“Knew what, Mr. Matters?”
“You knew when you sent me to Moscow. That’s why you sent me. To get me out of the way.”
“Knew what?” Rockefeller repeated more sharply now. Neither man seemed to take notice of Isaac Bell who stood by, boots balanced lightly on the swaying floor plate, his eye on Matters, who looked angry enough to strike the older man.
“You knew that you were closing a private deal for the pipe line,” Matters yelled.
“How I choose to negotiate for Standard Oil is my affair, Mr. Matters,” Rockefeller answered in a firm voice that cut through the racket. “It was my judgment that one man speaking for the company rather than two would do a better job of cutting through heathen mendacity.”
“We had an agreement!” Matters yelled. “The Persia pipe line was not for Standard Oil—it was for us. We would then sell it to Standard Oil.”
“I signed no such agreement.”
“You led me to believe—”
“You believed what you wanted to.”
Face contorting, Matters sucked great gulps of air. Suddenly he shouted, “You busted up my pipes.”
Bell saw that Rockefeller knew instantly what Matters meant. “Is that what is troubling you? You’re blaming me, unfairly, for some event that occurred back in 1899?”
“You stole the Hook.”
Rockefeller turned to Isaac Bell as if the three were golfers strolling to the next tee and explained offhandedly, “Constable Hook. The refinery we just finished building next to Bayonne. It’s our largest—the most efficient in the world.”
“You stole it from me and Spike.”
“I paid you.”
“Pennies!”
“I paid you in Standard Oil stock. I made you rich. You ride around in a fancy private car. Even I don’t go to that expense.” Again he turned to Bell as if in a threesome. “I’m quite content to charter cars when the need arises.”
“You busted up my business,” Matters shouted.
“Right there!” Rockefeller rounded on him. “I thought you were not one of those who are controlled by the insane idea to destroy the Standard Oil Company. Clearly, I was wrong. You are a miserable failure who will go to your grave an unhappy man.”
Matters lunged at Rockefeller with the speed and power of a Komodo dragon.
Bell seized his wrists. But by then Matters’ big hands were clamped to John D. Rockefeller’s throat. He yanked Rockefeller’s two hundred pounds off the platform and rammed him toward the connector curtain. Unable to break his grip, Bell let go and sank his fists into Matters’ kidneys with a hard left and a harder right.
The crazed Matters gasped. His hands opened convulsively. He let go of the struggling Rockefeller. But Bell’s powerhouse blows didn’t stop him, only slowed him, and he shoved his back into the tall detective, smashing him with all his weight against the opposite gangway connection. Bell bounced off the springy curtain and hurled himself on Matters as Matters lunged at Rockefeller again.
Too late, he saw that Matters’ explosion of rage was not as impromptu as it had seemed. Before he stormed into the diner, he had removed the vertical pins that locked the adjoining cars’ gangway connectors. Then he had lured the old man onto the gangway to throw him off the train.
The connectors parted like a theater curtain. The black night thundered past at sixty miles per hour. John D. Rockefeller tumbled backward through the opening.
Isaac Bell rammed past Bill Matters and jumped.
32
Isaac Bell had a single instant to wonder whether his injured arm had the strength to save their lives. By then he was committed to the lightning move, with his good hand gripping Rockefeller’s belt and the other clamped on the steel-rimmed edge of the observation car’s gangway connector. He was hanging off the rear end of the car. Pain lanced from his shoulder to his fingertips. If he lost his grip, they would fall under the wheels of the sleeper behind it.
The slipstream beating the side of the train slammed them flat against the connectors. Bell tried to take advantage of the rushing air with a Herculean twist of his entire body. Combining his every muscle with the power of the slipstream, he hauled Rockefeller close and swung him back through the narrow opening into the train.
Bill Matters was waiting on the gangway.
