The Striker

“Looks like someone smacked it with a cold chisel. You see where the blade cut half through it?”

Isaac Bell said, “I thought it was chiseled, too.”

“O.K. Now what?”

“It broke in plain sight of a hundred men who would have noticed a guy whacking it with a chisel.”

“I recall you saying that back in Pittsburgh. But look. It looks like it was cut with a chisel.”

“How?”

Kisley sat back and stroked his chin as if he were grooming a beard. “Several ways to drive a cold chisel through steel spring to mind. Whack it with a hammer.”

“Which didn’t happen,” said Mack Fulton.

“Persuade an eagle to drop the chisel from a hundred feet in the air.”

“Which didn’t happen.”

“Drive it with an explosive charge.”

Isaac watched a rare smile cross Mack Fulton’s grim face. “Which could have happened.”

“Isaac,” said Wish Clarke. “Do you recall hearing a charge explode?”

“I heard a heck of a bang. But how would you detonate it?”

“Fulminate of mercury blasting cap.”

“How would you attach the cap?”

Wally Kisley poked the link. Then he picked it up and smelled it. “Could have stuck it on with tar, I suppose.”

“Maybe just a short length of chisel.”

“Molded in a ball of tar— Mighty cumbersome, though. Mighty cumbersome…”

Wally Kisley stared silently out the saloon door into the dark street. Isaac Bell observed that the explosives expert was falling less and less in love with the concept of a dynamite-driven chisel.

Archie Abbott glanced at Bell and raised an eyebrow to ask what was going on. Bell motioned for Archie to join him at the bar. He explained quietly, “They’ve seen it all. They’re just trying to remember which applies.”

“How the heck old are they?”

“Who knows? Wally was already a top agent when he investigated the bomb that set off the Haymarket Riot. They’ve got to be over fifty.”

“Amazing,” Archie marveled.

Finally, slowly, like a newly lighted oil lamp gathering kerosene up into its wick, Wally’s face began to glow. He turned to Mack Fulton. “Mack, you know what’s on my mind?”

“Dynamite.”

“A great improvement over black powder, patented in 1867 by Alfred Nobel.”

“From which Alfred Nobel made so much dough — and felt so guilty for making it easier to kill people — that last year he handed out prizes of money to the best physicist, the best pacifist, the best poet, even the guy who invented X-rays.”

“You know who else should have won a prize last year?”

“Rosania,” said Fulton.

“Laurence Rosania.”

Isaac Bell and Wish Clarke exchanged a look.

Archie asked, “Who’s that?”

“Chicago safecracker,” answered Bell. “Jewel man.”

“Best dynamite man in the business,” said Kisley, his smile growing.

“Aces across the continent, too,” said Fulton, “since he’s taken up travel. If those other guys deserved that Nobel Prize and all that dough, so does he.”

Bell called from the bar, “What about Rosania? Do you see his hand in this?”

“No, no, no. He’s a jewel thief. Too fastidious a dude to muck around coal mines even if he was sabotage-minded, which he ain’t. But I am thinking about a job he pulled last year. Remember, Mack?”

“Shaped charge.”

“Sometimes called hollow charge.”

Bell and Archie rejoined the others at the table.

Mack said, “This politician bought himself a big safe with six-inch walls made of plates of iron and steel.”

“In the event,” Wally explained to Archie, “that a city contractor or a police chief or a sporting house proprietor had a sudden need to safeguard some cash and it was after banking hours, this politician would help out by holding it for them in his safe.”

Archie nodded.

“Performing a public service.”

“Some safecracker,” Mack continued, “tried to blow it. Seeing six-inch walls, the yegg applied enough dynamite to blast the roof off the politician’s house. Which it did, but only dented the safe. Barely scratched it. A while later, along comes Rosania. He’s caught wind that the politician purchased diamonds for his girl. Rosania blows a hole in the six-inch walls big enough to stick his hand in. Like it was made of cardboard. And no one even heard the explosion.”

“How’d he do it?” asked Bell.

“Rosania’s one of those fellows who’s always got his nose in a book,” said Fulton.

Kisley said, “He read about this scientist at the Naval Torpedo Station up in Newport, Rhode Island, who came up with this big idea called a hollow charge. Sometimes they call it a shaped charge ’cause where you make it hollow, the direction its hollow points is the direction where the explosion goes. Instead of blowing off the politician’s new roof, Rosania drove all that dynamite in the exact direction he wanted, straight through the wall of the safe. Quiet little poof. Four-inch hole.”

“Did he get the diamonds?” asked Archie Abbott.

Mack Fulton looked at the apprentice incredulously. “What? No, he got diamond dust and diamond flakes.”

“I thought diamonds were indestructible.”

“So did Rosania,” said Mack Fulton.

Wally Kisley laughed. “Clearly, the safecracking classes have some experimenting still to do. But, Isaac, if your saboteur found a way to stick a hollow charge to the chain bridle, he wouldn’t need a big bunch of sticks of dynamite you’d spot a mile off. Fact is, I don’t think he used a cold chisel at all. I think that hollow charge did the job all by itself. What you heard, Isaac, was a small charge of dynamite blowing all in one direction straight at this link — so concentrated that it sheared the chain like a chisel.”

“But how long would the charge stick to the chain? Jerking around like it does.”

Kisley shrugged. “Not long. Maybe he wired it on. You said you never found that shackle. I bet he packed the entire charge inside the shackle.”

Mack Fulton said, “Maybe you couldn’t find the shackle because all that was left was shackle chips and shackle dust.”

Bell stared at Fulton. For a second he felt the floor shift under him. Like a dream remembered days later, he could almost see a pair of golden eyes, wolf eyes, from which exploded a fist. The white-damp dream in which he thought he had seen the shackle he never found. He shook his head, wondering how to unscramble tangled memory, and pressed on. “It doesn’t take much shaking to explode fulminate of mercury. How long before the winch jerking the wire set off the detonator?”

“Minutes at most.”

“Which meant the saboteur was in the mine when he attached the explosive.”

“Had to be. Slapped it on with a wad of tar last minute as the train went by.”

“A cool customer, knowing the train might come crashing back at him before he could get out.”

“Mighty cool,” Wish Clarke agreed. “Knowing it was coming gave him a certain leg up to get out of the way. Still, you gotta hand it to him. A cool customer.”

“Who knows his business,” said Wally Kisley.

“All of which supports young Isaac’s contention,” said Wish Clarke. “With the timing of the explosion unpredictable, what union man would perpetrate such an act knowing it could kill his brother miners?”

“It does make you wonder what he’ll think of next time.”

“This calls for a drink,” said Wish Clarke, emptying the bottle into his glass. “Wally’s right, we are onto something.”

“Until Gleason fires us.”

“When Gleason fires us,” said Bell, “I’ll try and talk Mr. Van Dorn into letting us stay on.”

“I wouldn’t count on that.”

The food arrived, and Isaac Bell’s squad began debating what it had been before the cook got ahold of it. Wish Clarke took his glass to the bar. He motioned for Bell to join him.

“If you want us to keep looking for your provocateur, steer clear of the telegraph office.”

“Why?”

“And if you see a boy coming your way with a telegram, run like hell. The Boss can’t order you to stop if he can’t find you.”