He ran down the slope and joined Wish in the lead auto. “They want our Maxim.”
“I would, too, in their position,” said Wish.
“They’re welcome to it,” said Bell.
“What?”
“We’ll trade it for a cease-fire and directions to Tiflis.”
“They’ll kill us,” said Rockefeller.
“That thought occurred to me,” said Bell. He looked at Wish.
Wish said, “Isaac, why don’t you talk to him? I’ll get the gun ready to travel.”
Bell cupped his hands and shouted very slowly and clearly, “Tell your friends to come out where we can see them. All of them.”
Josef shouted over his shoulder.
Twelve men started down the slope. They were dressed in workmen’s clothes and they looked very sure of themselves. Bell counted only three rifles. The rest carried pistols. They descended to the road and started toward the autos, fanning out and covering one another with military discipline.
“That’s close enough,” Bell called, stopping them at fifty feet.
“You act suspicious,” said Josef.
“I don’t like people who roll boulders at me.”
“Not us. Cossacks. We chase them.”
“So did we,” said Bell. From what he had seen, heavily armed Cossacks were not easily chased. If what the chauffeurs in the Hotel de L’Europe’s stables told him was true, then an Okhrana informer could arrange for the Cossacks to be called off or driven off by loyal troops if they were renegades. How had Josef found them here in the middle of nowhere? How had he known about the machine gun?
“Who are you, Josef? Who are these men?”
“Social Democrats.”
“Aren’t they illegal?”
Josef flashed his cheerful smile. “Reason we are wanting gun.”
“Are you their leader?”
“No, no, no. They ask me translating.”
“But you just said ‘we.’”
“Mistaking translating.”
“Translate this: Guide us to a road to Tiflis. When we see the town, the gun is yours.”
“Tiflis no safe. Much unrest.”
“Pogromy?”
“Politicals. General Prince Amilakhvari dead. Hateful Russian. Oppressing all Caucasia. Russians bringing for priests to pray on. People protest. Social Democrats protest. Police shooting Social Democrats.”
“You want our gun to fight the police.”
Josef’s smile disappeared. “Not your business.”
“If he’s a translator,” muttered John D. Rockefeller, “I’m my old maid aunt Olymphia.”
—
The Social Democrat fighters led the way on foot. Wish Clarke covered them with the Maxim gun. Bell drove his Peerless. Rockefeller, Edna, and Nellie trailed in the second car. The wind continued high, buffeting them and blowing dust, and the sun grew hot.
They climbed a steep road up a mountain. When they finally reached a broad plateau—an open brown steppe bare of vegetation and baked brown by the sun—their guides met up with a pair of horse-drawn phaetons. The men squeezed into the wagons and started across the flatter ground on a dusty track. After about four miles there were signs of recent roadwork, surveyors’ stakes, and the cutting of streets as if the area was to be developed.
Quite suddenly the plateau ended at the rim of a cliff.
Tiflis lay below them, one thousand feet straight down.
Bell saw it was an ancient city growing large in modern times. An old town of church steeples, cathedral domes, and twisted streets hugged the curves of a river. A ruined fortress of jagged rock, abandoned walls, and ramshackle outbuildings crouched on a lower cliff. In the river floated what looked like mills, each with its waterwheel.
A new city spread out from the center on a square grid of streets. Smoke drew Bell’s eye a mile or so from a big open square at the center of the old city. It was the railroad station where two weeks ago they had holed up for the night on their way to Baku.
Beyond the station sprawled vast railyards with many rows of sidings. On every siding stood a train of black tank cars. Bell raked it with his field glasses. He saw no wreckage, none of the destruction they had encountered on the eastern stretches of the line. Switch engines and locomotives were expending the smoke that hung over the yard.
“Trains are running.”
“How are we getting down that cliff?”
“Good question.”
Just as suddenly as they had come upon the cliff, they saw the answer. Nellie was delighted by a perspective she would see normally only from a balloon. Her pretty face aglow, she erupted in a happy cry.
“Funicular!”
Two counterbalanced carriages, large enough to hold fifty people each and linked by a strong cable, rolled up and down a steep railroad between the top of the mountain that Bell and his people had just crossed and the city below. There was a bulge in the line halfway down the mountain, a way station where the tracks doubled to allow the two carriages to pass each other.
“Any steeper,” said Wish Clarke, “and it would be an elevator.”
Josef jumped down from his phaeton and strode toward them, gaze locked greedily on the Maxim gun. Wish kept his finger on the trigger.
Isaac Bell said, “Josef, order your men to place their weapons around that rock.”
Josef started to protest.
Bell cut him off. “The Maxim is ours until they lay down their guns and we drive to the funicular.”
Wish Clarke raised a water can in his free hand and called out in a friendly voice, “We just filled the barrel-cooling sleeve. Here’s more water when you need it.” He took a swig from the can and wiped his mouth. “You must remember to refill the sleeve every couple hundred rounds or the heat will steam it off and you’ll melt the barrel.”
“We are knowing gun.”
“I had an inkling you might.”
Wish jumped to the road, gathered the heavy weapon in his arms, heaved it off the Peerless, and laid it gently on the ground. He left the one remaining ammunition belt, then he got back behind the steering wheel and drove after Nellie’s car.
Bell watched with the Savage 99 braced against his shoulder. Before they reached the funicular station, Josef’s gang had pounced on the Maxim, loaded it into a phaeton, and whipped up their horses.
—
“What a pleasure,” said Wish. “The simple act of buying tickets compared to fighting across
