by Kim Newman
A commotion was running through the crowd. Parker thought it was because of his impolite and bleeding presence, but it was the news, fresh from the street and spreading...
"Wilson's been shot, killed..."
Cross smiled wider, a skull in a silk hat.
"You did well," he said.
"There was a gunfight with the police. Six men dead or injured..."
"...but you weren't to come here."
Cross stood up, and, child-woman on his arm, walked away. He slipped the attendant a hundred dollar bill.
Parker saw the crowds making way for the President. Kane shambled like an old steer, surrounded by boiled-shirt bully boys. He had learned a lesson from Teddy Roosevelt, and no one was going to get close enough to plug him.
Kane received the news. Parker didn't need to hear it. He could still remember the candidate's look as the bullets went into his lungs, cutting short his call for a congressional inquiry into Kane's conduct of the War. The President nodded briefly, and made up a speech of tribute on the spot. Cross edged away from Kane long enough not to be in any of the pictures the newsman from the Inquirer was taking.
Everyone flowed out of the foyer, and left Parker behind, unnoticed. The gunshots got louder, then stopped...
*
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
Monday, February 5th, 1917.
Courtroom 1, Foley Square Courthouse, New York City.
The accused could not stop smiling, although Reed assumed he must be in a blue funk. If anyone was living on borrowed time, it was Private Edward Bartlett. He had come through the worst bloodbath of the War, and narrowly escaped summary execution without benefit of court martial —only a general mutiny, a strike-like downing-of-tools by his comrades had prevented the carrying-out of that order—and now, back in the States, he was having to be ferried to and from the court by armed guards lest some patriotic citizen try to cheat the firing squad. To Reed, and to many others, there was no greater hero in the United States Armed Forces than Eddie Bartlett.
Judge Royston Bean, past ninety and proud of his frontier reputation, looked like a bronzed cigar store Indian on the bench. The rumour was that he still wore guns under his robes. For the prosecution, Attorney General Ransom K. Stoddard had retained society lawyer Randolph Mason, usually the elegant ornament of libel suits and divorce actions. For the defence, Clarence Darrow was quietly magisterial, weighed down with the concerns of the case, but still sharply witty. If anyone could make anything of Vaffaire Bartlett, it was Darrow, fresh from a three-month jail sentence for contempt of Congress, a crime Reed thought a man would have to be a blind and deaf half-wit not to commit in his heart every time he opened a newspaper and saw a troop ship unloading coffins from the hold while taking conscripts onto the deck.
Reed sat with the other reporters, making notes. His job was shaky at best—he had suffered four nuisance arrests in the past year—but he had noticed lately how the Iron Grip of the House of Have was less able to contain the boiling forces of the free in mind. Four million Americans, one-tenth of the adult male population, were in France, fighting and dying for muddy inches of Europe even as Villa's raiders massed on the Mexican borders, staking a claim to considerable spreads of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico. At the height of the mutiny, one quarter of the four million had expressed support for Bartlett. Back home, the Movement was gathering strength. Woodrow Wilson and dead-in-prison Mother Jones were martyrs of the Revolution, which must be causing considerable revolutions in Wilson's grave. The Kane press was a joke, and nobody
Back in the USSA
bothered with it any more, even the most conservative recognising the truth of the handbills or folk songs no police force could stamp out. Joseph Pulitzer, a plutocrat cannily seeing a hole in the market to be profitably plugged, had been running accurate stories of the mismanagement of the War and the sufferings of "our boys at the front", a policy which even extended to hiring on John Reed, fresh from a spell as a foreign correspondent in Villa's Mexico, as a Washington commentator. The military censors had run out of blue pencils, and the muddy truth was starting to filter back to the mothers and sweethearts.
Sergeant Samuel Dashiell Hammett was giving evidence, retelling the now-familiar story of the petition of grievances Private Bartlett and his comrades had worked up, and of their month-long frustration as they tried through every legal and reasonable military channel to obtain an audience with General Mix. Darrow's questions drew out details to which Mason persistently objected as "not germane to the case", but which, by the weight of accretion, was giving the court a powerful, unpalatable depiction of the everyday lot of the American soldier in France.
Isabel Amberson Minafer—a society matron whose own son was an officer posthumously decorated for his gallantry—had come along on Mason's invitation to see the private whose treason shamed the memory of her boy. As Hammett spoke, Mrs. Minafer was shaking with deep sobs, tears flooding past her tiny handkerchief, realising at last how her country had betrayed its sons, betrayed her son.
