The Striker

Bell grinned at his old partner. “I keep telling Mr. Van Dorn you’re the sharpest operator in his outfit.”

“How delighted he must be to hear it.”

* * *

“Hold it right there, mister!”

Two big men blocked Isaac Bell’s path into the Mine Workers’ union hall, which was on a street of saloons in the First Ward. Ragtime music clattered from player pianos on either side. The miners had installed steel shutters on their windows and a rifleman on the roof.

“Hello, Mike. Terry. How are you?”

The Van Dorn Protective Services agents looked more closely. “Isaac! Haven’t seen you since you apprenticed.”

Mike Flannery and Terry Fein were a pair of handsome bruisers who made excellent hotel dicks at the Palmer House but laid no claim to the mental machinery required of an investigator.

“Your mustache threw me off,” said Mike.

“Mighty becoming,” said Terry. “The ladies’ll love it.”

“Let’s hope you’re right. Is Mary Higgins in there with her brother?”

“Showed up yesterday,” said Terry, adding a broad wink as he escorted Bell into the front room. “Amazing how many unionists suddenly have pressing business with her brother since she hit this town.”

“Is Mary all right?”

“Of course I’m all right!” Mary said, striding into the front room.

She was buttoning a coat over her shirtwaist and trumpet skirt. A plain red hat, with neither ribbons nor feathers, was pinned to the portion of her hair swept up to the top of her head. The rest tumbled, glossy black, to her shoulders. Her eyes were as gray and unfathomable as a winter sky.

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

Isaac Bell could not say, Because you vanished in the middle of a riot while I was shadowing you — orders of Mr. Van Dorn, who thinks you’re up to something. Nor could he blurt out in front of her brother and the Protective Services boys, You are even more beautiful than I remembered.

“I’m glad to see you, again,” he said. “You, too, Jim.”

Jim Higgins took his hand. “Welcome to Chicago,” he said warmly.

Mary did not offer her hand, and her smile was as remote as a nod to a casual acquaintance seen across a busy train station. “Brother, I’m going out. Nice to see you, Isaac.”

“I hope to see you again.”

“Are you in Chicago long?”

“Hard to tell.”

“Same here.”

She swept out the door and was gone.

“Who’s watching out for her?” Bell asked Mike and Terry.

“No one.”

“What? Why not?”

“She won’t let us.”

“But if Jim’s in danger, surely his sister is, too.”

“We’ve already had the argument,” said Jim Higgins.

“And lost,” chorused the Protective Services agents.

“Don’t worry, Isaac,” said Jim, “I’m taking her to Pittsburgh. The boys are watching me, and we’ll all stick close.”

* * *

Henry Clay made absolutely sure that none of the Van Dorns had shadowed her before he followed Mary Higgins inside a nickelodeon in a long, narrow converted storefront on Halsted Street. A coin piano banged away in a corner, and the audience was howling at a comedy on the screen, Appointment by Telephone, in which a couple drinking champagne at lunch was spotted through the restaurant window by the man’s wife.

Clay located Mary in the back row, where he had instructed her to sit. His heart took him by surprise, soaring when the projection light jumped from the screen to her beautiful face. She was the only person in the theater not laughing.

Before he could reach her, a man stood up and moved a few seats over to sit next to her. Suspecting one of the mashers who preyed on women who sat alone in nickelodeons, Clay rushed to the seat next to him. He had guessed right. The man was already laying a hand on Mary’s leg. She slapped it away. The masher whispered, “Don’t play hard to get.”

Clay took the masher’s hand in his right, clamped his left over his mouth to muffle his scream, and broke his finger. “Leave quietly,” he whispered in his ear. “If I hear a peep out of you or ever see you again, I’ll break the other nine.”

The masher stumbled away, moaning, and Clay slipped into the seat he had vacated. Loud laughter and the coin piano allowed them to speak in low tones without fear of being overheard.

“I’ve lined up fifty barges and a couple of towboats.”

Nothing in her manner suggested whether she had noticed what he had done to the masher, and he could not tell whether that was because he had done it smoothly or because she didn’t care. Her reply was all business.

“Mr. Claggart, where did the money come from? Fifty barges and two towboats must cost a fortune.”

“Empty barges are going cheap at the moment. What with the operators fearing the strike will diminish production. Pittsburgh is awash in empties.”

“Fifty barges and the services of two steamboats still must cost money.”

“Don’t you read the papers?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s been a slew of bank and payroll robberies in the Chicago area, out toward Evanston and Cicero and all the way down to Hammond and Gary.”

“What do bank robberies have to do with the coal strike?”

“Not every bank robber is in it for personal gain,” Clay answered. “Some support worthy causes.”

The idea of labor radicals raising money by robbing banks had a ring of truth, he thought. And regardless of her scruples, if any, about robbing capitalist banks, they would be nothing compared to her scruples about financing her brilliant barge scheme with Judge James Congdon’s Wall Street money.

He glanced at her to see how the lie registered.

She was staring straight ahead at the show on the screen. The wife stalked into the restaurant. Crockery flew. Tables were overturned. The woman scorned procured a horsewhip from somewhere and flailed away, and the audience roared as she chased her husband and his girlfriend around the restaurant. Henry Clay feasted on Mary’s compelling profile, waiting, thinking, She’s got to laugh. She’s not made of stone.

* * *

Mary Higgins had been troubled from the first by the money. It seemed that whatever Claggart needed, he had access to limitless funds. But she found it difficult to believe that the bank robbers, who had inspired all sorts of lurid reporting in the newspapers, were nobler than common criminals. Albeit skillful ones who had managed enough successful robberies to inflame so much attention. With the Spanish War long gone from the headlines, and a reluctance on the part of many newspapers to lend the mine strike credence by writing about it, their editors were probably getting desperate.

But none of that guaranteed the robbers were supporting the strike.

She felt as she had since she first met Claggart in New York. She could not entirely trust the man. Despite his radical talk, his underlying motive was a mystery. But she hadn’t thought through how much money it would take to accomplish blocking the river, and she had little choice but to subscribe to the old saying Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. What if it was a trick by the owners? What kind of trick, she had no idea.

All she knew for sure was that she had thrown her lot in with someone she knew nothing about. She had