WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1902
“Old is a state of mind.”
“That’s hogwash, and you know it,” I replied, although my noun was stronger.
The masseur laughed. “I know nothing of the kind,” he said. Ewell Lindgren, big and blond, was a Norwegian who lived a block to the east, along H street. On most mornings he jostled my muscles and tendons awake; the constrictions of Pittsfield needed some kneading. “And with all due respect, Mr. Hay, I know more older people, more … intimately, than you do. Your body is not old. Nor is your mind.”
“My mind is a mess, and why do I ache all the time?” If your masseur can’t command your honesty, who can? “You are … what … thirty-four?”
“Thirty-five.”
“You know nothing.” The heel of a palm pressed into my hamstring and I grunted.
“Say that again,” he panted, and I did. He pressed harder into my leg, until I squawked.
“Be careful,” I managed. “I feel a poem coming on.”
The edges of his hands chopped at my unresisting back, further breaching the boundary between relaxation and pain.
“So why do you do these things?” Clara liked to get to the point. (Diplomats prefer to digress.) I swallowed another spoonful of blueberries and cream. We sat in a sunny spot in the kitchen.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Each time, I’ve been drafted. First by Lincoln, in Willie’s death. Now by Theodore. By all of them. You tell me why.”
“Because you seem to figure it out in the end.” Clara smiled over her teacup.
“So far,” I said. “This time, I’m still not sure there’s an it to figure out.”
“Oh?”
“Theodore certainly thinks so. And this motorman does have some … peculiarities, shall we say.”
“Such as?” Clara said, always interested in human foibles she can find a way to excuse. She saw the best in people, even in me.
I sighed. “He is an odd mammal. A timid man, but they can be the nastiest. A bit of an agitator, says his boss. About hours and wages—the usual.”
“Not unreasonable.”
“Agreed.” I told her of the motorman’s three thousand-plus unexplained dollars and the unresolved question of the trolley’s speed. “Beside that map that one of the streetcar company’s directors…” I exhaled. “Never mind. I’m tired of this. Tell me what is happening here.”
“Nothing.”
“With the wedding?”
“Happily, nothing. Alice is sunny as always. The RSVPs—a lot of noes. The distance, you know.”
“Perfect,” I said.
I couldn’t help but think about who wouldn’t be there. He had fallen three stories to his death. In New Haven for his Yale reunion, Del was lounging in the window of his hotel room at two thirty in the morning. A half-smoked cigarette was found on the sill. There was no question of ill intent, by himself or by anyone else. It wasn’t his fault. And it wasn’t mine. That much I knew—really I did. But it made no difference in how I felt.
“Is Theodore coming, do you know?” Clara mercifully broke in. “People might change their minds if he does.”
“I doubt it. That limp of his isn’t getting any better. He’ll probably decide the day before.”
“It’s always such a circus when he’s around.”
“But entertaining, you’ve got to admit. He’s always interesting, even when he won’t shut up. He’s made entertaining the voters a legitimate function of democratic government. Why do you think he invites the reporters in at one o’clock every afternoon to watch him get shaved? His personality is bigger than he is; you can’t avert your eyes. A new kind of president for a new century.”
“But I want an old-fashioned wedding,” Clara said. “Let him do whatever he likes with his Alice, whenever the poor groom is trapped and bound. But not with our Alice, thank you very much.”
I couldn’t disagree. (Nor would I dare.)
How convenient life in Washington could be, if you were lucky enough to live a block from your office and around the corner from your morning rounds. Lafayette Park was quiet but for the scampering of squirrels. (An animal fancier from Virginia had recently let loose nearly a hundred of them.) My footsteps scraped in the gravel. The magnolias’ succulent leaves, which I so admired, were edged in brown. The air was brisk.
Congress was out of session, so the republic was safe. It also meant Mark Hanna would be at home, lingering over breakfast, such as he had shared with McKinley when 21 Madison place was known as the Little White House. The door knocker was shaped like a lion’s rump—landlady Lizzie’s sense of humor, no doubt—and I allowed it a certain respect. It fell heavily. The door opened right away, as if someone was waiting.
