The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  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 skull 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 threshing 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.

  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.”