Clive Cussler - The Striker

Bloom Sr., red-faced and carrying too much weight to be healthy, planted both hands on the snow-white cloth in order to stand up from his chair. He raised his glass.

“I won’t say I liked him. But he was one of ours. Gentlemen, I give you Black Jack Gleason— Struck down by the union! May he rest in peace.”

“Rest in peace!” thundered up and down the long table.

“And may the unionists burn in Hell!” echoed back.

Isaac Bell touched water to his lips.

Kenny Bloom, in line to inherit half the anthracite coal in Pennsylvania from his mother, and control of the Reading Railroad and vast bituminous fields from his father, winked at Bell. “We shouldn’t speak ill of the dead,” he muttered. “But, if we did, the things we could say.” He drank deeply. “I’m so glad you came, Isaac. These dinners get mighty grim.”

“Thank you for inviting me.”

Kenny grinned, “Didn’t give me much choice, did you, Mr. Make-Believe Insurance Man?”

“I do appreciate it.”

Halfway up the table, Pennsylvania’s attorney general raised his voice. “The union will pay for this outrage. Steamboats dynamited. Innocent workingmen, attempting to travel to Gleasonburg to get an honest job, injured. River blocked. Coal traffic at a standstill.”

“And Gleason murdered.”

“That, too. Yes, sir, the rabid dogs will pay.”

Kenny said to Bell, “They should, and they will, but he’s talking through his hat because West Virginia’s attorney general gets first crack, seeing as how they killed Black Jack in their state.”

“I’m not convinced,” said Bell, “that the union had anything to do with it.”

The military precision of back-to-back dynamitings simultaneous with the barge tow set adrift seemed to him far beyond the capability of the union organizers, who were scrambling to keep one step ahead of the Pinkertons. Inspections of the steamboat boiler rooms had increased his skepticism.

But Kenny, who had been hitting the whiskey before dinner, didn’t hear him. He was boasting instead to everyone at their end of the table about events in the anthracite fields. “So we mounted a Gatling gun on the back of a Mercedes Simplex and welded on steel plates to protect the driver.”

“Did it work?”

“Did it work? I’ll say it worked,” Kenny snickered. “The strikers call it the Death Special.”

At the top of the table, Bloom Sr. was addressing the strikers’ demands.

“The eight-hour workday will be the ruination of the coal business.”

“Hear! Hear!”

“And I’ve heard more than enough nonsense about safety. The miner has only himself to blame if he doesn’t keep his workplace in safe condition.”

Another baron agreed. “It’s not my fault if he refuses to mine his coal properly, scrape down dangerous slate, and install proper timbering.”

“Risk is naturally attached to the trade. Fact is, with prices tumbling, we’ll be lucky to stay in business.”

Bell noticed a perplexed expression on the face of an older mine operator, who called up table, “The iniquitous price we’re paying to ship coal isn’t helping either.”

Bloom Sr. returned a tight smile. “The railroad’s hands are tied, Mr. Morrison.”

“By whom, sir? Surely not the government?”

“Them, too, but it’s not like we don’t report to our investors.”

“There you go blaming Wall Street again. Didn’t used to, in my day. We called our own tune. If the banks wanted to make money, they were welcome to invest with us. But they did not presume to tell us how to dig coal or how to ship it.”

“Well, sir, these are different days.”

Isaac Bell noticed Kenny observing his father with a thoughtful, if not troubled, expression. “Sounds like you’ll have your work cut out for you when it’s your turn to run the railroad.”

“What makes you think I will run the railroad?”

“You’re his son, his only son, and you’ve been working with him since you left Brown.”

“I’d like nothing better,” said Kenny. “And I’m trying my darnedest to learn as fast as I can. But it may not be my choice.”

“Surely your father prefers you.”

“Of course he does. That was settled the day I graduated. But what if they don’t?”

“They?” asked Bell, though he suspected the answer already.

“The banks.”

Bell glanced up the table at Mr. Bloom. Behind the boasts and the bluster, even the rich and powerful railroad president R. Kenneth Bloom, Sr., was not in command of coal.

“Which banks?” he asked.

“The New York banks.”

“Which ones?”

Kenny shrugged.

“You don’t know?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

Bell leveled a stern gaze at the railroad heir. “ Not at liberty? You sound like a cautious lawyer instead of the pal who ran off to the circus with me.”

“That almost got us killed.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Yes.”

“Which banks?”

Kenny Bloom grinned. He looked, Bell thought, drunk, embarrassed, and a little scared. “Let me answer your nosy question this way — in a question back at you. Do you believe that the formation of the U.S. Steel Corporation is an end or a beginning?”

“End or beginning of what?”

“We’re dodo birds out here, Isaac. The self-determined Pittsburgh operator is going extinct. So’s the independent railroad that hauls coal. Wall Street is killing us off. Black Jack Gleason was a dodo. So’s every man at this table. Some of them just don’t know it yet.”

“Not you. You’re young. You’re like me. It’s 1902. We’re just starting out.”

Kenny Bloom stuck out his hand. “Shake hands with the son of a dodo.”

Bell formed a grin as lopsided as Kenny’s and shook his hand.

Kenny said, “If you’re so fired up to know which banks, look in the newspapers who made Carnegie and Frick into U.S. Steel.”

Bell’s father was a banker, a Boston banker. Boston was a long way from New York, and the two cities banked differently. But some things were the same. And if there was one thing Isaac Bell had learned from his father, and his grandfather, about banks, it was those who called the tune lay low.

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.

Brother,” said Mary Higgins. “I am going back to Pittsburgh.”