Isaac Bell saw an instance of indecision flicker on the angry man’s face. Who would he attack first? His enemy, the old man sprawled at his feet? Or his enemy’s bodyguard, who was barely hanging on to the side of the car? He chose Bell, braced himself with both hands, and cocked a foot to kick the fingers Bell had clamped around the connector. Bell was already in motion.
A gunshot—a clean, sharp Crack!—cut through the thunder of wheels and wind. Matters fell back with an expression of astonishment that Bell had somehow managed to draw his revolver and fire. Hanging by one arm as he triggered the Bisley, Bell missed his shot. He fired again; another went wild. Matters whirled away and fled toward the back of the train.
—
Bill Matters raced down the first sleeping car’s corridor, burst out the end door, through the gangway and into the second. Near the end of the car was his tiny stateroom. He locked the door, put on his coat, grabbed a bag, already packed with several thousand in gold, British ten-pound notes, and German marks, and his Remington pistol. Then he opened the window on the locomotive’s smoke and thunder and reached high in the corner of the cabin where the emergency communication cord swayed with the train’s motion and yanked its red handle.
The communication cord activated the boat train’s air brakes. From the locomotive on back, curved steel shoes slammed down hard on every wheel of every car. The effect was swift and violent.
Matters kept his feet by ramming his shoulder against his stateroom’s front partition to brace for the impact. From the compartments ahead and behind his came the thud of passengers crashing into bulkheads, the clatter of flying luggage, cries of pain, and frightened screams. Steel shrieked on steel under the hurtling car as the brake shoes bit and locked wheels slid on the rails.
The train bucked like a giant animal. The cars banged couplers into couplers. The speed dropped from sixty to fifty in an instant, and dropped as quickly to forty. Matters squeezed through the window, dragged his bag after him, and tried to gauge a safe landing by the beam of the locomotive headlamp. He could see in the distance four cars ahead, the beam flickering through a forest that hugged the tracks. To jump would be to run headlong into a tree.
Suddenly the headlamp disappeared.
For a second, Matters was baffled. Then the train whistle gave a strangely hollow, muffled shriek, and he realized that the locomotive had entered a tunnel. The car he was clinging to would be next into the narrow opening after smashing him against the stonework that rimmed it. He heard a crash. His stateroom door flew open. Isaac Bell blasted through it, revolver in hand, eyes locked on the window.
In the most decisive move of his entire life, Bill Matters dropped off the train.
—
Isaac Bell thrust head and shoulders and gun out the stateroom window and looked behind the train. The night was black, the spill of window light negligible, and he could not see where Matters had landed. The train whistle sounded oddly muffled. Bell started to turn his head toward it when he sensed something immense hurtling at him. He shoved back inside Matters’ stateroom, and the next second saw smoke-blackened masonry inches from the window.
The boat train screeched to a stop inside a tunnel.
Bell bolted from the stateroom and out the back of the sleeper car, past shaken passengers in pajamas and dressing gowns, through the last car, and jumped off the back of the train onto the crossties. A brakeman was running frantically with a red lantern to alert the next train that the boat train was blocking the tracks.
Bell followed him out the tunnel and along the railbed, searching for Matters and fully expecting to find his body smashed against a tree. Instead, one hundred yards from the tunnel portal he found a b
reak in the forest. It looked like a meadow, but at that moment the clouds parted and he saw moonlight gleam on water.
—
“Good-bye,” said Edna. “We’ll see you in New York.”
“Good-bye?” asked Bell. “We’re on the same ship.”
“We’re sailing Second Class. You’re in First.”
“No. Stay with me. I’ll pay the difference.”
“We will not sit in the same dining room as that man,” said Nellie, turning away without another word to walk briskly to the Second Class gangway.
Edna said, “We can barely stand to be on the same ship. But it’s the fastest way home. I’ve promised a full report to the Sun, and Nellie has got to take command of the New Woman’s Flyover before a certain suffragette tries to steal it. Apparently, Amanda Faire’s husband bought her a balloon.” She lowered her voice, though her sister was far beyond earshot. “Nellie is so distraught about Father. I’ve got to get her home and busy.”
