The Anarchist (28 page)

GIMMEL said they were to use handkerchiefs—he liked the idea because Czolgosz had used one to conceal his revolver. Hyde was to position himself the farthest down Trenton Avenue toward the women’s penitentiary. He chose a street corner in front of a bakery. At least the rain had let up.

There weren’t many people in the street—it was as though Buffalo had been evacuated. Hyde kept looking to his right, in the direction of the penitentiary, which was about half a mile away. In the distance he could see a small cart working toward him slowly, pulled by a ragman with a gray beard.

When Hyde looked in the other direction, he could see Anton on the next block. The plan was that when Hyde saw which carriage Czolgosz was in he would take a handkerchief out of his coat and hold it to his face. Anton would wait until the carriage reached him and do the same thing, signaling farther on down Trenton, to where Josef, Bruener, and Gimmel were waiting.

The ragman turned off on a side street before he reached Hyde. What Gimmel had not discussed was how long they should wait—there was the possibility that the police wouldn’t use Trenton Avenue. Hyde studied the houses and buildings along the avenue, the upper windows, the roofs, expecting to see some sign of security, men positioned along the prisoner’s route. But
there was nothing, not even open windows, which had all been closed against the rain.

Then, several blocks ahead, he saw a carriage come around the bend in the avenue, pulled by two horses. It wasn’t moving fast. The carriage was so far away that the horses’ hooves struck the ground a moment before the sound reached him. And then beyond it, a second carriage came into sight. They were identical—two black carriages, each drawn by a pair of bays.

Hyde looked the other way—Anton had seen the carriages, too—and then he turned toward the carriages again. They kept coming, slowly. The horses sauntered, their heads bobbing rhythmically, and the clop of their hooves reverberated down the avenue. The drivers, men in long coats and broad-brimmed hats, did not push their teams. There was such a lack of urgency that Hyde wondered if these carriages were nothing more than people out for a Sunday ride.

As the first carriage drew near, he tried not to seem interested. He dropped down on one knee and tied the lace of his right boot. When the carriage was in front of him, he stood up and looked inside—there were three men, two sitting with their backs to the horses and the other sitting to the near side, his arm out the window, holding a cigarette. It was just a moment that the carriage was directly in front of Hyde, but he was certain that none of them was Czolgosz—they all had dark hair, one had a mustache, and they were all quite large men. The one smoking the cigarette, Hyde realized, was Captain Savin.

Hyde looked down the street toward Anton, but he did nothing. After a moment, he turned and watched the second carriage approach. The driver was older than the first, his cheeks hollow, suggesting he was missing teeth. Inside this carriage there were two men; the one with his back to the horses was blond, but Hyde didn’t think it was Czolgosz—and he seemed to sit too erect somehow. But the other man, sitting across from the first, was Norris. Though he looked straight ahead, there was
no doubt: it was Norris. His bowler was pulled down tight on his head, and in profile there was considerable flesh beneath his jaw.

For a moment, Hyde felt confused. His first reaction was to call out to Norris, to warn him, but then he realized that the worst thing was for Norris to see him, so he quickly turned his back to the road and gazed into the bakery window. Though it was Sunday, he could see men and women inside, dressed in white uniforms and hats, working around large ovens. As the second carriage continued down the avenue, he watched its reflection in the glass. He was tempted to simply walk quickly in the other direction, to get as far away as he could, and at that moment he realized he still had a choice. After this moment, though, he understood that there would be no escape, not if he wanted to stay in Buffalo.

Down the avenue, Anton was staring at him. Hyde reached inside his coat and took out the handkerchief—as they had walked down Trenton, Gimmel distributed them, new handkerchiefs—and he raised it to his face until Anton turned toward the avenue. The first carriage reached him but he didn’t do anything. When the second carriage passed, he turned his back on Hyde, and he raised a white handkerchief to his face. Anton put his handkerchief away, and then disappeared down a side street.

Gimmel had said that after the carriages passed, Hyde and Anton were both to get to the barge as quickly as possible, using streets other than Trenton Avenue. But for some reason Hyde couldn’t move. Not yet.

He folded his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket, and then he looked in the bakery window once more. A heavy woman stood at a table, rolling dough. Once she raised a fleshy arm, dusty with flour, to wipe her forehead with the back of her hand. She didn’t notice him watching her, and it seemed an almost indecent thing to be observing her. She was completely absorbed in her work, kneading and pounding and rolling the dough, which
caused her whole body to shake. When she was finished with one loaf, she slid it over next to the others on the side of the wood table and began working on another lump of dough. The finished loaves were lined up, smooth, white, identical, like something newborn and innocent.

Hyde walked quickly up Trenton Avenue and turned down the first alley.

NORRIS leaned out the window and looked up the avenue. He could see the first carriage turning off Trenton and passing out of sight behind the corner of a clapboard house. He assumed that they were going to approach the prison on side streets that would keep them away from the crowd in front of city hall. He didn’t like the idea of traveling down narrow streets, but he didn’t know Buffalo well enough to say if there was a better route. Trenton Avenue was wide, open, and quiet, as he assumed it would be on an ordinary Sunday afternoon. Feeney gazed out the other window, his shotgun across his thighs.

Raising his shotgun, Norris pounded on the carriage roof and said,
“Faster!
We need to keep up with them.”

The horses continued at the same pace. Norris waited only a moment, and then pounded the roof again. Still nothing happened, and then the carriage began to slow down.

“What are you
doing?”
he shouted.

