Clive Cussler - The Assassin

The private reflected for a long moment. “It was like nothing else mattered. Like he didn’t care about nothing. Except the target.”

Isaac Bell took the train back to the ferry. Before he got on the boat, he sent another wire to Archie Abbott.

MAKE ARMY FRIENDS.

TRACE DESERTER BILLY JONES.

SLIGHT BUILD, 5’3”.

BROWN HAIR, GRAY-GREEN EYES.

When Walter L. Hawley, chief political reporter of the Evening Sun , spotted Isaac Bell striding to his desk, he stopped typing to clasp the detective’s hand hello.

“You’re looking prosperous.”

“You’re looking ink-stained.”

“How’s the big guy?” Hawley and Joseph Van Dorn had met back in the early ’90s when the reporter covered police headquarters and Van Dorn had chased a Chicago arsonist to New York.

“Fired me,” said Bell. “Or I quit, depending on who shot first.”

“Welcome to Newspaper Row. Multitudes who have failed in all attempts at every occupation turn to journalism to find a stopgap between mediocrity and professional begging.”

“Actually, I did come to discuss a job.”

Hawley looked alarmed.

“Easy does it,” said Bell, “not for me. What do you make of the situation in Russia?”

“It resembles the bedlam of unchecked human emotion. My beat is City Hall, so maybe I’m not qualified to predict a gloomy future for the czar. But they’ve had a bad year and it’s only June.

“It could blow the Baku oil business to Kingdom Come.”

Hawley said, “I won’t ask a private detective, assuming you are still one, what that has to do with you. But I will ask, what does that have to do with me? When I need oil, I get it from John D. Rockefeller.”

“E. M. Hock would jump at a freelance assignment to report on the threat to the oil industry in Baku.”

“Are you serious?”

“Absolutely.”

“Wonderful!.. Except, I’ve always thought the rumors were true. She’s a woman, isn’t she?”

“Very much so.”

Hawley shook his head. “I’ll tell you, Isaac, I would jump at a chance to hire such a good writer. So would my publisher. He’d approve in a flash. But we would be strongly hesitant to send a woman among heathens. Russians and Moslems, and I believe they’ve even got some Persians, they’re next door, aren’t they?”

Bell said, “When I met Edna Matters in Kansas, she had just driven up from Indian Territory in a buckboard wagon. Her sister was her traveling companion. I imagine Nellie Matters would go along to Russia.”

“Nellie Matters? The Insufferable Suffragette?”

“I find Nellie Matters anything but insufferable.”

“I don’t mean to disparage the lady,” the newspaperman said hastily. “Certainly lovely to look at, and a fiery orator. She’ll really make her mark with that New Woman’s Flyover.”

“What do you say?” asked Bell. “Will you hire E. M. Hock?”

“But now you’re suggesting sending two women among the heathens. If something happened to them in wherever that godforsaken place is — the Caspian Sea? — Joe Pulitzer and Bill Hearst and Preston Whiteway would yellow-journal us into our graves. They would incite mobs to tear us limb from limb. Newsies who tried to sell the Sun would be hung from lampposts.”

“I’ll arrange for the best private detective in the business to stand watch over them.”

“That could get expensive.”

“I’ll pay for the detective, you pay Miss Matters’ fee.”

“Sounds like you have a wealthy client, Isaac, if you’re not working for Van Dorn anymore.”

“I will pay for the detective,” Bell repeated.

Hawley said, “That’s right. You’re rich. I forgot. O.K. It’s a deal! And thanks, Isaac. If she’ll take the job, she’ll set a new standard for our overpaid hacks.”

They shook on it. Bell said, “But don’t tell her — or anyone — that I have anything to do with this. No one! ”

Walter Hawley winked. “Mind me asking which sister you’re sweet on?”

Isaac Bell delivered the grin that a married man expected from a bachelor.

“Let’s just say that with this arrangement, I can keep my eye on both of them.”

Archie Abbott came through with a wire to the Yale Club. His friends in the State Department reported strong rumors that the Shah of Persia was negotiating a monster loan from the Russian czar. Archie speculated that maybe such a loan would explain Rockefeller’s clandestine visit to the Persian embassy.

Maybe.

Bell had packed and was just leaving the club to walk to Grand Central, intending to board the train well ahead of Rockefeller, when the day hall porter said, “There’s a street urchin asking for you.”

“Where?”

“He snuck in through the kitchen.”

“Did he say what he wanted?”

“He claims he’s a probationary Van Dorn apprentice. I figured if he were, he’d know you don’t work there anymore.”

Bell hurried downstairs to the kitchen. A boy who looked like a cleaned-up, dressed-up street rat was standing quietly in a corner. Scarcely into his teens, his eyes alert, his manner so diffident, he was almost invisible.

“What’s your name, son?”

“Tobin, sir. Eddie Tobin.”

“Who do you apprentice under?”

“Mr. Warren.”

Of course. The Van Dorn street gang expert. If Eddie Tobin was good enough for Harry Warren, he was good enough for Bell.

“How old are you?”

“Not old enough to apprentice. I’m only probationary.”

“I asked how old?” Bell growled.

“Fifteen.”

“ How old?”

“Fourteen.”

“When I was fourteen, I ran away to the circus. Did Mr. Warren send you?”

“Mr. Forrer. Mr. Warren said it was O.K.”

“What do you have there?”

The kid had an envelope of newspaper clippings.

Bell had read the top one already:

Averell Comstock, director of Standard Oil, and at one time president of the corporation, died after a brief illness. Comstock was one of the big oil capitalists of the country who laid the foundations for the Standard Oil Company alongside John D. Rockefeller, Clyde Lapham, and Henry M. Flagler. He served, too, as a director of the Western Union Telegraph Company, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and the Pittsburgh National Bank. His wealth was estimated at from $75,000,000 to $100,000,000.

The second clipping reported that Averell Comstock had left ten thousand dollars to a Mrs. Mary McCloud who had a coffee stand that the oil magnate had frequented on Fulton Street.

The last clipping reported that a Mrs. Mary McCloud had died in a tenement fire in Chatham Square.

Forrer had typed a note.

Same Mrs. McCloud. Tenement short walk from Fulton.

“Come with me, Tobin.” John D. Rockefeller’s train was leaving in three hours. If Bell didn’t have enough time, the kid could follow up and wait for reinforcements.

“Yes, sir, Mr. Bell!”

They raced downtown on the Elevated.

Before descending to the street, Bell scanned the squalid neighborhood from the vantage of the Chatham Square El station. Walt Hawley and the Evening Sun and most of the big New York dailies occupied the clean, modern Newspaper Row section of Park Row less than a half mile downtown. This was the upper section of Park Row, a slum that had been a slum for most of the city’s long history.

He spotted a burned-out tenement and led Tobin down the stairs, three at a bound.

Sawhorses blocked the sidewalk. The buildings that flanked it had burned, too. Rain had fallen since, and the odor of wet charred wood hung heavily in the air. Settlement House workers were helping families who lost their homes load bedclothes and furniture that had survived the fire.