The Striker ib-6 Read online

  She stopped on Fourteenth Street where Broadway and Fourth Avenue joined at Union Square and listened to a speaker haranguing a crowd about the coal strikes and the United States war against the Philippine insurgents.

  “Three cheers for anarchy!” he roared, and the crowd took up the cry.

  Mary Higgins put money in the hat when passed and hurried on. South of Houston Street, she cut east into the crowded Jewish district, and Bell drew closer to keep her in sight.

  “Don’t buy beef!”

  Groups of women were mobbing Kosher butcher shops and yelling at housewives who emerged with bundles: “Boycott the Beef Trust!”

  Cops gathered on the corners, big men in blue coats and tall helmets.

  Bell almost lost sight of Mary in a mob of women screaming at one another.

  “My babies are sick. They must eat.”

  Isaac wedged through and ran after Mary. He was no longer afraid of Mary seeing him. There was a grim electricity in the air — the same threat of imminent, mindless violence that he had felt in the miners’ mob at Gleasonburg. The women and the butchers and the glowering cops were all about to lose the last vestiges of reason, and Mary Higgins was caught in the middle.

  * * *

  A hundred feet ahead of Isaac Bell, half a city block, Mary Higgins followed her ears to the exciting roar of a mass meeting that was spilling from the new Irving Hall and packing Broome Street sidewalk to sidewalk. She was thrilled that the bold immigrant Jewish women leading New York’s needle-trades union battle were exerting their newly won power against the Beef Trust’s extortionate prices.

  “The Hebrews are rioting!” roared a red-faced Irishman.

  Whistles shrieked and the police advanced.

  “Break it up!”

  The women screamed back at the cops. “Who do you work for? The trusts? Or the people?”

  “Move along, sister.”

  “Cossacks!” screamed a woman, and her sisters combined to chant.

  “Cossacks! Cossacks! Cossacks!”

  “Break it up! Break it up!”

  Then a girl screamed at the top of her lungs, “What’s a penny made of?”

  “Dirty copper!”

  A big cop shoved a woman. She fell on the rain-slicked cobblestones.

  Mary Higgins jumped to help and pulled her to her feet before she was trampled.

  Another woman sprawled and her bundles went flying. Something soft landed on Mary’s boots — blood-soaked butcher paper had torn open, spilling a slab of liver. A fat cop with a handlebar mustache and bushy eyebrows knocked Mary to her knees. Terrified of being trampled, she tried to stand.

  The cop held her down and roared in her face, “What’s a pretty Irish lass doing with a bunch of dirty Yids?”

  In that eruption of hatred, Mary Higgins felt her doubts evaporate. There was a huge difference between right and wrong, and what she had to do in Pittsburgh was right. She picked up the liver, hauled back, and slapped the cop’s face with it. The soft red flesh splattered on his eyebrows and mustache and stuck to his skin. Blinded, he reeled away, shouting in anger and confusion.

  The other cops saw him pawing at his bloodstained face.

  Thirty charged up Broome Street, swinging clubs.

  The women’s screams of anger turned to shrieks of fear. They stumbled back and tried to run, surging into those behind, slipping on the wet cobblestones. Mary yanked a wild-eyed girl to her feet only to fall herself, crushed by the pack. A shoe mashed her hand against a cobblestone, another slammed into her back. The sky turned black with bodies tumbling on top of her. Struggling with all her strength, she could not rise. She could hardly breathe under the weight of the bodies. Suddenly, a powerful hand closed around her arm.

  “I’ve got you,” a strong voice cut through the shouts and screams. “Stick close.”

  The hand lifted her effortlessly up and out of the crush and set her on her feet and pulled her through the mob as if its owner was a mighty sword cleaving a path through the melee and around a corner.

  More cops were coming on the run.

  “Don’t look at them. Walk fast. Don’t run.”

  She finally got a glimpse of her rescuer at Canal Street when he let go of her arm and turned to her. A broad-shouldered workman in a loose coat and overalls. He had a red scarf knotted at his throat, a battered felt hat with the brim slung over his eyes.

  “Are you all right?” he asked her.

  “You saved my life.”

  “Someone had to. I just happened to be close enough.”

  She offered her hand. “Thank you. I’m Mary Higgins.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mary Higgins. I’m John Claggart.”

  22

  Those poor women. They were right. The cops attacked like Cossacks.”

  John Claggart had led her into an eatery that catered to the workers digging the ditch for the Rapid Transit Subway and pressed a hot cup of coffee into her trembling hands. “If you give cops the Devil’s task,” he answered, “they’ll use the Devil’s methods.”

  “It should make every American cheek tingle with shame.”

  “This is a bum government,” said Claggart. “Rotten to the core.”

  “Three cheers for anarchy,” Mary said bitterly.

  Claggart shook his head. “Anarchy’s a joke. It gets you nowhere. You have to do something. Something the bloodsucking capitalists will feel like a body blow. Something that will knock them flat.”

  He was, Mary thought, very intelligent-looking. Though of similar build to the sturdy ditchdiggers downing their knockwurst and pea soup, he had an air of refinement about him that reminded her of Isaac. Also, like Isaac, he possessed the unflappable gaze of a man accustomed to success, which was rare in workmen beaten down by the struggle to put bread on the table. He was not, of course, as handsome as Isaac. Nor, she realized, was he as warm.

  She could see a remoteness in his eyes, almost an emptiness. She had thought at first glance that they were hazel-colored, but they were actually that rarest of colors, amber. They looked golden in the smoky light of the eatery. But they did not glow like gold. They were opaque like copper. If, as she suspected, John Claggart was a man who harbored secrets, his eyes would never give them up. But whatever secrets he harbored, she did not care. She did not need warmth.

  “I know a way,” she said, “to knock them flat.”

  * * *

  Isaac Bell searched for Mary Higgins at the Tombs, the damp and gloomy city prison, still under construction, where the police had booked nearly a hundred women. He had last seen her half a block away in a crush of cops and boycotters, but before he fought his way to the spot she had vanished. A telephone call to the Cadillac Hotel had produced a messenger with a letter of introduction signed by Joseph Van Dorn. The Boss had already made enough friends in New York to get special treatment — as did Mary’s Irish name. But it didn’t help. The Halls of Justice had no record of a Mary Higgins being arrested.

  “You might check the Emergency Hospital for Women on East Twenty-sixth,” said a sympathetic sergeant. “God forbid Miss Higgins may have fallen in the melee. Those Hebrew women are ferocious.”

  “No hospitals closer?”

  “Brooklyn?”

  It was raining hard when he stepped out, and he stood sheltered under the portico while he looked for a horse cab or a streetcar. He spotted a cab and ran for it. A workman in a loose-fitting coat and slouch hat got to it first. A dirty bandage masked his nose and cheeks, and folds of a red neckerchief muffled his chin.

  “Take it,” said Bell. Blood had soaked the bandage, and he guessed the poor devil had been caught in the riot.

  “No, you take it,” the man said and turned away.

  Bell had glimpsed the eyes under the brim of the hat, and his dream in the coal mine was suddenly as real as the rain pelting down. The man glanced back and headed around the corner. Bell hurried after him.

  “Wait!”

  The man walked faster.

 
“Wait. You, sir!”

  Bell broke into a run.

  The man he was following darted to the demolition site where the thick granite walls of the old Tombs were being leveled and slipped between two remaining columns. Maybe he had been injured working on the demolition, thought Bell.

  “Hold on, there!”

  The man looked back again. When he saw Bell still following, he ran down an exposed flight of stairs. Bell followed him, deep down, into an enormous cellar that reeked of decay. The little light there came from holes in the ceiling.

  The man stopped suddenly.

  “Are you following me?”

  “Yes,” said Bell. “Didn’t you hear me shouting?” He peered at features obscured by bandage and neckerchief and shadowed by the hat. “Have we met, sir?”

  “Not that I recall,” he answered through the folds of his neckerchief. “Where are you from?”

  “West Virginia,” said Bell.

  “Nope. Never been there.”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Mister, you’ve got cop written all over you, and I ain’t done nothing that gives no cop call to ask questions.”

  “Shrewd eye,” said Bell, thinking that fear of cops could explain him running. “But not entirely accurate. I’m not a cop. I’m a private detective.”

  “Dicks, cops, bulls, strikebreakers, you’re all the same to me. Back away, mister.”

  “I’m asking you civilly,” said Bell. “Where are you from?”

  “Don’t try and stop me.”

  “I met you somewhere. I want to know where.”

  The man moved fast, feinting like a heavyweight, with his left hand to jab and set Bell up for a knockout right. Isaac Bell was equally quick. His left flew to block the right, and his right cocked to counterpunch. But instead of swinging his fist, the amber-eyed man plunged his right hand into his coat and whipped out a revolver. The cold click of a hammer thumbed back to fire told the young detective he had been duped by a master.

  “You look surprised.”

  Bell peered past the gun into his eyes. Grady Forrer was right. In this dim light, they were gold. Equally odd was a tone of pride in the voice. Almost as if he expected Bell to express admiration for getting the drop on him. But what in blazes was going on? They had not ended up in this cellar by accident. The man had laid a trap, and Bell had obligingly walked right into it. He felt like a fool. But at least this proved that his dream in the mine had been no dream.

  “Remove your pistol from your shoulder holster. Thumb and forefinger on the butt. If I don’t see your other three fingers, you’re dead.”

  Bell reached slowly, opening his coat, gripping the butt of his single-action Colt Army with his thumb and forefinger and slowly pulling the revolver from his holster. The man reached for it. Bell placed it in his palm and he slipped it into his shoulder holster.

  “Now your sleeve gun.”

  Bell shook his two-shot derringer from his sleeve and handed it over.

  “And your other one.”

  “I don’t have another sleeve gun.”

  “It’s in your coat pocket.” He snapped his fingers.

  Bell pulled a single-shot derringer from his coat pocket. It was small and unusually lightweight — a “graduation” gift from Joe Van Dorn — and he had thought after repeated inspections that it did not bulge the pocket or tug the cloth.

  “Sharp eyes,” he said.

  “I’ve seen it before, sonny.”

  Bell heard the pride he had hoped to elicit. Not a world-weary I’ve seen it before but a boast. Again the man seemed to be expecting applause. Bell was impressed. The man knew his business. But he was not about to clap. Not yet. Instead he said, “Seen it before? Or tracking me? Who are you?”

  “The knife in your boot.”

  He pointed the derringer he had taken from Bell in Bell’s face and swiveled his revolver down at Bell’s feet. It looked like a Colt, thought Bell, but the hammer was unusually wide, the frame’s top strap was flat, and the front sight had been removed, undoubtedly to smooth his fast draw.

  “Which boot?”

  “I can shoot a hole in one of them. Or you can show me — slowly!”

  Bell pulled a throwing knife from his right boot. “Your hands are full. Where do you want it?”

  “Stick it in that doorjamb, if you think you can hit it.”

  The doorjamb, all that remained of the cellar woodwork not yet demolished, was twenty feet away. Bell raised his arm. The gun stayed pointed at his head. His blade flew across the cellar and stuck in the narrow strip of wood a quarter inch off dead center.

  The man with amber eyes shrugged dismissively. “Your overhand throw wastes time.”

  He dropped the derringer in his pocket, reached down under his trouser leg, and pulled out a flat sliver of steel identical to Bell’s.

  “Here’s a better way.”

  His hand flipped outward, with an underhand twist of his wrist. The knife hissed through the air and thudded beside Bell’s, dead center, in the jamb.

  Bell was betting the man would repeat that self-congratulatory lapse of attention, and it happened. He gazed proudly, as if inviting Bell to express awe. It lasted only a fraction of a second but long enough to kick, Bell sinking the point of his boot into the man’s wrist.

  His hand convulsed, his fingers splayed open.

  Bell was already reaching to catch the gun when it dropped.

