The Assassin

The crude that continued to rush down the hill was flowing toward the waterfront. The river split again suddenly and the main branch rampaged onto the docks, caught fire, and ignited stacks of case oil. Mooring lines and tug hawsers were set alight, and as the flames consumed them, they parted, sending ships and workboats adrift on a tide of burning oil. The ships caught fire and burned swiftly. Flames leaped up rigging faster than sailors could climb. Tugboats raced to the rescue and batted flames down with torrents from their fire nozzles.

The second stream of oil veered below the docks and splashed against a three-story hotel and restaurant on a pier in the Kill with a roof board that read:

GOOD NEWS CAFÉ

ROW, FISH, EAT DINNER, AND DRINK A SOCIAL GLASS

The oil ignited. Flame flashed up the restaurant’s wooden walls. A man and woman in cook whites ran out lugging a cash register and a glass case of cigars. The burning oil encircled the building and closed in on the couple from both sides. They ran toward the water on a path swiftly narrowing. The fire chased them onto the dock to the water’s edge, where they teetered, clutching their rescued treasures.

If I hadn’t missed my shot at Nellie Matters, Bell thought, these people would be safe.

A B&O railroad tugboat swooped against the dock. Deckhands pulled them aboard. But the burning oil chasing them splashed off the dock onto the water. Floating, still burning, it surrounded the tugboat with a ring of fire. Six tugs steamed to its aid, fire nozzles pumping water to confine the burning oil while their stricken sister steamed away and wetting down one another’s wheelhouses to cool paint bubbling in the heat. The tugs formed a cordon, spraying to prevent the fire from spreading on the water to nearby ships and piers.

After Isaac Bell saw the burning oil encircle the restaurant, and then the couple, and then the tug, he suddenly realized how Nellie Matters would attack next. He turned around and looked up the hill. The slope was a shallow incline and The Hook saloon was tall. He climbed out the window again and onto the roof of the widow’s walk. From that vantage he could see over the city’s tenement roofs. The swiftly expanding oil refinery had continued building higher up the hill. Tank yards and kerosene and gasoline stills were everywhere, below, around, and up behind the city.

Now he saw Constable Hook as Nellie saw it. He had dubbed her “heiress” to The Hook saloon, but, in fact, she was also heiress to her father’s dream of building on a hilly cape an ultramodern gravity-fed refinery with access to the sea. The refinery that her father had envisioned and the boomtown that sprang up with it were one in her mind. If Bill Matters couldn’t have the refinery, having lost it to Rockefeller, he would destroy it. Since he was locked in a jail cell, Nellie Matters would destroy it for him. By their way of thinking, the city it had nurtured and ultimately surrounded did not exist.

He swung back in the window and raced down the stairs and across the street to the gates. Wally Kisley was there. “Did you see Nellie?” Bell asked.

“No. I was just looking for you. You O.K.?”

“We forced her hand,” Bell said. “This wasn’t her first choice, setting it off down here.”

“It’s go

“If we hadn’t blocked the high ground, she’d have attacked from up there. You can’t see from here, but I saw it from the roof. A mammoth crude oil tank above the city.”

Wally nodded. “Number 14. The first of the new crude storage tanks to feed the stills below. One hundred thousand gallons.”

“That’s her goal—a Johnstown Flood of burning oil.”

—

Wally Kisley was incredulous. “Why attack the city?”

“There is a deranged logic to her scheme,” said Bell. “While everyone’s trying to protect the city, she can concentrate on the refinery.”

He borrowed a police sergeant and a squad of local cops from Eddie Edwards’ headquarters at the refinery gates. The cops led him and Wally on a shortcut past twisted ruins of burned-out tanks and through tank yards and stills. Firemen were deluging them with hose water to cool them. They entered the city streets, passing a school from which the children had been sent home and a hospital into which injured firefighters were stumbling.

Bell spotted Edna Matters, somber in black. She had an Evening Sun press card in her hatband and was taking down in shorthand the words of the rail-thin, harried-looking chief of Constable Hook’s volunteer firefighters. “Gossip that we refused to fight Standard Oil’s fire is bunk. We are protecting twenty thousand people in our city—families, friends, and neighbors.”

“Can you speak to the rumor that water is ru

“Bunk! We get our water direct from the Hackensack River and the Hackensack is wet yet.”

Three fire horses galloped past pulling a steamer pump engine and the chief jumped on the back. Edna closed her notebook. “Hello, Isaac. Thank you for letting me see my father the other day.”

“Have you seen Nellie?”

“Of course not. If I had, I would have turned her in. What could make her do . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Whatever made Father do it, I suppose.”

Bell said, “Be careful here, Edna. Don’t let the fire get above you.”

The city streets ended abruptly at a shiny new chain-link fence. It had a gate ma

“How could she miss?” said Wally. “Big as the battleship Maine and twice as explosive.”

Freshly poured concrete footings were laid on both sides of the tank. Sheets of steel were stacked next to them, awaiting assembly.

“I need twenty strong men,” Bell told the sergeant.

“There ain’t a man in The Hook not fighting the fire.”

“O.K. Take four armed men, empty the jail, bring the prisoners here.”

“I don’t think I’m allowed—”

Bell cut him. “A champion sniper with a gun that fires exploding bullets is going to blast a hole in that tank by hitting it repeatedly in the same spot until one of them ignites a crude oil fire that will drown your city in flames. I need your prisoners to erect a barricade. Now!”

The sergeant took off at a dead run. Bell removed his coat and said to the others, “Let’s get to work.”

Wally asked him quietly, “You’re just guessing about those bullets, aren’t you? Who knows if the smith actually made them.”

“I know,” said Bell. “I found one in his shop. It looked like he had set up to run a batch of them. My only guess is that Nellie got the first batch. Knowing her, she probably did.”

“You found one? Where is it?”

“In my rifle.”

—

When night fell, the fires lighted Constable Hook bright as day, from Tank 14 on its highest hill to the Kill Van Kull waterfront, where flames were eating through the piers, consuming the sheds, and burning the pilings down to the waterline. An entire warehouse of case oil was fueling a pillar of flames visible from every point of New York Harbor, and a burning barge of oil barrels glared at Staten Island like vaudeville limelights.

Isaac Bell had still not seen a trace of Nellie Matters. But Tank 14 was shielded on all four sides by a hastily erected barrier of sheet steel. “Now she can’t pierce the tank by hitting it repeatedly in the same spot,” Bell told Joseph Van Dorn. “And since it’s on the top of the hill, there is no vantage point on the Hook—no hill, no building, no tree—high enough to shoot through the roof.”

“She’ll shoot other tanks,” said Van Dorn.

“She’ll start fires. We’ll put them out. Eventually, she’ll run out of ammunition and strength.”