Текст книги "The Striker"

Автор книги: Clive Cussler

Соавторы: Justin Scott
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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

BOOK TWO
FIRE

18

Brother,” said Mary Higgins. “I am going back to Pittsburgh.”

Jim had been worrying about this and here it was. Back in West Virginia, a thousand miners had been evicted from their Gleason company shanties. Some were huddling in a tent city, their usual fate while a strike dragged on and scabs dug the coal. Some, however, had begun a march to Pittsburgh in hopes that newspaper stories about men, women, and children marching in cold rain would raise the nation’s sympathy. It might. It might even give President Roosevelt courage to intervene.

A thousand marching up the coal-rich Monongahela Valley stood a good chance of doubling their ranks and doubling them again and again as workers struck the hundreds of mines along the way to join the march. Ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand arriving in Pittsburgh might well spark the general strike Higgins dreamed of. But he hesitated to join it.

The murder of Black Jack Gleason had turned the mood violent. Governors were threatening to call up troops. Prosecutors were staging trials. And the coal mine owners had dropped even pretenses of restraint.

“There’s plenty to keep us busy here. Plenty. The smelters’ strike is a disaster.”

“Read this!” She thrust the Denver Postin his face and pulled a carpetbag from under her cot. Jim read quickly. “What is this? We know Gleason got blown up.”

“Keep reading. Do you see what happened next?”

Jim read to the end where it was reported that the barges that sank at Gleasonburg had blocked the river for four days.

Mary asked, “The rivers are not deep at Pittsburgh, are they?”

“Not very. The Mon’s about eight or ten feet. Shallower in many places, depending on rain. About the same for the Allegheny.”

“And the Ohio?”

“About the same… Why?”

Mary’s eyes were burning.

“Why?” Jim repeated sharply.

“Even scab coal has to reach Pittsburgh to be shipped by trains to the eastern cities and by barge to the west.”

“I don’t understand,” said Jim. He understood fully, but he didn’t want to hear it.

Mary said, “The barges that sunk at Gleasonburg blocked the river for four days. One tow’s worth of barges, brother, a single fleet. What would happen at Pittsburgh if many, many, many barges sank and blocked the river?”

“No coal would move,” said Jim Higgins.

“No coal to the Pittsburgh mills,” said Mary. “No coal trained east to the cities. No coal barged west down the Ohio.”

“But the miners are already marching. What about the march? A peaceful march.”

“The marchers will need all the help they can get. This will help them.”

“Sabotage is war, Mary.”

“Coal is the lifeblood of the capitalist class.”

“War means death.”

“Precisely, brother. Without coal, the capitalist class will die.”

* * *

Isaac Bell headed to New York to get a handle on the new owners of Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke. He wangled the last seat on the Pennsylvania Special by flourishing Kenny Bloom’s rail pass. Ten thousand buyers from out-of-town firms were flocking to the city to purchase merchandise for the fall and winter, and the eastbound trains were packed.

“Don’t let the Boss catch sight of you before you can prove what’s driving your provocateur,” Wish Clarke warned as they parted in Pittsburgh. Wish was heading out to Chicago to ask Laurence Rosania who, in a safecracker’s opinion, might practice the esoteric and extremely rare art of shaping explosives. “He’ll pepper you with questions: Who is he? Who’s behind him? What do they want? Better have a clear idea or he’ll switch you to another case.”

But Bell had been far from forming clear ideas, even before the explosions on the Monongahela. Was a saboteur provoking violence for profit or to win the war between labor and operators? Whoever bought Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke could be angling for both.

“I can’t dodge Mr. Van Dorn. I have to go to the office to tap the new research man.”

“Tap him in a bar around the corner. I was in New York lastSeptember when the buyers came. The Broadway hotels were putting up cots and turning people away. If only a small portion of them encounter New York sharpers, our new field office will be doing a land-office business. And you will get shanghaied into interviewing waiters, bartenders, cabbies, ushers, maître d’s, and chambermaids on behalf of a ladies’ unmentionables buyer from Peoria who, having celebrated a morning of wholesaler haggling with drinks in a club, lunch at a café, an automobile ride around Central Park, dinner in a roadhouse, a show at the vaudeville, and late supper and a cold bottle on a roof garden, woke up minus his wallet – which he will finally recall he saw last in the company of a respectable, refined young lady he met in one of those establishments.”

