The Race ib-4 Read online

  “Sure thing, Isaac. If you like.” She studied the detective’s face as if seeing him for the first time. “Do you have a girl, Isaac?”

  “Yes. I am engaged to be married.”

  She gave him a flirtatious grin. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

  “Miss Marion Morgan of San Francisco.”

  “Oh! Mr. Whiteway mentioned her. Isn’t she the lady who will be taking moving pictures?”

  “Yes, she’ll be here soon.”

  “So will Mr. Whiteway.”

  Josephine glanced at the ladies’ watch she wore sewn to her flying jacket sleeve.

  “Which reminds me, I’ve got to get back to the train. He’s sent a dress designer and a seamstress with another flying costume I’m supposed to wear for the newspaper reporters.” She raised her pretty eyes longingly to the sky. It was the soft blue color of the warm and windless early afternoons before strong sea breezes swept across Belmont Park and made it dangerous to fly.

  “You look like you’d rather go flying,” said Bell.

  “I sure as heck would. I don’t need a special costume. Did you see that white getup he made me wear the other day? Didn’t stay white long when we pulled the head off the Antoinette. This is all I need,” she said, indicating her worn flared leather gloves, wool jacket belted at her tiny waist, jodhpurs tucked into high laced boots. “Now Mr. Whiteway wants me to pose in a purple silk flying costume. And at night I’m supposed to wear long white dresses and black silk gloves.”

  “I saw your outfit last night. Very becoming.”

  “Thank you,” she said with another flirtatious grin. “But just between us chickens, Isaac, I couldn’t wait to get back into my overalls and help the boys fixing my machine. I’m not complaining. I know that Mr. Whiteway is anxious for me to draw any publicity I can to help the race.”

  Bell walked her to the train yard. “Hasn’t he asked you to call him Preston instead of Mr. Whiteway?”

  “All the time. But I don’t want him to get the wrong idea, using first names.”

  After Bell got her safely aboard the bright yellow Josephine Special and in the care of the dress designer and the Van Dorn who guarded her train, he hurried to the headquarters car, which had a telegraph key linked to the detective agency’s private system.

  “Anything yet from San Francisco?” he asked the duty officer.

  “Sorry, Mr. Bell. Not yet.”

  “Wire James Dashwood again.”

  The young man reached for the key. “Ready, sir.”

  “NEED CELERE AND PRESTOGIACOMO INFORMATION SOONEST.”

  Bell paused. The widely divergent opinions of Marco Celere held by Danielle Di Vecchio and Josephine Josephs Frost would raise interesting questions about any murder victim, but they were particularly interesting when the victim had disappeared.

  “Is that it, sir? Shall I send it?”

  “Continue: ‘PARTIAL STORY BETTER THAN NONE.’

  “And then add: ‘ON THE JUMP.’

  “In fact, add ‘ON THE JUMP’ twice.”

  “There it is, sir. Shall I send it?”

  Bell considered. If only it were possible to telephone long-distance all the way to San Francisco, he could query the usually reliable Dashwood as to what was taking him so long and impress upon him the urgency he felt.

  “Add another ‘ON THE JUMP’!”

  14

  “I HEAR THE WRIGHT BROTHERS started a flying school, Mr. Bell,” Andy Moser called from the front of the Eagle when Isaac Bell ordered him to spin the propeller to start the sleek machine.

  “I don’t have time to go to Ohio. The race starts next week. Besides, how many teachers have driven flying machines for more than a year? Most aviators pick it up on their own, just like Josephine. Spin her over.”

  It was a perfect day for flying, a sunny late-spring morning at Belmont Park with a light west wind. Andy and the mechanicians who Bell had hired to assist him had rolled the Eagle to a distant stretch of grass far from the main activity of the infield. They had chocked the wheels, and when they heard Bell order Andy to start the motor, they grabbed the chocks’ ropes and prepared to steady the machine as wing runners.

