“You must be ‘Tough Mike,’” Falconer said slowly as the big man winced in pain. “Well, let me just say, we’re the police, see? And we’re interested in this Emma Goldman lady. We hear she likes to have a drink in your place with the rest of her fellow anarchist types.”
The big man struggled to look up at Falconer as he spoke up in a series of grunts and groans. “I don’t know no Emma Goldman,” he said. “I get lots of women in here, and I don’t know what you mean by this anarchist word.”
“You just remember us, Tough Mike,” Falconer said, tightening his hold on the man’s wrist. “We’ll be back, and I don’t want any funny business out of you or your workers. You see us again, you act like nothing’s wrong—you got it?”
“Ja, ja, I got it, sir,” the man said, grimacing.
“Good,” Falconer said, letting go of the man’s arm. “And thanks for the lemonade. Let’s go, James.”
The two men then slowly walked out of the deathly silent bar and headed down the street to check on Jimmy Halloran at 340 East Fifth Street.
7
Falconer stood inside Byrnes’ office with Waidler, Halloran, McNaught, Clubber Williams, and another unfamiliar police official after a couple of fruitless days of trying to shadow Emma Goldman.
“Falconer,” Byrnes said, pointing to the man, “this is Chief O’Hara of the Pittsburgh police. He’s traveled here to look into some things with us concerning the anarchist attack on Mister Frick.”
“Afternoon, sir,” Falconer said to O’Hara.
“Afternoon, Detective Sergeant Falconer,” O’Hara replied.
“The chief here went out to East Branch over in Jersey yesterday with one of our men,” Byrnes said. “There are indications that a certain Frank Mollick, another anarchist sympathizer who lives and works as a baker out there, was in on the Frick assassination attempt, and sure enough, the chief here uncovered evidence that Mollick wired Berkman six dollars just a couple of days before the shooting. So, he’s likely in on the deal.”
“Understood,” Falconer said.
“Well, it doesn’t end there, Falconer,” Byrnes said, slowly walking around his desk and coming forward. “The chief also found in his search of Mollick’s place a telegram that Miss Goldman had sent to him earlier this month. It was found amongst his papers and is most interesting. Here—take a look.”
Byrnes picked up a small piece of paper on his desk and handed it to Falconer, who slowly scanned the writing on it. It was a typical telegram, short and to the point, and Falconer read it out loud so that his men would know its contents, too: “‘Come as soon as possible, Nothing dangerous. Goldman.’”
He looked up at the superintendent. “Nothing dangerous,” he repeated. “I wonder what that means.”
“Why, in all likelihood, it means that she’s asking him to meet up as part of the conspiracy,” Byrnes said. “She’s sure to be on it, too.”
“I suppose so, sir,” Falconer said, handing the telegram back. “But there could be other meanings to it.”
“Other meanings?” Byrnes said. “What sort of meanings are you referring to?”
“Well, sir, I imagine that you’re aware she’s been talking to the reporters already,” Falconer said. “And she’s denying knowing about the assassination plan—it’s all over the front pages today.”
“Yes, we are aware, Falconer,” Byrnes said, walking back to the chair behind his desk. “So, she’s denying everything—what of it?”
“Well, she was asked by the reporters what the telegram meant,” Falconer said, “and she told them that it simply referred to her attempt to get Mollick back to his apartment because his wife was sick, but not dangerously sick. It seems a reasonable explanation to me, that’s all.”
“It’s clearly a lie,” Byrnes said, “and we need to get some solid evidence tying her to the conspiracy. She’s one of the main Red agitators out there, Falconer, and she was Berkman’s girl. There’s no way that she’s not involved, understand?”
“Yes, sir,” Falconer replied. “We’re trying to get something on her, but she’s shifty. She moves around town quietly and doesn’t slip up. I think she’s a smart one.”
“Well, not smart enough,” Byrnes said. “We’re getting a warrant to search the place on Fifth, and we’ll do that tonight. Can you handle this?”
