SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 1902
Isavored the smell of moldy straw in the stable behind my house as I caressed Single Malt. What a mare! She was my favorite horse since Hasheesh. (Their respective names tell you everything you need to know about my past forty years.) I fed her half an apple and she nuzzled against my shoulder. It was the simplicity of the transaction that was so appealing, a thoughtful gift in exchange for heartfelt, albeit conditional, love. If only people—or nations—made such sense. I produced the other half of the apple and Single Malt offered more of her temporary devotion. If you want a friend in Washington, get a horse.
I had decided to ride rather than walk the seven blocks. Sixteenth street was still what it had always been, a dwelling here and there beneath a canopy of elms. I detected scents of the countryside, or could pretend to. (Just think, if Jefferson had gotten his way, Sixteenth street would have served as the planet’s prime meridian, instead of Greenwich.) An old man’s pleasure—a trot into the past.
I remained lost in another time until my thoughts played ahead to my destination. Henry Cabot Lodge was as frosty a man as any I had ever known. Seeing him was Theodore’s idea, and not a bad one. Other than Edith, he probably counted as Theodore’s truest friend—and a greater mismatch in personality I could hardly imagine. As a senator from Massachusetts and a pharisee, he was as likely as anyone in the capital to have learned of any wayward behavior by one William Turtle, late of the Bay State, and he would not hesitate to speak ill of the dead. Cortelyou (of course) had ’phoned ahead on my behalf.
I slowed Single Malt to an amble, past the Cuban embassy, the wood and coal yard, and the shabby Gordon Hotel, just reopened after its summer hiatus. Dwellings clustered like teeth in a boxer’s mouth. I guided the mare past the scowling statue of Daniel Webster and west onto Massachusetts avenue. Thus we entered a different world, hushed and cloistered, one that must have reminded Cabot Lodge, the Boston Brahmin plus ultra, of Beacon Hill. The adjoining brick houses were imposing, all of them holier-than-thou. Lodge’s was the holiest, the grandest, three stories high and two houses wide, as spacious as Henry Adams’s and mine combined. Its stately Georgian style, the arches and peaks and bow walls, reminded me of Harvard. Surely no accident.
Inside, I talked my way past the butler and entered what my friend Clemens called the Gilded Age. And what an opulent age it was—cosseted with wine-colored fringed furniture, protected by carved bookshelves, dazzled by rococo chandeliers, swaddled in Persian rugs. I was requested to wait behind the closed double doors, which I did, for the most part patiently, for nine minutes (but who was counting?). On the bookshelves I found hundreds of histories, from ancient Greece to modern America, including my ten volumes on Lincoln and all nine volumes of Henry Adams’s epic on the Jefferson and Madison administrations. The spines of my books were intact; several of Henry’s were cracked. Then again, Henry had taught Lodge at Harvard while the future senator was burrowing into the past for his PhD.
I heard footsteps, and the doors swung open. Senator Lodge was tall and thin, every inch the ascetic Yankee, with a sharp chin and a graying goatee that made him look longer still. His muted cravat, below the high collar, was perfectly tied. His skin, an alabaster white, looked sickly. Were I to press his cheek, I wondered if it would bulge back. He deigned to shake my hand and then quickly withdrew his.
“You wished to see me, I understand,” he said in an aristocratic whine.
“At the president’s suggestion, Senator.” I had known him for more than a decade, but we were still on formal terms. “I apologize for intruding on a Saturday. It is about a state legislator from Pittsfield named William Turtle. Did you know him?”
“You employ the past tense. I heard something about that.”
Not from the newspapers. “I was there,” I said.
“Really?” His marble face was capable of showing surprise. “Why?”
“To question him.”
“For what purpose?” Lodge said.
Who was supposed to pose the questions here? “Has Theodore discussed this with you?” I said.
“Discussed what?”
“The collision in Pittsfield.”
“Oh yes. He says he wants to sue the motorman who killed poor Mr. Craig.”
My turn to say, “Really?” Theodore hadn’t said that to me. Maybe with Lodge he had been letting off steam. Or maybe he meant it. With our impetuous young president, you could never tell for sure. Nor, I suspected, could he.
“Well, Mr. Turtle was the motorman’s lawyer. And the conductor’s and the streetcar company’s. I am guessing this had something to do with his … death. His murder. I want to learn anything I can about him. As I say, he was a legislator, so I hope you might have known him.”
A look of disbelief crossed Lodge’s face, presumably at the notion that a man of his breeding and position might know anything at all about a mere member of the Great and General Court. “A little, I suppose,” he said.
“What was your impression of him, then?”
We sat in deep leather armchairs, cups of bitter tea at our elbows, before a blazing fire that was making me perspire.
Lodge tilted his head back and literally looked down his nose. His high brow and his hooded eyes looked formidable. “Not a favorable one, my dear Hay. Rather uncouth, wouldn’t you say? And a rather … large man. And crass, I must say, in how he went about things.”
“Any particulars?”
