The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  A look of disbelief crossed Lodge’s face, presumably at the notion that a man of his breeding and position might know anything at all about a mere member of the Great and General Court. “A little, I suppose,” he said.

  “What was your impression of him, then?”

  We sat in deep leather armchairs, cups of bitter tea at our elbows, before a blazing fire that was making me perspire.

  Lodge tilted his head back and literally looked down his nose. His high brow and his hooded eyes looked formidable. “Not a favorable one, my dear Hay. Rather uncouth, wouldn’t you say? And a rather … large man. And crass, I must say, in how he went about things.”

  “Any particulars?”

  Lodge waved his hand at the flames—he was a man of conclusions, not of details—and waited for a worthier question.

  “Ethical in his dealings?” I tried.

  “I would have no way of knowing,” Lodge said. “I have every good reason to doubt it.”

  “Namely?”

  “You only had to look at the man to know he lacked honor.”

  I couldn’t disagree. “I do need specifics,” I said.

  “Why? Once you know a man, you know him. The rest is just fill. What do you want to know about him, specifically?”

  He had me there. I decided to be frank. (Dangerous, I know, for a diplomat.) “I want to know if the late Mr. Turtle was, in your considered judgment, capable of trying to kill a man. A president.” I surprised myself at the question, but I knew Theodore wouldn’t mind.

  “Of course he was. Anyone is.”

  Just what Henry had said. “Not all of us act on it,” I pointed out. “Almost nobody does. The question is, did he?”

  “You seriously think that this wretched man Turtle had something to do with Roosevelt’s…” Cabot Lodge was speechless, for once in his life.

  “He had something to do with it. Look at his clients. He represented everyone involved. Well, not everyone, but on the streetcar company’s side of things. He came to Washington to … I don’t know what. I am trying to figure that out. To see me, among others, but I have no idea why. This is why I am asking you, can you shed any light on this man?”

  “Not in the way that you want. You should ask Governor Crane—he is arriving here to-morrow. He is a man of specifics. As you point out, I have only a general impression of the man. Your Mr. Turtle, as I understand things, is—was—at the center of the Republican … organization … out in Berkshire County.” I gathered that the senator, as a Cabot and a Lodge, had never needed to rely on anything as vulgar as a political machine. “Your Mr. Turtle knew how to make deals. He knew men. And how to cheat them. How to make them do what he wanted, whatever was required. Whatever was required. That is what he was good at. A valuable skill in politics. Maybe the most valuable. But rather a disagreeable quality in a man.”

  You should know, I thought uncharitably. I had rarely heard the acerbic Yankee so passionate about anything. I pressed my luck. “A plausible mastermind, do you suppose, of a plot to, say, assassinate”—I luxuriated in every syllable—“the president?”

  “Absolutely,” Lodge replied. He squinted and knocked over his tea. “Or a victim of it.”

  I left and learned that Single Malt had bitten the bark from an elm.

  * * *

  I repeated Lodge’s three words to Nellie Bly. Or a victim. We sat in my library on opposite settees, sipping coffee that Clara had brought us. A generous gesture, I thought, given the press of our evening’s plans. But I understood why she bothered: to catch a glimpse of the famous woman I had mentioned a little too often. The two women seemed to like each other, to my relief.

  “Why would somebody want to kill him?” Nellie said.

  “Good question. But let’s start with the fact that somebody did.”

  “As you can testify.”

  “Which I may have to. Possibly as the defendant.” Was I bragging?

  “Maybe a better question is this: Why would somebody want to kill Turtle then? As soon as he arrived here. Just before he was going to see—”

  “Yes,” I pounced, “to prevent him from talking to…” I told Nellie of the pocket diary. “Cortelyou, Mark Hanna, and … me.”

  “Talk about what?”

  I smiled and extended my palms in supplication. “I wish I knew.”

  “Any hint at all? You were with him.”

  “For hardly a minute. We hadn’t really started to talk. He went to get dressed and had already called for breakfast.”

