He said, “It won’t be in the newspapers. Those who ran the show stayed backstage.”
Kenny pulled an embossed card from his pocket and pressed it into Bell’s hand. “Here’s a rail pass, good anywhere in the country. Go to Boston. Ask your father which banks.”
“We are not on speaking terms,” said Bell.
“Because you’re a detective?”
“He wants me in the bank.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Be a detective.”
“That is too bad. He is a good fellow.”
“I know,” said Bell. “He is the best.” He held up the pass. “O.K. if I keep this?”
“Your grandfather left you plenty. You can afford to buy a ticket.”
“I would like to keep it,” said Bell. “Money talks. But a railroad pass from the son of a dodo shouts.”
The servants removed the oyster shells and the soup bowls and brought caviar, herring, and pâté. Bell switched from champagne to a sauterne. Kenny stayed with his whiskey.
“Are you going to buy Gleason’s mines?” Bell asked him.
“Somebody beat us to it. Snapped up the entire Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke Company, lock, stock, and barrel.”
“Who?”
“I haven’t the vaguest idea.”
“But not a Pittsburgh dodo,” said Isaac Bell.
BOOK TWO
FIRE
18
BROTHER,” SAID MARY HIGGINS. “I AM GOING BACK TO Pittsburgh.”
Jim had been worrying about this and here it was. Back in West Virginia, a thousand miners had been evicted from their Gleason company shanties. Some were huddling in a tent city, their usual fate while a strike dragged on and scabs dug the coal. Some, however, had begun a march to Pittsburgh in hopes that newspaper stories about men, women, and children marching in cold rain would raise the nation’s sympathy. It might. It might even give President Roosevelt courage to intervene.
A thousand marching up the coal-rich Monongahela Valley stood a good chance of doubling their ranks and doubling them again and again as workers struck the hundreds of mines along the way to join the march. Ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand arriving in Pittsburgh might well spark the general strike Higgins dreamed of. But he hesitated to join it.
The murder of Black Jack Gleason had turned the mood violent. Governors were threatening to call up troops. Prosecutors were staging trials. And the coal mine owners had dropped even pretenses of restraint.
“There’s plenty to keep us busy here. Plenty. The smelters’ strike is a disaster.”
“Read this!” She thrust the Denver Post in his face and pulled a carpetbag from under her cot. Jim read quickly. “What is this? We know Gleason got blown up.”
“Keep reading. Do you see what happened next?”
Jim read to the end where it was reported that the barges that sank at Gleasonburg had blocked the river for four days.
Mary asked, “The rivers are not deep at Pittsburgh, are they?”
“Not very. The Mon’s about eight or ten feet. Shallower in many places, depending on rain. About the same for the Allegheny.”
“And the Ohio?”
“About the same . . . Why?”
Mary’s eyes were burning.
“Why?” Jim repeated sharply.
“Even scab coal has to reach Pittsburgh to be shipped by trains to the eastern cities and by barge to the west.”
“I don’t understand,” said Jim. He understood fully, but he didn’t want to hear it.
Mary said, “The barges that sunk at Gleasonburg blocked the river for four days. One tow’s worth of barges, brother, a single fleet. What would happen at Pittsburgh if many, many, many barges sank and blocked the river?”
“No coal would move,” said Jim Higgins.
“No coal to the Pittsburgh mills,” said Mary. “No coal trained east to the cities. No coal barged west down the Ohio.”
“But the miners are already marching. What about the march? A peaceful march.”
“The marchers will need all the help they can get. This will help them.”
“Sabotage is war, Mary.”
“Coal is the lifeblood of the capitalist class.”
“War means death.”
“Precisely, brother. Without coal, the capitalist class will die.”
• • •
ISAAC BELL headed to New York to get a handle on the new owners of Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke. He wangled the last seat on the Pennsylvania Special by flourishing Kenny Bloom’s rail pass. Ten thousand buyers from out-of-town firms were flocking to the city to purchase merchandise for the fall and winter, and the eastbound trains were packed.
“Don’t let the Boss catch sight of you before you can prove what’s driving your provocateur,” Wish Clarke warned as they parted in Pittsburgh. Wish was heading out to Chicago to ask Laurence Rosania who, in a safecracker’s opinion, might practice the esoteric and extremely rare art of shaping explosives. “He’ll pepper you with questions: Who is he? Who’s behind him? What do they want? Better have a clear idea or he’ll switch you to another case.”
But Bell had been far from forming clear ideas, even before the explosions on the Monongahela. Was a saboteur provoking violence for profit or to win the war between labor and operators? Whoever bought Gleason Consolidated Coal & Coke could be angling for both.
“I can’t dodge Mr. Van Dorn. I have to go to the office to tap the new research man.”
“Tap him in a bar around the corner. I was in New York last September when the buyers came. The Broadway hotels were putting up cots and turning people away. If only a small portion of them encounter New York sharpers, our new field office will be doing a land-office business. And you will get shanghaied into interviewing waiters, bartenders, cabbies, ushers, maître d’s, and chambermaids on behalf of a ladies’ unmentionables buyer from Peoria who, having celebrated a morning of wholesaler haggling with drinks in a club, lunch at a café, an automobile ride around Central Park, dinner in a roadhouse, a show at the vaudeville, and late supper and a cold bottle on a roof garden, woke up minus his wallet—which he will finally recall he saw last
