The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  He said, “Josephine told me that you wept that Marco stole your heart.”

  He was not surprised when Danielle answered, “Marco must have told her that lie. I’ve never met the girl.”

  Danielle helped Bell and Andy roll the Eagle to the far end of the asylum lawn and turned it into the wind. She gripped the cane tail skid, as Andy spun the propeller, and held fast, retarding its forward motion while he struggled to hold it back and scramble aboard at the same time. She was strong, Bell noticed, and when it came to flying machines she knew her business.

  Bell cleared the asylum wall and followed the rail line to its connector to the New York Central line and followed the tracks to the Castleton-on-Hudson railroad station. Passing high over the main street, he saw white horses pulling fire engines and a close formation of brass horns and tubas gleaming in the sunlight.

  A fire department marching band was heading up the street, leading a horde of people, in the direction of the hayfield where Josephine’s machine was being repaired. They passed a brick schoolhouse, and the doors flew open and hundreds of children streamed out to join the parade. The word had gotten around, Bell realized. The whole town was coming to welcome her, and there were more people in the parade than would fit on the field.

  Bell raced the mile to the hayfield, put down on it, and ran to warn his detectives. “The whole town’s coming to greet Josephine. They let the kids out of school. We’ll be stuck here all night if we don’t go now.”

  23

  JOSEPHINE WAS FRANTIC, “Hurry it up!” she cried to the mechanicians.

  “I’ll drive you down the road,” said Bell. “Give them a speech. Let them see you so they won’t mob the field.”

  “No,” she said. “They don’t want to see me, they want to touch the machine. I saw it happen in California last year. They wrote their names on the wings and poked pencils in the fabric.”

  “Their parents are coming, too.”

  “The parents were worse. They were tearing off parts for souvenirs.”

  “I’ll block,” said Bell.

  He sent the Rolls-Royce roadster and the Thomas to try to intercept the parade on the road, a temporary solution, at best, as the excited townspeople would simply stream around the autos. He ran his Eagle on the ground to the head of the field to further distract them.

  Small boys, who had run ahead of the parade, jumped the ditch that separated the road from the hayfield. Bell saw there would be no stopping the children, who had no concept of the danger of whirling propellers before they got in her way.

  Just when it seemed they would block her path, everyone looked up.

  Bell heard the unmistakably authoritative roar of a six-cylinder Curtiss. Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s bright blue headless pusher, which Bell had last seen floating in New York Harbor, sailed overhead, making a beeline for Albany.

  “That man,” said Andy, “has nine lives.”

  Josephine dropped the wrench and jumped aboard her Celere.

  The boys stopped running and stood stock-still, staring at the sky. Two yellow monoplanes on the ground had seemed the epitome of excitement. But the sight of a flying machine actually in the air was more remarkable, and less likely than July Fourth at Christmas.

  “Spin her over!” Josephine shouted.

  Her Antoinette howled. The wing runners turned her around into the wind, and she raced across the cut hay and into the sky. Isaac Bell was right behind her, one step ahead of the welcoming committee.

  BELL FOUND ALBANY’S ALTAMONT Fairground buzzing with rumors of sabotage. The mechanicians tending the machines in the racecourse infield were debating whether the wings of Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss Pusher had been deliberately weakened. Bell went looking for the Englishman. He found him and his wife, Abby, at a party in a yellow tent that had been pitched beside Preston Whiteway’s private railroad car.

  The newspaper publisher intercepted Bell and whispered urgently, “I don’t like these rumors. Strange as it may seem, they suggest the presence of a second lunatic, someone other than Harry Frost. I want you to investigate whether there is a murderer among us, or if Frost is lashing out at everyone.”

  “I’ve already started,” said Bell.

  “I want constant reports, Bell. Constant reports.”

  Bell glanced around for something to distract Whiteway. “Who is that handsome Frenchman talking to Josephine?”

  “Frenchman? Which Frenchman?”

  “The dashing one.”

  Whiteway plowed through his guests to plant himself proprietorially next to Josephine and glower at the Blériot driver, Renee Chevalier, who had gotten her to smile despite her poor showing.

