The Race ib-4 Page 9

  “I’ve seen him operate. You haven’t.”

  “You saw him operate ten years ago, when you were a kid. You’re not a kid anymore. And Frost is ten years older.”

  “Do you want me to replace you?” Bell asked coldly.

  “Try firing me, I’ll appeal straight to Mr. Van Dorn.”

  They stared hard at each other. Men standing nearby backed away assuming punches would fly. But their friendship ran too deeply for fisticuffs. Bell laughed. “If he catches wind of us bull moose locking horns, he’ll fire both of us.”

  Archie said, “I swear to you, Isaac, no one will hurt Josephine while I’m on watch. If anyone dares try, I will defend her to my dying breath.”

  Isaac Bell felt reassured, not so much because of Archie’s words but because during their entire exchange he never took his eyes off her.

  A HEAVILY LADEN, immaculately lacquered Doubleday, Page delivery van rolled into Belmont Park. The driver and his helper wore uniform caps with polished visors that were the same dark green color as the van. They pulled up at the grandstand service entrance and unloaded bales of World’s Work and Country Life in America magazines. Then, instead of leaving the grounds, they steered onto the stone-dust road that connected the train yard to the infield and followed a flatbed Model T truck that was carrying a Wright motor from a hangar car to the flying machine it was meant to power.

  The gate that barred the way across the racetrack into the infield was manned by Van Dorn detectives. They waved the Model T through but stopped the Doubleday, Page van and regarded the duo, attired like trustworthy deliverymen, with puzzled expressions.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  The driver grinned. “I bet you wouldn’t believe me if I said we was delivering reading matter to the birdmen.”

  “You’re right about that. What’s up?”

  “We got a motor in the back for the Liberator. The mechanicians just got done with it and asked us to lend a hand.”

  “Where’s their truck?”

  “They had to pull the bands.”

  “Joe Mudd’s my brother-in-law,” interjected the helper. “Knew we was delivering magazines. Long as the boss don’t find out, we’re O.K.”

  “All right, come on through. You know where to find him?”

  “We’ll find him.”

  The green-lacquered van wove through the busy infield. The driver steered around flying machines, mechanicians, autos, trucks, wheelbarrows, and bicycles. Crammed in the back of the van, so tightly they had to stand, were a dozen of Rod Sweets’s fighters. Dressed in suits and derbies, they were a clear cut above the usual pug uglies in order to ensure the smooth flow of opium and morphine to doctors and pharmacists. They stood in tense silence, hoping their outfits would help them disappear into the crush of paying spectators when the clouting was over. No one wanted to tangle with Van Dorns, but the money Harry Frost had paid in advance was too rich to refuse. They would take their lumps. Some of them would get collared. But those who escaped back to Brooklyn intact wouldn’t have to work for months.

  Harry Frost stood with them, watching Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue Farman biplane through a peephole drilled in the side. He felt strangely calm. His plan would work.

  Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin was tearing up the sky, fighting to set a speed record for biplanes on an oval course marked by pylons fifteen hundred yards apart. The course was three miles. To beat the record, he had to circle twenty laps in less than an hour, and he was cutting the corners tightly by banking with great skill. But unbeknownst to the Englishman, every high-speed turn he hurled the sturdy Farman into could be his last. When the Jonas boys’ aluminum anchor failed under the terrific forces, the sabotaged wire tension stay would rip from the wing it counterbraced, and the wing would break. At that fatal moment, every eye in the grandstand and every eye in the infield would fly to the falling machine.

  Frost had seen them fall. From five hundred feet, it took a remarkably long time to hit the ground. In that time, no one, not even the Van Dorns, would see his fighters emerge from the van. Once out, it would be too late to stop them. They would slash a swath like a football wedge, and he would charge through the cleared space straight at Josephine.

  ISAAC BELL WAS ADMIRING how sharply Eddison-Sydney-Martin cut the corners when, thirty minutes into the speed record attempt, a wing came off. It seemed like an illusion. The engine kept roaring, and the biplane kept racing. The broken wing separated into two parts, the top and bottom planes, which remained loosely attached to each other by wire braces. The rest of the airship hurtled past them on a steep downward trajectory.

