SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1902
“So tell me,” I said, “is there a God?”
Whom better to ask than one’s masseur? If your body is a temple, isn’t he the high priest?
Lindgren pressed the heels of his hands into my shoulder blades. I yelped. “Of course there is,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“Everyone says so, and my daddy told me when I was a tot.”
I couldn’t argue with the latter. “Well, if there is, I’ve got a few questions to put to him,” I said. A sweet pain filled the small of my back. “Maybe it’s time to pay the good Lord a visit.”
“If he’s home,” Lindgren said.
An hour at Saint John’s did not resolve my query, or queries, although I can’t say the time passed unpleasantly. The church itself was calming, and this week’s sermon—on the perils of evil and the ubiquity of sin—roused no rabble and required no thought.
My expectations after church were lower still. I answered the peremptory knock with trepidation.
Alice Roosevelt stood tall in the doorway. “Father will be along,” she said. “He is giving the pastor a well-deserved piece of his mind.” Delight gave her ivory face a rosy hue. Her smile seemed cruel.
“Please come in, then,” I said. I almost added “princess.”
We had five minutes of uncomfortable small talk (it was disheartening how little I knew about polo) before a confident knocking produced the president. Theodore’s scowl darkened the entrance hall. What I had to tell him would not help.
The news of Pratt’s murder stopped him in the shadow of Botticelli’s Madonna and Child.
“So it was Pratt,” Theodore said, showing a preternatural calm. “These villains are serious.”
“‘Villains,’ plural?” I said.
“How could one man do all of this damage?”
I thought I detected some respect.
As we entered the library, Alice sprang up from her overstuffed chair and pressed her father for every detail of his confrontation with the Almighty’s nearest envoy. Theodore smiled as he recounted his triumph in making clear the previous Sunday’s embarrassment from listening to a eulogy for himself.
Alice clapped her hands. “And what did he say to that, Father?”
“What could he say, Sister, but that he was distressed to have caused me distress, that it was the furthest thing from his mind? So what choice did I have but to shake the man’s hand? He is a fine man, and I would say we had a meeting of the minds.” Theodore’s vanity had a dollop of humility. Then he turned to me and said, “You need to go up there again, John.”
“Where?” I said, although I knew. “What can I find out that they can’t?”
“Somebody knows what this fellow Pratt knew. His wife, perhaps. You can find out things they can’t. I have every confidence in you.”
More than I had.
I wandered by without expectations. But in Washington, in this speedy new world of ours, even Sunday was becoming a workday, whether you were in the office or out.
John Wilkie was in. His coat was off, shirtsleeves rolled up, cravat pulled loose, and he was puffing away on his pipe. Behind him, the windows overlooked a green courtyard and the east end of the White House. Excavations for the new wing resembled an archeological site—was it an agora or a gladiator’s arena rising out of the marsh? Wilkie was reading a document and smiling to himself. I cleared my throat.
“Morning, Hay,” he said. “Or is it afternoon?”
“No such luck,” I replied.
“What can I do for you?”
“Ink.”
“Ah, yeah.” He pulled a paper from the top of a stack. “The only store in Washington that sells that particular ink is Brentano’s, down the avenue, almost to Tenth. They keep a list of regular buyers, the ones who carry an account. Would you care to see it?”
With a glimmer in his eye, like a pope’s to a crippled child, Wilkie handed me the typewritten page. On Brentano’s flowery stationery, the list was more than a dozen names long, in alphabetical order. The first one sickened me.
Adee, Alvey.
I forced myself to keep reading.
Brautigan, Daniel
Brooks, Isaiah
Court, Mrs. Franklin
Galston, Mrs. James
Ingle, Dr. Jonathan
King, Llewellyn
McCaughey, John
Miles, Mrs. Nelson
This time I winced.
“Which one?” Wilkie said.
“Mrs. Nelson Miles,” I replied. “She happens to be Elizabeth Cameron’s beloved older sister.”
“Beloved. Are you certain?”
“I was. It’s her husband I wonder about.”
I was praying that Adee would not be in. No such luck. He was at his rolltop desk, his black fountain pen racing over a legal-size paper. I watched him for a while. The pages piled up. His eyes were sharp and his brow remained unfurrowed. He enjoyed what he did, and I enjoyed watching him.
“Adee,” I said, and again, louder.
He looked up, smiling, his eyebrows raised in an unspoken question: What in the hell are you doing here?
“I love your pen,” I said.
“Thank you, Hay. I do as well, I must say. I bought it in a village near Lyon.” Adee spent weeks every summer bicycling through southern France, alone or with friends. “It fits perfectly into my hand and writes so smoothly. A diamond point.” He rolled the pen, as slender and smooth as an ivory hairpin, between his thumb and forefinger. “I could do an advertisement.”
“And the ink is awfully nice.”
“What a pleasing luster, don’t you agree?”
“Where do you buy it, if I might ask?”
“I could get it by the wagonload in France, but, given my usual luck, it would explode in my luggage. So I get it here. Brentano’s—you know it? They import it from Paris. You can tell the difference, don’t you think?”
“Oh yes, oh yes,” I babbled, relieved beyond description at his candor. Would he boast about the ink he used for a kidnapping note? “What are you writing?” I said, to change the subject.
“It is for you, actually. I am drafting responses to the rather impolite notes we’ve received overnight from Berlin and Moscow regarding the plight of your Roumanian Jews. I fear you are no longer the most popular man in Europe.”
