The Striker

  It resembled an orderly and much larger coal mine. It was ten times as wide as a mine and five times as high, and brightly lighted. Instead of rickety timber props, ranks of steel columns marched into the distance, holding up massive girders that spanned the tunnel to support the trolley line on Elm Street above and the stoop lines of the buildings along the sidewalks. Huge water pipes and sewer mains—from around which the ground had been painstakingly dug—were suspended from the girders with chains.

  Bell looked downtown, where the lights were brightest, then uptown, where they faded. Far, far ahead in the uptown direction, he saw the man in the long coat weaving through the construction site, dodging workmen, steam hoists, and wheelbarrows. He stopped suddenly, handed something to a man pushing a wheelbarrow on a plank track, and broke into a run again. Bell raced after him. When he reached the point where he had seen him, the man with the barrow, and another burly workman who had dropped his barrow, blocked his path. Clutched in their fists were the dollars the man had given them.

  “No cops allowed.”

  “Don’t believe what he told you,” Bell shouted. “Get out of my way.”

  “Why should we believe you?”

  Bell hit the first high and low, kicked the legs out from under the second, and ran after the man in the long coat. He had a two-block lead. The concrete floor stopped abruptly. Ahead, they were digging through raw earth. Rainwater muddied the floor of the ditch. The space narrowed and grew crowded with workers with picks and shovels. Where steel columns had held the city above, here were temporary wooden beams, a rough-plank roof, and openings to the sky through which poured the rain and fading daylight.

  Bell ran for what felt like miles, city block after city block, until he thought he could not run another step, nor lift his boots once more from the grasping mud. And still the man kept running, covering the broken ground at a strong pace, brushing past startled workmen, smashing aside those who got in his way and leaving Bell to dodge the angry ones still standing.

  Bell heard thunder, and the ground shook. Streetcars rumbled overhead, high above, on temporary timbers. Lights flickered. The water pipes swayed in their chains. On he ran, ignoring shaken fists and shouts of foremen, air storming through his lungs. The tunnel changed abruptly. Gone in an instant was the muddy floor; gone the men shoveling and picking. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, had turned to stone. The builders had hit Manhattan Schist in their drive north to Grand Central Station. The bedrock beneath the city had risen to the surface, and the tunnel was boring into it. The space felt more like a mine, with jagged walls and low ceiling and the whining rumble of steam drills.

  Free of the mud, Isaac Bell poured on the speed. The man ahead of him was tiring, stumbling occasionally, and Bell was catching up. Better yet, Bell thought, the tunnel would soon come to an end. It looked like the only way out would be up one of the shafts where steel buckets were hoisting excavated rock by steam derrick. That his quarry had at least four guns and he had only knives did not slow him.

  Suddenly, the man scrambled up the side of the tunnel, where it opened into an exposed gallery, and ducked under ropes that had been stretched to block off the area. Light spilled down from above. It looked like there was an opening to the street. A foreman came running from the other direction.

  “Get out of there, you damned fool,” he shouted. “That chunk of work is loose.”

  A shaft of daylight fell on the man Bell was chasing and Bell saw his face was still covered by the bloody bandage and the hat. But his eyes were gleaming as if in triumph, and Bell knew that he had seen something to his advantage. Bell ran harder. The man scrambled up the slanting side of the gallery where a section of bedrock had broken loose from the wall and slid down on the floor.

  Bell could see that layers of the bedrock slanted at a steep angle. An immense chunk was propelled like a toboggan about to slide down an icy slope. He caught up with the foreman, who was shouting, “That’ll kill you! Get down from there, you idiot! Hey, what are you doing? Don’t do that. You’ll kill us all.”

  The man had found a heavy pick and was using it to dig into the crumbling rock and pull himself higher up the slope.

  “He’ll start another slide!” the foreman wailed in despair. “Run, boys! Run for it.”

  Bell scrambled up onto the slope. The man had reached the opening and was flailing away with the pick, trying to make it wide enough to fit through. Broken rock rolled down at Bell. The hole suddenly opened wider, and the man started scrambling up through it. Bell took one of the throwing knifes and hurled it overhand.

