The Assassin

“No,” said Isaac Bell. “What is it you don’t find likeable?”

“Is that a detective trait to always ask questions?”

“Yes.”

“You’re as bad as my sister the reporter.”

A hansom cab whisked them across town. She held his hand, and, all too soon, the cab pulled up to the Matters town house in Gramercy Park, a quiet oasis of a neighborhood that predated the Civil War. Just across the narrow park was one of Archie Abbott’s clubs, The Players. The cab clattered off. Bell walked Nellie to the front door. The house was made of brick with gleaming black shutters.

“What a handsome house.”

“We moved up in the world with the Standard,” Nellie replied as she slipped a key in the door. She whirled around suddenly and faced him. “Come back tomorrow evening to meet Father.”

“As aspiring balloonist or gentleman caller?”

Nellie Matters gave Isaac Bell her biggest smile. “Both.”

She disappeared behind the door.

He lingered on the sidewalk. He had to admit that he was more than a little dazzled by the vibrant and witty young woman.

Suddenly he was alert, seeing movement from the corner of his eye. A slight figure, a woman in a cloak, materialized from the shadows of Gramercy Park. Lamplight crossed her face.

“Edna?” he asked, caught off base by how happy he was to see her.

“I was just coming home,” she answered. “I didn’t want to interrupt you and Nellie.”

She seemed upset.

“Are you all right?”

Edna Matters paused to consider her answer. “Not entirely. I mean, I’m in a bit of a quandary.”

“Good or bad?”

“If I knew, it wouldn’t be a quandary, would it?”

“Tell me what it is,” said Bell. “I’m a fair hand, sometimes, at sorting good from bad. Come on, we’ll take a walk.”

The hour was late and the well-dressed couple might have drawn the attention of thieves who would attempt to separate them from their money. That is until a closer inspection revealed a gent light on his feet and cold of eye. They walked until the lights grew brighter on Broadway, its sidewalks crowded with people bustling in and out of hotels, restaurants, and vaudeville theaters.

“I grew up with oil derricks,” Edna said suddenly. “Pipe lines and breakout tanks. And a father beaten repeatedly by the Standard.”

“Is that how you came to write the History of Under-handed?”

“Do you think I had a choice?”

“I don’t know,” said Bell. “Nellie didn’t respond to your father’s losses by becoming a reporter.”

“Wouldn’t you say that pursuing justice for women is the other side of the same coin?”

“How?”

“Of trying to make things right.”

“No,” said Bell. “Enfranchisement is a cause, a worthy cause. Writing the truth is more like a calling. So maybe you’re right. Maybe you had no choice.”

“You’re not making this easier.”

“I’m sorry, but I don’t know what your quandary is. Not making what easier?”

She fell silent again. Bell tried to reengage her. “What about Nellie? Did she take your father’s losses as hard as you did?”

Edna thought a moment. “Nellie loves him as fiercely as I do. But she wasn’t around for as much of it. She’s traveled ever since she put her teens and pinafores behind her. Here today, gone tomorrow.”

“Maybe she was trying to get away from them.”

“I don’t know. She’s always on the road—and at home wherever she alights.”

“You travel, too.”

“Like a hermit crab. I carry my home with me. No matter where I land at the end of the day, I’m at my typewriter. I thought it was time to stop writing, my crusade over.”

“Is there a purpose to stop your writing?”

“I thought I was ready to stop. But the new oil strikes make it a new story. And now the unrest in Baku threatens shortages that could upend the petroleum industry all over the world. Imagine what must be going through Mr. Rockefeller’s mind at a moment like this.”

“What is in Baku for him?”

“Half the world’s oil. And a well-established route to the customers. If they burn the Baku fields, who will supply the Russians’ and the Nobels’ and the Rothschilds’ markets? JDR, that’s who, even if it’s true he retired, which I never believed . . . Listen to me! I’m too obsessed with JDR to stop reporting on him. Just when I think I’m done, I learn something new.”

“Like what?”

“I’ve heard rumors—speculation, really—that Rockefeller uses his publicists to communicate secretly with his partners. They plant a story. It gets printed and reprinted in every paper in the world, and those who know his code get his message . . . Boy!”

She gave two pe

Bell said, “It sounds perfectly ordinary. So ordinary, you wonder why the papers print it.”

“Any pronouncement the richest man in America makes is automatically news. They change details to keep it up to date. After he returned from Europe they added the introductory ‘I recall, when I was in France,’ et cetera. Recently they added ‘the sun rising.’ I’m sure it’s a message. Maybe it doesn’t matter—except it might, and I can’t stop writing about him . . .” She leafed through the paper. “Here’s another I’ve been following in the social sections. I ca

“You should see your face. You’re on fire. Congratulations!”

“For what?’”

“An excellent decision not to retire.”

Suddenly a ragged chorus of young voices piped, “Extra! Extra!”

Gangs of newsboys galloped out of the Times building. They scattered up and down Broadway and Seventh Avenue, waving extra editions and shouting the story.

“Rich old man jumps off Washington Monument.”

Bell bought a paper. He and Edna leaned over the headline

TYCOON SUICIDE

STANDARD OIL MAGNATE LEAPS TO DEATH FROM WASHINGTON MONUMENT

and raced down the column and onto the second page.

“Why do you think he did it?” asked Bell. “Guilt?”

Edna Matters shook her head. “Clyde Lapham would have to look up ‘guilt’ in the dictionary to get even a murky idea of its meaning.”

“Maybe he felt the government closing in,” said Bell, knowing the Van Dorn investigation had yet to turn up enough evidence to please a prosecutor.

“If he jumped,” said Edna, “because he felt the government breathing down his neck, then his last living thought must have been I should have taken Rockefeller with me.” She cupped Bell’s cheek in her hand. “Isaac, I must go home. I have to look into this . . . I bet you do, too.”

—

At the Yale Club on 44th Street, where Isaac Bell lodged when in New York, Matthew, the night hall porter, ushered him inside.

“Mr. Forrer telephoned ahead and asked that I slip him in privately by the service door. I put him in the lounge.”

Bell bounded up the stairs.

The Main Lounge, a high-ceilinged room of couches and armchairs, was deserted at this late hour but for the chief of Van Dorn Research, who occupied most of a couch. Forrer wore wire-rimmed spectacles, as befit his station as a scholar. Scholarly he was, but a very large man, as tall as Bell and twice as wide. Bell had seen him disperse rioters by strolling among them.