The Pennsylvania Special’s last stop was at the Hudson River’s edge in Jersey City. Bell rode a ferry to Manhattan and the El uptown and walked to the Cadillac Hotel on Broadway. Avoiding the front door and the sharp-eyed house detectives recruited personally by Mr. Van Dorn, he found a bellboy smoking a cigarette outside the service entrance and tipped him to pass a private message to Grady Forrer in the Van Dorn suite.

Then Bell retreated five blocks down Broadway to the bar of the Hotel Normandie, which was loud with jobbers and wholesalers entertaining buyers. He watched from a corner table, guessing who among the customers streaming through the door was the big brain that the Boss had hired to establish the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s division of research.

Was it the guy with his hat cocked like a newspaperman? Reporters were trained in research. But, no, he did not appear to be meeting anyone as he went straight to the lunch bar. Was it the stern academic with a waxed mustache? No, he clapped a salesman on the back and was greeted like an old friend. Nor was it the long-haired fellow who looked like a scientist.

Suddenly, the bar grew quiet, conversations ceasing, as an immense shadow filled the door. It was certainly not this guy, large of shoulder and substantial of belly. As young as Bell, he had his hair slicked down and parted in the middle like a high-class floor manager who could keep a saloon orderly with a glance. He churned across the room, parting the crowd like a steamboat, straight at Bell. Then he placed wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and inspected the young detective closely.

His voice rumbled from deep in his chest. “I’m Grady Forrer, Mr. Bell. Your note described a fair-haired gent with a mustache. I’m going to venture that it’s a mustache you have just begun to encourage.”

“I’m hoping it will be worth the wait,” said Bell, thrusting out his hand. “Thanks for coming.”

“Glad to. It’s a madhouse up there. More business than you can shake a stick at.”

“Flimflammed buyers?”

“Flimflammed buyers by the gross, yard, bolt, ream, karat, bale, peck, dram, grain, pennyweight, each according to his measure. So many beating at the door that Mr. Van Dorn stripped my office of assistants to interview victims. Let’s have a drink.”

Bell hailed a waiter, and when the waiter ran with their order, he asked, “Do you have experts in Wall Street?”

“I have access to experts. And a certain rudimentary knowledge as I apprenticed down there before I became interested in this library work, and I’ve maintained friendships. What do you need to know?”

Bell told him about the sudden purchase of a controlling interest in Gleason Consolidated. “I’ve pored through newspapers and buttonholed a banker at a dinner in Pittsburgh, but I got no further than the name of a trust that no one’s heard of.”

“How quickly did they buy it up?” asked Forrer.

“Days.”

“Astonishing. Buying up a controlling interest takes time, particularly when trying to mask your intention. And buying from grieving heirs who are battling each other for the spoils takes even longer. Even if the deceased’s will was rammed through probate. Which is not impossible. If there is a more corrupt breed of judge than probate, I’ve never heard of them. Interesting, though, unless it was already in the works. Has it occurred to you that whoever bought Gleason had advance notice the shares would come to market?”

“I wondered if you would ask,” said Bell. “Fact is, whoever blew up Gleason’s yacht would know precisely when.”

After an hour, during which time Isaac Bell concluded that the Boss had made a brilliant decision to invest in a research department, and doubly brilliant to hire Grady Forrer, a weedy young man sidled into the Normandie Bar and spoke urgently to Forrer.

“Himself has gone to supper and won’t return ’til morning. Our boys are back at work.”

“Come on, Isaac! Now’s our chance.”

