The Race ib-4

by Clive Cussler

  “Me?”

  “We’re a long way from Brooklyn, Johnny. What are you doing here?”

  Musto objected mightily. “I don’t have to throw no race. Win, lose, draw, all de same to me. Youse a bettin’ man, Mr. Bell. And a man of the woild, if I don’t mistake youse. Youse know the bookie never loses.”

  “Not so,” said Bell. “Sometimes bookies do lose.”

  Musto exchanged astonished glances with his bodyguards. “Yeah? When?”

  “When they get greedy.”

  “What do youse mean by dat? Who’s greedy?”

  “You’re bribing newspaper reporters.”

  “Dat’s ridiculous. What could dos poor hack writers do for me?”

  “Tout one flying machine over another to millions of readers placing bets,” said Isaac Bell. “In other words, skew the odds.”

  “Oh yeah? And what machine would I happen to be toutin’?”

  “Same one you’ve been touting all along: Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless pusher.”

  “The Coitus is a flying machine of real class,” Musto protested. “It don’t need no help from Johnny Musto.”

  “But it’s getting a lot of help from Johnny Musto regardless.”

  “Hey, it’s not like I’m fixin’ the race. I’m passin’ out information. A public service, youse might call it.”

  “I would call that a confession.”

  “You can’t prove nothin’.”

  Isaac Bell’s smile had vanished. He fixed the gambler with a cold eye. “I believe you know Harry Warren?”

  “Harry Warren?” Johnny Musto stroked his double chin. “Harry Warren? Harry Warren? Lemme think. Oh yeah! Ain’t he de New York Van Dorn who spies on the gangs?”

  “Harry Warren is going to wire me in two days that you reported to him at Van Dorn headquarters at the Knickerbocker Hotel at Forty-second Street and Broadway in New York City. If he doesn’t, I’m coming after you – personally – with all four feet.”

  Musto’s bodyguards glowered.

  Bell ignored them. “Johnny, I want you to pass the word: betting fair and square on the race is fine with me, throwing it is not.”

  “Not my fault what other gamblers do.”

  “Pass the word.”

  “What good’ll that do youse?”

  “They can’t say they weren’t warned. Have a pleasant journey home.”

  Musto looked sad. “How’m I goin’ ta get back ta New York in two days?”

  Isaac tugged his heavy gold watch chain from his vest pocket, opened the lid, and showed Musto the time. “Run quick and you can catch the milk train to Chicago.”

  “Johnny Musto don’t ride no milk train.”

  “When you get to Chicago, treat yourself to the Twentieth Century Limited.”

  “What about da race?”

  “Two days. New York.”

  The gambler and his bodyguards hurried off, muttering indignantly.

  James Dashwood climbed down from his listening post on the roof of the boxcar.

  Bell winked. “There’s one out of the way. But he’s not the only high-rolling tinhorn following the race, so I want you to keep an eye on the others. You’re authorized to place just enough bets to make your presence welcome.”

  “Do you think Musto will show up again?” Dash asked.

  “He’s not stupid. Unfortunately, the damage is done.”

  “How do you mean, Mr. Bell?”

  “The reporters he bribed have already wired their stories. If, as I suspect, there’s a saboteur trying to derail the front-runners, then bookie Musto has put Eddison-Sydney-Martin in his crosshairs.”

  29

  ILLINOIS THUNDERSTORMS STRUCK AGAIN, cutting the race in half. The trailing fliers, those who had gotten a late start from Peoria due to mechanic failures and mistakes made by tiring birdmen, put down in Springfield. But the leaders, Steve Stevens and Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin, defied the black clouds towering in the west and forged on, hoping to reach the racetrack at Columbia before the storms blew them out of the sky.

  Josephine, midway between the leaders and the trailers, pushed ahead. Isaac Bell stuck with her, eyes raking the ground for Harry Frost.

  The leaders’ support trains steamed along with them, then shoveled on the coal to race ahead to greet them at the track with canvas shrouds to protect the aeroplanes from the rain and tent stakes and ropes to anchor them against the wind.

