The Assassin

Bell motioned to Bill Matters, one of the faces hovering over him.

“Get Mr. R—Envoy Stone—under cover. I’ll catch up.”

“You O.K., Bell?”

Bell took inventory. Bloody as he was, there were no arteries spurting or he’d have bled to death by now. He tried to move his arm. That made his shoulder hurt worse. But he could move it. No bones fractured. The whirling in his head and a general air of confusion he blamed on the shock of impact from a high-velocity bullet.

“Tip-top,” he said. “Get Envoy Stone under cover! Now!”

Matters knelt to speak privately. “He says he won’t leave you here.”

“Tell him I said to get under cover before he gets killed and I lose my only client. Explain to him that I don’t know what’s going on and I can’t help him at this moment.”

They were still shouting for a doctor.

One appeared, a sturdy, barrel-chested young man in a threadbare coat, who knelt beside him, opened his bag, and took out a pair of scissors. He cut away Bell’s blood-soaked coat and shirtsleeves, exposing a ragged tear through the flesh of his upper biceps. He reached for a bottle of carbolic acid and muttered something in Russian.

“What?” asked Bell.

“Is hurting. But important.”

“Beats infection,” Bell agreed. He braced for the fiery disinfectant. For a long moment, the sky turned dark. Afterwards the doctor bandaged the wound, then took a hypodermic needle from its nest in a box padded with red velvet.

“What’s in that?” asked Bell.

“Morphine. You are feeling nothing.”

“Save it for the next guy— What are those Cossacks shouting?”

“What?”

“Doctor, you speak English.”

“I study at Edinburgh.”

“I will pay you twenty rubles a day to be my translator. What are those Cossacks shouting?”

The doctor’s eyes widened. On January’s Bloody Sunday, the workers gu

“What is your name?” asked Bell.

“Alexey Irineivoich Virovets.”

“Dr. Virovets, what are those Cossacks shouting?”

“They are recognizing the captured guns as being looted from armory.”

Bell levered himself onto his good elbow. He saw pistols heaped on a horse blanket but no sharpshooter’s weapons.

“Now what’s he saying?” A Cossack officer was reporting loudly to a civilian dressed in top hat and frock coat. Bell pegged him for the governor’s representative or an Okhrana operative.

“He blames the attack on revolutionaries,” said Virovets.

“Help me up. We’re going for a walk.”

“I am not recommending—”

“Your objection is noted.”

Twenty minutes later, with his arm in a sling, the sturdy Dr. Virovets at his side, and anxious oil company officials trailing them, Isaac Bell walked beside the Caspian surf breaking at the feet of the derricks until he found one that had been abandoned. As much as he wanted to climb to its parapet, he doubted he could with one working arm and a spi

The doctor climbed for him and reported back that he could see the Cossacks still clustered where the bullets had rained down on the Peerless. Bell was not surprised. Forging ahead before the others trampled the beach, he had spotted a single set of footprints in the sand that had approached the ladder from one direction and left in another.

But it was puzzling. The derrick was less than five hundred yards from where the auto had been. How could the assassin have missed twice? The sudden stop could explain the first bullet going awry. But why hadn’t the second or third hit him in the head? Or the assassin’s favorite target, the neck?

23

Isaac Bell woke up stiff and sore the next morning to a slew of cipher cablegrams from New York. The first was from Grady Forrer, who continued to substitute as directing head of the case in his absence.

FIVE POINTERS BLAME GOPHERS.

Bell took that to mean that Van Dorn detectives had discovered that Anthony McCloud’s fellow Five Points gangsters did not believe he had fallen drunk into the East River but had been murdered. They naturally blamed their rivals the Gopher Gang. But whoever had killed him, and whatever the motive, it was a heck of a coincidence it happened the day of the fire that killed his mother.

Bell cabled back

INFORM NEW YORK CORONER.

entertaining a slim hope that the city’s medical examiner could be persuaded to dig up Averell Comstock’s body to investigate for a cause of death other than old age.

A cable that read

HOPEWELL OFTEN NEW YORK.

told Bell that Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton were grasping at straws about Spike Hopewell’s “tricks up his sleeve” inference. Any independent trying to build a refinery and pipe line would have to travel regularly to New York City to romance his Wall Street bankers.

But the information that Forrer passed along from Dave McCoart resonated with hope of a breakthrough on the gunsmith front—clues that Joseph Van Dorn believed could lead them to the craftsman who smithed the assassin’s deadly weapon.

THREE POSSIBLES.

TWO HARTFORD.

ONE BRIDGEPORT.

BOSS AUTHORIZED DETECTIVES.

Archie Abbott, on the other hand, still had nothing to report about sharpshooter Billy Jones.

ARMY UNFRIENDLY.

PURSUING FRIENDSHIP BRIGADIER GENERAL DAUGHTER.

IS SUPREME SACRIFICE AUTHORIZED?

Bell had just written in encipher on the cablegram blank

AUTHORIZED ON THE JUMP.

when Doctor Virovets arrived to change his bandage. The wound was clean, with no sign of infection, but they agreed on another dose of carbolic acid to be on the safe side. For distraction, Bell asked about the variety of languages he heard spoken in the streets. “Tatar,” the doctor explained, “Georgian and Russian.”

“May I borrow your stethoscope?” Bell asked as the doctor was leaving.

John D. Rockefeller walked in carrying a tray of milk and pryaniki, the Russian spice cookies of which Bell had grown fond.

“I’m surprised to see you dressed, Mr. Bell. I presumed I would venture out alone today.”

“I could use the fresh air.”

A Renault limousine was waiting with its curtains drawn. At Bell’s insistence, the Cossacks had been replaced by plainclothes police detectives on foot. Some trotted alongside, huffing and puffing, as they pulled onto the avenue. Others rode behind them in an identical Renault, Bell having convinced the cops that similar limousines would confuse a sniper.

He and Rockefeller sat in near darkness behind the curtains. Bell watched the streets through a split in the cloth, wondering whether a sense of shared danger might incline the reticent Rockefeller to open up further to him. He tested the waters with a joke.

“I guess we can’t blame the assassin for slandering Standard Oil if he shoots at the president.”

“He wasn’t shooting at me,” said Rockefeller. “He was shooting at you.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“You are the one with his arm in a sling, not I.”

“Isn’t it possible he hit me when he missed you?”

“The first report you filed when you came to work for me stated that he has missed his shot on rare occasions. And never by much. He was shooting at you.”

“Sounds like you no longer need a bodyguard.”

“Don’t worry, your job is not at risk. Baku is teeming with angry people primed to kill for every imaginable reason. I’m glad to have you with us.”