That someone was Elmer Dover. I had met him too many times. He was a large and obnoxiously cheerful young man, not quite thirty years old, with broad shoulders and a clean-shaven, jowly, blandly handsome face. There was never a cloud in his liquid brown eyes or an unkind word on his lips. Elmer Dover accomplished his evils without a grimace and behind your back (and behind mine, in ’ninety-six, when one of my donations to McKinley’s presidential campaign went … astray). Officially, he was the clerk of the Senate’s Relations with Canada Committee, which Hanna had served until recently as chairman. In practice, he was Hanna’s private secretary, his henchman, the man who heard the senator’s wishes and fulfilled them, who made the senator’s political problems go away, without always explaining how.
“It is such a pleasure to see you at this pleasant time of the morning,” Dover said.
“The same,” I replied. “Is the master here?”
“At breakfast,” Dover said, “if you would care to—”
I accepted.
The breakfast room, on the first floor, faced a walled garden that was overwhelmed by the six-story hulk of the opera house. It was a woman’s room, with flowered curtains and late-season daisies in delicate vases of a vaguely Oriental design. The junior (by a single day) senator from Ohio sat at the table, struggling with a soft-boiled egg. The puckered brow on his porcine face suggested that the egg was winning. Hanna’s huge, dark eyes look sadder than usual. His black silk bathrobe, loosely tied, showed a trapezoid of hairy belly. I suspected the Chinese letters embroidered in gold spelled out, depending on inflection, “Almighty Dollar” or “Besotted Plutocrat.” Thomas Nast would have adored the man.
I didn’t. Nor did I despise him, as Roosevelt did. But then, I didn’t have as much cause. He hadn’t called me a damn cowboy and a madman one life away from the presidency (though, under present circumstances, I was arguably the latter). We had a lot of history, Hanna and I, not all of it unpleasant, and more in common than I cared to admit. One was our debt to the dear departed McKinley. Another was the industrial city of Cleveland. It was Hanna’s hometown and also Clara’s. Hanna had co-owned, with Clara’s father, the Cleveland Daily Herald, until it failed. Besides his coal and iron ore mines, his steel-hulled ships and streetcar lines, Hanna owned the Euclid Avenue Opera House, on the street where Clara and I had lived for a half decade while I was managing my father-in-law’s business interests.
“You are looking well, Senator,” I said. In Washington, flattery never hurt, and usually helped—the wilder, the more beloved.
“You are as blind as a hog in a tornado, Hay.”
“On my better days, Senator.”
I sat across the small table, so as not to see his midsection. Elmer Dover pulled up a chair at the end. I had hoped to keep him away.
“And what can I do for you, Mr. Secretary?” Hanna said. “Breakfast?”
I glanced at the massacred egg and the corned beef hash. “No, thank you,” I said. What I wanted was information, but not the sort that was simple to collect, especially because I didn’t know what it was (often a drawback). Asking directly about the collision seemed like a stupid idea. I was interested in Northern Securities, on the slim chance the railroad monopoly wanted Theodore dead. Not slim that they wanted him dead, but that they would try to make it happen. The more I thought about it—and yes, it was a little late—the more I regretted taking Alice Roosevelt’s tidbit seriously. At the tender (ha!) age of eighteen, she was already an accomplished poseur. If she hadn’t made up this provocative fact, she had no idea what it meant.
Nor did I. Which was why I was here.
“I am interested in Northern Securities,” I said.
“We all are,” Hanna replied. “What about ’em?”
“Do you think they will succeed?”
“If your damn president…” Hanna ripped a cinnamon roll in half and shoved a hunk of it into his mouth, so I guessed he finished by saying, “Will let ’em.”
“How far do you suppose they would go in making sure of it?”
This gave him time to swallow, raisins and all. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said at last.
“Yes you do.” An outrageous accusation seemed my best play.
His melancholy brown eyes narrowed, and they slithered toward Dover, who shook his head.
“I’m sorry, I don’t,” Hanna said. “It has been a privilege to see you this morning, Mr. Secretary.”
“The pleasure is mine,” I said. “Before I leave this good company, may I ask if you happen to own stock in Northern Securities?”
Hanna stiffened, and his jowls seemed to swell. “And what business is it of yours, may I ask? Or of the president’s?”
