The Striker ib-6

by Clive Cussler

  “A jack-of-all-trades?”

  “He could master anything. Except people. Just like my brother, Jim. It broke his heart that evil people exist.” She touched the flask to her lips again. “He also said, ‘Never drink alone.’ Would you like some?”

  “It’s barely noon.”

  “Don’t put off ’til tonight what you can do today. Here.”

  She handed it to him with a smile. Henry Clay weighed the flask tentatively in his hand. “Pass it back if you’re not going to use it,” said Mary, her gray eyes warming as she teased him.

  Clay tilted it toward her in a toast, “Don’t put off ’til tonight…” and raised it to his lips. He handed it back.

  Mary said, “See you on the other side,” and drank deeply.

  When the flask was empty, Henry Clay said, “I’ll run and get us a refill.”

  Mary Higgins pressed her fingers to her temples. “Oh, my poor head. This was a terrible idea.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I need coffee. I need gallons of coffee.” She sprang to her feet, swayed a little, and said, “Come on, I’ll make some at my place.”

  They rode down on the incline and then took a horse cab across the Smithfield Bridge to her latest temporary digs. It was a small furnished apartment, more expensive than a rooming house but worth it for the extra privacy. She had begged the rent from her brother’s strike fund. She brewed strong coffee in the tiny kitchen and brought it to Clay in the sitting room. She was betting that the combination of the whiskey she had persuaded him to drink and the strong, heavily sugared coffee would mask the taste of the chloral hydrate.

  Not only did Clay not notice the knockout drops, he asked for a second cup, half of which he spilled on his trousers when he suddenly passed out with a mildly incredulous expression on his face.

  She searched his billfold and his pockets but found absolutely no clue about the man who paid him to provoke violence so the owners and the government could destroy the union. In disappointment and disbelief, she went through everything again. Again, nothing. She riffled through his business cards, thinking maybe he had slipped one he had been given among his own.

  She found a sheet of paper that had been folded over and over until it fit between the cards. She unfolded it. It was a private-wire telegram to his John Claggart alias from a New York broker. She slammed it down on the couch. Every word of it was in cipher. Useless.

  She could go to New York to the broker. But then what? Persuade them to decipher it for her? If they knew who he was, they would not tell.

  Clay’s hand closed around her boot.

  She looked down. He had awakened and was watching her through slitted eyes.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Searching your pockets,” she said. What could she say, with his billfold sitting in her lap and his private wire next to her?

  “Why?”

  “Because you still won’t tell me who is paying for everything. Did he send you this telegram?”

  “Why do you care so much?”

  “Because he is trying to destroy us.”

  Clay mumbled, “Oh, Mary, for God’s sake,” and that was when she realized that the knockout drops had put him in a half-delirious state.

  She sat on the floor beside him and took his hand in both of hers.

  “What is his name?”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I’m trying to.”

  She looked into his strange eyes. The chloral had turned him inside out. The pharmacist had warned her. Reactions varied. The drug could put a man to sleep, or make him delirious, or writhing in agony. Did Clay know he was awake? Did he know his own name? He knew her. He stared, his mouth working. “Mary, when I’m done, perhaps you and I… I would fund progressive impulses.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Important men, men of means, do that for their wives…” His voice drifted.

  Mary said, “What for their wives?” She had to keep him talking.

  “Reformers’ husbands pay the bills. When I am done, I will do that.”

  “Done with what?”

  “Mary. I’m doing something very important.”

  “Yes, yes, I know.”

  “I want you to understand that.”

  “I’m trying to… I do.”

  “I will be a made man.”

  “Of course.”

  “I will have so much to offer you.”

  “You do already,” she said. “You are quite remarkable.”

  For once, he ignored praise, saying, “But I couldn’t do this without him.”

  In a flash of insight into his strange mind, she said, “But he couldn’t do it without you.”

  “That’s right. That’s right. You know. As powerful as he is — the most powerful man in the country — he could not do it without me.”

