The Assassin Read online

  They attacked, galloping down the slope, brandishing long guns and sabers.

  “Get Mr. Rockefeller under cover,” Bell told Matters. “Fort him up with those bags.”

  Matters obeyed instantly, helping Rockefeller to the floor, pulling luggage down from the racks. The old man remained calm and watchful and seemed to have the horse sense to trust the job to the man he had chosen to protect him. If C. C. Gustafson was the most philosophical man on the subject of getting shot, John D. Rockefeller took the cake as the calmest man without a gun that Isaac Bell had ever seen in a gunfight.

  Bell counted ten expert riders on agile ponies. Without a telescope on the rifle, he’d be wasting ammunition if he opened up any farther than four hundred yards. But four hundred yards would give him only forty seconds to stop them before they reached the stranded train. He glanced about the car. Some of the men had pulled revolvers. Bill Matters unlimbered an ancient Civil War Remington. Bell’s was the only rifle.

  20

  When will you shoot?” John D. Rockefeller called to Isaac Bell.

  “When I can hit them.”

  He chose a large boulder on the hillside as his quarter-mile marker. The lead horseman steered his mount directly at it. As he raised his whip to make the animal jump, Bell pressed the Savage to his shoulder. The whip descended. The animal gathered its haunches and left the ground. Isaac Bell waited for the rider’s chest to cross the iron sight and curled his finger gently around the trigger.

  Dave McCoart had loaded a box of wildcats for him and Bell decided he owed the gunsmith a box of Havana cigars. The train wrecker slid off his horse almost as smoothly as if he had chosen to dismount. His foot jammed in a stirrup. The panicked animal veered sharply, dragging its dead rider across the line of charge. Two train wreckers crashed into them and went down in a tangle of hoofs.

  Bell levered in a fresh shell.

  He fixed a bead on a rider who was whirling a carbine over his head like a sword. Again the perfectly balanced trigger kept the weapon dead steady as Bell fired and another wrecker fell off his horse. But they had closed within two hundred yards. Bell’s next target was an easy hit, and they were so near for his next that he could have dropped his man with a rock.

  “Shoot!” he roared at the men gaping out the windows.

  They jerked the triggers of their revolvers, hitting nothing. Through that hail of wild fire, the horsemen charged. The Savage’s magazine indicator read one shot left. Bell fired at a man so close, he could see the hairs of his beard.

  That shot and the volume of pistol fire broke the charge. Twenty yards from the train, the survivors turned their horses and drove them back up the ridge. Bell reloaded, shouting to the others, “Keep shooting before they change their minds.”

  He sent two slugs whistling over their heads and they kept going, lashing their horses. The revolver-toting passengers stopped shooting or ran out of ammunition. The beginnings of a ragged cheer died on their lips as each and every man considered how close he had come to annihilation. Silence finally descended in the hot, dusty railcar.

  Isaac Bell helped John D. Rockefeller to his feet.

  “Now what?” asked the Standard Oil magnate.

  “We wait for a wreck train to repair the tracks.”

  “They’re coming back,” a passenger shouted.

  Men clutched their revolvers. But this time the thunder of hoofbeats was only a roving police patrol of Cossacks armed with bolt-action rifles and shashka sabers.

  Bell broke down the Savage.

  “Nice shooting,” said Matters. “Where’d you get the rifle?”

  Bell hid it in his carpetbag. “What rifle?”

  If he owed Dave McCoart a box of cigars for his bullets, he should in all fairness send one to the assassin for his gun. Lacking a name and address, Bell would wait until he installed him in his cell in death row.

  —

  Isaac Bell led a much-jauntier John D. Rockefeller off the train at Baku Station than the geezer in the overcoat who had boarded the Lake Shore Limited to Cleveland. His actress friend’s Comédie-Française costumers had camouflaged the magnate’s famous features with a silver-gray wig to cover his bald head and matching eyebrows fastened with spirit gum to replace those he had lost to alopecia. Tinted spectacles shaded his piercing gaze. A white flannel “ice cream” suit, a straw panama, and a gold-headed walking stick bedecked a gracefully aging dandy visiting a southern Russian city in the summer.

