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“Now what’s he saying?” A Cossack officer was reporting loudly to a civilian dressed in top hat and frock coat. Bell pegged him for the governor’s representative or an Okhrana operative.
“He blames the attack on revolutionaries,” said Virovets.
“Help me up. We’re going for a walk.”
“I am not recommending—”
“Your objection is noted.”
Twenty minutes later, with his arm in a sling, the sturdy Dr. Virovets at his side, and anxious oil company officials trailing them, Isaac Bell walked beside the Caspian surf breaking at the feet of the derricks until he found one that had been abandoned. As much as he wanted to climb to its parapet, he doubted he could with one working arm and a spinning head.
The doctor climbed for him and reported back that he could see the Cossacks still clustered where the bullets had rained down on the Peerless. Bell was not surprised. Forging ahead before the others trampled the beach, he had spotted a single set of footprints in the sand that had approached the ladder from one direction and left in another.
But it was puzzling. The derrick was less than five hundred yards from where the auto had been. How could the assassin have missed twice? The sudden stop could explain the first bullet going awry. But why hadn’t the second or third hit him in the head? Or the assassin’s favorite target, the neck?
23
Isaac Bell woke up stiff and sore the next morning to a slew of cipher cablegrams from New York. The first was from Grady Forrer, who continued to substitute as directing head of the case in his absence.
FIVE POINTERS BLAME GOPHERS.
Bell took that to mean that Van Dorn detectives had discovered that Anthony McCloud’s fellow Five Points gangsters did not believe he had fallen drunk into the East River but had been murdered. They naturally blamed their rivals the Gopher Gang. But whoever had killed him, and whatever the motive, it was a heck of a coincidence it happened the day of the fire that killed his mother.
Bell cabled back
INFORM NEW YORK CORONER.
entertaining a slim hope that the city’s medical examiner could be persuaded to dig up Averell Comstock’s body to investigate for a cause of death other than old age.
A cable that read
HOPEWELL OFTEN NEW YORK.
told Bell that Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton were grasping at straws about Spike Hopewell’s “tricks up his sleeve” inference. Any independent trying to build a refinery and pipe line would have to travel regularly to New York City to romance his Wall Street bankers.
But the information that Forrer passed along from Dave McCoart resonated with hope of a breakthrough on the gunsmith front—clues that Joseph Van Dorn believed could lead them to the craftsman who smithed the assassin’s deadly weapon.
THREE POSSIBLES.
TWO HARTFORD.
ONE BRIDGEPORT.
BOSS AUTHORIZED DETECTIVES.
Archie Abbott, on the other hand, still had nothing to report about sharpshooter Billy Jones.
ARMY UNFRIENDLY.
PURSUING FRIENDSHIP BRIGADIER GENERAL DAUGHTER.
IS SUPREME SACRIFICE AUTHORIZED?
Bell had just written in encipher on the cablegram blank
AUTHORIZED ON THE JUMP.
when Doctor Virovets arrived to change his bandage. The wound was clean, with no sign of infection, but they agreed on another dose of carbolic acid to be on the safe side. For distraction, Bell asked about the variety of languages he heard spoken in the streets. “Tatar,” the doctor explained, “Georgian and Russian.”
