“I smell oil. So what?”
“Penetrating oil, to make it easier to unscrew the bolts.”
“No squeak,” Platov said miserably. “No noise.”
“The rail was sabotaged,” said Isaac Bell. “The fishtail bolts were loosened just enough to let the rail slip under pressure.”
“No!” said Platov. “I check rail every test. I check this morning.”
“Ah,” said Bell, “that’s what those are.” He knelt down and picked up some oil-soaked matchsticks. “That’s how he did it,” he mused. “Jammed these into the crack to damp the motion when you tested it. But they would have fallen out when the rail started vibrating as the thermo engine approached. Diabolical.”
“Rail move,” said Platov. “Thermo engine fly away. . But why!”
“Do you have enemies, Mr. Platov?”
“Platov likes. Platov like-ed.”
“Perhaps back in Russia?” asked Bell, aware that Russian immigrants of every political stripe from radical to reactionary had fled their restive land.
“No. I leave friends, family. I send money home.”
“Then who’d do such a thing?” demanded Steve Stevens.
Isaac Bell said, “Could it be that someone didn’t want you to win the race with Mr. Platov’s amazing motor?”
“Ah’ll show ’em! Platov, make me a new motor!”
“Not possible. Take time. I am being sorry. You need to find ordinary gasoline motor. In fact, you need two motors, mounted on lower wings.”
“Two! What for?”
Platov spread his arms wide as if measuring Stevens’s girth. “For lifting heaviness. Powering equal to thermo engine. Two motors, mounted on lower wing.”
“Well, how the hell am Ah goin’ to find two motors, and who the hell is goin’ to install ’em, with Judd dead?”
“Judd’s assistants.”
“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.
“You bought yourself a beauty, Mr. Bell. But I’ll warn you, she’s going to be a handful. The trouble with going fast is you land fast. And that Gnome motor makes it even worse, since you won’t have a real throttle like my Antoinette’s.”
While the similarities were striking, Bell had to admit that, when it came to their French-made power plants, the Celere and Di Vecchio monoplanes were radically different. Josephine’s Celere was powered by a conventional water-cooled V-8 Antoinette, a strong, lightweight motor, whereas Di Vecchio had installed the new and revolutionary air-cooled rotary Gnome Omega in his. With its cylinders spinning around a central crankshaft, the Gnome offered smooth running and superior cooling at the expense of fuel consumption, ticklish maintenance, and a primitive carburetor that made it almost impossible to run the motor at any speed but wide open.
“Can you give me some tips on slowing down to land like I’ve seen you do?”
Josephine leveled a stern finger at the control wheel. “Before you get fancy, practice blipping your magneto on and off with that coupe button.”
Bell shook his head. Switching the ignition on and off, interrupting electricity to the spark plug, was a means, of sorts, to slow the motor. “Andy Moser says to go easy on the coupe button or I’ll burn up the valves.”
“Better the valves than you, Mr. Bell,” Josephine grinned. “I need my protector alive. And don’t worry about stalling the motor, it’s got plenty of inertia to keep it spinning.” Her face fell. “I’m sorry, that was really stupid of me about needing you alive. How is Archie?”