* * *

Forrer’s office was a collection of shabby rooms that connected by a narrow hall to the lavish Van Dorn suite. It was a windowless warren, unlike the agency’s big open front office. Cabinets, chairs, and tables were stacked with newspapers from towns and cities around the country, and, as Bell and Grady entered, a mailman staggered in under a canvas sack, which contained, he announced, three hundred subscription newspapers, none more than a week old. Clattering ceaselessly in one corner was the research division’s own telegraph key, presided over by an operator sending and receiving the Morse alphabet with a lightning-fast fist. A telephonist with a listening piece pressed to his ear was taking notes in another corner. A typewriter banged away, printing catalog cards, and the rooms echoed with shouts of “Boy!” as file boys were sent scampering to the ever-growing stacks.

Forrer explained that at this early stage he was devoting all his energy to collecting a library of information. He had hired students part-time from Columbia College and the seminaries to clip stories from the thousands of newspapers published around the country.

Bell asked, “How will you keep track?”

“I’m adapting the Dewey decimal system to Van Dorn requirements,” Grady explained. “All the information in the world is worth nothing if we can’t find it.”

* * *

Isaac Bell worked at a desk deep in clippings of newspaper headlines, features, cartoons, and pen-and-ink sketches about coal interests in Wall Street. The railroads had a powerful hand in the mineral, as he had seen in Pittsburgh. But Kenny’s father was only one of several line presidents depicted as grasping for controlling interests in the transport and sale of coal.

The western railroad builder Osgood Hennessy had attracted far more cartoonists’ ire than Mr. Bloom. Bell found the titan drawn in the images of an anaconda, an octopus, and a spider, all with more teeth than such creatures possessed in their natural state. Wall Street financiers – especially Judge James Congdon, founder of U.S. Steel; John Pierpont Morgan, consolidator of General Electric and lender of gold to the U.S. Treasury; and the lamp oil magnate John D. Rockefeller – received similar treatment, portrayed as sharks and alligators and rampaging grizzly bears.

In contrast on the Society pages, Congdon and Hennessy and Rockefeller assumed human form in staff-artist sketches, Congdon with young brides on his arm, Rockefeller attending his Fifth Avenue church, the widowed Hennessy escorting a pretty daughter of thirteen. Much attention was paid to Congdon’s art collection, much more to Hennessy’s private train.

Black Jack Gleason’s obituaries touted the coal combine he had put together, mansions he had built in West Virginia, and the shooting estate he had bought in Ireland. Bell read an editorial written before his death that lauded Gleason’s oft-stated opinion that labor organizers were “vampires that fatten on the honest labor of the coal miners of the country.”

The New York Worldcharged Gleason with exacting tribute from the people by illegally banding the Coal Trust into “the most powerful, grasping and grinding trusts in existence, beyond any question, not even second to J. P. Morgan’s Great Fuel Octopus that limits supply and fixes prices.” A Nebraska paper excoriated Gleason as “a coal baron who got fat on the honest labor of the coal miners, and rich through overcharging the coal consumers of the country.”

Grady Forrer arrived with a pot of coffee.

“You’ve been here all night.”

“Grady, you know many things.”

“I know how to findmany things.”

“Have you ever seen amber-colored eyes?”

“They are unusual,” said Grady. “Very rare. And amber is something of a misnomer. I would describe them as solid yellow or gold. Except in sunlight they will likely appear coppery, even orange. Why do you ask?”

“My provocateur might have them. Or might not.”

Grady looked troubled. “Based on the enmity already existing between labor and owners, you wouldn’t necessarily need a provocateur to provoke a war in the coalfields.”

“I would only agree that you would not need a provocateur to merely foment violencein the coalfields. There’s plenty of bitterness for that. But you would need a provocateur to set off a real, ongoing war.”

“To what purpose?!” roared a voice in Bell’s ear.

“Mr. Van Dorn!”cried Grady Forrer. The telegrapher, the telephonist, the typist shot to their feet, and the file boys froze in their tracks.

Isaac Bell stood up and offered his hand.

“Good morning, sir,” he greeted Van Dorn and answered the Boss with the main thought on his mind. “To the purpose of drawing attention.”

Joseph Van Dorn said, “Come with me!”