  Bell was seated behind the wing, with his head, shoulders, and chest exposed. The motor was ahead of him – the safest place for it, Eddison-Sydney-Martin insisted, where it wouldn’t crush the driver in a smash. Ahead of the motor gleamed a nine-foot, two-bladed propeller of polished walnut – the most expensive place for it, Joe Mudd had noted. “If you come down hard on the nose, it’ll cost you a hundred bucks for a new one.”

  Bell tilted the wheel post and watched the effect on the wings. Out at the tips, eighteen feet to his right and left, the alettoni hinged up and down. He looked back along the slim fuselage, whose booms and struts were covered in tightly drawn silk fabric to reduce drag, and turned the wheel. The rudder moved left and right. He pulled the wheel toward him. The elevators hinged to the horizontal tail keel tilted. In theory, when he did that in the air, the machine would go up.

  “Spin her over!”

  “A hundred fliers have died in accidents,” Andy reminded him for the third time that morning.

  “More mountain climbers die falling off cliffs. Spin her over!”

  Moser crossed his arms over his chest. He was one of the stubbornest men Bell had met. His father was a policeman, and Moser had the policeman’s wall-like resistance to anything he didn’t like. This resistance was stiffened by an unshakable belief in machinery. He knew machinery, loved it, and swore by it.

  “I know the machine is ready to fly because I put it together with my own hands. I know we walked around it and tested every moving part and every brace. And I know the motor is ready to fly because I pulled the cylinder heads off to tune the timing and the pressure. The only thing I do not know is ready to fly is the driver, Mr. Bell.”

  Isaac Bell fixed his overanxious mechanician with a no-nonsense eye.

  “If you’re going to help me protect Josephine, you better get used to the idea that Van Dorn operators go about their business promptly. I have observed how aviators take to the air since I first arrived at Belmont Park. When I purchased my American Eagle, I questioned both Josephine Josephs and Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin on their techniques. I have also grilled Joe Mudd, whose navigation of his Liberator indicates an especially steady hand in the flying line. All agree that these Breguet controls make it a lot easier to learn. Last, but not least,” Bell smiled, “I have read every issue of both Aeronautics and Flight since those magazines were first published-I know what I’m doing.”

  Bell’s smile vanished like a shotgunned searchlight. His eyes turned dark as December. “Spin! Her! Over!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  Bell opened the gasoline valve and moved the air valve to the idle setting. On the Gnome rotary engine, he had learned, the driver was the carburetor.

  Andy Moser turned the propeller repeatedly, drawing fuel into the motor. Bell moved the magneto switch.

  “Contact!”

  Andy clutched the propeller with both hands, threw his long, lean back into a powerful tug, and jumped back before it cut him in half. The motor caught, chugged, and spewed pale blue smoke. Bell let it warm. When it sounded ready, he opened the air valve fully. The smoke thinned. The gleaming nickel-steel cylinders and the shiny propeller begin to blur as they spun toward top speed with a powerful-sounding Blat! Blat! Blat! He had never felt a motor spin so smoothly. At twelve hundred rpms, it ran slick as a turbine.

  He glanced down at Andy.

  “Ready!”

  Andy nodded agreement and signaled the mechanicians to pull the chocks and run alongside to steady the wings in case of a crosswind. The Eagle began to roll, bouncing on pneumatic tires that were connected to the chassis’s skids with springy bands of rubber, and swiftly picked up speed. The wing runners dropped behind. Bell felt a smooth, muscular impulse as the tail lifted from the ground.

  He had a hundred yards of open space ahead of him before the
grass ended at the rail that separated the infield from the racetrack. He could blip the magneto button to slow the motor so he could practice rolling on the ground. Or he could pull back on the wheel and try the air.

  Isaac Bell pulled back on the wheel and tried the air.

  In a heartbeat, the Eagle stopped bouncing. The grass was five feet under him. Unlike trains and autos that shook as they went faster, when the machine left the ground Bell felt like it was floating on glassy water. But he was not floating. He was hurtling straight at the white wooden rail that separated the field from the racetrack.

  He was barely off the ground. His wheels would not clear it. He tugged a little harder on the wheel to go higher. Too hard. He felt the machine tip upward sharply. In the next instant, he felt a sudden void open up under him, and the Eagle started to fall.

