The Assassin Read online

  “Byzantine,” said Rockefeller. “In your experience, have you ever seen a murder as elaborately conceived?”

  “Three murders,” said Bell.

  “Three?” Rockefeller blinked.

  “And an attempted murder. And an elaborate act of arson.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “As ‘byzantine,’ to use your word, as the killing of Clyde Lapham was, it was merely an exaggerated version of his earlier crimes.” He described for Rockefeller the deaths of the independent Kansas refiners Reed Riggs and Albert Hill, the elaborate and highly effective duck-target explosion and burning of Spike Hopewell’s refinery, the attempt to shotgun him, Texas Walt, and Archie Abbott. Finally, he reminded Rockefeller of the faked suicide of Big Pete Straub. “By those lights, sniping Hopewell and C. C. Gustafson are his only ‘normal’ crimes.”

  “What motivates such complication?”

  “I don’t know yet,” said Isaac Bell. “The effect of the straightforward killings is the slander you want to stop, the blaming of Standard Oil. The killings that were masked as accidents don’t appear to fall into that category. Perhaps those people were killed for other reasons.”

  A secretary knocked and entered and murmured in Rockefeller’s ear. Rockefeller picked up a telephone, listened, then put the phone down, shaking his head. He sat silent awhile, then said to Bell, “My father used to read aloud to us. He liked the Fireside Poets. Do you know them?”

  “My grandfather read them,” said Bell. “Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell.”

  “Lowell was Father’s favorite . . .” He shook his head again. “I’ve just learned that Averell Comstock, one of my oldest partners, is dying . . . ‘O Death, thou ever roaming shark . . .’”

  Rockefeller looked at Bell, his fathomless eyes suddenly bright with pain.

  Bell completed the stanza for him—“‘. . . Ingulf me in eternal dark!’”—wondering whether the old man remembered it was from a humorous poem about a perch with a toothache who was hoodwinked by a lobster.

  “Averell became a warm, close, personal friend of mine in the course of business. I will miss him.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Bell. “Had he been ill?”

  “Briefly. The price of getting old, Mr. Bell. My partners are dying right and left. Most were older than I . . . They go so quickly. One week ago, Comstock was full of vim and push.”

  He stood up, laid a big hand on the telephone, and stared across the desk as if the room had no walls and he could see all the way to New York City.

  “When poor Lapham began losing his mind, there was time to get used to the idea that he would go. But Averell was a titan. I figured him for another twenty years.”

  He’s afraid of dying, thought Bell and suddenly felt sympathy for the old man. But he could not ignore the opportunity to investigate from even deeper inside the heart of Standard Oil.

  “Are you afraid the assassin will strike at you?”

  “Most people hate me,” Rockefeller replied matter-of-factly. “The chances are, he hates me, too.”

  “He strikes me as professional, without emotion.” True of his shooting, thought Bell. True of his deep-laid groundwork. Not true of his impulse to show off.

  “Then he’s paid by someone who hates me,” said Rockefeller.

  “A trigger finger that won’t shake with personal hatred makes him all the more dangerous.”

  Rockefeller changed the subject abruptly. “Can I assume that having broken with the Van Dorn Agency, you are free to travel on short notice?”

  “Where?” asked Bell.

  “Wherever I say.”

  Isaac Bell threw down a bold challenge calculated to impress the oil titan. If it worked, the lordly Rockefeller might open up to him as he would to an equal rather than a lowly detective.

  “Where ‘children dig in the sand’?”

  Rockefeller returned a fathomless stare. Bell gazed back noncommittally, as he would in the highest-stakes poker game—neither averting his eyes nor staring—while Rockefeller reassessed him. He said nothing, though the silence between them stretched and stretched. The old man spoke at last.

  “You appear to have studied my habits.”

  “As would an assassin.”

  “I may go abroad.”

  “Baku?” said Bell.

  Violence flared in the hooded eyes. “You know too much, Mr. Bell. Are you a spy?”