  The blade flew true to its target and stuck in the heel of the man’s boot as he disappeared up the hole. Bell scrambled after him. Then the rock around the hole separated in a giant sheet of stone that slid down the slope, hurtled past Bell, and crashed to the tunnel floor. The impact shook Bell loose and sent him sliding after it. He hit bottom and barely had time to move aside as a slab of rock half a block long broke off and thundered into the tunnel.

  It left in its wake a jagged slope that Bell climbed as easily as a flight of stairs. He emerged at the corner of Fourth Avenue and Thirty-seventh Street just in time to see a full block of brownstone mansions shaking as if in an earthquake. A chasm opened in the sidewalk. The front walls separated from the brownstones and plunged into the subway tunnel.

  Isaac Bell could see into the front rooms of the mansions as if he were at the theater watching a play on a stage. The occupants ran like actors who were exiting upstage as fast as they could. Bell ran to help. Motion caught his eye a short block across Thirty-seventh Street. A train on the tracks elevated above Third Avenue was accelerating downtown. Clinging to the back of the rear car was the man in the long coat, and as the El disappeared behind the buildings, he waved good-bye to Isaac Bell.

  • • •

  “HE GOT AWAY,” Bell reported to Joseph Van Dorn.

  The Boss was seething.

  “What happened to the young lady I ordered you to follow?”

  “I lost sight of Mary in a riot. I was looking for her at the Tombs when I ran into him.”

  “Was she arrested?”

  “The police arrested a hundred women, so I thought I might find her there. But she was not among them.”

  “The police,” growled Van Dorn. “Speaking of the police, I just had an unpleasant conversation by telephone with a deputy commissioner who informed me that his patrolmen received reports from the subway contractor that you were present at the street collapse. Apparently, there is speculation that you caused it.”

  “I did not,” said Bell. “But I did ask the engineers to explain what happened. They refer to that section of the tunnel between Thirty-fourth Street and Grand Central Terminal as the hoodoo part. All sorts of terrible things have gone wrong with its construction—a deadly explosion of blasting powder, rockfalls, a contractor killed. What happened today was the result of an unforeseen geological fault. The man I was chasing precipitated the slide—either by accident as he tried to escape or deliberately if he had knowledge of mine engineering and recognized the flaw in the rock.”

  Van Dorn spoke in a voice that rose. “Rest assured, I do not believe that any of my detectives would deliberately precipitate the collapse of a city block, but I would hope that at future such events you would not stick around to allow the police to link the name of the Van Dorn Agency to a natural disaster.”

  “I had to help some people out of the buildings.”

  “You’re sure you’d seen this man before?”

  “I’m not sure,” Bell said, because he was not yet able to explain, to the Boss’s satisfaction, his strange, dreamlike memory of the man with amber eyes who had to be the provocateur. “But I am convinced that he was looking for me. He lured me into that cellar.”

  “Lured?” echoed Van Dorn. “Lured is what penny-dreadful villains do to unsuspecting maidens.”

  “What I mean to say is, I feel like a darn fool.”

  Van Dorn nodded agreeme
nt. “I think you could do with a night’s rest.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Isaac Bell. But instead of going home to his room in the Yale Club, he went straight to a gunsmith that Wish Clarke patronized on Forty-third Street. It was after hours, but the gunsmith lived above his shop, and Wish’s name got Bell in the door.

  He bought a two-shot derringer, a tiny one-shot, and a Colt Army to replace the weapons taken by the amber-eyed man. Then he described the man’s revolver to the smith.

  “It was a .45. And I would have thought it was a Colt. But it had no front sight. And the hammer was much wider than this,” he added, hefting the gun. “I was wondering, do you know a smith who might modify a Colt that way?”

  “Folks do all sorts of things to six-shooters. Did you notice the top strap?”

  “It was flat,” said Bell. “Not beveled like this. And the hammer had a graceful little curl to it.”

  “Was the front sight cut off or ground down?”

  Bell considered for a moment. “No. There seemed to be a notch you could slip one into.”