Bell said, “I hope you understand that I’m terribly sorry about your father.”
“You cannot be as sorry as we are,” said Edna. “We’ve lived in fear of this day and now it has happened.”
“You expected him to attack Mr. Rockefeller?”
“We expected him to hurt himself. Since the day Rockefeller broke up his business and stole the pieces. We expected him to kill himself. What you call an attack, Isaac, had exactly the same effect.”
“It is highly likely,” said Bell, “that your father is still alive.”
The German police had dragged the pond beside the tracks and searched the forest with hunting dogs and found no body. They had visited every farm within twenty miles and canvassed doctors and hospitals. Bill Matters had thoroughly disappeared.
“Good-bye.” Edna started after her sister, then turned back and kissed him on the cheek. “Thank you, Isaac.”
“What for?”
“Engineering my job on the Sun.”
“They weren’t supposed to tell you.”
“No one had to tell me. I figured it out on my own. Very flattering.”
“The Sun was lucky to send you to Baku.”
“I meant flattering that you wanted me to come along.”
—
“Last stop,” said Isaac Bell.
Tugboats jetting clouds of coal smoke were working the Kaiser Wilhelm against North German Lloyd’s Hoboken pier.
“Not precisely,” said John D. Rockefeller. “We still have the train to Cleveland.”
“My last stop,” said Bell. He took a letter from his traveling suit and handed it to Rockefeller. “Here is my resignation.”
“Resignation? I am dismayed. Why are you quitting?”
“Standards.”
“Standards? What standards?”
“You had no need to rob Bill Matters. I will not condone his crimes, but you mistreated him badly and for no purpose other than beating him.”
Rockefeller’s lips tightened in a flat line. He looked away, gazing at the harbor, then he looked Bell in the eye. “When I was a boy, my father sharped us to make us strong. He taught us how to trade by taking us again and again. Every time I was soft, he took advantage and beat me in every deal until I learned how to win. It made me sharp.”
“It made you a bully.”
“It’s a habit,” said Rockefeller. “A habit that served me well.”
Bell appeared to change the subject. “I understand your father is still alive.”
A look of genuine affection warmed Rockefeller’s cold face. “Ninety and going strong.”
“Men live long in your family.”
“The lord has blessed us with many years.”
“Many years to break bad habits.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“You’ve been allotted more years than most to break habits you should break,” said Isaac Bell.
Rockefeller bridled. “I am using my years for philanthropy—for all the good it’s done me. They still think I’m a monster.”
“They think you’re a bully. And they’re right. But if you ask me, you’ve made a good start with philanthropy. I’d keep at it.”
“Would you, now? You are not familiar with business affairs, Mr. Bell. You’re like certain writers, theorists, socialists, and anarchists—so ready to determine how best they can appropriate the possessions of others.”
“Good-bye, Mr. Rockefeller.”
“You can’t leave me defenseless. You took a job and signed a contract to protect me. What if Matters surfaces and tries to kill me?”
“I’ve assigned Wish Clarke to escort you home to Cleveland. There, your bodyguards will be provided by Van Dorn Protective Services.”
“Van Dorn? Are you going back to Van Dorn?”
“I never left.”
“What? You never left Van Dorn’s employ?”
“Never.”
“You’re still working up the Corporations Commission case! You tricked me.”
The trace of a smile moderated Bell’s stern features. “You are not familiar with detective affairs, Mr. Rockefeller. It’s my job to trick suspects. In fact . . . you could call it a habit.”
Rockefeller’s eyes flickered as if he were trying to recall how much information he had given away. But when he spoke, all he said was, “How long will these guards protect me?”
“Until you feel safe.”
“How will I ever feel safe from that murderer?”
“You will feel safe when he is hanged.”
“What makes you so sure he will be?”
“Another Van Dorn habit. We never give up.”
