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Sweets stared. “Well, I’ll be damned.”
“You will be if you don’t put that gun away.”
Sweets shoved it hastily back his vest. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a taste for dope.”
The cow horns – sawn from the steers in Mexico, hollowed out, and fitted with threads – had been stuffed with Hong Kong opium before being screwed back on. Sweets smuggled hundreds of pounds of raw opium yearly into New York in this manner and presided over a vast refining and distribution network that supplied morphine to thousands of druggists and physicians. Protecting such an enterprise took an army.
“No dope,” said Frost. “I want to hire a crew.”
Rod Sweets’s men would not care that he hated Josephine for buncoing him nor that he hated Preston Whiteway for seducing her. Money was all they cared for. And money, he had plenty of.
Frost made arrangements with Sweets quickly. Then he hurried to the Red Hook saloon where could be found the brothers George and Peter Jonas, who specialized in tampering with the brakes and gasoline tanks of newspaper-delivery trucks. Again, money was all that was needed, and the saboteurs were falling all over themselves trying to persuade him that it was even easier to smash a flying machine than a motortruck.
“It’s all in the wires that hold ’em together,” said
George, and Peter finished his brother’s thought: “A wire lets go, the wing falls off, down she goes.”
Harry Frost had spent many a long hour watching his wife at air meets. “The birdmen know that. They check their wires every time they go up.”
The brothers exchanged a quick glance. They didn’t know much about flying machines, but they knew the logic of machines in general, which was all they really had to know to break one.
“Sure, they check ’em,” said George. “They look for nicks, for kinks, for weak spots.”
Peter said, “So, like you says, Mr. Frost, we’re not going to sneak up on ’em with a hacksaw.”
“But,” said George, “they don’t always check the fittings that anchor the wire to the wing.” He glanced at his brother, who said, “We pull a steel anchor bolt.”
“We replace it with a cast-aluminum anchor bolt that looks just the same but ain’t so strong.”
“They don’t see it.”
“They go up.”
“They jerk hard in the air.”
“The anchor lets go.”
“The wing falls off.”
“They’re flying a cinder block.”
FROST TOOK A TROLLEY BACK TO FLATBUSH.
He felt an unexpected sense of well-being.
Back in harness. He’d been idle too long. For the first time since the nightmare of Josephine’s betrayal, he felt restored, alive again, even as he hid in the dark. The important thing, as always, was to move quickly, move before anyone knew what he was doing, and never do what they expected.
He rode an electric Long Island Rail Road train to Jamaica in the borough of Queens. At an auto rental, he hired the most expensive car they had – a Pierce. He drove it through truck and dairy farms across the Nassau county line to Garden City, and swept under the porte-cochere of the Garden City Hotel. It was a grand place. Before Josephine, before the chauffeur and the asylum, he had rubbed shoulders with Schuylers, Astors, and Vanderbilts here.
The staff did not recognize him behind his gray beard. He paid for a large suite on the top floor, where he ordered dinner served in his room. He drank a bottle of wine with it and turned in for a fitful sleep haunted by strange dreams.
He sat bolt upright at dawn, thunderstruck by the clatter of threshing machines. His heart pounded, as he listened for the squealing of the wheels when the guards rolled the morning breakfast slop down the corridor and the clanging of the ladle striking the cauldron. The same morning racket he still remembered from the orphanage. Only, gradually, did he begin to notice things. The bed was soft and the room was quiet. He glanced at the open windows, where white curtains fluttered in a warm breeze. There were no bars. He wasn’t in the bughouse. They hadn’t dragged him back to the orphanage. A smile crept across Harry Frost’s face. Not threshing machines. Flying machines. Morning practice at Belmont Park.
He had breakfast in bed, three short miles from the racetrack where Josephine and her new admirers were tuning their airships for the race.
6
“WHERE’S JOSEPHINE?” Isaac Bell inquired of the Van Dorn detectives guarding the gate to the Belmont Park Race Track infield.