The carriage continued to slow down, and suddenly two men jumped up on the runners on each side and extended their arms through the open windows. A white-haired man with a disfigured face held his revolver within inches of Norris’s forehead and said, “Put it on the floor—slowly.”

The other man held the barrel of his pistol against Feeney’s ear. Norris considered swinging his shotgun up quickly, knocking
the gun away from Feeney’s head, but the man with the scarred face said, “Don’t finish that thought unless you want it to be your last.”

The carriage came to a complete stop. Norris slowly lowered his shotgun to the floor. Feeney did the same. There was movement up in the front of the carriage, and then Norris caught a glimpse of the driver, walking quickly away and out of sight. Someone else had climbed up on the bench and the carriage began moving again—reins were slapped and the horses began to turn around.

The two gunmen opened the doors, climbed inside the carriage, and sat down. Norris suddenly felt uncomfortably crowded, and he moved to his left to make room. The barrel of the revolver was now pressed into his neck, just below the jaw. The carriage moved back along Trenton Avenue, the horses quickly breaking into a trot.

“You’re Herman Gimmel,” Norris said. “From Chicago.”

“My reputation precedes me,” Gimmel said, not displeased. He looked at Feeney, and then said, “This is not Czolgosz?”

Norris didn’t answer. The cold steel pressed harder into his neck.

The other gunman was Klaus Bruener, who said in a heavy German accent, “With a shotgun? He’s blond but, this can’t be him.
Shit
—he’s in the other carriage. What do we do?” Gimmel didn’t say anything. “Shoot the bastards,” Bruener said. “We shoot them
now
and get away from here—we have no fucking choice.”

Gimmel turned his head and looked back at Norris. “What’s your name?”

“Norris.” He continued to stare straight ahead, looking at Feeney—who was clearly frightened. “It’s all right, Jack,” Norris said. “The important thing is that they have already failed.”

Bruener, who was holding his gun to Feeney’s temple, said, “We
must
shoot them!”

“No,” Gimmel said, and then he shouted out the window, “Faster! Drive
faster!”

CZOLGOSZ was on his back on the floor of the carriage, staring at the ceiling, where a spider had set up its web, flecked with the remains of moths and flies. It occurred to him that there was no such thing as politics in nature; it was just survival. Solomon and Geary sat in the front of the carriage, facing Captain Savin, who smoked one cigarette after another. No one spoke. Once Czolgosz tried to prop himself up on an elbow, but Solomon shook his head.

Eventually, the carriage slowed and turned to the right and Czolgosz could tell by the echo of the horses’ hooves that they were moving through a narrow street. Geary leaned toward the window and seemed to become alarmed. The others didn’t notice at first, but finally he said, “It’s not back there.”

“What?” Savin asked.

Without speaking, all three men opened their coats and drew their guns. They gazed out the windows, inspecting the houses and buildings along the street.

“We should go faster,” Solomon said.

Savin considered this a moment, but then said, “No. That may be what they want.”

Solomon only shook his head as he looked out the window.

“I saw nothing,” Geary said. “No mob, nothing back there—what happened?”

Savin said, “It may be ahead of us.”

Solomon looked at the captain. “Change our route?”

Savin considered this and said, “All right. You get up top with the driver and direct him—both of you.” He glanced down at Czolgosz. “I’ll stay here with him.” He flicked his cigarette out the window, and then hollered up for the driver to stop the carriage.

When the horses came to a halt, Solomon and Geary got
out and climbed onto the driver’s bench. With more weight forward, Czolgosz could detect the slightest increase in angle in the carriage floor. They started moving again, a little faster than before.

“It’s the mob,” Czolgosz said.

“Maybe,” Savin said without looking at him. “Or it could be a horse pulled up lame.”

“But if it is the mob, you know what you have to do.”

Savin looked down then. “It’s not going to come to that.”

“But if it does.”

“Does that frighten you?” Savin said. “What a mob would do?”

“What does the moth feel as the spider pulls it apart?” Czolgosz said. “Think how it would look in the newspapers. You’d be better off shooting me.”

“You’d like that. We shoot you and you’d be done with it.” Savin turned his head toward the window again. “But I’m going to see to it that you’re disappointed.”

Czolgosz remained still, listening to the carriage make its way through the streets. They turned again, left. He could hear Solomon and Geary talking to the driver but couldn’t make out what they were saying above the sound of the horses and carriage. They were arguing about the best route to take, and then the carriage turned again, right this time, and there was the slap of reins and the horses broke into a trot.

“Almost there,” Savin said.

It seemed a strange thing to say. Czolgosz was surprised at his own calm. Perhaps it was just because he knew these men guarding him were so tense. He was aware of something—he didn’t know what—something large and beyond his control, beyond anyone’s control. It was evident in the way the horses trotted faster, causing the carriage to buck over the uneven road. Before shooting the president, there had been moments when he had a sudden sense of the historical weight of what he was contemplating. He knew, of course, that he would die. But he tried to see what might
come of it. He tried to envision the aftermath. Perhaps this one act, assassinating William McKinley, would spark the revolt and thousands of workers would rise up. Perhaps Emma Goldman, and men and women like her, would lead that revolution. Eight years he’d been reading
Looking Backward
because it portrayed a world where the workers would not be exploited, where there would be equity and free love. To hope for that was not enough. To believe in that was not enough. To act was the only course. And now he had acted, and he was lying on the floor of this carriage, rolling through the streets of Buffalo, with his guards alert, maybe even frightened. Whatever was out there, whatever threat existed, he wanted it to come, he wanted it now. He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them Savin was staring down at him, still curious.