The Anarchist (25 page)

AFTER a good steak dinner Norris and Savin went to Big Maud’s. There were no customers in the parlor and only a few girls lounged in stuffed chairs and sofas.

“Assassination isn’t good for business,” Big Maud said. “I must say this whole business about President McKinley has been depressing. Half of Buffalo is in mourning, while the other half seems ready to burn something to the ground.” She addressed Savin. “Haven’t seen you in a good while, Lloyd.”

“Don’t take it wrong, Maud,” he said.

“Moved up in the world.” She smiled as she turned to Norris. “The captain and I go back a long way—to when I was on his regular beat.”

But Savin appeared in no mood to reminisce. “The Russian girl, Motka Ascher. She upstairs?”

“There a problem?” Big Maud looked put out. “Sorry, Maud, not tonight,” Savin said. “Can’t give her a few minutes?” Savin only shook his head.

Big Maud smiled at him. “You always were the bastard, weren’t you?” And then, in disgust, she said, “Third floor.”

Savin moved toward the stairs.

Norris nodded apologetically to the madam and then followed Savin. When they turned the landing, he whispered playfully, “Your regular beat, huh?”

“She’s put on weight—she was just Maud then.”

The house was quiet, except for some recorded opera music coming from a room on the second floor. They climbed to the third floor and Savin opened the door without knocking. The room was candlelit, and there was the sudden rustling of sheets as bodies flailed about and a man stumbled out of bed. Beneath a substantial belly he was fully erect, and he was clearly less than sober.

“What
do you think you’re
doing?”
he demanded.

“Alderman O’Reilly?” Savin said with regret, and then cleared his throat. “Sorry to disturb you. But we’re here on police business.”

O’Reilly cupped his hands over his loins as Norris gathered his clothes from the chair by the window. In the bed, Motka pulled a sheet up to her neck.

“Now, sir, if you’ll just step out here with me.” Reluctantly, Savin ushered O’Reilly toward the door.

“I am the commissioner of this ward!” O’Reilly said. “This is highly inappropriate, barging in on me in—”

“Sir,” Norris said, “this is a matter of national security. Believe me, we are doing you a favor.” He thrust the pile of clothes into O’Reilly’s arms, pushed him out into the hall. As he pulled the door closed, he said, “Wait for me downstairs, Captain.”

Norris went over to the bed. Motka’s eyes were startled and frightened. He took hold of the sheet and yanked it away. She didn’t move, and he sat down on the bed. In the candlelight her skin was golden and she gave off the deep smell of perfume and sex.

“My God,” he whispered, “you are something. What are you, nineteen, twenty?”

“Yes,” she whispered as though it were an admission.

“The police captain downstairs,” he said. “He wants to take you in for questioning.” She tried to raise herself up on her elbows, but he shook his head. “Now listen carefully. You have two choices. We can take you to police headquarters and the captain will want to question you all night. Eventually you’ll be so exhausted that you’ll tell us anything we want to know. Or you can cooperate with me now, and sleep here in your own bed tonight. The result will be the same—you’ll tell us what we want to know.”

“What is it you want to know?”

“We know Leon Czolgosz has been here with you, and we know that Moses Hyde brought him.” He watched her chest rise and fall; she was nervous, and when she exhaled there was
the slightest shudder, making her breasts jounce as they settled over her rib cage. “They planned to shoot the president—here, together, in this room.”

“No.”

“Motka, you told me before that Czolgosz was here several times. He brought that book. You said he was giving you reading lessons—do you know what that book is about?”

Helpless, she was shaking her head, her red hair fanning out on the pillow.

“Do you know what he was trying to do with you? Indoctrinate your mind.” Norris watched the tears run from the corner of her eyes, and with his finger he gently wiped them a way. “You don’t even know what that word means, ‘indoctrinate,’ do you?”

She continued to shake her head. “I cannot read that book. The words—they are too much hard for me.”

“It doesn’t matter.” Norris nodded toward the door to the hall. “It doesn’t matter to the captain waiting downstairs. The fact, the mere fact that you would have that book in your possession—a book given to you by Leon Czolgosz—it doesn’t matter to him whether you understand the words. You have the
book
, you know what it
means.”

