Текст книги "The Striker"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Justin Scott
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

27

Unwrapped from the sail, Laurence Rosania had recovered his equilibrium quickly, brushed off his dinner jacket and straightened his collar. He looked about the windowless room Bell and Wish Clarke had taken him to and concluded there was no escape until they were ready to let him go. That the Van Dorns wanted something from him was very good news, and he had high hopes of getting out of this mess without going to prison. That Wish Clarke was one of them meant he would be treated fairly as long as he did not make the mistake of underestimating Clarke’s intelligence. The handsome young fellow with him who explained what they wanted conducted himself like a gentleman, and soon all three were on a first-name basis.

“Thank you for that clear explanation, Isaac. And thank you, Aloysius. Always a treat to run into you. Now, here’s the deal as I understand it. I will tell you what you need to know and you let me go.”

“No,” said Isaac Bell. “You will tell us what we need to know. We will return what’s in your pockets to the lady who owns it and let you go.”

“Or,” said Wish Clarke, “you won’t tell us what we want to know. We return what’s in your pockets to the lady who owns it and give you to the cops. Take a moment to think on it.”

“I’ve reached a decision,” said Rosania. “What do you need to know?”

“Everyone you know who’s experimenting with shaped charges.”

Rosania had dark brown eyes. They opened wide. “Are you asking me to betray every thief I know who’s experimenting with shaped charges?”

“There can’t be that many,” said Wish.

“It’s rather an exclusive club,” Rosania agreed. “And the membership has been reduced drastically by experiments that went Poof!before they cleared the room. In fact, believe it or not, I’m the last man standing. Hollow charges are more complicated than anyone imagined.”

Isaac Bell’s face grew wintry. “Laurence. You are trying our patience.”

“And putting unwarranted faith in our good nature,” Wish added.

“What if I tell you what you need to know and I keep half the contents of my pockets and give you half and we go our separate ways?”

Bell tugged the thick gold chain draped across his vest and pulled out his watch. “Ten seconds.”

“If you insist, there are two safecrackers I can name who’ve not only survived but are getting quite good at it.” He named them.

Bell looked at Wish.

Wish shook his head. “Those guys are like you, Laurence, professionals happy in their work and not about to go to the trouble of wrecking coal mines.”

“Coal mines?” echoed Rosania. “What are you suggesting?”

“Everyone,”said Isaac Bell. “Not only thieves. Everyone experimenting with shaped explosives.”

For the first time since they waylaid Rosania, the jewel thief looked worried. “How would I know someone nota thief?”

“For your sake, you better.”

“You’re not going to love my answer.”

Wish nodded to Bell that it was his turn to be unpleasant, and Bell said, “In which case, you’re not going to love our reaction.”

“No, I’m serious. I can tell you something about him, but I can’t tell you his name because I don’t know his name.”

“Tell us what you know.”

“He’s a big fellow – as tall as you, Isaac, and wider than you, Wish. He is very intelligent. He is very quick on his feet and quick with his hands. He talks like he’s from Chicago, but I’ve never seen him around. So I think he’s probably a bit older than me and left town before I took up my calling. He wears a slouch hat that covers his hair, and he pulls it down low over his eyes. He’s clean-shaven. The bit of hair that shows below his hat is brown.”

So far, thought Bell, Rosania could be describing the man he had confronted in the Tombs and chased through the subway.

“What color are his eyes?”

“Hard to tell, the light was poor.”

Wish Clarke said, “Laurence, you are usually more observant than that, knowing that the alert safecracker is the free safecracker. Poor light would have prompted you to redouble your efforts to inspect his eyes.”

“You’re forgetting that I was attempting to learn the finer points of blowing holes in safes – not identify strangers.”

“Blue?”

“No, not blue. Some shade of brown.”

“Amber?”

“Amber is rare,” said Rosania. “But they could be amber.”

“How do you know he’s not a thief?” asked Wish.

