelve-year-olds. They made fun of the drunk as he approached until one of them locked gazes with his strangely soft violet-blue eyes. “Leave him alone!” he told his friends, and the tall young man whispered, “Thanks, shonny. Whuss yer name?”

  “Wally Laughlin.”

  “You’ve a kind soul, Wally Laughlin. Don’t end up like me.”

  “I TOLD YOU TO GET RID OF THE DRUNK,” said Harry Frost, a giant of a man with a heavy jaw and merciless eyes. He straddled a crate of Vulcan dynamite inside the morgue wagon. Two ex-prizefighters from his West Side gang crouched at his feet. They were watching the newspaper depot through peepholes drilled in the side, waiting for the owner to return from his supper.

  “I chased him off. He came back.”

  “Run him in that alley. I don’t want to see him again, except carried on a shutter.”

  “He’s just a drunk, Mr. Frost.”

  “Yeah? What if that newspaper dealer hired detectives to protect his depot?”

  “Are you crazy? That’s no detective.”

  Harry Frost’s fist shot fifteen inches with the concentrated power of a forge hammer. The man he hit fell over, clutching his side in pain and disbelief. One second he’d been crouched beside the boss, the next he was on the floor, trying to breathe as splintered bone pierced his lung. “You busted my ribs,” he gasped.

  Frost’s face was red. His own breath raced with anger. “I am not crazy.”

  “You don’t know your own strength, Mr. Frost,” protested the other boxer. “You could have killed him.”

  “If I meant to kill him, I would have hit him harder. Get rid of that drunk!”

  The boxer scrambled out of the back of the wagon, closed the door behind him, and shoved through the sleepy newsboys lined up to buy their papers.

  “Hey, you!” he yelled after the drunk, who didn’t hear him but did him the favor of stepping into the alley under his own steam, saving him the trouble of dragging him, kicking and screaming. He plunged in after him, tugging a lead sap from his coat. It was a narrow alley, with blank walls on either side, barely wide enough for a wheelbarrow. The drunk was stumbling toward a doorway at the far end, lit by a hanging lantern.

  “Hey, you!”

  The drunk turned around. His golden hair shone in kerosene light. A tentative smile crossed his handsome face.

  “Have we met, sir?” he asked, as if suddenly hopeful of arranging a loan.

  “We’re gonna meet.”

  The boxer swung his sap underhanded. It was a brutal weapon, a leather bag filled with buckshot. The buckshot made it pliable so that it would mold to its target, pulverize flesh and bone, and pound the young man’s fine, strong profile flat as beefsteak. To the boxer’s surprise, the drunk moved quickly. He stepped inside the arc of the sap and knocked the boxer off his feet with a right cross as expert as it was powerful.

  The door sprang open.

  “Nice going, kid.”

  Two middle-aged Van Dorn private detectives – ice-eyed Mack Fulton and Walter Kisley in a checkerboard drummer’s suit – grabbed the fallen man’s arms and dragged him inside. “Is Harry Frost hiding in that morgue wagon?”

  But the boxer could not answer.

  “Down for the count,” said Fulton, slapping him hard and getting no response. “Young Isaac, you don’t know your own strength.”

  “So much for our fledgling investigator’s first lesson in interrogating criminals,” said Kisley.

  “And what is that first lesson?” Fulton echoed. They were nicknamed Weber and Fields at the Van Dorn Detective Agency, for the vaudeville comics.

  “Permit your suspect to remain conscious,” answered Kisley.

  “So,” they chorused, “he may answer your questions.”

  Apprentice detective Isaac Bell hung his head.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Kisley. Mr. Fulton. I didn’t mean to hit him so hard.”

  “Live and learn, kid. That’s why Mr. Van Dorn teamed a college man like you with such wise old ignoramuses as we.”

  “By our grizzled example, the boss hopes, even a rich kid from the right side of the tracks might flourish into brilliant detectivehood.”

  “Meantime, what do you say we go knock on that morgue wagon and see if Harry Frost is home?”

  The partners drew heavy revolvers as they headed up the alley.

  “Stay back, Isaac. You do not want to brace Harry Frost without a gun in your hand.”

  “Which, being an apprentice, you are not allowed to carry.”

  “I bought a derringer,” Bell said.

  “Enterprising of you. Don’t let the boss get wind of it.”

  “Stay back anyway, a derringer won’t stop Harry Frost.”

  They rounded the corner into the street. A knife glittered in the lamplight, slicing through the reins that tied the morgue wagon’s horses, and a heavyset figure lashed their rumps with the driver’s whip. The animals bolted, stampeding past the wagons lined up at the depot. The newsboys scattered from flying hooves and spinning wheels. Just as the runaway reached the depot, it exploded with a thunderous roar and a brilliant flash. The shock wave slammed into the detectives and threw them through the swinging doors and front windows of the nearest saloon.

