“Is catching up,” Celere mumbled, reading as fast as he could:

An air race mechanician was found diabolically murdered at the Columbia fairground with his throat slashed, the victim of a robbery. According to Sheriff Lydem, the murderer could well be a labor agitator on the run from the cement strike in Missouri, and willing to stop at nothing to facilitate his escape. The victim’s body was not discovered for many hours due to the violence of last night’s storm.

Marco Celere looked up with a broad smile for the businessmen.

“Josephine is catching up,” he repeated.

The train trundled loudly onto an iron-girder bridge, and the sky suddenly spread wide over a broad river.

“Here’s the Mississippi. I read birdmen wear cork vests when they fly over bodies of water. Is that so?”

“Is good for floating,” said Celere, gazing through the girders at the famed waterway. Brown and rain-swollen, flecked with dirty whitecaps, it rolled sullenly past the town of Hannibal, whose frame houses perched on the far side.

“I thought was wider,” he said.

“Wide enough, you try crossing it without this here bridge. But you want to see real wide, you get down below Saint Louis where it meets up with the Missouri.”

“And if you want to see really, really wide, wide as the ocean, you take a look where the Ohio comes in. Say, mister, what are you doing on the train when the race is back in Illinois?”

Suddenly they were staring again, suspecting they’d been hoodwinked.

“Scouting route,” Celere answered smoothly. “Am getting off train in Hannibal and going back to race.”

“Well, I sure do envy you, sir. Judging by the smile on your face, you are one lucky man to be part of that air race.”

“Happy being,” Celere replied. “Very happy being.”

A good plan always made him happy. And he had just come up with a beauty. Kindly, bighearted, crazy Russian Platov would volunteer to help the baronet’s mechanicians by filling in for poor murdered Chief Mechanician Ruggs.

Steve Stevens would complain, but the hell with the fat fool. Dmitri Platov would help and help and help until he had finished the job on Eddison-Sydney-Martin’s infernal headless pusher once and for all.

Chapter 30

30

ISAAC BELL SAID, “Eustace, I’ve been watching you and you don’t look happy. Are you homesick?”

They were getting the machine ready to take off from Topeka, Kansas. The Chicago kid he had hired to help Andy Moser was pouring gasoline through layers of cheesecloth to strain out any water that may have contaminated the supply. It was a daily ritual performed before mixing in the castor oil that lubricated the Gnome engine.

“No, sir, Mr. Bell,” Weed answered hastily. But judging by the expression knitting his brow and pursing his lips, Bell thought something was very much wrong.

“Miss your girl?”

“Yes, sir,” he blurted. “I sure do. But . . . You know.”