The Assassin begins at the Filipino Village. The tops of thatched huts are visible as he skirts along the fence, smoke rising from a breakfast cookfire inside. Roast-pork smell. He hasn’t eaten since yesterday noon. He turns right between the cyclorama dramatizing the Battle of Missionary Ridge, a limping old man in yankee blue shouting the names of dead generals to drum up interest, and the Cineograph exhibit, slowing to mingle with the crowd that flows in and out of the Pabst Pavillion. Nobody is watching him.
Nobody knows.
Across the Midway is an enormous, beautiful woman’s face, chin slightly lifted, her eyes closed in sweet reverie while people stroll through the wide entrance portal at the base of her neck. DREAMLAND say the letters on the rim of the corona set in her luscious, wind-blown hair. Only moments after the gates open there are thousands of spectators at the Exposition, sleep-walking, hazily grazing past amusement and advertisement to ponder which exotic world they will surrender the quarters clutched in their fists to.
Only I am awake, thinks the Assassin, and turns away to walk toward the thick brown Bavarian turrets of Alt Nurnberg.
A German brass band thumps away inside the courtyard, tuba grunting rhythmically, and a man outside in lederhosen and a feathered hat does a hopping, knee-slapping dance. The Assassin turns left at the biergarten, passing the Johnstown Flood exhibit and then the tall wood-pole fence that protects the festgoers from Darkest Africa. He hooks south along the Canal, turning his head away when a motor-gondola passes bearing two men, one cranking the lever of some kind of large camera. He turns again at the Mall, plunging into the crowd between the Electricity building and the Machinery and Transportation complex. If the monster is Capital, as the books and pamphlets have it, then this is its lair. He holds the site map, carefully marked and folded, under his arm. Mines, Railroads, Manufacturing, Agriculture and Government, Standard Oil, Quaker Oats, Aunt Jemima, Horlicks Malted Milk, and Baker’s Chocolate, all glorified in plaster and stone. There is no escaping the message-barkers and street bands hammering the air from every side, young girls in strange costumes passing out samples, concession signs boasting that their prices beat any at the Pan. The Assassin squirms through the press of bodies and emerges to face the sparkling blue-green of the Grand Basin, pausing to stare up for a moment at the massive Electric Tower that dominates the fairgrounds. It is an ivory tower with gold trimming and lustrous blue-green panels, a steadfast white sentinel over the riotous reds, yellows, and oranges of the South American buildings, with the gilded Goddess of Light herself sparkling four hundred feet above them.
I will bring this down.
The Assassin turns and walks past the Cascades, each towering plume of water a different color of the rainbow, then takes a seat on the wall of the Fountain of Abundance to wait.
The Kodak fiends are hiding them in their wicker baskets. Or shoeboxes, if less prepared. Word has gone out about the extra charge at the gate, a squad of sharp-eyed boys collecting fifty cents per camera, but with so many visitors blithely carrying their own food onto the grounds for bench picnics it only makes sense to smuggle your Brownie or Bull’s-Eye past them. Harry sees the devices everywhere, pulled out to snap the family grouping in front of one of the Exposition juggernauts or immortalize a comrade with his arm around some Midway exotic or a sweetheart precariously astride a dromedary’s back, then quickly nestled back into their hiding places. There is no hiding Mr. Edison’s apparatus of course, and immediately upon hauling it from the gondola Daddy Paley is surrounded by shutter bugs and small boys wanting to examine it. Ensconced in Luchow’s Nurnberg restaurant with the machine at his feet, a platter of steaming wursts and a nickel draught before him, he gives Harry leave to explore until the President comes at noon.
“Find us some good views,” he says, flicking excess foam off the beer with a finger. “But I don’t want to lug this thing up any stairs.”
