The Striker ib-6

by Clive Cussler

  Bell pulled his Army and fired two shots into the ceiling.

  “Next are in your bellies,” he roared. “Let that man go.”

  The gangsters were not easily intimidated. None moved, except the man who had been punching Van Dorn. He reached into his pocket. Bell fired instantly. The heavy .45 slug threw the gangster into a wall.

  “Let him loose.”

  “Mister, if we let him loose, he’ll start up again.”

  “Count on it,” Van Dorn bellowed.

  Bell fired, dropping a man who pulled a revolver from his belt. The others let go. Van Dorn slugged two, as he barreled across the wrecked office, and kicked a fallen man who was starting to rise with a knife. Shoulder to shoulder with Isaac Bell, Van Dorn drew a heavy automatic pistol from his coat.

  “Louses started swinging the second I came in the door.”

  “Where’s our man?”

  “Not with these street scum. All right, boyos. You were waiting for me, weren’t you?”

  No one answered.

  “Where is he?” Van Dorn shouted. “Where is that son of a bitch?”

  A weaselly little man with a swollen eye and no teeth whined, “Mister, we’re just doing a job. We didn’t mean no harm.”

  “Eleven men ganging one?” Isaac Bell asked incredulously. “No harm?”

  “We was just supposed to beat him up.”

  “Shut up, Marvyn.”

  A gangster, a little older than the rest and clearly the boss, stepped forward and said, “If you know what’s good for you, you two, you’ll just turn around and leave like nothing happened.”

  “Cover them.” Van Dorn passed Bell his automatic. Bell leveled both guns at the gangsters, Van Dorn picked up a telephone off the floor.

  “Central? Get me the police.”

  “Hey, what are you doing?”

  “Pressing charges.”

  “That’s not how it’s done.”

  “I’ll promise you this,” Van Dorn retorted coldly. “Next time you try to beat up a Van Dorn, we won’t press charges. We’ll throw you in the river.”

  “But—”

  “Answer this! Where did Clay go?”

  “I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me where he goes.”

  “Where’s the people who worked in his office?”

  “Ran for it when this rumpus started.”

  “How long have you worked for Clay?”

  “Years.”

  Joseph Van Dorn was still holding the telephone and still breathing hard. “How long were you waiting for me?”

  “Two days— Mister, you ain’t gonna call the cops, are youse?”

  Van Dorn said, “You’ll owe?”

  “Sure.”

  “Make no mistake. If you give me your marker, I’ll collect.”

  “I ain’t a welsher.”

  “O.K. I’ll take you at your word. You pick up your boys and leave quietly. Got a man who does bullet wounds?”

  “Sure.”

  “All right. You owe me.”

  “Me, too,” growled Isaac Bell.

  “Hear that?” Van Dorn pointed at Bell. “Him, too. Whenever we come to you with a question, you’ll give us a straight answer. Square?”

  “Square,” said the gangster. “Want to shake on it?”

  “Get out of here!”

  * * *

  The Hudson dusters carried their fallen down the back stairs.

  Joseph Van Dorn gave Isaac Bell a tight grin. “Heck of a scrap. Thanks, Isaac. Saved my bacon.”

  “Who is Clay?”

  “Henry Clay. A private detective.” Van Dorn pointed at a brass wall plaque that was smeared with the blood of a gangster Bell had shot. “Henry Clay Investigations Agency.”

  “What is he to you?”

  “My first apprentice,” said Van Dorn.

  Bell glanced around the demolished office. “Turned out to be a disappointment?”

  “In spades.”

  “How did he know you were coming?”

  “Henry Clay is about the most intelligent man I have ever met. I am not surprised he knew I was coming. He has an uncanny ability to see the future.”

  “A psychic?”

  “Not in any mystical way. But he is so alert — sees much more clearly than ordinary men in the present — that it gives him a leg up on the future. Darned-near clairvoyant.”

  Van Dorn looked over the wreckage of what had been a first-class office and shook his head in what seemed to Isaac Bell to be sadness. “So gifted,” he mused. “So intelligent. Henry Clay could have been the best detective in America.”

