The Striker

A hundred feet ahead of Isaac Bell, half a city block, Mary Higgins followed her ears to the exciting roar of a mass meeting that was spilling from the new Irving Hall and packing Broome Street sidewalk to sidewalk. She was thrilled that the bold immigrant Jewish women leading New York’s needle-trades union battle were exerting their newly won power against the Beef Trust’s extortionate prices.

“The Hebrews are rioting!” roared a red-faced Irishman.

Whistles shrieked and the police advanced.

“Break it up!”

The women screamed back at the cops. “Who do you work for? The trusts? Or the people?”

“Move along, sister.”

“Cossacks!” screamed a woman, and her sisters combined to chant.

“Cossacks! Cossacks! Cossacks!”

“Break it up! Break it up!”

Then a girl screamed at the top of her lungs, “What’s a pe

“Dirty copper!”

A big cop shoved a woman. She fell on the rain-slicked cobblestones.

Mary Higgins jumped to help and pulled her to her feet before she was trampled.

Another woman sprawled and her bundles went flying. Something soft landed on Mary’s boots — blood-soaked butcher paper had torn open, spilling a slab of liver. A fat cop with a handlebar mustache and bushy eyebrows knocked Mary to her knees. Terrified of being trampled, she tried to stand.

The cop held her down and roared in her face, “What’s a pretty Irish lass doing with a bunch of dirty Yids?”

In that eruption of hatred, Mary Higgins felt her doubts evaporate. There was a huge difference between right and wrong, and what she had to do in Pittsburgh was right. She picked up the liver, hauled back, and slapped the cop’s face with it. The soft red flesh splattered on his eyebrows and mustache and stuck to his skin. Blinded, he reeled away, shouting in anger and confusion.

The other cops saw him pawing at his bloodstained face.

Thirty charged up Broome Street, swinging clubs.

The women’s screams of anger turned to shrieks of fear. They stumbled back and tried to run, surging into those behind, slipping on the wet cobblestones. Mary yanked a wild-eyed girl to her feet only to fall herself, crushed by the pack. A shoe mashed her hand against a cobblestone, another slammed into her back. The sky turned black with bodies tumbling on top of her. Struggling with all her strength, she could not rise. She could hardly breathe under the weight of the bodies. Suddenly, a powerful hand closed around her arm.

“I’ve got you,” a strong voice cut through the shouts and screams. “Stick close.”

The hand lifted her effortlessly up and out of the crush and set her on her feet and pulled her through the mob as if its owner was a mighty sword cleaving a path through the melee and around a corner.

More cops were coming on the run.

“Don’t look at them. Walk fast. Don’t run.”

She finally got a glimpse of her rescuer at Canal Street when he let go of her arm and turned to her. A broad-shouldered workman in a loose coat and overalls. He had a red scarf knotted at his throat, a battered felt hat with the brim slung over his eyes.

“Are you all right?” he asked her.

“You saved my life.”

“Someone had to. I just happened to be close enough.”

She offered her hand. “Thank you. I’m Mary Higgins.”

“Pleased to meet you, Mary Higgins. I’m John Claggart.”

22

Those poor women. They were right. The cops attacked like Cossacks.”

John Claggart had led her into an eatery that catered to the workers digging the ditch for the Rapid Transit Subway and pressed a hot cup of coffee into her trembling hands. “If you give cops the Devil’s task,” he answered, “they’ll use the Devil’s methods.”

“It should make every American cheek tingle with shame.”

“This is a bum government,” said Claggart. “Rotten to the core.”

“Three cheers for anarchy,” Mary said bitterly.

Claggart shook his head. “Anarchy’s a joke. It gets you nowhere. You have to do something. Something the bloodsucking capitalists will feel like a body blow. Something that will knock them flat.”

He was, Mary thought, very intelligent-looking. Though of similar build to the sturdy ditchdiggers downing their knockwurst and pea soup, he had an air of refinement about him that reminded her of Isaac. Also, like Isaac, he possessed the unflappable gaze of a man accustomed to success, which was rare in workmen beaten down by the struggle to put bread on the table. He was not, of course, as handsome as Isaac. Nor, she realized, was he as warm.

She could see a remoteness in his eyes, almost an emptiness. She had thought at first glance that they were hazel-colored, but they were actually that rarest of colors, amber. They looked golden in the smoky light of the eatery. But they did not glow like gold. They were opaque like copper. If, as she suspected, John Claggart was a man who harbored secrets, his eyes would never give them up. But whatever secrets he harbored, she did not care. She did not need warmth.

“I know a way,” she said, “to knock them flat.”

Isaac Bell searched for Mary Higgins at the Tombs, the damp and gloomy city prison, still under construction, where the police had booked nearly a hundred women. He had last seen her half a block away in a crush of cops and boycotters, but before he fought his way to the spot she had vanished. A telephone call to the Cadillac Hotel had produced a messenger with a letter of introduction signed by Joseph Van Dorn. The Boss had already made enough friends in New York to get special treatment — as did Mary’s Irish name. But it didn’t help. The Halls of Justice had no record of a Mary Higgins being arrested.

“You might check the Emergency Hospital for Women on East Twenty-sixth,” said a sympathetic sergeant. “God forbid Miss Higgins may have fallen in the melee. Those Hebrew women are ferocious.”

“No hospitals closer?”

“Brooklyn?”

It was raining hard when he stepped out, and he stood sheltered under the portico while he looked for a horse cab or a streetcar. He spotted a cab and ran for it. A workman in a loose-fitting coat and slouch hat got to it first. A dirty bandage masked his nose and cheeks, and folds of a red neckerchief muffled his chin.

“Take it,” said Bell. Blood had soaked the bandage, and he guessed the poor devil had been caught in the riot.

“No, you take it,” the man said and turned away.

Bell had glimpsed the eyes under the brim of the hat, and his dream in the coal mine was suddenly as real as the rain pelting down. The man glanced back and headed around the corner. Bell hurried after him.

“Wait!”

The man walked faster.

“Wait. You, sir!”

Bell broke into a run.

The man he was following darted to the demolition site where the thick granite walls of the old Tombs were being leveled and slipped between two remaining columns. Maybe he had been injured working on the demolition, thought Bell.

“Hold on, there!”

The man looked back again. When he saw Bell still following, he ran down an exposed flight of stairs. Bell followed him, deep down, into an enormous cellar that reeked of decay. The little light there came from holes in the ceiling.

The man stopped suddenly.

“Are you following me?”

“Yes,” said Bell. “Didn’t you hear me shouting?” He peered at features obscured by bandage and neckerchief and shadowed by the hat. “Have we met, sir?”

“Not that I recall,” he answered through the folds of his neckerchief. “Where are you from?”

“West Virginia,” said Bell.

“Nope. Never been there.”

“Where are you from?”

“Mister, you’ve got cop written all over you, and I ain’t done nothing that gives no cop call to ask questions.”

“Shrewd eye,” said Bell, thinking that fear of cops could explain him ru