  He had been in comparable fixes in autos and motorcycles, and even on boats and horseback.

  The solution was always the same.

  Stop thinking.

  He allowed his hands to ease the wheel forward a hair. He felt a shove from below. The propeller bit the air. Suddenly the railing was safely below his wheels, and the sky looked immense.

  A pylon was suddenly standing in front of him, one of the hundred-foot-tall racecourse markers around which they timed the speed trials. Just as Andy and Josephine had warned him, the gyroscopic force exerted by the spinning weight of the rotary engine had dragged him to the right. Bell turned the wheel to the left. The Eagle rolled sideways and drifted left. He straightened up, banked too far right, compensated again, compensated repeatedly, and gradually worked her onto an even keel.

  It was like sailing, he realized in a flash of insight that made everything clearer. Even though he had to counteract the engine pull, the Eagle would point where he wanted it to as long as he knew where the wind was coming from. The wind – the air – was his to use, keeping in mind that, with his propeller pulling him through the air, most of the wind he encountered he was producing himself.

  He drew back on the wheel to climb. The same principle seemed to hold. He climbed in stages, stepping into the sky as if going up stairs, leveling off when it felt too slow, angling up when he picked up speed. Speed made air stronger, Josephine had told him.

  Belmont Park grew small beneath him, as if he were gazing through the wrong end of a telescope. Farms and villages spread below. To his left he saw the deep dark blue of the Atlantic Ocean. Smoke ahead and scores and scores of converging rail and trolley tracks pointed toward New York City.

  A rational thought rambled through his mind, surprising him. He let go of the wheel with one hand to pull his watch chain. He tugged his gold watch from its pocket and deftly thumbed it open. It had occurred to him that this was so much fun that he had better check the time. Andy Moser had poured enough gas and castor oil into the tanks to run the motor for an hour. All by himself, in the middle of the sky, Isaac Bell laughed out loud. He had a strong feeling that he had changed his life forever and might never return to earth.

  “A BANDAGE,” said Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin, applying one to Isaac Bell’s forehead, “tends to unsettle my wife less than an open wound. I imagine you’ll find the same holds true with your fiancée.”

  “It’s just a scratch,” said Bell. “My poor flying machine suffered a lot worse.”

  “Only your wheels and skids,” said the baronet. “Your chassis seems intact, although I must say your mechanician appears put out.”

  Bell glanced at Andy Moser, who was stalking circles around the machine and shouting at his helper. Eddison-Sydney-Martin stepped back to survey his handiwork.

  “All done, and the bleeding has stopped. In fact, by the look of you, I expect you’re more in need of courage for reporting to your fiancée than when you took to the air. Be brave, old chap. I’m told Miss Morgan is a remarkable woman.”

  Bell drove to the Garden City Hotel to meet Marion, who was arriving from San Francisco that afternoon. The instant he walked into the hotel he knew that Marion was there ahead of him. Gentlemen seated in the lobby were staring over the tops of unread newspapers, bellboys eager to be summoned were lined up like tin soldiers, and the Palm Court maître d’ was personally pouring Marion’s tea.

  Bell paused a moment to gaze upon the tall, willowy blond beauty of thirty who had taken his heart. She was still in her traveling clothes, an ankle-length pleated mauve skirt with a matching vest and high-collared blouse cinched at her narrow waist and a stylish hat with a high crown and down-swept brim. Her coral-sea green eyes outshone the emerald engagement ring on her finger.

  Bell swept her into his arms and kissed her. “I have never seen you looking lovelier.”

  “Fisticuffs?” she inquired of the bandage.

  “My first flying lesson. I discovered an aeronautical phenomenon called ground effect, which made bringing the Eagle back down to earth something of a challenge. Andy and his helper will be up half the night fixing the wheels.”

  “Was your instructor put out?”

  Bell squared his broad shoulders. “Actually,” he admitted, “I taught myself.”

