The Striker (Isaac Bell 6)

“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.”