The Race (Isaac Bell 4)

“Farm boys, tractor hands. Fine doin’ what Judd told them to do, but they’re not real mechanicians.” Stevens jammed plump fists on his broad hips and glared around the infield. “If this don’t beat all. Here, Ah got my machine. Ah got money to buy new motors, but no hands to install ’em. Say, how ’bout you, Platov? Want a job?”

“No thank you. I am having new thermo engine to manufacture.”

“But Ah seen you runnin’ around takin’ jobs for money. Ah’ll pay top dollar.”

“My thermo engine come first.”

“Tell you what. When you’re not workin’ on my flyin’ machine, you can work on your thermo engine.”

“Could your train tow my shop car?”

“Sure thing. Glad to have your tools along.”

“And can I still being freelance machinist to make money for new thermo engine?”

“Just as long as my machine comes first.” Stevens beckoned his servants. “Tom! You, there, Tom. Fetch Mr. Platov some breakfast. Can’t expect a top hand to work hard on an empty stomach.”

Platov looked at Isaac Bell as if to ask what he should do.

Bell said, “It looks like you’re back in the race.”

He saw Josephine returning and hurried toward the open stretch where she would come down. His brow was furrowed. He was thinking hard about coincidences. The Englishman’s accident occurring simultaneously with Frost’s attack was no coincidence. It had been deliberate sabotage to create a distraction to support the attack.

But what was the distraction, this time? There had been no attack. Josephine was high in the sky, and Bell had seen nothing amiss on the ground. When last heard of, Harry Frost was in Cincinnati. It was possible he could have returned to New York. But it seemed unlikely that he would attack again at Belmont Park in broad daylight, particularly since Bell had assigned Van Dorns, backed up by local police, to check the loads inside every closed van and wagon that entered the infield. It was logical to assume that Frost reckoned he would do better to lie in wait and spring from ambush.

Bell found Josephine’s Van Dorn mechanicians watching her yellow monoplane spiral-dipping down toward the infield in a series of steep dives and sharp turns. “Have you boys seen anything out of order?”

“Not a thing, Mr. Bell. Except that thermo engine running wild.”

Was this sabotage a genuine coincidence? Had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? Not by the saboteur who caused the Farman to lose a wing but by another, operating on his own? For what purpose? To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the only answer.

“Did you say something, Mr. Bell?”

Isaac Bell repeated through gritted teeth what he had just growled under his breath. “I hate coincidences.”

“Yes, sir! First thing they taught me when I joined the Van Dorns.”

“YOUR FLYING MACHINE IS BEAUTIFUL!” Josephine exclaimed delightedly. “And look at you, Mr. Bell! You look happy as a jaybird in a cherry tree.”

Bell was grinning. Andy Moser and the mechanicians Bell had hired to help him were tightening the flying and landing wires that braced the wing. They still had work to do on the tail and the control links, and the motor was scattered in small pieces in their spick-and-span hangar car, but with the wing spreading across the fuselage, it was beginning to look like something that would fly.

“I must say, I’ve never in my life bought anything I’ve liked as much.”

Josephine kept striding around it, eyeing it professionally.

Bell watched for her reaction as he said, “Andy Moser tells me that Di Vecchio licensed the controlling system from Breguet.”

“So I see.”

“That wheel turns it like an automobile. Turn left to make the rudder turn you left. Tilt the wheel post left, and it warps the wings by moving the alettoni to bank left into the turn. Push the wheel post, and she’ll go down. Pull it, and the elevators make her go up.”

“You can drive it with only one hand, when you get good at it,” said Josephine.

Leaving a hand free for a pistol, which meant that Bell could counterpunch if someone attacked Josephine in her flying machine. He said, “It works just like yours.”

“It’s the up-to-date thing.”

“It ought to make it easier to learn to fly,” said Bell.