  Bell joined Eddison-Sydney-Martin, congratulated him on his survival, and asked how his headless pusher had come to fall in the harbor.

  “One of my chaps claims he found a hole drilled clean through the strut that snapped, causing the wing to collapse.”

  “Sabotage?”

  “Rubbish.”

  “Why do you say rubbish?”

  “I say it was a knothole in a timber selected poorly by the builder, though they’ll never admit to it.”

  “Could I see it?”

  “I’m afraid it floated off while she was extricated from the water. We lost several pieces plucking her onto the barge.”

  Bell located the mechanician working on the blue pusher, an American from the Curtiss Company, who scoffed at the knot explanation.

  “If it wasn’t a knot,” Bell asked, “could someone have accidentally drilled a hole and covered it over to hide the mistake?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “No flying-machine maker would take the chance. They’d own up to their mistake and replace the part even if it came out of their own pocket. Look, Mr. Bell, say a house carpenter mistakenly bores a hole in a board. He can plug it up, caulk it, paint it over, and no one’s the wiser. But a flying-machine strut is a whole ’nother story. We all know that if something breaks up there, down she goes.”

  “Down she went,” said Bell.

  “Could have been murder. The Englishman’s darned lucky they fished him out of the drink in one piece.”

  “Why do you suppose he insists it was a knothole?”

  “The baronet is a babe in the woods. He can’t imagine anyone doing him harm to win the race, just like he can’t imagine a birdman wanting to win it to collect the fifty thousand bucks. He’s always saying ‘the winning is prize enough,’ at least when he’s not saying ‘the race is the prize.’ Drives the boys nuts. He’s, like, above it all, if you know what I mean, having a title and a rich wife. But the thing is, it’s not fair to Mr. Curtiss. Glenn Hammond Curtiss would never let a patch job leave the factory.”

  “Was the pusher left unattended the night before the race started?”

  “Along with all the others at Belmont Park. Your ‘aviatrix’ was the only one who had guards, but that’s ’cause of the husband, I hear.”

  “So if neither a knothole nor a mistakenly drilled hole would ever get out of the Curtiss factory, how do you think that hole got in that broken strut?”

  “Sabotage,” said the mechanician. “Like everyone says. Bore a hole where we wouldn’t see it. Where fabric lapped over it or a fitting concealed it. It happened to his Farman, too, didn’t it? And look what happened to the Platov engine. Those were sabotage, right?”

  “They were sabotage,” Bell agreed.

  “Excepting I don’t see what none of them smashes had to do with Josephine’s crazy husband. Do you, Mr. Bell?”

  Bell pressed two dollars into the mechanician’s hand. “Here, buy the boys a drink.”

  “Not ’til we reach San Francisco. We’re sleeping stone-cold sober under our pusher from now on. One man awake all night.”

  Bell put his mind to the unsettling thought that of three acts of sabotage, only one could be connected to Harry Frost. Three acts of sabotage since the racers gathered at Belmont Park. Sir
Eddison-Sydney-Martin twice a victim, Platov and poor Judd the mechanician the third.

  Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s first smash had been so clearly a distraction engineered by Harry Frost to kill Josephine.

  But how could he blame the second attack on Eddison-Sydney-Martin on Harry Frost? What would Frost get out of Eddison-Sydney-Martin smashing? Just as he had wondered back at Belmont, what would Harry Frost get out of Dmitri Platov’s engine jumping the track and killing a mechanician? Was Frost attacking the entire race instead of concentrating on killing his wife? That didn’t make sense at this stage. Frost was too single-minded to spread himself thin. He would concentrate on killing his wife first, a crime which, if successful, would have the collateral effect of besmirching Preston Whiteway’s race as well.

  But to what purpose had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? And to what purpose had the headless pusher been made to smash?

  To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the likeliest answer.

  Who would gain? Three possibilities hovered in Bell’s mind, two likely, one odd but not entirely unlikely. The saboteur could be a competitor – one of the birdmen – eliminating his strongest rivals. Or the saboteur could be a gambler trying to throw the race by getting rid of front-runners. Or, oddly, it could be the race sponsor himself trying to generate publicity.