Lodge waved his hand at the flames—he was a man of conclusions, not of details—and waited for a worthier question.
“Ethical in his dealings?” I tried.
“I would have no way of knowing,” Lodge said. “I have every good reason to doubt it.”
“Namely?”
“You only had to look at the man to know he lacked honor.”
I couldn’t disagree. “I do need specifics,” I said.
“Why? Once you know a man, you know him. The rest is just fill. What do you want to know about him, specifically?”
He had me there. I decided to be frank. (Dangerous, I know, for a diplomat.) “I want to know if the late Mr. Turtle was, in your considered judgment, capable of trying to kill a man. A president.” I surprised myself at the question, but I knew Theodore wouldn’t mind.
“Of course he was. Anyone is.”
Just what Henry had said. “Not all of us act on it,” I pointed out. “Almost nobody does. The question is, did he?”
“You seriously think that this wretched man Turtle had something to do with Roosevelt’s…” Cabot Lodge was speechless, for once in his life.
“He had something to do with it. Look at his clients. He represented everyone involved. Well, not everyone, but on the streetcar company’s side of things. He came to Washington to … I don’t know what. I am trying to figure that out. To see me, among others, but I have no idea why. This is why I am asking you, can you shed any light on this man?”
“Not in the way that you want. You should ask Governor Crane—he is arriving here to-morrow. He is a man of specifics. As you point out, I have only a general impression of the man. Your Mr. Turtle, as I understand things, is—was—at the center of the Republican … organization … out in Berkshire County.” I gathered that the senator, as a Cabot and a Lodge, had never needed to rely on anything as vulgar as a political machine. “Your Mr. Turtle knew how to make deals. He knew men. And how to cheat them. How to make them do what he wanted, whatever was required. Whatever was required. That is what he was good at. A valuable skill in politics. Maybe the most valuable. But rather a disagreeable quality in a man.”
You should know, I thought uncharitably. I had rarely heard the acerbic Yankee so passionate about anything. I pressed my luck. “A plausible mastermind, do you suppose, of a plot to, say, assassinate”—I luxuriated in every syllable—“the president?”
“Absolutely,” Lodge replied. He squinted and knocked over his tea. “Or a victim of it.”
I left and learned that Single Malt had bitten the bark from an elm.
I repeated Lodge’s three words to Nellie Bly. Or a victim. We sat in my library on opposite settees, sipping coffee that Clara had brought us. A generous gesture, I thought, given the press of our evening’s plans. But I understood why she bothered: to catch a glimpse of the famous woman I had mentioned a little too often. The two women seemed to like each other, to my relief.
“Why would somebody want to kill him?” Nellie said.
“Good question. But let’s start with the fact that somebody did.”
“As you can testify.”
“Which I may have to. Possibly as the defendant.” Was I bragging?
“Maybe a better question is this: Why would somebody want to kill Turtle then? As soon as he arrived here. Just before he was going to see—”
“Yes,” I pounced, “to prevent him from talking to…” I told Nellie of the pocket diary. “Cortelyou, Mark Hanna, and … me.”
“Talk about what?”
I smiled and extended my palms in supplication. “I wish I knew.”
“Any hint at all? You were with him.”
“For hardly a minute. We hadn’t really started to talk. He went to get dressed and had already called for breakfast.”
“Did anyone know you were there?”
“Only Clara. And…” I decided to come clean about the woman I’d heard back in the bedroom. “But she wouldn’t have known who I was.”
“Unless he told her.”
“True,” I conceded. “But she was almost certainly a … a prostitute.” Unless she wasn’t. “Did you find anything in Lizzie’s … Lizzie Cameron’s”—a knowing look from Nellie—“rooms?”
“Nothing,” Nellie said.
“Nothing?”
“Nothing to speak of. Quite a lot, actually. Mrs. Cameron does not travel lightly.”
“She does nothing lightly.”
That knowing look again, deserved.
“A dozen pairs of shoes,” Nellie said. “None of them with hexagonal heels.”
I exhaled, for the first time in a while. Then a contrary thought. “Unless she was wearing them when you checked.”
“Why don’t you check the next time you see her?” Nellie said, with a level stare.
I chuckled to myself, loudly enough that she could hear. “I just might do that,” I replied, “and I will be sure to tell you everything I learn.” I stared back. “And my wife.”
“Naturally,” Nellie said.
I didn’t enjoy being ribbed about something I was agonizing over myself. I was stupid as hell; I knew that. Otherwise, why would I jeopardize everything I held dear—my wife, my daughters, my surviving son—in pursuit of a woman who would bring me nothing but grief? I knew all of that. Any yet … And yet what? Yes, Lizzie was beautiful to look at. Enthralling, really. All true. But so what? Was I truly that shallow? That callow? I used to be, I know, and at times I am embarrassed by my former self. By my current self, too, I’ll admit. Had I learned nothing over the years?
“How did you get in, by the way?” I said. “Merely as a matter of craft, if you would.”
