Walter would learn nothing unless he separated himself from those whom Isaak would think his colleagues. He slouched into the chair across the table, keeping as far back as he could to minimize the size difference.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Isaak,” he began in a soft voice. “The Chicago police are unfortunately prone to unprofessionalism.”
A small, mirthless smile formed in the corners of Isaak’s mouth. “On the contrary. I found Captain Hannigan exceedingly professional. Do I take it that you are not from the Chicago police?” Only a trace of an accent was present in his speech. But not German. Farther east.
“You’re Russian?” Walter asked.
“Very good. Yes, although I’ve lived in this country for twenty years.”
“Did you leave because of political reasons or religious ones?”
Isaak cocked his head to one side. “Are you considering writing a monograph on persecution?”
“No. I simply wish to understand you. It will help me to determine if I believe you had no part in this.”
“Why should I care what you believe?”
“I might be able to help you.”
“Oh, yes. I’m certain of that. But you didn’t answer my question. You are not of the Chicago police?”
“No. I’m with the United States Secret Service Division.”
“And your name?”
“Walter George.”
“Ah yes. I read about you. The counterfeiting case. This seems to be out of your bailiwick.”
“We protect the president as well.”
“Not too effectively, judging from recent events.”
“I don’t believe you’re in the position to be flip, Mr. Isaak.”
“Why? Do you think my manner will have any effect on whether or not I am railroaded into prison or to the gallows?”
“Perhaps not. But your candor might.”
“My candor? You certainly make every effort to separate yourself from others in your profession, Mr. . . . George, was it not?”
“Yes. And you didn’t answer my question. Why did you leave Europe? I’ve read how difficult it is for Jewish people in Russia. Was that the reason?”
“It is indeed difficult for Jews in Russia, although that had nothing to do with me.”
“You’ve renounced your faith?”
“Judaism? You assumed I’m a Jew? Like that damn Jew whore Goldman? That’s how it’s generally expressed.”
“With a name like Abraham Isaak, it seemed a reasonable assumption.”
“Reasonable, perhaps, but totally incorrect. As it happens, I was born an Anabaptist. A Mennonite. I don’t suppose you know what a Mennonite is though . . . we’re like the . . .”
“The Amish.”
“Not entirely, but close enough. Both Mennonites and the Amish are pacifists is what I believe you are saying.”
“Yes. Then you have given up your faith.”
“Altered it to fit the circumstances in which I find myself. As you are doing with me now.” Isaak shifted in his chair. The movement made him wince but he seemed angry with himself for showing pain. “And I must say, your performance has been excellent. I cannot remember being questioned by someone so articulate. You seem misplaced in your profession.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t you? Very well. But perhaps we could get to cases.”
Walter nodded. “All right. You told Hannigan that you thought Leon Czolgosz was a police agent. You said you published it in Free Society the week before the president was shot. I looked through the issue. There is only a general warning that your movement has been infiltrated by spies. If you thought Czolgosz was one of them, why not say so?”
“Because we merely had suspicion. Unlike you, we do not accuse people simply on the possibility that they might be an enemy.”
“What was the foundation of your suspicion? If you don’t mind telling me.”
“Not at all. I find it refreshing to talk to a policeman who is not trying to beat the answers out of me.”
“Thank you.”
Isaak blinked. “We suspected Czolgosz was a police agent because of his eagerness.”
“Aren’t all your converts eager?”
“We are not a religion. We don’t have ‘converts.’ But to answer your question, Czolgosz displayed an eagerness well beyond what a normal man would. We assumed that he was either insane or acting for someone else. The latter seemed the more likely prospect.”
“That’s all?”
“No. Subsequently we received . . . information that Czolgosz was not the least bit insane.”
“Information from whom?”
“‘Whom?’ Bravo, Mr. George. We have a wide circle of friends. Wider than I think you would expect. Many supposedly ‘patriotic’ Americans are disgusted at the way this country represses workers, women, Negroes, and even Jews and Mennonites.”
“And your information said that Czolgosz was a put-up. Who was he supposedly working for?”
Isaak shrugged. “I can’t do all your work for you. But someone important.”
“Or perhaps you’re simply trying to deflect suspicion from yourself and your followers. Perhaps you know that, even though the president survived, you’re all probably going to spend the next twenty years in the penitentiary.”
“Prison does not frighten me. Prison is, in fact, quite a fertile landscape. I can work for the betterment of society there as well as anywhere else.”
“Easy to say from out here.”
“No. It isn’t. But ask yourself this, Mr. George. What have we to gain by having one boy, whom most will dismiss as a lunatic, execute a man even as odious as McKinley? The answer is, we gain nothing unless we let the world know that we are the strong right arm of the people and have struck the blow. When Alexander Berkman attacked that pig Henry Frick, no one denied the gesture. Quite the contrary.”
“You didn’t admit the Haymarket.”
“No. For the simple reason that we had nothing to do with it. The Haymarket was a frame-up. As is this.”
“If you are so clever, then, perhaps you might suggest a substitute.”
Isaak gave an exaggerated shrug. “Maybe it was Roosevelt.”