Hammett concluded his evidence by confirming that he had been aware of Eddie Bartlett's intention to make his own way to the chateau at Crepy-en-Valois General Mix was using as a command post, to force his way through the obstructions placed around the General by ignorant staff officers and to explain, honest man to honest man, just how things were on the front line. "Eddie was convinced that General Mix was not being told the truth by those around him," Hammett said.
Mason began his cross-examination, probing Hammett for any memories he might have of statements on the part of Bartlett which revealed Red or anti-militarist sympathies.
Treachery was the by-word of the day. The Tsar of Russia, with his new "liberal" constitution and Prime Minister Kerensky to back him up, had slipped out of the War by the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, deeding huge tracts of land to Germany and the remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Russian factories were supplying munitions to both sides in the conflict, and Americans with "off" or "ovitch" or "ofsky" on their mailboxes
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
were changing their names faster than Jim Thorpe with salt on his tail. In Europe, American lives were being freely spent by Great Britain and France, and there was a strong, popular feeling—expressed even by such unlikely personages as Henry Ford—to convince Kane and his ring to pull a "Tsar" and get out, leaving the old world to shed its own blood. After all, if Villa and the Kaiser ever ironed out their differences, America might face the opening-up of a front closer to home, and find itself underequipped to defend its own borders, all for the sake of the vanity of a few inbred crowned clowns.
Mason finished his dance around Hammett, and the witness left the stand. One or two people applauded, and Mrs. Minafer would not look the prosecuting lawyer in the eye. Reed could sense sympathy for the cause welling up in the hardest of hearts. The thing that gave him the most hope was the deep division the War was bringing out within the foundations of the House of Have. Thus weakened, it could fall, or be taken by a united proletariat.
This was a show trial, but Bean was strictly enforcing the number of spectators. A few interested parties, like Stoddard and Harding, were in the courtroom with a scattering of influential commentators and administration flunkies, but the sensation-seekers were mainly outside. At the opening, the guest list had been more distinguished—with Aleister Crowley, Noah Cross and Vice-President Bryan lending their presence to oversee the doing of justice—but now the society page names were staying away, uneasily aware perhaps of how the trial was going to pan out. Bean, a knotty old bruiser Kane had hauled out of retirement to whip the Supreme Court into line, knew as well as Reed that all America, all the world, had interests in this trial, and he was not going to go down in history as the judge who let the lawyers pass a black-cap verdict on him.
The witness now was the soldier who had been with Bartlett on his visit to Crepy-en-Valois, Ernest Hemingway. Darrow cannily established the young man's credentials by asking him to expl
ain how he had come by his medal ribbons, whereupon Mason objected and Bean, who liked a good yarn, overruled. Hemingway modestly allowed Darrow to draw from him an account of his day and night crawl around no-man's-land under barbed wire and accurate fire, hauling home wounded soldiers. Hemingway impressed Reed, especially when his true age—sixteen—came out in court, and he had to admit he had lied to the enlistment board to get into the War. Mason sat impatiently through all this, finally objecting successfully when Darrow encouraged Hemingway to read out moving
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passages from the diary he had purportedly kept on the front—but which, according to newsroom rumour, he was actually busy writing as the trial went along—underlining everything Hammett had said about the inefficiency, brutality and insanity of the war effort. Hemingway used words like a sniper might use bullets.
There was a tense little pause, and Reed knew the question everyone had been waiting for was about to be asked. Hemingway looked at Bartlett, and made a fist over his heart. The accused fidgeted, clouds of memory passing over his face.
"Private Hemingway," Darrow began, "could you describe the situation you found at Crepy-en-Valois when you and Private Bartlett arrived on the morning of Sunday June 11th, 1916?"
Hemingway drew breath, then paused, then began, "we arrived at the chateau at about eleven o'clock. It was a warm day. There was a lull in the German shelling. There were two guards outside, and only a junior staff officer in the hall. The guards let us through when Eddie told them we had a message from the front for General Mix. We were so covered in mud they couldn't tell our rank. The junior staff officer, Lieutenant James Gatz, tried to stop us getting any further and I popped him one."
"You struck a superior officer?"
"I certainly did."
"And why did you do that?"
"I didn't care for his cologne. Cologne's a German perfume, ain't it?" Laughter rippled around.
"Was there any other reason?"
"He said General Mix was in the chateau's chapel and had given strict orders that he was not to be disturbed."
"Did anything strike you as unusual about the situation at Crepy-en-Valois?"
"Objection," said Mason, "counsel is calling for conjecture."
"Overruled," Bean said from one side of his mouth, as if spitting out a chew of tobacco.
"But..."
"That's m'rulin," Bean insisted, glaring. "Continue, Private Hemingway..."
