The Race

Platov, “Imagine reporting to Mr. Van Dorn that America’s Sweetheart of the Air got struck by lightning.”

“Here helping, not worrying.” Platov pulled on his own slicker. Enormous raindrops started kicking up dust. For a moment they sizzled in the blazing heat. Then the sky turned black as night, and an icy wind blasted rain across the infield. The last of the spectators ran to the hotel attached to the grandstand.

Bell’s men – Andy Moser and his helpers – dragged canvas over the Eagle.

Eustace Weed, the new mechanician Bell had hired in Buffalo, said, “That’s O.K., Mr. Platov. We’ve got it.”

Celere ran to help Josephine’s ham-handed detective-mechanicians tie down hers and he was reminded how frustrating it was not to be able to work on Josephine’s aeroplane – his aeroplane – to keep it flying at its best. Josephine was good, but not that good. He may be a truffatore confidence man, but if there was one skill he truly possessed, he was a fine mechanician.

Celere waited until the machines were covered and tied down and he was sure that Isaac Bell was not coming back from escorting Josephine to her private car. Then he ran through the pouring rain to where Eddison- Sydney-Martin’s headless pusher was tied down. He made a show of checking the ropes, though it was not likely anyone could see him through the dark and watery haze. The baronet and his mechanicians had fled to their train. It was an opportunity to do mischief. But he had to work fast and do something unexpected.

Thunder pealed. Lightning struck the grandstand roof, and green Saint Elmo’s fire trickled along the gutters and down the leaders. The next bolt struck in the center of the infield, and Marco Celere began to see the wisdom of Bell’s retreat from Mother Nature. He ran for the nearest cover, a temporary wooden shed erected to supply the flying machines with gasoline, oil, and water.

Someone was sheltering in it ahead of him. Too late to turn away, he saw that it was the Englishman Lionel Ruggs, the baronet’s chief mechanician and the chief reason why he had steered clear of the headless pusher, other than surreptitiously drilling a hole in its wing strut back at Belmont Park.

“Whatcha doin’ to the guv’s machine?”

“Just checking its ropes.”

“Spent a long time checkin’ ropes.”

Celere ducked his head as if he were embarrassed. “O.K., you are catching me. I was looking at competition.”

“Lookin’ or doin’?” Ruggs asked coldly.

“Doing? What would I be doing?”

Lionel Ruggs stepped very close to him. He was taller than Celere, and bigger in the chest. He stared inquiringly into Celere’s eyes. Then he cracked a mirthless smile.

“Jimmy Quick. I thought that was you hidin’ in those curls.”

Marco Celere knew there was no denying it. Ruggs had him dead to rights. It had been fifteen years, but they’d worked side by side in the same machine shop from ages fourteen to eighteen and shared a room under the eaves of the owner’s house. Celere had always feared that he would bump into his past sooner or later. How many flying-machine mechanicians were there in the small, tight-knit new world of flying machines?

Jimmy Quick had been his English nickname, a good-natured play on Prestogiacomo that the English found so hard to pronounce. He had recognized Ruggs from a distance and stayed out of his way. Now he had stumbled, face-to-face, into him in a thunderstorm.

“What’s this Russian getup?” Ruggs demanded. “I bet you been caught stealin’ somethin’, like you was in Birmingham. Doin’ the old man’s daughter was one thing – more power to you – but stealin’ his machine tool design he worked on his whole life, that was low. That old man treated us good.”

Celere looked around. They were alone. No one was near the shed. He said, “The old man’s dream didn’t quite work. It was a bust.”

Ruggs turned red. “A bust because you stole it before he perfected it. . It was you, wasn’t it, drilled our wing strut?”

“Not me.”

“I don’t believe you, Jimmy.”

“I don’t care if you believe me or not.”

Lionel Ruggs pounded his chest. “I care. The guv’s a good man. He may be an aristocrat, but he’s a good man, and he deserves to win, fair and square. He don’t deserve to die in a smash caused by a schemin’ little bludger like you.”

Marco Celere looked around again and confirmed they were still alone. The rain was coming down harder, pounding the tin roof. He couldn’t see six feet from the shed. He said, “You’re forgetting I make machine tools.”

“How could I forget that? That’s what the old man taught us to do. Gave us a roof over our heads. Gave us breakfast, lunch, and tea. Gave us a good-paying trade. You paid him back by stealin’ his dream. And you ruined it ’cause you were too damned lazy and impatient to make it right.”

Celere reached under his slicker and took a slide rule from his coat. “Do you know what this is?”

“It’s the slide rule you wave around with your disguise.”

“Do you believe that my slide rule is only a slide rule?”

“I seen you wavin’ it around. What of it?”

“Let me show you.”

Celere raised the instrument to the thin light in the open door. Ruggs followed it with his eyes, and Celere whipped it back toward him like a violin bow. Ruggs gasped and clutched his throat, trying to hold in the blood.

“This one’s a razor, not the one ‘Dmitri Platov’ waves around. A razor – just in case – and you are the case.”

Ruggs went bug-eyed. He let go his throat and grabbed Celere. But there was no strength left in his hand, and he collapsed, spraying blood on the Italian.

Celere watched him dying at his feet. It was only the second time he had killed a man and it did not get easier, even if the effect was worthwhile. His hands were shaking, and he felt panic flood his body and threaten to squeeze his brain into a lump that could not think or act. He had to run. There was no place to get rid of the body, no place to hide it. The rain would stop, and he would be caught. He tried to form a picture of running. The rain would wash the blood that sprayed all over his slicker. But they would still chase him. He looked at the razor, and he suddenly pictured it cutting cloth.

Swiftly, he knelt and slashed at Ruggs’s pockets, taking from them coin and a roll of paper money and a leather wallet with more paper money in it. He stuffed them in his pockets, slashed Ruggs’s vest, and took his cheap nickel pocket watch. He looked over the body, saw gold, and took Ruggs’s wedding ring. Then he ran into the rain.

There was no time for sabotage. If by a miracle he got away with murder, he would come back and try again.

ONE HUNDRED AND TWENTY MILES from Columbia, Illinois, but still short of the Mississippi River, the westbound passenger train slowed down and pulled onto a siding. Marco Celere prayed they were only stopping for water. In his panicked run, he had clung to a groundless hope that if he could somehow get across the Mississippi, they couldn’t catch him. Praying it was only a water siding, he pressed his face to the window and craned his neck for a view of the jerkwater tank. But why would they stop so close to the next town?

Two businessmen seated across the aisle of the luxurious extra-fare chair car that Celere had reckoned would be safer to flee in rather than an ordinary day coach seemed to be staring at him. There was a commotion at the vestibule. Celere fully expected to see a burly sheriff with a tin star on his coat and a pistol in his hand.

Instead, a newsboy sprang aboard and ran up the aisle, crying, “Great air race coming our way!”

Marco Celere bought a copy of the Hannibal Courier-Post and scanned it fearfully for a murder story that included his description.

The race occupied half the front page. Preston Whiteway, described as “a shrewd, wide-awake businessman,” was quoted in boldface print, saying, “Sad as the recent death of Mark Twain- Hannibal’s own bard – sadder still that Mr. Twain did not live to see the flying machines in the Great Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race for the Whiteway Cup alight in his beloved hometown of Hannibal, Missouri.”