Chimneys billowing smoke, stern wheel pounding foam, an enormous steamboat rounded the point. It was immensely long, and tall, and black as coal.
39
IS THAT A CANNON ON THE FOREDECK?” ASKED ARCHIE.
Bell shielded his eyes with cupped hands and focused on the gun. “Two-inch Hotchkiss,” he said. “The Navy had them on a gunboat Wish and I boarded in New Orleans.”
“Where the heck did they get it?”
“More to the point,” said Bell, “who are they and what do they want?”
“I can’t quite make out her nameboard.”
“Vulcan King.”
The black giant came closer.
One after another, then by the hundreds, the women pitching tents and the men building barricades stopped what they were doing. Ten thousand stood stock-still, waiting for the black apparition to turn midriver and point its cannon at them. It steamed very slowly, its giant wheel barely stirring the river, closer and closer, at a pace no less menacing for its majesty.
Directly opposite the point, it stopped, holding against the current. Not a living figure showed on deck, not a deckhand, not a fireman. The boiler deck and engine doors were shut, the pilot invisible behind sun-glared glass. Ten thousand people held their breath. What, Isaac Bell asked himself again, have I led these people into?
It blasted its whistle. Everyone jumped.
Then it moved forward, slicing the current, up the river, swung around the bend of the Homestead Works, and disappeared.
“Where’s it going?” asked Archie.
“My guess is, to collect the Pinkertons,” said Bell. “We’ll have to find out. But if I’m right, then the miners hold this point of land, and the owners hold the river. And if that isn’t the beginning of a war, I don’t know what is.”
• • •
DRIED OFF and clothes changed, Bell went looking for Camilla’s pilot.
He found Captain Jennings and his son in a Smithfield Street saloon up the slope from where their boats were docked. The two pilots congratulated him on the strikers’ safe passage.
“Did you see the Vulcan King?” Bell asked.
“Hard to miss,” said the younger Jennings, and his father declared, “Who in hell would paint a steamboat black?”
“Who owns her?”
Both pilots shrugged. “Never seen her before. We was just asking ourselves, was we thrown off by the black? But even imagining her white, she does not look familiar.”
“Where do you suppose it came from?”
“She weren’t built in Pittsburgh or we’d know her for sure. That leaves Louisville or Cincinnati.”
“Nowhere else?”
“It took a heck of a yard to build a boat that size. Like I say, Louisville or Cincinnati. I’d say Cincinnati, wouldn’t you, Pa?”
The older Jennings agreed. “One of the big old yards like Held & Court.”
“They still in business, Pa?”
“They’re the last that make ’em like that anymore.”
“What do you think of that cannon?” asked Bell.
“Not much,” said the senior Jennings.
His son explained, “Riverboats are made of spit-and-sawdust. The recoil will shake her to pieces.”
“Could they reinforce it to stand the recoil?”
Both Jenningses spit tobacco. “They’d have to.”
• • •
“INSURRECTION,” said Judge James Congdon, casting a stony gaze about the Duquesne Club’s paneled dining room. “When first offered the privilege of addressing the august membership, I intended to call my speech ‘New Economies in the Coal, Iron, Coking, and Steelmaking Industries.’ But for reasons apparent to anyone in your besieged city, my topic is changed to ‘Insurrection.’”
He raised a glass of mineral water to his wrinkled lips, threw back his head, and drained it.
“By coincidence, I happen to be your guest speaker on the very day that the criminal forces of radicalism and mindless anarchy seized a modern enterprise in which I hold an interest, the Amalgamated Coal Terminal. Amalgamated is a center of coal distribution, east, west, north, and south. Winter looms. City dwellers will freeze in their homes, locomotives will come to a standstill, and industry’s furnaces will be starved for fuel. Insurrection, you will agree, is a subject if not dear to my heart, extremely close by.”
The members laughed nervously.
“Were this attack to occur in New York City, where I conduct business, I have no doubt that government would respond with force and alacrity. Not blessed with residency in Pittsburgh, I can only guess your city fathers’ answer to this challenge. For the moment, I will leave that to them, trusting in their Americanism, their decency, their principles, and their courage to stand up to labor, which wields far too much influence in the state of Pennsylvania.
“But to you—those who have built this great city by transforming the minerals that God deposited in Pennsylvania’s mountains into the mightiest industry the world has ever seen, producing more iron and steel and coal than Great Britain and Germany could dream of—to you titans I say, labor must be brought to heel.
“Labor must be brought to heel or they will destroy everything you have worked to build. If we fail to master labor, future enlightened civilizations will look back on us in pity. ‘What did they fail to do?’ The answer will be, ‘They failed to fight. Good men failed to fight evil!’”
Judge Congdon slammed his fist down on the podium, glared one by one at every face gaping back at him, then turned his back and stalked off the stage.
Stunned silence ensued. It was followed by a roar of applause.
“Come back!” they shouted, pounding their palms together. “Come back! Come back!”
Congdon returned to the podium with a wintry smile.
“I hope,” he said, “that the men of Pittsburgh know who the enemy is and have the courage to face him. To those who don’t, to those who would appease, to those who would restrain the forces of order, I say, Get out of the way and let us do our job.”
