The Striker ib-6 Read online

Sounds drifted faintly up the mountain — the chug of a locomotive across the river, a steamboat whistle, bursts of raucous laughter from the saloons, and, once, the clang of the trolley. The ill-lit Gleasonburg itself appeared as a distant glow, softer than the thin moonlight filtered by river mists.

  Bell said, “Luke, maybe you ought to tell your father what you told me you overheard.”

  “What’s that, boy?”

  “The cops said the scabs are coming.”

  “What scabs? From where?”

  “Italians and Poles.”

  “Then we’ll block the trolley. Maybe even get the Brotherhoods to stop the trains.”

  “I’m afraid it won’t be that easy,” said Bell. “What Luke heard suggests that the company will barge them up the river from Pittsburgh.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “Well, that just plain ain’t possible. We haven’t even begun to strike. What would give them the idea to bring scabs? How could they know our plans? We just made ’em. Now, what are you Van Dorn fellows doing here?”

  Isaac Bell said, “Do you need our help?”

  “What kind of help? Fighting strikebreakers? We can barely feed ourselves. How we gonna pay your fees?”

  Luke said, “Pa, I asked them to help you get away.”

  “I can’t go away, son. I gotta stay here. The fight is here.”

  “But—”

  “No buts.”

  “But the Pinkertons said they’re calling up militia if you strike.”

  “I hope that’s not true.”

  Isaac Bell cocked his ear. He heard a strange sound and stepped out of the cave to hear better. Wish followed. “What the heck is that?”

  “Sounds like music.”

  It grew slightly louder, as if climbing on the vapors from far below.

  “I’ll be,” said Wish. “Recognize that?”

  Bell picked up the tune and sang softly.

  “You can hear them sigh and wish to die,

  You can see them wink the other eye

  At the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo.”

  The source was a mystery. None of the plank-and-barrel saloons had the means to hire orchestras. It certainly was not Reilly’s upright. Bell heard violins and horns, in addition to a piano, clarinets, and a double bass. And while there was no denying there were brothels in Gleasonburg, no one had the money to support a dance hall.

  “There,” he said. “Look on the water.”

  A steam yacht rounded a bend in the river. It was lighted end to end by electricity, its windows and portholes casting more light than the town and the moon combined. Bell recognized the clean and graceful lines of a Herreshoff, a magnificent boat built in Rhode Island. He was too far away to see the orchestra, but he could hear the musicians finish playing “The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo” and then jump smoothly into Joplin’s “Easy Winners.”

  “I’ll bet that’s Gleason’s steam yacht. The Monongahela.”

  “I wouldn’t mind being at that party,” said Wish.

  “What’s that following it?” asked Bell.

  A dark form, much longer than the steam yacht and four times as wide, crept after it. Only when it had completely rounded the bend could they see the lights of a towboat pushing a score of barges lashed together.

  The orchestra bounced to the new hit “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?”

  A loud steam whistle drowned out the music. The tow turned ponderously across the current and headed toward the barge dock.

  Luke and his father had followed them out of the cave. “Barge tow,” said Zeke. “Empties coming back from Pittsburgh.”

  Bell focused his keen eyes on the tow as it neared the barge dock. It was difficult to see for sure, but he sensed curious ripples of motion within the barges, like cattle boats landing for slaughter. “They’re not empty.”

  “Who the heck barges coal up the river?”

  “They’re not carrying coal… They’re full of men.”

  Bell looked at Wish and the two detectives shook their heads in amazement. The strikers would have their hands full. While they were still getting organized, Black Jack Gleason’s yacht had escorted scab labor straight to their back door.

  Luke said, “Oh, Pa, I’m powerful sorry.”

  Zeke stood there, shoulders bowed, and felt blindly for his son’s hand.

  The Monongahela stationed herself in the middle of the river. The steamboat pushed the barges against the dock, and soon Bell saw lanterns bobbing as the Gleason police began herding the men off the barges and up Dock Street.

  “What—”

  A white flash in the middle of the river lit the water from shore to shore and etched the surrounding hills as stark as snow. It cast a diamond brilliance on the tipple that towered over the shantytown, on a tow of laden coal barges moored to the tipple pier, and on the scabs shuffling ashore — a thousand workmen clutching bundles — their startled faces whipped to the sudden burst of light.

  Isaac Bell fixed on its source and saw the Monongahela’s superstructure jump straight up in the air. Cabins, navigation bridge, and smokestack parted from the steam yacht’s sleek hull. For half a second, they appeared to float.

  16

  A thunderous double salvo roared like battleship guns.

  Isaac Bell, high above the river, felt the heat of the explosion on his face.

  Then silence and darkness settled on the water, the town, and the hills. The music had stopped. Jagged flames pierced the dark. The yacht’s hull was burning.

  “What happened?” cried Luke.

  “Her boiler blew,” said Zeke. “The Good Lord has intervened! He has struck that Satan dead.”