Before he realized what he was doing, Walter had reached across the table and landed a backhanded slap on Isaak’s cheek. Isaak went sailing from his chair.
Walter froze. His fingers suddenly felt thick, inflexible. He could not stop staring, wide-eyed, at the man crumpled on the floor. He had never hit a prisoner before. Never. He wanted to rush and help Isaak up, but he couldn’t move. These were people who wanted to destroy America, he tried to tell himself. Who murdered their enemies. Set bombs to kill the innocent.
But Isaak didn’t need Walter’s help. He pushed himself to his feet lifted the chair off the floor and sat down, again facing Walter across the table. A speck of blood was at the corner of his mouth. Without taking his eyes from his adversary, Isaak removed a small handkerchief from the pocket of his waistcoat. The square of white cloth had several brown blemishes that Walter knew to be dried blood. Isaak slowly and deliberately blotted the corner of his mouth and then, after a brief glance at the newest stain, returned the handkerchief to his pocket.
“Well, Mr. George,” he said evenly, but with a note of triumph, “it seems as if you are not so different from the others after all.”
19
Roosevelt? Ridiculous. There wasn’t a man in America who was more admired. To Walter, and to millions of others, TR was America—brave, resourceful, honorable, willing to achieve great things over enormous odds.
Yes, it might be true that TR and McKinley didn’t like each other very much, but Chester Arthur and James Garfield didn’t much like each other either—and Arthur had been forced on Garfield just like TR had been forced on McKinley—but no one had said after Garfield was shot that Arthur had been behind it. And you don’t have to like someone to work well with them. He had been lucky with Harry, but he when he served in the Dakotas,
he couldn’t stand Colonel Ashcroft but they worked together just fine.
TR. Fuck you, Isaak.
Impossible.
Unless it wasn’t.
It had been there from the first, of course, not as a serious hypothesis, but as a logical possibility, the sort of thing that just rattles around for a little while before being dismissed. If McKinley had been a private citizen, running a business, say, and his second in command wanted the job, when he was shot, the first person everyone would have looked at was the guy with the most to gain. And no man stood more to gain from McKinley’s death than Theodore Roosevelt.
Walter strode away from the Central Station, the permutations playing in his head despite his attempts to banish them. But, as Walter knew all too well, for him, there would be no banishment of a plausible theory until it had been disproved. His mind was simply not made that way. The question would remain. Could the vice president of the United States have truly been responsible for an attempt on the life of the president?
If TR had been behind the plot, the two men who approached Czolgosz and Esther Kolodkin would therefore have been in his employ, or at least in the employ of his agent. And what about Foster and Ireland? Their behavior at the Temple of Music had seemed inexplicable. Harry may not have wanted to hear it, but the pair could not have been more incompetent in their duty than if they had been trying to get McKinley killed. And it didn’t sound like the two men who approached Esther Kolodkin were Foster and Ireland. The descriptions didn’t match—Ireland was fair-skinned with freckles. That meant a wider conspiracy, which fit what they knew. In any case, the aim was clear—to blame the anarchists.
Could Hannigan have been in on the frame-up? Unlikely. No one would trust him with a secret of that magnitude, or of any magnitude actually. But Hannigan would be the perfect dupe. He would cruise around Chicago grabbing up every anarchist that he could find. He would say the right things to the newspapers. There was no need to take someone like that into your confidence. TR’s men—if they were TR’s men—could move about secure in the knowledge that Hannigan, and other Hannigans throughout the nation, would sweep America’s enemies and deposit them in front of judges and juries who would find them guilty if they had been so much as taking a deep breath on September 6. No sane law enforcement official would dare place himself in the path of such a hurtling locomotive.
Almost none, at any rate.
To test the theory, Walter would have to work backward from Smith and Jones, although there would certainly be intermediaries between them and whoever employed them. No one in power—certainly not TR—would have been dumb enough to hire those guys personally.
The swagger the two had demonstrated in Cleveland, almost daring someone to guess who they were, and then cutting off the trail at the telegraph office, certainly sounded like lawmen or Pinkertons. Military? Maybe. Since the Philippines, a lot of army guys had developed swagger. And, of course, TR . . .
Then, of course, there was Wilkie. TR and Wilkie seemed to dislike each other, but in Washington, alliances and allegiances shifted like so many leaves in a breeze. The president didn’t want a witch-hunt, but Wilkie, and Mark Hanna for that matter, expressed no such reservations. But those questions could wait. This was a problem that would need to be solved from the bottom up, not the top down.
And finally, what to do about Harry? Walter could hardly share any of this with him. Harry would think it subversive, to say nothing of half-witted. And Walter wasn’t certain Harry wouldn’t be right. Hell, he wanted Harry to be right. But not to tell Harry was to expose his friend to great risk. A lot more was at stake than their jobs. Yet for the moment, it seemed, Harry would have to proceed in blissful ignorance. Walter wasn’t about to allow Harry to be dragged down with him.
Every scenario has its serendipity, however. In this case, it seemed that the best place for Walter to begin tracing the two provocateurs was with the only person in Chicago known to have seen them. Harry would be furious, of course, but that wasn’t such a bad thing. His possessiveness of Lucinda would prevent him from even beginning to guess the reason for the visit. Or at least one of the reasons.
