The Assassin (Isaac Bell 8)

—

A coal-black Pittsburgh sky mirrored Bill Matters’ despair.

“Business is business,” his banker was droning. Mortgaged to the hilt to build a pipe line they could not finish, they had to sell for pennies on the dollar to Standard Oil. “No one else will make an offer. My advice is to accept theirs and walk away clean.”

“They tricked us into building it for them,” Matters whispered.

“What about the Hook?” asked Spike.

“Constable Hook?” asked the banker. “Part of the package.”

“It is the most modern refinery in the world,” said Matters.

“There’s no deal without the refinery. I believe Standard Oil in

tends to expand it.”

“It’s made to grow. We bought the entire hill and every foot of waterfront.”

“The Standard wants it.”

“At least we won’t owe much,” said Spike.

“We planted,” said Matters. “They’ll reap.”

The banker’s voice tube whistled. He put it by his ear. He jumped to his feet. “Mr. Comstock is here.”

The door flew open. In strode white-haired Averell Comstock, one of John D. Rockefeller’s first partners from back in their Cleveland refinery days. Comstock was a member of the trust’s innermost circle, the privileged few that the newspapers called the Standard Oil Gang.

“Excuse us,” he said to the banker.

Without a word, the man scuttled from his office.

“Mr. Rockefeller has asked me to invite you gentlemen to join the company.”

“What?” said Spike Hopewell. He looked incredulously at Matters.

Comstock said, “It is Mr. Rockefeller’s wish that you start as co-directors of the Pipe Line Committee.”

Matters turned pale with anger. His hands trembled. He clenched them into fists and still they shook. “Managing the pipe line monopoly we tried to beat? Bankrupting wildcatter drillers? Busting independent refiners out of business?”

The tall, vigorous Comstock returned a steely gaze. “Standard Oil wastes nothing. We make full use of every resource, including—especially including—smart, ambitious, hard-driving oil men. Are you with us?”

“I’d join Satan first,” said Spike Hopewell.

He jammed his hat on his head and barreled out the door. “Let’s go, Bill. We’ll start fresh in Kansas. Wildcat the new fields before the octopus wraps its arms around them, too.”

—

Bill Matters went home to Oil City, Pennsylvania.

His modest three-story mansion stood on a tree-lined street cheek by jowl with similar stuccoed and shingled houses built by independents like him who had prospered in the early “oil fever” years before the Standard clamped down. The rolltop desk he used for an office shared the back parlor with his daughters’ books and toy theaters.

The paper models of London and New York stage sets that the girls had preferred to dollhouses occupied every flat surface. Rendered in brightly colored miniature, Juliet loved Romeo from her balcony. Hamlet walked the parapet with his father’s ghost. Richard III handed the death warrant to murderers.

Nellie and Edna found him there with tears in his eyes. He was cradling the Remington he had bought from a Civil War vet. The “faithful friend” had won shoot-outs with teamsters who had gathered in mobs at night to smash his first pipe line—a four-miler to Oil Creek—that put their wagons out of business.

The two young women acted as one.