  Isaac Bell exchanged dubious glances with Wish Clarke.

  The younger detective spoke first. “That one-two punch sounded like someone lent the Good Lord a hand with a hundred pounds of dynamite. First the dynamite, then the boiler.”

  “Isaac, old son,” said Aloysius Clarke. “I do believe you’re getting the hang of your line.”

  “We better get down there and lend a hand.”

  * * *

  Bell discovered as he and Wish pushed their way onto the dock that the Polish and Italian scabs had not been imported from their home countries. Nor had the numerous black men come directly from the South. They had been rounded up from the coalfields of eastern Pennsylvania, where an anthracite strike had shut down the hard-coal mines. Those he talked to were stunned by the explosion, bewildered, and afraid.

  “They didn’t tell us nothing about the union.”

  “They just said there was jobs.”

  In the middle of the river, the steamboat that had brought the scab tow was circling the burning remains of the Monongahela, playing lights on the water, looking for survivors. Suddenly, her whistle shrieked an alarm.

  “Now what?” asked Wish.

  Bell pointed upstream where the tipple loomed darkly against the night sky. “Coal barges adrift.”

  The entire tow that had been moored to the tipple pier — a fleet of twenty loaded barges lashed together — wheeled ponderously into the river and picked up speed as the powerful current dragged it downstream.

  “How in heck did they break loose?”

  “First thing I’ll ask, come morning,” said Isaac Bell.

  Wish said, “Amazing how many things went wrong at once.”

  Isaac Bell’s eyes shot from the drifting tow to the burning yacht to the bewildered scabs milling on the dock to the steamboat, whose captain had stopped his engine to let the current sweep him away from the wreck.

  “Too many things. And I have a bad hunch it isn’t over.”

  When the boat was a safe distance from any possible survivors still in the water, her big stern wheel churned, and she raced to capture the drifting coal barges. Deckhands scrambled with lines and the steamboat tied on. Stern wheel thrashing the water, she swung the lead barges into the current to maste
r the tow.

  “He’s got her,” said Wish. “Captain’s a man to ride the river with.”

  Just as he spoke, the big steamboat exploded with a colossal double roar that toppled her chimneys and wheelhouse into the river. To Bell’s ear, the double roar echoed the one-two that destroyed the Monongahela.

  But unlike the yacht, which was still drifting and on fire, the big steamboat sank straight to the bottom, leaving the wreckage of her upper decks exposed. The current slammed the coal barges against her, ripping their wooden hulls. Within minutes, twenty had sunk, blocking the channel to Pittsburgh.

  “My provocateur,” said Isaac Bell, “is getting the hang of his line, too.”

  17

  A pipe organ dominated the front room of bloom House, the finest mansion in Pittsburgh. The dining room, ablaze in candle- and electric light, seated thirty-six comfortably. Livery servants glided in with silver trays from a distant kitchen. But R. Kenneth Bloom, the father of Isaac Bell’s school friend Kenny, did not look happy. Nor, Bell observed, did his dinner guests, Bloom’s fellow coal barons, railroad magnates, and steel tycoons, whose evening clothes glittered with diamond studs and cuff links.

  Bloom Sr., red-faced and carrying too much weight to be healthy, planted both hands on the snow-white cloth in order to stand up from his chair. He raised his glass.

  “I won’t say I liked him. But he was one of ours. Gentlemen, I give you Black Jack Gleason— Struck down by the union! May he rest in peace.”

  “Rest in peace!” thundered up and down the long table.

  “And may the unionists burn in Hell!” echoed back.

  Isaac Bell touched water to his lips.

  Kenny Bloom, in line to inherit half the anthracite coal in Pennsylvania from his mother, and control of the Reading Railroad and vast bituminous fields from his father, winked at Bell. “We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” he muttered. “But, if we did, the things we could say.” He drank deeply. “I’m so glad you came, Isaac. These dinners get mighty grim.”

  “Thank you for inviting me.”

  Kenny grinned, “Didn’t give me much choice, did you, Mr. Make-Believe Insurance Man?”

  “I do appreciate it.”

  Halfway up the table, Pennsylvania’s attorney general raised his voice. “The union will pay for this outrage. Steamboats dynamited. Innocent workingmen, attempting to travel to Gleasonburg to get an honest job, injured. River blocked. Coal traffic at a standstill.”

  “And Gleason murdered.”

  “That, too. Yes, sir, the rabid dogs will pay.”

  Kenny said to Bell, “They should, and they will, but he’s talking through his hat because West Virginia’s attorney general gets first crack, seeing as how they killed Black Jack in their state.”

  “I’m not convinced,” said Bell, “that the union had anything to do with it.”

  The military precision of back-to-back dynamitings simultaneous with the barge tow set adrift seemed to him far beyond the capability of the union organizers, who were scrambling to keep one step ahead of the Pinkertons. Inspections of the steamboat boiler rooms had increased his skepticism.

