The Assassin (Isaac Bell 8)

The private reflected for a long moment. “It was like nothing else mattered. Like he didn’t care about nothing. Except the target.”

—

Isaac Bell took the train back to the ferry. Before he got on the boat, he sent another wire to Archie Abbott.

MAKE ARMY FRIENDS.

TRACE DESERTER BILLY JONES.

SLIGHT BUILD, 5’3”.

BROWN HAIR, GRAY-GREEN EYES.

18

When Walter L. Hawley, chief political reporter of the Evening Sun, spotted Isaac Bell striding to his desk, he stopped typing to clasp the detective’s hand hello.

“You’re looking prosperous.”

“You’re looking ink-stained.”

“How’s the big guy?” Hawley and Joseph Van Dorn had met back in the early ’90s when the reporter covered police headquarters and Van Dorn had chased a Chicago arsonist to New York.

“Fired me,” said Bell. “Or I quit, depending on who shot first.”

“Welcome to Newspaper Row. Multitudes who have failed in all attempts at every occupation turn to journalism to find a stopgap between mediocrity and professional begging.”

“Actually, I did come to discuss a job.”

Hawley looked alarmed.

“Easy does it,” said Bell, “not for me. What do you make of the situation in Russia?”

“It resembles the bedlam of unchecked human emotion. My beat is City Hall, so maybe I’m not qualified to predict a gloomy future for the czar. But they’ve had a bad year and it’s only June.

“It could blow the Baku oil business to Kingdom Come.”

Hawley said, “I won’t ask a private detective, assuming you are still one, what that has to do with you. But I will ask, what does that have to do with me? When I need oil, I get it from John D. Rockefeller.”

“E. M. Hock would jump at a freelance assignment to report on the threat to the oil industry in Baku.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wonderful! . . . Except, I’ve always thought the rumors were true. She’s a woman, isn’t she?”

“Very much so.”

Hawley shook his head. “I’ll tell you, Isaac, I would jump at a chance to hire such a good writer. So would my publisher. He’d approve in a flash. But we would be strongly hesitant to send a woman among heathens. Russians and Moslems, and I believe they’ve even got some Persians, they’re next door, aren’t they?”

Bell said, “When I met Edna Matters in Kansas, she had just driven up from Indian Territory in a buckboard wagon. Her sister was her traveling companion. I imagine Nellie Matters would go along to Russia.”

“Nellie Matters? The Insufferable Suffragette?”

“I find Nellie Matters anything but insufferable.”

“I don’t mean to disparage the lady,” the newspaperman said hastily. “Certainly lovely to look at, and a fiery orator. She’ll really make her mark with that New Woman’s Flyover.”