• • •
JAMES CONGDON’S special was waiting for him at a Union Station platform reserved for private trains. His Atlantic 4-4-2 locomotive, which had just rolled, gleaming, from the roundhouse, had steam up, and his conductor was arranging to clear tracks with a Pennsylvania Railroad division boss. The cook was shucking oysters from Delaware Bay, a steward was chilling champagne, and the actress who had come along for the ride to New York was luxuriating in a hot bath.
Congdon himself raised a brandy in the paneled library that served as his mobile office and said, “Nothing becomes Pittsburgh like the leaving of it.”
“You seem mighty cheerful for a man whose business has been seized by radicals,” answered Henry Clay.
“Bless them!” Congdon laughed. “They’ve outdone themselves. And outdone you, for that matter, Clay. You could not have planned it better.”
“They exceeded my expectations,” Clay admitted. “Even my imagination. But I will take full credit for creating the atmosphere that stimulated them.”
“Credit granted. What’s next?”
“Exploding steamboats and burning union halls.”
“In that order?”
“Simultaneous.”
Congdon eyed the younger man closely. “I don’t mind telling you that you’re doing an excellent job.”
“I was hoping you would say that.”
Of course you were, thought Congdon, saying only, “You deserve it.”
He checked the gilded clock on the wall and opened the louvers of the rosewood shutters. The railcar’s window overlooked the train yard and the sidings that snaked into the private platforms.
“Is there any more archetypical symbol of rampant capitalism than the special train?” he asked.
“None. Yachts pale by them.”
“Have you considered having the vicious strikers wreck a special?”
Clay sat straighter, alert as a terrier.
Congdo
n said, “The governor would have no choice but to call out the militia and hang strikers from lampposts.”
“Do you have a particular one in mind?”
“You see through me as if I were made of glass.” Congdon smiled, thinking, as Clay lit up like limelight, My oh my, does that make you preen. “Any special would do.”
As he spoke a locomotive glided into view, drawing a beautiful train of four cars painted in Reading Railroad green livery, with the yellow trim done in gold as befitted the president of the line.
“Look! Here comes one now.”
“That looks like R. Kenneth Bloom’s,” said Clay.
“I believe it is.”
“Two birds with one stone?”
“What do you mean by that?” Congdon demanded.
“President Bloom has been resisting your takeover of his Reading Line.”
“You presume too much, Clay. Be careful.”
“Forgive me,” Clay said contritely. “I’ve been up several days. I’m not thinking clearly.”
“Get some sleep,” said Congdon. And then, to put Clay deeper in his thrall, he warmed up a friendly smile and said, “Three birds, actually.”
“I beg your pardon, Mr. Congdon?”
“It so happens that young Bloom, who’s been goading his father to fight back and has given him spine where there was only jelly, is making a quick round-trip to Cincinnati. Four hours out, a secret meeting at the Queen City Club with some bankers, and four hours back. He’ll have a guest on board. A friend of the family asked to ride along. His name is Isaac Bell.”
Henry Clay was both delighted and astonished. “How do you know that?”
“Bloom’s resistance forced me to employ spies.”
Clay surged to his feet, sleep forgotten. “Three birds. A triple play.”
40
ISAAC BELL COULD NOT FIND MARY HIGGINS. A NEW RENTER had moved into her room, and the landlady had no forwarding address.
He went next to the tent city, riding the Second Avenue trolley to the end of the line where the strikers had torn up the tracks. The expressions on the sullen Pittsburgh cops observing from a block away told Bell that they feared the obvious: The coal miners defending the tent city included Army veterans of the Spanish and Philippines wars, military men who knew their business.
They had installed an iron gate that was only wide enough to admit one man at time. Bell showed a pass signed by Jim Higgins. Only then was he allowed through. And while approaching and entering, he was under the watchful gaze of strategically posted riflemen. Lookouts were stationed on top of the coal tipple with views of the city in three directions. Any movement of cops or militia would be spotted a mile away before they reached the gates. And in the shallows beside the riverbank, the strikers had sunk the barges that had floated them there, creating a crude breakwater like a crenellated castle wall, which would make it difficult to land police launches.
Two thousand tents pitched in neat rows with straight walks between them further conveyed the atmosphere of a military camp. By contrast, well-dressed women of means from Pittsburgh’s churches and charities swept by in long skirts, directing the placement of kitchen tents and water taps. The ladies’ presence, Bell thought, must be constraining the cops as much as the miners’ riflemen. Not to mention the city fathers who were their husbands, and it was amusing to imagine how many Pittsburgh bigwigs were sleeping at their clubs until the strike was settled. But despite strong defenses and capable administration and charity, the coal miners’ tent city had a precariousness, which was expressed by one stern matron whom Bell overheard:
“This is all well and good until it snows.”
He found a harried Jim Higgins directing the operation from under a tent’s open canvas fly. Mary’s brother said he had not seen her since the night they took her barges. He had no idea where she was. He admitted that he was worried, and he asked Bell to pass on the message, if he found her, that he could use her help desperately.
