The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  To-night she was sublime in a lime-shaded dress that sheathed her slender figure without mercy. I dreaded the conversation to come.

  “Hello, Mrs. Hay,” Lizzie said sweetly, once she had bullied her way to the aisle. “It is always a pleasure to see you.”

  “And for me as well, Mrs. Cameron,” Clara said. Did I mistake it, or had Clara stressed the Mrs.? “We miss you on the Square.”

  “I miss living there, I must say. There is no place lovelier in the spring, or the autumn.”

  “Where are you now?” Clara said.

  My question exactly.

  “At the Willard, for most of the month. My husband is at his … our farm, up near Harrisburg.” Donald Cameron, the former senator from Pennsylvania, was a quarter century her elder, and a lush. “Can you imagine me milking a cow?”

  “You must stop by and see us,” Clara said.

  “Yes, you must,” I echoed.

  “Nothing would please me more,” Lizzie said.

  I could think of nothing that would please me less.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 1902

  “Old is a state of mind.”

  “That’s hogwash, and you know it,” I replied, although my noun was stronger.

  The masseur laughed. “I know nothing of the kind,” he said. Ewell Lindgren, big and blond, was a Norwegian who lived a block to the east, along H street. On most mornings he jostled my muscles and tendons awake; the constrictions of Pittsfield needed some kneading. “And with all due respect, Mr. Hay, I know more older people, more … intimately, than you do. Your body is not old. Nor is your mind.”

  “My mind is a mess, and why do I ache all the time?” If your masseur can’t command your honesty, who can? “You are … what … thirty-four?”

  “Thirty-five.”

  “You know nothing.” The heel of a palm pressed into my hamstring and I grunted.

  “Say that again,” he panted, and I did. He pressed harder into my leg, until I squawked.

  “Be careful,” I managed. “I feel a poem coming on.”

  The edges of his hands chopped at my unresisting back, further breaching the boundary between relaxation and pain.

  * * *

  “So why do you do these things?” Clara liked to get to the point. (Diplomats prefer to digress.) I swallowed another spoonful of blueberries and cream. We sat in a sunny spot in the kitchen.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Each time, I’ve been drafted. First by Lincoln, in Willie’s death. Now by Theodore. By all of them. You tell me why.”

  “Because you seem to figure it out in the end.” Clara smiled over her teacup.

  “So far,” I said. “This time, I’m still not sure there’s an it to figure out.”

  “Oh?”

  “Theodore certainly thinks so. And this motorman does have some … peculiarities, shall we say.”

  “Such as?” Clara said, always interested in human foibles she can find a way to excuse. She saw the best in people, even in me.

  I sighed. “He is an odd mammal. A timid man, but they can be the nastiest. A bit of an agitator, says his boss. About hours and wages—the usual.”

  “Not unreasonable.”

  “Agreed.” I told her of the motorman’s three thousand-plus unexplained dollars and the unresolved question of the trolley’s speed. “Beside that map that one of the streetcar company’s directors…” I exhaled. “Never mind. I’m tired of this. Tell me what is happening here.”

  “Nothing.”

  “With the wedding?”

  “Happily, nothing. Alice is sunny as always. The RSVPs—a lot of noes. The distance, you know.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  I couldn’t help but think about who wouldn’t be there. He had fallen three stories to his death. In New Haven for his Yale reunion, Del was lounging in the window of his hotel room at two thirty in the morning. A half-smoked cigarette was found on the sill. There was no question of ill intent, by himself or by anyone else. It wasn’t his fault. And it wasn’t mine. That much I knew—really I did. But it made no difference in how I felt.

  “Is Theodore coming, do you know?” Clara mercifully broke in. “People might change their minds if he does.”

  “I doubt it. That limp of his isn’t getting any better. He’ll probably decide the day before.”

  “It’s always such a circus when he’s around.”

  “But entertaining, you’ve got to admit. He’s always interesting, even when he won’t shut up. He’s made entertaining the voters a legitimate function of democratic government. Why do you think he invites the reporters in at one o’clock every afternoon to watch him get shaved? His personality is bigger than he is; you can’t avert your eyes. A new kind of president for a new century.”

  “But I want an old-fashioned wedding,” Clara said. “Let him do whatever he likes with his Alice, whenever the poor groom is trapped and bound. But not with our Alice, thank you very much.”

  I couldn’t disagree. (Nor would I dare.)

  * * *

  How convenient life in Washington could be, if you were lucky enough to live a block from your office and around the corner from your morning rounds. Lafayette Park was quiet but for the scampering of squirrels. (An animal fancier from Virginia had recently let loose nearly a hundred of them.) My footsteps scraped in the gravel. The magnolias’ succulent leaves, which I so admired, were edged in brown. The air was brisk.

  Congress was out of session, so the republic was safe. It also meant Mark Hanna would be at home, lingering over breakfast, such as he had shared with McKinley when 21 Madison place was known as the Little White House. The door knocker was shaped like a lion’s rump—landlady Lizzie’s sense of humor, no doubt—and I allowed it a certain respect. It fell heavily. The door opened right away, as if someone was waiting.

