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“Why didn’t he kill Josephine first?”
“You’re asking me to explain the order of a madman’s killings?”
“Do you know what he said to me?”
“I wasn’t there when he escaped, Isaac,” Van Dorn said pointedly.
Isaac Bell was too involved in his line of inquiry to countenance Van Dorn’s jibe. “Harry Frost said to me, ‘You don’t know what they were up to.’”
“Up to? Marco and Josephine were running off together, that’s what they were up to – or so Frost suspected.”
“No. He didn’t sound like he meant only a love affair. He indicated they were scheming. It was as if he had discovered that they had perpetuated some sort of betrayal worse than seduction.”
“What?”
“I don’t know. But I’m beginning to suspect that we are fighting something more complicated than we took on.”
“We took on protecting Josephine from getting killed,” Van Dorn retorted firmly. “So far, that’s been complicated enough for two detective agencies. If what you’re suggesting now has any bottom to it, we should call in a third.”
“Send me that Remington autoload.”
VAN DORN DISPATCHED an apprentice across on the Weehawken Ferry with the rifle and dry clothes from Bell’s room at the Yale Club. Andy Moser arrived in one of the roadsters an hour later, with tools, stay wires, and a shiny new nine-foot propeller strapped to the fenders.
“Good thing you’re rich, Mr. Bell. This baby cost a hundred bucks.”
“Let’s get to work. I want this machine flying by dawn. I already removed this broken stay.”
Andy Moser whistled. “Wow! I’ve never seen Roebling wire snap.”
“It had help from Harry Frost.”
“It’s amazing the wing didn’t fall off.”
Bell said, “The machine is resilient. These other stays, here and here, took up the slack.”
“I always say, Mr. Di Vecchio built ’em to last.”
They replaced the propeller and the broken stay and patched the holes Frost had shot in the wing fabric. Then Bell sawed twelve inches off the wooden stock of the Remington autoloading rifle, and Andy jury-rigged a swivel mount, promising to construct a more permanent installation “with a stop so you don’t shoot your own propeller” when he got back to his shop in the hangar car. Next time Harry Frost fired at him he would discover that the Eagle had grown teeth.
21
FOUR MILES DOWNRIVER, at the foot of the Statue of Liberty, Josephine was trying to fix her flying machine. Blinded by the searchlights glaring from Preston Whiteway’s steam yacht, choking on its coal smoke, and harried by reporters shouting puddingheaded questions, she and her Van Dorn detective-mechanicians, who had finally come over on a boat, addressed the mangled wing. But the damage was beyond their skills and the few tools they had with them, and the young aviatrix had begun to lose hope when help suddenly appeared in the last person she would have expected.
Dmitri Platov hopped off a Harbor Patrol launch from Manhattan Island, shook hands with the policemen who had given him a ride, and saluted her with a jaunty wave of his slide rule. Everyone said that the handsome Russian was the best mechanician in the race, but he had never come near her machine or offered his services. She was pretty sure she knew why.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
He tipped his straw boater. “Platov come helping.”
“Isn’t Steve Stevens afraid I’ll beat him if you help me?”
“Steve Stevens eating victory meal in Yonkers,” Platov answered, flashing white teeth in his whiskers. “Platov own man.”
“I need a savior, Mr. Platov. The damage is much worse than I thought.”
“We are fixing, no fearing,” said Platov.
“I don’t know. You see, this sleeve – here, bring those lights!”