Bell winked reassuringly at Grady Forrer and glided alongside Van Dorn, confident he had discovered the answer.

Van Dorn’s private office was fitted out with up-to-date telephones, speaking tubes, and its own telegraph key. He sat at a mahogany desk and indicated a tufted leather chair for Bell.

“Whose attention?”

“The President’s, the Congress’s, and, most important, the nation’s.”

Van Dorn nodded. “I’ve been watching Prince Henry operate and I’ve been thinking along the same lines you are. By the time the Prince completes his tour, half the continent will be in love with him and all things German – despite his brother the Kaiser’s dismal record as a bloodthirsty despot. It’s a new world, Isaac. If you get in the newspapers, people will love you as long as the reporters spell your name right.”

“Or hate you,” said Bell.

“Tell me who wants to be loved.”

“They all do. But I don’t see the union having the talent for it.”

“How can you say that? The papers are on their side. The front pages are full of cartoons of tycoons in top hats abusing workingmen.”

“Not all,” said Bell. “Half I saw in the train stations depicted fresh-faced soldiers set upon by unshaven mobs. The same with those I read last night.”

“So it could be either side, could it not?”

Bell hesitated.

Van Dorn said, “Let me remind you that taking sides is no way to keep a clear eye.”

“But the unionists aren’t capable of a precision attack like the one I saw on the Monongahela. The timing was exquisite – two vessels dynamited within ten minutes and the barge fleet set adrift at the right moment to do the most damage. The union fellows I’ve encountered are brave men, but not all that practical, nor disciplined. Nor, frankly, trained in the dark arts. What I saw demanded military precision by someone who’s devoted his life to destruction.”

“How many men do you reckon it took to blow up the two vessels and set the barges adrift?”

“No more than three.”

“Only three?”

“It could have been one.”

“Impossible. One could not be in all three places at once.”

Bell said, “He wouldn’t have to be. The yacht and the steamboat both burned coal in sizable furnaces. A knowledgeable saboteur could have hidden dynamite and detonators fashioned to look like large chunks of coal in their bunkers.”

“But what would persuade the fireman – who was bound to die in the explosion – to shovel it into the furnace at just the right moment?”

Isaac Bell said, “I went aboard two of the steamboats that were clearing the channel. I took a good look at their boilers and I talked to their firemen.”

Joseph Van Dorn sat back in his chair and smiled. “Did you? What did you learn?”

“The coal is shifted in wheelbarrows from bunker to bunker, closer and closer to the furnace, in a logical manner. And the steamboats burn it at a consistent rate, depending on the speed they’re making and the current.”

“To calculate the timing, your provocateur must know all about steamboats, perhaps been employed on them.”

“No, sir. I figured it out, and I’m only a detective.”

Van Dorn looked out his window, cogitated in silence, then mused, “He sounds like quite an operator… Quite an operator… Provided he exists… But ‘fashioning’ dynamite and detonators to look like coal could be rather more difficult than you suggest.”

“Wally Kisley reckons that the runaway mine train was sabotaged with a so-called hollow or shaped charge. May I ask are you aware—”

“I know what a shaped charge is, thank you. Though, admittedly, the average farmer dynamiting stumps does not.”

“Nor the average coal miner dynamiting the seam,” said Bell.

“You are postulating a fellow with an extraordinary skill with explosives. I knowwhat a shaped charge is, but I would likely blow my head off trying to fashion one. Particularly disguised as coal that would fool an experienced fireman. Extraordinary knowledge.”

“I’ve got Wish Clarke tracking down Laurence Rosania.”

“Rosania?” Van Dorn stroked his red whiskers. “Morally, I would put nothing past Rosania of course. But why would a successful safecracker with his refined tastes stoop to blowing up coal mines and steamboats? It wouldn’t be worth his trouble or the risk. He’s made a splendid career of not getting caught. Yet.”

“I’m betting that Rosania can point us toward other experts in what must be a small field of inquiry. And I’ve asked Grady Forrer to research who among the military are experimenting with hollow charges, other than the fellows at the Torpedo Station.”

