“It was a time of great change, Daniel. A time of industrialization where there was little for an ambitious fifteen-year-old to do in a small village in Tsarist Lithuania except plow fields behind slow horses.”
Ambition was in the cities. Tadeusz went to the city to work in a foundry and send money home. But to learn, also, that he worked twelve hours a day, six days a week, to produce goods the tsar and the princes and the counts and the industrialists would sell for far more than they paid to have them made, and would therefore become rich and live good lives. To learn, in the words of the great president of the United States of America, Abraham Lincoln, that tyranny was when one man said to another, “You toil to produce the food, and I’ll eat it,” and that he, Tadeusz, and his fellow workers, were not among those who would eat the food.
Tadeusz read Marx and Engels, Bakunin and Blanqui, and learned that a poor man alone is powerless, strength comes from community. He learned, too, that the tsar, the princes, the counts, and the industrialists did not like those who worked for them to have such knowledge. In fact, the tsar hated that more than he hated the Poles, the Polish princes hated it more than they hated the Russians, the Lithuanian counts hated it more than they hated the Poles and the Russians, and all of them hated it even more than they hated the Jews. So they sent the Cossacks—the Cossacks still hated everyone, and it made no difference to them whose heads they broke as long as they were well paid.
Tadeusz Jan was beaten many times and thrown in jail more times. There was persecution, unemployment, prison, hunger, and little work for a militant socialist. So when his time for service in the tsar’s army neared, Tadeusz decided to go to the land of the great Abraham Lincoln, where everything would be better.
Alas, by then he spoke Polish, Russian, and some German, but no English, and there was no foundry work for even a skilled man without English. The only work was unskilled piecework in a sweatshop. Except that Tadeusz had one other skill—he knew how to work with horses—and English was not needed to talk to horses, or to muck out stables. A young Russian he met on the ship found him a job at the racetrack out in the healthy sea air of Sheepshead Bay in the city of Brooklyn.
He had been at the track three months when Colin “Condor” Cameron was found dying inside a horse stall in one of the stables where Tadeusz worked. A mighty outcry arose throughout the cities of Brooklyn and New York. Cameron was a rich and honored sportsman and public servant from distant California whose early vision and toil helped build the railroad from coast to coast and thus made the country a single nation where the goods of the fertile but distant West could be sold in the populous East for the benefit of all.
It was not immediately clear how the high-roller met his end, the horse in the fatal stall having panicked and trampled on him in a hundred places. However, in the opinion of the racetrack physician the injuries from the horse were inflicted after death, especially since the horse was a stallion often ridden by Cameron, and would not have been panicked by the presence of the sportsman alone.
An autopsy had to be performed, but the members of the Coney Island Jockey Club, the socialites and industrialists with hotels in the resort and horses at the track, and the local political authorities led by police chief John J. McKane, had no need to wait. They knew the murderer—Tadeusz Jan Fortunowski.
The circumstantial evidence against Tadeusz was, for the end of the nineteenth century, strong, convincing, and alarming to both the authorities and the public. “He had come to America, your grandfather, expecting a land of Abraham Lincolns,” my stepgrandmother told me in the living room of the Seventh Street tenement. “When he found only another land of tsars and princes, with the same wealth and power, and the same castles on the hills, it was a great shock. A great sadness, and a great anger. He was a man of, how do you say in English, Integrität?”
“Integrity, Grandma?”
“Ja, integrity. Tadeusz had not come to America to be silent.”
Tadeusz tried to form a union among the stable hands and exercise boys. He made speeches, fought McKane’s private police, was beaten and jailed. But the immigrant stable hands and exercise boys in Sheepshead Bay still dreamed of stealing their own kingdoms in this rich new land, so few responded.
Tadeusz was good at his work, and had failed in his organization attempt, so he was still employed at the racetrack when Condor Cameron was murdered. He was a dangerous anarchist, an agitator, a criminal. He had defied the police and politicians. He had been seen arguing with Cameron inside the stable only an hour before the dying man was discovered, was there working, or hiding many said, in another stall after the murder, and was carrying a knife.