She was crying now, her nose running. He took his handkerchief from his suit coat and daubed her nose and mouth. It seemed to calm her down, and she began to catch her breath.

“You can be implicated—that is a word you must understand, Motka. The president is dead. We can prove you were in on it. That book is evidence enough; believe me, in this case it’s enough. The captain will make sure of that.”

“I hit him,” Motka said. “I hit him on the head.”

“Who?”

“Hyde. The night before the president was shot. With the chamber pot. It knocks his brains out. No—you know what I mean—”

“Out cold. Why?”

“He was drunk. He finds the gun—it falls on the floor out of
Czolgosz’s coat. And he—I thought he was going to shoot Leon, so I hit him with the pot.”

Norris had to look away from her a moment. The wallpaper on the slanted wall above her bed was faded, yellow and brown, with friezes of women carrying urns on their heads, lyres, old ruins with free-standing columns. He remembered the gash in Hyde’s head. The president’s physician—Dr. Rixey, a tall man with a thick mustache, who was quiet and observant—he had noticed it too and had kept Hyde at the Milburn house for treatment. “Motka, why was Hyde going to shoot Leon?”

“I did not understand then. But he knew that Leon plans to shoot the president.”

“So it was planned here.”

She shook her head vehemently.
“No
. He wanted to stop Leon, but after I make Hyde out cold Leon left.”

“All right. But, Motka, you see how this would look to the captain downstairs. He would never believe you. He would say you—the three of you—planned the whole thing, right
here
, in this
room.”

“But we didn’t!”

“You would be better than Emma Goldman.”

“That woman in the newspapers? They arrested her in Chicago, yes?”

“Red Emma,” Norris said. “She’s Russian, a Jew.” He watched Motka’s face, the sudden panic in her eyes. “You know what I’m saying, don’t you? In America it’s easy to believe that all of you Jews from Russia are anarchists. Every one of you, in on it. They
want
to believe that—they
need
to believe that. It’s called a conspiracy—you know that word, do you? They need to believe that killing the president was a conspiracy. Do you understand?”

She shook her head.

But he was certain that she did. “A conspiracy is necessary, Motka. It makes it easier for everyone to understand, to accept.” Her lips began to tremble. Norris leaned closer and whispered, “So you must tell me—just me, Motka—where is your brother?”

“My brother?”

“Yes, Anton.”

“I don’t know—”

“He is an anarchist.”

“No.” But her eyes were doubtful now.

“This
, this is true, Motka. You know this is true, and it concerns you. He is in with them, a group that is working with an outside man from Chicago. Herman Gimmel. A man who has been associated with Emma Goldman. See, we know all about it. People talk. Eventually, people always tell us what we need to know. This is my point: you will, too. It’s just a question of method—”

“Please,”
Motka said, taking hold of his forearm. “Anton is
not—
”

“Do you know what they did?” He looked down at his arm until she removed her hand. “Gimmel and your brother, they threw Clementine’s body in the canal.”

“No, this cannot be?”

“We have a witness. Someone saw them, Motka. So the only way to save yourself is to tell us where Anton is.”

She lay very still, gazing up at him. He placed his fingertips on the hard bone between her breasts. Gently, he ran his hand down over her stomach, pausing at the depression around the navel, and then he let his palm rest over her hair, soft and damp.

“I cannot,” she whispered.

Norris moved his hand deeper, parting her thighs.

“I do not know where Anton is. That is all I can tell the captain.”

Norris took his hand away, held his fingers under his nose and inhaled slowly. “Yes, I believe that is all you would tell the captain. But as I said, the only difference between him and me is our methods.”

She was trying not to be afraid now. In fact, she looked brave, and he had to admire that, and the way it made her beautiful. “All right,” he said, as he got up off the bed. He drew the bedsheet
over her, and her hands clutched it beneath her chin. “All right, I’ll talk to him. Maybe we don’t have to bring you to police headquarters, not at the moment.” He went to the door, hesitated, and then looked back at her. “But I can’t make any promises about the future, you understand?”

She only stared at him, her eyes glistening in the candlelight.