Van Dorn asked, “What’s your next move?” and Isaac Bell realized with a swell of pride that the Boss was treating him more like a fellow detective than a new man on the job.

“My next move is to find out who bought a controlling interest in Black Jack Gleason’s coal mines and coking plants within a week of his death.”

“But if all this sabotage is in aid of a crime of profit, your provocateur theory falls into a cocked hat.”

“Except for one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“You told me not to take sides.”

“I meant between the operators and the union.”

“Your same advice could apply to evidencethis early in my case.

19

“There’s a lady to see you, Isaac.”

“Lady?” Bell yawned. He looked up blearily from a fresh stack of newspaper cuttings. “What kind of lady?”

Grady Forrer removed his spectacles, polished them on his shirtfront, and considered. “I would characterize her as the beautiful kind of lady with a snowy complexion and glossy black locks.”

Isaac Bell jumped to his feet. “Gray eyes?”

“Like pearls in moonlight.”

“Send her in– No, wait! I better see her in the main office. Where is she now?”

“Reception room.”

Bell buttoned his coat over his shoulder holster, smoothed his mustache, and rushed into the main offices. Off-duty detectives were jostling for turns at the peephole that afforded an advance look at customers waiting in the reception room. Bell burst through the door.

Mary Higgins turned from the window. A sunbeam slanted through her eyes.

Diamond dust and diamond flakes,thought Isaac Bell. I’m a goner.

Her voice was even prettier than he remembered.

“I will not apologize for slapping you.”

“The first slap or the second?”

“Both,” she said. “I’m not sorry for either.”

“My jaw’s still sore,” said Bell. “But I’m not.”

“Why not?”

“I deserved it. I misled you.”

“You surely did.”

“I apologize.”

Mary looked him in the eye. “No. That is not necessary. You were doing the job your bosses demanded and you got stuck in it.”

“I insist,” said Bell. “I’m sorry.”

“I don’t want your apology. I won’t accept it.”

“What would you accept?”

“We could try again for tea,” she smiled.

“How about breakfast? Which we missed last time.”

“Breakfast would be appropriate.”

“I hear the restaurant downstairs is a good one. Do you mind eating with capitalists?”

“I will take it as an opportunity.”

“For what?”

“To observe the enemy up close,” she replied.

“You’re smiling,” said Bell. “But I can’t tell if you’re joking.”

“Not while miners walk the Monongahela Valley.”

“You were there?”

Mary nodded. “Their spirits are high. But rain is forecast.”

The Cadillac Hotel’s breakfast room was packed with out-of-town buyers. A bribe to the headwaiter got them the last table. Mary noticed the money pass hands and said, after they were seated and she had spread her napkin on her lap, “Do I assume correctly that, in truth, your father did not lose his mansion in the Panic of ’93?”

“He did not. Nor is it in the Back Bay. I was born in Louisburg Square.”

Mary took a folded newspaper page from her purse, laid it beside her.

“That would make you a Bell of the American States Bank.”

“That is my father’s bank. How is it that you know Boston?”

“Why do you work as a detective?”

“Because I want to.”

Mary returned his even gaze with a searching one of her own. Before she could ask a question, they were interrupted by a loud man at the next table, a wholesaler entertaining buyers. “The shirtwaist and skirt will be replaced next year by a full-costume combination – a single piece of garment– How do I know? Paris declares such combinations plebeian, particularly in different texture or color. New York will lead the change, and your ladies in Chicago will take the same view.”

Mary looked down at her gray shirtwaist and blue skirt and smiled. “So I’m to be plebeian?”

“You look lovely,” said Bell. “I mean, stylish and attractive.”

“Do you really believe that Van Dorns are different than Pinkertons?”

“I know they are. How is it that you know Boston?”

“How are Van Dorns different?”

“We believe that the innocent are sacred.”

“Those are pretty words.”

“Words to live by. But before we debate further, our waiter is headed this way, the restaurant is busy, and we should order before they run out. What would you like for breakfast?”