“Good question. There’s something about him that’s more like a cop.”

“What about him was like a cop?”

“It’s hard to say. He had something of the authoritative air about him. Like you gentlemen. I mean, you could pretend to be police.”

“How?” asked Bell.

“I wouldn’t want you to take this the wrong way,” said Rosania, “but words like convincing, confident, cocksure, swaggering, and arrogantspring to mind.”

“I’m working hard at not taking it the wrong way,” said Wish Clarke.

Bell asked, “And you’re saying he came all the way to Chicago to study shaped explosives?”

“No, no, no. I didn’t say that. I met him in Newport.”

“Rhode Island, Virginia, or California?” asked Wish.

“Rhode Island,” said Bell. “The Naval Torpedo Station.”

“Where else? The fellow I’m talking about was standing drinks in the nearest bar and so was I. We both ended up talking to the same torpedo scientist. One of these big brains who doesn’t know anything except one thing. Of the three of us, he was the only one who didn’t know why we were asking all our questions. Good thing we weren’t foreign spies.”

“Are you sure the other fellow wasn’t a spy?”

“He was a safecracker through and through. Knew all the right questions. In fact, it went through my mind to exchange business cards. Team up for a big job.”

“But you said earlier he wasn’t a thief.”

“Did I? I suppose what I am trying to tell you is, he asked all the questions a safecracker would ask but he conducted himself more like a policeman.”

“A cop with amber eyes,” said Bell.

“Possibly amber. Very likely a cop.”

“Was he armed?” asked Bell.

“Brother, was he! Big revolver in his coat, and his wrist banged on the table like he had a cannon in his sleeve.”

“Any knives?”

“Why do you ask?”

“Curiosity.”

“He had a blade in his boot.”

“How’d you happen to see that?” asked Wish Clarke.

“He cut a cigar he gave to Wheeler.”

“Who’s Wheeler?”

“The big brain. And, by the way, his arsenal was another reason I figured he was not a thief. No self-respecting thief packs weapons. He was armed like you two.”

Isaac Bell exchanged glances with Wish Clarke, who looked like he agreed that they had gotten all they were going to. “Thank you, Mr. Rosania. You’ve been very helpful.”

“My pleasure. And with that, I will bid you gentlemen good evening.”

Rosania started for the door. He stopped abruptly at the sound of two Van Dorns cocking firearms.

“Don’t forgot to empty your pockets.”

* * *

“Like cops?” asked Wish as the detectives exited the Stambaugh mansion, having returned the lady’s necklace and been rewarded with snifters of forty-year-old brandy, memorable embraces, and an invitation to come back anytime they were in the neighborhood.

Wish drove. Bell was silent all the way into Chicago. They returned the auto to the stable where they had rented it and walked toward Black’s Social to get some late-night breakfast.

“Did you ever pretend to be a cop?” asked Bell, aware that Van Dorn regulations forbid it.

Wish shrugged. “Only when necessary.”

“What’s the trick?”

“In the words of the safecracker, act cocksure, swaggering, and arrogant.”

“Did you find it difficult?”

Wish grinned. “Would I be immodest to claim that arrogance did not come natural?”

“Otherwise you acted yourself?”

“I focused on cocksure. Any cop, good, bad, or indifferent, has to be cocksure to be taken seriously.”

“Like us,” said Bell.

“Except when we disguise ourselves as someone with a lower profile than a cop.”

“A detective,” said Bell.

“Beg pardon?”

“Ten-to-one, our provocateur is a private detective.”

“Why not a cop?”

“What cop could operate days apart in Gleasonburg, New York, and Chicago? Policemen can’t travel. They’re locked in their jurisdiction. But we can go anywhere in the country. That’s why Joe Van Dorn is opening field offices. Cops are stuck at home. We’re not, and neither is this guy. He’s a private detective.”

* * *

Wish Clarke nodded thoughtfully. “Son, I keep saying you’re getting the hang of this detecting line and you keep proving me right. He could most certainly be a detective. In fact, I’d bet on it.”