“Yes, sir,” Falconer answered. “We’ll take care of it.”
“Good,” Byrnes said, sitting down in his chair. “Miss Goldman might be a clever one, but she won’t be so clever when we’re clearing out her drawers of all her anarchist papers tonight. There will be something tying her directly to Berkman and his act—I’m sure of it. See to it that you coordinate the search of the place with Chief O’Hara here, and report back to me.”
“Understood,” Falconer said. He then motioned for Waidler and Halloran to follow him out of the office, and the three men departed.
“Think we’ll find anything in her place, detective sergeant?” Halloran asked as they stood outside the office.
“We’ll see,” Falconer replied, placing his bowler on top of his head. “Let’s meet back here at 8:00 PM and we’ll head over together. I’ll have the warrant ready.”
“Yes, detective sergeant,” Jimmy said.
“Got it,” Waidler answered.
Falconer then turned and headed for the stairs down to the first floor of the large police headquarters building.
8
Falconer stood before the anarchist group’s apartment building at 340 East Fifth Street with Waidler, Halloran, and several other men from the Detective Bureau. In his hand he held a search warrant signed earlier in the day by a judge of the court of general sessions. Looking up and down the block briefly, he saw no one except a lone, wandering drunk, tapping haphazardly on some wrought iron window bars on the ground floor of an apartment house about fifty feet away with a gnarled wooden stick. It was eight-thirty in the evening, and now that the sun had finally set beyond the Hudson River to the west, the oppressive 92-degree heat of the afternoon had finally yielded to a bearable seventy-five degrees.
Falconer motioned for the men to walk around the back of the building with him to where the fire escape rose to the top of the building. “We’ll go in through the back,” he said. “Doesn’t seem like anyone’s home, so we’ll just have to make entry through a window. Let’s go.”
The men walked to the back and a few of them immediately entered an open window on the first floor. Falconer, Halloran, and Waidler followed, edging over the windowsill into a bare kitchen. The place was silent and devoid of people, which pleased Falconer, as it would allow them to avoid a ruckus with Goldman and the Mollick family.
“All right,” he said to the gathered men. “Start looking for anything that might tie these people to Berkman or Mollick. Anything—papers, letters, money—you know the deal.”
The detectives then started to upturn the apartment in a search of evidence of a conspiracy—rifling through drawers, uplifting mattresses, peering into vases—as Falconer walked around the place and took in the surroundings. It was a drab, messy, three-room apartment, and things were strewn about everywhere—newspapers, pamphlets, letters, clothing, discarded vegetables, and dirty plates in the kitchen area—and it looked as if the residents had had many visitors in recent days, as the newspapers had reported.
He looked up on the walls and saw several framed mottoes, all clearly announcing central tenets of the anarchist faith: “Down with Government;” “Law is a Farce;” “Marriage is a Failure.”
Strange folk, these anarchists, he thought.
The men searched the place for the next hour, and then, with bags full of documents, photographs, and literature, they carefully exited the back window again and traipsed back to headquarters as onlookers gaped at them in wonder. Falconer made sure to leave a copy of the signed warrant on the kitchen table before leavi
ng, and on the walk back to Mulberry Street, he pondered the efficacy of the search, for it didn’t appear to him, at least, that they had uncovered anything of note relating to the attack on Frick.
“Well, we sure got a lot of stuff in there,” Halloran pointed out on the walk back to headquarters.
“Yes,” Falconer replied absently. “We’ll have to sift through it all. Maybe there’s something there.”
“I wonder where they were tonight,” Halloran said.
“Who knows?” Falconer answered. “These people seem to move around a lot—they’re really a strange crowd.”
“I’ll say,” Halloran chuckled, and the men continued walking through the breezy nighttime air of the summer evening.
9
“Nothing, you say?” Byrnes inquired from behind his desk at headquarters the day after the police raid of Emma Goldman’s flat on Fifth Street. “No note or letter referencing the attack?”
