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Nellie burst into the room, color high, eyes bright.
Wish Clarke was right behind her, his expression grim. “Big gunfight on Millionnaya and a riot at the train station,” he reported. “Nellie spotted a way across Vokzalnaya if we want the harbor.”
“We want it,” said Bell. “Let’s go.”
—
The Hotel de l’Europe was guarded by nervous plainclothes police. Europeans paced the lobby shouting at frightened staff. The hotel pianist began playing a Schubert serenade as if, Isaac Bell thought fleetingly, he hoped to help the world right itself. Bell ran to get his carpetbag. Rockefeller’s suite, adjoining his room, was empty. Bell searched it and ran back down to the lobby. Wish was standing on the stairs, where he could watch the doors. Edna and Nellie stood behind him. Both women were eerily calm.
“Did you see Rockefeller?”
“No.”
“There!” said Edna.
The oil magnate was exiting the hotel manager’s office. He looked like he was headed to a garden party in his dandy’s costume, but Edna had seen through the wig disguise in a flash. Bell saw her beautiful face harden. Her lips were pressed tightly, dots of color flushed on her cheekbones, and her eyes settled on Rockefeller with an intensity stoked by hatred.
He glanced at Nellie. Every trace of the big smile usually ready on her lips had extinguished like a burning coal plunged in cold water. The color of her eyes, like Edna’s, shed every soft vestige of green and turned gray as ash.
Wish muttered, as they plunged across the crowded lobby to intercept Rockefeller, “Are you still sure you want to run together? The young ladies are primed to claw his eyes out.”
“Not my first choice,” said Bell. “But it’s our only choice.”
Rockefeller saw them hurrying toward him and said, “There you are. I was just paying our hotel bill.”
“Bill?” echoed Wish. “The town’s blowing up.”
“I pay my debts.”
The manager ran from his office and put the lie to that.
“Envoy Stone! If they reply to your cables, where shall I forward the answers?”
“New York.”
“Envoy Stone!” Isaac Bell said with the ice of cold steel in his voice. “We’re going—now. Stick close.”
—
The situation on Vokzalnaya deteriorated radically before they were halfway to the harbor. Here, too, the trolley had stopped. Suddenly Tatars were running up the middle of the street shooting pistols at well-dressed Armenians huddled in groups.
Russian Army soldiers wheeled up a Maxim gun on a heavy Sokolov mount. As the machine gunners propped it on its legs, the Tatars fled around the corner. The Armenians ran toward the station, mothers dragging children, young men and women helping their elders.
Pistol fire rained down on the Russian soldiers from above. The gunners tilted the water-jacketed barrel upward. The Maxim churned, and a stream of slugs blasted second-story windows.
From one of those windows flew a baseball-size sphere with a glittering tail of a burning fuse. Still in the air, it exploded with a flash and a sharp bang, and the street and sidewalks w
ere suddenly littered with bodies. Wounded were reeling away when a second bomb exploded prematurely still inside the window. No one remained alive in the circle of the two explosions, not the Tatars, Armenians, or the Russian gun crew sprawled around the Maxim.
Isaac Bell and Aloysius Clarke charged straight at it. A Maxim gun and a thousand .303 rounds in trained hands would be their ticket aboard any ship running from the harbor. Wish heaved one hundred forty pounds of Maxim and Sokolov mount over his shoulder. Bell scooped up four canvas ammunition belts in his good arm and looped them around his neck.
“Go!”
They staggered toward the harbor, closely trailed by Nellie and Edna and Rockefeller. At the foot of Vokzalnaya, a mob of people was storming the passenger steamer pier fighting to get up the gangway of the one remaining ship. Ships that had already fled were far across the bay, lights fading in the sand haze as they steamed for the safety of the open sea.
“Mr. Bell!” cried Rockefeller. “Is that the Nobel lubricating oil refinery afire?”
The Standard Oil president’s eyes locked on the sight of a huge fire miles up the coast at Black Town. From the white-hot heart of it, flames leaped a thousand feet into the air.
