FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 5, 1902
I sat next to the coachman in the express wagon, as Theodore’s children called the two-seat, yellow-wheeled surrey. I raised the blanket from my lap to my shoulders and peered to the right. Between the tangle of trees, the sound looked indistinguishable from the sky. Gray against gray. It was that kind of day, chilly and aloof.
Franklyn Hall sat ramrod straight. “We’ll get there soon enough, Mr. Hay,” he said. “People will be rushing every which way. But ain’t it pretty in the meantime?”
“Indeed it is, Frank. I’m enjoying the quiet. I don’t get enough of it anymore.”
“Oh, this modern world of ours. Always the noise.”
“And the hurry.”
“Oh my, yes. Used to be, the whole world ran at a horse’s pace, no faster than that. That’s all a-dyin’, sir. Everythin’, it’s speedin’ up.”
The village of Oyster Bay still had its leisurely summertime pace. But the pastels of the shop fronts looked somber. Pedestrians sauntered across the street and scattered at an automobile’s honking. A horse reared.
The railroad station was a gabled shelter by the tracks. Men crowded on the platform, most of them wearing derby hats or unfashionably late-in-the-season straw boaters. Mine was the only high silk hat.
“This way, sir,” Franklyn Hall said, carrying my valise to the end of the platform. He boarded the car and lent me a hand in mounting the stairs. I didn’t need the help, but he wanted to give it. When I thanked him for the ride, he said, “I’m comin’ with you.”
“All the way?”
“To Long Island City, sir.”
I was being told, not asked. “No,” I said.
“I am under orders.”
“Which I am countermanding. I am perfectly capable of doing this on my own. You tell the president I insisted.”
Franklyn Hall stood like a donkey caught between two piles of hay.
“Thank you,” I said, and nudged him down onto the platform.
In the club car, I sank into the plushest chair, the one with crimson cushions and a latticed back. I was delighted to see that it both swiveled and rocked. A waiter brought me a corn muffin and a violet-and-white fluted cup with steaming coffee. On a side table I found a copy of yesterday’s Tribune. I unfolded it—I still loved the smell of paper and ink—and scanned the front page. A volcano had erupted in the Caribbean, killing two thousand people, a tragedy without meaning unless a victim was real. The president had agreed to review the Grand Army of the Republic parade, of Civil War veterans, in Washington next month. J. P. Morgan and the Pennsylvania Railroad were gobbling up another line—this time, the Reading. The strong preyed on the weak. The way of the world. Newsworthy, to be sure, but nothing new.
I stared over the top of the newspaper at the woodlands rushing by. The anarchists had a point; I would concede that. An individual counted for nothing anymore. The forces in ascendance—in control—were beyond the scope of any one man. Blame the capitalists, if you like, for spitting on labor, and blame labor for spitting back. The industrial trusts were cornering the economy, but at least Theodore was trying to stand in the way. Not to break them up but to civilize them a little. The anarchists should at least concede that.
Yet the president’s animus toward anarchists, his obsession with them, evidently his fear of them, was something that flummoxed me. An anarchist, for God’s sake, had put him in the White House. Maybe Theodore had some deep, dark reason to—
No, no, no. Leave that to the quack in Vienna. Let me think about Emma Goldman. Maybe she did know something. I shouldn’t rule it out. Though I had to admit she unnerved me a little. A force of nature, I understood. Lord save me from the like. Theodore was hard enough to handle. But a woman—an obstinate woman … Despite Theodore’s blithe assurance, my confidence about winning over women had already met its match. In Lizzie.
Ah, Lizzie. Elizabeth Sherman Cameron, a duchess of American history, one of her uncles the Union general who terrified Georgia, another uncle my predecessor plus one as secretary of state. Lizzie carried herself as royalty, and made herself unapproachable, which increased the temptation all the more.
It was an infatuation, nothing more. She was married; I was married. I had no defensible reason to pursue her. Usually I resisted, but sometimes I gave in and tripped on her toes or, more often, on my own. We were dancing a waltz; whenever I stepped forward, she stepped back. When I stepped back, she—Well, you can guess. It was a game. Both of us knew it wasn’t serious. It couldn’t be. We couldn’t allow it to be. But a man could flirt, couldn’t he? Up to the edge and no further.
But then why did I feel so guilty about it?
I checked my watch. It was hours too early to order a drink. Besides, I was heading for a saloon. It wouldn’t do to arrive smelling of liquor—and certainly not at eleven o’clock!
Through the windows, the woods gave way to scrums of buildings separated by cornfields and barns. We were entering Long Island City. The smokestacks spewed ashes that deepened the gray.
