The Anarchist (31 page)

Something changed in the boy’s eyes, a recollection, it seemed. “The bone felon,” he said. “It was you that treated her for the bone felon. I read about it in the newspaper. Out west last spring, when they were traveling, she had this problem with her finger and you treated it. She almost died, and all of the president’s plans were canceled.”

“Yes,” Rixey said. “That’s right.”

“I don’t know what that is, a bone felon.”

“A growth, an abnormal growth. It can become infected.”

“Then they spent the summer at their house in Canton. She
recovered, and he was rescheduled to come here, and then I knew what I had to do.” After a moment, he added, “You know I’m from Ohio, too?”

Something seemed to flood Rixey. A sorrow. An acceptance. This boy from Cleveland reading in the papers that the president would reschedule his trip to Buffalo, and his conclusion was to kill him. Rixey had been right—it was too dangerous for McKinley to attend the exposition. But Cortelyou was right, too: you can’t keep the president from the people. That simply wasn’t acceptable. McKinley understood that. Few people knew that about him. He understood their need to see him, to hear him. Furthermore, he needed to see them. “It was a terrible sacrifice,” Rixey said.

Czolgosz didn’t seem to understand. He looked curious.

“I was with him as he dressed the morning you shot him. The president was … He was in such a good frame of mind. I realize now why he seemed content, even jovial that morning: he would be meeting citizens, ordinary Americans. You have no idea how isolated a man like that is. He joked—I remember this now—he joked about having very little money in his pocket, not even two dollars, and he joked about the president being caught dead with so little money on him.”

“I didn’t rob him,” Czolgosz said. “And to some people two dollars is everything.”

“You’re missing my point.”

“You’re missing mine. Those boys, diving for expensive pearls—were they paid well? I don’t think so.”

“I’m not talking about pearls,” Rixey said. “There are things that you don’t understand—you don’t understand the sacrifice involved.”

For a moment the young man’s eyes were angry. “I have understood sacrifice for a long time. I done my duty.”

“Is that what this was, duty?”

“Yes.”

Rixey shook his head.

“Yes.”

“Another president has already been sworn in. You killed the man, a good man, a man I much revered, but there is still the president. You could not deny this country that. Its citizens, you see, they made him president. The presidency still exists—you could not take that away from us.”

“And I would kill that one, too, if I had the chance.”

“I believe you.” Rixey was suddenly sweating, and his hard collar was uncomfortably tight. “Now I do believe you.”

“And the next one after that.”

Rixey moved his feet, intending to stand up.

“I know sacrifice,” Czolgosz said. “I have known it for a long time. I seen it many years ago. When I was a boy my mother died giving birth to my sister. It was her eighth child. She died at forty, when I was ten years old. That was how I learned sacrifice.”

Rixey got to his feet, the stool legs scraping the floor, and leaned over the cot. He slapped the boy’s face. Then he straightened up, stunned by what he had done. The boy didn’t move, wrapped in his blanket, nor did the guards in the corridor. There was only the sound of the rain outside the stone walls.

His left hand felt warm and stung slightly. He turned toward the open cell door, but paused and said, “Your mother, she is fortunate not to be alive now. She would be ashamed. You know that, don’t you? You do know that?”

When he ducked his head and stepped out of the cell, the two guards got up from the table in a hurry. Rixey put on his hat and tugged it down on his head. “Now, show me the way out,” he said.

WITHIN the city of Buffalo there was an intricate web of waterways—canals such as the Erie, the Main-Hamburg, and the Clark-Skinner—and off these ran branches, known as slips, such
as the Commercial, the Prime, and the Ohio. During the day the
Glockenspiel
kept moving, and Bruener would tie her up after dark. During the night it rained on and off, and Hyde, Anton, and Josef took turns standing watch.

At dawn, Gimmel came up on deck. He nodded his head, indicating he wanted Hyde to join him in the stern. “All the newspapers—they’re full of articles about McKinley, about Czolgosz, but there has been no mention of problems during Czolgosz’s transfer.”

“I know, not one word about the Pinkertons.”

“It’s as though it didn’t happen,” Gimmel said as they watched the first light coming up on the canal. “Tell me something, Hyde. Bruener says you were raised in an orphanage.”

“St. John’s Protectory.”

“Terrible places, they are. I survived one myself in Illinois.” Gimmel’s eyes briefly drifted toward Hyde, and then he stared out at the river again. “But the experience prepares one for the realities of life. Family ties only complicate and confuse. You have no wife, no children?”

“No.”

“Bruener says you are a good canawler.”

“I have worked between Buffalo and Albany many years.”

“Don’t own your own barge.”

“They’re often handed down, father to son. It’s one of the benefits of family.”

“But you are unburdened. Can come and go as you please.”

“You make it sound like I was a man of wealth and privilege.”

“In some ways you are. You and I both, we possess a rare freedom, one not often afforded the working class.” Gimmel took a step closer. “This is why I’m so disappointed. You said you knew Czolgosz. You failed me—you were supposed to help me get him.” He watched the canal so long that Hyde thought that the conversation was over, that he had been dismissed. But then Gimmel
said, “At a place like St. John’s they must have instilled in you the concept of sin and redemption?”

“The nuns and priests did. That’s why I ran away when I was twelve.”

“You understand that you need to redeem yourself now?”

After a moment Hyde said, “What do you want me to do?”

