Clive Cussler - The Assassin

“Maybe this will help,” said Bell. He pressed two twenty-dollar gold pieces, two months’ sweatshop earnings, into the hands of the startled woman in charge.

“God bless you, sir.”

“Did anyone here know Mrs. McCloud?” he asked.

None did, but one said she thought Mrs. McCloud had worked on Fulton Street. Bell and Tobin hurried downtown and across Fulton toward the East River. At the waterfront, carts and temporary stalls had set up business selling refreshments.

“I hope those aren’t Jamaica Bay oysters,” said Tobin.

“Why’s that?”

“Jamaica Bay’s polluted with the typhoid.”

“We’re looking for coffee stands,” said Bell. They found a row of them selling coffee and cake and pastries. One space was empty. Bell paid for coffee and cake for the apprentice. The kid tore into it hungrily but paid close attention as Bell questioned the woman who poured.

“Where is Mrs. McCloud?”

“Gone.”

“When did she leave?”

“She didn’t leave. She died. She was killed in a fire.”

“That is terrible,” said Bell. “Did you know her well?”

“Not as well as Mrs. Campbell. The shop on the other side. Kate! ” she called across the empty stand. “Gentleman here is asking about Mrs. McCloud.”

Bell crossed over and ordered a slab of pound cake. “Mrs. Campbell? I’m Jethro Smith. I just heard. I had no idea. I didn’t know her well, but I stop by when I’m downtown. What happened?”

“Poor Mrs. McCloud. Widowed young. All she had was her boy and he died. Now this. Are you a newspaperman?”

“No, ma’am. I’m in the insurance line. Why do you ask?”

“Newspapermen came around. They said that Mary inherited ten thousand dollars . And never knew it! Died without knowing it.”

“Did you say her son died, too?” Bell asked.

“Drowned in the river.”

“When?”

“The same time as the fire — not that anybody was surprised. Anthony ran with the Five Points Gang. I pray she never knew he drowned.”

“Let us hope,” said Bell. “Ten thousand! That is a lot of money. Who left her the ten thousand?”

“An old man. He used to come every day. I teased her. He was sweet on her. Every day like clockwork. First he’d eat his oysters on the pier, then he’d come round the corner and drink Mary’s coffee. I used to say don’t give him so much sugar in his coffee. You’ll kill his appetite. He won’t order cake. I guess I was wrong about that. Ten thousand!”

Bell checked his watch, motioned to Tobin, and passed him the cake. “I have to catch a train. Have a look-see at whichever oyster stand the old man frequented.”

“Yes, Mr. Bell. Is there anything special you want me to look for?”

Bell paused for a moment. It was a smart question from a kid just starting out. No wonder Harry Warren had tapped him. Tobin just might be a natural.

“Start with where that stand gets its oysters. Let’s make sure Mr. Comstock didn’t die of that Jamaica Bay typhus you mentioned. Soon as you sort that out, report to Mr. Forrer. Then tell Mr. Warren I asked would he give you a hand to look into a Five Pointer named Anthony McCloud drowning in the East River.”

Thank you for seeing me off,” John D. Rockefeller told the New York reporters who mobbed the Lake Shore Limited platform at Grand Central. “I’d expect you’d have more profitable ways to pass your time, but it is very kind of you.”

He wore an old man’s overcoat and held tight to the burly Bill Matters’ arm while Isaac Bell stood guard just out of camera range. “What will I do in Cleveland? Warm these old bones and try my hand knocking golf balls.”

The Cleveland newspapers sent reporters to meet his train at Union Depot, and posted more reporters at the front gate of Forest Hill, Rockefeller’s summer residence on the edge of town. A week later, the newspapermen returned when the city’s Italian Boys Band came to serenade him. Rockefeller gave them a show, seizing a baton to conduct “The Star-Spangled Banner.” It would be his last public appearance until October.

That night Isaac Bell slipped him and Matters into a private car coupled to the New York Central’s eastbound Lake Shore Limited. Ten hours later, the train was divided at Albany. Some cars continued east to Boston, most headed south to New York City. Bill Matters joined the New York section to board the four-funnel German ocean liner SS Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse . Isaac Bell and John D. Rockefeller continued on the eastbound section.

Waiting with steam up in Boston Harbor was the three-hundred-foot Sandra , a handsome yacht with a lofty raked stack and the lines of a greyhound that Rockefeller had borrowed when Bell pointed out that the newspapers ensured there were no secrets on an ocean liner. Judge James Congdon had lent Sandra in a flash, leaving Bell to speculate whether the legendary Wall Street potentate, a founder of U.S. Steel, was in on Rockefeller’s deal. Whatever the deal was. So far, Bell had made no progress in getting Rockefeller to confide in his bodyguard.

Sandra ’s triple-expansion engines drove them across the Atlantic Ocean in twelve days. They landed at Cherbourg and rode in a private car coupled to the boat train to Paris. A French actress whom Bell had known in San Francisco recruited her favorite theatrical costumer and wigmaker from the Comédie-Française. They called on John D. Rockefeller in the privacy of his hotel.

Bell booked train tickets to Constantinople. Then he visited a director of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, whose wife’s sapphire necklace Van Dorn detectives had ransomed from the thief Rosania when she visited Chicago. The grateful director of the sleeping car company gave Bell a copy of the passenger manifest. Bell showed it to Rockefeller to ensure that the oil magnate would not bump into fellow tycoons on the Express d’Orient.

The tawny yellow all-stateroom train offered its pampered customers the unique benefit of not being rousted from their beds for passport checks at the border crossings as they steamed through Munich, Strasbourg, Vienna, and Budapest. Sixty-four hours after leaving Paris, they awakened to the balmy air and dazzling sunshine of Constantinople, a vast and ancient cosmopolitan city of mosques and minarets, a sprawling bazaar, mangy dogs, and a bustling harbor on a deep blue sea.

A mail steamer carried them up the Bosporus Strait and four hundred miles across the Black Sea to Batum, the world’s biggest oil port, where the snow-covered Caucasus Mountains loomed over the harbor, and the six-hundred-mile pipe line from Baku terminated.

Dozens of steam tankers rode at anchor, queuing to load at the kerosene docks. But the city’s streets were deserted and buildings shuttered.

“Muslims and Christians are shooting each other,” Bill Matters reported when he met them at the steamer in a Rolls-Royce. “It’s a pogromy , Tatars attacking Armenians.”

“Where do the Russians stand?” asked Bell.

“The cops and Army turn a blind eye.”

They drove five miles out of the city to Manziadjani. The American vice consul, a prosperous and well-connected ship broker whom Rockefeller had arranged to meet, had his country place there. Shots were fired from the woods as they pulled in through the front gate. Bell had his pistol out and was opening his carpetbag when Vice Consul Abrams staggered up to the car with blood pouring from his mouth.