“Now every train west is oil train. But one special train tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. Show papers.”
“What papers?”
“You need special pass. Government train visas.”
“Where do I get them?”
“You get issued by my friend Feltsman, high official. Russian. You must pay him.”
“Where is Feltsman?”
“Government building. Erevan Square.”
“Where in Erevan Square? Which building?”
“Next to Russian State Bank.”
Isaac Bell stood to his full height and stared down at the Russian train official. Then he opened his coat just enough to allow a glimpse of the Bisley nestled in his shoulder holster. “If I can’t find the government building—or if I can’t find Mr. Feltsman—I do know where to find you . . . Is there anything else you want to tell me before I go back to Erevan Square?”
“I am remembering,” said the chief agent, reaching for his telephone, “that it would be best if I personally telephoned Feltsman to tell him to expect you. That way he would not be out to lunch or somewhere when you arrive.”
“A wise precaution,” said Isaac Bell. He waited for the call to be completed and left somewhat surer now that the papers would be forthcoming, but considerably less certain that tomorrow’s special passenger train would materialize in the chaos.
—
“Hold it!” said Isaac Bell.
They had just stepped down from the tram to Erevan Square and were hurrying across the busy plaza toward the government building next to the Russian State Bank when Bell saw the gleaming black pompadour that crowned the Social Democrat Josef.
“Is that who I think it is skulking at the tram stop?” asked Wish.
“Josef.”
With a furtive glance over his shoulder, revealing beyond a doubt that it was he, Josef ran to jump on the tram leaving for the railroad station.
“What’s he up to?” said Wish.
Rockefeller started to make a beeline for the telegraph.
“Grab him, Wish.”
Wish snared the plutocrat.
“What? What?”
“Just wait,” said Wish. “Something’s up . . . What is it, Isaac?”
Bell had spotted three or four workmen in the crowds whom he might possibly have seen with Josef earlier on the road. Aware that he was sensing more than seeing, he looked up and scanned the tops of the two- and three-story buildings that bordered the open space. He could feel stress in the air, almost as if every person bustling about his business was about to stop breathing.
Suddenly two enormous carriages raced into the square. Thundering alongside them, Cossack outriders brandished lances and rifles. Heavy as freight wagons yet high-wheeled and fast, they were pulled by teams of ten horses. Their coachmen, enormous three-hundred-pound men in greatcoats, hauled back on their reins and the carriages and outriders came to a banging, clashing halt in front of the elaborately decorated stone edifice that housed the Russian State Bank.
Bell motioned urgently to Wish.
Moving as one, they backed their people away.
The Cossacks looked formidable and others in the crowds retreated, too. But the men Bell had noticed a moment earlier edged closer. Others, dressed in urban working garb, converged on the carriages. Bell looked up again. Now he saw men on the roofs.
“Isaac!” said Wish.
“I see them,” said Bell. “It’s a bank robbery.”
29
Expropriation,” said Wish Clarke, “is the word favored in the revolutionary lexicon.”
“Bank robbers!” said John D. Rockefeller. “We must inform the police . . . Officer!” He stepped into the street, waving at a Cossack.
“No,” said Isaac Bell, blocking him and forcing his arm down. “They’ve got twenty men around the square and on the roofs. The cops can’t stop it. They’ll only make it bloodier.”
“You should not have given them that gun.”
“It would appear that way,” Wish said serenely.
“Speaking of the devil . . .” said Bell.
The tall detective drew his revolver and herded Edna, Nellie, and Rockefeller toward the nearest street out of the square as Wish forged ahead, clearing a path for their retreat.
“Here he comes.”
A two-horse phaeton charged into the square.
A gunner and a belt feeder hunched over the Maxim gun. They had perched the Sokolov mount up on the high back bench where the driver ordinarily sat. The revolutionary handling the reins had shifted to the lower front bench.
The gunner triggered the weapon with an unearthly roar.
Shooting over the driver and horses’ heads, he tried to aim at the bank carriage. People ran from the noise, which was amplified and echoed by the buildings, and fled the galloping horses, whose iron shoes threw sparks from the cobblestones.
