The Striker ib-6 Page 6

  “What in hell is the difference? You’re all the same strikebreakers to me!”

  She slapped him again and stalked toward the hole in the fence.

  “You want we should stop her?”

  “There aren’t enough of you,” said Bell. “Let her go.”

  * * *

  “What line are you in, son?”

  “Insurance. Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock.”

  Bell had cleaned up at his lodging house and run with his bags to the train station, which was under construction and surrounded by an obstacle course of cursing carriage drivers and maddened horses, and had bought an extra-fare ticket on the Pennsylvania Special just as the express train pulled in from Chicago. Now, as the special’s locomotive accelerated smoothly out of Pittsburgh, he was sipping an excellent cup of coffee in the dining car, sharing a table with three well-dressed commission salesmen, and wondering what Mary Higgins was finding for breakfast.

  “Where you headed?”

  “New York.”

  Mr. Van Dorn was there, and Bell was determined to convince the Boss that the gunman he had glimpsed inflaming the lynch mob and then shooting off his hat and holing his coat proved that a provocateur was intent on starting a war in the coalfields. Somehow, he had to persuade Mr. Van Dorn to give him more time to pursue the case. More important, he knew he could not pursue it alone. He needed help, a lot of help. Somehow, he had to convince the Boss to assign to him, for the first time, his own squad of detectives.

  9

  “Welcome back, Mr. Clay.”

  The provocateur who shot at Isaac Bell from the back of the lynch mob marched into his elegant Wall Street office, where he was received with great deference, and no little fear, as the proprietor and chief investigator of the exclusive Henry Clay Investigations Agency of New York City. Clay’s manager, and secretary, and researcher, and telegrapher all stood respectfully at their desks, while the thugs ready to do his strong-arm work lined up in the back hall. Clay was a cultured man — his clothing exquisite, his taste sublime. The famous author Henry James had been known to converse with him companionably, utterly unaware — deserted, curiously, by his customary sound judgment — that Clay was also as ferociously ambitious as a hungry anaconda.

  He had been raised in bohemian poverty by his mother, a struggling portrait painter who had named him after the man she claimed was his father — the ruthless coal, steel, and railroad baron Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s man of all work.

  Henry Clay was thirty-five. He was well educated thanks to his mother’s gentlemen friends and clients who had staked him to excellent boarding schools in his youth. But the stints at school were as brief as his mother’s friendships, and he remained always the outsider — the day student at Choate, Phillips Andover, Exeter, Deerfield Academy, and St. Paul’s — brushing shoulders, fleetingly, with heirs to the great American fortunes that he hungered to possess himself.

  At fifteen, Clay ran away from home and became a Pinkerton spy in the labor unions. At eighteen, in Chicago, he lied about his Pinkerton service and hired on as the first employee of the great detective of the age, Joseph Van Dorn. Van Dorn had recognized Clay’s extraordinary natural aptitude — his striking wit, his astonishing physical strength — and had held high hopes that his first apprentice would help him build his detective agency.

  Van Dorn, a child of the Irish revolutions, which he had turned his back on when he saw them descend into criminality, had personally honed the boxing skills Henry Clay learned in school and trained him to fight with guns and knives. And while making Clay deadly, Van Dorn had taught him the fine art of investigation.

  Clay still mourned the day they parted company.

  Van Dorn had refused to make him a partner on the grounds that Clay was more interested in currying favor with industrialists than imprisoning criminals. Van Dorn, as bitterly disappointed in his choice of protégé as any man could be with this first failure, had also suspected — but could never prove — that the brilliant Henry Clay had thrown the bomb that set off the deadly Haymarket Riot.

  Clay had not seen Van Dorn in many years. But he was aware, and he knew Van Dorn was, too, of the other’s presence in the detective line: Van Dorn, chief of an outfit extending its reach from regional to national; the younger Clay yet to make a bigger mark than a lucrative one-man outfit courting a clientele of rich and powerful financiers.

