The Assassin (Isaac Bell 8)

A Tatar work gang was caught in their path. The Cossacks began slashing and shooting indiscriminately. The Moslems fled from the horses, leaving behind crumpled dead and squirming wounded and some hastily discarded sidearms.

Isaac Bell was surprised to see John D. Rockefeller standing over him, staring down with a concerned expression. “Mr. Bell, you’ve fallen down again. You are wounded.”

Bell started to stand again.

Rockefeller admonished him with an imperious gesture. “Right there! As I have been saying, you are wounded.” He raised his voice. “A doctor! Fetch a doctor!”

It finally struck Isaac Bell that it was not a good idea to stand and he lay back and let his mind fix on his memory of the shooting. He was sure it was the assassin. He was also fairly sure that the bullet had been aimed at him, not at Rockefeller. The car stopping suddenly had thrown off the first shot. That was the one he heard crackle over the seat back. He had taken the second. A terrible thought pierced his whirling thoughts. Was he drawing fire at the man he was supposed to protect?

Bell motioned to Bill Matters, one of the faces hovering over him.

“Get Mr. R—Envoy Stone—under cover. I’ll catch up.”

“You O.K., Bell?”

Bell took inventory. Bloody as he was, there were no arteries spurting or he’d have bled to death by now. He tried to move his arm. That made his shoulder hurt worse. But he could move it. No bones fractured. The whirling in his head and a general air of confusion he blamed on the shock of impact from a high-velocity bullet.

“Tip-top,” he said. “Get Envoy Stone under cover! Now!”

Matters knelt to speak privately. “He says he won’t leave you here.”

“Tell him I said to get under cover before he gets killed and I lose my only client. Explain to him that I don’t know what’s going on and I can’t help him at this moment.”

They were still shouting for a doctor.

One appeared, a sturdy, barrel-chested young man in a threadbare coat, who knelt beside him, opened his bag, and took out a pair of scissors. He cut away Bell’s blood-soaked coat and shirtsleeves, exposing a ragged tear through the flesh of his upper biceps. He reached for a bottle of carbolic acid and muttered something in Russian.

“What?” asked Bell.

“Is hurting. But important.”

“Beats infection,” Bell agreed. He braced for the fiery disinfectant. For a long moment, the sky turned dark. Afterwards the doctor bandaged the wound, then took a hypodermic needle from its nest in a box padded with red velvet.

“What’s in that?” asked Bell.

“Morphine. You are feeling nothing.”

“Save it for the next guy— What are those Cossacks shouting?”

“What?”

“Doctor, you speak English.”

“I study at Edinburgh.”

“I will pay you twenty rubles a day to be my translator. What are those Cossacks shouting?”

The doctor’s eyes widened. On January’s Bloody Sunday, the workers gunned down at the Winter Palace had been demanding their pay be raised to a daily salary of one ruble.

“What is your name?” asked Bell.

“Alexey Irineivoich Virovets.”

“Dr. Virovets, what are those Cossacks shouting?”

“They are recognizing the captured guns as being looted from armory.”

Bell levered himself onto his good elbow. He saw pistols heaped on a horse blanket but no sharpshooter’s weapons.