The mirror maze at Dreamland is no good, of course, not enough light and the problem of seeing the camera itself in reflection. Sig Lubin’s Cineograph parlor is next door, peddling their copycat views and counterpart boxing dodges, a bold venture considering Lubin himself has fled Philadelphia for foreign climes, avoiding indictment for patent infringement. Or perhaps he is only hiding out in the Gypsy Camp or the Streets of Mexico or sweltering with the sled dogs in the Esquimaux Village. Their own Mutoscope parlor is doing lackluster business so far, what with a live Fatima undulating her torso only one door over in the Cairo Bazaar.
Even here, in the mildly salacious Midway, there are twice as many women as men. Young and old, rich and relatively modest of means, in pairs and groups, a few dowagers squired about on wicker-seated roller chairs, women with picture hats and rented parasols strolling, observing, judging. “The American Girl,” as the periodicals like to label her, is here in abundance, and Harry can’t help but think of the fun it would be for Brigid and her sisters to do the Pan. He casts a professional eye up at the Aero-Cycle, a kind of giant teeter-totter with a revolving wheel full of screaming enthusiasts at either end. Perhaps a view from a distance, then the dizzied, excited passengers dismounting—but to film on the ride itself seems pointless, too many axes of motion for a viewer to keep a handle on. Those roller chairs, though—remove the old biddy and replace her with a camera operator, the device rigged just above his lap somehow, with a trained man to push him, and they could approximate a long moving shot on land similar to what they just filmed on the Canal—
Something to consider. Harry hurries under the wildly swinging armature and pays fifty cents for a Trip to the Moon.
Several dozen spectators gather in the darkened Theater of the Planets, their guide, a basso-voiced gentleman with riding goggles perched on his forehead, lit dramatically from below while the screen behind him glows with the whorls of the Milky Way.
“We are about to embark on a journey,” he intones, “to a landscape on which no human foot has ever trod.”
At least not since the last twenty-minute tour, thinks Harry, as they are led into the Airship Luna by the crew members. It is a beautifully designed fantasy, with multiple wings and propellers and large open portholes to see out from.
“Please steady yourselves, ladies and gentlemen,” suggests the guide, wearing a fancifully adorned football helmet and with his goggles pulled down over his eyes now. “We have some inclement weather reported over the Buffalo area this evening.”
It is not evening outside, of course, but as the wings begin to flap madly and the body of the Airship tilts and shakes, rear propeller buzzing as it picks up speed, what they see below them outside the wind-blasted portholes is the Pan-American Exposition at night, lit up in all its electric glory, surrounded by the city of Buffalo and yes, that must be it—
“Those are the Niagara Falls down to your left, ladies and gentlemen,” announces their guide from his pilot’s seat. “One of the Great Wonders of our own dear Earth, to which we bid a fond adieu—” and here a sudden swift upwrenching that causes the ladies to gasp and grab out for their men, Harry with a sudden pang, missing her here, his Brigid, not so much on this Midway as anywhere on the grounds, pointing things out to her, listening to her beautiful laugh, sitting quietly, perhaps, in the Botanical Gardens, floating in a gondola with his hand in hers—
“We’re going to fall!” cries the matron sitting beside him, hugging her bag tightly to her chest. “We’re going to fall and smash to the ground!”
“Mind yourselves, fellow adventurers, we’re passing through a storm!”
And a storm it is, the wind moaning past, a cloud bank enveloping the Luna, lightning flashes and the boom of present thunder, even a few drops of precipitation whipping in through the portholes and then—
The passengers sigh as one. Through the front panel, beyond the guide at his controls, the full moon sits like a giant pearl in the suddenly clear night sky, sparkling stars beyond it.
“There she is, dead ahead,” calls out the guide. “Our destination, ladies and gentlemen. The Queen of the Heavens.”
It grows larger and larger as they approach, a wonderful illusion, thinks Harry, looking around at the delighted, awe-stricken faces of his fellow passengers. Méliès knew it from the beginning—the viewer will soon tire of what he can already see, with all its color and immediacy, in the world. Even our actualities with the original fighters instead of Lubin’s counterparts, our rushing trains and fire wagons, our scenes of exotic or everyday wonder, are illusions, are a series of still photographs, devoid of color, flashed rapidly on a screen to fool the human eye. But treat that eye to something that could never exist—
The light in front of them grows blindingly white as the moon’s surface fills the panel.
