“I take that as a compliment. But we are
Mary let her own eyes rove around his paintings again. They settled on the statuette. He was rubbing its breasts with his thumb.
“Well? Have I?”
Mary draped her arms around the marble couple. “Considering your penchant for women in the altogether, I’d have been insulted if you hadn’t at least noticed me.”
“Good! Let’s get right to it. I will make you an offer, young lady. I won’t ask you to even pretend that you find a man three times your age attractive. I don’t care about being ‘attractive’ to you or anyone. I care about possession. And I have no objection to paying for possession. It is the most tangible reward for success. In return, you will live lavishly in comparison to the vast, vast majority of other women. Whether I decide to keep you or not. If not, you will receive a generous pension, based, of course, on how long I’ve kept you.”
“How large a pension compared to your regular employees?”
“There’s no comparison. Few receive pensions. The handful who do do not discover themselves rolling in wealth they didn’t earn.”
“If you decided to keep me, how much?”
“You’ll want for nothing.”
“An automobile?”
“Of course.”
“An apartment on Fifth Avenue?”
“For as long as I have the only key.”
“Could I come and see this statue?”
“Every night.”
“Could I have a yacht?”
“A yacht would require extra effort on your part.”
“I hoped you would say that.”
A broad smile uncreased Congdon’s face. “That suggests we understand each other perfectly. And let me put your mind to ease on one score. I can pretty much guarantee that when you find yourself on silk sheets, an older man might surprise you more than you imagine.”
“I’ve been surprised only once in my life and it wasn’t on silk sheets.”
“Where was that?”
“On a freight train. Go to hell, Congdon.”
Congdon, visibly surprised, fumbled around his desk and laid a hand on the bronze statuette of his naked wife. “But you just said you were hoping—”
“I was hoping you would say something that would give me enough courage, or enough hatred, to shoot you. And you did, thank you.” She took Henry Clay’s revolver from her bag and braced it on
The veins in the back of Congdon’s hand bulged as he gripped his statuette with sudden intensity. “Did the yacht do it?”
She tried to answer but couldn’t. Finally, she whispered, “I guess we all have our limits.”
“What do you mean?”
“I cannot kill another human being, even the worst one in the world.” She lowered the gun. “I can’t do it.”
“I can,” he said, and slammed the statuette down and jumped back — just in case a twenty-foot separation was not enough — and watched from afar.
Steam roared. Hot, needle-sharp jets spewed down from the ceiling and up from the floor and enveloped Mary Higgins in a scalding white cloud. She screamed only once. Congdon was surprised. He had expected it to take longer with a strong young woman. But she had died in a flash. So much for pain, he thought. She had died in the space of a single breath. Probably never knew what hit her.
He edged back to his desk and lifted the lever gingerly. It was actually cool to the touch, so tightly focused were the jets. The steam stopped gushing. The windows were fogged, and he felt dampness on his cheeks and saw a layer of dew on his polished desk. But the cloud that had enveloped Mary and
46
The
“She smells the barn!” said the Ohio River pilot — one of two Isaac Bell had hired in Cincinnati — along with a chief engineer famously reckless in the pursuit of hotter steam.
“Faster,” said Bell, and the pilot rang the engine room.
Forced draft furnace fans roared. Jim Higgins’s miners shoveled on the coal. And the engineer played fast and loose with his boiler levels, tempting eternal oblivion by pumping water on red-hot plates to jump the pressure.
At mile marker 10, Bell saw the horizon grow dark with city smoke. Thunderheads loomed. Bolts of lightning pierced them. Rain sizzled down and flattened the seething currents of the river in flood.
Soon the hills of Pittsburgh hunched into the dismal sky. Tall buildings emerged from the smoke. The
Escape pipes blew off excess steam with a roar that drowned out the ringing of her bell, and she nosed to a landing at the foot of the Amalgamated coal miners’ tent city. Miners recruited as deckhands hoisted her boarding stage onto a temporary wharf that the strikers had improvised by raising one of the barges that the Defense Committee had sunk to fortify the point with a crenellated breakwater.
Coal miners, their wives and children, church ladies, reformers, and scribbling newspaper reporters stared. Isaac Bell stared back, as amazed. The last person he expected to walk up the stage lugging his long carpetbag was Aloysius Clarke, decked out in top hat and tails.
“Pretty steamboat, Isaac.”
“What are you doing out of the hospital?”
Wish dropped his bag with a clank and caught his breath. “Couldn’t miss the Duquesne Cotillion.”
“You came all the way to Pittsburgh for the ball?”
“Quite a shindig. Everybody who was anybody was there. I even met Colonel J. Philip Swigert of the Pennsylvania state militia. Talkative gent, particularly when he’s had a few.”
“Well done!” Bell reached to slap Wish on the shoulder in congratulations. Wish stayed him with a gesture. “Don’t tear the stitches.”
Bell pulled up short. “Are you O.K.?”
“Tip-top.”
“You don’t look tip-top— What did the colonel say?”
“You got here just in time,” Wish answered gravely. “State militia, and the Pinkertons, and the Coal and Iron Police, are marching aboard the
Bell called down to the miners tending the