The phaeton leaned into a sharp turn, tall wheels skidding. Bell hoped the weight of the machine gun would capsize the inherently unstable vehicle. But just as it seemed it would spill the attackers to the ground, the wheels slid on the cobbles and it righted itself.
A bomb sailed from a roof, trailing the smoke of a fuse. It detonated in the air with a flash and a loud bang that scattered the Cossacks on rearing mounts. A second bomb flew from a roof. It landed on the cobblestones, bounced under the team pulling the lead money carriage, and exploded, blowing open the doors of the carriage.
Men, women, and animals screamed.
The revolutionaries dove into the maelstrom. Firing pistols, they ran to the carriage. One man leaped into it and threw bulging bank sacks to his partners. The Maxim gun kept firing.
The phaeton lurched and skidded and the gunner and belt feeder held on by clinging to the weapon. Bullets aimed at the bank carriage raked the rooftops instead. Then the driver got his animals under control and pulled up short. Still firing—the weapon had never ceased roaring since they entered the square—the gunner lowered his barrel. The torrent of flying lead stitched a path down the building’s stone walls.
The Maxim exploded with a thunderous Boom! and a ball of fire.
“Darn,” smiled Wish Clarke.
Sheets of flame enveloped the gunner and the belt feeder, the driver and the phaeton itself. The horses bolted. The burning wagon raced across the square and tipped over suddenly. The traces parted. The horses galloped away.
“What happened?” shouted Rockefeller.
“Their gun blew up,” said Wish Clarke. The detective shook his head in mock dismay. “The medicos keep telling me that demon rum plays havoc with one’s powers of memory. I hate to admit they’re right, but it appears that when I filled the Maxim’s cooling sleeve, I must have mixed up the cans of water and gasoline.”
“Railyards,” said Isaac Bell. “Now!”
“But there is no train until tomorrow,” Rockefeller protested.
Bell gripped his arm. “Social Democrat revolutionaries just tried to rob a Russian State Bank. Soldiers were injured. The revolutionaries escaped. The authorities will surround the city and close the roads to capture the criminals and recover the money.”
“But there is no train—”
“We’re taking a different train.”
—
“Never, never, never jump on the back of a moving railcar,” said Isaac Bell. “Always hop the front of the car.”
“Why?” asked Edna.
They laid flat on a ballast embankment beside the train tracks a mile west of the Tiflis yards, waiting for an oil train. Bell had chosen the spot for the sharp curve in the tracks that would shield them, though only briefly, from the sight of the engineer and fireman in the locomotive and the brakemen in the caboose. Behind them, a neighborhood of tenements and small factories baked in the sun. No one had ventured out to take an interest in them so far. But they could not count on that, as the police were fanning out from Erevan Square.
“If you slip and fall from the front of a car while trying to hop on,”
Bell explained, “you’ll fall to the side of the train. If you fall from the back of a car, you will fall under the wheels of the next car, which will run you over.”
“A memorable thought,” said Nellie.
“Nellie and Edna, you two will go first. I’m afraid you’re on your own. Wish and I will take care of the old man. If either of you can’t get on, the other jumps off again. We stay together. Wish and I won’t make our move until we see you’re both safely on. Nellie, you’ve still got Wish’s gun?”
“Yes.”
“Edna, you’ve got my derringer.”
Edna patted a pocket.
“It appears to be a well-run line, so the brakemen very likely will walk beside the train whenever they stop to inspect their trucks and air hoses. The locomotives I’ve seen are up-to-date Baldwin ten-wheelers with oil-burning fireboxes. They’ll stretch their water stops to about every hundred miles and fuel and relief crews to two hundred. But they’ll have to stop in the mountains to couple on extra pusher engines. Whenever they stop, stay out of sight.”
Wish came running from the head of the bend. “Train coming.”