“Shield your eyes, earth beings, for the intensity of the Lunar Rays may damage them!”
The Airship makes a sudden sweeping turn and there is a thump and scrape as they toboggan along the rough terrain, the faintly lit, cratered surface rushing past the portholes. Some of it is electricity, Harry decides, powered by the Falls not so many miles away, driving the Airship along some sort of rail past sets that have been artfully created. Some is only lantern projections, a horizontal strip, perhaps, or a turret revolved to give the sense of motion. Whether the ship moves past the landscape or the landscape past the ship, it is, with the rocking and buffeting and blasting of air, enormously effective.
“The inhabitants of the realm we have intruded upon are known as the Selenites,” says the guide, turning to them and deepening his voice in sober warning. “They are thought to be friendly to visitors, but please, if we should encounter any members of the race, be careful not to provoke them.”
The crew members help the voyagers out of the Airship and onto the moon’s craggy surface then, Harry refusing the proffered hand. The ground feels spongy underfoot, and his walking stick leaves tiny dents in it as they head away from the craft.
Above their heads hangs a carpet of stars. They are led around the raised lip of a large crater, stepping carefully, till they reach a small hill with a large cavern opening at the base of it.
“This is the Grotto of the City of the Moon. I must plead that we be allowed egress.” The guide steps ahead and cups his hands around his mouth, calling into the dark abyss. “Hello! We hail from Buffalo, on the planet Earth! May we enter?”
A gasp of surprise then, as a large-headed, spiky-backed creature in a green and red outfit and sharply pointed slippers appears at the mouth of the grotto. Harry estimates that the fellow barely comes up to his hip. He looks the passengers and crew over for a long moment, then holds a tiny hand straight out to them in greeting.
“Hail, Erse-Dwellairs!” he calls in a strange, high-pitched voice. “I welcome you to ze City of ze Moon.”
If Harry is not mistaken the Selenite has a touch of a French accent.
There are more little Selenites inside as they descend into the twisting, turning grotto, weaving through eerily glowing stalactites and stalagmites on a green concrete floor, past towering columns carved with the faces of fierce and unearthly creatures, some of the little inhabitants toiling away with miniature picks and crowbars, revealing veins of glistening gold or jewels gleaming in unimaginable colors. Among them glide lovely Moon-Maids of more human stature, dark-haired beauties dressed in diaphanous robes who stare at the visitors shyly with their huge eyes. They are led into a large chamber, and suddenly there is music, the liquid rippling of a harp, a sweet mandolin, and voices now, as the tiny Selenites and ghostly Moon-Maids join in a melody—
My sweetheart’s the Man in the Moon
I’m going to marry him soon
T’would fill me with bliss just to give him one kiss
But I know that a dozen I never would miss!
Harry and the other visitors, slightly embarrassed, look to the dozen or so children in their party, the only ones still rapt in the illusion now that they have left the realms of Galactic Flight for that of Music Hall. There are adults, he knows, who will only visit the movie parlors if they bring their children with them, some lingering unease at giving themselves up to the gossamer images on the screen.
I’ll go up in a great big balloon
And see my sweetheart in the moon
Then behind some dark cloud, where no one’s allowed
I’ll make love to the Man in the Moon!
They lose Harry in the Palace. It is only a proscenium, however elaborately decorated, the giants seemingly bored, the tumbling dwarves no better than circus performers, the Moon Pageant replete with shifting scenery and flashing colored lights but without dramatic tension, the greenish gorgonzola offered by beaming Moon-Maids more than he can stomach this early in the day. Moving, projected views, he thinks, to replace the lantern slides. They can only be tinted, of course, till the color problem is solved, but think of the illusion, think of the impact, if while you are being moved forward in a vehicle all that you see from the front and side portals has been filmed in some foreign capital or natural vista! You could tour the streets of Mexico from any city in the States, and never step out of the carriage.