I had no good answer for that. Only that the railroad scandals of President Grant’s day had shown the dangers of mixing politics—or politicians—with business, especially the business of railroads, and that the public had a right to know it. An argument that would cause him to scoff. He was Wall street’s man in the Senate; he recognized no boundary between business’s interests and the government’s. An alternative was to ask him to trust me—and be laughed at. Or … I figured Hanna might respond to bluntness. “The president thinks that Northern Securities might want him dead. It’s … possible they’ve already tried.”
“Of course they didn’t,” Hanna said. He stabbed at the hash with his fork. His long, slender fingers did not belong to his burly physique.
“You know that for sure?” I said. “It makes sense that they might. In their shoes, I might.”
This gave him pause, as I’d hoped. “I have no reason to think that they do,” Hanna said. He glanced over to Elmer Dover, as if to say, Do they?
Another imperceptible shake of the head.
“And what if they did?” Hanna said.
That gave me pause. “It would be…” I wanted to say criminal but feared that would end the conversation, such as it was. “Worrisome,” I said.
Elmer Dover started to say something but thought better of it, lowering his coffee cup to the table so violently I thought it might shatter. I knew better than to open my mouth. At last, Dover said, “You say they’ve already tried?”
“A possibility,” I said. “I’m not authorized to say anything more, I’m afraid.”
Hanna said, “I wish I … we could help you.”
“Maybe you could,” I replied. “Who takes care of their business in the capital, do you know?”
Hanna shrugged. Elmer Dover sat still.
I had mishandled that one.
I diverted the conversation onto a safer topic, Canada’s tariffs on iron ore, a matter close to Hanna’s heart (assuming he had one). The Ohio magnate buttered his rolls and rattled on about the greedy Canadians who deserved nothing less than annexation. “It would be good for them, and for us as well.” The issue had been simmering for decades, driven by American farmers and industrialists in search of fresh markets. I was careful not to nod to such nonsense—I was still the secretary of state—but listened with a pretense of respect. Why give him any more reason to fight Theodore for the nomination, two years hence?
Hanna’s joy in discussing dollars and cents faded and he lit a Havana, probably not his first of the day. My stomach roiled from hunger; the cigar smoke did not help.
I rose unsteadily to my feet, then tried one last time. “So please tell me, Senator, do you own stock in Northern Securities?”
Hanna glared. “I don’t need to answer that.”
“No, you don’t,” I said. “But you just did.”
Elmer Dover saw me to the door—to make sure I left, no doubt. “You look tired,” he said. I hate when people tell me that; it makes me feel tired. “When did you get back?”
“Late last night,” I said. “I’ll catch up.”
I don’t trust cheerful people. I figure they’re hiding something, probably from themselves.
The tone in Adee’s latest handwritten draft on Roumanian Jews seemed right at last—factual more than sentimental, ingratiating without being obsequious;.
The United States welcomes now, as it has welcomed from the foundation of its government, the voluntary immigration of all aliens coming hither under conditions fitting them to become merged in the body politic of this land …
It described the plight of Roumanian Jews, treated as aliens in the place they were born, forbidden to own land in the countryside or to work on farms, banned from the learned professions and from many trades, excluded from secondary schools, delivered into beggary, forced to flee the only home they had known—not only to European countries, whose governments had created Roumania, but to America. This gave Washington the standing to intrude on another nation’s affairs.
The argument was a little tenuous, I admit, but it wasn’t stupid. Would it convince the European powers that had created that mess of a country in the first place? I knew the odds were long. But first I had to convince Theodore.
Soon, however, I found I was reading the same sentences three or four times while thinking about the blob of treachery who called himself Mark Hanna. Didn’t Theodore, that damned cowboy, stand in the way of Hanna’s route to the White House? Nobody had a stronger motive to murder President Roosevelt—other than myself, of course. But I was satisfied that I was innocent.
A knock at the door brought Margaret Hanna, bearing a message. Her smile suggested she knew something I didn’t. I tried to smile the same smile back, with less success. I considered asking her if her unrelated namesake might be capable of murder, but thought better of it.
The note was a summons from John Wilkie. I left at once.
I passed the White House, unoccupied for months now. From the outside, no scaffolding was visible; all the chaos was inside. Beyond the stone foundations for a new East Wing, I entered the Treasury Building and climbed the semicircular steps to the third floor. A prim-looking man in a worn frock coat scurried across my path, hugging folders of documents he would guard with his life. The Secret Service chief waved me in. He, too, smiled as if he knew something I did not. Unlike Margaret, however, he intended to tell me.