Walter learned from a cooing Mrs. Freundlich that Natasha taught four blocks away. He wasn’t keen on bursting into a primary school and certainly didn’t fancy interrupting her classes—poor children should get every minute of schooling they could—but an inquiry into the attempted assassination of a president definitely was sufficient cause. As he closed the distance between her rooms and the school, he felt his palms grow sweaty and his breath came in big gulps.
He turned the corner. The school was just up the street. Walter could see a set of double iron doors on his side. But when he arrived at those doors and read the sign over them, he froze. Natasha Kolodkin did not teach in a school. She taught at the St. Catherine of Siena orphanage.
Walter stood, staring at the entrance, unable to will himself to push open the door. He could wait to see Natasha, he decided, until evening, or the next day, or anytime that didn’t require him to set foot inside that building. He tried to turn and leave, but he couldn’t look away from the sign. He began taking small steps backward when the door opened. A nun emerged. She was young, no more than twenty-five, with olive skin, brown eyes, and the air of placidity that comes when one is certain one serves God.
Her first reaction at seeing the immense, gawking, bearded stranger was to draw back as well. She remained in the entryway, unwilling to venture out even a step. After a moment, Walter realized that if he didn’t say something, the sister would duck back into the building and call the police. Then it would all come tumbling down then. Hannigan would probably haul in Natasha, and Harry would be furious for him two-timing Lucinda. Walter forced out some words.
“I’m with the United States Secret Service, ma’am.” His voice sounded scratchy, artificial. “I need to speak with one of your teachers. Lay teachers.”
The nun nodded but her suspicions were not allayed. “You have identification, officer?”
Walter nodded stiffly. He fumbled into his coat and brought out his badge. The sister leaned forward a bit, as to examine it, although from the distance at which she stood, she would have been unable to tell a real badge from a phony.
“Very well,” she said finally, her mouth pinched, “but you’ll need to speak with Mother Superior.”
Walter moved toward the entrance, stiff, his knees hardly bending, but he was unable to lubricate his joints. A few moments later, without being completely aware of how he got there, he found himself standing in the Mother Superior’s outer office. A secretary sat entering information into a large journal, refusing to look up. The inner door opened and another nun walked out.
The Mother Superior was tiny, old, with skin that glowed, almost translucent. She appeared to move within an aura of her own. Walter stared for a moment at the network of greenish-blue veins that ran just under the skin at her temples. When he finally looked to her eyes, he saw they were green, placid, without fear. Sister Ernestine, Mother Superior at St. Marguerite’s, had appeared much the same. She was likely dead by now. Had she taken her guilt to grave?
Walter was jarred when the Mother Superior spoke. “You wish to speak with one of our teachers, officer?” she asked. Her voice barely cleared a whisper, but could have been heard across a room.
“Yes, ma’am. Natasha Kolodkin.”
At the mention of the name, a small beneficent smile passed across the Mother Superior’s face. Small crinkles appeared in the corners of her mouth. “Natasha, yes. She is one of our most treasured possessions. A gift from God. And please call me, Sister Helena, officer.”
A gift from God who doesn’t believe in Him, Walter thought. “Please call me . . . Walter,” he said to the nun.
“This is important, Walter? Enough to interrupt school?”
“Yes, ma’am. It shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.” Walter’s voice sounded to him somehow higher in pitch, a boy’s voice.
Sister H
elena nodded slowly. “Very well. I will take you myself.”
She led him out the door, a tiny nun with the massive man slightly in her wake. Walter, twelve, being led to . . .
A chill permeated the halls, even in early September, but still Walter felt himself perspiring. It began under his arms and around his collar, but he soon felt himself drenched. His heart began to pound sufficiently that he felt the throb in his ears. He could not keep his gaze in one place. He began glancing about furtively. Was there a priest? He took in the location of each staircase and door, in case he was forced to flee. He tapped his forearm against the Colt to make certain it was still there. After a moment, the hall began to sway before him, as if he were looking at it through liquid. The nuns walking the halls glanced at the huge intruder behaving so erratically, but they were too well trained to gape, especially since he was with the Mother Superior.
Finally, they reached a room at the far end of the building. Walter saw a classroom filled with happy-looking urchins, all about eight or ten, who had been scrubbed and dressed to the limits of St. Catherine’s limited resources. As Sister Helena entered the room, he scoured the student population looking for . . . what? Himself?
A moment later, Natasha Kolodkin emerged. The Mother Superior had remained in the room to tend to the children. Natasha was dressed simply, in a blue frock buttoned to the neck. She wore no bonnet or scarf. She stiffened when she saw Walter.
“Is something wrong, Mr. George?”
He shook his head stiffly. “No. But I need to speak with you.”
“Are you ill then?”
Walter shook his head again. “But could we speak outside? The air in here . . .”
She nodded. “Of course.” To Walter’s relief she turned the other way from whence he had come, toward a door at the end of the hall, just a few feet away. The door led to a side street. Once they were outside, Walter began to draw in deep breaths.
Assassin of Shadows Page 12