In 1893, forensic science was barely in its infancy. Foreigners, anarchists, and the defiant poor were looked upon with suspicion by the higher classes, the police who worked for them, and the native-born masses. Tadeusz was arrested on the spot, and all but convicted and sentenced. The autopsy revealed conclusively that Cameron had not been killed by the horse, and was the final proof of Tadeusz’s guilt.
That the autopsy also showed the businessman and politician had not died from a knife wound, but had been shot from close range, meant nothing. A foreign agitator always had a pistol, everyone knew that. That no pistol was found was dismissed. Everyone knew that anarchists were cunning in covering their tracks. Who else could have, or would have, done it? Cameron had no known enemies, was unmarried, had retired from all public service, was liked by everyone at the track, had never failed to promptly pay a lost wager or debt, and was openly generous to all his women, employees, and servants. Even his last words, as reported by the two exercise boys who found him minutes before he died, seemed to damn Tadeusz.
“When we found him, sir,” one exercise boy told Chief McKane, “he whispered something about ‘our wars,’ or maybe ‘our laws.’”
The other chimed in eagerly, “I heard ‘our straws’ or maybe ‘our shores,’ sir.”
Who else at the track that day was known to have defied the laws of the state and city? Or carried bales of straw into the stables? Or had recently arrived on our shores? That Tadeusz claimed he had been sent on an errand to another stable at the time he was “seen” arguing with Cameron, and did not return before Cameron was dead, was greeted with scorn, since everyone connected to Cameron’s stable vigorously denied sending him on any errand.
“This,” Tadeusz’s widow told his grandson in the dim living room of the railroad flat on Seventh Street, “was when the man came to Tadeusz.”
“What man, Grandma?”
“Your grandfather never knew his name. An Englishman with rapid speech and not-very-good German. The man who saved him.”
“Saved Grandpa? Was he a detective?” I suppose I had already begun to think of being a policeman like my father.
“Tadeusz wondered that too, but if so, he was a very strange detective. This was all long before I met Tadeusz, but he had never forgotten the Englishman.” She had a faraway expression in her eyes. “A tall man, he told me, over six feet, and so very thin he looked much taller. But it was his eyes Tadeusz remembered most. They were alight, on fire, and seemed to burn through Tadeusz like red-hot knives cutting their way to the truth. An eagle searching for prey, Tadeusz said, with his thin, hawklike nose and strong, determined chin.”
The faraway expression turned sad. “Tadeusz was in the jail of the chief McKane when the Englishman came to see him. At first Tadeusz was afraid. The man was dressed as all the rich men who owned the horses at the racetrack dressed. In a high gray hat and white shirt with cravat, a long gray coat, gray trousers, and low gray boots. Like the princes and counts at home.”
Without preamble or explanation, the Englishman commanded in his poor German, “Tell me everything you recall from the day of the murder, young man.”
“Why?” Tadeusz retorted. “Who are you? How did you get in to see me?”
The Englishman smiled. “So, you do not grovel and beg, eh? Capital! My instincts are correct. I believe
you to be innocent, young man. I have been in the stable and the stall, and there are indications, but we have little time. This man McKane, and the late Condor Cameron’s cronies, want your head as soon as possible. The murder is bad for business, and you are branded a most dangerous agitator. So, it does not matter who I am, I travel incognito for the time being. As for being here, let us say I have powerful friends. Now, everything you remember, and quickly.”
Tadeusz felt a sudden wave of hopelessness. “But I remember nothing.”
“Nonsense! You remember, but you do not know you remember. Describe your actions that day. Everything. Leave nothing out. From the beginning.”
Tadeusz, who was by nature bold and skeptical, said, “I opened my eyes, and when they were accustomed to the dark, saw that I was in my room in the tenement. I yawned, and got out of bed. I scratched, splashed water on my face, rubbed my teeth with salt water, and—”
“Is the tenement in the city of New York, or the city of Brooklyn?” the Englishman interrupted.