As Bell was leaving to head back downtown, he looked up and suddenly had to smile. A painter with a sense of humor was changing one word of the Amalgamated Coal Terminal sign on top of the tipple to read
AMALGAMATED COAL MINERS
• • •
THE DOWNTOWN union hall was deserted but for an elderly functionary left in charge. He had not seen Mary Higgins nor had he heard anything about her.
Bell found Mike and Terry in the back, sitting around a cookstove, drinking coffee.
“I’ll give you a choice, boys. Now that Jim Higgins is holed up in Amalgamated, you can go back to Chicago as Protective Services, agents or you can work for my squad.”
“Is it O.K. with Mr. Hancock and Mr. Van Dorn?”
“I’ll clear it with them,” said Bell. He would pay them out of his own pocket if he had to. He could use the manpower.
“What do you want us to do?”
“Find out where that big black boat went. I have a feeling you should start looking at McKeesport. But wherever it went, I want to know who they are and where they are going next because I do not believe that thing arrived here by coincidence.”
Bell waited for them to put down their coffee cups and stand up. But they just sat there. “Is something the matter, gents?”
“Not really, Isaac.”
“Then get going.”
“Sure.” They exchanged heavy looks and portentous headshakes. “There’s just one thing.”
“What?”
“We heard you asking about Miss Mary.”
“Have you seen her?”
“Yes. That is, well . . .”
“When? Where?”
“Saloons. By the river.”
“Who was she with?”
“Talking with a whole bunch of fellows.”
“If you see her again, follow her. Meantime, find that black boat. I’ll be back tomorrow.”
“Where you headed?”
“Cincinnati. If you need me for any emergency, wire me care of R. Kenneth Bloom, Jr., Reading Railroad. His train has a grasshopper key.”
“How do you happen to know a fellow with his own train, Isaac?”
“We ran away to the circus together.”
• • •
HENRY CLAY unlocked the door of his apartment. The drapes were drawn, and it was dark. He was halfway in and reaching for the wall switch beside the door when he sensed a presence. Wrong-footed, too late to back out, he hurled himself sideways along the wall, pushing the light switch with his left hand and drawing his Bisley with his right. When the light flared on, he had the gun pointed at the figure sitting in the armchair.
“I am not armed,” said Mary Higgins, raising her hands to show they were empty.
“How did you find me?”
“When I learned that you were a detective,” she said calmly, “I wondered how I would ever track you down on my own, much less shadow you, without you seeing me. I thought of hiring another professional to find you.”
“Bell!”
“Not Bell. Don’t be ridiculous. Although I did consider my brother’s bodyguards. The Van Dorn Protective Services pride themselves in being more than bodyguards.”
“Stumblebums. They couldn’t find me.”
“That’s what I thought. Besides, they might run straight home to tell Bell.”
“Then how did you find me?”
“I remembered that the old fellows in Bell’s squad told me that those flash men you put in charge of the barges had fled the city. But that didn’t seem likely. Why would they let a couple of Van Dorns chase them out of their hometown? So I went looking for familiar faces.”
“Where?”
“Casinos and concert saloons by the river.”
“My God, Mary, you could have been killed, or worse.”
“Not killed,” she said. “Not even compromised.”
“You were lucky. People in those places would not hesitate to slip chloral powder into an innocent girl’s drink.”
“I would recog
nize the odor of knockout drops in my tea,” she said drily.
“It is not as easily detected as people think. There are ways of compounding it that mask taste and smell.”
“You would know more about that than I,” she replied pointedly. “But, in actual fact, I met more gentlemanly sorts—including one of your flash men. He directed me to the man I suspected had not fled Pittsburgh. He recommended I look for you in this street of apartment buildings. I smiled at many janitors.”
“But I am not known to the landlord as Claggart.”
“Oh, I didn’t give them your name. I wouldn’t betray you that way. I only described you.”
“How did you unlock my door?”
“I didn’t. I climbed the fire escape.”
Clay holstered the Bisley, greatly relieved. It was one thing for an intelligent girl to make inquiries—particularly with a winsome smile. But the extremely rare ability to pick locks would make her far less innocent than he thought she was. He was still troubled, however, that she had been alone in his apartment. He was vigilant about not leaving evidence behind, but even the most careful man could give himself away with a small mistake.
“How long were you waiting for me?”
“Long enough to look around. You live well. It’s an expensive apartment.”
“Who told you I was a detective? Bell?”
She nodded.
Clay said, “Bell bent the truth. I was a detective once. I’m not any longer.”
“What are you now?”
“I am John Claggart.”
“Isaac called you Clay. Henry Clay.”
“Henry Clay no longer exists.”
“And what are you, John Claggart?”
“I am a revolutionary.”
“I found that easier to swallow when you wore workman’s duds. A smart frock coat and homburg hat make you look like a Morgan or Vanderbilt.”
“If you find it hard to swallow, then hopefully the enemy will, too.”
“Who paid for the barges?”
He was ready for this one. “Bank robberies.”
“The bank robbers were caught.”
The Striker Page 22