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17
ISAAC BELL DROVE HIS American Eagle monoplane a thousand feet above Belmont Park to watch for trouble when the race began. The winds were tricky this afternoon – the firing of the start cannon was twice delayed by strong gusts – and novice though he was, the tall detective took to heart the expert birdmen’s love of high flying. Josephine Josephs, Joe Mudd, Lt. Chet Bass, race-car driver Billy Thomas, cotton farmer Steve Stevens, and “Frenchie” Renee Chevalier all favored altitude for reasons put succinctly by Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin: “Falling from high, you can try to stop in time. Falling from low, you encounter the ground too soon.”
The altitude gave Bell a spectacular view of the Belmont Park Race Track. The bright green infield was speckled with aeroplanes of every color. Gangs of mechanicians, distinguished by their vests and white shirtsleeves, milled about them, adjusting wire stays, tuning motors, topping off gasoline tanks and radiators. Fifty thousand spectators waving white handkerchiefs packed the grandstand.
Good thing he had planned for traffic jams. Clouds of coal smoke were billowing over the rail yard. Support trains were backed up already, trying to depart Belmont Park for the Empire City Race Track in Yonkers. The tracks heading out were one long line of crawling trains, locomotive to caboose, slow and ponderous as a procession of circus elephants. Locomotives jockeyed for position at the switches, engineers yanked shrieking whistles, brakemen scurried, dispatchers shouted, and conductors tore their hair in a noisy, smoky ballet that would be danced every morning the aviators took off for the next field. Bell’s American Eagle hangar-car special was already in Yonkers, sent ahead at midnight with two Thomas Flyer touring autos.
The roofs of each and every boxcar and Pullman were painted with the racers’ colors and names. A racer could tell at a glance whether a locomotive and cars below him was his support train, a competitor’s, or merely an ordinary freight going about its business.
Josephine’s jaunty yellow string was pulled by a fast, high-wheeled Atlantic 4-4-2. Presto
n Whiteway’s palatial private car was coupled to the back, separated from her private sleeping car by the hangar car, diner, dormitory Pullmans for mechanicians, newspapermen, and detectives, and the roadster car with Whiteway’s Rolls-Royce. It was well in the lead. Bell had seen to that, ordering it to depart before dawn, leaving behind an electric GMC moving van with a second set of tools. If all went as planned, the Josephine Special would be waiting in Yonkers when she alighted. Hopefully in the lead, thought Bell, having rashly pressed another thousand dollars into Johnny Musto’s scented palm.
Ahead of the crawling trains he could see the smoke of New York City staining the blue sky ten miles to the west. The Wall Street skyscrapers, poking through the smoke, marked where Lower Manhattan thrust into the harbor, dividing the waters from which Harry Frost would attack.
Bell had deployed New York Van Dorns, led by Harry Warren and guided by Staten Island waterman Eddie Tobin, on the East River, the Upper Bay, and the Hudson River in three fast boats, one for each body of water. They would be assisted, thanks to lavishly dispensed tips, by the New York Police Department’s Harbor Patrol.
He was acutely aware that it was almost impossible to communicate with his widely scattered outfit. Were he ramrodding such an operation on the ground, he could issue orders and receive reports by telephone, telegraph, and motorcar. A Marconi radio, such as the U.S. Navy employed to communicate with battleships, would come in handy coordinating his far-flung, thinly spread forces. But a wireless telegraph weighed considerably more than the American Eagle and required an even heavier source of electricity, so he had to rely on the alertness and enterprising nature of the detectives on the ground and water.
The start cannon fired.
Isaac Bell did not hear it over the roar of the Gnome, but he saw a big white puff of gunpowder smoke.
They had drawn straws for start position. First to tear across the grass was cotton planter Steve Stevens, his enormous white biplane powered by twin pump-fed V-8 Antoinettes that were similar to the motor in Josephine’s machine only bigger. Dmitri Platov had installed them, joking with the other mechanicians that the Antoinettes’ high ratio of power to weight almost made up for the Southern cotton planter’s tonnage. It took over two hundred yards to get off the ground. Wobbling into a turn, it circled the start pylon, where its departure time was recorded by Weiner of Accounting. But when it headed west, it appeared to Bell to move at a surprising clip.
Army Lieutenant Chet Bass rose next in his orange Signal Corps Wright 1909 Military Flyer. Joe Mudd followed in his “Revolution Red” biplane. Moments after Mudd circled the start pylon, Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin passed him in his blue headless pusher. Machine after machine took to the air, had its time noted when it circled the start pylon, and headed for the Statue of Liberty.