  “Does he know that?” she asked.

  “He doesn’t want to know it,” Clay said bitterly. “He thinks he doesn’t need me.”

  “But he does!”

  “Yes. Even he needs me. The most important man in the world. Mary, it’s James Congdon. The most powerful man in Wall Street. The most powerful man in steel and coal and railroads. But he needs me.”

  My God, she thought, Clay had gone straight to the top. Or bottom. Judge James Congdon made Frick look like a company store butcher overcharging for fatback.

  He was watching her, waiting. She said, “James Congdon is lucky to have you.”

  “Thank you,” Clay whispered. “Thank you for saying that.”

  * * *

  When Henry Clay fell asleep, again, Mary stuffed his Bisley revolver in her bag and left, shaking.

  He could have killed me, she thought. But he didn’t.

  She went straight to Union Station and bought the cheapest coach ticket on a slow train to New York with the last of her money. On the train, she wrote a letter to her brother, and another to Isaac Bell, and posted both when the train stopped at a station in the middle of Pennsylvania and changed engines to climb the Allegheny Mountains.

  The train was crowded. The seat was hard. Her reflection in the night-blackened window revealed her father’s features. His favorite saying had always been, The only thing you’ll ever regret is the thing you didn’t do.

  45

  Henry Clay drove a narrow, closed wagon with two high wheels in back and two shorter wheels in front. The wagon was much heavier than it looked, particularly as the words Hazelwood Bakery painted on the sides and the loaves of bread heaped in the left-hand front corner behind glass implied a bulky but light load. It took the combined effort of two strong mules to pull it up the hills.

  Clay walked alongside with the reins in his hands. On the driver’s seat beside the loaves sat a kindly-looking middle-aged woman clutching a Bible. Her cheeks were round and pink, her hair pulled back in a modest bun, her eyes alert.

  “Cops,” she said.

  “Just do as I told you and everything will be fine.” He was not worried. She was levelheaded and had weathered many strikes in the coalfields.

  The cops, shivering in dirty blue Pittsburgh Police Department uniforms, were manning the outside of a barricade the strikers had made of toppled streetcars to protect their tent city. They were cold and wet from the rain squalls that kept sweeping the Amalgamated point, they were bored, and they were hungry. The pink-cheeked, gray-haired woman tossed them loaves of bread that were still warm.

  The cops tore off chunks and chewed on them. “Can’t let you go in, lady.”

  “It’s from our church. There’s children in that camp and they’re hungry.”

  “Can’t you give ’em a break?” said Henry Clay.

  “We got our orders. No guns, no food.”

  Clay tied his reins to the wagon, nodded for the cop in charge to step aside, and passed an almost full bottle of whiskey from his coat. He whispered, “Don’t let her see this, but I figure you guys must be cold.”

  The cop took a
slug of it.

  Clay almost gagged from the smell. The chloral Mary had drugged him with had left him with a heaving stomach, a splitting headache, and weird dreams. But he could not for the life of him remember what had transpired between them at her apartment. All he knew for certain was that she was gone and had stolen his Colt Bisley. What she had wanted he could not guess. Had she drugged him for Bell? But she hated Bell. Besides, if she had done it for Bell, the Van Dorns would have slapped the cuffs on him while he was passed out. The cop was talking to him.

  “This is the good stuff.”

  “Keep it.”

  “You must really love them strikers.”

  Clay nodded in the direction of the woman on the driver’s seat. “She’s my big sister. Took care of me when I was a kid. What am I going to do? She wants to bring ’em bread.”

  “O.K. O.K. I don’t want to starve kids, either. Go on in. But don’t come back this way. Go out another side in case the sergeant comes.”

  “Thanks, pal.”

