The Anarchist (18 page)

“No. Only her ideas illuminated me. I have told you I am guilty for my acts. And that they were inspired by her ideas, I will not deny.” Czolgosz leaned toward the district attorney. “But, tell me, can you find someone guilty for their ideas?” He sat back in his chair. “You can’t, can you? Our ideas, Mr. Penney, are stronger than your laws.”

Penney ran his thumb back and forth along the edge of the table as he seemed to be trying to develop an argument, but finally, he murmured, “Yes, well. That’s enough for now.”

Czolgosz was taken back to his cell, though this time his handcuffs were removed and he was locked up without being touched. Lying on his cot, he could hear nothing. No voices, no screams and shouts. No mob. Outside the Buffalo police headquarters there had been fierce fighting. Occasionally, he had been allowed to watch from the window as the crowd in the street swelled toward the front of the building, where it was met by police. This had been happening for years in America, masses of people surging toward a line of uniformed men, who beat them back with clubs and rifles. People wanted jobs, they wanted food, they wanted better working conditions. Now they wanted Leon Czolgosz.

“YOU must be exhausted, Presley,” McKinley said. He was awake, lying on his back in bed, staring at the ceiling. His stomach was an enormous mound beneath the linen sheet. “You’ve been sitting there the whole night.”

Rixey got up from the chair by the window. “I must have dozed off, Mr. President.”

“Indeed.” Slowly McKinley turned on his side, which in itself was a good sign. He faced the large electric fan that had been installed in the corner of the room. “The breeze is wonderful. You know how Mrs. McKinley and I detest the heat. I trust she is keeping cool as well?”

“Yes, sir. They have installed fans in most of the rooms. The first lady is resting comfortably, and she’ll visit you later.” Rixey took the mercury thermometer from the nightstand and shook it out. “Let’s see how we’re doing this morning.”

“I feel very good.”

“Pain?”

“No. Stiffness, yes. But not pain, really.”

“You slept through the night, it seemed.”

“I dreamed of food.” The president tilted his head back and opened his mouth.

Rixey inserted the thermometer, making sure it was under the tongue. “I realize you’re hungry, but I think we’ll have to wait to give you anything. The other doctors and I have consulted on that and we think it’s best to continue to give you nourishment by injection for the time being.”

The president mumbled something around the glass thermometer.

“Doctors?” Rixey said. “How many? Too many, perhaps. But they all agree that you are making great progress.”

McKinley nodded. His eyes looked very alert.

They waited a minute in silence, and then Rixey removed the thermometer and read it. “Only slightly above normal,” he said. “Good.”

“Then I might have something to eat?”

“Not yet.”

“Perhaps a cigar?”

“Definitely not! Now I’ll bring my colleagues in and we’ll take your other vitals.”

“That should sufficiently exhaust me.”

“Perhaps we might give you a little broth later today.”

“God bless you!”

Rixey went to the door and told the nurse waiting in the hall that the president was awake. He remained by the door, and watched as the group of doctors gathered about the bed.

Cortelyou came into the room and whispered, “He’s looking like he’s ready to get up and walk.”

“He rested well through the night and does seem stronger,” Rixey said quietly. “But I don’t quite have the confidence of some of my colleagues.”

“Want to hear a terrible irony?” Cortelyou asked. “Do you know what was in another room at the exposition hospital during the operation? One of these new X-ray machines. It had been brought to be displayed as part of the exposition—and nobody even
knew
it was there! That might have enabled them to locate the other bullet lodged in his back?”

“It might have,” Rixey said.

“Well, it gets worse. This morning an X-ray machine was delivered here at the house—sent by Thomas Edison himself. But some of the doctors looked it over and determined that it was missing a part and wouldn’t work.” Cortelyou raised a hand to smooth back his shiny dark hair. “At least there’s good news from New York.”

“J. P. Morgan?”

“Yes. Even though the stock market doesn’t open for a few
more hours, he has sent word that there are no signs that Wall Street will panic.”

FOR hours Hyde sat watching the street from the window of his room on the second floor. He knew what he should do: go down to the canal and crew on any barge bound for Albany. Run, get out of Buffalo—it had been the answer since he was twelve, when the protectory wanted to put him on an orphan train. They called it “placing out.” He had read letters sent back from other boys who had been put on trains and sent west. In small-town depots the boys would be lined up on the platform and local families could pick one. It was like an auction, and in most cases the boys lived on a farm, where they were worked like animals. Several of the boys wrote that they’d tried to escape, but because the land was so flat and empty, they were easily caught and returned to their owners. They were prisoners, they were slaves, and Hyde wanted nothing to do with being placed out. Every time there was talk of an orphan train, he’d run away.

And he always ran to the Erie Canal. It went east and he felt safer on water. Marcus Trumbull said you could better see what was coming at you across water. Trumbull’s barge was called the
Northern Light
, and he was himself an orphan, eventually taken in by a farming family with land on Cripple Creek, north of Otsego Lake. Hyde’s first job was as a hoggee—he walked the mules along the towpath, for which he received a few pennies a day, food, and a berth on board at night. By the time he was fifteen, he’d walked to Albany and back several times.

