Second Street Station Read online

  Officer Russell turned just in time to stop the prostitute from planting the knife in his back. Two policemen ran over and helped subdue her, then cart her away.

  Mrs. Mead shrugged. “Can I go back to the laundry now?” There was no answer, and she left.

  Chief Campbell nodded his approval to Mary, who smiled, then turned and left.

  “Your sister’s very observant, Handley,” the chief commented. “Rather remarkable for a young lady.”

  Sean was too lost in the history of his relationship with his sister to be pleased with the praise. Once again she had bested him, and at his work, too. By now he had accepted this occurrence as a fact of life, but he didn’t have to like it.

  “The mind of Sir Isaac Newton, the sass of a rebel, and the purse of a street urchin,” Sean said, then returned to the basement and its leaky pipes.

  Chief Campbell absorbed his words and watched as Mary walked out the door. No one saw. It was practically indiscernible, but a hint of a smile crossed Chief Campbell’s face.

  3

  Thomas Edison was nervous, and he despised J. P. Morgan for it. Edison had known Morgan for years. Morgan had first hired this “telegraph boy turned inventor” to put electric lights in his Fifth Avenue mansion. Since then, their relationship had grown. Edison inventions backed by Morgan money had made them millions. Yet Edison always felt uncomfortable around Morgan. That was by design, not accident. Morgan thrived on others’ discomfort. It was what gave him his edge. Edison knew Morgan’s infamous cold stare was nothing more than a cheap device, but it always worked on him. Still, Morgan was the man with the money, and money was the reason Edison had asked Morgan to meet him at the Pearl Street Station one sunny day in the middle of March 1888, just a few days after the blizzard.

  Four men walked along inside the gray, cavernous building as six huge DC electricity dynamo generators chugged noisily. In addition to Edison and Morgan, there were Charles Batchelor, Edison’s right-hand man, and Charles Goodrich, Edison’s bookkeeper. Almost fifty-one, Morgan was the eldest and about a decade older than the others. Edison led the way. Having to talk loudly to be heard above the generators, he was feeling more self-conscious than ever about trying to sell Morgan. Internally, he was miserable. Externally, he was expansive and positive, bordering on boasting.

  “Each one of these jumbo dynamos produces enough electricity to power twelve hundred lights. Imagine, twelve hundred, and that’s just the beginning. The power production begins—”

  Morgan cut him off. “Across from city hall, Joe Pulitzer’s planning to put up the largest building in the world. That’s all I need to know.”

  “Both commercial and residential. The demand is endless, J. P.,” Edison added.

  “How much more do you need?”

  Morgan had known all along what Edison wanted. Once again, Morgan had made him feel like a bumbling amateur, but he was prepared. He motioned to Goodrich.

  Charles Goodrich was an unassuming man with a slight build. As he fished for the cost breakdown he had prepared, he was more concerned with something else.

  Morgan had a purple-tinted nose that was also deformed, the results of rosacea, a chronic skin disease he’d had his whole life. He was self-conscious about it and had gone as far as having the discoloration hand-brushed out of photographs. Edison and Batchelor had dealt with Morgan many times, so they were used to it. Goodrich wasn’t.

  Goodrich gave Morgan the paper, desperately trying to avoid looking at his nose, which made what he was doing all the more obvious. Morgan studied Goodrich but decided to let it pass. He gave the paper a cursory glance.

  “I’ll send a man over with a check.”

  “Thanks, J. P.,” said Edison, and they shook hands.

  “Next time, Tom, skip the science show. I don’t understand it, and I don’t care.”

  Having sufficiently chastised Edison for wasting his time, Morgan left. Edison’s minor irritation was overshadowed by their success.

  “That was rather quick,” Edison commented, catching Batchelor’s eye.

  “I’ll say,” Batchelor replied, and the two of them started laughing. Goodrich joined in, making sure his enthusiasm level was a notch below the other two’s. He viewed himself as a mere employee, much further down in the company’s hierarchy. To avoid offending anyone, he almost always opted for bland.

