Bell took the heaviest from him. “We are not going to Paris. We’re joining SS Kaiser Wilhelm II at Bremen. There’s a boat train in Berlin.”
“Much better,” said Rockefeller, happily mollified. The North German Lloyd passenger liner held the Blue Riband for the fastest time across the Atlantic Ocean.
—
The boat train to Bremen steamed out of the German capital on Monday night, gathered speed through the suburbs, and highballed into the dark at sixty miles an hour.
Isaac Bell, Wish Clarke, Edna and Nellie Matters, and John D. Rockefeller gathered in the dining room that occupied the front half of the observation car. They were studying menus and discussing, longingly, the prospect of soon eating American food again when Bill Matters burst into the car. He stormed past the club chairs and stopped short at their tables. His eyes were wild, his jaw clenched.
Bell saw he had crumpled a yellow telegram in his fist.
“Father!” said Nellie. “We wondered where you had gotten to.”
Edna asked, “Are you quite well?”
Matters ignored them both. “Mr. Rockefeller! We must speak.” He lowered his voice. “In private.”
“It is rather late to discuss business. Why don’t you sit down and have some supper with the rest of us?”
Matters said, “It is not too late to discuss the Peerless autos you brought for the shah.”
Rockefeller rose silently from the table and led Matters out of the dining car.
Isaac Bell watched them disappear through the vestibule door. His suspicion that Matters had not known about the bribes was proved correct. Then, according to Rockefeller, Matters had been elsewhere on “other business” during the all-important meeting with the Persians that Bell had eavesdropped on at the Hotel Astoria. Matters had not heard Rockefeller promise to pay off the shah’s loan from the czar. Shortly after Rockefeller had sent him to Moscow.
Clearly, John D. Rockefeller had gone to Baku with one purpose only: to strike a bargain to pay off the debt in exchange for a license to build Matters’ pipe line across Persia. The cables he’d been so desperate to send while escaping Russia must have completed the deal and cut Matters out of it.
Bell sprang to his feet and strode to the vestibule door. He pushed through it onto the gangway, where the observation car and the sleeping car behind it were coupled. The eight-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long space was enclosed by flexible leather-and-canvas gangway connectors. While they muffled the noise of the speeding train, it was still louder than inside the cars.
Matters was shouting, gesticulating, and waving the telegram.
“You knew! You knew all along.”
Rockefeller stood still as a stork, head inclined as if straining to listen over the rumble of the wheels and the rushing wind of the boat train’s passage.
“Knew what, Mr. Matters?”
“You knew when you sent me to Moscow. That’s why you sent me. To get me out of the way.”
“Knew what?” Rockefeller repeated more sharply now. Neither man seemed to take notice of Isaac Bell who stood by, boots balanced lightly on the swaying floor plate, his eye on Matters, who looked angry enough to strike the older man.
“You knew that you were closing a private deal for the pipe line,” Matters yelled.
“How I choose to negotiate for Standard Oil is my affair, Mr. Matters,” Rockefeller answered in a firm voice that cut through the racket. “It was my judgment that one man speaking for the company rather than two would do a better job of cutting through heathen mendacity.”
“We had an agreement!” Matters yelled. “The Persia pipe line was not for Standard Oil—it was for us. We would then sell it to Standard Oil.”
“I signed no such agreement.”
“You led me to believe—”
“You believed what you wanted to.”
Face contorting, Matters sucked great gulps of air. Suddenly he shouted, “You busted up my pipes.”
Bell saw that Rockefeller knew instantly what Matters meant. “Is that what is troubling you? You’re blaming me, unfairly, for some event that occurred back in 1899?”
“You stole the Hook.”
Rockefeller turned to Isaac Bell as if the three were golfers strolling to the next tee and explained offhandedly, “Constable Hook. The refinery we just finished building next to Bayonne. It’s our largest—the most efficient in the world.”
“You stole it from me and Spike.”
“I paid you.”
“Pennies!”
“I paid you in Standard Oil stock. I made you rich. You ride around in a fancy private car. Even I don’t go to that expense.” Again he turned to Bell as if in a threesome. “I’m quite content to charter cars when the need arises.”
“You busted up my business,” Matters shouted.
“Right there!” Rockefeller rounded on him. “I thought you were not one of those who are controlled by the insane idea to destroy the Standard Oil Company. Clearly, I was wrong. You are a miserable failure who will go to your grave an unhappy man.”
Matters lunged at Rockefeller with the speed and power of a Komodo dragon.
Bell seized his wrists. But by then Matters’ big hands were clamped to John D. Rockefeller’s throat. He yanked Rockefeller’s two hundred pounds off the platform and rammed him toward the connector curtain. Unable to break his grip, Bell let go and sank his fists into Matters’ kidneys with a hard left and a harder right.
The crazed Matters gasped. His hands opened convulsively. He let go of the struggling Rockefeller. But Bell’s powerhouse blows didn’t stop him, only slowed him, and he shoved his back into the tall detective, smashing him with all his weight against the opposite gangway connection. Bell bounced off the springy curtain and hurled himself on Matters as Matters lunged at Rockefeller again.
Too late, he saw that Matters’ explosion of rage was not as impromptu as it had seemed. Before he stormed into the diner, he had removed the vertical pins that locked the adjoining cars’ gangway connectors. Then he had lured the old man onto the gangway to throw him off the train.
The connectors parted like a theater curtain. The black night thundered past at sixty miles per hour. John D. Rockefeller tumbled backward