  The cops walked away. Henry Clay rapped on the barricade. Twenty men dragged a car aside, and the mules dug in their shoes to pull the weight over the hump in the road and through the opening. As soon as the car was pushed back, the head of the Defense Committee, Jack Fortis, greeted Henry Clay by the name John Claggart, and led the wagon into the tent city. The woman on the driver’s seat threw bread to the people crouched in their tents but quickly ran out. She climbed down without a word and plodded away in the rain. The wagon continued on, through the tents and up a muddy hill to the masonry base of the coal tipple.

  “Put it there,” said Fortis.

  Henry Clay nodded his approval. The strikers had chosen well. The site commanded the entire bend in the river.

  The mules were unhitched and led away. Carpenters and a blacksmith gathered with crowbars, hammers, wrenches, and chisels and quickly dismantled the bakery wagon. Sides, roof, driver’s seat, dashboard, shafts, and an improvised coupler were carried off. The front wheels were detached and rolled away.

  Henry Clay watched the carpenters, the smith, and especially Fortis’s picked men from the Defense Committee, all Spanish War veterans, gaze with great satisfaction at what was left — a four-foot-long cannon capable of firing an explosive shell two miles. It was a Hotchkiss Mountain Gun mounted on its own carriage, which had served as the fake bakery wagon’s high back wheels. The tube and its steel wheels and ammunition weighed seven hundred pounds. Portable and accurate, the type had proved its worth for a generation, slaughtering savages in the Indian Wars and Spaniards on San Juan Hill and currently blasting Philippine insurgents with jagged shell fragments.

  Fortis raised his voice. “Thank you, John Claggart. This will even things up. You are a true friend to labor.”

  Henry Clay replied, “I wish I could have brought you more ammunition. Only thirty rounds. But once you get the Vulcan King’s range, you ought to blow enough holes in her to sink her before they get off too many shots. Better yet, blow up a boiler. Remember, her boilers are directly underneath her wheelhouse. If you manage to hit a boiler, the explosion will sweep away the whole forward part of the boat, from the wheelhouse down to the waterline, and bury their guns.”

  “And the state militia,” said Fortis.

  “And the Pinkertons,” said Clay. “And the Coal and Iron Police. Good luck, boys. God go with all of you.”

  * * *

  A U.S. Marshal boarded the railroad ferry from Jersey City to Cortlandt Street with a prisoner in handcuffs and leg irons who recognized Mary Higgins from the union. He looked away so as not to cause her trouble. She had just bought a sandwich in the terminal. She carried it over and asked the marshal, “May I give this to your prisoner?”

  A smile got him to allow it.

  It was a short walk from the ferry terminal to Wall Street. She paused in Trinity Church cemetery, and paused again to stare in the tall windows of Thibodeau & Marzen. It looked like a bank.

  Nearby, she found the Congdon Building, the tallest on the block. The doorman eyed her borrowed coat and the hat Henry Clay had bought her and asked politely who she had come to see. Her voice failed her. She had lost her nerve. Stammering something unintelligible, she hurried away. She rode a streetcar uptown, clutching Clay’s revolver in her bag, walked a bit, and came back down on the Third Avenue El. The doormen had changed shifts. The new man was polite, too, equally impressed by her coat and hat.

  “Mr. James Congdon, please.”

  “Top floor,” he said, indicating the elevator.

  The elevator runner, a gawky kid who in a better world would still be in school, asked her what floor, and when she told him he asked, “What’s your name, please, miss? I have to call ahead to Mr. Congdon’s floor.”

  So much for surprising the great man in his lair. “Mary Higgins.”

  He called on the intercom, spoke her name, and listened.

  “He wants to know who you are.”

  “A friend of Mr. Clay.”

  “He says bring you up.”

  The elevator delivered her to a small foyer with a reception desk. A middle-aged woman at the desk pointed toward a series of rooms that spilled one into another. “Through there. Close each door behind you, please.”

  Mary Higgins went through the first door, closed it, and in through a second. Each room was quieter than the last. In the third she found a closed door and knocked.

  A strong male voice shouted, “Enter!”

  She pushed through the door, closed it behind her, and gasped.

  “My sculpture is Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss. Do you like it?”