  “I am imagining how an assassin stalks a man of many secrets—a victim like you. Baku is obvious: The newspapers are full of Russia’s troubles, and E. M. Hock’s History of the Oil Monopoly catalogs the territories in Europe and Asia that you’ve lost to Rothschild and the Nobels and Sir Marcus Samuel.”

  “Are you a spy?” Rockefeller repeated. But he was, Bell guessed, assessing him carefully, and he strove to answer in a manner that would instill confidence and project the picture of a valuable man, seasoned in his craft, alert, observant, and deadly when challenged. A man John D. Rockefeller could trust to guard his life.

  “I don’t have to be a spy to know that ‘the sun rising over the beautiful Mediterranean’ rises in the east—Russian oil in Baku and the Chinese and Indian refined oil markets you’re determined to dominate. If I were a spy, I would know the secret meaning of ‘children digging in the sand.’ I don’t. But the assassin has had more time to investigate and probably does know all about children digging in the sand. Would you feel safer if I accompany you as your bodyguard?”

  “Name your salary.”

  “I won’t work on salary. I’ve decided to start my own detective agency,” said Bell, embellishing the lie he had concocted with Joseph Van Dorn.

  “I applaud your initiative,” said Rockefeller. “We’ll send you a contract.”

  Isaac Bell drew a slim envelope from his coat. “I brought my own.”

  “Presumptuous of you.”

  “Not at all. I am modeling my business on yours.”

  “I am an old man and beyond the influence of flattery. But I do wonder how you would compare a gumshoe to an oil man?”

  “E. M. Hock wrote that you achieved your great success in the oil business by being ruthlessly efficient. I heard with my own ears your boast of efficiency to Mr. Van Dorn. In order to be the best ‘gumshoe’ in the private detective business, I had better be efficient.”

  Rockefeller replied without a hint of expression, and Bell could not for the life of him tell if the man had a sense of humor. “You’ll know you’re efficient, Detective Bell, when they call you a monster.”

  Bell said, “I will make the travel arrangements.”

  “I have a man who handles them.”

  “Not on this trip. I will decide the safest route.”

  Rockefeller nodded agreement. “Of course, none of this is to be repeated. I want no one to know I have business in Baku. We must travel in the utmost secrecy.”

  “That will make my job a lot easier,” said Bell. “When do you want to arrive?”

  —

  At Grand Central Station, which was being simultaneously demolished and expanded into an electrified Grand Central Terminal, the sidings reserved for private railcars offered connections to city telephone systems.

  “I need another rifle,” said the assassin.

  “Another 99?” asked the gunsmith.

  “Have you anything better?”

  “I always make you the best.”

  “Then more of the best! 99 it is.”

  “With telescope?”

  “Only the mounting. But I want different bullets.”

  “Is there a problem with my loads?”

  Picturing the gunsmith’s fussy hands and the desperate-to-please eyes of a genius who didn’t believe he was a genius, the assassin reassured him, “Your loads are wonderfully consistent. I trust my life with them. But I’ve been thinking, have you ever made a bullet that explodes?”

  “A dumdum bullet?”

  “No. Not a hollow-point. A bullet that detonates on impact.” />
  “Like an artillery shell?”

  “Precisely. A miniature artillery shell.”

  “It’s hard to imagine stuffing an impact fuse and explosive into such a small projectile.”

  “But you have a wonderful imagination.”

  “I am intrigued,” said the gunsmith. “You are as stimulating as ever.”

  17

  Back from Pocantico Hills, Isaac Bell wired Joseph Van Dorn in agency cipher:

  BAKU VIA CLEVELAND.

  And with very little time to set the murder and Corporations Commission investigations in productive motion before he was stuck incommunicado on the high seas, he fired off three more telegrams.

  To Detective Archie Abbott in Washington:

  WHY PERSIA? ON THE JUMP.

  To Detective Wally Kisley and Detective Mack Fulton still in Kansas:

  HOPEWELL TRICKS UP SLEEVE? ON THE JUMP.

  To Detective Aloysius “Wish” Clarke, who was about to receive the plummiest assignment of his checkered career:

  COME NEW YORK. ON THE JUMP.

  Bell himself went to the Sage Gun Company on West 43rd Street.

