Clive Cussler - The Striker

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 in the company of a respectable, refined young lady he met in one of those establishments.”

The Pennsylvania Special’s last stop was at the Hudson River’s edge in Jersey City. Bell rode a ferry to Manhattan and the El uptown and walked to the Cadillac Hotel on Broadway. Avoiding the front door and the sharp-eyed house detectives recruited personally by Mr. Van Dorn, he found a bellboy smoking a cigarette outside the service entrance and tipped him to pass a private message to Grady Forrer in the Van Dorn suite.

Then Bell retreated five blocks down Broadway to the bar of the Hotel Normandie, which was loud with jobbers and wholesalers entertaining buyers. He watched from a corner table, guessing who among the customers streaming through the door was the big brain that the Boss had hired to establish the Van Dorn Detective Agency’s division of research.

Was it the guy with his hat cocked like a newspaperman? Reporters were trained in research. But, no, he did not appear to be meeting anyone as he went straight to the lunch bar. Was it the stern academic with a waxed mustache? No, he clapped a salesman on the back and was greeted like an old friend. Nor was it the long-haired fellow who looked like a scientist.

Suddenly, the bar grew quiet, conversations ceasing, as an immense shadow filled the door. It was certainly not this guy, large of shoulder and substantial of belly. As young as Bell, he had his hair slicked down and parted in the middle like a high-class floor manager who could keep a saloon orderly with a glance. He churned across the room, parting the crowd like a steamboat, straight at Bell. Then he placed wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and inspected the young detective closely.

His voice rumbled from deep in his chest. “I’m Grady Forrer, Mr. Bell. Your note described a fair-haired gent with a mustache. I’m going to venture that it’s a mustache you have just begun to encourage.”

“I’m hoping it will be worth the wait,” said Bell, thrusting out his hand. “Thanks for coming.”

“Glad to. It’s a madhouse up there. More business than you can shake a stick at.”

“Flimflammed buyers?”

“Flimflammed buyers by the gross, yard, bolt, ream, karat, bale, peck, dram, grain, pennyweight, each according to his measure. So many beating at the door that Mr. Van Dorn stripped my office of assistants to interview victims. Let’s have a drink.”

Bell hailed a waiter, and when the waiter ran with their order, he asked, “Do you have experts in Wall Street?”

“I have access to experts. And a certain rudimentary knowledge as I apprenticed down there before I became interested in this library work , and I’ve maintained friendships. What do you need to know?”

Bell told him about the sudden purchase of a controlling interest in Gleason Consolidated. “I’ve pored through newspapers and buttonholed a banker at a dinner in Pittsburgh, but I got no further than the name of a trust that no one’s heard of.”

“How quickly did they buy it up?” asked Forrer.