The Race (Isaac Bell 4)

ISAAC BELL WIRED DASHWOOD IN SAN FRANCISCO, repeating his earlier order to investigate Di Vecchio’s suicide. In addition, he wanted to know what Marco Celere had done when he first arrived from Italy.

His telegraph caught Dashwood at a rare moment when the dogged young investigator was not out in the field. Dashwood wired back immediately.

APOLOGIZE DELAY. DI VECCHIO SUICIDE COMPLICATED.

MARCO CELERE ARRIVED SAN FRANCISCO. TRANSLATOR FOR

ROMAN NEWSPAPER CORRESPONDENT TOURING CALIFORNIA.

Isaac Bell read the telegram twice.

“Translator?”

Josephine told him it had been difficult to communicate with Marco Celere. She couldn’t understand his accent.

Miss Josephine? Bell smiled to himself. What are you up to? Were you trying to throw off suspicion about cheating on Harry Frost? Were you assuring your new benefactor Preston Whiteway and his censorious mother that your heart was pure? Or were you covering for Marco Celere?

WHEN DETECTIVE JAMES DASHWOOD heard the opening notes of the opera aria “Celeste Aida” pierce the fog on San Francisco Bay, he told the nuns he had brought with him, “They’re coming.”

“Why are the fishermen singing Verdi?” asked Mother Superior, gripping tightly the arm of a beautiful young novitiate who spoke Italian.

Dashwood had led them onto the new Fisherman’s Wharf, where they were surrounded by water they could not see. The cold murk coiled around them, chilling their lungs and wetting their cheeks.

“The fishermen sing to identify their boats in the fog,” the slim, boyish Dashwood answered. “So I am told, though I personally have a theory that they navigate by listening to their voices echo from the shore.”

Finding an Italian translator in San Francisco had not been difficult. The city was filled with Italian immigrants fleeing their poor and crowded homeland. But finding one that clannish, frightened old-world fishermen would talk to had thus far been impossible. Schoolteachers, olive oil and cheese importers, even a fellow from the chocolate factory next to the wharf, had encountered a wall of silence. This time would be different, Dashwood hoped. It had taken a warm introduction from the abbot of a wealthy monastery down the coast with whom he had dealings in the course of the Wrecker investigation, plus his own promise of an extortionate contribution to the convent’s poor box, to persuade Mother Superior to bring the girl to Fisherman’s Wharf to translate his questions and the fishermen’s answers.

The singing grew louder. Ship horns resonated deep bass counterpoint, and tug whistles piped, as unseen vessels made their cautious way about the invisible harbor. The fog thinned and thickened in shifting patches. The long black hull of a four-masted ship materialized suddenly and just as suddenly disappeared. A tall steamer passed, transparent as a ghost, and vanished. A tiny green boat under a lateen sail took form.

“Here they come,” said Dashwood. “Pietro and Giuseppe.”

“Which has one arm?” asked Mother Superior.

“Giuseppe. He lost it to a shark, I was told. Or a devilfish.”

The beautiful Maria made the sign of the cross. Dashwood said soothingly, “That’s what they call the octopus.”

Giuseppe scowled when he saw the detective who had visited Fisherman’s Wharf so often, some thought he was buying fish for a wholesaler. But when his sea-crinkled eyes fell on the nuns’ black habits, he crossed himself and nudged Pietro, who was preparing to throw a line around a cleat, and Pietro crossed himself, too.

Better, thought Dashwood. At least they weren’t throwing fish heads at him, which was how his previous visit had ended.

“What do you want Maria to inquire of them?” Mother Superior asked.

“First, is it true they overheard an argument in the street outside their rooming house between two inventors of flying machines?”

“And if they did?”

“Oh, they did, for sure. The trick will be to convince them that I mean no harm and am merely trying to right a wrong, and that it has nothing to do with them nor will it cause them any trouble.”

Mother Superior – a straight-talking Irishwoman who had led her convent through the recent earthquake and fires and taken in refugees like Maria from displaced orders whose motherhouses had tumbled down – said, “Maria will have her hands full convincing them of half that, Detective Dashwood.”

AFTER WAITING OUT THREE DAYS of wind and rain in a muddy Gary, Indiana, fairground, the Whiteway Atlantic-to-Pacific Cross-Country Air Race took to the air in hopes of reaching Chicago’s Illinois National Guard Armory ahead of another storm. In the bleachers erected along the broad avenue that served as the armory’s parade ground, the impatient spectators were read a telegraph message that said thunder and lightning had driven the aviators back to the ground at Hammond.

The National Guard’s fifty-piece brass marching band played to soothe the crowd. Then local aviators took to the air in early-model Wright Fliers to entertain them by attempting to drop plaster “bombs” on a “battleship” drawn in chalk in the middle of the avenue. The cobblestones were splotched with broken plaster when, finally, another message echoed from the megaphone.

The sky over Hammond had cleared. The racers were off the ground again.

An hour later, a shout went up.