With tremors and screeches we jerked to a halt. The splendid isolation of Sagamore Hill was gone. So, too, was the peace of the club car. I lowered myself onto the platform, into a maelstrom of fishmongers and rude commuters. The valise felt heavier than I remembered, probably because my arms and shoulders ached from yesterday’s exertions in the ring.
I weaved my way through the waiting room and onto the ferry. It was a paddle wheel, a whiff of the past. (Everything was a whiff of the past, if you paid attention.) The seats inside were crowded with men in derby hats on their way to work in Manhattan. Pinched lips, faraway looks—the human condition, twentieth-century style. The odors of steam, rotting bananas, and male-pattern anxiety drove me onto the deck. I ignored the chill and tried to imagine the wind as my friend, with minimal success.
The ferry landing at Thirty-fourth street was even smellier than in Long Island City. The automobiles and the motorboats by the wharf made it too noisy to think. Not that I wanted to.
I slapped my feet along the grimy boards, into the depot. The vaulted roof had no walls, and I peered under the eaves and saw the clouds, swollen and gray. I stepped around the piles of pig manure (I could still recognize it, sorry to say) and descended into the street.
At the curb, I noticed a brougham with brass trimmings but thought it unwise to arrive in luxury at an anarchists’ saloon. I hailed a hansom cab but let a woman with a squirming tot step in front of me—to-day’s contribution to the common good. And again for a haggard old man carrying a bulky package; that counted for to-morrow. The third hack’s nag looked ready to rear up at a human’s sneeze. I jumped into the cab.
The driver was a dwarf with a mop of red hair and a smile that reached his oversize eyes. “Whar to, suh?”
I recited the address.
“Raht ’way, suh.”
“Take your time.”
A nudge from the whip sent the nag trotting south onto First avenue.
Around Thirtieth street we passed the high iron gates and grimy brick of Bellevue Hospital for the insane. Was anyone more than an absurd act or two removed from an involuntary visit?
The farther downtown the carriage ventured, the more chaotic the traffic. At Twenty-third street, the elevated railway swooped overhead, casting a shadow and pressing down on the taverns, the tailors, the barber poles, and the grocers huddled below. In the roadway, the hacks and drays and rigs and clattering automobiles all claimed their right-of-way. By rights, a collision ought to occur at every intersection, on every block. The older I get, the more I realize how precarious life is, and how dependent we are on everyone else’s judgment. That scared me.
Turning onto east First street ushered us into a different world, one as tranquil as a summertime pond. A couple walked arm in arm down the center of the road, the woman plucking her long skirt above the muck. Number fifty was on the left side, almost to Second avenue, across from a macaroni factory and a Chinese laundry. The brick row house had seen better days. Soot covered the windows, and the peonies in the flower boxes were dead, their stalks gray. The saloon was four steps down.
The basement door, its green paint peeling, was heavy, but I pushed it open with ease. Until something—or someone—stopped it. I pressed my shoulder against it and a man grunted inside. My knocking brought a growl, and the door creaked. A pug-nosed giant straddled the doorway.
“I am Hay,” I said.
“Heard o’ ya. T’is way.”
The saloon was smoky and smelled of last month’s ale. Men sat at tiny tables, holding tightly to mugs, squawking in languages I did not understand. Polish or Albanian, perhaps. A young man with long, straggly hair and a collarless shirt sat with his back to the bar and examined me as I passed.
Ah, my silk hat. In an anarchists’ hideaway.
I grinned at the young man, as if sharing a joke. It was funny. To my surprise, he grinned back.
“In he’e,” my chaperone said, pointing to a door, ajar. I walked through and the door closed behind me with a click.
It took me a minute or more to see much of anything in the windowless room. A bead of perspiration tickled my spine. I sensed a movement in the far corner. The scratch of a match brought a candle to life. A woman sat behind it, at a tiny round table, her face in shadow except for a pursed mouth and a determined chin.
“Mr. Hay!” Her deep voice, accented by Europe, was used to command.
“Miss Goldman,” I replied. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“My pleasure.” Her pince-nez reflected the flame. She half rose, to the height of a fireplug, and just as thick. She wore no corset beneath the dark, shapeless dress. She was smaller than I had expected (like the Alamo), but her handshake was strong. “What did you wish to see me about?”
No offer of a drink, though she was nursing a short, chipped glass that was half filled with a clear liquid. “Euclid Madden,” I said.
“Pardon?”
I repeated the trolley motorman’s name. Her face registered nothing—my vision was adjusting to the gloom. Her thin, flat lips looked incapable of smiling. Black-rimmed spectacles magnified her eyes, which kept a stern and level gaze. Her features were too masculine to be pretty, but they had a strength, an assuredness—a magnetism—that made it hard to look away.