The show ends with a promise of friendship between peoples. “Just as the nations of North and South America have come together at this great Exposition,” says the Man in the Moon, “thus shall the citizens of my realm be ever bonded with those of your planet Earth.”
They exit through the shadowy gorge and jaws of a dragon-like creature called a Moon Calf onto the raucous, steaming Midway. Just one entrance down is the Old Plantation, a glimpse, as the brochure describes it, of the sunny South before the War. Sweat begins to run down Harry’s forehead from his hat brim. He wonders how they keep it so cool on the moon. Dozens of spectators, yankees, are flowing through the doorway of the “mansion” that fronts the exhibit. Harry checks his pocket watch, digs out a quarter, and follows them in.
Pretty, ringletted girls in stiff pastel dresses greet the visitors, all smiles and coquetry. Harry has been to gala occasions something like the one presented in the chandeliered ballroom they pass into, Sally’s coming out for one, though never with a colored band playing Dixie, and certainly never with so many colorful fans fluttering in ladies’ hands. There are unpainted slave quarters out back, along with log cabins claimed to have been occupied by Abraham Lincoln and Jeff Davis, and a swarm of negroes unlike any he’s ever encountered, even in South Carolina. Cotton-headed old uncles, pipe-smoking aunties doing wash and spinning yarn, clean but raggedy children running everywhere. Men and women stoop and pick cotton in several rows planted at the far end of the compound, several pale women with parasols watching intently. One knot of white visitors gathers around two little boys doing a frantic, barefoot buck-and-wing to the ministrations of a grinning banjo player, while others ring an old man sitting on a porch chuckling and giggling and slapping his knee with every response to their queries. Harry drifts over by a young fellow filling buckets of water from a hand pump.
“Good morning.”
“Mornin to you, Cap’m,” replies the young man, touching two fingers to his forehead in salute but continuing to pump.
“Where you folks from?”
“Oh,” he sighs, straightening to look around at his fellow Plantation dwellers, “mostly it’s Georgia, Alabama, M’ssippi. Me, I’m fum Valdosta.”
“You stay here at night?”
“Mostly, yassuh.”
Harry looks over toward the pickers. “That cotton,” he says, “what happens when it’s all been harvested?”
The hint of a smile tugs at the water boy’s mouth. “Well, Mr. Skip who run the Plantation, he bring in another patch by’an’by, but most mornins we gots to get up an stick them bolls back in the plants fore they open up the fair.”
“That seems like an awful lot of trouble.”
“Yessuh, an that’s why he got him some perfessional niggers like us. You see them what’s wanderin around the Midway, fum this yere Buffalo? That ain but amaters.”
“I see.” They both turn as the toothless old man on the porch emits a particularly high-pitched cackle, rocking back and forth in mirth as he entertains a growing crowd of yankees.
“That Laughin’ Ben. He ain right,” says the water boy, touching his temple with a finger. “But the white fokes sure love him.”
“I can see that.”
“You not fum up here neither, is you, Cap’n?”
“North Carolina.”
The boy nods. “Thas one of them in-between states. We run through it on the train.”
Harry bids him good day and manages to reach the exit just as the pickers and spinners and tale-tellers all drop what they’re doing to join the eleven o’clock cakewalk. His leg is hurting him, sharp pains running from ankle to hip, and he has perspired through to his vest.
At least, he thinks, pushing hard with his cane to make time through the crowded Mall, they haven’t included an Irish Pavillion.
He finds Paley still in the restaurant, comparing the apple and cherry pie selections.
“Anything good?”
“The Trip to the Moon—”
“It’s on my list,” says Daddy, extricating himself from the table. “But Skip Dundy wants a fortune to shoot it.”
“I had another idea. What if we were to stage a battle in the Filipino Vil-lage? They’ve got huts, palms trees, a lagoon with canoes, real Filipinos—”
“And who’s going to ask the Boss for the money to do that? There’s woods in Jersey, right near the shop.”
