The Race

13

“MR. MOSER, YOUR SITUATION is about to improve vastly,” Isaac Bell said to the sad-faced mechanician who was grilling a frankfurter on a fire he had built a safe distance from the crated American Eagle monoplane.

“How do you know my name?”

“Read this!”

Bell thrust a fine parchment-paper envelope he had lifted from Dr. Ryder’s writing desk into Moser’s grease-stained hand.

“Open it.”

Andy Moser slid a finger under the seal, unfolded a sheet of writing paper covered in an elegant Florentine cursive script, and read slowly, moving his lips.

Isaac Bell had seized an opportunity to help the beautiful Italian woman while helping himself solve the vexing problem he had warned Archie about. The field of competitors vying for the Whiteway Cup was growing so large that too many support trains would be jockeying for the same railroad tracks. Keeping up with Josephine’s flying machine to guard her life would be a nightmare even with the help of the auto patrols that Archie had envisioned.

But what, Bell had asked himself, if he took “the high ground”? With his own airship, he could ride herd on the race. He could watch Josephine in the air while he stationed men ahead at the racetracks and fairgrounds that would provide infields to alight on.

Danielle Di Vecchio needed money to plead her case to get out of Ryder’s asylum.

Isaac Bell needed a speedy airship. He bought hers.

“Danielle says I’m supposed to go with you, Mr. Bell.”

“And bring my flying machine,” said Bell, grinning at the wagon. Disassembled and folded up for travel, it looked like a dragonfly in a cage.

“And teach you how to drive it?”

“As soon as I set you up in a first-class hangar car.”

“But I don’t know how to fly it. I’m only a mechanician.”

“Don’t worry about that. Just get her running, and show me the controls. How long will it take to put it back together?”

“A day, with a good helper. Have you ever driven a flying machine?”

“I drive a one-hundred-mile-an-hour Locomobile. I have driven a V-Twin Indian racer motorcycle, a 4-6-2 Pacific locomotive, and a fifty-knot steel-hulled turbine yacht built by Sir Charles Algernon Parsons himself. I imagine I’ll pick it up.”

“Locomotives and steel yachts don’t leave the ground, Mr. Bell.”

“That’s why I’m so fired up! Finish your lunch and wave good-bye to Danielle. She’s watching from the fourteenth window from the left, second from the bottom. She can’t wave through the bars, but she can see you.”

Moser gazed sadly down the hill. “I hate leaving her behind, but she says you’re going to help get her out.”

“Don’t you worry, we’ll get her out. And in the meantime, Dr. Ryder has promised that her treatment will improve, dramatically. Will your truck make it to Albany?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’ll go ahead and charter a train. It will be waiting in the Albany yards, steam up for Belmont Park. Mechanicians will be standing by to help you reassemble the American Eagle the second you arrive.”

“Belmont Park? Are you intending to enter the American Eagle in the cross- country race?”

“No,” Bell laughed. “But it’s going to help me keep an eye on Josephine Josephs.”

Andy Moser looked incredulous. Of all he had read and heard since Isaac raced up in his Model K Ford, this took the cake. “You know the Sweetheart of the Air?”

“I am a private detective. Josephine’s husband is trying to kill her. The American Eagle is going to help me save her life.”

After Bell chartered his support train in Albany, he wired San Francisco to alert Dashwood to the fact that Marco Celere’s original name was Marco Prestogiacomo. He might well have still been Prestogiacomo when he landed in San Francisco, and Bell hoped that this new information would speed up Dashwood’s unusually slow progress.

“I’M NOT GOING TO WASTE flying time watching Dmitri Platov demonstrate his thermo engine,” Josephine told Isaac Bell a day later. “I doubt it will work. And even if it does, that horrible Steve Stevens is too fat to drive a flying machine, even one of Marco’s.”

“One of Marco’s? What do you mean?”

“It’s a biplane he invented for heavy lifting, to carry a bunch of passengers.”

Bell said, “I wasn’t aware that Marco had another machine in the race.”

“Steve Stevens bought it from his creditors. Lucky him. It’s the only machine in the world that will lift him. He paid twenty cents on the dollar. Poor Marco got nothing.”

Bell escorted her to her monoplane. Van Dorn mechanicians spun her propeller, and when the blue smoke of her motor turned white, she tore down the field and took to the sky for yet another of her long-distance practice runs.

Bell watched her dwindle to a yellow dot, secure in the thought that soon he would be flying beside her. The Eagle had arrived late last night on a four-car special train that Bell had chartered for the duration. Andy Moser and a Van Dorn crew were already trundling the pieces from the rail yard to the infield.

Then, thought Bell, all he had to do was learn to drive the thing before the race started. Or at least well enough to keep learning on the job, as he tracked Josephine across the country. By the time the race ended in San Francisco, he’d have gotten pretty good at it, and the first thing he would do was take Marion Morgan for a ride. The Eagle’s motor had plenty of extra power, Andy had told him, to carry a passenger. Marion could even bring a moving-picture camera. And wouldn’t that adventure be a wedding gift?

He watched Josephine disappear in the east. “All right, boys,” he told the Van Dorns, “stay here and wait for Josephine to come back. Stick close to her. If you need me, I’ll be over at the thermo engine.”

“Do you think Frost will attack here like he did before? He knows we’re primed.”

“He’s surprised us before. Stick close. I’ll come back before she lands.”

Bell walked across the infield to the three-hundred-foot-long steel rail on which Platov had promised his engine would race in a final experiment before they installed it in Steve Stevens’s biplane.

The enormously fat Stevens, bulging in a white planter’s suit and glowering impatiently, sat at a breakfast table that his elderly servants had set with linen and silver. Platov and Stevens’s chief mechanician were tinkering with the still-silent jet motor, the mechanician setting valves and switches while Platov consulted his slide rule. Stevens was venting his restlessness by upbraiding his servants. His coffee was cold, he was complaining. His sweet rolls were stale, and there weren’t enough of them. The docile old men attending the cotton planter looked terrified.

Stevens’s arrogant gaze fell on Bell’s white suit.

“Surely Southern blood courses in your veins, suh,” he drawled in dulcet Southern tones. “Ah have never laid eyes on a Yankee who could do justice to the pure white duds of the Old South.”

“My father spent time in the Old South.”

“And taught you to dress like a gentleman. Do Ah presume correctly that he was buyin’ cotton for New England mills?”

“He was a Union Army intelligence officer, carrying out President Lincoln’s order to free the slaves.”

“Ready, sirs,” Dmitri Platov called out.

The Russian inventor’s springy mutton-chop whiskers were quivering with excitement and his dark eyes