The Assassin

“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 ma

“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 co

“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: