The Striker Read online

  As he continued up the rails, out of the mine, he recalled the cops who’d been watching him. Rather than get caught with the broken link if they made him turn out his pockets, he slipped it into a crack between a prop and the coal seam and noted the spot carefully in his memory—four support props above the lowest side gallery.

  He started up. Or was it three? He went back, counted again, touching each. Four. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck. He had a photographic memory. How could he forget a picture so simple as these four ceiling props standing in a row? He noticed a strange silence. Something had changed in the narrow passages. The ventilators had stopped blowing fresh air.

  The damps were gathering again. No wonder he felt light-headed. Bell turned and stumbled upward, toward the distant mouth. If it was blackdamp, he hadn’t a prayer. The carbonic acid would stop him within seconds. White damp from the extinguished fire? Minutes. Less than ten.

  He broke into a shambling run. His head was pounding and his heart hammered in his chest. He imagined the poison gases chasing after him, breaking like a tidal wave, cresting, splashing, clutching his boots, his knees, tugging at his legs, suction pulling him under. He ran harder, his fading light bouncing low shadows from the crossties. Two ties for each step. He made himself stretch for three longer strides, flowing over the floor of the mine faster than the wave crashing after him.

  He was pulling ahead when he saw something gleam in his light. It was tucked against the right rail, half obscured by a wooden tie. He slowed, stopped, stared down at it, desperately trying to mine thoughts from a heavy head. The shackle? Did he imagine it? Or did he see a piece of it directly under his feet? Should he try to pick it up? He had the feeling that if he knelt to pick it up, he might never stand again. His head was spinning. But it was important. The saboteur . . . He gathered his strength and dropped to one knee. Before he could reach it, it disappeared in a shadow that moved over it.

  Isaac Bell turned his head to see what caused the shadow.

  He sensed motion and found himself looking into golden eyes as simultaneously remote and intent as those of a wolf that had fixed on its prey. The jaws between the eyes formed a fist. The white damp had rattled his mind. He had to stand up. He had to run. The fist traveled at his face with the speed and power of a locomotive. Bell’s own fists leaped automatically to block and counterpunch. Then he heard an explosion, deep in his head, and then he saw nothing.

  • • •

  ISAAC BELL awakened to a current of cool air fanning his face.

  He was flat on his back on the ties between two rails. An electric bulb blazed down from the rough-hewn ceiling of coal. His head ached, his jaw was sore, and as he sat up and looked around he recalled the ventilators stopping and him running from the damp. The fans were running again, the air just fresh enough to revive him. He climbed to his feet and started up the sloping haulageway, his mind shambling through dreamlike memories.

  He had found the broken link of the bridle chain. He had hidden it in a crack between the tunnel wall and a roof prop. Fourth prop above the deepest gallery. He had looked for the missing shackle. He hadn’t found it. Or had he? Thoughts cascaded. He had seen it. He hadn’t seen it. He saw amber eyes. He saw a shadow. He saw a ghostly fist. His head ached. So did his jaw. He had fallen hard. And the only thing he knew for sure was that he was very lucky that the fans had started up again before the damps suffocated him.

  Ahead, he saw the light of the mouth. He quickened his pace.

  “Where the heck did you come from?”

  Some miners rigging new electrical wires were staring at him.

  Bell jerked a thumb in the general direction of the depths of the mountain and said, “Tell the mechanician boys who fixed them ventilators I’m going to buy ’em a drink.”

  Hundreds of men were waiting to enter the mine and go back to work. Bell melted into the crowd, avoiding the company cops, slipped out the gates, and hurried toward the telegraph office. Dodging the goats that roamed Gleasonburg’s Main Street, a shanty-lined dirt road rutted by wagon wheels and reeking of sewage, he pondered the telegram that he would send to Joseph Van Dorn.

  Who would sabotage a mine? No union man in his right mind would murder his own people. Certainly not the mild-mannered Jim Higgins who preached moderation. But if not the union saboteurs he had been ordered to hunt—criminals who he was now firmly convinced did not exist—then who? Could they be the owners of the mine? But the owners had everything to lose if they couldn’t dig coal. This disaster could have been much worse. Hundreds could have died. The mine could have been blocked for months instead of days.

  But if not the union and not the owners, who?

  With that unanswered, Bell turned his thoughts to a stranger mystery. It certainly appeared that a saboteur had chiseled the chain apart. But at the moment when the chain had fractured, the coal train had been climbing to the tipple in plain sight of hundreds of miners. Not one of them, Isaac Bell himself included, had seen a blacksmith riding the lead coal car, attacking the bridle chain with hammer and chisel.

  4

  ISAAC BELL TOOK TWO BATHS UPON ARRIVING IN PITTSBURGH, Pennsylvania, the first at the five-cent lodging house where he had left his bags and scrubbed off enough coal dust to gain admittance to the city’s exclusive Duquesne Club—an ornate Romanesque Revival building that dominated the Golden Triangle where the Monongahela joined the Allegheny to form the Ohio River—the second bath at the Duquesne Club before donning an immaculate white suit.

  He asked the front-hall porter to escort his lunch guest, Mr. Van Dorn, to the bar when he arrived. Then the young detective shouldered into the favorite watering hole of the industrial barons and railroad tycoons who ruled the capital of America’s coal and steel empire. Having researched the coal industry meticulously, he recognized many in the enormous room. But the man who captured his attention right off was holding court under an acanthus-leaf-carved mantel topped by life-size mahogany satyrs—John “Black Jack” Gleason, ruthless owner of the Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company.

  If the day before yesterday’s runaway train, explosion, and deaths of six doorboys in Mine No. 1 troubled Gleason at all, it did not show. Instead, he was taunting his fellow barons, with a grin like the satyrs’: “When I drive the union out of West Virginia, my mines will sell coal cheaper than every man in this room. I’ll take your customers.”

  A patrician turned red in the face. “My grandfather was a founding member of this club, sir, and I do not hesitate to tell you that you are a vulture!”

  “Proud of it,” Gleason fired back. “If you don’t stick with me against the union, I’ll buy your bones at bankrupts’ auction.”

  The founder’s grandson stormed out. But the others, Bell noticed, murmured compromisingly, and looked relieved when one of their number steered the conversation toward the Pirates’ winning streak.

  “There you are, Isaac.”

  Joseph Van Dorn enveloped Bell’s big hand in a manicured ham-size paw and shook it firmly. He was tall, broad in the chest, broader in the belly, and light on his feet, a balding man in his forties who might have passed for a sea captain who had prospered in the China Trade or a blacksmith who had invented a tool that made him rich. He appeared convivial, with a ready smile that could brighten his hooded eyes. Red burnsides cascading to an even redder beard gave the impression of a man more hail-fellow-well-met than the scourge of the underworld, and many a confined criminal was still wondering how he got confused.

  The founder and chief investigator of the Van Dorn Detective Agency was not impressed by much, nor easily nonplussed, but, taking in the lavish club and the wealthy members, he asked in a low voice that carried no farther than Isaac Bell’s ears, “How’d you wangle your way in here?”

  “My school friend Kenny Bloom’s father put in a word.”

  “Do they know you’re a detective?”

  “No, sir. I’m using the Dagget front.”

  “Well done. You can learn a lo
t in a place like this. Now, what’s all this ‘urgent report’ about?”

  Bell had spoken with the dining room captain and reserved a table in a quiet corner. He hurried Van Dorn to it. But before he could say a word about the unlikely nature of union sabotage, Van Dorn said, “You won’t believe this, Isaac. I just met the President.”

  “Black Jack?”

  “Not Gleason. The President!”

  “Beg pardon, sir?”

  “Of the United States! TR himself. Big as life. Shook my hand— Littler fellow than you’d think. But full of fire. Shook my hand, big as life.”

  “Well, that’s wonderful, sir. Now, what I found in the mine—”

  “The Van Dorn Detective Agency has snagged a plum job. Prince Henry’s coming. German Prince Henry of Prussia. Coming to visit America. And we’re one of the outfits the Secret Service is hiring to help protect him. That’s why Teddy asked me to the White House. I’ll tell you this, Isaac, long as the Van Dorns keep Prince Henry unscathed by anarchist assassins, we’ll be in the catbird seat.”

  Bell said, “Congratulations, sir. That is wonderful news.”

  He was fully aware of Van Dorn’s dream of expanding the Van Dorn Detective Agency from its Chicago base into a crack transcontinental outfit with field offices in every city and even, one day, the capitals of Europe. The Prince Henry job had come from working at it “eight days in the week, thirteen months in the year,” and the Boss was understandably excited.

  “Report quickly, Isaac. I’m meeting with Pittsburgh’s police chief in an hour. They’ll be giving Prince Henry a big testimonial dinner right here in this club.”

  Bell had to shift Van Dorn’s attention to get permission to investigate the accident for the sake of justice even though the agency was originally hired by the coal company. He said, “The proud Van Dorn motto—We never give up! Never!—is based on principles.”

  “Of course it is. We never ignore crime. We never abandon innocents.”

  “The first thing you taught me, sir. We were in Chicago, in Jimmy Armstrong’s Saloon, and you said, ‘The innocent are sacred and . . .’”

  The younger man paused expectantly.

  Joseph Van Dorn was obliged to complete the creed he drilled into his detectives: “. . . and it is the duty of the strong to protect them.”

  “The boys killed in the mining accident were innocent, sir. The union man Jim Higgins is innocent of the murder charge. And the runaway train was not an accident.”

  Van Dorn’s eyes gleamed, and Bell knew he had his attention. “Can you pinpoint the saboteurs who caused it?”

  “It was not a saboteur.”

  “What?”

  “Not in the sense you mean. It was not union sabotage.”

  “Then who?”

  “Not a saboteur. A provocateur.”

  “What the devil are you talking about? Are you mincing words? Sabotage is sabotage.”

  “No it isn’t, sir. Not in the way you mean.”

  “Stop telling me what I mean and tell me what you mean.”

  “The broken chain that caused the accident was deliberately fractured, a fracture very likely caused, I believe, by a provocateur.”

  “To what purpose?” Van Dorn demanded.

  “To perpetrate a larger crime.”

  “What larger crime?”

  “I don’t know,” Bell admitted. “Although there have been incidents in labor disputes when provocateurs were employed by owners to fabricate excuses to arrest unionists. But I don’t think it is that.”

  Van Dorn sat back and crossed his arms over his mighty chest. “I’m relieved to hear your logic. Wrecking his own coal mine is a mighty expensive method for Black Jack Gleason to arrest unionists.”

  “I know. Which is why I wonder—”

  “Where were you when he sabotaged the mine train? Didn’t I send you there to prevent such attacks?”

  Isaac Bell said, “I’m sorry I let you down, sir.”

  Van Dorn stared hard at him for a full twenty seconds. Finally, he spoke. “We’ll get to that later. What did you see?”

  Bell reported what stoked his suspicions: the suicidal effect of underground sabotage; the mysterious chisel mark he found on the broken link; and the fact that by arresting Higgins, the coal company had undercut the union effort.

  Joseph Van Dorn stared at Isaac Bell.

  Bell met his gaze coolly. The Boss was a very ambitious man, but he was an honest man and a responsible man.

  “Against my better judgment,” Van Dorn said at last, “I will give you permission to investigate this vague idea for one week. One week only.”

  “Thank you, sir. May I draw on men to help me?”

  “I can’t spare anyone to help you. This Prince Henry tour requires every hand. You’re on your own.”

  There was a sudden ruckus on the far side of the richly decorated dining room. Black Jack Gleason’s party were swaggering in and sitting down for lunch. Gleason pounded his fist on the table and vowed in a loud voice, “I will destroy the mining unions once and for all.”

  The older mineowners counseled caution, noting that in Pennsylvania the union was strong: Winter is coming, we can’t afford a strike.

  “The nation won’t put up with millions freezing in their homes.”

  “It’s already cost the anthracite operators two million to pay, feed, lodge, and arm five thousand Coal and Iron Police with revolvers and breech-loading-magazine rifles. Heck, if we increase the miners’ pay ten cents a day, it would cost less than five thousand armed policemen.”

  Gleason hit the tablecloth again. Silver jumped. Waiters sprang to rescue crystal. “Gentlemen, I will say it again. I will destroy the mining unions once and for all.”

  “But mightn’t we do better to give the miners a small raise and nip it in the bud?” asked an owner.

  “Before that damned dictator President Roosevelt horns in,” warned another. “He’ll demand we recognize the union.”

  Van Dorn said to Bell, “The fellows around TR told me that he would love nothing more than to settle a strike.”

  Black Jack Gleason laughed at compromise. “If they strike, I’ll break their strike like I broke every strike before,” he boasted.

  Bell said to Van Dorn, “I heard him in the bar. He wants a strike if it will hurt his competitors.”

  “Hard man,” said Van Dorn. “But very capable.” His manner toward Bell softened slightly. He himself was a hard man, but not the sort to hide his warm feelings for a young employee he admired. Isaac Bell had been his personal apprentice after graduating from Yale and was the immigrant Irishman’s favorite protégé.

  “Be careful, Isaac. You heard Gleason. Labor and owners are scheming for every advantage in a high-stakes war. They’re digging in to fight to the death. Look out you don’t get caught between them.”

  “I won’t, sir.”

  “And whatever you do, don’t end up choosing sides.”

  “I’ll be careful, sir. I promise.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  The young man stiffened. “Sir, I’ve given you my word.”

  “No,” said Van Dorn. “You will break that promise and do something reckless the moment you let your better instincts take command.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I’ve watched you operate. You have an eye for the downtrodden. Unlike most of your privileged class, you notice that they exist. That sets you miles apart, which is commendable probably. But don’t get yourself killed trying to upend the natural order of things.”

  5

  ISAAC BELL CHANGED INTO MINER GARB IN HIS FIVE-CENT lodging house, paid the landlady to store his bags, and hurried back to the coalfields, traveling to Morgantown, West Virginia, in a B & O day coach and the final eight miles up a narrowing valley on the newly laid interurban Gleasonburg line. The trolley’s last stop was near the courthouse, a slapped-together wood-frame affair wedged between a steep hillside and the Monongahela River. It stood next to
the bigger, more substantial yellow-brick Gleason company store and housed a justice of the peace, who was the highest legal authority in the coal-mining town, his courtroom, and, in a cellar under the building, the Gleasonburg jail.

  Bell headed for the jail.

  With only a week to prove his theory, or at least make enough of a case to keep the Boss interested, he had decided on the train that his most productive first step would be to persuade the jailers to let him visit Jim Higgins. The union man knew his business. He had laid the groundwork for a strike by learning who to trust among the miners, who to look out for among the police, who to cultivate among the bosses. Bell was anxious to test his theory on the labor organizer and pick his brain as to who the provocateur might be and what he wanted.

  A crowd of miners and their wives and children were gathering around the entrance to the jail, a separate doorway beneath the courthouse steps. Bell glided through them, politely touching his cap to the ladies and sidestepping small fry. They were a somber crowd. Some of the women were red-eyed from weeping. They were the mothers, Bell realized, of the doorboys. How many, he wondered, were widowed like Sammy’s mother? How many of the boys had been their family’s sole breadwinner?

  They spoke in low tones, like a congregation waiting for the service to begin, and as Bell passed among them he heard whispers that seemed to blame Jim Higgins more than the Gleason Company for the doorboys’ deaths.

  The jail was guarded by company police. They were fat, older men and Bell feared if the mood turned ugly and the crowd swelled into an angry mob, as grieving crowds were wont to do, they were not up to protecting the accused unionist. A Pinkerton usually commanded the company squads, but he saw no detectives there. At the moment, however, the crowd was peaceful, the company police were firmly in charge. They saw him coming and blocked the door.

  Bell said, “I’d like to visit Jim Higgins.”

  “No visitors.”

  “His priest in Chicago sent me a telegram, asking me to look in on him.”

  “Ah don’t care if the damned Pope telegraphed. No visitors.”