“If we’re going to stay competitive—”
“When Mr. Edison’s lawyers finish their business,” says the cameraman, helping arrange the apparatus and tripod on Harry’s shoulder, “we won’t have any competition.”
“But think of the excitement it would add, the verisimilitude.” Harry has pictured the view in his mind. A young captain, maybe even Niles himself, leading a desperate charge into the village as insurrectos leap from the huts to fire at them. And then a shot—the roller chair could be employed here—as if the viewer himself was running through the melee, native rebels firing directly at him—
“We’ve nabbed Aggy, my friend. That war’s over.” Paley stabs a last forkful of pie and snaps it down. “We’d better get over to the Esplanade.”
The Assassin watches him approach, preceded by marching bands and squadrons of cavalry, snug in his open victoria pulled by four glistening steeds, waving affably to the cheering citizens who line the Causeway. The Assassin leans on one of the piers till the carriage has passed, then joins the throng across the flag-draped Triumphal Bridge in pursuit.
Idolatry. The word has been pressed in his mind since his entrance this morning. The dreaming woman’s massive face, the Sphinx over the Beautiful Orient, Cleopatra, the Baker’s Chocolate maiden, the Goddess of Light perched on the Electric Tower, the kindly President in his silk top hat and frock coat—this is the Pantheon of false gods, and these poor, deluded sleepwalkers have come to worship them.
Applause as he climbs down from his carriage, is led onto the platform that has been set up in the Esplanade. The Assassin tries to move forward through the multitude as the Expostion head introduces the President. People are hot, ladies have their parasols open against the noonday sun, all are pressing forward to see closer, hear better. More applause as he rises, begins to speak. The words are unclear at this distance. The Assassin passes the men he saw in the gondola, now with their tripod mounted on what look like apple boxes to see over the crowd, the fat one with his eye pressed tight to it, cranking all the while. A man in a suit silently moving his lips on a platform decked with bunting that will be without color. Pointless idolatry. Men glare as the Assassin pushes between them. He can make out words now, but still they make no sense. He comes to a wall of policemen, standing face to the crowd, hands folded behind their backs, immobile. Expressionless. More statues. The grounds are full of statues, heroic statues, allegorical groupings, Indians in wax and wood, massive bear and buffalo and moose and elk, statues representing Labor and Capital and Motherhood and Bounty. The Shield of Despotism, this grouping could be called, or The Blue Wall of Tyranny.
The Assassin pushes up to look between their shoulders. If he is lucky it might work from here. But no, one of the statues is staring at him.
“Take a step back, Bud,” says the policeman. “Yer crowdin me.”
Rapturous applause as the President finishes his address, as hands are shaken on the platform, as bemedaled John Philip Sousa himself leads his band in The Stars and Stripes Forever. The President starts down from the platform and the crowd behind pushes the Assassin toward him. He reaches into his pocket, closing his hand around the little pistol. Maybe, maybe—but the Blue Wall holds fast, pushing back as McKinley is escorted away in a phalanx of security agents for his tour of the Exposition.
“Easy, folks,” calls the burly copper. “He’ll be back tomorrow to shake hands.”
The Assassin drifts away then, throwing looks back over his shoulder at the official party, counting bodyguards. A man seems to be watching him, following. A blue-eyed man with a moustache and a bowler tilted on his head, a gold-headed walking stick resting casually on his shoulder. The Assassin hurries through the dispersing crowd, pulling his watch out to look at it as if he is late for an appointment, bathed in sweat now, the rubbing bodies of the multitude, the noon sun, the fate of the future in his pocket. He struggles back down the Mall, past the little Acetylene Exhibit, a man shouting the praises of the Wonder Gas even as hundreds turn into the massive Electricity Building across the way, flicking a look back to see that the watcher is still there, closer now, feigning inattention but definitely following. How can they know? How can they know? And the Assassin cuts sharply left and trots into the welcoming coolness of the Infant Incubators.