  That someone was Elmer Dover. I had met him too many times. He was a large and obnoxiously cheerful young man, not quite thirty years old, with broad shoulders and a clean-shaven, jowly, blandly handsome face. There was never a cloud in his liquid brown eyes or an unkind word on his lips. Elmer Dover accomplished his evils without a grimace and behind your back (and behind mine, in ’ninety-six, when one of my donations to McKinley’s presidential campaign went … astray). Officially, he was the clerk of the Senate’s Relations with Canada Committee, which Hanna had served until recently as chairman. In practice, he was Hanna’s private secretary, his henchman, the man who heard the senator’s wishes and fulfilled them, who made the senator’s political problems go away, without always explaining how.

  “It is such a pleasure to see you at this pleasant time of the morning,” Dover said.

  “The same,” I replied. “Is the master here?”

  “At breakfast,” Dover said, “if you would care to—”

  I accepted.

  The breakfast room, on the first floor, faced a walled garden that was overwhelmed by the six-story hulk of the opera house. It was a woman’s room, with flowered curtains and late-season daisies in delicate vases of a vaguely Oriental design. The junior (by a single day) senator from Ohio sat at the table, struggling with a soft-boiled egg. The puckered brow on his porcine face suggested that the egg was winning. Hanna’s huge, dark eyes look sadder than usual. His black silk bathrobe, loosely tied, showed a trapezoid of hairy belly. I suspected the Chinese letters embroidered in gold spelled out, depending on inflection, “Almighty Dollar” or “Besotted Plutocrat.” Thomas Nast would have adored the man.

  I didn’t. Nor did I despise him, as Roosevelt did. But then, I didn’t have as much cause. He hadn’t called me a damn cowboy and a madman one life away from the presidency (though, under present circumstances, I was arguably the latter). We had a lot of history, Hanna and I, not all of it unpleasant, and more in common than I cared to admit. One was our debt to the dear departed McKinley. Another was the industrial city of Cleveland. It was Hanna’s hometown and also Clara’s. Hanna had co-owned, with Clara’s fath
er, the Cleveland Daily Herald, until it failed. Besides his coal and iron ore mines, his steel-hulled ships and streetcar lines, Hanna owned the Euclid Avenue Opera House, on the street where Clara and I had lived for a half decade while I was managing my father-in-law’s business interests.

  “You are looking well, Senator,” I said. In Washington, flattery never hurt, and usually helped—the wilder, the more beloved.

  “You are as blind as a hog in a tornado, Hay.”

  “On my better days, Senator.”

  I sat across the small table, so as not to see his midsection. Elmer Dover pulled up a chair at the end. I had hoped to keep him away.

  “And what can I do for you, Mr. Secretary?” Hanna said. “Breakfast?”

  I glanced at the massacred egg and the corned beef hash. “No, thank you,” I said. What I wanted was information, but not the sort that was simple to collect, especially because I didn’t know what it was (often a drawback). Asking directly about the collision seemed like a stupid idea. I was interested in Northern Securities, on the slim chance the railroad monopoly wanted Theodore dead. Not slim that they wanted him dead, but that they would try to make it happen. The more I thought about it—and yes, it was a little late—the more I regretted taking Alice Roosevelt’s tidbit seriously. At the tender (ha!) age of eighteen, she was already an accomplished poseur. If she hadn’t made up this provocative fact, she had no idea what it meant.

  Nor did I. Which was why I was here.

  “I am interested in Northern Securities,” I said.

  “We all are,” Hanna replied. “What about ’em?”

  “Do you think they will succeed?”

  “If your damn president…” Hanna ripped a cinnamon roll in half and shoved a hunk of it into his mouth, so I guessed he finished by saying, “Will let ’em.”

  “How far do you suppose they would go in making sure of it?”

  This gave him time to swallow, raisins and all. “I don’t know what you mean,” he said at last.

  “Yes you do.” An outrageous accusation seemed my best play.

  His melancholy brown eyes narrowed, and they slithered toward Dover, who shook his head.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t,” Hanna said. “It has been a privilege to see you this morning, Mr. Secretary.”

  “The pleasure is mine,” I said. “Before I leave this good company, may I ask if you happen to own stock in Northern Securities?”

  Hanna stiffened, and his jowls seemed to swell. “And what business is it of yours, may I ask? Or of the president’s?”

  I had no good answer for that. Only that the railroad scandals of President Grant’s day had shown the dangers of mixing politics—or politicians—with business, especially the business of railroads, and that the public had a right to know it. An argument that would cause him to scoff. He was Wall street’s man in the Senate; he recognized no boundary between business’s interests and the government’s. An alternative was to ask him to trust me—and be laughed at. Or … I figured Hanna might respond to bluntness. “The president thinks that Northern Securities might want him dead. It’s … possible they’ve already tried.”

  “Of course they didn’t,” Hanna said. He stabbed at the hash with his fork. His long, slender fingers did not belong to his burly physique.

  “You know that for sure?” I said. “It makes sense that they might. In their shoes, I might.”

  This gave him pause, as I’d hoped. “I have no reason to think that they do,” Hanna said. He glanced over to Elmer Dover, as if to say, Do they?