  He even cracked a joke.

  “Process servers from the Corporations Commission won’t know me from Adam.”

  With Bell at his side, he strode through the station, the picture of an adventurous American who might be a tourist or a wealthy missionary. Though, in fact, they had made him a diplomat. Rockefeller’s Washington “correspondents” had provided unassailable documents for a fictitious Special U.S. Envoy for Commercial Affairs to Russia and Persia—the Honorable Joseph D. Stone.

  On Bell’s orders, Bill Matters had left the train earlier at a suburban station. Matters was traveling under his own name as the representative of the American refinery builder Purest Incorporated of New Jersey—which happened to be one of Standard Oil’s secret subsidiaries. His letters of introduction to the mayor of Baku, the prefect, the governor, and the city’s leading oil men stated that his mission was to persuade the Russian government to let Purest build new, modern refineries and replace the old ones owned by Rothschild and Nobel. A seemingly chance meeting with Special Envoy Joseph D. Stone would lead to Matters and Stone discovering that their business interests coincided.

  Isaac Bell, too, traveled under his own name. Bogus papers established the tall detective as Special Envoy Stone’s private secretary and bodyguard who had been granted extended leave from the United States Secret Service.

  Compared to Tiflis and Batum, the much-bigger city of Baku seemed peaceful and less tense, exhibiting few outward signs of last winter’s murderous riots. Baku was also quite clearly the thriving capital of an oil-rich region that pumped half the entire world’s petroleum. The lavish railroad station, bustling with crowds of people speaking Farsi, Russian, and Armenian, was the equal of any in Paris or London.

  Outside the station, women wore veils, cart horses plodded under tall Russian yokes, and the ruins of a centuries-old Persian citadel loomed on a hill. But swift modern trolleys glided on broad cobblestone avenues. The stonework, mansard roofs, towers, cupolas, and porte cocheres of Baku City Hall and the Embassy Row buildings were typical of a great metropolis. The ostentatious private palaces built by the oil kings spoke of vast fortunes made as suddenly as they were on Wall Street—and were no less gaudy than those lining Fifth Avenue.

  An hour of buying drinks and eavesdropping in the Hotel de l’Europe’s bars and lobby confirmed Bell’s decision to base Rockefeller’s envoy disguise on the information Archie had turned up in Washington. The rumor repeated most anxiously said that the Shah of Persia had secretly borrowed fifteen million rubles from Czar Nicholas. That the loan might gain Russia’s Navy entrée to the Persian Gulf had Great Britain and the United States riled to the core.

  John D. Rockefeller was thrilled. Beaming, he confided to Bell in one of the unguarded moments he had begun to offer up since his costuming in Paris, “Not one man in a hundred will keep his eye on the ball.”

  He did not seem at all surprised by the rumors of the czar’s moneylending, and Isaac Bell concluded that he had probably known about the loan right down to the last ruble long before they left New York for Cleveland.

  21

  The assassin’s first and strongest inclination had been to masquerade as a Cossack. The pageantry and sheer spectacle of the savage warriors appealed, and there was great advantage to be had playing the role of a character who frightened ordinary folk. But Cossacks were so closely related by blood and clan that they knew one another, and all knew their place from a hundred traditions of tribal hierarchy.

  To act the part of an aristocrat was almost as t
empting. The privileged gratin of Russian society spoke French, which the assassin could understand, and were kowtowed to by everyone, especially soldiers and police. But aristocrats, too, were divided by impenetrable layers of rank. Who knew what superior you would accidentally insult?

  Luckily, there was one sort that every Russian feared.

  The lowliest peasant, the noblest aristocrat, the angry Tatar, the despised Armenian, the arrogant soldier, the brutal cop, the corrupt bureaucrat, all were terrified by the Okhrana, the czar’s secret police.

  Plainclothes agents’ disguises ranged from the rubbernecking tourist to the city laborer. The assassin had observed that, however disguised, secret agents often betrayed themselves with a superior attitude. Lording it over people was no way for the czar’s spies to catch revolutionaries. That was their loss. But from the assassin’s point of view, pulling rank was a foolproof way to scare Russians into backing down and leaving you alone.