  Back from the coalfields, Henry Clay locked the door to his private office. He kept a brass telescope in the window, a powerful instrument made for a harbormaster, which he swept across the fronts of the office-building headquarters of Wall Street tycoons. An expert lip-reader, he fleshed out their conversations with information he had acquired by bribing the engineers and mechanicians who installed their voice tubes, telephones, and private telegraph lines to reroute them through his.

  This morning he focused his spyglass on a one-hundred-thousand-dollar, life-size white marble sculpture — Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss—which decorated the private office of a steel magnate that Wall Street men rated more cold-blooded than robber baron Frick at his worst. He was the financial titan who forged the old empires of Carnegie and Frick into the United States Steel Corporation — Judge James Congdon.

  Judge Congdon was unyielding in his opposition to union labor. As Clay focused on the old man’s lips, Congdon was haranguing a visitor, a rich owner of coal mines, who was listening attentively.

  “Labor’s victory will be not to labor when modern machines work for them. Until then, they’ll accept their place in God’s estate, if I have anything to do with it. And I do. After machines replace them, God knows how they’ll spend their time.” He whirled abruptly to his desk, moving with startling speed for a man his age, and wrote a note in a flowing hand:

  There will be great profit in providing them games.

  Congdon’s visitor nodded obsequiously.

  Clay focused his spyglass on the mineowner’s face and took pleasure in watching him squirm. “Black Jack Gleason,” he whispered. “Not such a big man here in Wall Street, are you?”

  Gleason was standing in Congdon’s office, literally hat in hand, worrying the brim of his homburg with anxious fingers, while James Congdon bullied him. Even lip-reading only parts of their conversation, as Congdon occasionally turned his face from the window, it was clear to Clay that the financier was calling the tune. The biggest coal baron in West Virginia was no match for a Wall Street titan hell-bent on consolidating the industry. Congdon’s money controlled the steel mills, and the coking plants that bought coal, and the railroads that not only burned it in their locomotives but also set the rates to ship it.

  “Have you read Darwin?” Congdon asked contemptuously.

  “I don’t believe so, Mr. Congdon.”

  “The weak perish, the fittest survive.”

  “Oh yes, sir. I know who you mean.”

  “Mr. Darwin knows his business. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yes. The weak die — perish. We’ll always have the poor. It’s the way of the world.”

  “The way of the world,” said Congdon, “brings us to the business of digging coal less expensively than the next man. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Henry Clay, a painter like his mother though not as gifted, likened Congdon’s craggy face to a sunless, cold north slope gullied by storm water. It was no surprise, looking at that face, that Judge Congdon was the most powerful man in Wall Street, and Henry Clay’s chest filled with hope in the knowledge that he was about to hitch his wagon to an element as mighty as fire.

  * * *

  Judge James Congdon listened with a cold smile as the now thoroughly cowed Black Jack Gleason turned to flattery to try to shift the subject from the price of coal.

  “Some members of the Duquesne Club were wondering out loud at lunch the other day whether you would consider a run at public office?”

  “The ‘people’ won’t elect a banker president,” Congdon replied.

  “I’ll bet you could
change their minds.”

  “No, they won’t vote for a Wall Street man. I know. I ran for governor and I lost. They beat the pants off me.”

  “There’s always a next time.”

  Congdon shrugged his broad and bony shoulders. “Who knows what the future holds?” he asked modestly while thinking to himself, I do. Next time, I know how to win.

  “First thing you ought to do,” said Gleason, “is get the damned newspapers to stop complaining about your senators.”

  “If only it were that simple, Gleason. The papers can howl their heads off about bribing congressmen and buying senators. People don’t give a hang. Oh no. People expect it. People admire a president who controls Congress.”

  “So you would consider running for president?”

  “Who knows what the future holds?” Congdon repeated. “Other than that in the immediate future, starting this afternoon, my mills will pay twenty cents a ton less than you’ve gotten used to, and my roads and barges will increase our shipping rates by five percent.”

  Gleason turned pale.

  “How am I to make a profit?”

