“I have never met the man.”
“I would love a sea urchin before I would love Marco Celere. A poisonous sea urchin. You have no idea how treacherous he is. He breathes lies as another man breathes air. He schemes, he pretends, he steals. He is truffatore.”
“What is truffatore?”
“Imbroglione.”
“What is imbroglione?”
“Impostore! Defraudatore!”
“A con man,” said Bell.
“What is con man?” she asked.
“A confidence trickster. A thief who pretends to be your friend.”
“Yes! That is Marco Celere. A thief who pretends to be your friend.”
Isaac Bell’s quick mind raced into high gear. A murdered thief whose body was never found was one sort of mystery. A murdered confidence man whose body disappeared was quite another. Particularly when Harry Frost had cried in bewildered anguish, “You don’t know what they were up to.”
Nor did you, Harry Frost, thought Bell. Not until after you tried to kill Marco Celere. That’s why you didn’t kill Josephine first. You didn’t intend to kill her at all. That twisted desire came later, only after you learned something about them that you thought was even worse than seduction.
Bell was elated. It had been a most productive visit indeed. Although he still did not know what Marco and Josephine had been up to, he was sure now that Harry Frost was not merely raving.
He said, “Josephine told me that you wept that Marco stole your heart.”
He was not surprised when Danielle answered, “Marco must have told her that lie. I’ve never met the girl.”
Danielle helped Bell and Andy roll the Eagleto the far end of the asylum lawn and turned it into the wind. She gripped the cane tail skid, as Andy spun the propeller, and held fast, retarding its forward motion while he struggled to hold it back and scramble aboard at the same time. She was strong, Bell noticed, and when it came to flying machines she knew her business.
Bell cleared the asylum wall and followed the rail line to its connector to the New York Central line and followed the tracks to the Castleton-on-Hudson railroad station. Passing high over the main street, he saw white horses pulling fire engines and a close formation of brass horns and tubas gleaming in the sunlight.
A fire department marching band was heading up the street, leading a horde of people, in the direction of the hayfield where Josephine’s machine was being repaired. They passed a brick schoolhouse, and the doors flew open and hundreds of children streamed out to join the parade. The word had gotten around, Bell realized. The whole town was coming to welcome her, and there were more people in the parade than would fit on the field.
Bell raced the mile to the hayfield, put down on it, and ran to warn his detectives. “The whole town’s coming to greet Josephine. They let the kids out of school. We’ll be stuck here all night if we don’t go now.”
23
JOSEPHINE WAS FRANTIC, “Hurry it up!” she cried to the mechanicians.
“I’ll drive you down the road,” said Bell. “Give them a speech. Let them see you so they won’t mob the field.”
“No,” she said. “They don’t want to see me, they want to touch the machine. I saw it happen in California last year. They wrote their names on the wings and poked pencils in the fabric.”
“Their parents are coming, too.”
“The parents were worse. They were tearing off parts for souvenirs.”
“I’ll block,” said Bell.
He sent the Rolls-Royce roadster and the Thomas to try to intercept the parade on the road, a temporary solution, at best, as the excited townspeople would simply stream around the autos. He ran his Eagleon the ground to the head of the field to further distract them.
Small boys, who had run ahead of the parade, jumped the ditch that separated the road from the hayfield. Bell saw there would be no stopping the children, who had no concept of the danger of whirling propellers before they got in her way.
Just when it seemed they would block her path, everyone looked up.
Bell heard the unmistakably authoritative roar of a six-cylinder Curtiss. Baronet Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s bright blue headless pusher, which Bell had last seen floating in New York Harbor, sailed overhead, making a beeline for Albany.
“That man,” said Andy, “has nine lives.”
Josephine dropped the wrench and jumped aboard her Celere.
The boys stopped running and stood stock-still, staring at the sky. Two yellow monoplanes on the ground had seemed the epitome of excitement. But the sight of a flying machine actually in the air was more remarkable, and less likely than July Fourth at Christmas.
“Spin her over!” Josephine shouted.
Her Antoinette howled. The wing runners turned her around into the wind, and she raced across the cut hay and into the sky. Isaac Bell was right behind her, one step ahead of the welcoming committee.
BELL FOUND ALBANY’S ALTAMONT Fairground buzzing with rumors of sabotage. The mechanicians tending the machines in the racecourse infield were debating whether the wings of Sir Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s headless Curtiss Pusher had been deliberately weakened. Bell went looking for the Englishman. He found him and his wife, Abby, at a party in a yellow tent that had been pitched beside Preston Whiteway’s private railroad car.
The newspaper publisher intercepted Bell and whispered urgently, “I don’t like these rumors. Strange as it may seem, they suggest the presence of a second lunatic, someone other than Harry Frost. I want you to investigate whether there is a murderer among us, or if Frost is lashing out at everyone.”
“I’ve already started,” said Bell.
“I want constant reports, Bell. Constant reports.”
Bell glanced around for something to distract Whiteway. “Who is that handsome Frenchman talking to Josephine?”
“Frenchman? Which Frenchman?”
“The dashing one.”
Whiteway plowed through his guests to plant himself proprietorially next to Josephine and glower at the Blériot driver, Renee Chevalier, who had gotten her to smile despite her poor showing.
Bell joined Eddison-Sydney-Martin, congratulated him on his survival, and asked how his headless pusher had come to fall in the harbor.
“One of my chaps claims he found a hole drilled clean through the strut that snapped, causing the wing to collapse.”
“Sabotage?”
“Rubbish.”
“Why do you say rubbish?”
“I say it was a knothole in a timber selected poorly by the builder, though they’ll never admit to it.”
“Could I see it?”
“I’m afraid it floated off while she was extricated from the water. We lost several pieces plucking her onto the barge.”
Bell located the mechanician working on the blue pusher, an American from the Curtiss Company, who scoffed at the knot explanation.
“If it wasn’t a knot,” Bell asked, “could someone have accidentally drilled a hole and covered it over to hide the mistake?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“No flying-machine maker would take the chance. They’d own up to their mistake and replace the part even if it came out of their own pocket. Look, Mr. Bell, say a house carpenter mistakenly bores a hole in a board. He can plug it up, caulk it, paint it over, and no one’s the wiser. But a flying-machine strut is a whole ’nother story. We all know that if something breaks up there, down she goes.”
“Down she went,” said Bell.
“Could have been murder. The Englishman’s darned lucky they fished him out of the drink in one piece.”
“Why do you suppose he insists it was a knothole?”
“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.”