Hyde eventually became a first-rate pilot and lived on board the
Northern Light
for several years, until Trumbull got into an arm-wrestling match in Utica. One night at Dominique Picard’s whorehouse it took Trumbull more than six hours to beat Red-Eye
Sam, the strongest arm on the Erie Canal. A lot of bargemen lost money over the match, and in the early-morning hours several friends of Red-Eye who took exception to their losses came aboard the
Northern Light
. Trumbull and Hyde put up a good fight but were outnumbered. In the end the boy was held down and made to watch while Trumbull’s right arm was hacked off with a meat cleaver. It took him two days to bleed to death in Picard’s bed. For good measure the
Northern Light
was burned to the waterline.

Trumbull used to say that a man who had no home, no family, was free to go wherever he wanted. At night they would often attend workers’ meetings held in factory towns along the canal. Speakers got the audience riled up over higher wages and better hours, and then the police would usually show up and bust heads. Trumbull liked to say he believed the socialists with one ear. You don’t keep your barge moving, you end up in one of them factories, where you can’t see the sun rise and set on the water. So Hyde considered the canal home, but this time he couldn’t run to it so easily, not while Motka was still working in Big Maud’s house. He was unaccustomed to thinking about a woman the way he thought about Motka. It made him nervous, and he tried not to think of her being a whore. He supposed it was love.

In the evening he watched as a boy came down the street and climbed the porch. He knew that the boy had been sent by Norris, who wanted a meeting at the Three Brothers Café Sunday morning. Hyde also knew he had no choice. The president of the United States had been shot and there was no running from this now.

He found Norris sitting in a back booth, eating steak and eggs. Norris hardly acknowledged him when he sat down, and worked on his plate in a serious, thorough fashion. The fried eggs—at least half a dozen of them—had been broken, their yolks smeared over the blackened top of an enormous T-bone, which was blood-raw in the middle. There was a side dish of baked beans, laced with sweet-smelling molasses.

Hyde ordered coffee.

There was a stack of newspapers next to Norris’s elbow. “Nobody found Czolgosz,” Norris said, tapping the papers with the point of his steak knife, leaving a red-yellow dollop to soak into the page. “Nobody found Fred Nieman. He was
your
man and you didn’t find him in time. It’s in all the papers, you know.”

“I was there, right outside that building.”

“Yes, well, apparently he was inside the Temple of Music and he managed to walk right past half the U.S. Army with a gun in his hand.”

“And Pinkertons. The papers say there were plenty of them, too.”

“True,” Norris said. “But you were the only one who knew what he looked like.”

“The crowd was huge,” Hyde said. “It wasn’t my fault.”

Norris cut into his steak and forked a large piece into his mouth. “What wasn’t your fault, Hyde?”

“The whole thing. Czolgosz acted alone. He’s the most solitary man I’ve ever seen and he never stopped moving. No one—
no one
—was going to stop him. He is what he says he is, Fred Nobody.”

“Well, he’s somebody now, the papers are making sure of that,” Norris said, chewing deliberately. “And
you
are nobody, mister. I’ll tell you something else: I don’t believe he acted alone. No. Maybe, just maybe, you’re in on it, too? You and that little Russian whore?” He watched Hyde’s face, and smiled. “Ah, so you’re sweet on her. I can understand why.” Norris looked down and cut his steak. “It all fits, Hyde. You spent a lot of time with Czolgosz. I think he convinced you to help him. He recruited you. Just like I recruited you—or thought I did. You’ve never been certain about all this—you lack … conviction. I can see it in your eyes. You believe in his ‘duty’—that’s what the papers are saying he calls it. Maybe he convinced you to set me up so I would
think
I had him covered. Maybe you just didn’t try as hard as you could to find him.”

“That’s not true, none of it.”

“Who knows what the truth is? Do you?”

“You believe we’re all the same. Ignorant criminals.”

“I think it’s a crime you people were ever allowed in this country.” Norris took a flask from inside his coat and topped up his coffee. He put the flask away and leaned over his plate. “Now let me eat in peace.”

“You owe me money.”

Norris wiped up egg yolk with a piece of bread. “You and Czolgosz and I have one thing in common: Russian cunt.” He paused, and ran his tongue out to collect a bit of crust from the corner of his mouth. “I know that both you and Czolgosz were with the little bitch shortly before he shot the president.”

“I went there to try and stop Leon. I told you that. Czolgosz is not afraid for his own life—that’s why he was dangerous. I said that to those men in that house on Delaware Avenue.”

Norris put his fork down, got his wallet out of his coat pocket, and placed a five-dollar bill next to Hyde’s coffee cup. He took up the knife and resumed cutting his meat. “Pick it up and we’re square.”

Hyde hesitated, and then as he reached for the bill Norris swiftly drew the blade of the steak knife across his wrist. Hyde stared down at his hand as though he’d never seen one before. For a moment there was the neatest straight line in the flesh, and then blood flowed out.

“Now we’re square,” Norris said.

Hyde got to his feet, holding his hand against his coat, and left the restaurant.