It is mostly women in the building. The nurses, of course, in their white uniforms, and then a dozen female spectators of various ages, cooing and whispering over the babies in their steel and glass ovens.
“Poor, dear things,” says one in a dress of black crepelike material. “I can’t imagine they’ll be normal.”
“Our graduates do very well,” responds a nurse, transferring one of the tiny, monkey-face creatures from incubator to a basket in a dumbwaiter shaft. “Those that survive.”
“You’ve lost some, then?”
“A few. Less than one out of ten.”
“God wanted them.”
“God is in no hurry,” says the nurse. “They just died, and their mothers were distraught.” She presses a button and waits while the basket is drawn out of sight, then turns to the watching women. “Every two hours each child is changed and fed.”
The Assassin walks along the machines, peering in at the infants, mindful of the entrance door. The man has not followed him in.
“No matter what their weight, Dr. Couney believes that a warm, clean environment is the key to these babies’ survival. Until the hospitals in this country accept his findings,” the nurse spreads her arms to indicate the exhibit, “here we are.”
“I don’t think I could bear having my child in a side-show hatchery,” says a young woman making a pained face as she stares in through a porthole.
The nurse smiles politely. “Let’s hope you never have to, then. Please tell your friends who visit the Exposition about us,” she says brightly to the others in the room. “Your quarters make our efforts possible.”
America, thinks the Assassin, watching a discolored, pint-sized creature struggle for breath, translucent eyelids fluttering but never quite opening. Even the infants have to earn their keep.
Harry spends the afternoon touring the more educational exhibits. Graphic Arts, Ethnology, Machinery and Transportation, the state and foreign buildings. All very informative but nothing active enough for the camera lens. They’ll do the Indian Congress tomorrow, maybe get the President with Red Cloud or Geronimo, and film the mock battle with the cavalry in the Stadium. Evening brings more young couples to the Pan, strolling hand-in-hand to Venice in America and taking the boat ride, swaying together by the many bandstands listening to waltzes, sitting in the Plaza by the Sunken Garden. There is a casual anonymity here, an escape from judgment. Not that he is ever ashamed to be seen with Brigid, but—
As the sun sets most of those still strolling the grounds make their way back to the Esplanade. The speakers’ platform is now serving as a reviewing stand for the President and his entourage, gazing with thousands of his constituents across the Court of the Fountains toward the Electric Tower, waiting for the Illumination.
It begins at the very edge of dusk.
The doors of the Temple of Music have been thrown open and the Great Organ within, joined outside by Sousa’s band, begins to play The Star-Spangled Banner, slowly building power and volume. The lamps set low around the fountains dim, as do the streetlamps. Then, starting with the Electric Tower and the larger structures, lights begin to glow, faint and pink at first, just a few of them, then more, outlining the buildings, outlining the fountains, edging the heroic statues, growing in number and intensity as the crowd sighs as one, and then as the last blush of sun fades from the sky the whole Exposition blazes forth in golden effulgence as the organist strikes a mighty chord and the people are cheering and applauding and thrilled to be here for this wonder, light all around them, a city of light, and if the Airship could indeed make the voyage Harry has no doubt you would see this beautiful light from the moon.