—
The locomotive hauling the oil train to Batum rounded the curve under a massive crown of thick black smoke. She was an oil burner, all right—no self-respecting fireman would allow such smoke from a coal furnace—a modern, ten-drive-wheeled, Pennsylvania-built “decapod,” moving faster than Bell would have liked for the first attempt by novice hobos. But they weren’t likely to get a second chance to hop a freight before the authorities started searching even oil trains for the bank robbers and the money.
The powerful Baldwin approached where they hid on the ballast slope, accelerating as it threw off the eight-hundred-ton inertia of thirty heavily laden tank cars. The locomotive passed them, trailed by its fuel-and-water tender. Then came the first car, which was comprised of a long, cylindrical, six-thousand-gallon tank laid horizontally on a flatbed. Bell pointed out the niches where the tube-shaped tank was braced on the flatbed and shouted over the thunder, “Get inside that brace where they can’t see you.”
He looked Edna in the eyes and saw a healthy mix of fear and determination. Nellie, by contrast, showed no fear. When he gauged Rockefeller’s ability to take the chance, the magnate said sternly, “I am counting on you, Mr. Bell, that one day I may relate this incident to disbelieving great-grandchildren.”
The locomotive disappeared around the bend in the tracks.
“Go!” Bell said to Edna.
30
Edna Matters scrambled up the embankment. Nellie followed, overtaking her and reaching back to help her up. They clasped hands, attained the flat roadbed, and ran along the crossties beside the moving train.
Isaac Bell took John D. Rockefeller’s arm. “Wish and I have you, sir. Just do what we tell you to.”
The Van Dorn detectives heaved the two-hundred-pound Rockefeller between them like a scarecrow stuffed with straw and sprang up the embankment.
Nellie Matters vaulted nimbly onto the flatbed of the rolling car. She grabbed a strut that braced the tank and, as Edna jumped, reached to join hands with her. Edna stumbled. For a second she dangled from Nellie’s hand, her feet frantically trying to push off as she ran along the stone ballast and wooden ties. She planted one foot and tried to jump again. Bell saw his two-shot derringer fall from her pocket and bounce on a crosstie and under a wheel.
Nellie screamed with effort and lifted her aboard. The women rolled under the tank, out of sight, which was Bell and Wish’s signal to hoist Rockefeller onto the next car.
Wish, with two working arms, went first.
—
The train had come down from the final mountain pass to a switching yard, where they stopped to uncouple the pusher engine, and Bell began to believe their luck would hold all the way to Batum when a lone brakeman walked slowly beside the car, shining a bull’s-eye lantern at the trucks. They had, all five, shifted by then to one car, the second back from the tender. Suddenly the brakeman straightened up with a cry and began stomping at the ground. He stopped, breathing hard, and picked up a dead snake in his glove. He tossed it away and his lantern beam hit John D. Rockefeller full in the face.
Isaac Bell and Wish Clarke reached toward him with both hands. Each held a pistol in one and gold in the other.
The brakeman blinked. Then he jerked off his heavy glove, snatched the coins, and ran into the dark.
Wish held tight to his gun. “Think he’ll come back?”
“Not if he’s an honest man,” Bell answered, still holding his. They waited, ears straining for the sound of the brakeman coming back with reinforcements and praying for the train to start. The locomotive whistled. Then it huffed. It was moving. The couplers clanked as the cars took up the slack. Suddenly they heard footsteps pounding, overtaking them, as the train began to roll.
The brakeman ran alongside, spotted them again. His face lit with a triumphant grin. He was carrying something and he thrust it at them. It quivered like something alive. For a second Bell thought it was an animal or a baby. Wish Clarke recognized it for what it was and held on tight. “Gracias, amigo!” he called to the Georgian.
He held it up for the rest to see. “Wineskin!”
Down from the mountains at last, the oil train raced west, stopping only once for fuel and water. The day dawned bright and sunny. The air grew humid as the train descended toward the river delta from which had been carved the harbor of Batum. Wish, who had put a sizable dent in the wineskin, thrust it at Rockefeller. “Have a snort?”
“I don’t drink.”