That was when Tadeusz realized the Englishman knew exactly what he was doing. He knew that Tadeusz was mocking him, but did not care, because every unimportant detail was precisely what he wanted.
“Brooklyn, sir,” Tadeusz said, a small hope beginning inside him. “But not in Sheepshead Bay. It is too expensive. A place for the rich.”
The Englishman said drily, “Yes, young man, it is. But I suggest you refrain from such comments for the time being. We do not want your accusers to become so incensed they proceed against you despite proof of your innocence. Now, continue your narration. Did anything unusual occur before you left your room?”
“No, noth—.” Tadeusz blinked. “No, not before, but when I left. A man—”
“Was on the street,” the Englishman interrupted again. “A man doing nothing when all others were hurrying to work.”
Tadeusz was astonished. “Ye … yes, sir. Leaning against a wall across from the tenement. He was near the streetlamp, and I noticed him.”
The tall Englishman nodded grimly. “It is as I thought. This was no spur-of-the-moment crime, but one well planned. Did you see the man’s face?”
“No, sir. He had his cap pulled low and stood in shadow.”
“Yes, he would have. Go on!”
Tadeusz had ridden the steam train to the racetrack by the sea. He had not seen the lurking man again. Once at the track he mucked five stalls, spread fresh straw, and rubbed down three of Condor Cameron’s horses after their morning exercise. At that point Tadeusz took a short break, sitting in the sun outside the stable and breathing the sea air, when a stable hand he had never seen ran up to tell him Mr. Cameron’s trainer wanted him to go to a distant stable with some tack. He was gone over an hour, and soon after he returned and resumed cleaning the stalls in his stable, the dying Cameron was found by the two exercise boys.
“Of course. That would be the way it happened,” the Englishman exclaimed. He whirled toward the door at the end of the hallway. “Be of good heart, young man. I shall return soon with the key to your predicament, and to your cell.”
Then he was gone.
Tadeusz waited a whole day. Alone in his cell, food shoved in from time to time without a word, he was overcome by despair. What could the Englishman do to help him? Was he not also a foreigner whom Boss McKane and the rich men would laugh at? The Englishman was mad, escaped from some asylum.
Darkness fell, and Tadeusz lay on his straw pallet, his eyes closed against the feeble light from the stone corridor outside the cell, fighting his fear. But he was young, strong of will, with the optimism of youth that had not yet been beaten down by the weight of poverty and injustice, and he soon fell asleep.
“Tadeusz!”
Tadeusz’s eyes snapped open, his hand reached swiftly for his knife. Then it all flooded back. He was in jail, his knife taken, and … a man he had never seen before was staring down and vigorously shaking him. The man wore a cheap suit, soiled and ill-fitting, with the trousers held up by a length of rope threaded through the belt loops. His jacket torn and mud-spattered, his wrinkled shirt collarless, a rough cap jammed on his ragged hair and pulled low to his eyes. Stocky and hunched like someone who had worked all his life in the fields. A broad face and thick nose.
Tadeusz sat up, his fists clenched, and cried in German, “Stand away! What do you—?”
“Collect yourself, confound you. There is little time!”
Tadeusz stared. “Engländer? Englishman?”
“Come quickly, our bird may even now be on the wing!”
Tadeusz stared. Before his eyes the hunched and filthy laborer seemed to change like flowing liquid into the tall, bone-thin English gentleman with the flaming eyes that burned now like the soaring eagle who saw his prey below. Only the thick, coarse face and shabby clothing remained in grotesque contrast.
Tadeusz snatched up his jacket, flopped his hat onto his uncombed hair, and followed as the Englishman hurried to the open cell door. Only then did Tadeusz see that they were not alone. Another man waited outside the cell. A well-dressed, heavyset man with a solid gold watch chain across his broad expanse of ample belly and waistcoat, who scowled at both Tadeusz and the Englishman. Chief John J. McKane himself!
There could be only one reason McKane was there. It was all a ruse!