  Isaac Bell picked himself up and stormed back into the street. Flames were leaping from the newspaper depot. The wagons had been tumbled on their sides, their horses staggering on shattered legs. The street was filled with broken glass and burning paper. Bell looked for the newsboys. Three were huddled in a doorway,
their faces white with shock. Three more were sprawled lifeless on the sidewalk. The first he knelt by was Wally Laughlin.

  COME, JOSEPHINE IN MY FLYING MACHINE.

  BY ALFRED BRYAN amp; FRED FISCHER

  Oh! Say! Let us fly, dear

  Where, kid? To the sky, dear

  Oh you flying machine

  Jump in, Miss Josephine

  Ship ahoy! Oh joy, what a feeling

  Where, boy? In the ceiling

  Ho, High, Hoopla we fly

  To the sky so high

  Come Josephine, in my flying machine,

  Going up, she goes! up she goes!

  Balance yourself like a bird on a beam

  In the air she goes! There she goes!

  Up, up, a little bit higher

  Oh! My! The moon is on fire

  Come, Josephine in my flying machine,

  Going up, all on, Goodbye!

  BOOK ONE

  “come, josephine in my flying machine”

  1

  The Adirondack Mountains, Upper New York State

  1909

  MRS. JOSEPHINE JOSEPHS FROST – a petite, rosy-cheeked young woman with a tomboy’s pert manner, a farm girl’s strong hands, and lively hazel eyes – flew her Celere Twin Pusher biplane eight hundred feet above the dark forested hills of her husband’s Adirondack estate. Driving in the open air, in a low wicker chair in front, she was bundled against the cold headwind in padded coat and jodhpurs, a leather helmet and wool scarf, gloves, goggles, and boots. Her motor drummed a steady tune behind her, syncopated by the ragtime clatter of the drive chains spinning her propellers.

  Her flying machine was a light framework of wood and bamboo braced with wire and covered with fabric. The entire contraption weighed less than a thousand pounds and was stronger than it looked. But it was not as strong as the violent updrafts that cliffs and ravines bounced into the atmosphere. Rushing columns of air would roll her over if she let them. Holes in the sky would swallow her whole.

  A gust of wind snuck up behind and snatched the air that held her wings.

  The biplane dropped like an anvil.

  Josephine’s exuberant grin leaped ear to ear.

  She dipped her elevator. The machine pitched downward, which made it go faster, and Josephine felt the air lift her back onto an even keel.

  “Good girl, Elsie!”

  Flying machines stayed up by pushing air down. She had figured that out the first time she left the ground. Air was strong. Speed made it stronger. And the better the machine, the more it wanted to fly. This “Elsie” was her third, but definitely not her last.

  People called her brave for flying, but she didn’t think of herself that way. She just felt completely at home in the air, more at home than on the ground where things didn’t always work out the way she hoped. Up here, she always knew what to do. Even better, she knew what would happen when she did it.

  Her eyes were everywhere: glinting ahead at the blue mountains on the horizon, glancing up repeatedly at the aneroid barometer that she had hung from the upper wing to tell her her altitude, down at the motor’s oil pressure gauge between her legs, and searching the ground for breaks in the forest big enough to alight on if her motor suddenly quit. She had sewn a ladies’ pendant watch to her sleeve to time how much gasoline she had left. The map case, and compass ordinarily strapped to her knee, were back at the house. Born in these mountains, she steered by lakes, railroad tracks, and the North River.

  She saw its dark gorge ahead, so deep and sheer that it looked like an angry giant had split the mountain with an ax. The river gleamed at the bottom. A break in the trees beside the gorge revealed a golden meadow, the first sizable opening she had seen since she had taken to the air.

  She spied a tiny splash of red, like a flicker’s red crest.

  It was a hunting hat worn by Marco Celere, the Italian inventor who built her flying machines. Marco was perched on the cliff, rifle slung over his back, scanning for bear through field glasses. Across the meadow, at the edge of the trees, she saw the hulking silhouette of her husband.

  Harry Frost raised his rifle and aimed it at Marco.

  Josephine heard the shot, louder than the motor and drive chains clattering behind her.

  HARRY FROST HAD A WEIRD FEELING he had missed the Italian.

  He was a seasoned big-game hunter. Since retiring rich, he had shot elk and bighorn sheep in Montana, lion in South Africa, and elephants in Rhodesia, and he could have sworn the bullet had gone high. But there was his wife’s swarthy boyfriend squirming on the edge of the cliff, hit but not dead.