  “Did anyone know you were there?”

  “Only Clara. And…” I decided to come clean about the woman I’d heard back in the bedroom. “But she wouldn’t have known who I was.”

  “Unless he told her.”

  “True,” I conceded. “But she was almost certainly a … a prostitute.” Unless she wasn’t. “Did you find anything in Lizzie’s … Lizzie Cameron’s”—a knowing look from Nellie—“rooms?”

  “Nothing,” Nellie said.

  “Nothing?”

  “Nothing to speak of. Quite a lot, actually. Mrs. Cameron does not travel lightly.”

  “She does nothing lightly.”

  That knowing look again, deserved.

  “A dozen pairs of shoes,” Nellie said. “None of them with hexagonal heels.”

  I exhaled, for the first time in a while. Then a contrary thought. “Unless she was wearing them when you checked.”

  “Why don’t you check the next time you see her?” Nellie said, with a level stare.

  I chuckled to myself, loudly enough that she could hear. “I just might do that,” I replied, “and I will be sure to tell you everything I learn.” I stared back. “And my wife.”

  “Naturally,” Nellie said.

  I didn’t enjoy being ribbed about something I was agonizing over myself. I was stupid as hell; I knew that. Otherwise, why would I jeopardize everything I held dear—my wife, my daughters, my surviving son—in pursuit of a woman who would bring me nothing but grief? I knew all of that. Any yet … And yet what? Yes, Lizzie was beautiful to look at. Enthralling, really. All true. But so what? Was I truly that shallow? That callow? I used to be, I know, and at times I am embarrassed by my former self. By my current self, too, I’ll admit. Had I learned nothing over the years?

  “How did you get in, by the way?” I said. “Merely as a matter of craft, if you would.”

  “It was easy.” A prideful smile lit up her face like a lantern in a belfry. “I, uh, borrowed the key from the front desk while the clerk was … away. And I … just in case … dressed like a chambermaid.”

  I was impressed. “Where on earth did you find a uniform?” I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

  “Easy again,” she said. “I stole it.”

  Thus confirming my fears. Should the newspapers ever get wind of my role in a murder—innocent, inadvertent—I was a goner.

  * * *

  I was perusing the Evening Star, trying not to doze off in my favorite leather chair. Pershing was making headway in the Philippines. Transpacific mail left daily for China. (How the world was shrinking!) Typhoid fever had slammed other cities worse than Washington. Prince Henry of Prussia, the kaiser’s brother, had taken out the first-ever insurance policy on an assassination—his own. Croquet was reviving. An item in the neighboring column caught my eye:

  The Penalty of Progress

  From Life.

  Is it anybody’s business to keep count of the number of persons who are killed by accidents from day to day in this country? The number must be enormous, and most of the victims die of modern improvements of one kind or another. Fatal trolley car accidents are more common and comprehensive this year than ever before; railroads kill and maim about as usual; automobiles do their share …

  All right, all right. I was fundamentally a nineteenth-century man, still a believer in polite dealings, deliberate thought, gentlemanly restraint—in transport and in life. So sue me. I wasn’t proud of these fetishes, like Henry Adams was, but I
was honest enough not to deny them. As if anyone gave a damn besides myself. The age of invention had its wonders and its perils, but the age of the gentleman was dying if not dead. My advantage over Henry was that I was adaptable to modern ways—educable, even into my sixties. In the boxing ring I had learned to escape corners.

  The past is a land in which I was born

  Not bad.

  And where I’ve spent my days.

  Redundant. Worse, boring.

  The past is a land in which I was born

  And where my life …

  I was rescued by a scraping in the room and discovered that my eyes were closed. I opened them and there Henry stood, in front of me. His beard looked less devilish than usual. An angelic smile wreathed his face.

  “This is a dream, right?” I said.

  “If you like,” he replied. He was waving a paper at the edge of my vision.

  “Take a seat, Henry,” I said.