  Their celebration was short-lived. Unexpectedly, out of a shadowy section of the Pearl Street Station, Nikola Tesla emerged and stood next to a generator. In his early thirties, he was tall—six foot two—weighed a slight one hundred forty-two pounds, and had intense blue-gray eyes. He was a brilliant scientist and also very combustible. He had a strong sense of right and wrong but little aptitude for business and was even less adept at human relations. He began clapping his hands loudly and deliberately, the clapping taking on a mocking tone.

  “Well, well, the Wizard of Menlo Park,” said Tesla, his accent revealing his Serbian origins.

  Batchelor was concerned. Edison noticed this, but he was unruffled.

  “My lab’s in West Orange now,” Edison calmly corrected him.

  “No more Wizard then. How about Hack?”

  “Ah, still as charming as ever, Nikola.”

  Edison wasn’t taking Tesla’s bait. Unlike his interactions with Morgan, he could handle Tesla with ease. Tesla was first and foremost a man of science and believed that in the end all that really mattered was the quality of the work. He didn’t understand what Edison knew so well: business could make or break any invention. That was why Tesla’s superior AC electricity was lagging so far behind Edison’s inferior DC. Mistakenly thinking it would get a rise out of Edison, Tesla pointed derisively to the DC dynamos.

  “Much ado about nothing,” he said.

  “Reading Shakespeare now? I’m impressed, Nikola. Come, let’s have some wine, and we can talk about old times.”

  Edison took Tesla by the arm, but Tesla pulled away, frustrated his attempts to unnerve Edison had failed and more upset that he could never make any headway with him.

  “I want my money, Thomas! You promised me, in front of these men!”

  Irate and indignant, Tesla pointed to Batchelor and Goodrich. Edison now had Tesla exactly where he wanted him. He casually turned to the two men.

  “Did I? Go ahead, speak up, gentlemen.” Neither responded.

  Having given Edison the ammunition to outmaneuver him, Tesla felt like a fool.

  “You’re scum, Thomas! You’re all scum!”

  Tesla stormed off. Edison and Batchelor shared a smile. Edison was especially pleased, having reassured himself that his clumsiness with Morgan was an anomaly. It was time to leave. They turned to Goodrich, who seemed bothered.

  “Is something troubling you, Goodrich?” Edison asked.

  “Me, sir? No,” said Goodrich, whose behavior suggested the opposite.

  “Take a stand for once, man. Now’s the time. You’re quitting anyway.”

  Not wanting a confrontation at this time, Goodrich was afraid to state what was on his mind. Trying to redirect the conversation, he assumed a deferential tone. “I’ve built boardinghouses that need my attention. We’re not all trailblazers, sir. We can’t all be Thomas Edison.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Edison mused, his head seeming to grow a few hat sizes.

  Goodrich naturally thought he had avoided a touchy situation. It lasted a mere fraction of a second, but if Goodrich had seen the pointed glance Edison gave Batchelor, it would have shaken him to his very core.

  4

  The Bowler Hat pulled his horse and buggy onto the main street of Pithole, Pennsylvania, stopped, took off his hat, and dusted it. It was the same bowler he had purchased in a Greenport, Long Island, shop twelve years earlier. A haberdasher had done some minor repairs on it since then, but otherwise, it was still in good shape. He had grown fond of this bowler like some become attached to an old robe, and he hoped to wear it for many more years.

  The Bowler Hat looked around.
The one saving grace was that he didn’t have to deal with snow. Being in western Pennsylvania, Pithole had avoided the Blizzard of 1888. But if ever a town fit its name, it was Pithole. Only rubble remained where many of its buildings had once stood. Of the structures that were still recognizable, roofs had caved in, windows were shattered, and doors had fallen off their hinges. Weeds grew freely in the middle of the street, and a strong wind blew dust everywhere. Pithole was completely deserted, the quintessential ghost town.

  When oil had been discovered in Titusville a few decades earlier, the influx of wildcatters to Pennsylvania mirrored the California Gold Rush. Oil strikes were plentiful, and Pithole became a boomtown. That was then. Unlike Titusville, Pithole had run dry, and everyone had left in search of dreams elsewhere. Then an immigrant farmer made an unexpected strike, a very rich one. Albert Zuckerman was his name.

  A Jew farmer in the middle of nowhere, the Bowler Hat thought. Lucky bastards. Money follows them wherever they go.

