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“Which way?”
“California.”
“So why did Mr. Van Dorn send you here?”
Texas Walt grinned, a blaze of startling white teeth in a stern countenance as sun-browned as a saddle. “’Cause he had every reason to. Isaac, old son, wait ’til you clap eyes on who I brung with me.”
“There’s only two men I want to clap eyes on: Harry Frost. Or Marco Celere, back from the dead.”
“Damn! You are always one step ahead. How in heck did you know?”
“Know what?”
“I brung Marco Celere.”
“Alive?”
“Darned tootin’, alive. Got him from some Southern Pacific rail dicks I’m acquainted with. They caught a hobo hopping off a freight who swore up, down, and sideways that he’s part of the air race. Claimed to know Josephine personally and demanded to see the Van Dorn detectives guarding her. As that information is not printed in the newspapers, the boys believed him enough to wire me.”
“Where is he?”
“Got him right in the cookhouse. The man’s starving.”
Isaac Bell charged into the galley car and saw a ragged stranger, forking eggs and bacon off a plate with one hand and stuffing bread in his mouth with the other. He had greasy black hair, parted by a red scar that traveled from his brow across the crown of his skull, another red scar on his forearm, and intensely bright eyes.
“Are you Marco Celere?”
“That is my name, sir,” he replied, speaking with an Italian accent somewhat heavier than Danielle Di Vecchio’s though not as difficult to understand as Josephine had led Bell to believe. “Where is Josephine?”
“Where have you been?”
Celere smiled. “I wish I could answer that.”
“You’re going to have to answer that before I let you within a mile of Josephine. Who are you?”
“I am Marco Celere. I came awake two weeks ago in Canada. I had no idea who I was or how I got there. Then, gradually, my memory returned. In tiny bits. A trickle to start, then a flood. I remember my aeroplanes first. Then I saw a newspaper account about the Whiteway Cup Air Race. In it, I read, I have not only one but two machines, my heavy biplane and my swift monoplano, and suddenly it all came back.”
“Where in Canada?”
“A farm. To the south of Montreal.”
“Any idea how you got there?”
“I do not honestly know. The people who saved me found me by the train tracks. They assumed that I rode on a freight train.”
“What people?”
“A kindly farm family. They nursed me through winter into spring before I began to remember.”
Challenging the man who Danielle had called a thief and a confidence man, who had changed his name from Prestogiacomo to Celere while fleeing his past, and who James Dashwood suspected might have murdered Danielle’s father in San Francisco and disguised the crime as a suicide, Bell kept peppering him with questions.
“Any idea how you happened to get amnesia?”
“I know precisely how.” Celere ran his fingers along the scar on his scalp. “I was hunting with Harry Frost. He shot me.”
“What brings you to the Arizona Territory?”
“I have come to help Josephine win the race in my flying machine. May I see her, please?”