  But Kenny, who had been hitting the whiskey before dinner, didn’t hear him. He was boasting instead to everyone at their end of the table about events in the anthracite fields. “So we mounted a Gatling gun on the back of a Mercedes Simplex and welded on steel plates to protect the driver.”

  “Did it work?”

  “Did it work? I’ll say it worked,” Kenny snickered. “The strikers call it the Death Special.”

  At the top of the table, Bloom Sr. was addressing the strikers’ demands.

  “The eight-hour workday will be the ruination of the coal business.”

  “Hear! Hear!”

  “And I’ve heard more than enough nonsense about safety. The miner has only himself to blame if he doesn’t keep his workplace in safe condition.”

  Another baron agreed. “It’s not my fault if he refuses to mine his coal properly, scrape down dangerous slate, and install proper timbering.”

  “Risk is naturally attached to the trade. Fact is, with prices tumbling, we’ll be lucky to stay in business.”

  Bell noticed a perplexed expression on the face of an older mine operator, who called up table, “The iniquitous price we’re paying to ship coal isn’t helping either.”

  Bloom Sr. returned a tight smile. “The railroad’s hands are tied, Mr. Morrison.”

  “By whom, sir? Surely not the government?”

  “Them, too, but it’s not like we don’t report to our investors.”

  “There you go blaming Wall Street again. Didn’t used to, in my day. We called our own tune. If the banks wanted to make money, they were welcome to invest with us. But they did not presume to tell us how to dig coal or how to ship it.”

  “Well, sir, these are different days.”

  Isaac Bell noticed Kenny observing his father with a thoughtful, if not troubled, expression. “Sounds like you’ll have your work cut out for you when it’s your turn to run the railroad.”

  “What makes you think I will run the railroad?”

  “You’re his son, his only son, and you’ve been working with him since you left Brown.”

  “I’d like nothing better,” said Kenny. “And I’m trying my darnedest to learn as fast as I can. But it may not be my choice.”

  “Surely your father prefers you.”

  “Of course he does. That was settled the day I graduated. But what if they don’t?”

  “They?” asked Bell, though he suspected the answer already.

  “The banks.”

  Bell glanced up the table at Mr. Bloom. Behind the boasts and the bluster, even the rich and powerful railroad president R. Kenneth Bloom, Sr., was not in command of coal.

  “Which banks?” he asked.

  “The New York banks.”

  “Which ones?”

  Kenny shrugged.

  “You don’t know?”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  Bell leveled a stern gaze at the railroad heir. “Not at liberty? You sound like a cautious lawyer instead of the pal who ran off to the circus with me.”

  “That almost got us killed.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which banks?”

  Kenny Bloom grinned. He looked, Bell thought, drunk, embarrassed, and a little scared. “Let me answer your nosy question this way — in a question back at you. Do you believe that the formation of the U.S. Steel Corporation is an end or a beginning?”

  “End or beginning of what?”

  “We’re dodo birds out here, Isaac. The self-determined Pittsburgh operator is going extinct. So’s the independent railroad that hauls coal. Wall Street is killing us off. Black Jack Gleason was a dodo. So’s every man at this table. Some of them just don’t know it yet.”

  “Not you. You’re young. You’re like me. It’s 1902. We’re just starting out.”

  Kenny Bloom stuck out his hand. “Shake hands with the son of a dodo.”

  Bell formed a grin as lopsided as Kenny’s and shook his hand.

  Kenny said, “If you’re so fired up to know which banks, look in the newspapers who made Carnegie and Frick into U.S. Steel.”

  Bell’s father was a banker, a Boston banker. Boston was a long way from New York, and the two cities banked differently. But some things were the same. And if there was one thing Isaac Bell had learned from his father, and his grandfather, about banks, it was those who called the tune lay low.

  He said, “It won’t be in the newspapers. Those who ran the show stayed backstage.”

  Kenny pulled an embossed card from his pocket and pressed it into Bell’s hand. “Here’s a rail pass, good anywhere in the country. Go to Boston. Ask your father which banks.”

  “We are not on speaking terms,” said Bell.

  “Because you’re a detective?”

  “He wants me in the bank.”

&nbs
p; “What are you going to do?”

  “Be a detective.”

  “That is too bad. He is a good fellow.”

  “I know,” said Bell. “He is the best.” He held up the pass. “O.K. if I keep this?”

  “Your grandfather left you plenty. You can afford to buy a ticket.”

  “I would like to keep it,” said Bell. “Money talks. But a railroad pass from the son of a dodo shouts.”

  The servants removed the oyster shells and the soup bowls and brought caviar, herring, and pâté. Bell switched from champagne to a sauterne. Kenny stayed with his whiskey.

  “Are you going to buy Gleason’s mines?” Bell asked him.

  “Somebody beat us to it. Snapped up the entire Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company, lock, stock, and barrel.”

  “Who?”

  “I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

  “But not a Pittsburgh dodo,” said Isaac Bell.

  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.”