  Marco Celere played his kind and helpful Dmitri Platov role to the hilt, directing Steve Stevens’s huge retinue of mechanicians, assistants, and servants in the securing of the big white biplane. Then he scooped up three oilskin slickers and ran to help tie down Josephine’s and Bell’s machines as they dropped from a sky suddenly seared by bolts of lightning.

  The twin yellow monoplanes bounced to a stop seconds ahead of a downpour.

  Celere tossed a slicker to Josephine and another to Bell, who said, “Thanks, Platov,” then shouted, “Come on, Josephine. The boys’ll tie it down.” He threw a long arm over her shoulder and dragged her away, saying to Platov, “Imagine reporting to Mr. Van Dorn that America’s Sweetheart of the Air got struck by lightning.”

  “Here helping, not worrying.” Platov pulled on his own slicker. Enormous raindrops started kicking up dust. For a moment they sizzled in the blazing heat. Then the sky turned black as night, and an icy wind blasted rain across the infield. The last of the spectators ran to the hotel attached to the grandstand.

  Bell’s men – Andy Moser and his helpers – dragged canvas over the Eagle.

  Eustace Weed, the new mechanician Bell had hired in Buffalo, said, “That’s O.K., Mr. Platov. We’ve got it.”

  Celere ran to help Josephine’s ham-handed detective-mechanicians tie down hers and he was reminded how frustrating it was not to be able to work on Josephine’s aeroplane – his aeroplane – to keep it flying at its best. Josephine was good, but not that good. He may be a truffatore confidence man, but if there was one skill he truly possessed, he was a fine mechanician.

  Celere waited until the machines were covered and tied down and he was sure that Isaac Bell was not coming back from escorting Josephine to her private car. Then he ran through the pouring rain to where Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless pusher was tied down. He made a show of checking the ropes, though it was not likely anyone could see him through the dark and watery haze. The baronet and his mechanicians had fled to their train. It was an opportunity to do mischief. But he had to work fast and do something unexpected.

  Thunder pealed. Lightning struck the grandstand roof, and green Saint Elmo’s fire trickled along the gutters and down the leaders. The next bolt struck in the center of the infield, and Marco Celere began to see the wisdom of Bell’s retreat from Mother Nature. He ran for the nearest cover, a temporary wooden shed erected to supply the flying machines with gasoline, oil, and water.

  Someone was sheltering in it ahead of him. Too late to turn away, he saw that it was the Englishman Lionel Ruggs, the baronet’s chief mechanician and the chief reason why he had steered clear of the headless pusher, other than surreptitiously drilling a hole in its wing strut back at Belmont Park.

  “Whatcha doin’ to the guv’s machine?”

  “Just checking its ropes.”

  “Spent a long time checkin’ ropes.”

  Celere ducked his head as if he were embarrassed. “O.K., you are catching me. I was looking at competition.”

  “Lookin’ or doin’?” Ruggs asked coldly.

  “Doing? What would I be doing?”

  Lionel Ruggs stepped very close to him. He was taller than Celere, and bigger in the chest. He stared inquiringly into Celere’s eyes. Then he cracked a mirthless smile.

  “Jimmy Quick. I thought that was you hidin’ in those curls.”

  Marco Celere knew there was no denying it. Ruggs had him dead to rights. It had been fifteen years, but they’d worked side by side in the same machine shop from ages fourteen to eighteen and shared a room under the eaves of the
owner’s house. Celere had always feared that he would bump into his past sooner or later. How many flying-machine mechanicians were there in the small, tight-knit new world of flying machines?

  Jimmy Quick had been his English nickname, a good-natured play on Prestogiacomo that the English found so hard to pronounce. He had recognized Ruggs from a distance and stayed out of his way. Now he had stumbled, face-to-face, into him in a thunderstorm.

  “What’s this Russian getup?” Ruggs demanded. “I bet you been caught stealin’ somethin’, like you was in Birmingham. Doin’ the old man’s daughter was one thing – more power to you – but stealin’ his machine tool design he worked on his whole life, that was low. That old man treated us good.”