  “How long was the barrel?”

  “Not so long it couldn’t come out of his holster real quick.”

  “And it had a slot for the front sight? . . . Did you get a look at the trigger?”

  “No. His finger was curled around it.”

  “How big was the grip?”

  “Let me think . . . The man had large hands, but I could see the butt— It was longer than most.”

  “I think you were looking at a Bisley.”

  “The target pistol?”

  “Yes, that flat top is for mounting a rear windage sight. Fine, fine weapon. Very accurate.”

  “It is, in my experience,” said Bell, remembering how close two pistol shots had come to killing him at extreme range in Gleasonburg.

  “But it is more than a target pistol,” said the smith. “It makes an excellent close-in fighting gun with that long grip and wide hammer.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “I’d have to order it special.”

  “Send it to the Van Dorn office at the Cadillac. They’ll forward to me.”

  Bell paid for the guns, dropped the one-shot in his pocket, and put the Army in his shoulder holster. Then, as he started to slide the two-shot up his coat sleeve, he weighed it speculatively in his hand, wondering. Had the amber-eyed provocateur assumed or guessed he had a derringer in his sleeve? Or had he been sharp enough to spot that the sleeve was tailored extra-wide? Or had he just been covering all the places a man might hide a gun?

  “I’d like another of these, please. But a lighter one, if you’ve got it.”

  “I’ve got a real beaut I made myself. Weighs half that. Fires a .22 long. But it won’t pack quite the punch.”

  “Some punch beats no punch,” said Bell. “I’ll take it.”

  The gunsmith brought out a miniature two-shot over-under derringer. “Always happy to make a sale,” he said. “But you’re running out of places to put them.”

  “Can you recommend a good hatmaker?”

  • • •

  THE HATMAKER was working late and eager to please the gunsmith, who was a source of clients who paid top dollar for custom-made. At midnight, Bell hurried back to the Cadillac Hotel to check for wires that had come in on the Van Dorn private telegraph.

  Grady Forrer, who never seemed to sleep, said, “Excellent chapeau!”

  Bell touched the wide brim in salute and looked for telegrams in his box.

  Weber and Fields had not reported in, and he could only guess whether they were keeping tabs on the strikers heading for Pittsburgh or holed up in a saloon; he made a mental note to instruct Archie to report to him independently. But two wires had just come in from Chicago, both sent in the money-saving shorthand that the parsimonious Joseph Van Dorn demanded.

  Wish Clarke reported,

  R LAMING

  LIKELY JOB.

  In other words, Wish could not find Laurence Rosania in any of his usual haunts to question him about fellow experimenters with shaped explosives, but the detective had caught wind of rumors in the Chicago underworld that a wealthy dowager or an industrialist’s girlfriend was about to be separated from jewelry locked in her safe.

  Bell sat up straight when he read the second wire. It was from Claiborne Hancock, who Joseph Van Dorn had coaxed out of early retirement to manage Protective Services.

  CLIENT’S SISTER HERE

  A LOOKER.

  GLAD TO PROTECT TOO.

  A looker and glad to equaled four excess words, but Hancock had done Van Dorn a favor and could take liberties.

  Bell wired back.

  UNTIL I ARRIVE.

  24

  YOU’RE LOOKING MIGHTY FULL OF YOURSELF,” SAID JAMES Congdon.

  Henry Clay took dead aim at The Kiss and sailed his hat across Congdon’s office. “I have every right to,” he exulted. “Our coalfields’ war is exploding.”

  “From what I read in the newspapers, it would be exploding regardless of your expensive efforts to shove a chunk under the corner.”

  Clay was not to be denied his victory. His grand joust with Isaac Bell had been deeply satisfying. He had duped, disarmed, and humbled Joseph Van Dorn’s new young champion. Better yet, the fact that Bell had been shadowing Mary Higgins proved that Clay had chosen Mary brilliantly. Bell—or, more likely, Van Dorn—suspected what Clay had already learned from his spies in the union about her derailing a train in Denver. Mary Higgins was a dangerous radical because she was imaginative and supremely capable. That Joe Van Dorn sensed her powers made Clay’s plans for the unionist even more gratifying.