“I want to send a message to someone in the police department,” Gimmel whispered. “Norris says there’s a Captain Savin. He was riding in the first carriage and had Czolgosz lying at his feet. And now he’s kept the Pinkertons out of the newspapers. Clever fellow, this Savin. So this is what I want you to do: go talk to Savin. Tell him I want to exchange these two for Czolgosz.”

“He won’t do that,” Hyde said.

“I know, but you tell him that first,” Gimmel said. “Then you tell him that if he refuses these two Pinkertons will be end up dead, and this time I’ll make sure the papers know about it, and that Savin had a chance to save them. Savin will realize he has to do something—he has no choice because this entire corrupt society is built upon the value of one life. A man doesn’t do something to save that one life, he’s considered a savage. But the truth is that we are all savages.”

“He’ll never give up Czolgosz,” Hyde said.

“No, I know he won’t.”

“What do you really want for these two Pinkertons?”

“We’re talking about two ‘innocent’ men, two defenders of the law. Savin’s responsible for them. You tell him the price for these two Pinkertons is a thousand dollars.”

“A thousand dollars?” Hyde said.

“Bring back his reply without having half the Buffalo police force follow you—can you do that?”

“Yes. Where?”

“Bruener says tonight we’ll tie up just north of Black Rock Harbor. You’ll probably need these just to get to see Savin.” He handed two cards to Hyde. “These are their Pinkerton identification cards.”

IT was midmorning when Hyde arrived at city hall. Dozens of police guarded the front entrance of the building, admitting people, mostly newspaper reporters. Hyde stood in line in the rain and when the sergeant demanded his credentials he handed over the two Pinkerton identification cards.

“What’s this?” the sergeant asked impatiently. He was Irish and his soft jowls reminded Hyde of the rolls of bread dough he’d seen the day before in the Trenton Avenue bakery.

“Show them to Captain Lloyd Savin. He’ll want to see me. My name is Hyde.”

The sergeant’s blue eyes were skeptical, but then he went inside the entrance and showed the cards to another officer.

Behind Hyde two reporters had been complaining about editors and deadlines. Now, as they watched the policemen guarding the front doors, one of them said, “I tell you, this security’s tighter for Czolgosz than it was for old man McKinley.”

“Maybe we should get out our handkerchiefs, Lundt,” the other reporter said. “Wrap them around our fists and see if that gets us inside out of this rain.”

“Right,” Lundt said. He had a flask, which he sipped from, and his whiskey breath cut through the raw air. “This is America and everyone’s packing a gun now. You hear about Mr. Hearst? All of his editorials that have been critical of McKinley—they’ve come back to haunt him, particularly when he hinted that the situation was so dire that political assassination was warranted. Since the president has died, there’s been a mob outside his office in New York, wanting at Hearst. The bastard’s so afraid he keeps a pistol on his desk all the time.” Lundt took another pull from his flask.

The Irish sergeant came back out to the steps. “Here, boyo,” he said to Hyde. “Come with me.”

Hyde glanced over his shoulder at the two reporters, their
faces stunned and resentful, and then he followed the policeman inside to the first-floor lobby. They climbed the marble staircase beneath an enormous portrait of McKinley, and on the second floor pushed through a crowd gathered outside the courtroom. The sergeant led Hyde around the balcony to the front of the building, and opened a door to a reception hall. “You wait in here,” he said, and then he pulled the door shut.

Hyde had never been in such a large room. Chandeliers hung from a ceiling trimmed with gilt moldings. Tall windows were covered with red velvet drapes edged with gold fringe and tassels. He crossed the parquet floor, his footsteps echoing, and stood next to a grand piano. Out the window he could see the crowd waiting in the rain. Behind him, one of the doors opened. Captain Savin came in and walked toward the piano, seeming unimpressed by the size of the room. When he reached the piano, he leaned the Pinkerton identification cards against the music stand, and then he sat on the bench and tapped out the melody to “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

“My mother,” he said. “She paid Mrs. Flannigan, who lived downstairs, to give me piano lessons, but I refused to go after a couple of months.” He took his hand off the keys. “Tell me, which would you rather: to be able to afford a fine instrument like this, or to be able to play Chopin?”

“I’m not the least bit musical,” Hyde said.

“Can’t carry a tune myself. My father had a wonderful tenor, and my mother thought she could give me a little bit of culture. Poor woman, I became a cop anyway.” He opened up his suit coat and took out a pack of Turkish Delights. “Tell me where they are, Hyde.”

“They’re being held by a group of anarchists.”

“I gather that. Where?”

Hyde looked down into the street, where the line of reporters still waited to get into Leon Czolgosz’s arraignment. But there were hundreds of other men milling about, and they looked as though they might storm the doors of city hall at any moment.

“It’s Herman Gimmel, isn’t it?” Savin said.

“Yes.”

“We’ve sought him for years. What’s he want?”

“To exchange Norris and Feeney for Czolgosz.” Savin said nothing. “And he wants a thousand dollars.”

Savin put the cigarette in his mouth, picked up Norris’s identification card, and squinted at it through smoke. Once he deposited ash into the potted plant next to the piano. When he put the card back on the piano, he said, “And if I refuse, they die.”

“And Gimmel will make sure those reporters down there in the street find out that you could have saved them.”

“Everybody wants something.” Savin got up from the piano bench and went to the window. “I want to be police chief one day. What do you want, Hyde?” After watching the crowd below for a moment, he said, “What do you want for Herman Gimmel?”