The Race

Frost fingered his weapons. Josephine still had her head in the motor. He could seize her by the throat, let her see that it was him, then cut her heart out. But the awful truth was that he could not get near her. There were too many Van Dorns masquerading as mechanicians. He couldn’t kill them all. They would gun him down first. He was not afraid to die. But he was damned if he would die in vain.

He needed help.

He hurried back to the train terminal and boarded an electric to Flatbush, where he entered a Brooklyn savings bank. Fleeing poverty, riding the rails as a child, begging for pe

He withdrew three thousand dollars from an account that held twenty. The bank manager counted it out personally in his private office. After Frost picked it up, the banker casually laid on his desk a wanted poster similar to those Frost had seen at the racetrack.

This poster was tailored to bankers. It warned them to be on the lookout for Harry Frost, or someone who looked like Harry Frost, drawing from his account. Frost acknowledged the banker’s loyalty with a brusque nod. They both knew that it was the least the banker could do. If Frost hadn’t covered his losses on an ill-advised scheme involving other men’s money, the banker would be serving time in Sing Sing.

A trolley took him to the waterfront.

He walked to a Pe

There were two men with the cows. One was seated at a table on which were scattered cow horns. The other was removing a horn from one of the tethered animals by turning it in his hands, unscrewing it from a threaded rod that had been drilled in the base of the horn. Rod Sweets, the man at the table, didn’t recognize Harry Frost in his beard. He pulled a pocket pistol.

“Don’t,” said Frost. “It’s me.”

Sweets stared. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

“You will be if you don’t put that gun away.”

Sweets shoved it hastily back his vest. “Don’t tell me you’ve developed a taste for dope.”

The cow horns – sawn from the steers in Mexico, hollowed out, and fitted with threads – had been stuffed with Hong Kong opium before being screwed back on. Sweets smuggled hundreds of pounds of raw opium yearly into New York in this ma

“No dope,” said Frost. “I want to hire a crew.”

Rod Sweets’s men would not care that he hated Josephine for buncoing him nor that he hated Preston Whiteway for seducing her. Money was all they cared for. And money, he had plenty of.

Frost made arrangements with Sweets quickly. Then he hurried to the Red Hook saloon where could be found the brothers George and Peter Jonas, who specialized in tampering with the brakes and gasoline tanks of newspaper-delivery trucks. Again, money was all that was needed, and the saboteurs were falling all over themselves trying to persuade him that it was even easier to smash a flying machine than a motortruck.

“It’s all in the wires that hold ’em together,” said George, and Peter finished his brother’s thought: “A wire lets go, the wing falls off, down she goes.”

Harry Frost had spent many a long hour watching his wife at air meets. “The birdmen know that. They check their wires every time they go up.”

The brothers exchanged a quick glance. They didn’t know much about flying machines, but they knew the logic of machines in general, which was all they really had to know to break one.

“Sure, they check ’em,” said George. “They look for nicks, for kinks, for weak spots.”

Peter said, “So, like you says, Mr. Frost, we’re not going to sneak up on ’em with a hacksaw.”

“But,” said George, “they don’t always check the fittings that anchor the wire to the wing.” He glanced at his brother, who said, “We pull a steel anchor bolt.”

“We replace it with a cast-aluminum anchor bolt that looks just the same but ain’t so strong.”

“They don’t see it.”

“They go up.”

“They jerk hard in the air.”

“The anchor lets go.”

“The wing falls off.”

“They’re flying a cinder block.”

FROST TOOK A TROLLEY BACK TO FLATBUSH.

He felt an unexpected sense of well-being.

Back in harness. He’d been idle too long. For the first time since the nightmare of Josephine’s betrayal, he felt restored, alive again, even as he hid in the dark. The important thing, as always, was to move quickly, move before anyone knew what he was doing, and never do what they expected.

He rode an electric Long Island Rail Road train to Jamaica in the borough of Queens. At an auto rental, he hired the most expensive car they had – a Pierce. He drove it through truck and dairy farms across the Nassau county line to Garden City, and swept under the porte-cochere of the Garden City Hotel. It was a grand place. Before Josephine, before the chauffeur and the asylum, he had rubbed shoulders with Schuylers, Astors, and Vanderbilts here.

The staff did not recognize him behind his gray beard. He paid for a large suite on the top floor, where he ordered di

He sat bolt upright at dawn, thunderstruck by the clatter of threshing machines. His heart pounded, as he listened for the squealing of the wheels when the guards rolled the morning breakfast slop down the corridor and the clanging of the ladle striking the cauldron. The same morning racket he still remembered from the orphanage. Only, gradually, did he begin to notice things. The bed was soft and the room was quiet. He glanced at the open windows, where white curtains fluttered in a warm breeze. There were no bars. He wasn’t in the bughouse. They hadn’t dragged him back to the orphanage. A smile crept across Harry Frost’s face. Not threshing machines. Flying machines. Morning practice at Belmont Park.

He had breakfast in bed, three short miles from the racetrack where Josephine and her new admirers were tuning their airships for the race.

6

“WHERE’S JOSEPHINE?” Isaac Bell inquired of the Van Dorn detectives guarding the gate to the Belmont Park Race Track infield.

“In the air, Mr. Bell.”

“Where’s Archie Abbott?”

“Over by the yellow tent.”

Bell had driven out to Belmont in a borrowed Pierce-Arrow to interview Josephine about her husband’s habits and the associates he might recruit. As the only person who had spent time with him in his reclusive years, she might even have an idea of where he would hide.

Bell saw right off that Whiteway had chosen a perfect place to start the air race. The Belmont infield was enormous. Encompassed by the longest racetrack in the country, a mile and a half, it was the size of a small farm. Nearly fifty acres of flat grass inside the track were overlooked by a grandstand that could seat thousands of paying spectators. It offered numerous two-hundred-yard stretches of grass on which the machines could gather speed to take to the sky and return to the ground, as well as room for tents, temporary wooden aeroplane hangars, trucks, and autos. The rail yard for the support trains was just on the other side of the stands.