March 4, 1888
“You weren’t out of work long, were you, Ned?”
It was my Irish friend from the past, hat pulled down over his face, waiting for me as I came out of Laddy’s into the snowbanks on North Avenue.
“I thought you had disappeared forever.”
“Ah, no, just for the time. ‘Twas a shame those poor men had to swing. You and your da gave it a good effort.”
“You could have stopped it,” I snapped.
“No, Ned. We couldn’t have stopped it. Not at all, at all.”
We plowed on through the snow in silence.
“Still, we have something that might help you.”
“Oh?” I said still angry at the damnable Irish love of indirection and mystery, perhaps the only quality in my wife that I find it hard to tolerate.
“ ’Tis about your good friend Michael Schaack.”
“Is it now?”
“ ’Tis… There’s a certain house over on Grand Avenue, not all that far from the police station, where he keeps his treasures.”
“Treasures?”
“All the things he’s stolen from prisoners, the payoffs from the saloonkeepers and the whores, list of names of people he blackmails, some letters from Marshall Field and Joe Medil, grand stuff. He also has been known to entertain women there.”
“Indeed… What’s the exact address?”
That was too blunt for an Irish person.
“ ’Tis on the three hundred block on West Grand, not far from the jail either.”
“Is it?” I said.
“ ’Tis… Just beyond Orleans.”
“Near the river?”
“On the right-hand side of the street. You can’t miss it. An old cottage, ready to collapse.”
“I’ll try not to miss it.”
“There’s a funny thing.”
“Ah?”
“Doesn’t your man have one just like it?”
“Captain Bonfield?”
“The very same, Black Jack himself, not mind you that either knows about the other one.”
“They wouldn’t tell each other, would they now?”
“They would not.”
“Same general area?”
“Not exactly.”
We turned off on Dearborn and sloshed down the street.
“You wouldn’t be far away from the truth if you looked over by the Desplaines Street Police Station.”
“Ah?”
“Round the corner from where the bomb went off.”
“Washington Street?”
“The very place.”
“Just west of Desplaines?”
“You have the right of it, Ned.”
“Another cottage?”
“No, a snug little house with a wrought-iron fence. Nice place to invite women, if you take me meaning.”
“Perhaps my friends and I might have a look at them.”
“That might not be all that bad an idea, Ned. I’ll take me leave of you now. We’ll not be seeing each other again, not in this world anyway.”
I was so excited by the news that I slipped and fell down the steps leading to my front door and landed in a big snowdrift.
“Ned, whatever did you do to yourself?”
Nora had been waiting for me in a thick quilted robe in front of a blazing fire. A decanter of whiskey and two glasses waited on a table next to the couch.
“Fell in a snowdrift,” I said embracing her.
“Ned,” she protested without much sincerity, “you’re getting snow all over my robe!”
“The way to prevent that is to take off your robe.”
“Ned!”
I kicked off my boots, hung up my coat, and snuggled with her on the couch. She poured me a glass of Irish whiskey.
“ ’Tis only your second tonight, Mr. Fitzpatrick? If it were your third, I wouldn’t be safe with you.”
“You’re not safe with me now, woman!”
I opened the top button on her vest.
“Well,” she replied with a little gasp, “a man has to keep warm on a cold March evening.”
She bundled me inside her vast robe. It was indeed warm there. I opened a second button.
“You found out news about Bonfield and Schaack?”
Long ago I had given up trying to know how she reads me so well, especially since she’s not fey like Josie.
I told her about my mysterious friend.
“What do you want to do to those men, Ned? Send them to jail?”
I hadn’t thought much about that issue. All I cared about was trapping them.
“It will be enough to get them off the police force, take away their power, so they can never abuse innocent people again.”
Then our conversation ended.
The next morning (today) I brought the news down to the Chicago Times building at Wells and Washington, built after the fire specifically to be a headquarters for a newspaper. We shared the building with the Freie Presse, a German-language paper which huddled under our protection when the police were shutting down everything German in Chicago.
West and Dunlop, my bosses, were delighted.
“Those could be gold mines!”
“What do we do?”
“We find a judge who will issue us secret search warrants,” I said, “and then demand that Pemberton live up to his promise to assign officers of unquestioned integrity to conduct the searches in our presence. We have to be sure that we are acting legally.”
In early afternoon five of us were slogging down Grand Avenue towards the frozen river—the three of us from the Times and two stalwart plainclothes detectives. The sun had emerged from a long period of hiding and quickly turned our snowdrifts into rushing tides of water, seeking the Lake, the River, anyplace to run.
The cottage which was alleged to be the site of Schaack’s illegal treasure trove was so decrepit that one could easily imagine it swept into the river by the rushing thaw. The police officers pried open the door. A dank, sickeningly sweet smell assailed us as we entered, the smell of sexual orgy and of spilled wine.
“This will do for Mike,” one of the cops said in a rich Kerry brogue, “the focking bastard!”
It would indeed. The three rooms of the house were littered with jewelry, bottles of wine and whiskey, women’s clothes appropriate for a bordello, obscene posters, and huge packs of money—at a glance as much as a hundred thousand dollars in cash.
