She began talking a mile a minute. Marco Celere had worked for her father in Italy as a mechanician, helping him build the aeroplanes he invented. “Back in Italy. Before he made his name short.”
“Marco changed his name? What was it?”
“Prestogiacomo.”
“Prestogiacomo,” Bell imitated the sound that rolled off her tongue. He asked her to spell it and wrote it in his notebook.
“When Marco came here, he said it was too long for Americans. But that was a lie. Everyone knew Prestogiacomo was ladro. Here, his new name, Celere, only means ‘quick.’ No one knew the kind of man he really was.”
“What did he steal from your father?”
What Marco Celere had stolen, Di Vecchio claimed, were new methods of wing strengthening and roll control.
“Can you explain what you mean by roll control?” Bell asked, still testing her lucidity.
She gestured, using her long graceful arms like wings. “When the aeroplano tilts this way, the conduttore—pilota—changes the shape of wing to make it tilt that way so to be straight.”
Recalling his first conversation with Josephine, Bell asked, “Did your father happen to invent alettoni?”
“Yes! Si! Si! That’s what I am telling you. Alettoni.”
“Little wings.”
“My father,” she said, tapping her chest proudly, “my wonderful babbo. Instead of warping the whole wing, he moved only small parts of it. Much better.”
Bell passed his notepad to her and handed over his Waterman fountain pen. “Can you show me?”
She sketched a monoplane, and depicted the movable hinged parts at the back of the outer edges of the wings. It looked very much like the yellow machine that Josephine was flying.
“Alettoni—hinged little wings—is what Marco stole from your father?”
“Not only. He stole strength, too.”
“I don’t understand.”
“My father learned how wings act to make them strong.”
In a fresh torrent of English peppered with Italian and illustrated with another sketch, Danielle explained that monoplanes had a habit of crashing when their wings suddenly collapsed in flight, unlike biplanes, whose double wings were structurally more sound. Bell nodded his understanding. He had heard this repeatedly in the Belmont Park infield. Monoplanes were slightly faster than biplanes because they presented less wind resistance and weighed less. Biplanes were stronger—one of the reasons they were all surprised when Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s Farman had broken up. According to Danielle Di Vecchio, Marco Celere had proposed that the monoplane’s weakness came not from the “flying wire” stays underneath the wings but the “landing wires” above them.
“Marco tested his monoplano with sandbags to make like the strain of flying—what is your word?”
“Simulate?” “Si. Simulate the strain of flying. My father said a static test was too simplistic. Marco was pretending the wings do not move. He pretended that forces on them do not change. But wings do move in flight! Don’t you see, Mr. Bell? Forces of wind gusts and strains of the machine’s maneuvers—carico dinamico—attack its wings from many directions and not only push but twist the wings. Marco’s silly tests took no account of these,” she said scornfully. “He made his wings too stiff. He is meccanico, not artista!”
She handed Bell the drawings.
Bell saw a strong similarity to the machine that Josephine had persuaded Preston Whiteway to buy back from Marco Celere’s creditors. “Is Marco’s monoplane dangerous?” he asked.
“The one he made in San Francisco? It would be dangerous if he had not stolen my father’s design.”
Bell said, “I heard a rumor that a monoplane Marco sold to the Italian Army broke a wing.”
“Si!” she said angrily. “That’s the one that made all the trouble. His too-stiff monoplano—the one he tested with sandbags back in Italy—smashed.”
“But why couldn’t your father sell his Eagle monoplano to the Italian Army if it was better than Marco’s?”
“Marco ruined the market. He poisoned the generals’ minds against all monoplano. My father’s monoplano factory went bankrupt.”
“Interesting,” said Bell, watching her reaction. “Both your father and Marco had to leave Italy.”
“Marco fled!” she answered defiantly. “He took my father’s drawing to San Francisco, where he sold machines to that rich woman Josephine. My father emigrated to New York. He had high hopes of selling his Aquila monoplano in New York. Wall Street bankers would invest in a new factory. Before he could interest them, creditors seized everything in Italy. He was ruined. So ruined that he killed himself. With gas, in a cheap San Francisco hotel room.”
“San Francisco? You said he came to New York.”
“Marco lured him there, promising money for his inventions. But all he wanted was my father to fix his machines. He died all alone. Not even a priest. That is why I tried to kill Marco Celere.”
She crossed her shapely arms and looked Bell in the eye. “I am angry. Not insane.”
“I can see that,” said Isaac Bell.
“But I am locked with insane.”
“Are you treated well?”
She shrugged. Her long graceful fingers picked at her dress, which a hundred launderings had turned gray. “When I am angry, they lock me alone.”
“I will take Dr. Ryder aside and have a word with him.” Firmly aside, by the scruff of his neck, with his face jammed against a wall.
“I have no money for lawyers. No money for ‘medical experts’ to tell the court I am not lunatic.”
“May I ask why your father could not find other buyers for his Eagle flying machine?”
“My father’s monoplano is so much better, so fresh and new, that some of it is still—how do you say?—innato. Tempestuous.”
“Temperamental?”
“Yes. She is not yet tamed.”
“Is your father’s flying machine dangerous?”
“Shall we say ‘interesting’?” Danielle Di Vecchio replied with an elegant smile. And at that moment, thought the tall detective, they could be thousands of miles from Massachusetts, flirting in a Roman salon.
“Where is it?” he asked.
The Italian woman’s dark-eyed gaze drifted past Bell, out the window, and locked on the hilltop. Her face lighted in a broad smile. “There,” she said.
Bell looked out the window. What on earth was she imagining?
The truck with the flat tire had towed its wagon to the crest of the hill. “A boy,” she explained. “A nice boy. He loves me.”
“But what is he