IT took Hyde several hours to work his way along the canal, stopping in taverns and saloons to avoid sudden downpours. When he reached Black Rock Harbor, a dense fog had come in off Lake Erie, making it difficult to see across the water to Squaw Island. Dozens of barges were tied to piers and he found the
Glockenspiel
in front of the Grand Canal Warehouse. He heard footsteps coming toward him on the pier, and he recognized Bruener’s son, Josef, a tall, lean boy still in his teens. He was carrying a club.

“Josef, it’s Moses Hyde,” he said slowly. “I need to see your father.”

Josef held up his hand, indicating that Hyde was to remain where he was, and then he went back out along the pier, and climbed down a plank to his father’s barge. When the door to the pilothouse opened he gestured with his hands for a moment to someone holding a lantern, and then waved toward Hyde.

Once Hyde was on board he saw that the man with the lantern was Klaus Bruener. He had known the big German for years, occasionally crewing on his barge, and they had often attended socialist meetings together in towns along the Erie Canal. “Anton Ascher is here, Klaus?”

“Why?”

“I have something for him from his sister. Money.”

Bruener nodded and let Hyde into the pilothouse. “I hear
she’s the prettiest cocksucker in Buffalo.” He grinned, revealing crooked, blackened teeth. “Too pretty to come down here to fuck canawlers.”

Hyde said nothing. Bruener liked to bait people, egg them on, and draw them into fistfights. They went down the companion-way ladder to a tight cabin, where the air was thick with cigar smoke. Two men sat in a booth, a bottle of whiskey and glasses on the table. One of them stood—Anton. Hyde held up his bandaged hand, to which he had pinned the earring.

Anton removed the pin. “So, my sister sent you?”

The other man sitting in the booth wore a tattered frock coat and his hair was long, silky, and white, hanging well down below his shoulders. The right side of his face and neck was badly scarred, and his right eye was nearly closed beneath a lid that appeared to have melted. Hyde recognized him: his name was Herman Gimmel and he had given a speech at a meeting in Buffalo last spring. He was from Chicago, and word had gone around the hall where he spoke that he was a bomb expert. It was said that he had thrown the bomb that killed eight policemen during the Haymarket riot back in ’86. When he stood on the stage, his scarred face was testimony to years of devotion to the workers’ cause.

Hyde took the two folded twenty-dollar bills from his coat pocket and handed them to Anton, who went back to the table and dropped the money next to the whiskey bottle. He said, “Told you I could raise some money, Gimmel.”

“So you did.” Gimmel’s raspy voice was deep and humorless, and the words seemed to bubble up out of his throat. He got to his feet slowly and came over to Hyde. “And you know this fellow, Bruener?”

“Moses Hyde’s as good a canawler as you’ll find,” Bruener said. “Always turns out for the meetings.”

“I saw you speak here last spring,” Hyde said to Gimmel.

As though he hadn’t heard, Gimmel turned Bruener. “You’re saying I can trust him?”

“You come here from Chicago,” Bruener said. “Someone gave you a few names, men you could contact. You don’t really know any of us.”

“They didn’t mention Moses Hyde,” Gimmel said.

“When you came here you said you needed help,” Bruener said. “Since McKinley was shot, the police they been rounding up a lot of boys—canawlers, men from the foundries and the slaughterhouses. They’ve declared war on the workingman.” When Gimmel didn’t say anything, Bruener added, “He’s all right because Klaus Bruener says he’s all right.”

“Well, he delivered forty dollars,” Gimmel said. “That tells me something. A lot of men would have disappeared with that much money in hand.” Gimmel shrugged and returned to the table, where he picked up the bills and added them to a wad that he took from his pocket. He tucked the money in his coat, sat down in the booth again, and poured more whiskey into his glass. His distorted face was illuminated by the lamp hanging above the booth. “Take a good look, Mr. Hyde,” he said. “Ten years ago I was teaching somebody how to make a bomb. I have often taught this fine art, but I’ve lost some of my best pupils before they could graduate.” His laughter was more a gurgle that seemed to originate in his lungs. He took a drink of whiskey and placed the glass on the table. “Now they send me here to organize a disturbance during the president’s visit. And to my surprise—to everyone’s surprise—this Leon Czolgosz up and shoots McKinley. This man, he is a true anarchist.”