Through the haze of pipe smoke, Wilkie’s eyes were alert, like a bird’s. His desktop shone. “How’s the derringer?” he said.
I had almost forgotten it. I patted my waistcoat pocket. “Unfired,” I replied.
“May you keep it that way.” Wilkie gestured at the scrawled map of Howard’s Hill in Pittsfield that lay open at the center of his desk. “My men worked through the night,” he said with pride.
“And?”
“They found your fingerprints, which you thoughtfully provided on your coffee cup yesterday.”
A little unnerving.
“On the outside and the inside of the map,” Wilkie went on. “And Madden’s, too. You did a nice job, incidentally, of capturing his fingerprints on the cardboard. They were clear. No question they matched.”
“On the inside, too—on the map itself? He told me he never opened it.”
“Oh, they were there, all right. Not they, exactly. One fingerprint, but a clear one, of his right index finger. In an interesting spot.” Wilkie raised his own right index finger like a man of the cloth citing the Prophets. Then it arced toward hell. “Directly over the site of the collision.”
The motorman had lied. “And nowhere else on the inside?”
“Only there. And only one set of prints on the outside—his thumb on one side and his fingers on the other. He was holding it like a book.”
“Consistent with pulling out a twenty-dollar bill and handing it back?”
Wilkie thought a moment. “I would say so.”
“And consistent with stuffing it into his seat?”
Wilkie took in a mouthful of smoke and loosed it upon the world. I realized the slowdown was the point of a pipe. “Possibly,” he said.
“Or possibly not?”
Another puff. “Or possibly not.”
Wilkie’s men had found other fingerprints, too. He presumed that one set belonged to James Hull, the company director who had sketched the map and had offered the twenty-dollar bribe (no other word fit).
“And another set,” Wilkie said, “which took us a while to match. But we did. Around six o’clock this morning, one of my smartest men had a hunch and tested the letter you gave us that authorized us to take possession.”
“You mean my fingerprints.”
“No. Someone else’s.”
I was puzzled for a moment about what he meant. Then I remembered.
“Chief Nicholson!” I said. “Inside the map?”
“Inside and out.”
Odd.
The White House was in a haze. Pennsylvania avenue and its traffic and its pedestrians had faded from view. I kept walking to my office as I contemplated the oddity: Chief Nicholson had never handled the map, not while it was in my keeping. I had made sure of that, in order to leave the motorman’s fingerprints unsmudged. But when else might he have touched it? The explanation must be simple—I just wasn’t seeing it. Had I forgotten?
I probably insulted a civil servant or two by brushing past as I scuttled up the marble stairs to my office.
The telephone operator connected me to Pittsfield immediately. Chief Nicholson was at his desk. My lucky day.
“What?” the police chief shouted. I was grateful for the scratchy line; it gave me a chance to rephrase my question.
“The fingerprints—your fingerprints,” I shouted back. I held the tubular receiver aloft, cradling it like a pipeline to God. “Why are they on that map?”
“They are?” he said.
“Yes.”
Silence but for the crackle of invention. I waited. I doubted he was calculating how much this telephone call was costing … me. Then he growled, “I know they are.”
Why was I not surprised? Of course he knew. “Oh?” I said.
“Because I put it there—put it back there.”
“What do you mean, ‘put it back there’?”
“I found the map under the seat and examined it and put it back there.” A pause. “For you to find.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“I couldn’t have. Why would you want to do that?”
“Not to disturb a crime scene. So you could see it as it was.”
“But you disturbed it.”
“I had every right to. May I remind you that I am the police chief here. And besides, I restored the crime scene. What difference does it make?”
Must I explain the sanctity of evidence to a police chief? And did I believe his far-fetched story? I trusted the man, but what did I really know about him? Only what he wanted me to know. He had seemed candid enough, strikingly so, willing to tell a stranger (me) about the flaws of a political machine to which he was beholden. Maybe he was merely a truth teller, guileless—a guileless police chief?—and therefore unlikely to succeed. Or maybe he was too clever by half, and therefore unlikely to succeed. I’d thought I understood him, at least a little, but maybe it was just that I liked him. A risky confusion for a diplomat. For a detective, too.