  Not so lucky this time. The Bowler Hat had been sent by the Oil Trust to “negotiate a settlement,” and that wasn’t good news for Zuckerman.

  “Hi there, mister, you lost?”

  The voice came from the right of the horse and buggy, and the Bowler Hat realized that whoever it belonged to was hardly concerned about his predicament.

  “No, just resting before moving on.”

  The Bowler Hat slowly turned to size up the competition. He was five foot eight or nine and average weight with sunken eyes and several days’ beard growth. Standing in front of what used to be the assessor’s office, Sunken Eyes jumped to the street to avoid the broken steps. The Bowler Hat could tell he was shaky. He figured it was probably from nerves or drink, or a combination of both, but one thing was abundantly clear. There was no way Sunken Eyes would have enough guts to approach him alone.

  “No place to rest here, unless you’re partial to having splinters in your ass.”

  This voice was from the left, and it came from a balding man with a thick mustache who stood in front of an old stable on the opposite side of the street from Sunken Eyes. He had a huge barrel chest and was wide all over. The Bowler Hat immediately pegged Mustache as a man who would be valuable in a bar fight but would lose any advantage in open space, where it wasn’t easy to simply grab a man and muscle him.

  As the two men slowly approached, the Bowler Hat waited to see who else would present himself. These two certainly weren’t the brains of this unit. As expected, a third voice was heard, this one from behind.

  “In his own crude way, what my friend was trying to say is, this godforsaken place offers nothing. But I’m sure you didn’t mistake it for Philadelphia.”

  “Hardly,” the Bowler Hat replied, playing along. Trying to keep track of the first two, he turned to get a look at Number Three. As he did, the wind swirled up, and he caught a mouthful of dirt. The Bowler Hat coughed and spit it out.

  Number Three laughed, gesturing grandly. “Ah, the March winds. Welcome to Pithole.”

  The man was capable of sarcasm, something that was certainly beyond the reach of the other two. He was tall and slim and carried himself with total confidence. The gun belt he wore with a holstered Colt .45 tilted just to the right indicated he was a pretty fair shot. Now it all fell into place. Number Three was the leader and probably the most dangerous. The strategy was simple. Send Sunken Eyes and Mustache as a distraction. Then Number Three could come from behind and use his skills to finish the job. If he saw that the opponent was too formidable, he could just leave and make a clean getaway. Either way, Number Three was at minimum risk. He had found partners who were either desperate or stupid. Probably both. But then, who else would be residing in Pithole?

  The Bowler Hat knew he only had seconds to decide on a course of action. He viewed this trio as a chicken, with Number Three being the head. Once the head was gone, the other two might run around for a while, but it was just a matter of time until they realized they were dead and dropped to the ground. Still, it meant at some point he would have to get out of the buggy, so gunfire was out. It would spook his horse, and he had no desire to spend the rest of the day chasing after him.

  He started coughing. “Yes, grand place, Pithole, garden spot of the world.” His coughing became more pronounced as he ducked back into the buggy and out of sight.

  Number Three quipped, “I see our little town has already gotten to you.” But all he heard in return was a few garbled words accompanied by loud coughing. “You all right, friend?”

  Number Three stepped next to the rear of the buggy on the right side, pulling a knife out of his coat pocket and signaling the others to attack. Laziness is a strong motivator. They also preferred not to use guns because they, too, did not want to chase after the horse and buggy.

  “I’m coming in with some water,” Number Three said. “I have a canteen in—”

  Unexpectedly, with shocking accuracy and speed, a large dagger ripped through the canvas of the buggy, cutting its way deep into Number Three’s ear and piercing his brain. He stood there, frozen, blood pouring out of every orifice in his head. Then, his mouth still open, he fell to the ground, the handle of the knife protruding from his ear.

  Moving faster and more efficiently than any human being these two men had ever seen, the Bowler Hat landed a blow to the windpipe of the charging Mustache that caused the man to fall back, desperately gasping for air. He then caught a glimpse of Sunken Eyes, consumed with fear, frantically fumbling for a gun in his coat, and he leapt from the buggy. With one powerful blow, he broke Sunken Eyes’s right arm in two places, dislodging the gun. As Sunken Eyes fell to the ground, writhing in pain, the Bowler Hat heaved the gun as far as he could. He was about to put Sunken Eyes out of his misery when he got hit from behind with a force that felt like a fully powered locomotive.