  Celere looked around. They were alone. No one was near the shed. He said, “The old man’s dream didn’t quite work. It was a bust.”

  Ruggs turned red. “A bust because you stole it before he perfected it. . It was you, wasn’t it, drilled our wing strut?”

  “Not me.”

  “I don’t believe you, Jimmy.”

  “I don’t care if you believe me or not.”

  Lionel Ruggs pounded his chest. “I care. The guv’s a good man. He may be an aristocrat, but he’s a good man, and he deserves to win, fair and square. He don’t deserve to die in a smash caused by a schemin’ little bludger like you.”

  Marco Celere looked around again and confirmed they were still alone. The rain was coming down harder, pounding the tin roof. He couldn’t see six feet from the shed. He said, “You’re forgetting I make machine tools.”

  “How could I forget that? That’s what the old man taught us to do. Gave us a roof over our heads. Gave us breakfast, lunch, and tea. Gave us a good-paying trade. You paid him back by stealin’ his dream. And you ruined it ’cause you were too damned lazy and impatient to make it right.”

  Celere reached under his slicker and took a slide rule from his coat. “Do you know what this is?”

  “It’s the slide rule you wave around with your disguise.”

  “Do you believe that my slide rule is only a slide rule?”

  “I seen you wavin’ it around. What of it?”

  “Let me show you.”

  Celere raised the instrument to the thin light in the open door. Ruggs followed it with his eyes, and Celere whipped it back toward him like a violin bow. Ruggs gasped and clutched his throat, trying to hold in the blood.

  “This one’s a razor, not the one ‘Dmitri Platov’ waves around. A razor – just in case – and you are the case.”

  Ruggs went bug-eyed. He let go his throat and grabbed Celere. But there was no strength left in his hand, and he collapsed, spraying blood on the Italian.

  Celere watched him dying at his feet. It was only the second time he had killed a man and it did not get easier, even if the effect was worthwhile. His hands were shaking, and he felt panic flood his body and threaten to squeeze his brain into a lump that could not think or act. He had to run. There was no place to get rid of the body, no place to hide it. The rain would stop, and he would be caught. He tried to form a picture of running. The rain would wash the blood that sprayed all over his slicker. But they would still chase him. He looked at the razor, and he suddenly pictured it cutting cloth.

  Swiftly, he knelt and slashed at Ruggs’s pockets, taking from them coin and a roll of paper money and a leather wallet with more paper money in it. He stuffed them in his pockets, slashed Ruggs’s vest, and took his cheap nickel pocket watch. He looked over the body, saw gold, and took Ruggs’s wedding ring. Then he ran into the rain.

  There was no time for sabotage. If by a miracle he got away with murder, he would come back and try again.

  ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES from Columbia, Illinois, but still short of the Mississippi River, the westbound passenger train slowed down and pulled onto a siding. Marco Celere prayed they were only stopping for water. In his panicked run, he had clung to a groundless hope that if he could somehow get across the Mississippi, they couldn’t catch him. Praying it was only a water siding, he pressed his face to the window and craned his neck for a view of the jerkwater tank. But why would they stop so close to the next town?

  Two businessmen seated across the aisle of the luxurious extra-fare chair car that Celere had reckoned would be safer to flee in rather than an ordinary day coach seemed to be staring at him. There was a commotion at the vestibule. Celere fully expected to see a burly sheriff with a tin star on his coat and a pistol in his hand.

  Instead, a newsboy sprang aboard and ran up the aisle, crying, “Great air race coming our way!”

  Marco Celere bought a copy of the Hannibal Courier-Post and scanned it fearfully for a murder story that included his description.

  The race occupied half the front page. Preston Whiteway, described as “a shrewd, wide-awake businessman,” was quoted in boldface print, saying, “Sad as the recent death of Mark Twain- Hannibal’s own bard – sadder still that Mr. Twain did not live to see the flying machines in the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup alight in his beloved hometown of Hannibal, Missouri.”

  Celere looked for the short out-of-town stories that these local newspapers plucked from the telegraph. The first he saw was an interview with a “prominent aviation specialist” who said that Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss Pusher was the aeroplane to beat. “Far and away the sturdiest and fastest, its motor is being improved every day.”