“That’s correct, sir,” Falconer answered as he stood in front of the desk with his men. “We turned the place upside down, but Miss Goldman didn’t leave anything incriminating in there, unfortunately.”
“Well, that is unfortunate,” Byrnes said, slowly walking away from his desk as he rubbed his chin with his hand. “She must have expected this and burned anything that ties her to the crime. As you’ve said, Falconer, she’s very clever.”
“Indeed,” Falconer said.
“Any idea of her whereabouts today?” Byrnes asked, looking back at Falconer.
“We’ve got some info on another speech she’s giving tonight,” Falconer said, nodding at Waidler.
“Yes, superintendent,” Waidler said, stepping forward. “There’s a meeting of radicals scheduled for tonight at Military Hall on the Bowery. There have been a lot of pamphlets flying around town advertising it as a rally for the working man, and she’s listed on the bill. It should be pretty crowded.”
“I see,” Byrnes said, slowly walking back to his desk. “Well, make sure you men are in attendance, too, and see who she fraternizes with. I want to catch her when she slips up. There’s no telling what this little foreign agitator is cooking up next, but she’s surely up to something. She’s in deep with Berkman and the rest and is probably the leader.”
“Right, sir,” Falconer said. “We’ll check it out.”
“Good, thanks,” Byrnes said. “That will be all, gentlemen.”
The men then shuffled out of the office and headed downstairs to the Detective Bureau.
“I read in the paper today that Goldman’s mad as hell at our search of her place,” Waidler said as the men walked down the stairs. “She’s furious.”
“Oh, well,” Falconer said, “if you don’t want your place searched, don’t go around telling people to burn down the damned government.”
Waidler and Halloran both chuckled and the men continued walking down the stairs past the steady stream of humanity moving up past them in the great headquarters building in the heart of Lower Manhattan.
10
The driver pulled on the horses’ reins and the police wagon bearing Falconer, Waidler, and Halloran stopped in front of Military Hall at 193 Bowery. The three men jumped off as a second wagon pulled up near to them carrying another three plainclothes detectives from the nearby Eldridge Street station.
As the second group of men clambered down from their wagon, Falconer scanned his surroundings. It was evening and a large crowd was slowly moving through the front door of the three-story brick building that stood before them. The temperature had dropped significantly as the sun had gone down, and due to a cool front that had slipped into the city in the past 48 hours, the air was almost pleasant, giving the city’s residents a satisfying break from the suffocating heat of the summer months.
Falconer motioned for the men to gather around him. “All right,” he said amidst the din of the conversing throng stepping into the hall, “we’re obviously not hiding who we are tonight, so wear your badges on your jackets. They know we’re here and why. Just keep to the back of the room and don’t interfere unless you have to. They won’t be happy with us, so just expect that.”
He looked at one of the detectives from the Eldridge Street station, Michael Arndt. “Arndt, are you okay with translating if they start speaking German?”
“Sure thing, detective sergeant,” the detective replied. “I’ll just stand by you so you can hear me.”
“Thanks,” Falconer replied. “They probably won’t speak English because this is largely a German crowd. All right, let’s move in.”
He led the men from the sidewalk up to the front door through the multitude of spectators waiting to get inside the assembly hall. As they pushed through the crowd, some of the people grunted in frustration, but the policemen just ignored their protestations and moved quickly into the place. Stepping inside, they moved to either side of the entrance and stood against the wall as the crowd followed them in.
Falconer looked around the room. It was a long, narrow lecture hall, and at the end, below the dais, was a table where an assemblage of reporters had already taken their seats and pulled out their pencils and notepads. The regular spectators had no chairs, however, and thus, they were forced to simply stand where they could and try to see what was happening up on the dais.
People continued streaming into the hall, and soon the air grew heavy and oppressive in the absence of the cool, evening breezes outside. After another fifteen minutes had elapsed to allow the last of the spectators to enter, a man finally walked up onto the dais and the crowd cheered. He then motioned for them be quiet and spoke.
