Bell vaulted into the basket. The bask ropes—the shrouds that suspended the basket from the load ring—were quivering, vibrating from the power of the gas straining to lift it.
“Hello, Achilles’ heel,” she greeted him cheerfully.
“What?”
“You’re my Achilles’ heel. Every time I try to shoot you, I miss.”
“If you want to be mythological, Nellie, say hello to your Nemesis.”
“Her, too. But if you weren’t my Achilles’ heel, you would be dead already. Somehow I could never bring myself to kill you.”
“Too late to change your mind,” said Bell.
Nellie drew her hand from her vest. Her pearl-handled derringer was already cocked. She aimed at Bell’s heart. “Don’t get close.”
“It’s over,” said Bell.
“Get out of the basket before I shoot you. You know I will.”
Bell moved toward her.
Nellie said, “I will pull the trigger this second if you do not sit on the floor. Now! You will die and it won’t change a thing and I’ll still get away.”
“How far do you think you’ll get in a balloon?”
“Last chance, Isaac. You’re bigger and stronger. I can’t let you close.”
He crossed his ankles and lowered himself into a cross-legged sitting position, poised to spring the instant she looked away. She loved to talk. It would not be hard to keep her talking.
“The wind is dead calm,” he said, “you’ll go straight up. When the gas dissipates, you’ll come down within a couple of miles from here.”
“I will go higher and higher until I find the wind. The troposphere. The stratosphere. The exosphere! As high as I have to to catch the wind.”
“You can’t breathe up there. You’ll die.”
“The wind always swings west. My body will be blown out to sea.”
“Do you want to die?”
“How would you like to die in prison or hang, Isaac? Tell me.”
“First tell me something.”
“Anything, Isaac.” She actually seemed on the edge of laughing. “What can I tell you?”
“Whose idea was it to kill for your father? His? Or yours?”
“I volunteered.”
Bell shook his head. He had tried to convince himself that her father had somehow coerced her. “Why did he accept? His own daughter?”
“He knew I could deliver. He’d seen me in action.”
“When you murdered your brother?”
“Stop asking silly questions, Isaac. Ask something important.”
“How did you learn to shoot?”
Nellie answered as if telling a story she had read in a book. “I ran away from home when I was fourteen. Like you. I joined a circus. Like you.”
“Your father told me the same story. The sheriff drove off his mother’s pigs and cows. What’s your excuse?”
She ignored the question. “By the time Father found me, the trick shootist had taught me everything she knew. I had a talent for guns—steady hands and a keen eye. I can see farther than any human being. And I can concentrate; most people can’t.”
“A natural?”
“As natural as breathing.”
“And lashing out to banish fear?”
“I’m never afraid,” said Nellie. “By the way, I see you gathering your legs to jump . . . Don’t!”
Bell made a show of relaxing his legs. “Is that your rifle in the bag?”
“I’m at my absolute best with the rifle.”
“Loaded with explosive bullets?”
“Stop showing off, Isaac. Everyone knows you’re a crack detective.”
“Who’s it for?”
“Who do you think it’s for?”
“Rockefeller.”
“For what he has done to my father, John D. Rockefeller will pay with much, much more than his life.”
“What could be more than life, Nellie?”
“What Rockefeller loves most. Do you have any other questions, Isaac?”
He had to keep her talking. “A young soldier was commended by the President of the United States for winning the highest shooting metal in the nation. Why would he desert the Army?”
“She saw no future in the Army.”
“There is a long, brave history of women serving their country disguised as men.”
Suddenly she was bitter, her cheeks taut, her voice harsh. “I had no choice. How else could a girl win the President’s Medal? I knew I was the best shot, better than any man. How else could I prove it?”
“But how hard it must have been fooling men in their barracks. How did you do it, Nellie?”
She was all too ready to boast and the bitterness dissolved. But she never took her eyes from him. Nor did her derringer waver as she demonstrated planting her legs apart, lowering her voice to mock him and the people she fooled: “Manly tones; theater tricks like skullcap and wig, trousers, boots. A detective must know that men believe what they assume is true.”
“But why did this young sharpshooter desert?”
“She won the medal. Why stay? It was time to move on. I always move on.”
“Or was she afraid they would find her out? Just as she feared she would be found out when her brother was murdered and she joined the Army disguised as a boy?”
“She was never afraid.”
“After she learned that her father loved her so much, he would forgive her of anything . . . ?”
“Or refuse to believe his worst fear,” Nellie replied coldly. “Even when he saw it with his own eyes, all he could say was how much he loved my mother.”
The derringer remained rock-steady as she hiked herself up to sit on the rounded edge of the wicker basket while clutching her carpetbag under her arm. “Billy was only Father’s stepson.”
“And your half brother, your own mother’s child.”
“I never knew my ‘own mother.’ She died when I was a baby.”
“But why did you kill Billy?”
Nellie’s eyes bored into Bell’s. “Lots of reasons, Isaac. He was such a coward. I was trying to get rid of his silly drowning fear. I made the mistake of confiding in him. I told him I was running away to join the Army . . . I loved him, Isaac. I loved him very much. But he would have ruined everything if he told. And I couldn’t stand him being afraid.”
