BOOK THREE
GAS
JUNE–SEPTEMBER 1905
THE BLACK CITY
19
Thank you for seeing me off,” John D. Rockefeller told the New York reporters who mobbed the Lake Shore Limited platform at Grand Central. “I’d expect you’d have more profitable ways to pass your time, but it is very kind of you.”
He wore an old man’s overcoat and held tight to the burly Bill Matters’ arm while Isaac Bell stood guard just out of camera range. “What will I do in Cleveland? Warm these old bones and try my hand knocking golf balls.”
The Cleveland newspapers sent reporters to meet his train at Union Depot, and posted more reporters at the front gate of Forest Hill, Rockefeller’s summer residence on the edge of town. A week later, the newspapermen returned when the city’s Italian Boys Band came to serenade him. Rockefeller gave them a show, seizing a baton to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It would be his last public appearance until October.
That night Isaac Bell slipped him and Matters into a private car coupled to the New York Central’s eastbound Lake Shore Limited. Ten hours later, the train was divided at Albany. Some cars continued east to Boston, most headed south to New York City. Bill Matters joined the New York section to board the four-funnel German ocean liner SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse. Isaac Bell and John D. Rockefeller continued on the eastbound section.
Waiting with steam up in Boston Harbor was the three-hundred-foot Sandra, a handsome yacht with a lofty raked stack and the lines of a greyhound that Rockefeller had borrowed when Bell pointed out that the newspapers ensured there were no secrets on an ocean liner. Judge James Congdon had lent Sandra in a flash, leaving Bell to speculate whether the legendary Wall Street potentate, a founder of U.S. Steel, was in on Rockefeller’s deal. Whatever the deal was. So far, Bell had made no progress in getting Rockefeller to confide in his bodyguard.
Sandra’s triple-expansion engines drove them across the Atlantic Ocean in twelve days. They landed at Cherbourg and rode in a private car coupled to the boat train to Paris. A French actress whom Bell had known in San Francisco recruited her favorite theatrical costumer and wigmaker from the Comédie-Française. They called on John D. Rockefeller in the privacy of his hotel.
Bell booked train tickets to Constantinople. Then he visited a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, whose wife’s sapphire necklace Van Dorn detectives had ransomed from the thief Rosania when she visited Chicago. The grateful director of the sleeping car company gave Bell a copy of the passenger manifest. Bell showed it to Rockefeller to ensure that the oil magnate would not bump into fellow tycoons on the Express d’Orient.
The tawny yellow all-stateroom train offered its pampered customers the unique benefit of not being rousted from their beds for passport checks at the border crossings as they steamed through Munich, Strasbourg, Vienna, and Budapest. Sixty-four hours after leaving Paris, they awakened to the balmy air and dazzling sunshine of Constantinople, a vast and ancient cosmopolitan city of mosques and minarets, a sprawling bazaar, mangy dogs, and a bustling harbor on a deep blue sea.
A mail steamer carried them up the Bosporus Strait and four hundred miles across the Black Sea to Batum, the world’s biggest oil port, where the snow-covered Caucasus Mountains loomed over the harbor, and the six-hundred-mile pipe line from Baku terminated.
Dozens of steam tankers rode at anchor, queuing to load at the kerosene docks. But the city’s streets were deserted and buildings shuttered.
“Muslims and Christians are shooting each other,” Bill Matters reported when he met them at the steamer in a Rolls-Royce. “It’s a pogromy, Tatars attacking Armenians.”
“Where do the Russians stand?” asked Bell.
“The cops and Army turn a blind eye.”
They drove five miles out of the city to Manziadjani. The American vice consul, a prosperous and well-connected ship broker whom Rockefeller had arranged to meet, had his country place there. Shots were fired from the woods as they pulled in through the front gate. Bell had his pistol out and was opening his carpetbag when Vice Consul Abrams staggered up to the car with blood pouring from his mouth.
They rushed him to a nearby Russian Army fort, where he died within moments of arriving. Isaac Bell raced Rockefeller and Matters back to Batum and onto the train to Baku. At Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, halfway to the Caspian Sea, there were reports of riots. A bomb exploded outside the station. Bell kept his party on the train and they slept the night sitting up on hard benches.
Next morning, the authorities dithered. It was midday before the train pulled out, proceeded by a pilot engine, in case wreckers taking advantage of the collapse of law and order had mined the tracks to rob the passengers. They steamed slowly across an endless, ever-more-desolate dry valley between snowy mountains to the north and indistinct highlands to the south.
An hour before nightfall, still fifty miles from Baku, the pilot engine hit a mine.
The explosion blew it off the rails and into a ravine, taking with it the riflemen guarding the train. Horsemen in black cloaks gathered on a ridge that loomed above the tracks.
Isaac Bell opened his carpetbag and joined the Savage 99’s barrel to its chamber with a practiced twist. Another explosion blocked the rails behind them, and a wild-eyed conductor ran through the car yelling, “Wreckers!”
They attacked, galloping down the slope, brandishing long guns and sabers.
“Get Mr. Rockefeller under cover,” Bell told Matters. “Fort him up with those bags.”
Matters obeyed instantly, helping Rockefeller to the floor, pulling luggage down from the racks. The old man remained calm