  “I’m not sure how intelligent,” said Bell. “He disguised nothing about his past. He practically handed it to me on a silver platter.”

  Van Dorn nodded. “Almost like he wanted to be caught.”

  “Or noticed.”

  “Yes, that was always his flaw. He was so hungry for applause— But Isaac?” Van Dorn gripped Bell’s arm for emphasis. “Never, ever underestimate him.”

  Bell wove through an obstacle course of broken furniture and tried a door marked Private. It was locked. He knelt in front of the knob and applied his picks, then stepped aside abruptly.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Too easy.”

  Van Dorn handed him a broken table leg. They stood on either side of the door, and Bell shoved it with the leg. The door flew inward. A twelve-gauge shotgun thundered, and buckshot screeched where he would have been standing as he pushed it open.

  Bell glanced inside. Blue smoke swirled around a wood-paneled office. The shotgun was clamped to a desk, aimed at the doorway. Rope, pulleys, and a deadweight had triggered the weapon.

  “Heck of a parting shot.”

  “Told you not to underestimate him.”

  “That was on my mind.”

  They went through Clay’s desk and inspected his files carefully.

  Not a word or a piece of paper applied to current cases.

  “I’ve never seen so many telephone and telegraph lines in one office,” said Bell. “It’s a virtual central exchange station.”

  Closer inspection showed every wire had been cut.

  “He did not run in haste.”

  “No, sir. He took his own sweet time. I doubt he’s out of commission.”

  Van Dorn said, “I cannot imagine Clay out of commission until he wants to be. He’ll regard having to flee as a minor setback.”

  Bell put his eye to a handsome brass telescope that was mounted on a tripod in the window. It angled upward and focused on a penthouse office atop the tallest building on the block. A storklike figure was pacing back and forth, dictating, apparently to a secretary seated below the sight line. As the man turned, his face filled the glass, and Isaac Bell recognized the financier Judge James Congdon from scores of newspaper sketches.

  “Clay spied on his neighbors.”

  Van Dorn took a look. “Who’s that?”

  “Congdon.”

  “Oh yes, of course.” Van Dorn pivoted the telescope, sweeping it side to side. “I’ll be. You can see into twenty offices. You know, Clay’s a heck of a lip-reader. Probably how he paid for these digs. A man could make a pretty penny knowing what Wall Street’s got on its mind.”

  “You know him, sir. What will he do next?”

  “I told you, I don’t see him throwing in the towel.”

  “Is he the sort of man who would take pleasure in provoking bloodshed?”

  “Only for profit.”

  “Profit or acclaim?”

  “Smart question, Isaac. Acclaim.” Van Dorn swung the telescope at the Wall Street buildings. “He wants to be one of them.”

  “Which of them do you suppose he’s working for?”

  “A man wise enough to take account of Henry Clay’s talents and greedy enough to employ them.”

  BOOK THREE

  STEAM

  32

  Isaac Bell rejoined his squad in Pittsburgh. After he had filled in Wally Kisley, Mack Fulton, and
Archie Abbott on events in New York, Archie parroted a favorite Weber and Fields saying:

  “A poke in the snoot means you’re getting close.”

  “If we were close,” said Bell, “we would know what Henry Clay is going to do next. But we don’t have a clue. Nor do we know who gives him his orders. All we know is, we have a bloody-minded provocateur serving a ruthless boss.”

  * * *

  Dressed like a wealthy Southern banker, in a white suit, a straw planter’s hat, and rose-tinted glasses, Henry Clay pretended to admire the launchways of the bankrupt Held & Court Shipyard of Cincinnati. Scores of rails ran side by side down a muddy slope into the Ohio River, and the owner of the yard— foppish young Mr. Court Held, who was anxious to borrow money or sell out, or both — boasted that his family had been launching side-paddle steamers and stern-wheelers down those rails for sixty years.

  “Ah suppose you-all have the hang of it by now?” said Clay, laying a Deep South drawl on thick as he pleased. Not only was Court Held desperate, but repeated intermarriage among the founding families had bequeathed his generation the brainpower of a gnat.