  “Rob Peter to pay Paul.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You may think of me as Paul. Labor is Peter. After you meet my terms and get your coal on the market, you can keep whatever you can hold on to. In other words, pay labor less.”

  “I’m doing everything I can, but, I warn you, labor is fighting back.”

  Judge James Congdon stood to his full height. “I warn you: I will not subsidize any mine operator’s failure to bring labor to heel.”

  10

  Heading out to meet Isaac Bell, Joseph Van Dorn swaggered proudly from the high-class Cadillac Hotel on Broadway, where he had just signed the lease on a suite of rooms for his brand-new New York field office. He was not one to throw money around, but a client clapping eyes on its fine limestone façade would not be inclined to quibble over fees. And having passed through its marble lobby — under the watchful eye of top-notch house detectives supplied by Van Dorn in exchange for a break on the rent — and been wafted upstairs in its gilded elevator, the client would count himself lucky that the Van Dorn Detective Agency agreed to take his case.

  At Forty-fourth Street, a redheaded gentleman stopped dead in his tracks and stared at him. Van Dorn stared back. Faint scars on the man’s brow indicated some experience with fisticuffs, though hardly in the professional prize ring, for the fellow looked prosperous, in a tasteful tweed suit and a bowler and with a heavy gold watch chain. Van Dorn saw anguish in his expression and a tear forming in his eye.

  “Are you quite all right, sir?”

  The answer came in a lilting Irish brogue, “Och, aye, forgive me, sir. I could not help but notice…” He swallowed hard.

  “What is it, young fellow?” The accent of Van Dorn’s Dublin childhood was almost too faint to be heard over the harder layers of his Chicago years.

  “Begod, sir, if you’re not the spitting image of me old dad.”

  “Your father?”

  “Is it not as if he rose from his grave to parade big as life down Broadway?” He caught himself. “Oye, I mean no harm.”

  “No, no, no. Not to worry, young fellow.”

  “The splendid whiskers — scarlet as new dawn — the piercing eyes, the high brow.” He shook his head in amazement and in sorrow.

  “When did he leave us?” Van Dorn asked gently.

  “Only at Easter. I thought I had reckoned with it, and there you were. You’re kind to stop, sir. Don’t be putting yourself out a moment longer.” The young man bowed, his expression still troubled, and turned away.

  Joseph Van Dorn was a sharp detective and a shrewd businessman, but he was a kindly soul and he called after him, “I experienced the like when mine passed. I’ll not promise it gets easier, but gradually, you won’t dwell every day.”

  “I will cherish that thought… You’ve been very kind— Sir, it would give me great pleasure to stand you to a wee dram.”

  Van Dorn hesitated. He was already late to meet Isaac Bell, but the young fellow looked to be in desperate need, and a brother Irishman in need was not to be ignored. “Of course.”

  “There’s a friendly snug just around the corner,” said the redhead, extending his hand. “Finnerty. Jack Finnerty.”

  They shook hands and found the bar. The bartender greeted Finnerty with a warm “Welcome back” and poured Bushmills.

  Van Dorn waited a decent interval to let Finnerty speak about his father before, in hopes of changing the subject to one less morbid, he asked, “What line are you in, Mr. Finnerty?”

  “Coal,” said Finnerty. “Or, I should say, supercoal.”

  “What is supercoal?”

  “Something of a modern miracle. Scientists have developed a means of releasing the excess power hidden inside coal — burning a bucket of supercoal produces the heat of a carload. Imagine a locomotive crossing the continent on one full tender, or the city dweller snug in his apartment with his entire winter supply in a single cupboard.”

  “I have never heard of it.”

  “You’ll be hearing of it soon—”

  All of a sudden, Finnerty jerked his watch chain and looked at the time. “Begor! I must run. I promised the investors I’d attend their board meeting. I’ve not ten minutes to get to Wall Street. Thanks be to God for the El — though they’ll not finish digging the Rapid Transit Subway soon enough for me. What good fortune to meet you, Mr. Van Dorn! You were kind when kindnesses made a difference.”

  Van Dorn shook his hand and held tight a moment to ask, “At what stage of development is this invention?”