Bell asked, “Have you noticed we have three fellows sticking close behind us?”

“If you’re referring to the short, fat, and tall gents in bowler hats, they latched onto us where we left the auto.”

“The short ugly one was hanging around Black’s.”

They started across the Harrison Street jackknife bridge. Wish pretended to admire the elaborate ironwork of the lift towers and glanced back. “The fat ugly one was stuffing his face at Little’s lunch.”

“Do you happen to have your coach gun in your bag?” Bell asked.

“Right on top.”

“How about you stop to tie your shoelace?”

Wish knelt and opened his carpetbag. “Move a hair behind me, Isaac. She spreads wide.”

“Cops,” said Bell.

Three in blue coats and tall helmets coming up behind the men following them. The tallest had a handlebar mustache.

Wish Clarke had worked Chicago long enough to ask, “Whose team?”

Bell said, “That’s Officer ‘Muldoon’ in the middle. Looks like they were freelancing earlier.”

“And finishing the job here.”

Wish counted heads. “Six of them, two of us. We have to pull off a couple of triple plays, Isaac. Or is that Harry O’Hagan I hear galloping to our rescue?”

The answer came in the thunder of iron-shod hooves, and it was not the first baseman but two gigantic horses dragging a paddy wagon around the corner on the far side of the bridge.

28

The men in bowlers followed Isaac Bell and Wish Clarke onto the bridge. Moving in unison like a drill team, they drew press-button knives and released the blades with a simultaneous click that the detectives heard twenty feet away.

The cops led by Muldoon stopped under the lift towers, blocking that side.

The paddy wagon driver wheeled his horses across Harrison Street, barricading the other side.

Wish left his coach gun in his bag.

“It appears that the forces of the law have come to watch a knife fight.”

“Neutral observers,” said Bell.

“Unless we introduce firearms.”

“In which case,” said Bell, “the cops will shoot us.”

“How you fixed for knives?”

“A little throwing steel in my boot.”

“I’d hold on to that as a last resort,” said Wish, rummaging in his bag. “Well, look here. Would you like a Bowie knife?” He pulled a twelve-inch blade sharpened on both sides from its fancy worked-leather sheath.

“How many do you have?”

“Just the one. Flip a coin?”

“Keep it,” said Isaac Bell. “I’ll borrow one of theirs.”

He went straight at them at full speed, eyes locked like binoculars on the tall man in the middle. Five feet away, Bell feinted a kick at the fat man on the right, launched off his left foot and pivoted a half circle away from him. His right boot grazed the nose of the man in the middle and smashed the face of the short man on the left, who dropped as if poleaxed.

Isaac Bell snatched his knife off the deck. “Thank you.”

Wish was beside him in a rush, Bowie knife slashing the air like a saber. “Run for it, boys, while you still have faces.”

Fat & Ugly lunged with startling speed and skill. His blade plunged into the space where Wish Clarke had been an instant earlier. The razor edge of the Bowie knife parted his coat sleeve and tore the flesh of his forearm from his elbow to his hand. He dropped his knife, screamed, clutched his arm, and ran.

That left the tall man in the middle. His eyes flicked from Bell’s slim blade to the blood dripping from Wish’s Bowie. He shoved his blade at Wish. Isaac Bell chopped down with all his strength. The knife he had taken pierced the attacker’s hand and stuck there as the man reeled away.

Wish Clarke gave a harsh laugh. “Now all we have is to reason with the police– Look out, Isaac!”

29

The blade came out of nowhere.

The first man down, the man on the left whom Isaac Bell had kicked unconscious, awakened in a flash and lurched to his feet, gripping the knife that had fallen beside him and driving it toward the young detective’s ribs.

Bell tried to twist aside, but the blade kept coming and there was nothing he could do to avoid it. Just as suddenly as it had blazed at him, it disappeared, blocked by Wish Clarke, who grunted and staggered back, clutching his side.

