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Bell saw he had crumpled a yellow telegram in his fist.
“Father!” said Nellie. “We wondered where you had gotten to.”
Edna asked, “Are you quite well?”
Matters ignored them both. “Mr. Rockefeller! We must speak.” He lowered his voice. “In private.”
“It is rather late to discuss business. Why don’t you sit down and have some supper with the rest of us?”
Matters said, “It is not too late to discuss the Peerless autos you brought for the shah.”
Rockefeller rose silently from the table and led Matters out of the dining car.
Isaac Bell watched them disappear through the vestibule door. His suspicion that Matters had not known about the bribes was proved correct. Then, according to Rockefeller, Matters had been elsewhere on “other business” during the all-important meeting with the Persians that Bell had eavesdropped on at the Hotel Astoria. Matters had not heard Rockefeller promise to pay off the shah’s loan from the czar. Shortly after Rockefeller had sent him to Moscow.
Clearly, John D. Rockefeller had gone to Baku with one purpose only: to strike a bargain to pay off the debt in exchange for a license to build Matters’ pipe line across Persia. The cables he’d been so desperate to send while escaping Russia must have completed the deal and cut Matters out of it.
Bell sprang to his feet and strode to the vestibule door. He pushed through it onto the gangway, where the observation car and the sleeping car behind it were coupled. The eight-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long space was enclosed by flexible leather-and-canvas gangway connectors. While they muffled the noise of the speeding train, it was still louder than inside the cars.
Matters was shouting, gesticulating, and waving the telegram.
“You knew! You knew all along.”
Rockefeller stood still as a stork, head inclined as if straining to listen over the rumble of the wheels and the rushing wind of the boat train’s passage.
“Knew what, Mr. Matters?”
“You knew when you sent me to Moscow. That’s why you sent me. To get me out of the way.”
“Knew what?” Rockefeller repeated more sharply now. Neither man seemed to take notice of Isaac Bell who stood by, boots balanced lightly on the swaying floor plate, his eye on Matters, who looked angry enough to strike the older man.
“You knew that you were closing a private deal for the pipe line,” Matters yelled.
“How I choose to negotiate for Standard Oil is my affair, Mr. Matters,” Rockefeller answered in a firm voice that cut through the racket. “It was my judgment that one man speaking for the company rather than two would do a better job of cutting through heathen mendacity.”
“We had an agreement!” Matters yelled. “The Persia pipe line was not for Standard Oil—it was for us. We would then sell it to Standard Oil.”
“I signed no such agreement.”
“You led me to believe—”
“You believed what you wanted to.”
Face contorting, Matters sucked great gulps of air. Suddenly he shouted, “You busted up my pipes.”
Bell saw that Rockefeller knew instantly what Matters meant. “Is that what is troubling you? You’re blaming me, unfairly, for some event that occurred back in 1899?”
“You stole the Hook.”
Rockefeller turned to Isaac Bell as if the three were golfers strolling to the next tee and explained offhandedly, “Constable Hook. The refinery we just finished building next to Bayonne. It’s our largest—the most efficient in the world.”
“You stole it from me and Spike.”
“I paid you.”
“Pennies!”
“I paid you in Standard Oil stock. I made you rich. You ride around in a fancy private car. Even I don’t go to that expense.” Again he turned to Bell as if in a threesome. “I’m quite content to charter cars when the need arises.”
