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Celere weighed the risk of being a foreign agitator versus a murderer on the run and chose to deal with the more immediate threat. “I am being aviation mechanician in Whiteway Cup Cross-Country Air Race.”
Their suspicious expressions brightened like sunshine.
“You in the race? Put ’er there, feller!”
Soft pink palms thrust across the aisle, and they shook his hand vigorously.
“When are all you getting to Hannibal?”
“After thunderstorming over.”
“Let’s hope we don’t get tornadoes.”
“Say, if you was a bettin’ man, who would you put your money on to win?”
Celere held up the newspaper. “Is saying here that Englishman pusher is best.”
“Yeah, I read that in Chicago, too. But you’re right there in the thick of it. What about Josephine? That little gal still behind?”
Celere froze. His eye had fallen on a telegraphed story down the page.
MURDER AND THEFT IN SHADOW OF STORM
“Josephine still behind?”
“Is catching up,” Celere mumbled, reading as fast as he could:
An air race mechanician was found diabolically murdered at the Columbia fairground with his throat slashed, the victim of a robbery. According to Sheriff Lydem, the murderer co
uld well be a labor agitator on the run from the cement strike in Missouri, and willing to stop at nothing to facilitate his escape. The victim’s body was not discovered for many hours due to the violence of last night’s storm.
Marco Celere looked up with a broad smile for the businessmen.
“Josephine is catching up,” he repeated.
The train trundled loudly onto an iron-girder bridge, and the sky suddenly spread wide over a broad river.
“Here’s the Mississippi. I read birdmen wear cork vests when they fly over bodies of water. Is that so?”
“Is good for floating,” said Celere, gazing through the girders at the famed waterway. Brown and rain-swollen, flecked with dirty whitecaps, it rolled sullenly past the town of Hannibal, whose frame houses perched on the far side.
“I thought was wider,” he said.
“Wide enough, you try crossing it without this here bridge. But you want to see real wide, you get down below Saint Louis where it meets up with the Missouri.”
“And if you want to see really, really wide, wide as the ocean, you take a look where the Ohio comes in. Say, mister, what are you doing on the train when the race is back in Illinois?”
Suddenly they were staring again, suspecting they’d been hoodwinked.
“Scouting route,” Celere answered smoothly. “Am getting off train in Hannibal and going back to race.”
“Well, I sure do envy you, sir. Judging by the smile on your face, you are one lucky man to be part of that air race.”
“Happy being,” Celere replied. “Very happy being.”
A good plan always made him happy. And he had just come up with a beauty. Kindly, bighearted, crazy Russian Platov would volunteer to help the baronet’s mechanicians by filling in for poor murdered Chief Mechanician Ruggs.
Steve Stevens would complain, but the hell with the fat fool. Dmitri Platov would help and help and help until he had finished the job on Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s infernal headless pusher once and for all.
