The Striker (Isaac Bell 6)

“Keep it quiet!”

“Hold on, boys,” the rail dick shouted. “He’s O.K. He’s a Van Dorn private detective.”

Mary Higgins rounded on Bell. “What?”

Her eyes flashed. Her cheeks flushed scarlet.

“A Pinkerton!” she yelled, her voice not at all musical, and slapped Bell’s face so hard she knocked the tall detective sideways. “You’re a Pinkerton?”

His disguise in shreds, Isaac Bell tried to explain, “No, Mary, I’m not a Pinkerton. I’m a Van Dorn.”

“What in hell is the difference? You’re all the same strikebreakers to me!”

She slapped him again and stalked toward the hole in the fence.

“You want we should stop her?”

“There aren’t enough of you,” said Bell. “Let her go.”

* * *

“What line are you in, son?”

“Insurance. Dagget, Staples & Hitchcock.”

Bell had cleaned up at his lodging house and run with his bags to the train station, which was under construction and surrounded by an obstacle course of cursing carriage drivers and maddened horses, and had bought an extra-fare ticket on the Pennsylvania Special just as the express train pulled in from Chicago. Now, as the special’s locomotive accelerated smoothly out of Pittsburgh, he was sipping an excellent cup of coffee in the dining car, sharing a table with three well-dressed commission salesmen, and wondering what Mary Higgins was finding for breakfast.

“Where you headed?”

“New York.”

Mr. Van Dorn was there, and Bell was determined to convince the Boss that the gunman he had glimpsed inflaming the lynch mob and then shooting off his hat and holing his coat proved that a provocateur was intent on starting a war in the coalfields. Somehow, he had to persuade Mr. Van Dorn to give him more time to pursue the case. More important, he knew he could not pursue it alone. He needed help, a lot of help. Somehow, he had to convince the Boss to assign to him, for the first time, his own squad of detectives.

9

“Welcome back, Mr. Clay.”

The provocateur who shot at Isaac Bell from the back of the lynch mob marched into his elegant Wall Street office, where he was received with great deference, and no little fear, as the proprietor and chief investigator of the exclusive Henry Clay Investigations Agency of New York City. Clay’s manager, and secretary, and researcher, and telegrapher all stood respectfully at their desks, while the thugs ready to do his strong-arm work lined up in the back hall. Clay was a cultured man — his clothing exquisite, his taste sublime. The famous author Henry James had been known to converse with him companionably, utterly unaware — deserted, curiously, by his customary sound judgment — that Clay was also as ferociously ambitious as a hungry anaconda.

He had been raised in bohemian poverty by his mother, a struggling portrait painter who had named him after the man she claimed was his father — the ruthless coal, steel, and railroad baron Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie’s man of all work.

Henry Clay was thirty-five. He was well educated thanks to his mother’s gentlemen friends and clients who had staked him to excellent boarding schools in his youth. But the stints at school were as brief as his mother’s friendships, and he remained always the outsider — the day student at Choate, Phillips Andover, Exeter, Deerfield Academy, and St. Paul’s — brushing shoulders, fleetingly, with heirs to the great American fortunes that he hungered to possess himself.

At fifteen, Clay ran away from home and became a Pinkerton spy in the labor unions. At eighteen, in Chicago, he lied about his Pinkerton service and hired on as the first employee of the great detective of the age, Joseph Van Dorn. Van Dorn had recognized Clay’s extraordinary natural aptitude — his striking wit, his astonishing physical strength — and had held high hopes that his first apprentice would help him build his detective agency.

Van Dorn, a child of the Irish revolutions, which he had turned his back on when he saw them descend into criminality, had personally honed the boxing skills Henry Clay learned in school and trained him to fight with guns and knives. And while making Clay deadly, Van Dorn had taught him the fine art of investigation.

Clay still mourned the day they parted company.

Van Dorn had refused to make him a partner on the grounds that Clay was more interested in currying favor with industrialists than imprisoning criminals. Van Dorn, as bitterly disappointed in his choice of protégé as any man could be with this first failure, had also suspected — but could never prove — that the brilliant Henry Clay had thrown the bomb that set off the deadly Haymarket Riot.

Clay had not seen Van Dorn in many years. But he was aware, and he knew Van Dorn was, too, of the other’s presence in the detective line: Van Dorn, chief of an outfit extending its reach from regional to national; the younger Clay yet to make a bigger mark than a lucrative one-man outfit courting a clientele of rich and powerful financiers.

Back from the coalfields, Henry Clay locked the door to his private office. He kept a brass telescope in the window, a powerful instrument made for a harbormaster, which he swept across the fronts of the office-building headquarters of Wall Street tycoons. An expert lip-reader, he fleshed out their conversations with information he had acquired by bribing the engineers and mechanicians who installed their voice tubes, telephones, and private telegraph lines to reroute them through his.

This morning he focused his spyglass on a one-hundred-thousand-dollar, life-size white marble sculpture — Auguste Rodin’s The Kiss—which decorated the private office of a steel magnate that Wall Street men rated more cold-blooded than robber baron Frick at his worst. He was the financial titan who forged the old empires of Carnegie and Frick into the United States Steel Corporation — Judge James Congdon.

Judge Congdon was unyielding in his opposition to union labor. As Clay focused on the old man’s lips, Congdon was haranguing a visitor, a rich owner of coal mines, who was listening attentively.