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“You must. To make it out of here alive, we have to pull together.”
“How will you stop me?”
“I will ask for your word.”
“And if I don’t give you my word?”
“Looters are robbing shops,” Isaac Bell answered without the trace of a smile. “I will join them. I will steal a Persian carpet and roll you up in it. I will unroll you when I have delivered you safely back to Newspaper Row.”
“How Cleopatric!” said Nellie.
To Bell’s immense relief, her joke made Edna smile. She looked at the others who were watching closely. “O.K.! If Mr. Rockefeller promises not to slow us down stopping to cable orders to his head office, I promise not to write about him.”
“Done,” said Rockefeller.
“But when he breaks that promise—which he surely will—he must tell me the contents of the cable.” She extended her hand to Rockefeller. “I give you my word. Is it a deal?”
“You’re a good negotiator, young lady. It’s a deal.”
She turned to Isaac Bell. “You, sir, will find some way to make this up to me.”
“It’s a deal.”
A bullet ricocheted off a lamppost and smashed a window.
“The question remains,” said Wish Clarke, “how are we getting out of here if we can’t take a ship or a train?”
“We can drive by auto back to Batum,” Rockefeller ventured. “Then a Black Sea steamer to Constantinople.”
“What auto?” asked Bell, intending to get Rockefeller to reveal how the Peerlesses he had hidden in the hotel stables served his scheme.
“My Peerless Tonneau car.”
“Impossible. Batum is six hundred miles over hard country.”
“Tiflis is halfway to Batum, and trains are safer in Georgia.”
Bell shook his head emphatically. “We can barely all squeeze in the car, much less stow the gasoline, oil, food, water, tools, and spares for crossing open country.”
“And let us not forget Mr. Maxim,” said Wish, patting the weapon he had propped on the telegrapher’s desk, “without whom no one in their right mind would venture on the so-called roads to Tiflis.”
“We would need three autos as sturdy as a Peerless,” said Bell.
“We have three,” said Rockefeller.
“Three?”
“I had three Peerless Tonneau cars shipped ahead.”
“Why?”
Rockefeller hesitated before he answered, “Gifts.”
“For whom?” Bell pressed.
Rockefeller clamped his mouth shut.
Bell said, “Mr. Rockefeller, Miss Matters agreed not to reveal your business. You, in turn, agreed—fairly and squarely and aboveboard, sir—that we’re all in this together.”
