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“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-T
win 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.”