“Euclid Madden, the motorman in the trolley that collided with President Roosevelt’s carriage in Pittsfield, Massachusetts—do you know him?”
“Why should I know him?” she said.
“There is every indication … There is some indication that Mr. Madden’s action in operating his streetcar in … an unsafe manner was … not an accident. That it was on purpose.” I had to be careful about saying too much.
Was that a smirk? “And you want to know if this Mr. Madden of yours has been hypnotized by my irresistible oratory, perhaps, or otherwise enslaved in my brigade of anarchists, who will obey my wishes even if I never express them. Is that what you are asking?”
“That is not how I would phrase it,” I replied, “but … yes.”
“Oh? How would you phrase it?”
“Just as I did. Do you know him?”
“I do not. So far as I know, I have never met the man. Nor did I know Leon Czolgosz, to skip to your next question, although I have no reason to quibble with the government’s”—she fairly spat the word—“contention that he once attended a lecture of mine. I have become accustomed to arrests for every crime the police are unable to solve. Now you are accusing me, are you not, of trying to murder another president. Whether a crime has actually been committed or not. Or do I misunderstand you, Mr. Hay?”
“You are most cooperative, Miss Goldman. I am much obliged. It is indeed a pleasure to interview someone who both asks the questions and answers them. It allows me to take a rest from my duties. But if I may be allowed to resume them, is there any possibility that Mr. Madden attended one of your lectures?”
“Not that I know of, though I could not say for certain one way or the other. But I will tell you, if you are asking, that I have never delivered a lecture in … where did you say? In Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Maybe I ought to. But even if I did, I can’t be held responsible for everyone who listens to me, Mr. Hay. Nor am I responsible for what they do.”
“There is such a thing as inciting to riot.”
“Is that what you are accusing me of?”
“I am not accusing you of anything. I am simply asking a question.”
“And I have answered it. Do I know this Mr. Madden? I do not. Are you satisfied now?”
“What are you drinking?” I said.
“Water.”
“Nothing for me, please,” I said. If asceticism was the game, I would compete. “Tell me, if you would, what happened in Omaha.”
“Nothing happened. That is why I am back in New York. They let me go, as surely you know, for lack of evidence.”
“That was not my understanding. I was told”—I prayed that Cortelyou’s information was accurate enough—“that you were seen in the company of known communists who are skilled as bomb-makers.”
Emma Goldman gave rather an easy laugh. “Who told you that mishegas?”
“You were arrested for plotting against the president, were you not?”
“The authorities can make up whatever charges they wish. I cannot be held responsible for their literary imaginations. I have said this every time someone has asked me: I do not believe in killing the president. Not because it would be an evil in itself but simply because it would not succeed. The reaction would undo any good that the action might bring. Isaac Newton understood these things. I daresay you do as well, Mr. Hay.”
She reached under the table—I froze—and returned holding a cigarette, which she lit by leaning into the candle. She offered me one.
“No, thank you,” I said. “Though I would like to reserve the right to change my mind.”
“Why should you have that right and not everyone else, Mr. Hay?” She was looking at me oddly, examining me like I was a bug under a microscope. “I have seen you before,” she said at last. “At one of my lectures.”
I felt like I was blushing. “How did you know?” I said.
“Where was it?” The eyes behind the glasses snapped alive. “Tell me, where? You sat in the second row, in the center.”
“In Brooklyn,” I said, amazed. “How did you know this?”
A shrug.
I said, “But you have no recollection of Euclid Madden?”
That easy laugh again. “Do you believe me now?” she said. “It is immaterial to me whether you do or not, but let me tell you another reason why you should. Two reasons. If this … collision was the work of an anarchist, he would have used a gun, like Mr. Czolgosz did, not a trolley car. He would want a sure thing. And he never would have kept the crime to himself. He would have shouted it from the rooftops. Otherwise, what was the point? Mr. Czolgosz confessed his crime. He was proud of it.”
“But only because it succeeded. Why brag about failure?”
“You miss the point,” she said. “The ease of the attempt reveals the state as vulnerable, and if the state is vulnerable the people can take back their power. I will admit my involvement if that is the truth, and I will deny it when that is the truth. I am naive enough, Mr. Hay, to still believe in the truth, and I am even more naive to believe that you do.”
“So, what did the old girl say?” The squeal was either the president or the telephone line. I was calling from an apothecary around the corner from the saloon.
“Young girl,” I replied. “Well, young woman.”
“So, what did the old girl say?”
“She doesn’t remember ever meeting the motorman.”
“Which doesn’t mean she didn’t.”
“I suppose not.” I preferred not to explain why I believed her. “But there is no evidence that she did.”