It isn’t over, though, not tonight. As the organ’s last note echoes away there is another mass sigh—spitting, sparkling fires of green, red, blue, and gold flame up at the four corners of the fairgrounds, and then hundreds of balloons, somehow glowing from within, are released at once and float above the light-adorned buildings of the Pan, followed by a barrage of rockets, a hundred of them streaking and screaming up from all sides and then larger rockets exploding, shrieking horizontal to the ground with silver and gold comet tails streaming after and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! rainbow starbursts in the air and Harry almost breathless with it, the crowd gasping and oohing and aahing like a great enraptured creature and he aches to have her with him at this moment, Brigid beside him, longs to see her face lit by these colors, to feel her pulse quicken, the radiance of her unstudied delight. Fireworks are exploding now to form the colorful flags of the South American nations taking part in the Exposition and he wonders what the Judge would think, can feel the tone of Niles’s dismissive banter like a twinge down his spine and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! each bombardment more spectacular than the last, shells bursting into flowering patterns and beginning to fade just as BOOM! BOOM! the next barrage begins, raining parachutes now that swing down slowly toward the earth with ruby globes sizzling beneath them, pouring multi-hued lightning over the Rainbow City from the black sky and he vows to himself, Harry Manigault vows that he will come back to this place with her, that they will see the Falls as man and wife like so many of these beaming, cheering Americans around him have done before and a band begins to play, Sousa’s band again and BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! the ground trembles as four mighty bombs explode, one forming an outline of the United States, one forming the outline of Cuba, one of Porto Rico, and the last spattering into smaller shells that pop into a myriad of Philippine islands. We should have the camera here, thinks Harry, something of this would register on the nitrate. KABOOM! a last, earth-shaking explosion, directly above the Tower, and then a gunfire crackling as a thousand tiny balls ignite while they hang in the air to make a portrait of their beloved leader, the one who has brought them to prosperity, to victory, to this glorious new century, and Harry wonders if they are watching in the Filipino Village and the Indian Congress and in the red-dirt courtyard of the Old Plantation, wonders what those dusky, vanquished peoples feel as they gaze upon this majesty—
WELCOME, PRESIDENT McKINLEY
—announce the sparkling silver letters below the portrait—
CHIEF OF OUR NATION AND OUR EMPIRE!
The Assassin sits drinking beer in Pascek’s saloon on Broadway, thinking about the stacking game. There are amusements of the cheaper sort just outside the Exposition grounds and he lingered at one after leaving today, watching to see if he was being followed. The sharper had built an elaborate house of tiles on his little table, balancing one upon the other till the structure was almost up to his chin. A spectator bet him a quarter against a five-dollar bill that he couldn’t place another without the toppling the whole edifice, and this he did. The next bet had to be fifty cents—only fair, as it was now an even more impossible feat—and then seventy-five cents and then a silver dollar to see another tile balanced, the structure beginning to wobble slightly even when he wasn’t touching it. The circle of spectators grew as the amount of the wagers rose, till one gent in a checked suit stepped forward and plunked down two dollars and fifty cents to beat the master architect. The sharper put on a long face, then, holding a tile with the very tips of the fingers of his two hands, lowered it gingerly toward the top of his mansion.
This is my bullet, thought the Assassin, this is my gift to the world.
And yes, that was the last straw, the tile that brought it all crashing down, spectators yowling with a mix of disappointment and glee depending on the direction of their side bets. It was a sign. Yes, the system had not fallen after the Habsburg Empress was eliminated, or the French President or even King Umberto. But the weight of each killing upset the balance of the edifice, undermined its foundations. One more, the right one, and there will be blessed release. If not, he will have done his duty, bringing the inevitable day that much closer.
The working men at the end of the bar begin to curse each other in Polish. “You filthy pig,” shouts one, “you filthy lying pig!” Stools are toppled. Only a moment ago they were quietly drinking themselves unconscious. “I’ll kill you!” cries the other man, the shorter one. The Assassin stands and backs away from the working men. The shorter one draws a knife and suddenly he is stabbing the other, again and again in the head and neck, shrieking all the while “I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you, I’ll kill you!” The bartender leaps over the counter and tries to pull him away, the taller man sliding silently to the floor, blood spurting from him like an obscene fountain.
“Get help!” yells the bartender to the Assassin in English. “Go get help!”
The Assassin runs out onto Broadway, turning to hurry back to his hotel. Two beefy patrolmen sprint past him, heading for Pascek’s. He slips his hand into his pocket to make sure the pistol doesn’t swing as he picks up his pace. It will be quick and clean, not like the hapless Berkman’s botched attentat on Henry Clay Frick, no, quick and clean and irreversible. The Assassin hears fireworks above, but keeps his gaze fixed straight ahead.