I was barely listening as Chief Nicholson reported on his interview with the motorman’s previous employer, Taconic Mills, which had fired him for distributing leaflets extolling the dignity of labor. Was that illegal? Suspicious, perhaps. Also understandable (though please don’t tell anyone I uttered such a heresy; I’m a good Republican, among the best). He had also quizzed the two New York cops overheard in the Hotel Wendell lobby. They had been “just gabbing.”
My attention revived as Chief Nicholson described what he had learned at Madden’s bank. The three thousand–odd dollars looked legitimate, a windfall from the estate of a recently deceased, childless uncle in Pennsylvania, produced by selling anthracite coal stocks, divvied up five ways. Anthracite! Surely a coincidence. In any event, was that a motive to murder a president?
“You’ve never searched Madden’s house?” I said.
“We tried, but Mr. Turtle blocked it in court. By way of the regular judge.”
The streetcar company’s president, that is. “So what do you think?” I said.
“About what?”
“About Mr. Madden’s … role in this.” Why not just say it? “About his guilt.”
Chief Nicholson’s sigh overtook the static. “I wish I knew the answer to that. But I will tell you what I testified at the inquest this morning. From everything I’ve been told and my men have learned, I think … I do think … the trolley could have stopped.”
“But was it on purpose, do you think?”
A longish pause. “I cannot see inside a man’s mind,” Chief Nicholson said.
That was my job, I guess. “Then they will plead guilty, I take it—Mr. Madden and Mr. Kelly.”
“That is my current understanding. The court date has been put off for another two weeks, at the defendants’ request. You may get a chance to make inquiries before I do.”
“How’s that?”
“Their esteemed lawyer is on his way to your fair city, even as we speak. Scheduled to arrive to-night, a little past eleven.”
I imagined the great and grand Mr. Turtle waddling into Washington. “For what purpose, would you happen to know?”
“No, Mr. Secretary,” Chief Nicholson said. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“Just what this blessed nation needs, old boy!” Henry Adams exclaimed. “A few million more Israel Cohens!”
“Henry!” How much of what Henry said he actually meant and how much was for show or for shock I could never decide for sure. (I am not sure he could, either.) I had mentioned, mainly for the sake of conversation—and yes, to draw a reaction—the missive to European capitals on the Roumanian Jews. “Anyway, more would be staying in Europe than coming here.”
“Have you been to the Lower East Side?” Henry said.
“Yes. Have you?”
“I’ve seen pictures.”
I reminded him of my foray into the squalid Jewish ghetto in Vienna as a chargé d’affaires decades ago, and the empathy I’d felt ever since. It only deepened his scorn.
“Henry, do you have any feeling for anyone besides yourself?”
“Of course I do. For you, dear heart.”
“Allow me to decline the honor,” I said.
“As everyone does, my nieces excepted.”
This conversation was making me sad. This afternoon’s stroll had taken us south along Seventeenth street to the Potomac banks, into the past. I could pretend that B street was still a canal and an open sewer, as when I’d first arrived, forty-one short years ago. The Washington Monument was then a third of its present height and its grounds a swamp, not terra firma. The river was still untamed—the whitecapped moat that had kept the Confederacy (mostly) at bay. I was pretty sure I smelled sewage, although it might have been my memory playing tricks. The ground was spongy; the marshy shoreline sucked at my boots. Henry refused to risk his shoeshine, so we turned back.
“Find anything?” I said, as casually as I could, reluctant to ask a scholar for his conclusions after a single day of perusing a railroad trust’s effluence of paper.
“No end of forthwiths and pursuants and parties of the first parts. Legal gibberish. It is a crime that people are paid to write such things.”
“Probably more than you earn. Or me.”
“I appreciate your pointing that out.”
The walk home took us past the ironworks, the Tea Cup Inn, and an ice-cream shop, then the Corcoran art gallery and the War Department offices. At the corner of Seventeenth and G, a bareheaded black woman watched as we ambled past. I tipped my top hat and said, “Good afternoon, ma’am.”
She nodded gravely, willing to treat me as an equal.
Henry was babbling on about the need for all right-thinking men to protect the canon of Western culture. Naturally, I agreed—how could I not?—but my heart wasn’t in it. What use was Homer or Kipling at a time like this? I worried instead about the … I went blank. Alice’s wedding, I guess. What could matter more?