  Too late. Moving with speed Bell would not have believed if he didn’t see it, the man caught the falling gun in his left hand, sidestepped Bell’s rush, and swung hard, raking Bell’s temple with the barrel. The young detective saw stars, pinwheeled across the cellar, and slammed into a wall.

  He sprang to his feet and was trying to shake sense into his head and launch a counterattack when a trio of workmen thundered down the stairs to resume demolition of the cellar.

  “What in hell—”

  The man in the long coat brushed past them and bounded up the steps with his gun and all three of Bell’s.

  Bell, scattering the trio with a bellowed “Gangway!” yanked both throwing knives from the doorjamb and tore after him.

  23

  The rain had intensified to a deluge, and Isaac Bell could not see a full block. But the downpour had cleared the streets and sidewalks surrounding the Tombs of cops and pedestrians, and across that empty expanse he thought he saw on the farthest edge of his vision a single figure. The man’s long, loose coat was flapping as he headed west toward Elm Street.

  Bell ran after him. Tall and long-legged, Bell halved the distance, when suddenly the man disappeared into a hole in the sidewalk. Isaac Bell jumped into the same hole and landed on a wooden scaffolding a few feet below grade. He saw a wooden ladder and climbed down it into a seemingly endless tunnel lit by electric lights. He found himself on the concrete floor of the covered ditch they were digging for the Rapid Transit Subway.

  It resembled an orderly and much larger coal mine. It was ten times as wide as a mine and five times as high, and brightly lighted. Instead of rickety timber props, ranks of steel columns marched into the distance, holding up massive girders that spanned the tunnel to support the trolley line on Elm Street above and the stoop lines of the buildings along the sidewalks. Huge water pipes and sewer mains — from around which the ground had been painstakingly dug — were suspended from the girders with chains.

  Bell looked downtown, where the lights were brightest, then uptown, where they faded. Far, far ahead in the uptown direction, he saw the man in the long coat weaving through the construction site, dodging workmen, steam hoists, and wheelbarrows. He stopped suddenly, handed something to a man pushing a wheelbarrow on a plank track, and broke into a run again. Bell raced after him. When he reached the point where he had seen him, the man with the barrow, and another burly workman who had dropped his barrow, blocked his path. Clutched in their fists were the dollars the man had given them.

  “No cops allowed.”

  “Don�
��t believe what he told you,” Bell shouted. “Get out of my way.”

  “Why should we believe you?”

  Bell hit the first high and low, kicked the legs out from under the second, and ran after the man in the long coat. He had a two-block lead. The concrete floor stopped abruptly. Ahead, they were digging through raw earth. Rainwater muddied the floor of the ditch. The space narrowed and grew crowded with workers with picks and shovels. Where steel columns had held the city above, here were temporary wooden beams, a rough-plank roof, and openings to the sky through which poured the rain and fading daylight.

  Bell ran for what felt like miles, city block after city block, until he thought he could not run another step, nor lift his boots once more from the grasping mud. And still the man kept running, covering the broken ground at a strong pace, brushing past startled workmen, smashing aside those who got in his way and leaving Bell to dodge the angry ones still standing.

  Bell heard thunder, and the ground shook. Streetcars rumbled overhead, high above, on temporary timbers. Lights flickered. The water pipes swayed in their chains. On he ran, ignoring shaken fists and shouts of foremen, air storming through his lungs. The tunnel changed abruptly. Gone in an instant was the muddy floor; gone the men shoveling and picking. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, had turned to stone. The builders had hit Manhattan Schist in their drive north to Grand Central Station. The bedrock beneath the city had risen to the surface, and the tunnel was boring into it. The space felt more like a mine, with jagged walls and low ceiling and the whining rumble of steam drills.

  Free of the mud, Isaac Bell poured on the speed. The man ahead of him was tiring, stumbling occasionally, and Bell was catching up. Better yet, Bell thought, the tunnel would soon come to an end. It looked like the only way out would be up one of the shafts where steel buckets were hoisting excavated rock by steam derrick. That his quarry had at least four guns and he had only knives did not slow him.