“How did you kill him?” Bell kept waiting for her to look away, but her eyes were fixed on his.
Suddenly the women in the nearest balloon called, “Nellie! We’re almost ready.”
She waved to them, the gun tucked to her side, neither turning her head nor taking her eyes from Bell.
“How could a girl drown a boy as big as she? Didn’t he fight back?”
“He was groggy.”
“You poisoned him.”
“I didn’t poison him,” Nellie said indignantly, “I gave him a little chloral hydrate.”
“Chloral hydrate? That’s knockout drops.”
“Just to calm him down. Not poison.”
“Calm him to kill him?”
“I was helping him beat his fear. I knew if he swam once, he could swim forever. But it didn’t work. He was a hopeless coward.”
“Did he pass out? Is that how he drowned?”
“Aren’t you listening, Isaac? He was groggy. He didn’t pass out.”
“You drowned him.”
“He was a hopeless coward.”
“You drowned him.”
“Let’s just say the chloral hydrate created an opportunity.”
“Was that how you drugged the old man who fell from the Washington Monument? Slipped him knockout drops?”
“Chloroform.”
“What did you feed Comstock?”
“Arsenic.”
“Where did you learn—?”
“I worked as a pharmacist once. I’ve done lots of things, Isaac. I love different things. I was an actress for a bit. Every time I ran away, I found a fascinating job. I went back to the circus and became an ac
robat. For a while. I was a medical student, one of the first girls at Johns Hopkins. I didn’t stay long.”
“Long enough to know your poisons.”
“And anatomy,” she smiled, reaching to touch the back of her neck.
Bell’s hat flew from his head. Before it touched his shoulder his derringer filled his right hand, the barrel aimed at her face. He saw shock in Nellie’s eyes but no fear even though she knew he would fire before she could. Still, she was lightning fast.
—
There was a part of Isaac Bell, the part that beat deepest in his soul, that held innocents sacred. Until this moment, that part could never have imagined triggering a gun at a woman. He knew full well that Nellie Matters was no innocent but a cold-blooded murderer trying to kill him. He pulled the trigger. He was not entirely surprised when his bullet missed her head by a full inch and broke a control wire that parted with a musical twang.
The close call caused Nellie to flinch and her shot whizzed past Bell’s ear.
For a microsecond that stretched like an eternity, they stared at each other. His gun was empty. Her two-shot had one bullet left. He gathered himself to charge, reasoning that a wild shot would more likely wound than kill him. Nellie aimed the derringer directly at his face. Then she gave him a big “Nellie smile.”
“I guess you missed because Van Dorn detectives bring their suspects in alive? Or are you just a lousy shot?”
“You missed, too,” said Bell. “Again. So if you can’t shoot me and I’m not about to swallow poison for you, how will you stop me from taking that gun away from you?”
“Gas!”
She jerked the red emergency lever and held tight. The tanks spewed their compressed loads of hydrogen. The gas roared up the mouth of the already full envelope and the balloon lurched like a rogue elephant breaking its chains. Then Nellie pulled the ballast lever, releasing the total weight of the sand all at once, and somersaulted backward to the grass.
Isaac Bell sprang to his feet. Halfway out of the basket, he saw the ground vanish beneath him as if he were suddenly peering down the wrong end of a telescope.
The balloon was fifty feet in the air, five stories high, too high to jump, and soaring toward the clouds.
BOOK FOUR
THUNDERBOLT
OCTOBER 1905
CONSTABLE HOOK
41
Nellie Matters’ runaway gas balloon shot skyward, lofting Isaac Bell toward the stratosphere where the air was too thin to breathe. The other colorful Flyover balloons, so enormous an instant ago, suddenly looked tiny, dotting the Sleepy Hollow field like a game of marbles. A white circle in the green grass marked the spot Nellie had dumped the sand.
Bell thought he saw her running to another partially inflated balloon. But with no ballast left to counteract the urgent lift of the lighter-than-air gas, he was too high up in another second to distinguish individual figures, so high he could see Rockefeller’s estate spread to the Hudson River. He heard a locomotive and realized that the only noises were from the ground; after the initial roar of extra gas, the balloon was ascending silently. A New York–bound passenger train, the crack Lakeshore Limited, was heading for the North Tarrytown railroad station towing two black cars. They would be chartered by Rockefeller, who was returning from Cleveland with his entire family, and Isaac Bell had the momentary satisfaction of knowing that whether or not he got out of this fix, he had at least stopped Nellie Matters from shooting the old man this morning.
The only way to stop his wild ascent was to release gas.
Bell traced the control lever wires. The ballast wire that went down through the bottom of the basket was useless, as Nellie had already dumped every grain of sand. Of the two that went up into the mouth of the giant gasbag, one connected to a “rip panel” at the top of the balloon. Nellie had explained more than once, while spinning her balloon tales, that pulling that lever would tear the fabric envelope wide open and release all the gas at once. It was an emergency device for instantly emptying the balloon when it was on the ground to keep high winds from dragging it into the trees or telegraph wires. To pull the rip panel lever at this height would be to fall like an anvil.