  It would improve less rapidly with Ruggs out of the picture, Celere thought. But the famous high-flying baronet would have no trouble attracting top mechanicians eager to join up with a winner. The headless pusher was still the machine that posed the worst threat to Josephine.

  Celere thumbed deeper into the paper, looking for his description. The state militia was being called out. His heart skipped a beat until he read that it was to quell a labor strike at Hannibal’s cement plant. The strike was blamed on “foreigners,” egged on by “Italians,” who were seeking protection from the Italian consulate in St. Louis. Thank God he was disguised as a Russian, Celere thought, only to look up at the grim-faced businessmen lowering their newspapers to stare at him from across the aisle. He did not look Italian in his Platov getup, but there was no denying it made him look like the most foreign passenger in the chair car. Or had they already seen a story about the murder and a description of his curly hair and mutton chops, his ever-present slide rule, and his snappy straw boater with its stylish red hatband?

  The nearest leaned across the aisle. “Hey, there!” he addressed him bluntly. “You. . mister?”

  “Are you speaking to me, sir?”

  “You a labor striker?”

  Celere weighed the risk of being a foreign agitator versus a murderer on the run and chose to deal with the more immediate threat. “I am being aviation mechanician in Whiteway Cup Cross-Country Air Race.”

  Their suspicious expressions brightened like sunshine.

  “You in the race? Put ’er there, feller!”

  Soft pink palms thrust across the aisle, and they shook his hand vigorously.

  “When are all you getting to Hannibal?”

  “After thunderstorming over.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t get tornadoes.”

  “Say, if you was a bettin’ man, who would you put your money on to win?”

  Celere held up the newspaper. “Is saying here that Englishman pusher is best.”

  “Yeah, I read that in Chicago, too. But you’re right there in the thick of it. What about Josephine? That little gal still behind?”

  Celere froze. His eye had fallen on a telegraphed story down the page.

  MURDER AND THEFT IN SHADOW OF STORM

  “Josephine still behind?”

  “Is catching up,” Celere mumbled, reading as fast as he could:

  An air race mechanician was found diabolically murdered at the Columbia fairground with his throat slashed, the victim of a robbery. According to Sheriff Lydem, the murderer co
uld well be a labor agitator on the run from the cement strike in Missouri, and willing to stop at nothing to facilitate his escape. The victim’s body was not discovered for many hours due to the violence of last night’s storm.

  Marco Celere looked up with a broad smile for the businessmen.

  “Josephine is catching up,” he repeated.

  The train trundled loudly onto an iron-girder bridge, and the sky suddenly spread wide over a broad river.

  “Here’s the Mississippi. I read birdmen wear cork vests when they fly over bodies of water. Is that so?”

  “Is good for floating,” said Celere, gazing through the girders at the famed waterway. Brown and rain-swollen, flecked with dirty whitecaps, it rolled sullenly past the town of Hannibal, whose frame houses perched on the far side.

  “I thought was wider,” he said.

  “Wide enough, you try crossing it without this here bridge. But you want to see real wide, you get down below Saint Louis where it meets up with the Missouri.”

  “And if you want to see really, really wide, wide as the ocean, you take a look where the Ohio comes in. Say, mister, what are you doing on the train when the race is back in Illinois?”

  Suddenly they were staring again, suspecting they’d been hoodwinked.

  “Scouting route,” Celere answered smoothly. “Am getting off train in Hannibal and going back to race.”

  “Well, I sure do envy you, sir. Judging by the smile on your face, you are one lucky man to be part of that air race.”

  “Happy being,” Celere replied. “Very happy being.”

  A good plan always made him happy. And he had just come up with a beauty. Kindly, bighearted, crazy Russian Platov would volunteer to help the baronet’s mechanicians by filling in for poor murdered Chief Mechanician Ruggs.

  Steve Stevens would complain, but the hell with the fat fool. Dmitri Platov would help and help and help until he had finished the job on Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s infernal headless pusher once and for all.

  30