The Striker

“Fair enough.” Mary Higgins stuck out her hand, and they shook on it.

* * *

Instead of descending the Cadillac Hotel’s grand staircase that curved into the lobby, Mary Higgins waited by the elevator without pressing the call button. She needed time to collect her spirit for she was deeply disturbed by her encounter with the Van Dorn Agency’s chief investigator. Joseph Van Dorn’s piercing gaze had seemed to penetrate her skull and burrow into her deepest thoughts. It was as if he knew better than she how confused she was. Van Dorn could not see why, of course. Or maybe he could. Some of it. He could not know her grand plan to block the river at Pittsburgh. She had told only her brother, and Jim would never tell anyone because he hated the idea. But Van Dorn, the renowned scourge of criminals, had suspected that something was up.

She was not a criminal. Although she had scheming in common with criminals, and the chief investigator seemed to sense that she was scheming something. That was disturbing enough — to succeed, her plan to block the river depended on secrecy and surprise — but it wasn’t all that troubled her.

Waiting by the elevator did not help one bit. She pressed the button. When the runner bowed and guided her into the gilded car, she thought instantly, predictably, of the silly ballad they were singing everywhere:

But she married for wealth, not for love he cried,

Though she lives in a mansion grand.

She’s only a bird in a gilded cage.

Van Dorn had seen right through her. He had guessed her confusion about Isaac Bell. What if a woman had pledged her heart, her soul, and her entire life to eliminate mansions grand, and then, just as she wound up to throw a brick at a window, she saw love smiling through the glass?

20

“Shadow her!”

“What?” Isaac Bell had just bent over a fresh pile of clippings when Van Dorn rushed into the research offices.

“Find out what the devil she is up to.”

“Mary? What do you mean?”

“If I knew, I would not be impelled to send you after her. I have a hunch she is up to something big and I don’t like it.”

“What about her brother?”

“I suspect it has nothing to do with him.”

“But will you look out for him?”

“Of course. We gave our word. Go! Don’t let her get away. And do not let her see you.”

* * *

Mary Higgins burst from the gilded elevator. A hotel detective stared, suspicion aroused by the incongruous sight of such a tall, attractive woman in a drab costume and plain cloth hat that sported neither a ruffle nor a feather. What was such a poorly attired creature doing in such a fine establishment? An actress? Or something worse?

Mary froze the detective with a stern glare, brushed past him, passed the bowing doormen, and set a fast pace down Broadway, which veered southerly and easterly across the Tenderloin District. She walked fast, block after block, oblivious to fine hotels and theaters on the wide thoroughfare, and saloons and gambling halls along the dark and narrow cross streets, her destination a settlement house in the East Side slums where she could find shelter with the girls and women who had founded the Shirtwaist Makers’ Union.

She tried to outpace the storm in her mind. But walking didn’t help any more than stalling by the elevator. She was too confused, her brain swirling with questions about her brother and their cause of equality and justice, his vague dreams of a general strike, her sharp plan to block the river. How different Isaac Bell was than any other man she had ever met: strong, but tender; ferocious in a fight, but able to be gentle; privileged, but not obliviously; quick to laugh, but just as quick to comfort. Had she believed in some vague way that she could use Isaac to help her grand plan? Or had she really only wished they could somehow repeat a cold night on a freight train?

Drowning in doubt, she revisited her scheme: At Pittsburgh, the Monongahela River was lined with coal barges tied ten deep on either shore. They narrowed the channel. When the river was crowded with tows five and six wide, there was scarcely room for two to slip past each other. Plus, six bridges crossed the Mon. The piers that supported the six narrowed the waterway, dicing it into narrow channels. She envisioned drifting barges piling up against them like ice floes. If half the river was carpeted with barge fleets, how many would have to sink before they blocked traffic? Would they cause a flood? And now she could hear her brother asking, How many will be injured? How many will die? None? Guarantee it? She couldn’t. The Mon washed along the Point, the river-girded stretch of land that formed Pittsburgh’s rich Golden Triangle. Thousands lived and worked there.

The sky turned gray and it began to drizzle. She walked. The drizzle quickened to rain. And still she walked, ignoring streetcars she could ride downtown, ignoring the Els that would whisk her there in a flash, noticing nothing ahead of her or behind her, seeing neither the young detective shadowing her nor the steamfitter in the slouch hat trailing them both.

21

Isaac Bell followed Mary Higgins at a distance that varied from a half to a full block, depending upon how crowded the sidewalks were. He endeavored to keep numerous pedestrians between them, and repeatedly donned and removed his dark coat and his broad-brimmed hat to change his silhouette.

Joseph Van Dorn’s orders were ringing in his ears—Find out what the devil she is up to. If he hadn’t seen her throw the lantern that burned down the Gleasonburg courthouse, he might have protested her innocence, or at least taken the accusation with a grain of salt. But he had seen her hurl it and had seen the look of triumph on her beautiful face. So he followed, intensely curious, and pleased to be near her, even though it took him off his own case.

She was easy to follow, taller than most people thronging the busy sidewalks, and plunging along single- mindedly, never looking back. It started to rain. She bought a red scarf from a peddler on Twenty-third Street.

She stopped on Fourteenth Street where Broadway and Fourth Avenue joined at Union Square and listened to a speaker haranguing a crowd about the coal strikes and the United States war against the Philippine insurgents.

“Three cheers for anarchy!” he roared, and the crowd took up the cry.

Mary Higgins put money in the hat when passed and hurried on. South of Houston Street, she cut east into the crowded Jewish district, and Bell drew closer to keep her in sight.

“Don’t buy beef!”

Groups of women were mobbing Kosher butcher shops and yelling at housewives who emerged with bundles: “Boycott the Beef Trust!”

Cops gathered on the corners, big men in blue coats and tall helmets.

Bell almost lost sight of Mary in a mob of women screaming at one another.

“My babies are sick. They must eat.”

Isaac wedged through and ran after Mary. He was no longer afraid of Mary seeing him. There was a grim electricity in the air — the same threat of imminent, mindless violence that he had felt in the miners’ mob at Gleasonburg. The women and the butchers and the glowering cops were all about to lose the last vestiges of reason, and Mary Higgins was caught in the middle.

* * *