  Mustache had recovered faster than the Bowler Hat had anticipated and now had him where he definitely didn’t want to be—in close, against the stable wall, where Mustache could use his strength to his best advantage. As Mustache pressed against the Bowler Hat, holding him there while punching away at his body, the Bowler Hat had one thing on his mind: limiting the damage until he could find a way to separate. He tucked his elbows into his body, making many of the blows glance off his arms. After a while, he began to slowly sink to his knees as if Mustache’s punishment were taking its toll. And it was, but not as much as he let on. Then he summoned up all the strength he had in his thighs to push upward as hard and as fast as he could. His head crashed into Mustache’s fleshy chin, causing him to stumble back a step or two. That was just enough room for the Bowler Hat to free himself. Now out in the open, this fight would radically change.

  Mustache rushed the Bowler Hat with all he had, but he quickly stepped to the side and punished him with blows to the face. Mustache kept charging like a bull, and like a very skilled matador, the Bowler Hat made him pay dearly. Finally, his face bruised and bloodied, Mustache stumbled to the ground, exhausted. Very businesslike, the Bowler Hat kneeled down, wrapped his arm around Mustache’s neck, and squeezed the life out of him.

  As the Bowler Hat stood over the body of Mustache catching a slight breather, he heard a gunshot, promptly followed by his horse’s whinny and the noise of it galloping off with the buggy. The warm, burning sensation in his right arm meant he had been shot, but that wasn’t what angered him. He knew that the bullet had exited his arm, doing very little damage. What angered him was that after all this effort he would still have to chase down his horse and buggy. He turned and glared down the street.

  Sunken Eyes had dragged himself over to Number Three and had taken the Colt .45 out of its holster. Defying all probability, he had somehow been able to shoot with his off hand and hit his target. The Bowler Hat headed straight for Sunken Eyes. He was the one with the gun, but Sunken Eyes still panicked. As he reeled off shot after shot, the Bowler Hat rolled to the ground to avoid the bullets or pressed himself against the stable wall to become a smaller target. I
t worked, yet each shot only succeeded in making the Bowler Hat angrier. It meant his horse would keep running, and it would take that much longer to catch him.

  Finally, Sunken Eyes ran out of bullets. The Bowler Hat moved toward him with the alacrity and purpose of a man who has finally found the pesky gopher that has been burrowing holes in his garden.

  “Please don’t!” Sunken Eyes pleaded, but the Bowler Hat did and soon Sunken Eyes had joined his comrades. The Bowler Hat pulled his knife out of Number Three’s ear and wiped it clean on Sunken Eyes’s shirt. He then cut a piece out of Number Three’s coat and tied it around his wound.

  An unsettling thought entered his mind. Could it be he was slipping? It did happen to men in his profession. Five years ago, might he have dispatched these three losers more quickly and with less trouble? Hell, three years ago, or two. But the Bowler Hat was never one to dwell on his own mortality. He dismissed this notion as ridiculous and looked down the street. He couldn’t see the slightest trace of his horse and buggy, not even a cloud of dust. That meant he had a very long hike ahead of him.

  That Jew Zuckerman better not give me any trouble, he thought as he looked at his knife, or I’ll circumcise him a second time. He sheathed the knife and trudged down the empty streets of Pithole, leaving the three lifeless bodies for the vultures.

  5

  It was Mary’s first day back at work after the blizzard, and it was not easy adjusting. The Lowry Hat Factory seemed bleaker and more depressing than usual, which made it more difficult for her to focus on her long-term goals.

  Like many of its brethren in the garment industry, the Lowry Hat Factory was a sweatshop, but its working conditions were even more deplorable than the norm. It was located in a basement of an old grain storehouse, and there were forty girls and women from age eight to fifty lined up in rows and packed into a space that should only have accommodated fifteen. They worked twelve-hour shifts and were paid a few pennies per piece. Cockroaches and rats were commonplace, there was no heat in winter, and the ventilation was abysmal. Come July and August, workers often fainted on the job.