  Thousands in the grandstand gasped. As one, they surged to their feet, blood draining from their faces, eyes locked on the sky. The mechanicians in the infield looked up in anguish. A woman screamed – Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s wife, Bell saw. The stricken aeroplane was falling nose down, when it began to spin. Terrible forces tore its canvas, and it shed ragged strips of fabric that trailed after it like long hair.

  Bell could see Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin grappling with the controls. But it was hopeless. The biplane was beyond control. It hit the ground with a loud bang. Bell felt it shake the earth a quarter mile away. A collective moan rippled across the infield and was echoed by the crowd in the grandstand.

  Bell heard another scream.

  The tall detective’s heart sank even as he exploded into action. The English airman’s wife was running toward the wreckage, but it wasn’t Abby who had screamed. She held both hands pressed to her mouth. The scream, a hopeless shriek of terror, had come from behind him.

  Josephine.

  BOOK TWO

  “balance yourself like a bird on a beam”

  10

  ISAAC BELL YANKED HIS BROWNING PISTOL from his shoulder holster and ran full tilt up the middle of a double row of flying machines.

  The sight of a tall man in a white suit running toward them with a gun in his hand scattered the mechanicians who were staring at the wreckage behind him. At the end of the path they cleared for him Bell saw Josephine with her back to him. In front of her, the red-haired Archie Abbott was shielding her with his own body. In front of Archie, six Van Dorn detectives fought shoulder to shoulder to block a flying wedge of thugs charging with fists, clubs, and lengths of sharpened bicycle chain.

  Behind the attackers stood a dark green Doubleday, Page delivery van with its back doors open wide. Harry Frost leaped through the doors with a gun in one hand and a knife in the other.

  A Van Dorn drew his gun. A bicycle chain snaked it out of his bloodied hand. A club to his skull sent him pinwheeling. A second detective was knocked to the trampled grass. The remaining four fought to hold the line, but they were overwhelmed by the flying wedge and flung aside, opening a clear path to Archie and Josephine. Harry Frost charged up it with the speed and power of a maddened rhino.

  Isaac Bell triggered his Browning. It was a highly accurate weapon, but he was running at full speed so he aimed for the larger target of Frost’s body instead of his head. Bell’s bullet went home. He saw it pluck Frost’s coat, but it did not slow the big man’s charge. Nor did it prevent Frost from leveling his gun at Archie.

  Bell was almost to them, close enough to recognize Frost’s gun as a Webley-Fosbery. Knowing Frost’s predilection for brutality, Bell feared that the weapon was loaded with the.455 “Manstopper” hollow-points.

  Archie stood his ground and aimed his pistol at Frost. It was a small-scale 6.35mm Mauser pocket pistol, an experimental model that the factory owners had presented to him when his honeymoon took him through Germany. Bell had argued that it was too light to count on. But Archie had smiled, “It’s a keepsake of our honeymoon, and it doesn’t wrinkle my suit.”

  Coolly, he let Frost close the range before he squeezed off three bullets.

  Bell saw the bullets pierce Frost’s lapels. But Frost kept coming. Speed, weight, and momentum were stronger forces than three 6.35mm slugs. Archie’s well-aimed bullet
s would ultimately kill Harry Frost, but not before the charging man wreaked bloody destruction. Bell aimed for Frost’s head. Archie blocked his line of fire.

  Cool as ice, the redheaded detective tipped up the barrel to place the coup de grâce between Frost’s eyes. Before he could fire, another of the attackers’ sharpened chains whistled through the air like a bullwhip and slashed the Mauser out of his hand.

  Isaac Bell jinked to the left and fired over Archie’s shoulder. He was sure he had hit Frost again. But the angry red-faced giant triggered his own weapon point-blank at Archie Abbott. The Webley boomed like a cannon.

  Archie staggered as the hollow-point bored a tunnel through his chest. His legs crumpled under him. Frost jammed his revolver in his pocket and switched the knife to his right hand, burning eyes locking on Josephine as he brushed past Archie.

  Archie hurled a mighty left hook as he fell.