  He walked in carrying a carpetbag and shook hands with Dave McCoart, a hard-muscled gunsmith with long, thin fingers and a ruddy Irish complexion.

  “I was just thinking about you,” McCoart greeted him. “Are you familiar with the FN outfit in Belgium?”

  “Fabrique Nationale. Firearms manufacturer in the Liège district.”

  “Mr. Browning gave FN a contract to manufacture a 9mm variant of a new design. I am told it’s a beautiful pistol. I’m thinking I can modify it with a chamber bushing to fire an American .380 caliber cartridge. It would be considerably lighter than that brick in your shoulder holster.”

  “I like my gun’s stopping power. It’s served me well.”

  “What the Number 2 lacks in stopping power—and you are right to be concerned—will be made up with outstanding accuracy.”

  “How outstanding?”

  “Compared to your Colt? Like a rifle.”

  “O.K., make me one. Now, I have a question. Have you ever seen a breakdown model of a Savage 99?”

  “No.”

  “Could you convert a factory piece to a breakdown?”

  “I could.”

  “How many gunsmiths could do such a conversion?”

  McCoart grinned. “That depends on whether the accuracy of the weapon is high on your list of expectations.”

  “At the top.”

  “Then I would shop very carefully to get the right man. Look for one who has a top-notch machine shop and several pints of artist in his bloodstream.”

  “How many such men do you know?”

  “With a top-notch machine shop?”

  “Or access to one.”

  “. . . A few, I suppose.”

  “How many more would be out there that you don’t know personally?”

  “Around the country? Quite a few.”

  “How many would be known to gunsmiths who you know?”

  “There are cities where the best congregate. They settle near where they learned the craft and can turn to each other to make specialty items. Around the Winchester works in New Haven, Connecticut, or Savage’s factory upstate in Utica. Springfield in Springfield, Massachusetts. Remington in Bridgeport, Colt in Hartford. Do you mind me asking what the rifle is used for?”

  “I was about to warn you. It’s being used for murder.”

  “Reckoned as much.”

  “So ask carefully. You don’t want to get on the wrong side of this guy.”

  McCoart asked, “Do you suppose the smith knows what his customer is up to?”

  It was a good question, and Bell thought on it before he answered. “The smith could believe his customer is a target shooter.”

  Dave McCoart shot a hole in that theory. “He wouldn’t think it long if the guy weren’t actively competing. He would want to know how his gun did.”

  Bell opened his carpetbag. “What do you think of this one?”

  McCoart weighed the parts in his big hands, examined them in the light, then screwed them together. “Nice. Very, very nice work. The barrel and chamber lock like they’re welded.”

  “Recognize it?”

  “No. Other than it narrows the field considerably. There aren’t that many smiths of this caliber. Like I said, an artist. Did you shoot it?”

  “I hit a fence post at a quarter mile twice and winged it twice.”

  “Could have been the wind. Could have been the loads. Could have been knocked around since it was last sighted in. Would you like me to bench-sight it?”

  “And load me some cartridges.”

  “Where’s the telescope?”

  “It wasn’t on it.”

  “Why do you suppose he left such a beautiful piece behind?”

  “To throw me off the scent.”

  “Saving money on the telescope. Good ones don’t come cheap.”

  “Or,” said Bell, seeing another way to backtrack the assassin, “maybe the telescope is even rarer than the gun.”

  —

  “What are your prospects, Mr. Bell?” Bill Matters asked bluntly when Isaac Bell called at Matters’ Gramercy Park town house.

  Bell reckoned he should not be surprised by how young, vigorous, and tough Edna and Nellie’s father was. “Hard as adamantine,” Spike Hopewell had dubbed him. “Choirboys don’t last in the oil business.”

  Still, he had expected a smoother company man version of Spike Hopewell. Instead, he found a man fifteen years younger than Spike. He had a hard mouth, and harder eyes, and seemed inordinately protective of his accomplished, independent daughters.

  “Father,” said Nellie before Bell could answer, “Mr. Bell just walked in the door,” and Edna, who had descended the stairs with Nellie and was now seated beside her on a green silk-covered settee that highlighted the color of their eyes, said, “This role of vigilant father, Father, does not become you.”

