Clive Cussler - The Race

Bell watched the sidewalks for cops and gangsters.

Stealthy movement beside a pool of streetlamp light caught his attention. A slight figure, a young man in a wrinkled sack suit and bowler hat, eased past the light, then veered across the sidewalk on a route that took him close enough to the Packard for Bell to recognize him.

“Dash!”

“Hello, Mr. Bell.”

“Where the devil did you come from?”

“Mr. Bronson gave me permission to report in person. Got me a free ride guarding the Overland Limited’s express car.”

“You’re just in time. Do you have your revolver?”

James Dashwood drew from a shoulder holster a long-barreled Colt that had been smithed to a fare-thee-well. “Right here, Mr. Bell.”

“Do you see those French doors on the third-floor balcony?”

“Third floor.”

“Those stairs lead up from the balcony to the roof. I’d prefer not to engage in a public gun battle with anyone trying to escape from that room through those doors. Do you see the knob?”

Dashwood’s keen eyes penetrated the shadows to focus on the barely visible two-inch bronze knob. “Got it.”

“If it moves, shoot it.”

Bell tugged his gold watch from its pocket and traced the second hand. “In twenty seconds, our boys will knock on the hall door.”

Twenty-three seconds later, the knob turned. Dashwood, who had been trained by his mother – a former shootist with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show – fired once. The knob flew from the door.

“Hop in,” said Bell. “Let’s hear what this fellow has to tell us.”

Moments later, the heavyset Van Dorns exited the front of the bordello, balancing a man between them like friends helping a drunk. Bell eased the Packard along the curb, and they bundled the man into the backseat.

“Do you realize who I am?” he blustered.

“You are Alderman William T. Foley, formerly known as ‘Brothel Bill,’ less for your handsome mug than for your managemental prowess in the vice trade.”

“I’ll have you arrested.”

“You’re running for reelection on the reform ticket.”

“The alderman was carrying these,” said one of the detectives, presenting Bell with two pocket pistols, a dagger, and a sap.

“Where is Harry Frost?”

“Who?” Bill Foley asked innocently. Like any successful Chicago criminal who had graduated to public office, Foley could recognize Van Dorn detectives when seated between them in the back of a Packard. He was emboldened by the knowledge that they were less likely to shoot him in an alley or drown him in Lake Michigan than certain other parties in town. “Harry Frost? Never heard of him.”

“You were spending his money tonight in the most expensive sporting house in Chicago. Money he paid you this afternoon to cash a five-thousand-dollar check at the First Trust and Savings Bank. Where is he? ”

“He didn’t leave a forwarding address.”

“Too bad for you.”

“What are you going to do, turn me in to the sheriff? Who happens to be my wife’s uncle.”

“You’re running for reelection on the reform ticket. Our client publishes a newspaper in this town that you would not want as your enemy.”

“I’m not afraid of Whiteway’s papers,” Foley sneered. “Nobody in Chicago gives a hang for that California pup who-”

Bell cut him off. “The people of Chicago may continue to put up with your bribery and corruption a bit longer, but they will draw the line at even a hint that Alderman William T. Foley would endanger the life of Miss Josephine Josephs, America’s Sweetheart of the Air.”

Foley wet his lips.

“Where,” Bell repeated, “is Harry Frost?”

“Left town.”

“Alderman Foley, do not try my patience.”

“No, I ain’t kidding. He left. I saw him leave.”

“On what train?”

“In an auto.”

“What kind?”

“Thomas Flyer.”

Bell exchanged a glance with James Dashwood. The Thomas was a rugged cross-country auto, which was why Bell had chosen them for his support train. Such a vehicle – capable of traversing bad roads and open prairie, and even straddling railroad tracks when washouts and broken ground made all else impassable – would make Frost dangerously mobile.

“Which way did he go?”

“West.”

“Saint Louis?”

Alderman Foley shrugged. “I got the impression more like Kansas City – where your air race is going, if I can believe what I read in the newspapers.”

“Is he alone?”

“He had a mechanician and a driver.”

Bell exchanged another look with Dash. There was five hundred miles of increasingly open country between Chicago and Kansas City, and Frost was prepared for the long haul.

“Both are gunmen,” Foley added.

“Names?”

“Mike Stotts and Dave Mayhew. Stotts’s the driver. Mayhew’s the mechanician. Used to be a telegrapher ’til they caught him selling horse-race results to the bookies. Telegraphers are sworn to secrecy, you know.”

“What I don’t know,” said Bell, frowning curiously at Foley, “is why you’ve turned unusually talkative all of a sudden, Alderman. Are you making this up as we go along?”

“Nope. I just know Harry ain’t coming back. I done him his last favor.”

“How do you know Frost isn’t coming back?”

“Never thought I’d see the day, but you damned Van Dorns ran him out of town.”

ISAAC BELL LED JAMES DASHWOOD into a chophouse to feed him supper while the kid reported what he had discovered in San Francisco.

“Last you wired me, Dash, you found that Celere and Di Vecchio were both in San Francisco last summer. Celere had arrived earlier, working as a translator, then built a biplane he subsequently sold to Harry Frost, who shipped it back to the Adirondacks and hired Celere to work on Josephine’s flying machines at their camp. Both Celere and Di Vecchio had fled Italy one step ahead of their creditors. Di Vecchio killed himself. What new do we know?”

“They got in a fight.”

Two immigrant Italian fishermen, Dashwood explained, had overheard a long and angry shouting match in the street outside their boardinghouse. Di Vecchio accused Marco Celere of stealing his wing-strengthening design.

“I already know that,” said Bell. “Celere would claim it was the other way around. What else?”

“Di Vecchio started it, shouting that Celere copied his entire machine. Celere shouted back that if that was true, why had the Italian Army bought his machines and not Di Vecchio’s?”

“What did Di Vecchio answer?”

“He said that Celere had poisoned the market.”

Bell nodded impatiently. This, too, he had already heard from Danielle. “Then what?”

“Then he started yelling that Celere better keep his hands off his daughter. Her name is-”

“Danielle!” said Bell. “What did keeping his hands off his daughter have to do with the Italian Army buying his aeroplane design?”

“Di Vecchio shouted, ‘Find another woman to do your dirty work.’”

“What dirty work?”

“He used a word that my translators found very hard to repeat.”

“A technical word. Alettone? ”

“Not technical. The girl knew what it meant, but she was afraid to say it in front of Mother Superior.”

“Mother Superior?” Bell echoed, fixing his protégé with a wintery eye. “Dash, what have you been up to?”

“They were nuns.”

“Nuns?”

“You always told me people want to talk. But you have to make them comfortable. The girl was the only Italian translator I could get the fishermen to talk to. Once they started telling the story, they wouldn’t shut up. I think because the nun was so beautiful.”

Isaac Bell reached across the tablecloth to slap Dashwood on the shoulder. “Well done!”