Tadeusz had heard of such murderous tricks perpetrated by the Cheka, the dreaded Russian secret police, to silence dissidents without anyone knowing, not even the poor wretch’s family. They simply ceased to exist, disappeared. They were going to murder him!
Blindly, Tadeusz hurled himself forward to escape.
And found himself held as if by some invisible wall in the amazingly strong grip of the tall Englishman. “Calm yourself, Tadeusz. You have misunderstood, though I commend both your instincts and your speed of reaction. McKane is here only to be shown his error, much as he does not want to listen or believe.”
Tadeusz could only stare at the glowering self-appointed police chief and political boss, and stammer, “ … but … but …”
McKane growled at the Englishman, “You can show me nothing. You might fool Mr. Vanderbilt and Diamond Jim, but you don’t fool me. I am a policeman, and the facts are clear. That anarchist is the murderer, and he’ll swing for certain.”
“Your so-called facts are as worthless as your knowledge of your own profession. The guilty no longer ‘swing,’ as you so colorfully put it, in the state of New York, but are executed in the new electric chair, where I confidently predict you will end your corrupt life someday. Now, step out of the way, sir, and we shall complete our business.”
McKane snarled something unintelligible, but stepped aside and followed Tadeusz and the Englishman out of the jail to where ten uniformed policemen waited beside two large carriages.
McKane chose to ride on the outside driver’s seat from where he could coordinate his men, and the two carriages raced through the growing light of dawn. Alone in the cab with Tadeusz, the Englishman explained that connections at home among the high-and-mighty, which included the Prince of Wales and the American daughter of the man who had been the leading figure in building the Sheepshead Bay racetrack, had forced McKane to listen to him.
“But where are we going?”
“To expose the true murderer, young man. If we are not too late.” And the Englishman leaned out of the cab window. “Faster, faster!”
With the Englishman’s continued exhortations, they soon arrived on a dark street in sight of the river and New York across it. Rows of shabby tenements lined the street on both sides, and the Englishman commanded the carriage to stop. Leaping out, he exclaimed to McKane, “Place three of your men front and rear, and instruct them to hold anyone who attempts to leave this building. Everyone else, follow me!”
With that, the Englishman rushed in through the unlocked front vestibule door, and, climbing as swiftly as a jungle cat, finally stopped at a door on the third floor, a long, thin finger to his lips.
“If you
would have your men break down the door, Chief McKane, we will all enter. But be swift and sure, our quarry is a man of high caution, great skill with a pistol, and stout heart. He will not be surprised long, nor taken easily. I only pray he is still inside.”
The four uniformed policemen formed on either side of the battering ram they had brought with them, and charged the door. It exploded in a shattering of splintered and torn wood, and they were in, the tall Englishman in the lead, his nostrils flaring and his eyes flashing like those of the lead hound who smells the fox to be near. Tadeusz came close behind, seeing his possible salvation ahead, with the policemen spreading out behind him and Chief McKane judiciously the last to enter.
Indistinct in the gloom of the early-dawn light from the single window, a shape streaked through the windowless middle rooms toward the kitchen at the rear of the narrow railroad flat. At an unexpected second door in the kitchen, the figure spun sharply and two shots ripped the air in rapid succession. A policeman cried out and clutched his right arm, his pistol falling to the floor. The tall Englishman grunted and stumbled against the kitchen table, holding to the top to keep from falling.
Two shots, two hits, and Tadeusz knew better than to hesitate a split second as he charged on into the man before he could fire again. The impact knocked the man’s pistol away, but Tadeusz found himself gripped as if by some great bear and flung to the floor. In an instant, the man had the door open and was almost through when a single shot rang out. The fleeing man stumbled, slowed, and the remaining three policemen swarmed him to the floor in a narrow corridor that led to an equally narrow flight of stairs up to the roof.
“Hold him fast,” the tall Englishman warned, still bracing himself on the table, his revolver in his hand. “He is clever, and a wizard with a pistol.”
Sherlock Holmes: The Hidden Years Page 41