  Frost levered a fresh.45-70 shell into his Marlin 1895 and found him in the scope. He hated the sight of Marco Celere – oily black hair brilliantined slick to his skull, high forehead like a vaudeville Julius Caesar, thick eyebrows, deep-set dark eyes, waxed mustache curled at the tips like pigs’ tails – and he was taking great pleasure in smoothly squeezing the trigger when suddenly a strange noise clattered in his head. It sounded like the threshing machine at the farm at the Matawan Asylum for the Criminally Insane, where his enemies had locked him up for shooting his chauffeur at the country club.

  The bughouse had been worse than the most monstrous orphanage in his memory. Powerful politicians and high-priced lawyers claimed credit for springing him. But it was only right to let him out. The chauffeur had been romancing his first wife.

  Unbelievably, it was happening again with his new bride. He could see it written on their faces every time Josephine hit him up for more dough to pay for Marco’s inventions. Now she was begging him to buy the Italian’s latest flying machine back from his creditors so she could win the Atlantic – Pacific Cross-Country Air Race and claim the fifty-thousand-dollar Whiteway Cup.

  Wouldn’t that be swell? Winning the biggest air race in the world would make his aviatrix wife and her inventor boyfriend famous. Preston Whiteway – the snoot-in-the-air, born-with-a-silver-spoon-in-his-mouth San Francisco newspaper publisher who was sponsoring the race – would make them stars, and sell fifty million newspapers in the process. The chump husband would be famous, too – a famously cuckolded, fat old rich husband – the laughingstock of all who despised him.

  Rich he was, one of the richest men in America, every damned dollar earned himself. But Harry Frost wasn’t old yet. A little over forty wasn’t that old. And anyone who said he was more fat than muscle hadn’t seen him kill a horse with a single punch – a trick he had performed famously in his youth and lately had made a birthday ritual.

  Unlike the treachery with the chauffeur, this time they wouldn’t catch him. No more flying off the handle. He had planned this one down to the last detail. Savoring revenge, going about it like a business, he had resurrected his formidable talents for management and deception to lure the unsuspecting Celere on a bear hunt. Bears couldn’t talk. There’d be no witnesses deep in the North Country woods.

  Convinced he had shot higher than he meant to, Frost aimed low and fired again.

  – -

  JOSEPHINE SAW CELERE whiplashed from the cliff by the force of the bullet.

  “Marco!”

  THE CLATTER IN HARRY FROST’S SKULL GREW LOUD. Still peering down the barrel of his rifle at the wonderful empty space where Marco Celere had been, he suddenly realized that the noise was not a memory of the Matawan farm but real as the 405-grain lead bullet that had just blown the bride thief into the gorge. He looked up. Josephine was flying over him in her damned biplane. She had seen him shoot her aeroplane inventor.

  Frost had three cartridges left in his magazine.

  He raised the rifle.

  But he didn’t want to kill her. She’d stay with him now that Marco was out of the way. But she saw him kill Marco. They would lock him back in the bughouse. Second time around he’d never get out. That wouldn’t be fair. He wasn’t the betrayer. She was.

  Frost whipped the rifle skyward and fired twice.

  He misjudged her speed. At least one shot passed behind her. With only a
single bullet left, he gathered his wits, settled his nerves, and led the biplane like a pheasant.

  Bull’s-eye!

  He had scored a hit, for sure. Her flying machine lurched into a wide, clumsy turn. He waited for it to fall. But it kept turning, wobbling back in the direction of the camp. It was too high to hit with a pistol, but Frost jerked one from his belt anyway. Bracing the barrel on his powerful forearm, he fired until it was empty. Eyes bugging with rage, he flicked a snub-nosed derringer out of his sleeve. He emptied its two shots futilely in her direction and pawed at his hunting knife, to cut her heart out when she smashed into the trees.

  The clatter grew fainter and fainter and fainter, and Harry Frost could do nothing but watch helplessly as his treacherous wife disappeared beyond the tree line and escaped his righteous wrath.

  At least he had blown her lover into the gorge.

  He lumbered across the meadow, hoping for a glimpse of Celere’s body smashed on the river rocks. But halfway to the rim of the cliff, he stopped dead, poleaxed by a horrible realization. He had to run before they locked him back in the bughouse.

  JOSEPHINE FOUGHT WITH ALL HER SKILL to guide her machine safely to the ground.

  Harry had hit it twice. One bullet had nicked the two-gallon gasoline tank behind her. The second was worse. It had jammed the link between her control lever and the wire that twisted the shape of her wings. Unable to warp them to bank the machine into a turn, she was dependent entirely on its rudder. But trying to turn without banking was like flying a glider before the Wright brothers invented wing warping – god-awful awkward and likely to slide her sideways into a deadly flat spin.

  Lips tight, she worked the rudder like a surgeon’s scalpel, taking measured slices of the wind. Her mother, a frantic woman unable to cope with the simplest task, used to accuse her of having “ice water in her veins.” But wasn’t ice water handy on a crippled flying machine, Mother? Slowly, she brought the biplane back on course.