Josephine had drawn the short straw. She rose last, leaping her Celere off the field in less than eighty yards, diving dangerously close to the ground to gain speed in the pylon turn, and whipped west as if fired from a slingshot. Bell flew above and slightly behind her, blessing Andy Moser for tuning the Gnome engine so finely that it could hold the pace of Josephine’s powerful Antoinette.
The immensity of his task struck hard, as the land swiftly changed from the open farm fields of Nassau to the rooftops of densely developed Brooklyn. He could see everything for miles ahead but nothing in detail. If Harry Frost opened fire, shielded by chimneys, pigeon coops, and clotheslines of flapping laundry, the first clue in the air would be lead ripping into Josephine’s machine.
Or his, Bell comforted himself grimly, since the two yellow craft looked so similar. Also of some relief, the aviatrix’s course was constantly altered by air currents and wind gusts. If Frost ended up a quarter mile to either side of it, the same objects screening him would block a clear shot. Which made it all the more likely that the savvy hunter would attack from the water.
Bell saw it gleaming up ahead ten minutes after Josephine took to the air.
New York Harbor was a huge swath of rivers and bays cluttered with tugs, fleets of ferries carrying people to watch the race, barges, steamers, black freighters billowing smoke, four-masted ships, fishing boats, oyster boats, rowboats, speedboats, and lighters. To his right, Bell saw the Brooklyn Bridge draped across the East River, connecting Brooklyn to Manhattan Island. A white battleship surrounded by little tugboats was steaming toward the Navy Yard. Others, painted the new camouflage gray color, were moored pier side, being fitted with modern cage masts.
Dead ahead, Bell saw Brooklyn ending at Buttermilk Channel. Across that narrow strait lay Governors Island. A speedboat patrolled the middle of the strait, its deck marked with a white canvas V for Van Dorn. Beyond Governors Island, open water stretched nearly a mile to the Statue of Liberty.
The colossal copper green statue stood three hundred feet tall on a granite-clad pedestal set atop an ancient stone star-shaped fort on tiny Bedloe’s Island. The Van Dorn Agency had another V-marked launch cruising near Bedloe’s, weaving among the ferryboats, barges furnished with bleachers, and private yachts packed with spectators waving hats and handkerchiefs.
Bell saw that Steve Stevens’s white biplane had already circled the waypoint and was disappearing far to the north up the Hudson River. He was closely followed by Billy Thomas in the race-car driver’s green Curtiss Pusher. Four contestants trailed them. Joe Mudd’s red biplane was just completing its turn around the tall statue, and two fliers were close behind him. Missing from the field was Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s blue headless pusher, and Bell knew that Josephine had to be worried that the Englishman was so far ahead of Stevens that he was already sipping tea in Yonkers.
Bell took his left hand off the control wheel, gripped the field glasses suspended from his neck, and scanned the waters for small boats of the type Frost had supposedly hired. He noticed to the north a group of tugs, and two enormous ferries churning big wakes as they converged urgently toward a patch of water between Governors Island and the pier-bristled tip of Lower Manhattan. Bell swept the glasses ahead of them and saw a bright blue flying machine sinking in the water. Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss had fallen into the bay. The lower wing and the fuselage were already submerged.
The Eagle lurched like an auto skidding toward a ditch. Bell let go of his glasses to use both hands. When he had coaxed her back on an even keel, he resumed flying with one hand, spun the focus wheel to narrow in on the wreckage, and found the Englishman with his field glasses. The baronet was kneeling on the pusher’s top wing. His goggles were askew, and he had lost his helmet, but he had somehow managed to light a cigarette. He greeted the first tug to arrive to fish him out of the water with a grateful wave of his smoke.
Before Bell could resume scrutinizing small boats with his field glasses, he ran into a patch of rough air that required both hands to control the American Eagle. It got rougher, roller-coastering him fiercely. He guessed that he had driven into the precise junction in the sky where opposing winds, blowing down the rivers and up New York Bay, butted heads violently. Whatever the cause, he felt them battering his monoplane, testing Di Vecchio’s wing design for weaknesses.
Suddenly the machine heeled on its side, turned to the right, and fell.
18
ISAAC BELL ACTED INSTINCTIVELY, quickly, and decisively, and tried to steer out of the turn with the rudder. As he turned the rudder, he pulled back on the wheel to raise the nose. Neither rudder nor elevator had any effect. The American Eagle turned tighter and heeled more sharply.
His instincts had betrayed him. His propeller pointed into empty sky, and the ships in the harbor were suddenly under his right shoulder. And then, before he could reckon what he was doing wrong, everything began to spin.
He glimpsed a blur of yellow in the corner of his eye. In a flash, it was huge. Josephine’s machine. He whizzed past it like an express train, missing her by yards, imagining Joe Van Dorn’s reaction when, in the course of protecting America’s Sweetheart of the Air, his chief investiga