  The riots, and the dread of worse impending, gave the disguise even sharper teeth. The government had put the Baku region in a state of chrezvychainaia okhrana, or “extraordinary security.” People dreading merciless sentences of prison and exile without a trial were doubly in terror of the Okhrana.

  Head high and gaze contemptuous, brandishing a master rigger’s toolbox, the assassin brushed past the guards at the Nobel refinery gate. They were watching for armed Tatars, and not inclined to tangle with a plainclothes secret policeman masquerading in brand-new, too-clean overalls.

  The derricks in the Baku fields were fireproofed with metal and Gypsolite sheathing and more densely positioned than in Kansas—stacked more like the crowded Los Angeles fields along Sunset Boulevard, with the accompanying smoke, fumes, stench, and noise. In all other aspects, they resembled those the assassin had studied. Steam engines powered the drill machinery, ladders ran up the sides, cables turned over crown pulleys, and the tops of the derricks were surrounded with parapet work platforms that made an ideal shooting perch.

  The workmen tending the engines and the pumps looked away, hoping not to make eye contact that could lead to questions. Even the drillers deepening the wells with bit and casing—a much-tougher lot of men—averted their faces. The way was clear to choose an untended derrick that offered a clear field of fire yet was remote enough to allow an unimpeded escape.

  The assassin found the right derrick along the shore of Baku Bay, which sheltered tank steamers, barges, and tugboats from the Caspian Sea. Its parapet commanded a perspective of the Baku road and the gate where traffic entered the refinery. The smoke made it hard to see, but wind gusts off the water stirred it sporadically, much as the Kansas wind had at Hopewell Field.

  Safely ensconced high in the air with a panoramic field of fire, all that remained was to assemble the Savage, adjust the telescope, insert the clip, and wait for the so-called Special Envoy Joseph D. Stone, Standard Oil directing head Bill Matters, and supposed former Van Dorn detective Isaac Bell.

  —

  After months of instigating murder in the streets and homes set afire and property looted in hopes of distracting angry citizens from contemplating revolution—hopes largely realized—it dawned on the czar’s government that the European investors demanding stability were right to be alarmed. The Tatar pogromy against the Armenians was about to destroy Russia’s most valuable industry. So when Purest Incorporated executive Bill Matters and Special Commercial Envoy Stone drove to the Nobel refinery in Black Town, the Baku region prefect and the governor insisted on providing a powerful escort.

  Cossack outriders in brilliant red uniforms crowned by tall sheepskin papakhi formed a cordon around their auto—a Cleveland-built, 24-horsepower Peerless Tonneau car—which caused Isaac Bell to elevate every nerve end to its highest state.

  Surrounded by saber-wielding horsemen, the car’s rate of speed was limited to a brisk trot. At the same time, the glittering Cossacks pinpointed the exact location of the Peerless—itself a visual extravaganza of red enamel and polished brass—for a revolutionary with a pistol or a sniper drawing a bead.

  Bell was not particularly concerned about a revolutionary getting past the Cossacks, and even if one managed to, the scuffle would give him plenty of time to blow the attacker’s head off with his Colt automatic. A sniper was a grimmer story, and Bell watched anxiously for a glint of smoke-darkened sunlight on a distant rifle. He could be stationed on a roof or in an attic window, at any height that presented a line of fire above the tall horsemen.

  They moved out of the hotel and embassy districts, past Armenian neighborhoods of shuttered houses, and through slums where the Tatars, distinguished by their blue tunics, darker skin, and round faces, stared sullenly. The Cossacks’ faces hardened, their tension betrayed by stiffened backs and darting eyes.

  Bell had befriended the chauffeur, Josef, a Georgian with a tall pompadour of wavy black hair and the furtive flicker in his coal-dark eyes of a police spy assigned to eavesdrop on the Americans. Josef explained in halting English that the Cossacks had new orders to stop the pogromy, to which they had been turning an officially sanctioned blind eye. Now they were the Tatars’ enemy. “Tatar shoot Cossack,” the Georgian flung cheerfully over his shoulder to Bell in the backseat. “Cossack shoot Tatar. Make peace.”