“I never was,” I said. “Why aim low?”
The last person I wanted to see came to the door. By early afternoon on the Lord’s day, Don Cameron was soused. I had no particular desire to punch him (back)—to my credit, I thought.
“You!” he said.
I had heard this before. “Yes, me,” I replied, my wit in short supply. “Senator, is the lady of the house in, please?” I try to remember my manners, especially with drunks.
“Ladies, you mean.”
“As you say. Either or both. May I come in?”
He seemed to consider the question before stepping aside. Then he thought better of it. “What’s this about?” he said.
“Ink,” I replied.
If he thought I was mocking him, he was right. He let me in anyway.
Nellie Bly emerged from the back corridor, looking radiant, like she had just discovered publishable proof of a king’s infidelity. For good reason. She had found a railroad clerk at the Sixth street depot who remembered selling a ticket to Pittsfield, Massachusetts, to a large, red-bearded man, around noon the previous day. That would have allowed Samson to arrive at David Pratt’s bedside in time to kill him. When I told Nellie that Pratt had been murdered, she eagerly accepted the assignment I had in mind for her: to swoop in on Lizzie’s sister, the peacock general’s wife, and to wheedle her innermost thoughts on the subject of ink. And yes, Nellie should feel free to ask General Miles the same, if he happened to spend Sundays at home. I gave her the N street address, and she hustled off.
I sat for a minute or three before I went to the window and watched the snarls on the avenue below—the horse carts trotting along, the pedestrians crisscrossing, an electric streetcar sweeping down the center—the irresistible force.
I waited. Lizzie treated herself like a queen of the stage who considered it her due, if not her duty, to make men wait. I was pondering an escape—this was not a conversation I wanted—when she made her entrance. And what an entrance it was. She wore a taffeta gown that folded over itself, showing her underwhelming breasts to best advantage. The skirt rustled as she walked.
She assumed her customary recline on the divan and said, “What brings you here, Johnny?”
“Your sister,” I said.
“Mary? What has she done now?”
“Now? What has she done before?”
“Oh, the usual things.” Lizzie affected boredom. “This and that.”
“What usual things?”
“Why are you interested?” Now she was interested.
I debated telling her the truth and calculated I had more to gain—her cooperation, maybe even an insight—than to lose. “Apparently she uses a particular kind of ink, manufactured in Europe, that was also used in the note I received on Friday morning about your, uh, whereabouts.” I saw no reason to mention the Riggs account.
Lizzie seemed neither surprised nor distressed. “I can’t imagine why you find this interesting,” she said.
“I find everything interesting,” I replied. This was true, though incomplete. “This in particular.”
“I’m sure there are many people who use this ink.”
“There are. And your sister is one of them. Can you think of any reason why she might … want to … to cause you harm?”
Lizzie physically recoiled on the divan. Was she repulsed at me or at Mary? I waited, this time with a purpose—which, after no more than a minute, was achieved.
“No,” she said weakly, which I figured might well mean yes.
“The august Mrs. Nelson A. Miles gave me ten minutes and then she ushered me out.” Nellie’s mouth was scrunched to the point of a daffodil’s cup. “Politely, of course. You know how these society matrons are. All flutter and light on the surface, and mean as a madhouse guard underneath.”
Oh, I knew. “So, what did she say?”
I had run into Nellie, almost literally, in the Willard’s lobby, and we had found our quiet spot behind the farthest pillar.
“Not a lot. That she buys her ink from Brentano’s, a standing order. That she loves her sister to pieces—her exact words. That she knew nothing of her sister’s … sojourn on Mason’s Island until it was over.”
“Did you believe her?”
“That’s a good question. I’d say, mostly. She may love her sister to pieces, but she may hate her, too. It happens. And another factor. Just for the shock value, I asked her point-blank if she would like to see her husband, the overdecorated general, as president. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ she said. She’s honest, I’ll say that for her. That’s when she remembered a previous appointment.”
Nellie laughed. It wasn’t a ladylike titter or a circus guffaw but an up-from-the-belly explosion of merriment, of a sort I hadn’t felt in the fourteen months and twenty-nine days since Del died.
The railcar rattled along through New Jersey, the rhythm of the wheels unrelenting. The finest accommodations that money could buy brought me mild discomfort. My nightshirt itched. I stretched out in my compartment, as it rocked from side to side, and tried to pretend I was sailing to Europe. Ha! This journey to Pittsfield had no prospect of pleasure.
Wait, who cared about pleasure anyway? (I did.)
I’m too damn old.
To ever be told
That life is a scold
Except when it’s not …
Hmm. Not terrible. Rhyme had its charms. A second verse wouldn’t hurt, but I felt too damn tired to think.
And I’m too damn tired
Feeling mucked up and mired
Energetic, at least.
In a rut and expired
Ready to …
Ready to … what? Oh, never mind.
I closed my eyes and saw Del. He was standing in our entrance, on Sixteenth street, leaning against the doorframe, smiling. Everyone loved him. I ached with loving him. I never told him that I—
My eyes snapped open.
Life was short—another cliché that was true. So what was worth doing in the meantime? In the scheme of things, no other question counted. Be a father, be a husband, be a friend, be a secretary of state. Yes, all of those mattered. And figure out who tried to kill the president—that, too, was time well spent. Though only if I succeeded.