The doctor hesitated. To Isaac Bell, Lillian Osgood Abbott was the little sister he had never had. He could forget that she was so exquisitely beautiful that most men found it very difficult to speak to her on first meeting. In this awful instance, Bell guessed that the doctor could not bear to utter any word that would cause tears to track her cheeks or her brave mouth to crumble.
“Tell me,” she repeated, and took the doctor’s hand. Her firm touch gave the man courage.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Abbott. The bullet did much damage, barely missed the heart and shattered two ribs.”
Bell felt a cavern open in his own heart. “Is he dead?”
“No!. . Not yet.”
“Is it hopeless?” Lillian asked.
“I wish I could. .”
Bell held tighter as she sagged in his arms.
He said, “Is there nothing that can be done?”
“I. . nothing I can do.”
“Is there
The doctor gave a deep sigh and stared sightlessly back at him. “There is only one man who could even attempt to operate. The surgeon S. D. Nuland-Novicki. In the Boer War, he developed new procedures for treating gunshot wounds. Unfortunately, Dr. Nuland-Novicki-”
“Get him!” cried Lillian.
“He is away. He’s lecturing in Chicago.”
Isaac Bell and Lillian Osgood Abbott locked eyes in sudden hope.
The doctor said, “But even if Nuland-Novicki could board the Twentieth Century Limited in time, your husband will never last the eighteen hours it will take to get here. Nineteen, with the extra time from here to Long Island. We can’t move him to New York.”
“How long does he have?”
“Twelve or fourteen hours at most.”
“Take us to a telephone,” Bell demanded.
The doctor led them at a dead run through echoing halls to the hospital’s central telephone station. “Thank God, Father’s at home,” said Lillian. “New York,” she told the operator. “Murray Hill four-four-four.”
The connection was made to Osgood Hennessy’s limestone mansion on Park Avenue. The butler summoned Hennessy to the telephone.
“Father. Listen to me. Archie’s been shot. . Yes, he is desperately wounded. There is a surgeon in Chicago. I need him here in twelve hours.”
The doctor shook his head, and said to Bell, “The Twentieth Century and the Broadway Limited take eighteen hours. What train could possibly make it from Chicago to New York faster than those crack fliers?”
Isaac Bell allowed himself a hopeful smile. “A special steaming on tracks cleared by a railroad baron who loves his daughter.”
“COMMISSIONER BAKER’S ENEMIES call him a lightweight,” growled Osgood Hennessy, referring to New York City’s recently appointed police commissioner. “I call him a damned good fellow.”
Six Traffic Squad touring cars and a motorcycle that the department was testing with a view to forming a motorcycle squad were racing their engines outside Grand Central Terminal, prepared to escort Hennessy’s limousine at the highest possible speed over the Manhattan Bridge, across Brooklyn, and into Nassau County. The streets were dark, dawn a faint hint of pink in the eastern sky.
“Here they are!” cried Lillian.
Isaac Bell exploded from the railroad terminal, running hard, with his hand locked on the arm of a youthful, fit-looking Nuland-Novicki, who was scampering alongside like an eager schnauzer.
Engines roared, sirens howled, and in seconds the limousine was tearing down Park Avenue. Lillian handed Nuland-Novicki the latest wire from the hospital. He read it, nodding his head. “The patient is a strong man,” he said reassuringly. “That always helps.”
AT BELMONT PARK that same pink hint of dawn reflected on the shiny steel rail down which Dmitri Platov’s revolutionary thermo engine was scheduled to speed on its final test run. The freshening sky gave urgency to the task of a man crouched under it. If he stayed much longer, early risers would see him loosening bolts with a monkey wrench. Already, he smelled breakfast. The breeze traveling across the infield carried whiffs of bacon frying on the support trains in the yards on the other side of the grandstand.
Mechanicians would appear any minute. But sabotage was slow work. He had to wait before he turned each nut to sluice the threads with penetrating oil to prevent the loud screech of rusty metal. Then he had to mop the drips that would be noticed by sharp eyes performing the last earthbound tests before experimenting on Steve Stevens’s biplane, which was waiting near the rail under canvas.
He would have finished by now, except that the detectives guarding Josephine Josephs’s flying machine made a habit of sweeping the infield. Silent, unpredictable, they would appear out of nowhere shining flashlights, then vanish just as suddenly, leaving him to wonder when they were coming next and from which direction. Twice he had crouched, nervously rubbing his arm, while he waited for them to move on.
His final step, when he had loosened the fishtail that held two abutting ends of rail, was to work matchsticks into the space he had opened. If anyone tested the joint, it would not feel loose. But when assaulted by the enormous forces unleashed by the thermo engine, the rails would part and the joint burst open. Its effect would be like a railroad switch opened to shunt a train from one track to another. The difference was, this was a single rail, and the “train,” Platov’s miracle engine, would have no track to shunt onto but would fly through the air like a self-propelled cannonball. And God help anyone who got in its way.
12
“HARRY FROST IS NOT DEAD,” said Isaac Bell.
“By all accounts,” said Joseph Van Dorn, “Harry Frost was shot twice by you and three times by poor Archie. He’s got more lead in him than a tinsmith.”
“Not enough to kill him.”
“We’ve not seen hide nor hair of him. No hospital has heard of him. No doctor has reported treating a broken jaw accompanied by unexplained gunshot wounds.”
“Outlaw doctors charge extra not to report gunshot wounds.”
“Nor have we received proof of any sightings by the public.”
“We received numerous tips,” said Bell.
“None panned out.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s dead.”
“At least he’s out of commission.”
“I wouldn’t bet on that,” said Isaac Bell.
Joseph Van Dorn smacked a strong hand on his desk. “Now, listen to me, Isaac. We’ve been down this road repeatedly. I would love that Harry Frost were not dead. It would be good for business. Preston Whiteway would continue paying a fortune for cross-country protection of our Sweetheart of the Air. Happily, he’s willing to pay us to find Frost’s corpse. But I cannot in good conscience continue to bill him for a dozen agents around the clock.”
“There is no corpse,” Bell replied.
The boss asked, “What evidence do you have that he is not dead?”
Bell jumped up and paced long-leggedly around the Hotel Knickerbocker suite that Van Dorn commandeered for his private office on the occasions he was in New York. “Sir,” he addressed him formally, “you have been a detective longer than I.”
“A lot longer.”
“As such, you know that a so-called hunch by an experienced investigator is bedded in reality. A hunch does
