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 could 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