  Bell glanced at Rockefeller beside him. The old man was looking everywhere with big eyes. “What splendid horses!” He seemed happy, almost joyful. Bell speculated that he was delighted that his Special Envoy disguise allowed him for the first time in decades to move about in public. Tatars were glowering at his police escort, not at the “most hated man in America.”

  Whereas Bill Matters sat rigidly in the front seat next to the chauffeur, uncomfortable as he always appeared to be in Rockefeller’s presence. He did not appear nervous, although he was hardly at ease.

  Bell was not quite sure what to make of him. As brusque and tough as he had found Edna and Nellie Matters’ father on first meeting, he had not seen real indications of the “hard as adamantine” that Spike Hopewell had characterized. Granted, the man had kept a cool head during the train attack. He was clearly accustomed to command. And it seemed that the former independent had effected a successful transition to what Rockefeller referred to as a “valuable executive.” But regardless of the high level of Standard Oil director or head of department the president had permitted him to rise to, Bell did not believe that Bill Matters had yet become “one of the boys” who ran the secretive trust.

  The smoke grew thicker in the suburbs, the sky blacker.

  They headed southeast toward the Bibi-Eibat oil field and Black Town refineries.

  The slow-moving auto and clattering horses crept into an enormous field of refinery tanks. Beyond the tanks were countless refining pots, each with a squat chimney belching smoke. A sharpshooter could crouch on the climbing rungs on one of the chimneys, though he would be taking a big risk of being seen. The more likely sniping position, like the roost that the assassin had climbed up to in Kansas, would be in the virtual skyscraper city of a thousand oil derricks that marched in close-packed ranks to the edge of the Caspian Sea.

  A Tatar plumber working on the roof of one of the refinery tanks dropped a monkey wrench. The tool banged resoundingly against the metal side. The noise startled a horse. It reared so suddenly that its rider nearly slid off his saddle. For a moment, there was consternation, angry shouts, and milling horses. The chauffeur had to slam on his brakes. The Peerless stopped abruptly, jostling Matters against the windshield, the chauffeur into his wheel, and Rockefeller half off his seat until caught and held firmly in place by Isaac Bell.

  In that same instant, Bell heard the crack of a high-velocity rifle slug split the air inches from the back of his seat. He grabbed Rockefeller’s arm to drag him down out of the line of fire. A second bullet struck the tall detective like a bolt of lightning.

  22

  The impact of the high-velocity slug threw Isaac Bell against the side door, breaking its latch. It flew open. He tumbled
out of the Peerless, ricocheted off the running board, and sprawled on the oil-soaked road. Still gripping Rockefeller’s arm, he found himself vaguely aware that he somehow landed underneath the two-hundred-pound magnate. A bullet shattered the windshield. Bills Matters and the chauffeur jumped for their lives.

  Bell heard his own voice. He sounded as if he were calling to John D. Rockefeller from a passing train. “Are you O.K.?”

  The old man straightened his wig.

  “My, my! Mr. Bell, your coat is drenched in blood.”

  From Bell’s neck to his elbow, his white suit jacket was soaked ruby red.

  His shoulder felt on fire.

  The shooting had stopped. Now the danger was the steel-shod hoofs of the panicked horses plunging and rearing as their riders looked everywhere at once for the source of the gunfire.

  Again his voice drifted from a distance. “We better stand up, Mr. Stone. Before we get trampled.”

  He struggled to his feet, used his working arm to help Rockefeller to his, then found himself holding on to the old man to keep his balance.

  “There!” Bell shouted, pointing at the derricks, the likeliest place the assassin fired from.

  The Cossacks drew swords and galloped in the opposite direction.

  A Tatar work gang was caught in their path. The Cossacks began slashing and shooting indiscriminately. The Moslems fled from the horses, leaving behind crumpled dead and squirming wounded and some hastily discarded sidearms.

  Isaac Bell was surprised to see John D. Rockefeller standing over him, staring down with a concerned expression. “Mr. Bell, you’ve fallen down again. You are wounded.”

  Bell started to stand again.

  Rockefeller admonished him with an imperious gesture. “Right there! As I have been saying, you are wounded.” He raised his voice. “A doctor! Fetch a doctor!”