“What are you having?”

“Everything that can’t run away. I’ve been up all night and I am starving.”

“I walked from the ferry. I’m starving, too. I’ll have what you’re having.”

Bell picked up the menu. “Good morning,” he said to the waiter. “We both want coffee, buckwheat pancakes with cranberries, fried bananas, omelets with mushrooms, and calf’s liver.” Mary was nodding approvingly. Bell asked, “With onions?”

“And bacon.”

“You heard the lady. And may we have our coffee as soon as humanly possible?” Of Mary he asked, again, “How is it that you know Boston?”

“I am by occupation a schoolteacher. I graduated from the Girls’ Latin School.”

“So you were born in Boston.”

“No. My parents moved us there so my brother and I could attend the Latin Schools. Father found work as a tugboat captain and we lived on the boat.” She smiled. “Yes, I know what you’re thinking. The saloon was another time in another city. Father was always changing jobs.”

“A jack-of-all-trades?”

“He could masteranything. Except people. He was like Jim. It broke his heart when he couldn’t deny that evil people exist. That’s when he gave up on the tugboat.”

“What changed his mind?”

“Too many deckhands shanghaied by knockout drops.”

“But tug captains must be used to freighters kidnapping able seamen. And no experienced deckhand would be surprised to wake up miles from land with a splitting headache. Spiked booze mans ships.”

“Father was surprised.”

The coffee arrived. Bell sought her eyes over their cups and asked, “What’s in that newspaper?”

“The reason I’m here.”

“I thought you came to not apologize.”

Mary Higgins did not smile back but thrust the clipping across the table. “Read this.”

Bell glanced at the headline and handed it back.

“I read it last night,” he said and recited the last paragraph from memory:

“It is understood that a great amount of evidence of the Coal Trust’s existence, and proof that the railroads are large owners in the coal mines, and that they combine to regulate the price of coal to the seaboard and in every important city not only by setting carrying charges but also by naming the price at which retailers shall put the coal on the market, is in possession of Jim Higgins, president of the Strike Committee. Higgins will probably be called upon by the attorney general in the course of the investigations to be commenced.”

Mary was staring at him.

Bell said, “I have a photographic memory.”

“I thought so. I have one, too. I always wondered if my eyes move while I’m remembering. Now I know.”

“How did your brother become president of the Strike Committee?”

“By having the guts to stand up for it.”

“How did he get ahold of the evidence?”

“He carried it out the back door of a Denver union hall while the Pinkertons were breaking in the front door.”

“How did that evidence get all the way to Denver?”

“They moved it from Pittsburgh and Chicago to keep it safe.”

“Well, I guess that didn’t work… Does your brother realize the danger he’s in holding that stuff?”

“He doesn’t think about it.”

“But you do,” said Bell, guessing what was coming next.

Mary said, “It will get him murdered. They will kill him and burn the evidence before the attorney general gets around to calling him. Unless…”

“Unless?”

“Unless he is protected by a detective who claims to believe that the innocent are sacred.”

Bell nodded eagerly. It was as he had supposed and hoped. Safeguarding Jim Higgins would be an opportunity for a closer, inside look at the unions and their top organizers. That might shed light on the identity of the provocateur if he happened to be a former labor organizer. But that meant that Bell would need more men in his squad.

“We better go see the Boss.”

* * *

Upstairs in his office, Joseph Van Dorn listened to Mary Higgins’s request. He questioned her closely about the documents and elicited that Jim, too, had been born with a powerful memory and that even if the evidence was locked in a safe the fact that it resided complete in his mind put him at great risk of being murdered to prevent him from testifying. He asked if Mary had read the documents.

“Jim wouldn’t let me.”

“Of course not,” Van Dorn nodded. “Was this your sole reason for coming to New York City?”

She hesitated only a heartbeat. “Yes.”

Joseph Van Dorn nodded. “Of course…” He cast a shrewd eye on his young detective, noted how avidly Isaac Bell was watching Mary, and made up his mind.

