The Race

ISAAC BELL TRIED TO SLEEP in a blanket roll under the monoplane, but his mind kept seizing on Harry Frost’s strange statement. Suddenly he sat up, galvanized by an entirely different and even stranger thought. He had been struck by his aeroplane’s resilience – and grateful for it saving his life – even before Andy Moser’s admiring remark that Di Vecchio “built ’em to last.”

Bell pulled on his boots and ran to the rail-yard dispatch shack, where they had a telegraph. The peculiar strength of the American Eagle stemmed from multiple braces and redundant control links. Not only had its inventor used all the best materials, he had anticipated structural failure and designed to prevent catastrophe.

Such an inventor who built to last did not seem to be the sort of man to kill himself over a bankruptcy. Such a man, Bell thought, would rise above failure, seeing a bankruptcy as nothing worse than a temporary setback.

“Van Dorn,” he told the New York Central Railroad dispatcher. He had a letter of introduction signed by the president of the line. But the dispatcher was delighted to help anyone in the air race.

“Yes, sir. What can I do for you?”

“I want to send a telegraph.”

The dispatcher’s hand poised over the brass key. “To whom?”

“James Dashwood. Van Dorn Agency. San Francisco.”

“Message?”

Bell listened to the dispatcher tap the letters of his message into the Morse alphabet.

INVESTIGATE DI VECCHIO SUICIDE.

SPEED CELERE INVESTIGATION.

ON THE JUMP!

22

“LOOK AT HER GO!”

Throttle full, Antoinette engine discharging a high-pitched snarl that sounded like ripping canvas, Josephine’s yellow monoplane streaked past Weehawken, New Jersey, at first light.

“Spin her over!”

Isaac Bell was already at the Eagle’s controls, having learned by telephone that Dmitri Platov and the Van Dorn mechanicians had worked all night to replace Josephine’s alettone and its wind-mangled mounts. The aviatrix had just taken off from Bedloe’s Island. Bell had his Eagle positioned at the head of the pier he had landed on the day before to take off over the river. His Gnome rotary was already warm and ready to fly. It blatted to life on one pull of the propeller.

“Chocks!”

They yanked the chocks from the wheels, and the monoplane started rolling. Andy and his helper ran beside the wings, steadying them, as Bell raced across the smooth boards between the railroad tracks and soared after Josephine.

He stayed close behind her as they flew up the middle of the Hudson River, eyeing the ships and boats for signs of Harry Frost, rehearsing flying with one hand and swiveling the rifle with the other. After fifteen miles, the two yellow aeroplanes veered toward the New York side, where the city of Yonkers stained the sky with smoke.

Although Bell was following Josephine’s aeroplane, he practiced navigating by a race map sketched with pertinent landmarks. With the stiff paper strapped to his leg, he traced the oval Empire City Race Track, which grew visible a couple of miles inland beside a huge pit of mud where steam shovels were digging a new reservoir for New York City.

Bell saw Thoroughbreds cantering around the track on their morning workouts, but the racetrack’s infield was deserted of flying machines, and the only hangar train in the rail yard was the long yellow Josephine Special. He learned upon alighting behind Josephine that every other flying machine still in the race had already taken off for Albany.

While the mechanicians poured gasoline, oil, and water in Josephine’s tanks, and gasoline and castor oil in Bell’s, they reported that even though Steve Stevens’s double Antoinette twin-propellered tractor biplane had turned in the best time from Belmont Park to Yonkers, the cotton planter was mad as hell at Dmitri Platov for helping Josephine fix her plane at the Statue of Liberty.

“De idea is dat,” they mimicked Platov affectionately, “every peoples racing together.”

“So Mr. Stevens yelled at poor Dmitri,” the mimics went on, switching to a Southern drawl, “Y’all is a socialist.”

Bell noticed that Josephine did not join in the laughter. Her face was tight with tension. He assumed that she was deeply upset to be so far behind this early in the race. Ordinarily polite and pleasant to everyone, she was railing at her mechanicians to “Hurry it up!” as they made further repairs to her whirlwind-damaged wing.

“Don’t worry,” Bell said gently, “you’ll catch up.”

The tall detective motioned one of the Van Dorns on her support train to join him. “Any idea why that flap fell off the wing?”

“She got caught in a pocket tornado.”

“I know that. But could the hinge have been weakened beforehand?”

“Sabotage? First thing I looked for, Mr. Bell. Fact is, that machine’s never been out of our sight on the ground. Mr. Abbott made that darned clear. We watched like hawks for sabotage. We slept next to it at Belmont. With one man always awake.”

Andy and his helper arrived in a Thomas Flyer via a ferry from the Palisades of New Jersey before Josephine’s mechanicians were finished. They drove it up the ramp into the American Eagle Special, and Bell sent the train ahead.

It was noon before Josephine could take to the sky.

She circled the grandstand for Weiner of Accounting’s deputy to record her departure time, climbed to a thousand feet, and headed north. Isaac Bell flew a little above and a quarter mile behind. His race map said it was a hundred and forty miles to Albany’s Altamont Fair Grounds. The route was easy to follow, the New York Central Railroad tracks hugging the east bank of the river, until, above the city of Hudson, he saw a number of short lines merge in from the east. At that confusing junction, the race stewards had marked the correct tracks to follow with long white canvas arrows.

The two monoplanes proceeded north without incident, eventually overtaking Bell’s white-roofed Eagle Special train, which was loafing along waiting for them to catch up. The fireman shoveled on a little more coal to keep pace with the flying machines.

Suddenly, ten miles short of Albany, Bell saw Josephine drop in a steep volplane.

Isaac Bell followed her down in a longer series of descending loops and was still high up when she alighted on a freshly mown hayfield outside the village of Castleton-on-Hudson. Through his field glasses, he could see why she had found a place to land. Steam was gushing from the Antoinette. Something had gone wrong with the motor’s water cooling.

Bell swung back toward the New York Central tracks. He flew low over the Eagle Special and pointed where he’d come from, and then spotted the yellow-roofed Josephine Special, which was highballing to catch up. He swooped in front of the locomotive and turned in the direction where Josephine was. The train stopped at the next siding, where the Van Dorn had already parked. Brakemen jumped down, waving a red flag in back and throwing a switch in front so the special could pull off the main line.

Bell alighted beside Josephine and told her that help was on the way. It came aboard two roadsters, Preston Whiteway’s Rolls-Royce, with two detective-mechanicians, who got straight to work on her machine, and Bell’s Model 35 Thomas Flyer, with Andy Moser, who replenished gas and castor oil and adjusted the Gnome.