  “Yes, sir. In fact, crane your neck around that bend and you’ll see fine examples of our product.”

  Henry Clay had already looked around that bend.

  “I would like very much to see a large steamboat.”

  Held & Court had two of the biggest paddleboats left over from the steamboat age that ended when fast, modern railroads rendered leisurely travel passé. Nimbler Cincinnati shipyards still boomed, launching by the hundreds utilitarian stern-wheelers that pushed coal barge tows. Numerous such workboats were churning the river white as Clay and the yard owner walked across the yard for a look around the bend. But Held & Court had persisted in building giant floating palaces until the last grand Mississippi riverboat companies went under.

  “Behold, sir. Vulcan King and White Lady.”

  They towered over their wharf. Four tall decks of painted wood, polished metal, and cut glass were heaped upon broad, flat hulls three hundred feet long. Topping their decks were glass pilothouses near the front, and soaring about the pilothouses were twin black chimneys with flaring tops. Each boat was propelled by a giant stern wheel forty feet in diameter and fifty feet wide.

  “We installed the latest triple expansion engines.”

  The White Lady was appropriately white.

  “She’s the prettier one, don’t you think? A brag boat, sure as shootin’.”

  The Vulcan King was painted a dull blue-gray color. It was this more somber of the vessels that had brought Henry Clay to Cincinnati.

  “Which has the reinforced decks?”

  “Where’d you hear about reinforced decks?” the owner demanded. “That’s a government secret.”

  Henry Clay returned a smile much colder than his drawl. “Ah believe a United States senatah acquaintance confided War Department plans to dispatch a shallow-water gunboat to Cuba. Although it could have been my friend the admiral who told me about the cannon and the Maxim gun.”

  “Well, then, you know the sad story,” said the shipyard owner. “A darn shame that the Spanish War ended too soon. We were just fixing to mount the cannon when the War Department canceled the order.”

  “Which boat?”

  “Vulcan King. The Navy said she couldn’t be white, so we found this gray paint.”

  “How much are you asking for her?”

  The young heir blinked. No one had offered to buy a steamboat from Held & Court since the aborted gunboat scheme and that was four years past. “Are you saying you want to buy her?”

  “Ah’d consider it if the price is right.”

  “Well, now. The Vulcan King cost the better part of four hundred thousand dollars to build.” He glanced at Clay and appeared to decide that this banker with friends in high places knew too much of her history to be fleeced.

  “We would accept a rock-bottom price of seventy-five thousand.”

  Clay asked, “Can you have her coaled by morning and steam up?”

  “I could certainly try.”

  “Try?” Clay asked with a wintry scowl.

  “Yes, sir! I’m sure I can do that. Coaled and steam up tomorrow morning.”

  “Throw in the cannon and the Maxim, and you’ve got a deal.”

  “What do you want her guns for?”

  “Scrap steel,” said Henry Clay with a straight face. “Defray the cost of a paint job.”

  “Mighty fine idea. She’ll look her best in white.”

  Black, thought Henry Clay. Her gigantic stern wheel would thrash the river white. But while she steamed up the Ohio River to Pittsburgh, his crew would paint the Vulcan King black as the coal that fired her boilers.

  The strikers who marched down the Monongahela River had cursed the cruel and heartless owners for abusing them with Clay’s Cyclops. Terror bred anger. Hotheads shouted down the moderates, and the miners’ Defense Committee had armed themselves, spending their meager treasury on repeating rifles. How rabidly would they rage at the grim sight of an evil-looking Vulcan King steaming up their river? How angrily would they seize the gauntlet thrown in their faces? How violently would they defend their tent city?

  So violently — Henry Clay had promised Judge James Congdon, who had balked initially at buying a steamboat — so rabidly, that law-abiding Americans would offer grateful prayers in their church pews: God bless the mineowners for mounting Maxim guns and cannon to protect them from the mob. And newspapers would thunder, commanding the defenders of property to pull out all stops to crush the socialists before labor tore the nation asunder with a second civil war.

  Court Held cleared his throat.

  “As ‘steam up’ implies, you intend to leave Cincinnati tomorrow. May I ask how do you intend to pay for her?”