Some of the wine bottles had frozen and broken open. Schaack probably wasn’t worried. There was plenty more where that came from.
The five of us stared in amazement at the vile corruption which surrounded us like the stench from the Union Stockyard.
“Well, lads, let’s get to work,” Jim West said. “We’ll list all the material here and then get an order to seal the place. Joe, would you start afire? We don’t want to burn this place down, but there’s no point in freezing to death.”
I worked my way through a mountain of jewelry that was piled up on the floor just inside the door, bracelets, necklaces, rings of every kind—diamond, emerald, ruby, sapphire, wedding bands. No piece of jewelry, however small or inexpensive, was beneath Michael Schaack’s avarice.
WE AT THE Times HAD been hounding them for several weeks.
“Bonfield proclaims to the world that the gamblers are gone and the dens of vice are closed but the Times knows of scores of places open to the public.”
“Bonfield still would shrug his shoulders and say, ‘There is no gambling in Chicago’ and march off to look for some respectable German citizen whom he might arrest and call an Anarchist.”
POLICE ENGAGED TO BUILD, REPAIR, AND DECORATE HOMES OF BONFIELD AND SCHAACK
MARSHALL FIELD DENIES FINANCIAL SUPPORT FOR SCHAACK’S ANTI-ANARCHIST CAMPAIGN.
Now we had more sensational evidence. They were finished.
Joe Dunlop found a boy wandering down the street and sent him over to the Times building. He came back with four more reporters and a couple of artists. We’d have great pictures of Schaack’s prizes.
Then I found the prize that I had expected to find. I closed my eyes and waited till the churning in my stomach stopped.
I took out my notebook and began to write.
GHOUL SCHAACK STOLE LINGG’S CUFF LINKS
Police Captain Michael Schaack removed the gold cuff links that alleged Anarchist murderer Louis Lingg was wearing when he committed suicide in the County Jail the day before he was to be executed. The cuff links had been given to Lingg by his immigrant girlfriend, Elise Freidel, for him to wear when he made his speech before sentencing and when he was executed. Miss Freidel, who had spent all her meager savings to purchase the cuff links, had caused to be engraved on them the initials E.F. and L.L. inside a heart. She told people that they would be buried with Mr. Lingg as a token of their love, which death could not destroy.
These very cuff links, with the inscription, were found today by investigators from the Police Department and the Times in a bawdy house treasure trove that Captain Schaack maintains at Grand Avenue and the River.
We will never know in this world whether Louis Lingg, a defiant warrior, committed suicide or was murdered in the County Jail. We do know, however, that after his death, Captain Schaack did steal the only treasure Lingg had in the world.
“JIM” I CALLED WEST OVER to the jewel mountain. “My first story on this.”
He glanced at it.
“Great God in heaven, Ned!”
“Precisely.”
“Those are the cuff links?”
“Look at the inscription.”
“Tony,” he cried to one of our artists, “a quick drawing of these cuff links!”
As I stared at the two pathetic little pieces of gold, my eyes filled up with tears.
“Lou,” I prayed silently, “I’m sure that you’re in heaven, much to your own surprise. I hope you know that we have found Elise’s gift.”
“Take your story over to the paper,” West ordered, “and Tony’s drawing. Tell them to get out an Extra. Then put a team together and go after Bonfield’s place. We have to document all of this before they find out what we’re doing.”
It took most of the afternoon to assemble a team of reporters, artists, and cops to raid Captain Bonfield’s hideaway. I managed to scribble a note to my father and send it by messenger.
Chief Pemberton himself managed to accompany us.
Captain Bonfield was a much more orderly man than his colleague. The little house on Washington Street was clean and neat. Someone had stacked wood and kindling by the fireplace. The walls were lined with bureaus, cabinets, chests, and closets—all filled with money and jewelry. In the file cabinets we found letters from the plutocrats of the city in which they praised Bonfield for maintaining order in the city and enclosed large sums of money to help him in his work.
We also discovered, discreetly tucked away in closets, women’s clothes appropriate for an aristocratic bawdy house, obscene photographs and paintings, and vicious-looking instruments of torture.
I jotted down my headline.
BONFIELD TREASURE HOUSE NEATER THAN SCHAACK’S BUT TORTURE INSTRUMENTS FOUND
“He’s finished,” Pemberton muttered. “We might not be able to put him in jail, but he’ll never serve as a police officer again.”
“It’s about time,” I replied.
Then I came upon the biggest treasure of them all—a file about threats on Bonfield’s life. From the Fenians.
The threats were on a crude letterhead which purported to belong to the “Army of the People of Ireland,” one of the fifty or so Irish nationalist groups in the city.
My fingers trembled as I went through the file. The letters informed Captain Bonfield that he had been indicted by a court of the People of Ireland for the murder of three soldiers of the Army in Chicago. A later one informed him that he had been convicted. And a yet later one told him that he had been sentenced to death, a sentence which would be carried out at a time and place chosen by the Army High Command.
I continued to examine the file. One scrap of paper noted the payment of two hundred dollars to Bonfield to permit the killing of a certain Jack Mulhern, a traitor to the cause of Ireland, by officers of the Army of the People of Ireland.
