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“Wish, what do you say? Do you want her on your gun?”
Wish didn’t love it either, Bell could see. Nonetheless, he said, “I’m afraid Edna’s right.”
They shifted positions. Edna gave Bell’s derringer to Nellie and climbed in the back of the lead Peerless. “Try not to blow my head off,” Wish called over his shoulder.
“Duck if you hear me shooting.”
John D. Rockefeller climbed into the front of the middle car.
Nellie Matters said, “This should be interesting.”
“What do you mean?”
“Sitting side by side with the devil incarnate.”
“You don’t seem that bad to me,” said Rockefeller.
It was the kind of joke that Nellie Matters loved, and Bell expected her to let loose one of her big laughs, but all Rockefeller got was an angry glare. He looked at her sister, hunched over the Maxim behind him, and saw that Edna, too, had not even cracked a smile.
“Looking on the bright side,” said Wish Clarke, “we’re driving brand-new, rock-solid, Cleveland-built machines.”
“Turn left on the main road,” said Bell, attempting to fold the map with one hand. Failing that, he worked his arm out of the sling and stuffed it in his pocket. “Let’s go.”
He op
ened the stable doors.
The three red cars rumbled through the cobblestone yard and out the driveway onto streets nearly light as day. House fires nearby and oil fields and refineries burning far off lit the sky. They turned away from the fires, west, out of the city on roads clogged with refugees riding in carriages, work wagons, and rich men’s autos and plodding on foot.
Isaac Bell saw that his one-day timetable to Shemaha had been wildly optimistic. They’d be lucky to make that first town in two days. Then seven or eight more towns and four hundred eighty miles to go.
27
Of the six longest, hottest days and freezing cold nights ever endured,” wrote Edna Matters, typing up her shorthand notes as she did every night when the autos finally stopped rolling, “today was the longest yet, and I’m afraid it is not over.
This afternoon’s shoot-out, our third since escaping Baku, ended inconclusively. Those who were shooting at us are still out there. Neither IB nor WC are ceasing their vigilance. Neither has slept more than a catnap. The autos are circled, as tightly as the narrow cliffside clearing will allow, like a latter-day wagon train besieged by Indians, and we are watching the steep slopes and the fast-falling darkness.
She looked around her. When they left the hotel stable in Baku, the Peerless autos’ tires had been white as snow. They were black now, blackened by the oily streets before they were even off the Absheron Peninsula, caked with road dust and marred by the pries used to work them on and off their rims to patch punctures. Wish Clarke was fixing one now. Nellie was helping him. JDR was stretched across a backseat, sound asleep. The plutocrat was the envy of all; he could sleep through anything. Isaac was draped over the Maxim gun, as still and watchful as a cat, the bag in which he carried his rifle in easy reach, as always.
She typed.
The roads are abysmal, verging on the nonexistent, except for the occasional better-graded stretch, which IB identifies as forty-year-old Russian military roads built to subdue the region. There are fortresses and barracks, some abandoned, some occupied by soldiers disinclined to venture out. Occasionally we trundle across handsome iron bridges the Army built over rushing rivers. The road often snakes beside the railroad tracks, on which we have not seen a single train moving, though we did pass a smoldering line of blackened oil tank cars set afire.
IB, reading over EMH’s shoulder, was just informed by EMH that nothing in our agreement says I cannot reveal Envoy Stone for the louse JDR is, so long as I don’t reveal his true identity. Although if IB were not so exhausted from his wonderfully successful efforts to keep us alive, he might have read further to see that I gave Envoy Stone his due, albeit grudgingly, admitting that Stone actually believes, truly believes, that he and his ilk deal, in his own oft-repeated phrase, ‘fairly and squarely and aboveboard.’ I base this conclusion on an interview granted by sister Nellie, who’s been stuck driving his Peerless all this time and arguing incessantly to no effect. Sister Nellie feels, as does this reporter, that the trouble comes by how differently we estimate the location of that board he purports to be above.
For example, in the midst of today’s running gun battles—first with renegade Cossacks bent on relieving us of our vehicles, then gangs of Social Democrat revolutionaries who probably want our Maxim gun—the ‘envoy’ suddenly scampered into a railroad telegrapher’s hut. He was not trying to hide, not running from the fight, but trying to send another business cable to America. No one denies his bravery. (He gave his borrowed pistol to sister Nellie before running a gauntlet of bullets in his abortive attempt to communicate God-knows-what.)
His elastic ethics don’t trouble him at all. He bald-facedly insisted to this reporter that because he was unable to send his cable, as the wires were cut, the contents do not fall under the terms of our agreement and therefore he does not have to admit them to me. It would take a herd of expensive lawyers to get around that one. Which, of course, has always been his specialty. He said, incidentally, that before the wires were cut the telegrapher had received reports of bigger fires, continued looting, and hundreds more murdered in Baku.
Suddenly Edna heard what sounded like thunder and felt the ground shake. She stopped typing and looked up. Then she resumed typing, faster than ever, as if something was chasing her fingers.
A boulder just rolled down the hill . . .
Here comes another . . . They’ve started shooting again. IB can’t see them. He has abandoned the Maxim gun and is running up the road with his rifle . . .
IB is shouting at EMH to close up her typewriter and take cover behind our “rock-solid, Cleveland-built machines.” EMH keeps typing because it beats being terrified. IB appears prepared to shoot EMH if she doesn’t close up her machine. But she can’t stop. She just keeps typing. She is not exactly hysterical. In fact, not at all. She’s typing because, against all logic, it feels like it makes her bulletproof.
Isaac is retreating from the curve in the road where he was trying to see who was shooting. He is running back to the Maxim gun. Bullets pluck his sleeve.