  “Don’t believe anything in the newspapers.”

  “You promised me we’ll win this war in the newspapers,” Congdon shot back.

  “We will win, I promise. The newspapers will destroy the unions when they convince their readers that only the owners can stop murderous agitators.”

  “When, dammit? Winter’s coming, and the miners have struck. What are you waiting for?”

  “An earthshaking event.”

  “Earthshaking requires an earthquake.”

  “I have recruited an earthquake.”

  “What the hell are you talking about? Stop playing games with me, Clay. What kind of earthquake?”

  Henry Clay smiled, supremely confident of Judge James Congdon’s approval. “A lovely earthquake. In fact,” he boasted, “an earthshakingly beautiful earthquake.”

  “A woman?”

  “A lovely woman with a big idea. And who happens to be smarter, braver, and tougher than any unionist in the country. Her only weakness is that she’s so dedicated to ‘the good fight’ that she can’t see straight.”

  “I want to meet her,” said Congdon.

  “I told you at the start,” Clay objected coldly, “the details are mine.”

  “Tactics are yours. Strategy is mine. An earthquake falls in the category of strategy. I will meet her.”

  • • •

  ISAAC BELL paid extra for the biggest private stateroom on the Pennsylvania Special and tipped the porter to bring his meals on a tray. The train to Chicago, which steamed from the ferry head in Jersey City, ran on a twenty-hour schedule, and he intended to use every waking hour teaching himself how to draw his derringer from his new hat.

  There was a mirror on the door to his private bath. He faced his reflection. He raised his hands in the air as if already disarmed of his Colt, his sleeve gun, and his pocket pistol. Moving in slow motion, he experimented, devising a series of steps to get the gun out of the hat and cocked to fire.

  The special rocketed across New Jersey, stopped in Philadelphia briefly, and sped into Pennsylvania. Bell worked at the draw with an athlete’s hands and eyes and let his mind chew on the few facts he knew about the amber-eyed man who had gotten the drop on him and had taken away his weapons.

  It was strange how they had almost identical throwing knives. And strange how he knew that Bell’s was in his boot. Some men hi
d it behind their coat collar. Some in the small of their back.

  He also knew where Bell hid his derringer, knew it was in his sleeve instead of his belt or his boot. And he had spotted the tiny one-shot in his coat pocket, which no one ever noticed.

  What else do I know about him? thought Bell.

  He no longer doubted that his memory of being slugged unconscious in the coal mine was real and not a hallucination conjured by the damps. Nor did he doubt that the coalfield provocateur who shot him in Gleasonburg was the same man who had taken his weapons and run circles around him in New York. But other than that, he had more questions than answers. Why did he follow me all the way to New York? How did he find me outside the Tombs? Had he followed me down Broadway while I was shadowing Mary?

  The train was two hours west of Philadelphia, climbing the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains, when the tall young detective felt he had choreographed a series of movements to draw the gun swiftly using both hands, one for the hat, one for the gun. Now he had to master the sequence. That meant practice, drilling over and over and over again, until the steps were automatic. Hour after hour. Day after day. Starting now.

  They stopped in Altoona to change engines and pick up a dining car. Bell jumped down to the ballast and walked briskly back and forth the length of the train to work out the kinks in his arms and legs. The cold air felt good, but it was beginning to rain. By the time the yard crew had the old Atlantic off and a fresh 4-4-2 coupled on, rainwater was streaming down the sides of the train.

  Bell swung aboard as the special resumed rolling, asked the porter for a sandwich and coffee, and returned to his stateroom to practice, barely aware that the rain was lashing the window.

  Eight hours after leaving Jersey City, the Pennsylvania Special slowed to a sedate forty miles an hour, and the conductors began announcing Pittsburgh. Bell sat on his berth and tore hungrily into the sandwich he had yet to eat and washed it down with cold coffee. Night and cloud had closed in. Through the window he noticed dots of red fire. He turned out the lights to see better in the dark beyond the rails.