The wire broken by the bullet that had missed Nellie turned out to be the gas control. It had snapped inches above the lever. Looking up eighty feet, Bell could see the business end was still attached to the release flap in the dome at the top of the balloon. Parting while under tension, it had sprung up into the mouth. He could see it swinging inside the empty gasbag, tantalizingly near but infinitely far out of reach. There was no framework to climb inside the balloon—the gas pressing against the fabric envelope gave it shape—but even if it had a frame that he could improvise for a ladder, the gas would asphyxiate him before he climbed ten feet.
He jumped onto the rim of the rattan basket and shinnied up a bask rope to the steel load ring. Hanging by one hand, he caught ahold of the ropes that were woven into the enormous net that encased the bulging envelope like a giant spiderweb. Then he reached down for the knife snugged in his boot. He touched the blade to the straining fabric to slash an opening to vent gas.
He felt a breath of cool air for the first time in a week. The balloon had carried him above the heat wave into a cold current in the upper atmosphere, and he saw he hadn’t a moment to lose. The patchwork of farm fields far below appeared to be moving. The blue line of the Hudson River was receding behind him. Wind that Nellie had predicted was carrying him east over Connecticut.
But just as he braced to press down on the blade, it struck him forcibly that there were vital aeronautical reasons why both the regular gas release and the emergency rip panel were situated at the top of the balloon. He drove his hand between that rope and the fabric to overcome the pressure inside it and pulled himself higher up by the netting ropes until he could brace his feet on the load ring.
Like a celestial giant climbing from the earth’s South Pole to the North Pole, he worked his way up and out, hanging almost horizontally from the web, as the bulge of the globe-shaped balloon spread from the narrow mouth at the bottom toward the Equator.
He climbed some forty feet as it swelled wider and wider. Then he climbed gradually into a vertical stance as he crossed the Equator at the widest part of the balloon.
When he glanced down, he saw the silvery waters of the Long Island Sound riddled with white sails and streaked by steamer smoke. He glimpsed the sand bluffs of the North Shore of Long Island and realized that the balloon had risen up into a more powerful air current. In its grip, he was traveling rapidly. And the balloon was still climbing. The farms appeared smaller and smaller, and the clusters of towns gave the illusion of growing closer to one another as it gained altitude.
Past the equatorial bulge, he was able to move faster, scrambling to get to the top, tiring from the effort, but driven by an arresting sight: the balloon was now so high that he could see the green back of the twenty-mile-wide Long Island and, beyond it, the deep blue waters of the Atlantic Ocean. If he didn’t suffocate in the stratosphere, the ocean would be waiting below.
He reached the dome, the top of the gas envelope, drew his throwing knife from his boot, and plunged it into the fabric. In the strange silence, the hiss of gas escaping under enormous pressure was deafening. It blasted from the small slit he had cut. But he felt no effect, no indication that the balloon had ceased to climb, much less begun to sink. He dragged the sharp blade through more fabric, skipping over the netting, lengthening the slit, hunting the ideal size to reduce the lift of gas so the balloon would descend quickly but still float.
He felt light-headed. His foot slipped from the rope web. His hands were losing their grip. The knife started to slide from his fingers. The gas! He suddenly realized the gas was jetting past his face and he was inhaling it, breathing it into his lungs, slipping under the edge of consciousness. He ducked his face below the slit and held on with all his fading strength. It was getting worse. His head was spinning. He gathered his will and dropp
ed down a row of rope netting and sucked in fresh air. When he could see straight again, he reached overhead with the knife and slashed more holes in the fabric.
There were thousands of cubic feet of lighter-than-air gas lifting the balloon. How much did he have to let out to make it sink? He recalled Nellie describing a fine line to calculate the balance between the weight to be lifted and the volume of gas. He heard a ripping sound and looked up. The fabric between the two slits he had cut was tearing, joining the slits, and suddenly the gas was rushing from the united fissure.
Bell’s stomach lurched. He thought for a moment that the gas was making him sick. Then he realized the balloon had lost all buoyancy and was plummeting back to earth.
—
With no way to control the release, Isaac Bell’s only hope was to climb down to the basket and throw everything over the side to reduce the weight dragging the balloon back to earth before it collapsed. Retracing his ascent, hand under hand, boot under boot, he slipped from cross rope to cross rope, down toward the middle bulge as fast as he could.
Was the bag less taut? No doubt about that. The fabric had ceased to press so hard against the net. He looked down. He saw the farms. He saw the silver Sound and Long Island shore. But the balloon had fallen so far that he was no longer high enough to see the ocean.
He lowered himself around the Equator and started the long horizontal climb down under the overhead curve of the globe-shaped envelope, hanging from the net, swinging hand over head, working his way into the vertical wall of the lowest part of the balloon, until he finally reached the load ring and slid down the bask ropes into the basket.
A farm spread under him, green fields speckled with black cows, a big sprawling house sheltered by shade trees, red barns, a pond, and round silos poking up at the sky like pencils standing on end. At the edge of the fields stood the darker green of trees, the wood lot. The Sound was no longer in sight.
The Assassin Page 27
