The Race (Isaac Bell 4)

“The baronet is a babe in the woods. He can’t imagine anyone doing him harm to win the race, just like he can’t imagine a birdman wanting to win it to collect the fifty thousand bucks. He’s always saying ‘the winning is prize enough,’ at least when he’s not saying ‘the race is the prize.’ Drives the boys nuts. He’s, like, above it all, if you know what I mean, having a title and a rich wife. But the thing is, it’s not fair to Mr. Curtiss. Glenn Hammond Curtiss would never let a patch job leave the factory.”

“Was the pusher left unattended the night before the race started?”

“Along with all the others at Belmont Park. Your ‘aviatrix’ was the only one who had guards, but that’s ’cause of the husband, I hear.”

“So if neither a knothole nor a mistakenly drilled hole would ever get out of the Curtiss factory, how do you think that hole got in that broken strut?”

“Sabotage,” said the mechanician. “Like everyone says. Bore a hole where we wouldn’t see it. Where fabric lapped over it or a fitting concealed it. It happened to his Farman, too, didn’t it? And look what happened to the Platov engine. Those were sabotage, right?”

“They were sabotage,” Bell agreed.

“Excepting I don’t see what none of them smashes had to do with Josephine’s crazy husband. Do you, Mr. Bell?”

Bell pressed two dollars into the mechanician’s hand. “Here, buy the boys a drink.”

“Not ’til we reach San Francisco. We’re sleeping stone-cold sober under our pusher from now on. One man awake all night.”

Bell put his mind to the unsettling thought that of three acts of sabotage, only one could be connected to Harry Frost. Three acts of sabotage since the racers gathered at Belmont Park. Sir

Eddison-Sydney-Martin twice a victim, Platov and poor Judd the mechanician the third.

Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s first smash had been so clearly a distraction engineered by Harry Frost to kill Josephine.

But how could he blame the second attack on Eddison-Sydney-Martin on Harry Frost? What would Frost get out of Eddison-Sydney-Martin smashing? Just as he had wondered back at Belmont, what would Harry Frost get out of Dmitri Platov’s engine jumping the track and killing a mechanician? Was Frost attacking the entire race instead of concentrating on killing his wife? That didn’t make sense at this stage. Frost was too single-minded to spread himself thin. He would concentrate on killing his wife first, a crime which, if successful, would have the collateral effect of besmirching Preston Whiteway’s race as well.

But to what purpose had Platov’s engine been destroyed by a saboteur not employed by Frost? And to what purpose had the headless pusher been made to smash?

To eliminate a potentially strong competitor, seemed the likeliest answer.

Who would gain? Three possibilities hovered in Bell’s mind, two likely, one odd but not entirely unlikely. The saboteur could be a competitor – one of the birdmen – eliminating his strongest rivals. Or the saboteur could be a gambler trying to throw the race by getting rid of front-runners. Or, oddly, it could be the race sponsor himself trying to generate publicity.

The likeliest was a competitor trying to gain an edge by eliminating his strongest rivals. Fifty thousand dollars was a huge prize, more money than a workingman would earn in a lifetime.

But the money wagered as the race progressed across the country would be even more than could be made by fixing a horse race. High rollers like Johnny Musto could rake it in.

Preston Whiteway presented a third, strange possibility. Bell could not forget that the publisher had stated unabashedly that the best thing that could happen to keep people excited about the race would be half the male contestants smashing to the ground before Chicago. “A natural winnowing of the field,” as he had put it coldly, “will turn it into a contest that pits only the best airmen against plucky tomboy Josephine.”

Too far-fetched? But was Preston Whiteway above engineering aeroplane smashes to sell newspapers? Truth, facts, and moral decency hadn’t stopped him from trying to start a war with Japan over the Great White Fleet. Nor had they restrained him from using the sinking of the battleship Maine to incite the Spanish-American War.

JOSEPHINE JOSEPHS FELL farther behind on the one-hundred-forty-five-mile leg from Albany to Syracuse when the hastily repaired alettone seized up, and its entire mounting had to be replaced. Then she lost half a day between Syracuse and Buffalo when the Antoinette blew a cylinder.

Isaac Bell reminded her that she was not the only competitor running into difficulty. Three aeroplanes were already out of the race. A big Voisin tangled terminally with a pasture fence, a fast Ambroise Goupy biplane broke apart when a down current dropped it into a stand of trees short of the field where it was attempting to alight, and the formidable Renee Chevalier splashed into the Erie Canal, reducing his Blériot to matchwood, and nearly drowned in the shallow water, unable to stand or swim having broken both legs.

Josephine, whom Bell had noticed had become rather standoffish ever since they left Belmont, surprised him with one of her exuberant grins that made her look much more herself. “Thanks for the thought, Isaac. I guess I should be grateful I haven’t broken any bones yet.”

Bell hired a third mechanician – a skillful Chicago boy named Eustace Weed, who had lost his job on the ruined Voisin – to keep his Eagle running. That gave Andy spare time to investigate the mechanical cause of each of the smashes, with an eye to pinning down evidence of sabotage. The meticulous policeman’s son gathered evidence carefully, and reported that since Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s smash into New York Harbor most accidents had a legitimate mechanical explanation for what went wrong. The possible exception was Chevalier’s, but key parts of his machine were on the bottom of the Erie Canal.

Bell followed up by questioning the mechanicians. Who was near the machine? Who was in your hangar car? Any strangers? None they remembered. Sometimes the mechanicians found evidence to show the Van Dorns – a broken strut, a crushed fuel line, a kinked stay wire – sometimes there was none.

Preston Whiteway kept railing at Bell that there was “a murderer among us.” Bell kept his counsel, knowing that Whiteway could be him – not a murderer in the strictest sense but a cold-blooded saboteur with little regard for the fate of the drivers when they smashed.

As the racers struggled west, smashes grew increasingly common. Machines faltered, winds sprang up with no warning, and birdmen made mistakes. Others suffered breakdowns that added hours to their time. Joe Mudd’s sturdy red Liberator was leaking so much oil that the entire front of the machine turned black. Then it nearly killed him when the oil caught fire over Buffalo. Mudd was luckier than Chet Bass. Bass’s Army Signal Corps Wright Flyer skidded sideways on landing at Erie, Pennsylvania, throwing him thirty feet across the grass.

Bell listened closely to the heated discussions that followed. The fact Bass would lose two days in the hospital with a brain concussion prompted the birdmen and mechanicians to debate the value of installing belts to keep the drivers from falling off their machines. An Austrian aristocrat flying a Pischof monoplane ridiculed the “cowardly” idea of strapping in with a belt. Many agreed that belting on would be unmanly. But Billy Thomas, the race-car driver who had proven his bravery repeatedly on the raceways before learning how to fly the Vanderbilt syndicate’s big Curtiss Twin Pusher, announced that the Austrian could go to hell, he would wear a belt.

The day he did, a Great Lakes gale blew his Curtiss against a railroad semaphore mast atop a signal tower on a depot building. The Curtiss ricocheted into twenty strands of telegraph wire and bounced back through the second-floor windows of the signal tower.

Billy Thomas’s belt kept him in the wreckage, but he was nearly cut in half by the force of the sudden stop against the rigid leather. Internal organs ruptured, he was out of the race.