“You’ll love it,” said Wish. “They sealed the skin with naphtha. The wine tastes like oil.”
Bell leaned out from the tank car to look ahead. He spotted the Black Sea.
—
The Constantinople steamer blew its whistle as Bell herded his people out of their phaetons.
“There’s Father,” cried Nellie.
Bill Matters was on the dock, heading for the gangway. When he saw his daughters, his grim features melted in a smile of relief and he scooped Edna and Nellie into his big arms like they were little girls.
“How did you make out in Moscow?” Rockefeller greeted him.
Matters’ expression hardened. “I was doing fine until they suddenly clammed up. Next day, they refused to see me at all. I pressed an official I had given a lot of money to. He claimed they were angry. They told him they had been betrayed—by you, Mr. Rockefeller.”
“How?”
“They wouldn’t tell me. Any idea why?”
“None at all,” said Rockefeller.
“What did you do?”
“Nothing. Don’t you understand? They threw dust in your eyes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You gave up. You left Moscow too soon.”
“Do you want me to go back?”
“Wait until the disturbances settle down. For now, we’re going home.”
31
At Budapest, Isaac Bell surprised the party and he hoped the assassin, if he were nearby, by unexpectedly transferring everyone onto the Orient Express’s new section to Berlin.
“Berlin? You’re taking us the long way to Paris,” complained Rockefeller, who had insisted again on carrying his own bags to save European luggage fees when they boarded the Orient Express in Constantinople.
Bell took the heaviest from him. “We are not going to Paris. We’re joining SS Kaiser Wilhelm II at Bremen. There’s a boat train in Berlin.”
“Much better,” said Rockefeller, happily mollified. The North German Lloyd passenger liner held the Blue Riband for the fastest time across the Atlantic Ocean.
—
The boat train to Bremen steamed out of the German capital on Monday night, gathered speed through the suburbs, and highballed into the dark at sixty miles an hour.
Isaac Bell, Wish Clarke, Edna and Nellie Matters, and John D. Rockefeller gathered in the dining room that occupied the front half of
the observation car. They were studying menus and discussing, longingly, the prospect of soon eating American food again when Bill Matters burst into the car. He stormed past the club chairs and stopped short at their tables. His eyes were wild, his jaw clenched.
Bell saw he had crumpled a yellow telegram in his fist.
“Father!” said Nellie. “We wondered where you had gotten to.”
Edna asked, “Are you quite well?”
Matters ignored them both. “Mr. Rockefeller! We must speak.” He lowered his voice. “In private.”
“It is rather late to discuss business. Why don’t you sit down and have some supper with the rest of us?”
Matters said, “It is not too late to discuss the Peerless autos you brought for the shah.”
Rockefeller rose silently from the table and led Matters out of the dining car.
Isaac Bell watched them disappear through the vestibule door. His suspicion that Matters had not known about the bribes was proved correct. Then, according to Rockefeller, Matters had been elsewhere on “other business” during the all-important meeting with the Persians that Bell had eavesdropped on at the Hotel Astoria. Matters had not heard Rockefeller promise to pay off the shah’s loan from the czar. Shortly after Rockefeller had sent him to Moscow.
Clearly, John D. Rockefeller had gone to Baku with one purpose only: to strike a bargain to pay off the debt in exchange for a license to build Matters’ pipe line across Persia. The cables he’d been so desperate to send while escaping Russia must have completed the deal and cut Matters out of it.
Bell sprang to his feet and strode to the vestibule door. He pushed through it onto the gangway, where the observation car and the sleeping car behind it were coupled. The eight-foot-wide, twelve-foot-long space was enclosed by flexible leather-and-canvas gangway connectors. While they muffled the noise of the speeding train, it was still louder than inside the cars.
Matters was shouting, gesticulating, and waving the telegram.
“You knew! You knew all along.”
Rockefeller stood still as a stork, head inclined as if straining to listen over the rumble of the wheels and the rushing wind of the boat train’s passage.
The Assassin Page 21
