The Attempted Murder of Teddy Roosevelt Read online

  “Certainly, sir,” she said. “May I help you?”

  “An apple, please.” The politeness was also my mother’s doing.

  I tossed a penny on the counter. I figured the apple could always serve as a weapon, and the purchase gave me standing as a customer to state again, “Back door!”

  The disapproving look recurred, but she pointed past the displays of cheeses and beef at the rear.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I skedaddled past the woven curtain and through the storeroom with boxes piled high. There was a door at the end, on the right. I worried that it might be locked and that, by the time I returned to the front, the store would swarm with policemen. Possibly to my advantage, but I would rather arrive at Pierpont Morgan’s premises alone, preferably without manacles. I pulled on the sturdy metal door—and it creaked open.

  I darted out into the daylight, onto Liberty street. I glanced back toward Broadway and saw no one I wished not to see. I fled in the opposite direction, at a New Yorker’s fleet but unexceptional pace. At the corner, I turned right onto Nassau street, heading south. I was entering the realm of money, no subtlety about it. The names carved over the doorway betrayed their temporal concerns. Bank of Commerce, the Equitable Building, the Western National Bank. Now I crossed Pine street. Hanover National Bank. Buildings needn’t be nineteen stories to exceed human scale. That was New York: the loss of human scale. The slabs of marble or steel or limestone made me feel small, as they were meant to.

  I kept glancing behind me as I hurried along. My pursuer was gone. I took a bite of the apple. It was crunchy and sweet.

  I reached Wall street. The buildings were slathered with enough Greek pillars for a heathen temple. On the far corner, straight ahead, the New York Stock Exchange embodied solemnity and self-regard—deserved, no doubt, now that Wall street rivaled the City of London in financing the world. Facing the stock exchange stood 23 Wall street, the marble fortress of J. P. Morgan & Company. Well, almost facing—from its catty-cornered entrance, more like a sideways glance. An apt metaphor for how this brusque and willful genius had leveraged his millions to gain control of any industry that needed a hand.

  No corporate name decorated the exterior; none was needed. I pushed on the heavy brass door, which swung ajar with no help from me. I stepped through, into the cool of a mausoleum.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hay.” I jumped back and felt for my derringer; my apple dropped to the floor.

  It was the man who had chased me.

  “I hoped to catch you on the street,” he was saying, “but I must have lost you in the crowd. Mr. Morgan has been delayed. He should not be much longer. If you would be kind enough to wait.”

  My erstwhile pursuer was horrified when I asked for a New York World instead of the highbrow Sun or the stodgier Times. I chose it because of Nellie Bly—the World was still as lively as she was. A drawing of the locomotive whose boiler exploded in Pennsylvania. The millionaire’s son who posed as a tramp. Mrs. William Rockefeller overruling her husband to let baseball nines play on their Greenwich, Connecticut, estate. Digging the city’s subway tunnels, three-fifths completed, had cost twenty-four lives so far. Christy Mathewson won’t deny rumors he might jump from the National League’s Giants to the fledgling American League. A letter to the editor championed pineapple juice as a medicine for indigestion—“the pure juice … only, never swallow the pulp.”

  The absence of serious news was giving me a bellyache, and then I was summoned from my uncomfortable chair in the lobby. I will remember the ancient elevator until my dying day. It felt like a coffin, lacking silk frills but fashioned of finely carved walnut, the brass fittings as polished as an admiral’s buttons, as stately as the Union League’s hearths. A casket for three, counting the white-haired operator and my nursemaid.

  We emerged on the top floor and I was startled to see the great man himself, behind a glass wall, in his wood-paneled office. He sat in a swivel chair behind his rolltop desk, dictating to a fast-scribbling young man who was as handsome as Morgan was ugly. Any of his subordinates lucky enough to work up here could see him—and he could see them.

  I was left standing with my nose to the glass, and I studied the man I had come to question. He was ugly. The famous nose, of course, misshapen like an Asian fruit. (Most of the photographs touched it up, taming its size and bulbousness.) But it wasn’t his nose so much as the shape of his head. It was bottom-heavy, as if the formidable brow had sunk over the decades, compressing his face and puffing his jowls. Beneath the aggressive mustache, his thick lips snarled.

