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“So Billy Hock was the brother who ran away? Strange . . . I wondered at school how he would fare. When did he go?”
“That same summer, right after his freshman year,” said Edna.
“He was adventurous,” said Nellie. “Just like me—always running around and trying new things.”
“We never heard from him again,” said Edna.
Nellie said, “Sometimes I blame myself. I became a kind of model for him, even though I was younger. He saw me running around—one second I was entranced by balloons, then I was trying to be an actress, then I ran off to be an acrobat in the circus—remember, Edna?”
“I remember Father laughing when the ringmaster walked you home.”
“On a white horse! He said I was too young. I said, ‘O.K., take me home on a white horse!’ . . . And he did . . . I gave Billy courage. I only hope it didn’t push him toward the Army.”
“No, it didn’t,” Edna said, laying a reassuring hand on her sister’s arm. “If anything, it gave him courage to go away to Yale. Father,” she explained, turning to Bell, “so wanted Billy to attend Yale because many ‘Oil Princes’ went to college there—Comstock’s son, Lapham’s son, Atkinson’s nephews.”
“Billy and I talked about joining the Army. The Spanish war was brewing—the papers were full of it—and boys were signing up.” Bell had tried, caught up in the excitement, but his father, a Civil War veteran, had intervened forcefully, arguing with unassailable logic that there were better causes to die for than “a war started by newspapers to sell newspapers.”
Edna said, “We guess that Billy enlisted under an assumed name. Lied about his age. We fear he was lost either in the swamps of Cuba or the Philippine jungle. We never heard. If he did join, he must have changed his name and lied about his family.”
“But we don’t really know what happened,” said Nellie. “Except that it nearly destroyed our poor father.”
—
“You cut it close,” said Joseph Van Dorn.
Isaac Bell lifted his gold watch from his pocket, sprang the lid, and let Van Dorn read the dial. Then he shook his head at the latest addition to the Boss’s Willard Hotel office, a modern, glass-cased table clock from Paris. “Your O’Keenan electric, imported at untold expense, is running fifty-seven seconds fast.”
“Sit down,” said Van Dorn. “He’s in my private waiting room. But brace yourself. The poor devil lost all his hair to some disease.”
“Alopecia totalis.”
“Even his eyebrows and mustache. I had a look through the peephole. He’s smooth as a cue ball.”
“Don’t worry,” said Bell, “it’s not catching . . . Now, sir, we need a plan.”
They spoke for two minutes, Van Dorn dubious, Bell prepared with persuasive answers. When the tall detective had prevailed, the Boss murmured into a voice tube and his visitor was ushered in from the private entrance.
12
Mr. Rockefeller.”
The retired president of the Standard Oil Corporation was a tall, sixty-six-year-old, two-hundred-pound man. He had piercing eyes that burned in an enormous hairless head, an icily quiet manner, and a powerful presence that reminded Isaac Bell of the long-reigning heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries.
John D. Rockefeller shook hands with Joseph Van Dorn and nodded to Bell when Van Dorn introduced him as “my top investigator.” He refused a chair and got straight to the
point.
“An assassin is discrediting Standard Oil by attacking enemies of the trust. The public, inclined to believe the worst, gossips that Standard Oil is behind the attacks.”
“It’s the price for hitting the big time,” Van Dorn said sympathetically. “You get blamed for everything.”
“This outcry against us is wrong. The public cannot seem to understand that we are not monsters. We are merely efficient—enormously more efficient than our competitors. Oil is not the biggest business in America. Coal is bigger. Railroads are bigger. Steel is bigger. Yet, we own coal. We control railroads. We own steel. Why? Not because we’re monsters, but because they are chaotic, embroiled in murderous rivalry, each conducting his own business independently of the other and in sharp competition. We cooperate.”
Van Dorn glanced at Bell. Bell had been the Boss’s personal apprentice when he started at the agency straight out of college and Van Dorn had taught him the trade on Chicago’s West Side—as dangerous a city ward as could be found anywhere in the country. Like Apache braves who had stalked game and hunted enemies side by side since boyhood, they could communicate with signs known only to them.
“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” said Van Dorn, uncharacteristically blunt.
John D. Rockefeller fixed him with his cold gaze. “The next time someone tells you that Standard Oil is an octopus, Mr. Van Dorn, you may tell them for me that the ‘octopus’ keeps his books straight, his inventory in order, his bank accounts positive, and pays his debts when due. He is not hoodwinked by alluring prospects. He keeps his powder dry. The octopus is organized and disciplined and the rest of them . . . they are not.”