  He was too excited to sit. That excited me, too. Henry came at the world with the scholar’s perspective of centuries. There was little that was new under the sun. But occasionally there was.

  “I found something,” he said unnecessarily.

  “Tell me.”

  “It was deep in one of the boxes. It’s a letter. Quite a tedious one, actually. Written by the lawyers, surely—they must get paid by the word—and signed by the principals. From Morgan, J. Pierpont himself, to James J. Hill, himself. Almost impenetrable, the letter, about the Sherman Antitrust Act and whether it might be applied by an unsympathetic administration.”

  “The Sherman act. Lizzie’s uncle. Ha! And might it?”

  “Precisely what you would expect from Northern Securities lawyers who want to remain employed as Northern Securities lawyers. A railroad monopoly is a boon to heaven and to all of mankind, a veritable fulfillment of the Founding Fathers’ rosiest vision.” Those Fathers included Henry’s great-grandpappy, John, and his cousin, Sam. “But what their lawyers think isn’t what’s interesting.” Henry stopped, as if to gather himself, and shoved two pages of typewritten, single-spaced, impenetrable prose under my nose.

  My dear Mr. Hill:

  If we intend to succeed in our endeavor …

  Those were the last words in English, before an onslaught of “whereas” and “foregoing” and “thereunder” and “conspiracy in restraint of trade” and, turning the page, “political animus.” Well, those two words I understood, along with the four that followed: “of the current administration.” By the current president, it meant. Lawyerly language for loathing.

  “There!” Henry pointed, once I got to that phrase.

  “I see it. Seems reasonably polite, given that the administration is taking them to court to break them up.”

  “You’re not seeing it, old boy. On the side.”

  I had missed it because it was handwritten with a hard, sharp pencil along the right margin. I shifted the page to find the light.

  Hay > TR!

  I cursed to myself.

  Apparently the pencil point had broken on the exclamation point, because the words underneath were ragged and thick: ’Phone me.

  ’Phone me about what? I must have spoken that aloud, because Henry said, “My question precisely.”

  “It could mean anything, I guess.”

  “It could.”

  “Are you certain this is Morgan’s handwriting? That’s what you’re suggesting, correct?”

  “You are quick to catch on, old boy. I am no … graphologist, I believe they are called, but if you will examine the capital P in ’Phone and the capital P in his signature”—JPM—“to my eye they look similar. More than similar. Identical.”

  I glanced back and forth three, four times, and I had to agree. “I’ll ask Wilkie to have his men take a look. So, what do you suppose it means?”

  “What it says.”

  “It doesn’t mean they did anything about it.”

  “It means he wanted to—wants to. One thing you can say about J. Pierpont Morgan, he gets what he wants, if he wants. Has he ever said anything about this to you?”

  “That he’d rather that I … Of course not—I hardly know the man. Why on earth would he…” I had broken into a sweat. “When was this written?”

  I was fumbling with the pages when Henry replied, “August third, this year. In the defendants’ latest filings.”

  Henry was talking like a lawyer. “One month before the collision,” I said.

  “To the day.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1902

  Matters of church and God I left in Clara’s hands—the earthly decisions were daunting enough. Besides, Saint John’s suited me. The Episcopal church was certainly convenient, directly across Sixteenth street, and historical as hell. Every president since Madison has prayed there, with varying degrees of success. And the place was pleasing to the eye. The modest stucco church, pale yellow, made even the godless feel at ease. Not that I am godless (I lack the moral courage to follow the preponderance of evidence to its conclusion), but I have always been inclined to hedge my bets. Personally, I doubt that an hour’s presence on Sunday morning matters very much to my destiny, eternal or shorter term. But as my sainted mother used to say, it can’t hurt. Besides, it made Clara happy, which counted.