  When the letter was finished and the young man had left, I was audacious enough to step inside. Morgan ignored me while he read, reread, and signed a letter on his desk, all the while chewing on a fat black cigar. He wore a stiff collar and a frock coat. He looked up, half stood, held out a pugilist’s thick hand that enveloped mine. His gray eyes latched onto my own and would not let go. He nodded me into the abandoned seat and said, “Well?”

  This would not be easy.

  I saw no point in small talk. I opened my valise and slid out the thin cardboard, folded over. Inside was Morgan’s letter to Hill, the one Henry had found and Wilkie had returned with admirable dispatch. I asked him to be careful not to touch the letter itself. I made sure he pressed his fingers into the cardboard.

  “Did you write this?” I said.

  Morgan glanced over it and replied in a foghorn voice, “What if I did?”

  “If you would kindly read the note in the margin.”

  Morgan’s eyes blazed. “I did,” he said.

  “You wrote it?”

  “So?”

  How could I answer without explaining too much? “Is it true, then, that you would prefer … someone else as president?”

  “Just about anyone,” Morgan said, his gray eyes narrowing into points. “Except that jackass Bryan.”

  “Including me?” I said.

  “Anyone.”

  “So your note in the margin here…”

  “Is a statement of fact. How did you get this?”

  Now what? Do I accuse the most powerful man in America of trying to murder the president, without a shred of evidence beyond wanting him gone? Not a winning tactic. The Morgans and the Roosevelts went way back. Their fathers were friends, and Theodore (after some urging) had named Morgan’s son as a special attaché to King Edward VII’s coronation.

  “Did Jack enjoy London?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  Thus ended my attack at his flank. Morgan was not a bush I could beat around, and I needed to be careful. “This preference of yours,” I said. “Would you”—the subjunctive to the rescue—“ever take action to make it come to pass?”

  Morgan’s brow expanded and his mighty mustache bristled. He half rose—he was a big man—and leaned over me.

  “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “Money.”

  “What? I’m not asking for … Money for what? You think I’m trying to bribe you?”

  “Is that what you call it? Hanna called it a donation to make America greater.”

  It dawned on me what Morgan meant, and I burst out laughing. Morgan looked offended. He did not like to be laughed at. (Who did?)

  “I am not running for anything,” I assured him. “I don’t even want the job.” Each time I said this, I was a smidgen less sure it was true.

  “What do you want?” Morgan said. “And how did you get this?”

  Two good questions. I wanted to know if he had had a hand in trying to murder President Roosevelt or if he knew anyone who did. But on its face, the question somehow seemed silly—more precisely, far-fetched. I could ask him and search his face for a glimmer of … what?

  The second question was easier, and I mentioned the materials that Northern Securities had filed with the court. Then I tackled the first question. “The accident in Pittsfield,” I said. “We are not certain it was an accident.”

  No reply except a blan
k look, possibly one he had mastered.

  “It might have been an attempt on the president’s life,” I said.

  A pause. “So?”

  I nodded toward the letter on his desk.

  Morgan sat upright. Then he laughed. A high-pitched cackle. I had never heard it before, nor imagined it. A horrible sound. Once it ended I would not have sworn it had happened.

  “Ask the man who sent you,” Morgan said, then turned his attention to the stack of correspondence on his desk. I sat for a moment. Before I felt my dignity begin to erode, I retrieved the letter and the cardboard and took my leave. No nursemaid was in sight.

  * * *

  Ask the man who sent you.

  What in the hell did that mean? Theodore had sent me. Ask Theodore about an attempt on his life? He would be the last to know. Wouldn’t he?

  The train was rumbling past the truck farms of New Jersey. In the late afternoon sunlight, bales of hay dotted the honey-colored fields. I watched with a scotch in hand, as I sank into the plush vermillion chair. The evening papers sat unread on the elaborately carved ebony table.