Waidler turned to Falconer and whispered into his ear. “That’s a fella’ named Dyer Lum,” he said. “Important Red agitator and general troublemaker.”
Falconer nodded and then looked toward the dais to hear what Lum was saying. He was already shouting in English and gesticulating wildly, telling the people how heroic Berkman’s deed in Pittsburgh had been, and how the working men now had to face down their capitalist oppressors like the wounded Henry Frick. Building his exhortation to a crescendo, he raised one hand high in the air and shouted to the wild-eyed and smiling spectators: “When an anarchist like Berkman decided to leave the world, he considered it his duty to take a good Christian like Frick along with him!”
The crowd roared with approval and Lum stepped down from the dais with a host of hands being held out to shake his own. Then, after he had made it to a seat in the front, another man stepped up and took his place at center stage. The crowd cheered heartily for the man who was noticeably tall and sported a very dark beard.
“Who’s this?” Falconer asked Waidler.
“Joseph Peukert,” Waidler answered. “Leader of a certain group of anarchists called the ‘Autonomists.’ Not sure what that means.”
Falconer nodded and turned back to listen to Peukert, but quickly learned that the tall firebrand would be speaking in his native German tongue. As Peukert looked down disapprovingly at the reporters sitting in front, Arndt slipped closer to Falconer and began translating the speech: “This meeting,” he said, “is an expression of approval on the part of the working class of the deed of Berkman. When the working men of Homestead were ground down by the capitalists, one man elected himself the champion of the oppressed classes and tried to liberate them from their slavery, not by shooting Frick, but by showing them where the source of their misery lay. We approve of the act most heartily. You paid vassals of the press cannot stop the wheels of history. The people are awakening, and they will crush you, with those who pay you, these murderers, these robbers, the capitalists. So long as there are people who are starving, there will be a Berkman, and these Berkmans will shoot without any conspiracy.”
The crowd cheered, and then, after Peukert had quieted them, he continued. Falconer listened closely as Arndt continued to translate the words into English. “We are proud of Berkman’s act,�
� Peukert asserted. “We were associated with him and we don’t deny it. The working men must fight and that soon. Hundreds of Berkmans will arise to do their duty. These reporters before me are the people who declare us unwashed and unkempt. We do not wash ourselves because we have to work. When we are through work, we are tired, and we cannot afford to change our shirts twice a day. Now the question is whether we are dirty or you. You have been trained like parrots and are the parasites of capital.”
The spectators erupted into applause once more, and then, after taking a long bow, Peukert walked down the steps to his chair near the other speakers. Falconer and the men next heard from an Italian anarchist doctor by the name of Merlino, who struggled through broken English to decry in a wild and frenzied speech the crimes of the capitalists and the promise of approaching revolution.
After the doctor at length composed himself and sat down to the cheers of the assembled workers, Emma Goldman then finally ascended the stairs. Falconer peered intently at her as she walked slowly to the center of the dais and looked down at the clapping spectators with a stern and almost reproachful look on her face. Her brown hair was pulled back into a bun, and her large, bright, blue eyes glared behind her silver pince-nez spectacles, giving her the appearance of an unpleasant schoolmarm displeased with her pupils. He was surprised at her tiny frame and wondered how such a petite creature could have instilled such fear and worry in the authorities. But here she was—the woman who was considered a prime danger to the country and possibly even a terror mastermind—in league perhaps with countless unnamed bomb throwers and secret assassins bent on tearing down the government and the existing capitalist structure of society.
Falconer reached into his jacket and pulled out a cigarillo as the applause continued. Lighting it, he noticed that Goldman’s intense gaze now appeared to be settling directly on him and his men standing against the back wall near the entrance to the hall. For a moment, despite the distance that separated them, he almost felt that their eyes met, and he felt strangely uncomfortable. Then, still seemingly staring at him, Goldman finally spoke to the people: “Comrades, I would warn you to be quiet in this hall tonight, for it happens to be filled with detectives who want to raise a row and kill the speakers.”
The Fall Page 3