  Inside, the church’s simplicity suited me, too—the easy curves of balconies, the arched ceiling, the understated warmth. Clara’s concession was to take seats in the last row, on the right, in case I needed an escape. My excuse was that it had been Lincoln’s pew (probably for the same reason) whenever he worshiped here. I also liked the vantage point, the detached view of the proceedings and of the man in the pulpit, the Reverend Alexander Mackay-Smith.

  On this particular morning, such a detachment was to be prized. The Reverend Mackay-Smith was a handsome young man with a barrel chest, a mustache as lush as Grover Cleveland’s, and a magnetic presence. He delivered a perfunctory tribute to President McKinley, dead exactly one year now—the sermon’s supposed topic—before he turned his oratorical attentions to the parishioner in the front row.

  “Who can read history and believe that the course of events happens by chance?” the good reverend cried out. “It was by no accident that Judas betrayed the great Nazarene to be crucified. But who can tell why Mr. McKinley was so suddenly taken from the earth in the hour apparently of his greatest usefulness? Who could fill his place?

  “Fortunately, a David was vice president. How came he to be vice president? Was it by accident?”

  I imagined the David I knew to be turning red.

  “How the love of him is filling the hearts of the people!” The Reverend Mackay-Smith leaned over the pulpit toward his subject. “His honesty, his bravery, his positive convictions, his resolute purpose, his frankness, his impartiality, his independence, his ability and willingness to look at every side of a question, his kindness of heart, and his democratic simplicity command the respect of every rank.”

  How Theodore hated being praised to his face. I half expected him to stomp out. His discipline awed me, and scared me a little.

  * * *

  There was a peremptory knock at the door. I answered it myself, as a mark of respect for the office but also for the man. For nigh on a year now, Theodore had stopped by my house most Sundays after church. For a dozen years before that, since he became a civil service commissioner for the forgettable Benjamin Harrison, I had hosted him for the occasional meal or salon.

  It wasn’t Theodore at the door but Princess Alice, dressed in white. Her broad-brimmed hat had more flowers than we had ordered for my Alice’s wedding.

  “Mr. Secretary,” she said, bowing low, in mocking deference. “My good sir, may we enter?” Her father stepped from behind her.

  “Anytime,” I replied.

  Alice helped her father limp up the steps to my doorway. He looked pale, his eyes unfocused. He was trembling.

  We went into the parlor, though it could barely contain them
. Both of the Roosevelts seemed caged. Theodore squirmed in his seat and Alice refused to take one, pacing along the walls, prowling the bookshelves, brushing her fingers across the marble and onyx in the mantel. Clara poured the tea, but I was the only taker. Maybe they feared spilling it, or perhaps they meant to leave soon. I needed to talk with Theodore first.

  “What did you think of the sermon?” Clara said, either from obliviousness or—my guess—from a desire to cut to the core.

  Theodore’s fist pounded the table; the tea tray jumped.

  “I have something I need to discuss,” I said, glancing over at Alice in the corner. She was examining a Japanese vase with a covetous air.

  “What is it?” Theodore said.

  This would have to be in Alice’s hearing. “Henry found something,” I said.

  My tone must have given me away, for the president’s face snapped to attention.

  “What?” he said.

  I told him about the note in the margin, and not without apprehension. Hay > TR! was not the message I hoped to convey. Especially the exclamation point.

  “Who wrote it?” Theodore said, as gruffly as his high pitch would allow.

  “Morgan himself, best we can tell. Though it takes a handwriting expert to confirm it.”

  “Get one,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “And Morgan, too,” Theodore said.

  “What about him?” I said.

  “Ask him.”

  “Ask him what—does he want you dead?”

  “Exactly. As soon as you can. I’ll have Cortelyou arrange it.”

  Alice’s head jerked up. “Father, who wants you dead?”

  Roosevelt chortled. “Everyone,” he said. “Don’t you, Sister?”

  “Oh, Father, don’t joke like that.”

  How sweet, for Alice.

  “And you, Hay?”

  I assumed a falsetto and said, “Oh, Father, don’t joke like that.”