Isaac Bell slammed a fist that started at his knees up against the attacker’s jaw, tumbling him over the side of the bridge and into the river. He caught his friend as he fell. “Wish!”

“I’m O.K. I’m O.K.”

But he was not, Bell could feel his big body go slack.

He made sure no arteries were cut. Thank God, there was no blood pumping from the wounded side. Then he slung Wish over his shoulder, picked up his carpetbag, and stalked to the paddy wagon blocking the bridge.

The driver and the officer riding shotgun stared down at him.

Isaac Bell said, “Odds are, your precinct captain is an old pal of our boss, Joe Van Dorn. You sure as hell don’t want him to hear you’re freelancing tonight.”

The driver looked across the bridge. Muldoon and company were shuffling their feet but not coming to help. “You’re right about that.”

“Drive us direct to the hospital and we’ll be square.”

“Jake,” the driver told his shotgun, “hop down and make the gentlemen comfortable in back.”

Bell laid Wish on a long bench and knelt beside it to keep him from rolling off. The driver whipped up his team, and the paddy wagon lurched through the city.

“Stop trying to talk,” Bell told Wish.

Wish beckoned him closer.

“I said, that mustache is working like I said it would.”

* * *

Aloysius Clarke woke up at dawn and looked around the private room Isaac Bell had paid for. “What are you doing here?” he asked Bell.

“Wish, what do you mean what am I doing here? You saved my life.”

“Heck, you did the same for me in New Orleans.”

“I didn’t step in front of a knife.”

Wish shrugged, which made him wince. “You’re making a mountain out of a molehill.” Then he winked. “Fact is, I enjoy the occasional wound. Nobody complains when I take a little something for the pain.”

Bell passed him his flask.

“How bad am I?”

“Doc says a couple of weeks in bed ought to do you.”

“Sorry, Isaac. I’ll catch up as soon as I can. You going to Pittsburgh?”

“Just stopping at Union Station to see Mack and Wally and Archie on my way to New York.”

“Why New York?”

“Report to the Boss.”

“What happened to the telegraph?”

“I want to see his face when I tell him what I’m thinking.”

* * *

Mary Higgins felt like she was falling backwards in her nightmare.

But she knew for sure that she was not dreaming. And she certainly was not sleeping. She was too cold and wet to sleep. Besides, who could sleep standing up, much less slogging along a road that had turned to mud?

Suddenly, screams pierced the dark, worse than any nightmare.

“They’re coming!”

“They’re coming!”

A glaring white light almost as bright as a locomotive raced straight at them. Men and women scurried off the road, dragging their children into the ditches and shoving them through the hedges. Eight huge white firehorses galloped up the road towing a freight wagon on which the Coal and Iron Police mounted a gasoline dynamo and an electric searchlight. Its only purpose was to terrorize. The miners’ wives had named it the Cyclops.

Their march was twenty miles short of Pittsburgh, and they were pressing on through the night, hoping to reach a farm where philanthropists and progressive church people were erecting a tent city. In this place, they dreamed, they would find hot food and dry blankets.

When the Cyclops had gone and Mary was helping people to their feet, a deep despair descended upon her. The cause seemed hopeless. But worse than her fear that the march and the strikes would achieve nothing was the bleak realization there existed in the world a brand of human being that wanted to attack with something as diabolically cruel as the Cyclops. A tiny, tiny minority,her brother always said, but he was wrong. It had taken many to dream up such a monstrosity, many to build it, and many, many more to allow it.

“Cyclops!”

Again it roared, blazing through the night, and again they jumped. From the ditch, Mary Higgins caught a fleeting glimpse of the horses as they galloped ahead of the light, nostrils flaring, eyes bulging, heads thrashing against their harness, terrified by the whip, the dark, and the screaming.