  Bell knew that with his body shattered, the punch was born of all that Archie had left – his courage and his skill. It caught Frost square on the side of his jaw with such force that bone cracked. Frost’s eyes widened with shock. His fist convulsed open. The knife dropped.

  Bell was almost on him. He couldn’t shoot. Josephine was in his way.

  Frost whirled and ran.

  Bell started to chase after him. But as he leaped across his fallen friend’s body he saw bright red blood frothing from Archie’s coat. Without hesitating, he dropped to the ground beside him.

  “Doctors!” he shouted. “Get doctors!”

  Bell opened Archie’s coat and shirt and pulled a razor-sharp throwing knife from his own boot to cut away Archie’s undershirt. Air was bubbling from the wound. Bell looked around. People were gaping. But one set of eyes was cool and ready to help.

  “Josephine!”

  He handed her the knife.

  “Quick. Cut me a patch of wing fabric. Like this.”

  He indicated the size with his hands.

  “Doctors!” Bell shouted to those watching. “Get moving, you men! Find doctors!”

  Josephine was back in seconds with a neatly cut square of yellow fabric.

  Isaac Bell pressed it over the wound and held three sides of the square down tight to Archie’s skin. As Archie’s chest rose and fell, Bell let air escape from the wound but allowed no more air to be sucked in.

  “Josephine!”

  “I’m here.”

  “I need cloth to tie this down.”

  Without hesitation, she removed her heavy flying tunic and then her blouse, which she sliced into long strips.

  “Help me slip it under him.”

  Bell rolled Archie onto the side of the wound while Josephine worked the cloth under him. Bell tied the ends.

  “Grab those shrouds to keep him warm. Doctors!”

  A doctor ran up at last. He banged his bag down, knelt beside Archie, and felt for a pulse. “Good job,” he said of the patch. “Are you a physician?”

  “I’ve seen it done,” Bell answered tersely. On his own chest, he could have added, when he was twenty-two years old, by Joseph Van Dorn, calmly trying to save his apprentice’s life while tears were soaking his whiskers.

  “What put the hole in him?” asked the doctor.

  “Hollow-point.455.”

  The doctor looked at Bell. “Is he a friend?”

  “He is my best friend.”

  The doctor shook his head. “I’m sorry, son. There’s a reason they call it a manstopper.”

  “We need an ambulance.”

  “One’s coming right now. The English birdman didn’t need it.”

  WITHIN MINUTES ARCHIE was loaded into the ambulance and on his way to the hospital with two doctors riding with him. By then the Van Dorns had regrouped, and formed a powerful cordon around Josephine.

  Harry Frost had escaped in the confusion.

  Bell quickly organized a manhunt, which included alerting every hospital in the area.

  “He’s carrying at least three slugs in him,” he said, “maybe four. And Archie broke his jaw.”

  “We caught two of their crew, Isaac. Brooklyn toughs. I recognize one. He works for Rod Sweets, the opium king. What do we do with them?”

  “See what you can get out of them before you hand them to the cops.” Bell had no doubt that Archie had romanced the local police when he first arrived at the racetrack. It was standard practice to cozy up and find who should be paid off to be friends in an emergency.

  “They’re singing already. Frost paid them a hundred bucks a head. Gave them the dough up front so they could bank it with their girlfriends in case they got caught.”

  “O.K. I doubt they’ll know anything useful about Frost. But see what you can learn. Then turn them in. Tell the cops Van Dorn will press charges. Give them a reason to hold them.”

  Bell spoke briefly with Josephine to make sure she felt safe and to assure her that he had ordered up additional guards until they caught Frost. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m going up,” she said.

  “Now?”

  “Flying clears my mind.”

  “Don’t you have to replace the fabric you cut out of your airship?”

  “I didn’t cut it from an essential surface.”

  BELL HURRIED TO WHERE Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s biplane had struck the ground. It was a very odd coincidence that the Englishman’s accident had distracted everyone in Belmont Park, including his detectives, at the moment Harry Frost’s thugs attacked. In fact, it could not be a coincidence. Frost must have somehow engineered it.