  Other than having satchels bulging with cash, it was always difficult to pony up an enormous sum of money in a distant city. It was even harder to do it quickly and anonymously. But there was a way. “Obviously, I don’t expect you to accept a check that would not clear until after I steam away. I can offer railroad bearer bonds in denominations of twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  The shipbuilder looked uncomfortable. Bearer bonds were, in theory, negotiable as ready cash and a lot less cumbersome, but the holder had to hope that they were neither forgeries nor issued by an entity no longer in business.

  “Would the issuing agent happen to have a branch office here in Cincinnati?”

  Clay would prefer not to appear in that office, but he had no choice. “Thibodeau & Marzen have a branch in Cincinnati. Why don’t we go there now? They’ll guarantee the good faith of the issuer, and you can get the bonds locked up safely in your bank.”

  “Would Thibodeau & Marzen redeem them immediately?”

  “I don’t see why not. If you prefer to cash in, they will accommodate you.”

  33

  Mary Higgins walked fast from her Ross Street rooming house, down Fourth Avenue and across Smithfield, toward the waterfront. She was easy to track in the red scarf Isaac Bell had seen her buy from a peddler in New York. Even without it, how could he miss her erect carriage and determined stride?

  In a factory town like Pittsburgh, workingman’s clothing was the simplest disguise, and Wish Clarke always said, Keep it simple. To shadow Mary, Bell donned overcoat, overalls, and boots, and covered his distinctive blond hair with a knitted watch cap.

  Archie Abbott trailed Bell, alternately hanging behind and sprinting to catch up when he signaled. The streets were crowded with men and women pouring out of offices and banks and hurrying home from work, and Bell was teaching Archie what Wish Clarke had taught him: Alternating their profile between one figure and two made them less conspicuous when Mary peered over her shoulder, which she did repeatedly as they neared the river.

  She crossed First Avenue into a district of small factories and machine shops.

  “So far, she’s headed for the same place,” said Archie.

  The so
ot-blacked trusses of the Smithfield Street Bridge spread graceful curves against the grimy sky. Instead of boarding a trolley to cross the Monongahela on the bridge or walking the footpath, Mary Higgins followed a street that circled alongside its stone piers and down to the riverbank.

  “Just like yesterday,” Archie whispered in his ear. “Now, watch.”

  Barges were rafted ten deep into the channel and appeared to extend down the shore as far as the bridge at the Point — the tip of Pittsburgh where the Mon joined the Allegheny. They were empty, riding high on the water. Across the river, all but the lowest reaches of Mount Washington and the Duquesne Heights were lost in smoke. The sun had disappeared, and night was settling in quickly.

  Mary Higgins took another look around.

  “Down,” said Bell, and they ducked behind a wooden staircase that ran up the side of a building. When they raised their heads, Mary had climbed a ladder onto a barge and was walking on planks laid barge to barge toward the middle of the river.

  “She has amazing balance,” said Archie.

  “Her father was a tug captain. They lived on the boat.”

  “I thought it was those long, long legs.”

  Bell gave his friend a cold, dark look, and Archie shut up.

  Mary crossed ten rows of barges and stepped down onto a workboat moored at the edge of the fleet. “Was that boat there yesterday?” Bell asked.

  “Right there. That’s where she went.”

  “How long did she stay on it?”

  “An hour and four minutes.”

  Bell nodded approvingly. Mack and Wally were teaching Archie to be precise in observation and report.

  “Were these same barges here?”

  “Yes.”

  “How can you be sure? They all look alike.”

  “You see the barge right smack in the middle with the white cookhouse sitting on it?” The apprentice detective indicated a painted shack with a stovepipe poking through the roof. “Exactly where it was yesterday.”

  Bell thought it strange that on such a busy river the empty barges had not been moved. He would expect them to be swarming with deckhands preparing for towboats to push them back up the Monongahela to move the coal being mined by scab labor. Even as he watched, a tow of empties bustled up the river from the harbor pool between the Point and Davis Island Dam, and an oversize towboat was pushing a loaded fleet of Amalgamated Coal’s big Ohio River barges downstream.