  Matters did not smile. Nor would he be derailed. “I want to know what his prospects are if he’s calling on my daughters. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  Edna started to protest.

  Bell interrupted.

  “Thank you, ladies. I will speak for myself. To answer your question, sir, I enjoyed steady advancement in the Van Dorn Detective Agency. Now I’m striking out on my own. I intend to start my own firm, and I will work hard to make a go of it.”

  “How much will you earn?”

  “Sufficient for my needs.”

  “Sufficient to support a family?”

  “Pregnancy,” said Nellie, “has not come under discussion. Yet.”

  Matters glowered.

  Edna said, “I believe that Mr. Bell is a Boston Bell, Father. The bankers. He does not need to ‘marry well.’”

  “American States Bank? Is that true, Bell?”

  Bell looked from Edna to Nellie and addressed his answer to their father’s questions to both of them. “I would rather marry happily than ‘well.’”

  Bill Matters barked a laugh that did nothing to soften his eyes. “Hear! Hear! Well said! O.K., you won’t be a detective for long. Take over the bank when your old man retires.”

  “I will remain a detective,” said Bell. He did not elaborate upon the deep contestation with his father on that issue, nor that his grandfather had interceded with a legacy that made him financially independent. Neither was Matters’ business, beautiful daughters notwithstanding.

  “Have it your way. Sit down. Girls, let’s give Mr. Bell something to drink.”

  Matters’ butler appeared in the doorway. The man wore a tailcoat and white gloves, and his face was remarkably smooth, but Bell pegged his stance and light-footed gait as that of an ex-prizefighter who had retired before he lost a match.

  “What is it, Rivers?”

  “Telephone, sir.”

  Matters hurried off without a word. Edna rose. “I’ll leave you two to it.”

&n
bsp; “Where are you going?” asked Nellie.

  “Mr. Bell is calling on you, not me.”

  “Don’t be absurd. He’s calling on both of us. Aren’t you?”

  Isaac Bell said, “Considering we’ve dined together, traveled together, been set upon by drunks and shot at together, I feel less like a caller than an old friend catching up.”

  “Do you want me to stay?” asked Edna.

  “Of course,” Bell and Nellie chorused.

  Edna was still hesitating when Bill Matters returned to the drawing room, his face set in a grave mask.

  “What is it?” asked Edna, resuming her seat.

  “Old Comstock died.”

  “Another bites the dust,” said Nellie. “That’s two in a week.”

  “You won’t mourn him, will you?” asked Edna.

  “I won’t speak ill of the dead,” said Bill Matters. “But you know I won’t miss his badgering.” To Isaac Bell he explained, “Averell Comstock treated me like some sort of interloper. He made it hard to do business, and hard to advance in the firm.”

  “What did he die of?”

  “God knows. Even a simple cold will kill at his age . . . The upshot is, Mr. Bell, we’ll be seeing a lot of each other in weeks to come.”

  “How is that, sir?”

  “That was Mr. Rockefeller on the telephone. With Comstock gone, the president has asked me to accompany him in his travels. He mentioned you will be his bodyguard.”

  “You poor things,” said Nellie. “I would rather die than be stuck all summer in Cleveland. The heat! The humidity! The neighbors!”

  “Mr. Rockefeller summers at his estate in Cleveland,” Edna explained to Bell.

  Matters gave Bell a significant look. “I suspect we’ll create the impression he’s in Cleveland than range farther afield. Wouldn’t you say, Mr. Bell?”

  “I cannot say, sir,” Bell replied stiffly. “As his bodyguard, if Mr. Rockefeller confided our destination, it would be indiscreet, not to mention reckless, to repeat to anyone where we are going.”

  —

  The First Regiment of Newark was billeted in a sturdy National Guard armory, four stories of slab-sided brick walls, relieved only slightly by rounded turrets, and crowned with a parapet. The sentries guarding the arched Jay Street portal remembered Billy Jones warmly but expressed bafflement when Isaac Bell asked why the champion marksman had deserted right after winning the President’s Medal.