True to form, John D. Rockefeller did the unexpected. He laughed. “That’s a good one.” He thrust out his hand. “I prefer friendships founded on business. I’m glad we’ve done business, Mr. Bell.”
—
The grim atmosphere in the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s New York field office reminded Isaac Bell of the night riots broke out in Baku. “Himself” was back in town, Joseph Van Dorn, hulking like a bad-tempered sphinx in the back of the bull pen where Bell, who had just raced from the ferry pier, had summoned his assassin squad to bring him up to date.
Archie Abbott looked miserable and was sporting a black eye. The anxious glances he kept shooting at Van Dorn told Bell that Archie had learned nothing about the Army deserter who won the President’s Medal.
Grady Forrer, directing head of the gunsmith hunt, was watching Van Dorn as if the Boss were a rotund cobra.
Wally and Mack typically were not intimidated; the old guys had known Van Dorn too long and the self-satisfied Weber & Fields grins on their gnarly faces gave Bell hope. They looked more confident than their grasping-at-straws cable report about Spike Hopewell’s so-called tricks up his sleeve. Maybe good news.
Bell glanced at Van Dorn and stepped out the door. The Boss lumbered after him.
“What’s up?”
“You’re spooking my boys.”
“Your boys aren’t delivering.”
“Why don’t you let me buy you a drink at the Normandie after I straighten them out?”
Bell returned to the bull pen alone.
“When I left for Baku, you were pursuing various leads on the Army sharpshooter, the gunsmith who improved the assassin’s Savage 99, the exhumation of Averell Comstock’s body, and the tricks that Spike Hopewell claimed to have up his sleeve. That no news awaited me in Constantinople or Berlin or Bremerhaven on my way home suggests unfruitful pursuits. Did the situation improve while I steamed across the Atlantic?”
Wally and Mack grinned. The rest were silent.
“Archie. How’d you make out with the general’s daughter?”
“No dice.”
“Who gave you the shiner?”
“She took a swing at me.”
“Why?”
Wally Kisley laughed. “The young lady took insult, misled that Princeton, here, was romancing her. Just when the spooning should commence, Princeton says he has business wi
th her father.”
Archie hung his head. “I misinterpreted her motive for inviting me to visit when he was out of the house.”
“Boom!” said Wally. “Smack in the eye.”
“When I went back to try again, the butler said she was ‘not at home.’ So what I’m thinking, Isaac, is maybe it’s time for me to get back to work in Chicago. Rosania is—”
Bell said, “Write down her name and address for me.”
He turned to the head of Van Dorn Research. “Grady. How did you do with Dave McCoart?”
“We’ve eliminated every gunsmith in the country except for two in Hartford and one in Bridgeport. But none of those fellows have panned out yet.”
“None of them ever worked on a 99?”
“None that admit it. I’m fairly convinced that the Hartford gunsmiths are in the clear. Fairly convinced. But the detective I sent to Bridgeport—a pretty good contract man we’ve used in Connecticut—was suspicious. But he could not shake the guy’s story, and he was smart enough to back off before he tipped his hand. It will be worth sending a regular man.”
“I’ll go,” said Bell. “How did we do with the New York coroner?”
“He won’t exhume Mr. Comstock without a court order. The court refused on legalistic grounds that essentially came down to the judge’s belief that an eighty-three-year-old should have been dead anyway.”
“But what about Mrs. McCloud in the fire and her son in the river?”
“The judge expressed no faith in the likeliness of connections joining the Five Points Gang, the West Side Gophers, and the Standard Oil Trust.”
“Sounds like we need another judge.”
“The next judge concurred with the former’s incredulity.”
Bell turned to Weber & Fields. “Wally and Mack, you look pleased with yourselves.”
“Always, Isaac, always,” said Wally.
“It’s hard not to be,” said Mack, and the two broke into Weber & Fields mode. “A very pretty girl who was promised by refiner Reed Riggs that he . . .”
“. . . and therefore she . . .”
“. . . by extension . . .”
The Assassin Page 22