  The likeliest was a competitor trying to gain an edge by eliminating his strongest rivals. Fifty thousand dollars was a huge prize, more money than a workingman would earn in a lifetime.

  But the money wagered as the race progressed across the country would be even more than could be made by fixing a horse race. High rollers like Johnny Musto could rake it in.

  Preston Whiteway presented a third, strange possibility. Bell could not forget that the publisher had stated unabashedly that the best thing that could happen to keep people excited about the race would be half the male contestants smashing to the ground before Chicago. “A natural winnowing of the field,” as he had put it coldly, “will turn it into a contest that pits only the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine.”

  Too far-fetched? But was Preston Whiteway above engineering aeroplane smashes to sell newspapers? Truth, facts, and moral decency hadn’t stopped him from trying to start a war with Japan over the Great White Fleet. Nor had they restrained him from using the sinking of the battleship Maine to incite the Spanish-American War.

  JOSEPHINE JOSEPHS FELL farther behind on the one-hundred-forty-five-mile leg from Albany to Syracuse when the hastily repaired alettone seized up, and its entire mounting had to be replaced. Then she lost half a day between Syracuse and Buffalo when the Antoinette blew a cylinder.

  Isaac Bell reminded her that she was not the only competitor running into difficulty. Three aeroplanes were already out of the race. A big Voisin tangled terminally with a pasture fence, a fast Ambroise Goupy biplane broke apart when a down current dropped it into a stand of trees short of the field where it was attempting to alight, and the formidable Renee Chevalier splashed into the Erie Canal, reducing his Blériot to matchwood, and nearly drowned in the shallow water, unable to stand or swim having broken both legs.

  Josephine, whom Bell had noticed had become rather standoffish ever since they left Belmont, surprised him with one of her exuberant grins that made her look much more herself. “Thanks for the thought, Isaac. I guess I should be grateful I haven’t broken any bones yet.”

  Bell hired a third mechanician – a skillful Chicago boy named Eustace Weed, who had lost his job on the ruined Voisin – to keep his Eagle running. That gave Andy spare time to investigate the mechanical cause of each of the smashes, with an eye to pinning down evidence of sabotage. The meticulous policeman’s son gathered evidence carefully, and reported that since Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s smash into New York Harbor most accidents had a legitimate mechanical explanation for what went wrong. The possible exception was Chevalier’s, but key parts of his machine were on the bottom of the Erie Canal.

  Bell followed up by questioning the mechanicians. Who was near the machine? Who was in your hangar car? Any strangers? None they remembered. Sometimes the mechanicians found evidence to show the Van Dorns – a broken strut, a crushed fuel line, a kinked stay wire – sometimes there was none.

  Preston Whiteway kept railing at Bell that there was “a murderer among us.” Bell kept his counsel, knowing that Whiteway could be him – not a murderer in the strictest sense but a cold-blooded saboteur with little regard for the fate of the drivers when they smashed.

  As the racers struggled west, smashes grew increasingly common. Machines faltered, winds sprang up with no warning, and birdmen made mistakes. Others suffered breakdowns that added hours to their time. Joe Mudd’s sturdy red Liberator was leaking so much oil that the entire front of the machine turned black. Then it nearly killed him when the oil caught fire over Buffalo. Mudd was luckier than Chet Bass. Bass’s Army Signal Corps Wright Flyer skidded sideways on landing at Erie, Pennsylvania, throwing him thirty feet across the grass.

  Bell listened closely to the heated discussions that followed. The fact Bass would lose two days in the hospital with a brain concussion prompted the birdmen and mechanicians to debate the value of installing belts to keep the drivers from falling off their machines. An Austrian aristocrat flying a Pischof monoplane ridiculed the “cowardly” idea of strapping in with a belt. Many agreed that belting on would be unmanly. But Billy Thomas, the race-car driver who had proven his bravery repeatedly on the raceways before learning how to fly the Vanderbilt syndicate’s big Curtiss Twin Pusher, announced that the Austrian could go to hell, he would wear a belt.

  The day he did, a Great Lakes gale blew his Curtiss against a railroad semaphore mast atop a signal tower on a depot building. The Curtiss ricocheted into twenty strands of telegraph wire and bounced back through the second-floor windows of the signal tower.