“Your job is to find it.”
“I understand that, but I cannot find evidence where it doesn’t exist.”
“We have been through that, Hay. So you need to look for the evidence where it does exist.”
“Where is that, would you say?”
“Pittsfield.”
The reply I had feared. “On a Friday?”
“No time to waste, John.”
My Christian name—he was pulling out the stops. In my experience, a life without time to waste wasn’t worth living. But I could never expect an apostle of the strenuous life to agree.
“I suspect the world can survive without you for a few days,” Alvey Adee said. He was still at the office late on a Friday, married to nobody but the department.
“It hasn’t done all that well with me,” I replied. Margaret Hanna repeated what I’d said.
“We might keep you away indefinitely,” Adee said.
“That’s a strategy. Anything I need to know?”
“Not really.”
That meant yes. “What is it?” I said.
“A letter from Taft. Asking you to support eight hundred more troops in Mindanao.”
“Only to cover his sizable derriere,” I said. “My apologies, Miss Hanna.”
“A fact is a fact,” she replied.
The depot was thick with men tired after a long week, heading home to unhappy wives. They scurried this way and that, crossing paths but only rarely colliding, their derbies bobbing but never displaced, a marvel of individually regulated chaos. A point for the anarchists!
I bought my ticket at one of those marble-rimmed windows beneath the rotunda. The waiting room at the enlarged Grand Central Terminal, on Forty-second street, in an up-and-coming part of town, was immense. If you wished to feel small, this was a good place to sit. I chose a rocking chair by a fireplace and imagined myself a water bug in the desert.
My third telephone call, to Clara, had not gone as smoothly. Not a cross word was said, but I felt all the things unsaid, having only the faintest idea what they were. I apologized for being called away, and meant it. That usually worked (I think), but not this time. She seemed distant. She was distant. My fault, no doubt—it always was. If only I could figure out how.
All for the sake of going to Pittsfield. Lucky me. Pittsfield. I waved the ticket in my hand; the faint breeze might keep me awake. What I knew about Pittsfield would fill a worm’s ear. A small city at the western edge of Massachusetts, a few miles from New York State. In the Berkshires, but far from beautiful. Industrial, drab. A Republican stronghold, like most of the state. Hence the president’s political interest.
These were impressions, nothing more. I would see what the place was like once I got there, not before. No longer was it too early for a drink.
The call for my train—“New York Central, to Danbury and points north”—came none too soon. I dragged my valise through the waiting room and along the platform. My compartment was in the farthest car. The woodwork was worn, the seat cushions torn. It would do. It would have to.
I found the parlor car, claimed an upholstered chair, ordered a whisky, and opened a volume I had slipped from between unruffled shirts. The cover was lush, the lettering in gold on a regal red.
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
The spring’s literary sensation. Sherlock Holmes had supposedly died eight years before, fallen to his death at Reichenbach Falls. Everyone knew that. But now he was back for another yarn, which supposedly happened prior to his demise. A “prequel,” to coin a word. I had to admire the author’s audacity. Or was it cowardice, to yield to the seductions of commerce? Any writer should be so tempted.
To be sure, I still worshiped Vidocq. For one thing, he had been real, the master criminal turned France’s master detective, the founding director of the Sûreté nationale. Eugene Vidocq was Victor Hugo’s model, in Les Miserables, for Jean Valjean and for Inspector Javert. Vidocq, however, relied on deception and disguise in solving crimes—hardly my forte, even as a diplomat. While I deified him, I would never wish to emulate his methods.
But Sherlock? No dabbling detective, such as myself, could fail to adore him. I admired his skills at boxing and at the violin and, of course, his brains. He noticed everything, missed nothing, understood the implications, then thought and thought and thought about how the pieces fit, amid clouds of pipe smoke and snorts of cocaine. He was smarter than I could ever be. On the other hand, he wasn’t real, which gave me an edge. Though an edge in what, I couldn’t say with any assurance.
What, in fact, was my advantage? I evaded the question by turning the page and starting to read. The master detective was examining the thick, bulbous-headed walking stick a would-be client had left behind. Inside of four pages, Holmes deduced everything about its owner, his background and position and sense of self. Only then did the owner arrive, in need of a detective to look into Sir Charles Baskerville’s recent death on the moor. Holmes was peeved to be described as Europe’s second-finest detective, next to Monsieur Bertillon, who had pioneered the use of eleven bodily measurements to identify criminals. Sherlock (if a colleague in detection may assume familiarity) was brilliant, yes, but in need of affirmation, and not beyond pique. Even this fictional detective had his faults. I sighed with pleasure. There was hope for me yet.