  Ask the man who sent you. Maybe Morgan had meant nothing at all, merely a cryptic comment to mark my dismissal. Unlikely. Morgan’s words were few, and never extraneous. All right. I’ll ask Roosevelt. But ask him what?

  Or Hanna. Hadn’t he hounded Morgan for money to make himself president, and hadn’t Turtle planned to meet with him, too? I needed to question him again. Or Cortelyou. Yes! This whole endeavor had been his idea. Maybe that’s what Morgan meant. But how on earth would Morgan know? Maybe he hoped to smear him before Cortelyou became the inaugural secretary of commerce and labor. But in that case, why not be blunt? Because he had no evidence to offer? Still, I needed to chat with Cortelyou, preferably in a way that kept my purpose masked. Not easy; the man was shrewd.

  Then I thought of a way.

  I sat back and bolstered my scotch and pulled The Hound of the Baskervilles from my valise. The cover, a red threaded in gold, nearly matched the color of my seat.

  I had left Dr. Watson puzzling about the strange silhouette on the moor, and meanwhile a clue turned up regarding Sir Charles Baskerville’s mysterious death. Dr. Watson learned of a partially burned letter, signed “L. L.,” inviting Sir Charles to meet at ten p.m. by the gate to the moor. Laura Lyons, for that was her name, claimed she never kept the appointment. Her story rang true, and Dr. Watson’s questions couldn’t shake it, so he had to figure she was telling the truth.

  Oh Lord, I knew how he felt. If Pierpont Morgan was telling the truth … And I had to figure he was. Because of who he was, in part. And because of something he had misunderstood—that I was seeking a campaign donation, not a bribe. There was something else, too, and I had known it all along: If Pierpontifex Maximus wanted someone killed, would he rely on a trolley motorman in Pittsfield to do the deed? The very notion was absurd.

  But where, exactly, did this leave me? Approximately where I had started, that’s where. What did I know? That Big Billy Craig, the president’s bodyguard, was dead. That the president might have been killed but wasn’t. That someone had murdered William Turtle at the Willard Hotel—and it wasn’t me, no matter what the police wanted to think. That Turtle knew something about the collision in Pittsfield—proof that it wasn’t an accident! He apparently planned to tell Theodore, Mark Hanna, and me, the latter two having the most to gain from the president’s demise.

  What else did I know? Not a lot. A damn muddle, it was. The trolley might or might not have been hurtling down Howard’s Hill and might or might not have stopped in time. The motorman, who might or might not have harbored anarchistic feelings, had come into a three-thousand-dollar windfall of dubious provenance. Despising the president did not necessarily mean wanting to murder him, although it helped. If Pierpont Morgan tried to kill a president, he would do it in a way no one would ever detect. But by way of a trolley collision in Pittsfield?

  All right, I knew next to nothing. What did I suspect? That Cortelyou should not be trusted but was most unlikely to put himself—or Theodore, his patron saint, his golden goose—in danger. That Euclid Madden, the motorman, needed money for his family and presumably would do whatever he must.

  Or maybe it was an accident, and nothing more. This is what I wanted to believe. Collisions occurred every day, didn’t they? Two facts, however, stood in the way. Fact one: a man had attacked me in the center of Pittsfield and knew my name. Not to mention fact two: William Turtle had been murdered before my eyes.

  I stared out the window into the darkness and then napped through Delaware.

  * * *

  The naphtha lamps around Lafayette Square barely dented the darkness. I returned the glare of the Secret Service man—he was a new one—with a genial smile. It didn’t fool him. He had no intention of letting me in or, certainly, of awakening the president.

  “But he is awake,” I protested. “His light is on.” I pointed to the third floor, although I had no idea whether Theodore slept in the front or the back.

  “Wait,” he ordered, and went inside. A lock clicked.

  I stood on the sidewalk, cooling my heels—literally. My pocket watch said twenty minutes past ten. The night had a chill; leaves rustled in the park. I felt autumn in the air.

  The lock clicked open and the bodyguard stepped outside. He looked too young for the incipient fissures from his nostrils to the corners of his grim mouth. He withheld the courtesy of words as he invited me inside.