It was still raining when the last of the marchers straggled into the tent city at dawn. Mary was last, carrying a child in one arm and propping up the mother, a woman with a racking cough. She was surprised when church ladies, who looked like they had never missed a meal or ironed their own linen, rushed to help. They took the child and the mother to a makeshift infirmary and directed Mary to a soup kitchen under a stretched tarpaulin. Hundreds of people had lined up to eat, and she had just found the tail end when John Claggart appeared out of nowhere and pressed into her cold hands a mug of hot coffee that smelled better than seemed possible.

Claggart had men with him. They were dressed like miners. But none, she noticed, looked like they worked with their hands, and she recognized the flash operators who hung around prize rings, pool halls, and racetracks. She saw in their eyes their contempt for the miners.

“Who are those men?” she asked.

“Not choirboys,” Claggart replied boldly. “But they’ll get the job done.”

The word accompliceswormed its way into her mind.

“Criminals?” she asked.

Claggart shrugged. “It’s not for me to judge. But I’ll bet that you and your brother know plenty of men who have been railroaded into prison for fighting the good fight.”

“Those I know,” she said, “don’t resemble criminals.”

Claggart said, “Give me a brave man, quick on his feet, and I don’t care what you call him as long as he knows that the bosses are the real bums. Now, listen carefully. I have more barges tied along the banks and more boats to move them into the channel.”

* * *

“Missed your spittoon. Sorry, chief.”

Henry Clay recognized the brown trail of tobacco juice that soiled his pale blue Aubusson carpet for what it was, a challenge by a thug who had never lost a fight and was too stupid to imagine that he ever would. A dozen of them – all blood-oath members of the Hudson Dusters, a West Side New York docks gang – had crowded into his front office through the back hall. He would never permit these scum in his private rooms. Most didn’t know him from Adam. All they knew was their boss had ordered them to appear for a special job. But now, instead of quietly listening to Clay’s orders, they were snickering at the mess on his carpet.

The spitter’s second mistake was to underestimate a Wall Street swell just because he wore a splendid suit of clothes. Clay stood up. The Dusters’ boss and his enforcer exchanged expectant glances. Pain was about to be suffered.

“What’s your name?” Clay asked.

“What’s it to you?”

“Tell him your name,” said the boss, signaling Clay that he had no desire to get in the middle.

“Albert,” said the thug, watching with amusement as Clay walked closer.

“Not to worry about missing the spittoon, Albert. Just lick it up.”

“What?”

“Lick it up.”

“Go—”

Clay hit him high, low, and in between, then put him in a hammerlock, slammed him facedown on the floor, and jerked his pinioned arm higher and higher until the gangster screamed. Eventually, his screams turned to pleas. Clay jerked harder. Pleas dissolved into sobs.

Clay let go.

“Don’t bother licking it up, Albert. We know you would, and that’s all that matters.”

Eleven Hudson Dusters laughed.

“All right, boyos, you’re here because I have a strong feeling that I am going to have an angry caller bursting into my office. When he arrives, I want you to beat him slowly to a pulp. Make what happened to Albert here seem like a friendly wrestling match.”

“When’s he coming?”

“Soon. Meantime, there’s a spread laid out in the back room and cots where you can nap. Don’t get drunk, don’t molest my staff, and don’t spit on the carpet. Is that clear?”

“Yes, sir.”

After they had trooped out, Clay unlocked his private office and focused his telescope on Judge Congdon’s window. The Judge was hard at work, bullying someone on the telephone. Clay put on his hat, bid his staff farewell, went down to the street, entered the Congdon Building, and rode the elevator to the top floor.

Congdon kept him waiting half an hour. When he did allow him into his office, he said, “I’m busy. Make this quick.”

“This may be my last report in person for a while,” said Clay.

Somehow, Isaac Bell had survived. Clay blamed himself. He had made a rare mistake sending assassins instead of doing the job himself and he had no option but to pay the price.

“What’s wrong?” Congdon demanded.

“Suffice it to say that events are on schedule.”