  “It is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

  She tore her eyes from the white marble to look across the room at Congdon, who was standing at his desk. He looked older than in the newspaper sketches but more vigorous. He was very tall and stood well.

  “Go on. You can look at it. Touch it. It feels wonderful.”

  She approached reverentially. The confident way the woman’s left arm pulled her lover toward her was the most erotic sight she had ever seen.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want a world where everyone can see this beautiful statue.”

  “Not in this life,” Congdon said coldly.

  His office had double windows. No sound from the street penetrated. The walls were hung with paintings, most of thinly veiled naked women in the French Academy style. On his desk Mary saw a bronze statuette, another naked woman.

  “My wife,” said Congdon, stroking it. “Go on, you can touch it, if you like. I find the marble draws me close.”

  Mary laid her hand on the woman’s arm.

  “What else do you want?” Congdon asked. “What did you come for?”

  “I want you to stand aside and let the coal miners organize, and I want you to pay them a fair wage.”

  “Higgins? Yes, of course. You’re Jim Higgins’s sister, aren’t you? The unionist.”

  Mary nodded.

  Congdon said, “Even if I wanted to, which I don’t, you’re talking to the wrong man. I don’t own coal mines.”

  “You control them by the prices you pay for the coal the miners dig and for what your railroads charge to ship it. And please don’t insult my intelligence. If you don’t ‘officially’ own those railroads, you control them by their purse strings. If there is only one person in the country who can allow a union and pay the miners a fair wage, it is you.”

  “Assume, for a moment, I could. What would I get out of it?”

  “The well-being gained when equality spawns justice.”

  “Equality spawns mediocrity at best, the mob at worst.”

  “If you refuse, I will expose your scheme to foment violence in the coalfields.”

  “And how will you do that?”

  “I will persuade Henry Clay to confess everything you two have done and everything you plan to do next.”

  James Congdon regarded her with a thoughtful smile. At last, he said, “I’ll be
damned… You know, I have no doubt you could do that. I suspect you are an extraordinary young woman. I would not be at all surprised if you’ve established insights into Clay that would allow you to command his frail emotions.”

  “You and I are similar,” said Mary Higgins.

  “In what way?”

  “Clear-eyed and quick.”

  “I take that as a compliment. But we are dissimilar in more important ways. I would build — you would tear down. You love mankind — I can’t abide it. I am old — you are young. And very, very beautiful.” He roved his eyes over her. “Have I insulted you by observing that?”

  Mary let her own eyes rove around his paintings again. They settled on the statuette. He was rubbing its breasts with his thumb.

  “Well? Have I?”

  Mary draped her arms around the marble couple. “Considering your penchant for women in the altogether, I’d have been insulted if you hadn’t at least noticed me.”

  “Good! Let’s get right to it. I will make you an offer, young lady. I won’t ask you to even pretend that you find a man three times your age attractive. I don’t care about being ‘attractive’ to you or anyone. I care about possession. And I have no objection to paying for possession. It is the most tangible reward for success. In return, you will live lavishly in comparison to the vast, vast majority of other women. Whether I decide to keep you or not. If not, you will receive a generous pension, based, of course, on how long I’ve kept you.”

  “How large a pension compared to your regular employees?”

  “There’s no comparison. Few receive pensions. The handful who do do not discover themselves rolling in wealth they didn’t earn.”

  “If you decided to keep me, how much?”

  “You’ll want for nothing.”

  “An automobile?”

  “Of course.”

  “An apartment on Fifth Avenue?”

  “For as long as I have the only key.”

  “Could I come and see this statue?”

  “Every night.”

  “Could I have a yacht?”

  “A yacht would require extra effort on your part.”

  “I hoped you would say that.”

  A broad smile uncreased Congdon’s face. “That suggests we understand each other perfectly. And let me put your mind to ease on one score. I can pretty much guarantee that when you find yourself on silk sheets, an older man might surprise you more than you imagine.”