  Marion raised one exquisite eyebrow and regarded him with the collected gaze of a woman who had graduated with the first class at Stanford Law School and worked in banking before flourishing in the new trade of moving pictures. She said, “I understand that Orville and Wilbur Wright learned the same way. Of course, they were busy inventing the aeroplane.”

  “I had the advantage of advice from seasoned aviators. . You are regarding me with a strange look.”

  “Your eyes are as bright as I’ve ever seen them, and you’re grinning ear to ear. You look like you’re still flying.”

  Isaac Bell laughed. “I suppose I am. I suppose I always will be. Though what you’re seeing at the moment is also the effect of being so very happy to see you.”

  “I am overjoyed to see you, too, my dear, and glad of a ‘love effect.’ It’s been too long.” She stood up from her chair.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I am standing up to kiss you again.”

  Bell kissed her back until she said, “The house detective will be coming over to ask what we’re doing in public.”

  “No worry there,” said Bell. “The Garden City Hotel just signed a contract with Van Dorn Protective Services. Our man took over house detective duties this very morning.”

  “So,” she said, sitting back down, “tell me about the bump on your noggin. And this ‘ground effect.’”

  “Ground effect prevents you from alighting when a cushion of air develops between your wings and the ground. Air turns out to be strong – stronger than you’d imagine. Essentially, the machine does not want to stop flying, and you have to somehow persuade it – like when a horse takes the bit in its teeth.”

  “A flying horse,” Marion remarked.

  “Apparently the effect is strongest on a monoplane because-”

  “You must tell me,” Marion interrupted, “what did you see when you were up there?”

  “Speed looks different in the air. The land didn’t appear to blur as it does beside a train or my Locomobile. It seemed to flow under me, more slowly the higher I went.”

  “How high did you go?”

  “High enough to see the Hudson River. When I saw it, I knew I had to fly to it.”

  Marion’s beautiful eyes widened. “You flew all the way to the Hudson River?”

  Bell laughed. “It seemed safer than flying over the ocean – I could see that, too.”

  Marion marveled, “At the same time you saw the Hudson River, you saw the Atlantic Ocean? Then surely you saw the skyscrapers of New York.”

  “Like spikes in the smoke.”

  “You must take me up to shoot moving pictures.”

  “You will love it,” Bell answered. “I saw a giant sturgeon swimming on the bottom of the river.”

  “When are we going?” she asked as excitement rose in her voice.

  “Well, umm, flying is perfectly saf
e, of course. But not yet safe with me.”

  Isaac Bell was reminded that his beloved could be as single-minded as Josephine when she asked with a challenging smile, “I wonder if Preston Whiteway would hire an aviator to take me up?”

  “Let me practice first. By the end of the race I’ll have the hang of it.”

  “Wonderful! We’ll do it over San Francisco. I can’t wait! But you will be careful while you learn?”

  “Promise,” said Bell.

  “I refuse to worry about gun battles and knife fights. But flying? You’re out of your element.”

  “Not for long. Next time I see the wind has shifted, I’ll land accordingly.”

  “How could you tell the direction of the wind when you yourself were in it? Did you see a flag blowing?”

  “I watched the cows.”

  “Cows?”

  “There are dairy farms around the park, and Josephine taught me that cows always graze facing upwind. They point true as a weather vane and are easier to see from above.”

  “What else has America’s Sweetheart of the Air taught you?”

  “Keep an eye peeled for emergency landing spaces. But steer clear of bright green fields. They’re too wet to land on.” Bell left out Josephine’s warning to avoid extreme movements that would cause his wings to collapse. Neither would he repeat Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s dry “I’d avoid blundering into flat spins if I were you, old chap,” or Joe Mudd’s blunt “Don’t get fancy before you know your business.”

  Marion said, “By all accounts, including Preston’s fulsome praise of her, Josephine sounds like an interesting character.”

  “Josephine’s a character, all right, and I could use your help reading her. In the meantime, I would not mind another kiss. Shall I instruct the house detective to erect a barricade of Chinese screens and potted palms?”

  “I have a better idea. By now, the maids have unpacked my bags. Let me get out of my traveling things and into a bath. And perhaps you’ll come up and join me for supper, or something.”