  Theodore was waiting for me in his bedroom, at the back of the house. His study, at the front, was also lit.

  “I was thinking of a book,” he said, pacing by the fireplace in his blue-and-white-striped dressing gown. “Writing one, I mean.”

  “About what?”

  “Wilderness. The one out there”—he swept his arm in the general direction of the continent—“and the one inside our souls. And the connection between the two.” With an intent look, he examined my face for a reaction.

  I had none, other than amazement. How could any one man find the time? I had little doubt he could accomplish it. He had written a baker’s dozen books already—and effortlessly, best I could tell—which, as an occasional author myself, drove me wild with envy. Still, this wasn’t the same as studying law while vice president. Didn’t he have a country to run? And a family? Alice alone was more than a part-time job.

  “Sounds fascinating,” I said, which it did.

  “Thank you,” he said. “I was writing.”

  “I will be quick, then. Mr. Morgan had nothing to do with the … collision. I am convinced of it.”

  “He told you this?”

  “He didn’t have to. He just laughed.”

  Theodore sat on the edge of the bed and nodded. He understood.

  I also told him that Mark Hanna had been to Wall street, begging for donations to a presidential campaign.

  No look of surprise or concern. “Anything else?” he said.

  I thought about mentioning Morgan’s assumption that I was doing the same, but I decided that no president—no politician—would be amused.

  “No,” I replied, and bid him a productive evening. A day had only twenty-four hours, and I appreciated a few minutes of his.

  The bodyguard was gone from the porch—even the soberest of men had physical needs—when I took my departure. The air felt fresh, but I was tired and more than ready to get home. To Clara. Waiting up for me, I hoped. I had told no one but Clara and Alvey Adee when I’d be home.

  I crossed Jackson Place and ambled along the edge of the park. Branches reached over the sidewalk like eaves; shrubbery intruded. The valise felt heavy on my shoulder. The lamps crackled, or was that the crickets? I thought I heard voices behind the trees.

  Maybe I should have left Theodore alone until morning. The little I had learned could have waited. Though he had seemed not to mind. Wilderness? Well, no accounting for taste. Give me civilization—vaudeville, the Edison cylinder, a smooth scotch, a moving pi
cture—any day of the week.

  I was nearing H street, watching the lights in Henry’s windows, when I heard the scrape of footsteps behind me. Suddenly, the crook of a left arm wrapped around my neck, and a blade, sharp and hard, touched the right side of my throat. A body taller than mine squeezed from behind. The hot breath in my ear smelled of cheap rye.

  “Tol’ ya, Hay, drop it, ya fuck”—a nasal, nasty voice—“or Lovey gets hurt.”

  I started to say something—I wasn’t sure what, but it was bound to be clever—when I felt a scratch on my throat and then a push from behind. I went sprawling. The herringbone brick sidewalk stopped me. It struck my hands, not my face, I am relieved to report, or I might not be telling you this tale.

  Footsteps scampered away, although in my mind I imagined them to be loping. All I could feel was a chill and a craving to sleep.

  * * *

  “Nothing was stolen,” I insisted. “Why on earth should I bother the police?”

  “You were the victim of a crime,” Clara said. She was propped up in our four-poster bed. The room was decorated in Clara’s taste, in pastels and flutters of fabric, but I had stopped noticing it years before. “You were stabbed. With a knife.”

  “Not stabbed. Sliced.”

  “Forgive me—sliced. You are a man of words. Is it still warm?”

  I was lying beside her as she pointed to the gauze at my throat. The compress had grown chilly, but it hurt to shake my head. I didn’t need to. She pulled the pinkish compress away and wetted another one. “See a doctor, at least,” she said.

  “It’s nothing,” I said. “We’ll talk about it to-morrow.” I reached under the fringed silk shade and switched off the electric lamp.

  Clara fell asleep, but I lay awake, listening over and over. Or Lovey gets hurt. The voice was gruff, exaggeratedly so. Or Lovey gets hurt.

  Only one person had I ever called Lovey, and no one else knew it—or so I had thought. Only Lizzie Cameron and me.