  Billy Thomas’s belt kept him in the wreckage, but he was nearly cut in half by the force of the sudden stop against the rigid leather. Internal organs ruptured, he was out of the race.

  Discussion that night at the Cleveland Fairgrounds shifted toward the concept of elastic belts. Mechanicians got busy tinkering with the thick rubber bands already on hand to spring the aeroplanes’ wheels.

  The Austrian aristocrat still scoffed. The next day, a gust heeled his Pischof sharply, and he fell off the monoplane a thousand feet over Toledo, Ohio.

  At the funeral, Eddison-Sydney-Martin announced that his wife insisted “vehemently” that he be strapped onto his aeroplane, wearing a broad belt fashioned from a horse sling.

  Josephine’s and Isaac Bell’s similar craft had them seated deeper within the fuselage, making falling off slightly less likely. Josephine ignored Preston Whiteway’s pleas that she wear a belt. Having survived a smash in a burning biplane, she explained, she was afraid of being trapped.

  Isaac Bell, at Marion Morgan’s suggestion, instructed Andy to anchor a wide motorcyclist’s belt to the Eagle with rubber bands. Sheathed next to one of the bands was a razor-sharp hunting knife.

  NOTHING WAS HEARD NOR SEEN of Harry Frost since he escaped from Isaac Bell under the Weehawken piers. Bell suspected that Frost was waiting for the race to reach Chicago. Chicago was where he had begun his meteoric rise to the criminal pinnacle from which he had launched his legitimate fortune. In no other city on the continent was Frost better established with gang associates and corrupt politicians. In no other city had he so deeply infiltrated the police.

  Try it, Bell thought grimly. The Van Dorn Detective Agency had started in Chicago, too. They, too, knew the city cold. When the race was stopped in Gary, Indiana, by lakeshore storms that the Weather Bureau predicted would last for days, he went ahead by train to scout the city.

  “We’ll beat him if he tries it here,” Bell vowed to Joseph Van Dorn while conferring by long-distance telephone from the agency’s Palmer House Chicago headquarters.

  Van Dorn, who was in Washington, r
eminded Bell that he had promised to keep a clear head.

  Bell changed the subject to sabotage. Van Dorn listened closely, then observed, “The weakness of that line of inquiry is that flying machines are perfectly capable of smashing without help from miscreants.”

  “Except,” Bell retorted, “in the cases of Eddison-Sydney-Martin and Renee Chevalier, and even Chet Bass, it’s the frontrunners who are smashing. Soon as a fellow pulls ahead of the pack, something goes wrong.”

  “Steve Stevens hasn’t smashed yet. I read here in the Washington Post that Stevens holds the lead.”

  “Josephine is catching up.”

  “How much have you bet on her?”

  “Enough to buy my own detective agency if I win,” Bell answered darkly.

  In fact, the newspapers were starting to take notice that a birdman heavier than the rotund President Taft was flying faster than five men who tipped the scales at half his weight and a woman who barely weighed a third.

  “According to the Post,” Van Dorn chuckled, “the dark horse is the heaviest horse.”

  Bell had seen similar headlines in Cleveland.

  SEVEN DAYS FROM NEW YORK TO CHICAGO?

  the Plain Dealer speculated breathlessly, before the weather gods put the brakes on overoptimism.

  MIRACLE FLIGHT. HEAVYWEIGHT COTTON FARMER STILL IN LEAD.

  “You’ve got to hand it to Whiteway,” Van Dorn said. “He’s pulling a regular P. T. Barnum. The whole country’s talking about the race. Now that the other papers have no choice but to cover it, they’re backing favorites and smearing rivals. And everyone’s got an opinion. The sportswriters say that Josephine couldn’t possibly win because women have no endurance.”

  “The bookmakers agree with them.”

  “Republican papers say that labor should not rise above its station, much less fly. Socialist papers demand aristocrats stay on the ground, as the air belongs to all. They’re all calling your friend Eddison-Sydney-Martin the ‘lucky British cat’ for his nine-lives habit of surviving smashes.”