I vaguely remember a shoot-out between the police and Irish nationalists just after I had returned with Nora. The police had tried to apprehend these men after they had killed another Irish nationalist. The men had resisted arrest and had died in the gunfight.
Why had Bonfield taken money to permit the killing and then shot it out with the killers? Or had something gone wrong? Had police not in Black Jack’s pay made a mistake? And why would Bonfield compulsively keep such neat records?
Then I came upon a yellowed photograph of a group of seven very dangerous-looking Irishmen in black coats and hats and with black mustaches and beards. The face of one of them was circled with a thick pencil mark.
It was the man who had lurked at the edges of the crowd during Myles Joyce’s execution, the man who had thrown the bomb from Crane’s alley.
He had been aiming at Captain Ward, who he must have thought was Captain Bonfield. Instead he hit poor Degen.
Attached to the photograph was a letter from an officer in the Royal Irish Constabulary.
Dear Captain Bonfield,
The so-called Army of the People of Ireland are nothing more than a raggedy group of incompetent ruffians, more interested in theft and murder of rivals than Irish independence from the Crown. They can, however, be dangerous in some circumstances.
According to your request we have made inquiries from our agents. They report that the man in the picture, known as Captain Mayo, has been assigned to kill you. We recommend that you take serious precautions. However, we suspect that this Captain Mayo will never make it to America, much less to Chicago.
I remain yours sincerely etc,
Thomas Cowan
Inspector.
So here was the explanation of the Haymarket bomb. It was a clumsy attempt at revenge against Black Jack Bonfield.
Why a bomb?
Perhaps to divert attention to someone else. If Bonfield had died someone might have found this file and tried to hunt down Captain Mayo.
Incompetent ruffians indeed!
I thought quickly. This file would have no impact now. It would get lost in the scandal that our stories would create. Better that it be kept for a later occasion, when it could be used to obtain pardons for the remaining Haymarket prisoners—Nebbe, Fielden, and Schwab.
I folded it into my overcoat pocket.
It was after ten when I returned to my home.
Nora was waiting for me in the parlor, as always. Tonight she was waiting for me fully dressed, which was the usual manner.
“Ned,” she said as she kissed me, “you look destroyed.”
“Sorry to be so late,” I murmured as I collapsed in the chair by the fireplace.
“You said you might be.”
“Everything all right?”
“The childeen is suffering from a new tooth, the girls are sound asleep. Annie wanted to spend the evening with her beau but was afraid to ask me. So I told her to go ahead, of course. Josie is writing a letter to her Timmy… We read your extra when it came down the street…”
“What did you think?”
“I cried, as I’m sure you did… Would you like a tiny drop of Irish whiskey?”
“Would you ever have a cup of tea?”
“Of course!”
As we were drinking the tea, I showed her the picture in the file I had taken from Bonfield’s house.
“Do you know that man, Nora?”
She pondered the picture carefully.
“I do, Ned. It’s that terrible man Sean-Tom Og Joyce. He was my Myles’s third cousin four times removed.”
“Was he a farmer?”
“Weren’t we all, Ned? His father, Sean-Tom Mor had a little place way up in the hills. The son was kind of a layabout, didn’t do much except talk. They said he was one of the ribbon men who killed an agent on the other side of the mountain. He tried to give the impression that he was high up in the Fenians, but no one really believed him.”
“I remember him in Galway when Myles was in prison there. He hung about at the edge of the crowd. He was such a big man, I couldn’t miss him.”
“That would be him all right, pretending he was taking care of things for the Fenians. He’s dead now.”
“Dead!”
“The last letter Josie had from Mary, her sister, said that he was found in a ditch by the road up the mountain with a bullet through his head.”
Did that, I wondered, have anything to do with the botched attack on Captain Bonfield?
“He threw the Haymarket bomb, Nora.”
“Merciful God,” she made the sign of the cross. “He didn’t!”
“I’m sure of it… Read this file.”
Very carefully she went through the file.
“You recognized him that night from the size of him?”
“From the way he carried himself, the shape of his shoulders, the air of recklessness… I don’t know what it was. It took me a long time to remember where I’d seen him before.”
“And then it was too late…”
“It was always too late, Nora. Who would have believed my story, especially when they had all the killers.”
“Now they’re dead and so is he.” She sighed. “How terrible!”
I buried my head in my hands.
“I keep asking myself if there wasn’t something else I could have done.”
“There was not, Ned,” she said firmly in her rarely used tone of voice which was designed to settle questions. Which it always did.
“I guess not.”
“What are you going to do with this file?”
“Save it till the day that a governor is thinking about a pardon so that he’ll know the truth.”
She nodded approvingly.
“That day will surely come, Ned,” she said.
I gave her Lou Lingg’s cuff links. When the weather improved we would ride out to Waldheim and bury them in the earth next to his tomb.
As I scratch these notes at the end of a hectic day, my eyes heavy and my heart aching, I hope she’s right.
I wonder what Schaack and Bonfield will do tomorrow to fight back.