The Assassin

“I have special steel containers installed in my basket,” Nellie answered. “Lots of balloons do. It’s very handy having extra hydrogen.”

“They must be heavy.”

“They beat falling,” she dismissed him and turned her green eyes back on Bell. “Where was I? Oh, yes. Too quick, too much emergency gas, you soar too high and suffocate. The air gets so thin, you run out of oxygen . . .”

Over the Neapolitan ice cream dessert, Bell echoed Archie’s earlier comment. “Strange how the three of us keep turning up together where crimes have occurred.”

Edna replied, “I’m begi

Nellie laughed. “I suspected him from the start.”

“May I ask you something?”

Nellie gri

“Like a detective,” said Edna. “Go on, we shouldn’t be teasing you.”

“At least until he’s paid the di

“Spike Hopewell told me that your brother ran off and you never heard from him. Is that true?”

Their mood changed in an instant. Nellie looked away. Edna nodded. “Yes. Actually, he was a Yale man, like you.”

“Really? What class?”

“You were probably several years ahead of him.”

“He didn’t go back after his freshman year,” said Nellie.

“Perhaps you knew him?” said Edna.

“I don’t recall anyone named Matters.”

“His name was Billy Hock.”

“Billy Hock?” Bell looked at her curiously.

“Yes,” said Edna. “He was my older brother.”

“And my older half brother,” said Nellie.

Isaac Bell said, “I never made the co

“We did,” said Edna. “Or we wondered. Do you remember now?”

Bell nodded, recalling a slender, eager-to-please youngster, more a boy than a man. “Well, yes, I knew him, slightly . . .”

Billy Hock had big, bright gray-green eyes as bright as Edna’s and Nellie’s. “He enrolled as a freshman my senior year. He was very young, youngest of the boys entering.”

“Fifteen. He was small. Undersized.”

Nellie said, “He tried out for crew. He would have made a perfect coxswain, being so light. But he was terrified of water. He always had a phobia about it.”

“The crew rowers ragged him mercilessly,” said Edna.

Bell nodded.

“Until some upperclassman stepped in and put a stop to it.”

“Yes.”

“We wondered how.”

“He could not abide bullies,” said Bell.

“One boy against a team?” asked Nellie.

“He trained at boxing.”

Edna directed her level gaze into Bell’s eyes.

“When I watched you and Archie boxing those men, I suddenly wondered was it you who stood up for our brother. Wasn’t it?”

“I hadn’t realized the co

Both women nodded.

“So Billy Hock was the brother who ran away? Strange . . . I wondered at school how he would fare. When did he go?”

“That same summer, right after his freshman year,” said Edna.

“He was adventurous,” said Nellie. “Just like me—always ru

“We never heard from him again,” said Edna.

Nellie said, “Sometimes I blame myself. I became a kind of model for him, even though I was younger. He saw me ru

“I remember Father laughing when the ringmaster walked you home.”

“On a white horse! He said I was too young. I said, ‘O.K., take me home on a white horse!’ . . . And he did . . . I gave Billy courage. I only hope it didn’t push him toward the Army.”

“No, it didn’t,” Edna said, laying a reassuring hand on her sister’s arm. “If anything, it gave him courage to go away to Yale. Father,” she explained, turning to Bell, “so wanted Billy to attend Yale because many ‘Oil Princes’ went to college there—Comstock’s son, Lapham’s son, Atkinson’s nephews.”

“Billy and I talked about joining the Army. The Spanish war was brewing—the papers were full of it—and boys were signing up.” Bell had tried, caught up in the excitement, but his father, a Civil War veteran, had intervened forcefully, arguing with unassailable logic that there were better causes to die for than “a war started by newspapers to sell newspapers.”

Edna said, “We guess that Billy enlisted under an assumed name. Lied about his age. We fear he was lost either in the swamps of Cuba or the Philippine jungle. We never heard. If he did join, he must have changed his name and lied about his family.”

“But we don’t really know what happened,” said Nellie. “Except that it nearly destroyed our poor father.”

—

“You cut it close,” said Joseph Van Dorn.

Isaac Bell lifted his gold watch from his pocket, sprang the lid, and let Van Dorn read the dial. Then he shook his head at the latest addition to the Boss’s Willard Hotel office, a modern, glass-cased table clock from Paris. “Your O’Keenan electric, imported at untold expense, is ru

“Sit down,” said Van Dorn. “He’s in my private waiting room. But brace yourself. The poor devil lost all his hair to some disease.”

“Alopecia totalis.”

“Even his eyebrows and mustache. I had a look through the peephole. He’s smooth as a cue ball.”

“Don’t worry,” said Bell, “it’s not catching . . . Now, sir, we need a plan.”

They spoke for two minutes, Van Dorn dubious, Bell prepared with persuasive answers. When the tall detective had prevailed, the Boss murmured into a voice tube and his visitor was ushered in from the private entrance.

12

Mr. Rockefeller.”

The retired president of the Standard Oil Corporation was a tall, sixty-six-year-old, two-hundred-pound man. He had piercing eyes that burned in an enormous hairless head, an icily quiet ma

John D. Rockefeller shook hands with Joseph Van Dorn and nodded to Bell when Van Dorn introduced him as “my top investigator.” He refused a chair and got straight to the point.

“An assassin is discrediting Standard Oil by attacking enemies of the trust. The public, inclined to believe the worst, gossips that Standard Oil is behind the attacks.”

“It’s the price for hitting the big time,” Van Dorn said sympathetically. “You get blamed for everything.”

“This outcry against us is wrong. The public ca

Van Dorn glanced at Bell. Bell had been the Boss’s personal apprentice when he started at the agency straight out of college and Van Dorn had taught him the trade on Chicago’s West Side—as dangerous a city ward as could be found anywhere in the country. Like Apache braves who had stalked game and hunted enemies side by side since boyhood, they could communicate with signs known only to them.

“You sound pretty sure of yourself,” said Van Dorn, uncharacteristically blunt.