  Finnerty glanced around and lowered his voice. “I would not be surprised to see customers lined up for supercoal next winter. Particularly if the miners strike.”

  “How are you making out with investors?”

  “Near fully subscribed— I must run, but here’s my card. Perhaps, we’ll meet, again.”

  Finnerty handed Van Dorn his card and was out the door.

  * * *

  Isaac Bell was pacing in the front hall when Van Dorn bustled into the Yale Club at Forty-fourth Street. Even impatiently pacing, Van Dorn thought, the young detective glided like a panther — precision-cocked to spring.

  “Sorry, Isaac. Tied up in a meeting.”

  Bell led the way to a pair of wing chairs in a quiet corner of the lounge. He related in detail what had happened at the Gleason jail and laid out his suspicions. Van Dorn listened attentively, intrigued again by Bell’s speculation about a provocateur but still dubious about the evidence.

  “I’m hoping you can spare me some men to get to the bottom of this, sir.”

  “Your own squad?”

  “It’s too big for one detective.”

  “Not possible,” said Van Dorn. “We are stretched to the breaking. Prince Henry is dragging us around the country like the tail of a kite and now he’s threatening to extend his visit. They love him everywhere he goes and he’s having a ball.”

  Bell spoke urgently. “Before I went down in the mine, I did as you suggested and learned everything I could about the coal business. The mines employ half a million men. Hundreds of thousands more work on the railroads and barge tows that transport it. In a nutshell, coal is the most important business in America.”

  “That nutshell does not alter the fact that the Van Dorn Detective Agency has other fish to fry,” Van Dorn growled back.

  Isaac Bell did not appear to hear him. “Coal is indispensable for heat, for coke to make steel, for smelting ore, for electricity generation for lights, pumps, elevators, and agriculture wells, and for fuel where wood is scarce. Coal powers ocean liners, battleships, and railroad trains.”

  Van Dorn nodded impatiently, thinking, All the more reason to invest some part of my savings in Jack Finnerty’s supercoal. He said, “I am aware that the wealth coal underpins is unimaginably immense, and the benefit to the entire nation is incalculable, as is ensuring a steady sup
ply.”

  “But such wealth has the potential to stir the worst in men of all stripes,” Bell persisted, “be they labor, owner, or financier.” He took a deep breath. “I could begin my investigation with Wally Kisley and Mack Fulton, and Wish Clarke.”

  Van Dorn could not conceal his surprise. “Only them?”

  “Kisley is expert in explosives. Fulton’s been working labor cases since the Haymarket Riot. And the boys all say that Wish Clarke is the toughest fighting man in the agency, which I observed to be true when you let me work with him in Wyoming and again in New Orleans.”

  “You would be the youngest squad leader in the history of the agency.”

  “No, sir. You were younger when you led your first squad.”

  “Times were simpler back then…”

  “Coincidentally,” said Isaac Bell, “your first squad consisted of Kisley and Fulton and an apprentice named Wish, for ‘Aloysius,’ Clarke.”

  It was Van Dorn’s turn to take a deep breath.

  “O.K., you can have Weber and Fields,” he said, using the agency nickname for Kisley and Fulton whose jokes reminded everyone of the vaudeville comics. “They’re in Chicago. God knows where Wish Clarke is.”

  “I can find him.”

  “If you can find him, you can have him.”

  “Could I also have Mr. Bronson?”

  Joseph Van Dorn’s bushy eyebrows would have shot no higher if Isaac Bell had demanded the combined services of heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries, President Roosevelt and half his Rough Riders.

  “Horace Bronson,” the Boss answered coldly, “is engaged in San Francisco.”

  Bell was not surprised, but it had been worth a try. He asked, “Is there anyone else currently at large you could spare, sir?”

  “You’ll have to make do with what I’ve given you,” Van Dorn said sternly. “You’ll be thin on the ground, so don’t get cocky. Weber and Fields are old hands but no longer spry, to put it mildly. They’re of the years when men age quickly. And Wish… well, enough said.”