“Your request for protection for your brother comes at a propitious moment, Miss Higgins. I have just started a new division of the Van Dorn Detective Agency, which will be named Van Dorn Protective Services.”

“You have?” asked Bell. “I hadn’t heard.”

“Because you were concentrating on your own case. Van Dorn Protective Services will provide valuables escorts, hotel house detectives, night watchmen, and, of course, bodyguards. Protecting Jim Higgins will be right up their alley.”

“Will Mr. Bell be one of them?” asked Mary.

“Mr. Bell is a detective, not a bodyguard. For your brother, we will provide men especially skilled at ensuring the personal safety of our clients.”

Mary said, “But Mr. Bell did an admirable job of protecting my brother from a lynch mob.”

Van Dorn smiled at the beautiful young woman gracing his office. It was easy to see how Bell had fallen for her; nor was it hard to imagine how she could cloud a younger man’s judgment.

“We expect Van Dorns to rise to every occasion. On this occasion, however, Mr. Bell is already engaged on an important case in the coalfields that requires his full attention.”

He turned to Bell. “Thank you for bringing this situation to me, Isaac. There’s no reason for you to expend any more of your valuable time in my office while Miss Higgins and I conclude our business. Suffice it to say that I guarantee she will find her brother in excellent hands.”

Bell stood up. “Yes, sir.” To Mary he said, “Mr. Van Dorn is a man of his word. Jim will be safe.”

“Thank you for introducing me.”

“It was wonderful to see you again.”

“I look forward to seeing you, again.”

They reached awkwardly to shake hands.

Joseph Van Dorn cleared his throat – a noise that reminded Bell of a water-cooled, belt-fed Maxim gun that he and Wish Clarke had drawn fire from in Wyoming – and, with that, the young detective beat a retreat. His head was spinning. What a girl! What a wonderful girl!

* * *

“There is, of course, the matter of our fee.”

“The Strike Committee is prepared to pay the going rate,” said Mary Higgins, “asking, however, that you take into account the small fortunes of workingmen.”

“We are a new, struggling business,” said Van Dorn. “Nonetheless, we are not heartless and can offer a rate somewhat lower than we expect from bankers and jewelers. Where is your brother at this moment?”

“Chicago.”

“I have good men in Chicago. We’ll get right on it before your brother leaves for Pittsburgh.”

“What makes you think he’s going to Pittsburgh?”

“Union organizers are descending on Pittsburgh like…”

“Flies, Mr. Van Dorn?”

Van Dorn’s cheeks flushed redder than his whiskers. “I did not mean it that way. What I do mean is that I understand by reliable information that a general strike is brewing there – inspired by the Monongahela march – and any union organizer worth his salt will be heading to Pittsburgh as we speak. I have no doubt that Jim Higgins will be in the lead.”

“He is.”

“Let us be clear on one important issue, Miss Higgins. The Van Dorn Agency will not take sides. We will move Heaven and Earth to keep your brother from harm. But we will not help him pull down the institutions of law, order, property, and justice.”

“There can be no order without justice, Mr. Van Dorn. No justice without equality.”

“We are all entitled to our opinions, Miss Higgins. I would be surprised if you and I agree on much, if anything, but when the Van Dorn Agency takes the job to protect your brother we are honor-bound to keep him safe – fair enough?”

“Fair enough.” Mary Higgins stuck out her hand, and they shook on it.

* * *

Instead of descending the Cadillac Hotel’s grand staircase that curved into the lobby, Mary Higgins waited by the elevator without pressing the call button. She needed time to collect her spirit for she was deeply disturbed by her encounter with the Van Dorn Agency’s chief investigator. Joseph Van Dorn’s piercing gaze had seemed to penetrate her skull and burrow into her deepest thoughts. It was as if he knew better than she how confused she was. Van Dorn could not see why, of course. Or maybe he could. Some of it. He could not know her grand plan to block the river at Pittsburgh. She had told only her brother, and Jim would never tell anyone because he hated the idea. But Van Dorn, the renowned scourge of criminals, had suspected that something was up.