The New Willard, in truth, was nothing like the old. The former, plain-named Willard, where president-elect Lincoln had stayed, was an attractive but unornamented building, five stories high, rounded at the corner of Fourteenth street and Pennsylvania avenue. Its recent replacement was an explosion of Beaux Arts style, with a pillared entrance and twelve stories of eye-catching gray, capped by a mansard roof of lavish cornices and a cupola. All was meant to dazzle, and it did.
The lobby was a feast of mottled marble pillars and sensuous chandeliers. I zigzagged past the clusters of guests and early drinkers. The farthest of the three elevators was waiting, operated by a coffee-colored man with a shock of white hair and a dignified bearing. He was willing to deliver me to the fifth floor.
My watch said five thirty-five. I knocked on Lizzie’s door with trepidation. I had been drawn here, almost unthinkingly, but I couldn’t say why (not that I had asked). I heard footsteps and an unlatching—but nothing like Who is it? Did she think she knew already? Did she assume it was somebody else?
The door swished open, and there she stood, radiant. It would probably be physiologically inaccurate to say that my heart skipped a beat, but metaphorically it counts as true. She had what Clara lacked—a sinuous body, a coy manner, an easy and seductive laugh. And a cruel streak, like Kate Chase’s, back when I was young and she was the Treasury secretary’s daughter and the capital’s belle. (She had married for money but died a pauper three years ago.) Lizzie Cameron was trouble—this, I knew. But somehow this was part of her allure. Why, I’m not sure I could tell you, even assuming I wanted to know.
She was taller than Clara, and dressed more stylishly, even in the boudoir, in a green satin robe with navy blue trim and a fetching paisley scarf. As usual, she scared the hell out of me but, also as usual, I rose to the occasion.
“Lizzie,” I said, with barely a tremble. “May I come in?”
An instant’s hesitation. “Of course, Johnny,” she said, and stood aside.
“Your husband, is he here?”
“You know he isn’t.”
“I suspected it, I must confess.” I placed my silk hat on the Queen Anne armchair. “And I came despite that.”
“You must be very brave,” Lizzie replied, with a mirthless laugh.
“Determined, anyway.”
I draped my overcoat across the top of the chair.
“Please have a seat, Johnny,” she said. “I wish I had something to offer.” My chuckle brought an amendment. “Besides bourbon, I mean. A bottle that Don left behind—inadvertently.”
Nothing I could say would advance my cause.
What was my cause, exactly? I wished to hell I knew. I stepped toward her, and she stepped back.
“Would you join me,” I said. “In a drink, I mean?” I meant no more than that. I swore that was so, with an air of desperation that I didn’t trust.
What was her pull on me? No puzzle, really. It was that I wanted her, pure and simple. I knew I shouldn’t, but I did. That was a fact. An inconvenient one, to be sure, one I ought to resist, and I did—and I would. But facts, by their nature, are hard to deny. Isn’t it best to confront them? Denied, they have an ugly habit of sticking around.
“I suppose I would,” she said.
“Allow me.”
My drink was deeper—I figured I needed it more—but hers went down in a gulp. “Another?” I said.
“Oh no, this will work.”
She had seated herself on the beige divan, on the far end from my chair. “You seem to have something in mind,” she said.
It wasn’t my mind on my mind. I sighed. I was, uncharacteristically, tongue-tied. “You are a difficult woman to please,” I said at last.
“Not always.”
“Thank you. I feel even worse.”
She laughed. This time she meant it.
I was heading home before eight o’clock, none the worse for wear. Why had I had gone to see Lizzie at all? I knew why: If I hoped to master my own emotions, I needed to feel them first, and then walk away. I had to see her to know if I could resist her. And I could. I did. Granted, with her help, saving me from myself. In any event, I counted the visit as a success.
The sky was clear and moonlit. The gravel in Lafayette Square scrunched under my feet. The park was crossed with shadows and the archway over my front door resembled a cavern roof. The entrance was unlocked. Nobody came to greet me, which was just as well.
On the silver tray in the foyer, an official-looking envelope had my name on it, written in a familiar hand. I considered ignoring it, but only for a moment. I slit open the envelope with my thumb and unfolded the paper, then placed it under the flickering bulb. Embossed across the top: SECRET SERVICE.
Then a scribble:
Hay,
Reptile staying at the Willard.
Wilkie
First thing to-morrow.