  Bell saw from a distance that the Farman had crashed nose first. Its fuselage was sticking straight up in the air like a monument, a tombstone, to poor Eddison-Sydney-Martin, who, if Bell’s suspicions were correct, was the victim of a murder, not an accident. The baronet’s wife was standing beside the wrecked biplane. A tall man in a flying helmet had his arm around her as if to comfort her. He was smoking a cigarette. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. She laughed.

  Bell circled so he could see their faces. The man was Eddison-Sydney-Martin himself. He was dead white in the face, with a trickle of blood seeping from a bandage over his eye, and he was leaning heavily on Abby. But, miraculously, the Englishman was standing on his own two feet.

  Bell looked again at the =wrecked Farman, and asked, “Who was driving your machine?”

  Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin laughed. “I’m afraid I attended the entire adventure in person.”

  “Something of a miracle.”

  “The framework tends to absorb the impact – all that wood and bamboo collapses in a cushiony manner, if you know what I mean. So long as one doesn’t tumble out and snap one’s neck, or one’s motor doesn’t jump its moorings and crush one, one has a fair shot at surviving a smash. Not that a chap is not immensely grateful for whatever part luck plays, what?”

  “I’m sorry to see you’re out of the race.”

  “I’m not out of the race. But I do need another machine straightaway.”

  Bell glanced at his wife, wondering whether, as she wrote checks, she would risk sending her husband up in the air again. Abby said, “Some clever folk in New Haven are experimenting with a sort of ‘headless’ Curtiss that has a lot of go.”

  “They’ve a license from Breguet, who make an excellent machine,” her husband added.

  “What went wrong?” Bell asked. “Why did she go down?”

  “I heard a loud bang. Then a wire stay shrieked past my head. It would appear that a counterbracer parted. Unsupported, the wing collapsed.”

  “Why did the counterbracing stay break?”

  “That is something of a mystery. I mean, one never encounters shoddy construction on a Farman machine.” He shrugged. “My chaps are looking into it. But it’s all in the game, isn’t it? Accidents do happen.”

  “Sometimes,” said Bell, even more convinced that the Englishman’s accident was no accident. He stepped closer to the wreck, where Lionel Ruggs, the Farman’s chief mechanician, was removing par
ts to be salvaged. “Did you find the wire that broke?” he asked.

  “Bloody little that didn’t break,” Ruggs retorted. “She hit so hard, she’s mostly splinters.”

  “I mean, the wire that broke that caused the accident. The baronet said he heard one let loose.”

  “I’ve laid them all over there.” He pointed at a row of wires. “So far, I find none broken. It’s Roebling wire. Same as was spun into the cables that hold up the Brooklyn Bridge. Virtually indestructible.”

  Bell went to look for himself. A helper, a boy no more than fourteen, came and went with more wire. He was puzzling over one end of a strand when Bell asked, “What do you have there, sonny?”

  “Nothing.”

  Bell took a shiny silver dollar from his pocket. “But you’re staring like something struck you – here.”

  The boy grabbed the coin. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Why don’t you show this to your boss?”

  The boy dragged the wire to the chief mechanician. “Look at this, Mr. Ruggs.”

  “Lay it out with the rest, laddie.”

  “But, sir. Look at this, sir.”

  Lionel Ruggs put on reading spectacles and held it to the light. “Bloody hell. . Bloody, bloody hell!”

  Just then, Dmitri Platov came running up. He shook his head at the remains of the Farman. Then he looked at Eddison-Sydney-Martin, who was lighting a fresh smoke. “Is surviving? Is lucky.”

  Bell asked, “What do you make of this, Mr. Platov?”

  Platov took the fitting in his fingers and studied it, puzzlement growing on his face. “Is strange. Is very strange.”

  Bell asked, “Why is it strange?”

  “Is aluminum.”

  Chief Mechanician Ruggs exploded, “What the bloody hell was it doing on our machine?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Isaac Bell.

  Platov said, “Is something should not be. Is – how you say – link-ed weak.”

  “This anchor at the end of the wire is made of cast aluminum,” Ruggs seethed. “It should be steel. There’s tons of tension on those wires, tons more when the machine moves sharply. The anchor bolt should be as least as strong as the wire. Otherwise, like Mr. Platov says, it’s a weak link.”