  Another imperceptible shake of the head.

  “And what if they did?” Hanna said.

  That gave me pause. “It would be…” I wanted to say criminal but feared that would end the conversation, such as it was. “Worrisome,” I said.

  Elmer Dover started to say something but thought better of it, lowering his coffee cup to the table so violently I thought it might shatter. I knew better than to open my mouth. At last, Dover said, “You say they’ve already tried?”

  “A possibility,” I said. “I’m not authorized to say anything more, I’m afraid.”

  Hanna said, “I wish I … we could help you.”

  “Maybe you could,” I replied. “Who takes care of their business in the capital, do you know?”

  Hanna shrugged. Elmer Dover sat still.

  I had mishandled that one.

  I diverted the conversation onto a safer topic, Canada’s tariffs on iron ore, a matter close to Hanna’s heart (assuming he had one). The Ohio magnate buttered his rolls and rattled on about the greedy Canadians who deserved nothing less than annexation. “It would be good for them, and for us as well.” The issue had been simmering for decades, driven by American farmers and industrialists in search of fresh markets. I was careful not to nod to such nonsense—I was still the secretary of state—but listened with a pretense of respect. Why give him any more reason to fight Theodore for the nomination, two years hence?

  Hanna’s joy in discussing dollars and cents faded and he lit a Havana, probably not his first of the day. My stomach roiled from hunger; the cigar smoke did not help.

  I rose unsteadily to my feet, then tried one last time. “So please tell me, Senator, do you own stock in Northern Securities?”

  Hanna glared. “I don’t need to answer that.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said. “But you just did.”

  Elmer Dover saw me to the door—to make sure I left, no doubt. “You look tired,” he said. I hate when people tell me that; it makes me feel tired. “When did you get back?”

  “Late last night,” I said. “I’ll catch up.”

  I don’t trust cheerful people. I figure they’re hiding something, probably from themselves.

  * * *

  The tone in Adee’s latest handwritten draft on Roumanian Jews seemed right at last—factual more than sentimental, ingratiating without being obsequious;.

  The United States welcomes now, as it has welcomed from the foundation of its government, the voluntary immigration of all aliens coming hither under conditions fitting them to become merged in the body politic of this land …

  It described the plight of Roumanian Jews, treated as aliens in the place they were born, forbidden to own land in the countryside or to work on farms, banned from the learned professions and from many trades, excluded from secondary schools, delivered into beggary, forced to flee the only home they had known—not only to European countries, whose governments had created Roumania, but to America. This gave Washington the standing to intrude on another nation’s affairs.

  The argument was a little tenuous, I admit, but it wasn’t stupid. Would it convince the European powers that had created that mess of a country in the first place? I knew the odds were long. But first I had to convince Theodore.

  Soon, however, I found I was reading the same sentences three or four times while thinking about the blob of treachery who called himself Mark Hanna. Didn’t Theodore, that damned cowboy, stand in the way of Hanna’s route to the White House? Nobody had a stronger motive to murder President Roosevelt—other than myself, of course. But I was satisfied that I was innocent.

  A knock at the door brought Margaret Hanna, bearing a message. Her smile suggested she knew something I didn’t. I tried to smile the same smile back, with less success. I considered asking her if her unrelated namesake might be capable of murder, but thought better of it.

  The note was a summons from John Wilkie. I left at once.

  I passed the White House, unoccupied for months now. From the outside, no scaffolding was visible; all the chaos was inside. Beyond the stone foundations for a new East Wing, I entered the Treasury Building and climbed the semicircular steps to the third floor. A prim-looking man in a worn frock coat scurried across my path, hugging folders of documents he would guard with his life. The Secret Service chief waved me in. He, too, smiled as if he knew something I did not. Unlike Margaret, however, he intended to tell me.

  Through the haze
of pipe smoke, Wilkie’s eyes were alert, like a bird’s. His desktop shone. “How’s the derringer?” he said.

  I had almost forgotten it. I patted my waistcoat pocket. “Unfired,” I replied.

  “May you keep it that way.” Wilkie gestured at the scrawled map of Howard’s Hill in Pittsfield that lay open at the center of his desk. “My men worked through the night,” he said with pride.

  “And?”

  “They found your fingerprints, which you thoughtfully provided on your coffee cup yesterday.”

  A little unnerving.

  “On the outside and the inside of the map,” Wilkie went on. “And Madden’s, too. You did a nice job, incidentally, of capturing his fingerprints on the cardboard. They were clear. No question they matched.”

  “On the inside, too—on the map itself? He told me he never opened it.”

  “Oh, they were there, all right. Not they, exactly. One fingerprint, but a clear one, of his right index finger. In an interesting spot.” Wilkie raised his own right index finger like a man of the cloth citing the Prophets. Then it arced toward hell. “Directly over the site of the collision.”

  The motorman had lied. “And nowhere else on the inside?”

  “Only there. And only one set of prints on the outside—his thumb on one side and his fingers on the other. He was holding it like a book.”

  “Consistent with pulling out a twenty-dollar bill and handing it back?”

  Wilkie thought a moment. “I would say so.”

  “And consistent with stuffing it into his seat?”