“It was easy.” A prideful smile lit up her face like a lantern in a belfry. “I, uh, borrowed the key from the front desk while the clerk was … away. And I … just in case … dressed like a chambermaid.”
I was impressed. “Where on earth did you find a uniform?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.
“Easy again,” she said. “I stole it.”
Thus confirming my fears. Should the newspapers ever get wind of my role in a murder—innocent, inadvertent—I was a goner.
I was perusing the Evening Star, trying not to doze off in my favorite leather chair. Pershing was making headway in the Philippines. Transpacific mail left daily for China. (How the world was shrinking!) Typhoid fever had slammed other cities worse than Washington. Prince Henry of Prussia, the kaiser’s brother, had taken out the first-ever insurance policy on an assassination—his own. Croquet was reviving. An item in the neighboring column caught my eye:
The Penalty of Progress
From Life.
Is it anybody’s business to keep count of the number of persons who are killed by accidents from day to day in this country? The number must be enormous, and most of the victims die of modern improvements of one kind or another. Fatal trolley car accidents are more common and comprehensive this year than ever before; railroads kill and maim about as usual; automobiles do their share …
All right, all right. I was fundamentally a nineteenth-century man, still a believer in polite dealings, deliberate thought, gentlemanly restraint—in transport and in life. So sue me. I wasn’t proud of these fetishes, like Henry Adams was, but I was honest enough not to deny them. As if anyone gave a damn besides myself. The age of invention had its wonders and its perils, but the age of the gentleman was dying if not dead. My advantage over Henry was that I was adaptable to modern ways—educable, even into my sixties. In the boxing ring I had learned to escape corners.
The past is a land in which I was born
Not bad.
And where I’ve spent my days.
Redundant. Worse, boring.
The past is a land in which I was born
And where my life …
I was rescued by a scraping in the room and discovered that my eyes were closed. I opened them and there Henry stood, in front of me. His beard looked less devilish than usual. An angelic smile wreathed his face.
“This is a dream, right?” I said.
“If you like,” he replied. He was waving a paper at the edge of my vision.
“Take a seat, Henry,” I said.
He was too excited to sit. That excited me, too. Henry came at the world with the scholar’s perspective of centuries. There was little that was new under the sun. But occasionally there was.
“I found something,” he said unnecessarily.
“Tell me.”
“It was deep in one of the boxes. It’s a letter. Quite a tedious one, actually. Written by the lawyers, surely—they must get paid by the word—and signed by the principals. From Morgan, J. Pierpont himself, to James J. Hill, himself. Almost impenetrable, the letter, about the Sherman Antitrust Act and whether it might be applied by an unsympathetic administration.”
“The Sherman act. Lizzie’s uncle. Ha! And might it?”
“Precisely what you would expect from Northern Securities lawyers who want to remain employed as Northern Securities lawyers. A railroad monopoly is a boon to heaven and to all of mankind, a veritable fulfillment of the Founding Fathers’ rosiest vision.” Those Fathers included Henry’s great-grandpappy, John, and his cousin, Sam. “But what their lawyers think isn’t what’s interesting.” Henry stopped, as if to gather himself, and shoved two pages of typewritten, single-spaced, impenetrable prose under my nose.
My dear Mr. Hill:
If we intend to succeed in our endeavor …
Those were the last words in English, before an onslaught of “whereas” and “foregoing” and “thereunder” and “conspiracy in restraint of trade” and, turning the page, “political animus.” Well, those two words I understood, along with the four that followed: “of the current administration.” By the current president, it meant. Lawyerly language for loathing.
“There!” Henry pointed, once I got to that phrase.
“I see it. Seems reasonably polite, given that the administration is taking them to court to break them up.”
“You’re not seeing it, old boy. On the side.”
I had missed it because it was handwritten with a hard, sharp pencil along the right margin. I shifted the page to find the light.
Hay > TR!
I cursed to myself.
Apparently the pencil point had broken on the exclamation point, because the words underneath were ragged and thick: ’Phone me.
’Phone me about what? I must have spoken that aloud, because Henry said, “My question precisely.”
“It could mean anything, I guess.”
“It could.”
“Are you certain this is Morgan’s handwriting? That’s what you’re suggesting, correct?”
“You are quick to catch on, old boy. I am no … graphologist, I believe they are called, but if you will examine the capital P in ’Phone and the capital P in his signature”—JPM—“to my eye they look similar. More than similar. Identical.”
I glanced back and forth three, four times, and I had to agree. “I’ll ask Wilkie to have his men take a look. So, what do you suppose it means?”
“What it says.”
“It doesn’t mean they did anything about it.”
“It means he wanted to—wants to. One thing you can say about J. Pierpont Morgan, he gets what he wants, if he wants. Has he ever said anything about this to you?”
“That he’d rather that I … Of course not—I hardly know the man. Why on earth would he…” I had broken into a sweat. “When was this written?”
I was fumbling with the pages when Henry replied, “August third, this year. In the defendants’ latest filings.”
Henry was talking like a lawyer. “One month before the collision,” I said.
“To the day.”