"There was food, Mr. Darrow. Damn real food. Cakes and meat and bread. Potatoes and beans and coffee and wine and sugar. Eddie and me hadn't seen anything like that for months. The last meat we'd tasted was rat. I don't care for rat. It was left out on a table where there had been a
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
dinner the night before. We couldn't understand it. They'd had all this food right there in front of them. They hadn't eaten everything. It was like finding out there were people who didn't deign to breathe air."
"And what did you do then?"
"We looked for the General in the chapel."
"And what did you find in the chapel?"
"Not General Mix. He wouldn't have been able to get in."
"Why is that?"
"It was stacked to the rafters with cases of champagne, sir."
"What did you do then?"
"We found the General's quarters. It was easy."
"How so?"
"We followed a trail."
"A trail?"
"Yes, sir."
"Of what?"
A pause. Hemingway cleared his throat. "Ladies' underthings. Lacy, perfume-smelling underthings."
Mason looked uncomfortable, and some of the spectators tittered.
"What did you find in the General's quarters?"
"General Mix. He was in a large sunken marble bath, wearing only his white ten-gallon-hat. He was leaning back, pouring champagne from the bottle into his mouth. Sir, he was drunk as a skunk."
Laughter, scowls, an objection, a ruling.
"Was there anyone else present?"
"Yes, there were three women in the bath with the General, one diving under the suds between his legs, hair floating on the surface of the water, bubbles foaming around her. She was French, I believe. The others were either side of him, working with their hands. It was plain they were drunk too. I believed from the sweet smell in the air that at least one of the bathers had been smoking opium."
"Did you recognise any of the three, let us say, filles de joie?"
"We had a different expression in the army, sir. One was Gertrud Zelle, a Dutch dancer I had seen perform in Paris. And one was an American adventuress, Miss Sadie Thompson. I don't know anything about the French lady."
"How did Private Bartlett react to this sight?"
"Eddie was overcome with emotion. All this time, he had insisted General Tom was a fine soldier who loved his men but was surrounded by
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incompetents. This display of excess sickened and revolted him. He was struck down."
"Struck down?"
"He was unable to express himself. He kept babbling about food and women and wine and mud and shells and gas."
"What happened then?"
"General Mix squirted champagne out of his mouth at Private Bartlett and told him to fu...to go away."
"Did Private Bartlett then, as legend has it, shoot the General?"
"No, sir."
Commotion, gavel-banging, quiet.
"Eddie said a bullet was too good for Traitor Tom. Besides, there was a chance of a dud blowing up in the barrel and taking his hand off. That was happening a lot. Eddie drew his bayonet. The women got out of the way quickly. They were a damn sight less drunk than the General."
"Did you try to stop Private Bartlett assaulting General Mix?"
"No, sir. I held the General down while Eddie cut him to pieces. The blood and the champagne and the perfumed bathwater soaked right through my sleeves."
Now, all Bean's gavelling could not stem the uproar in the court. Finally, he drew an antique revolver and fired a shot into the ceiling, calling for a recess. One of the raised letters of the motto behind him fell away. It now read IN GOD WE RUST.
Thursday, March 8th, 1917.
The Bramford, 1 West 72nd St, New York, N.Y.
From the window of Crowley's apartment, Nick Carraway could see the riots. It was dark, but there were flames even where the strikers had cut off the street-lights. There were mounted cops down there, creaky old-timers in blue uniforms while their sons and younger brothers were in khaki overseas. Many of the Reds were short a limb or otherwise scarred. It was a battle of the old and infirm, and it was turning bloody. Vance's face reflected in the dark mirror of the window, aloof and apparently unconcerned, his double slash of a moustache like a razor scar. He turned away, and Nick did too.
Tom was being hearty, talking too loud, bluff and nervous as he explained to the First Lady's astrological consultant that he was organising
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Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
a volunteer force to take over the vital services in his district once the strikers were put down. It should only be a month or two before order was restored. According to Tom, the Reds were on the run.
Nick was not so sure. Also, Tom was no actor, and all his Rover Boys cheeriness could not but make the Great Beast suspicious. They said Crowley could read minds. They also said he had held a ceremony in the White House, with President and Mrs. Kane in attendance, promoting himself to the rank of Magus by baptising a frog as Jesus Christ and crucifying it.
Crowley stood in front of the fireplace, striking a Satanic pose. His bald head gleamed in the candle-light. This, Noah Cross had told Nick and Tom, was the dilettante whose ridiculous prophesies had prompted Kane to order the Vimy Ridge attack, exchanging 100,000 American casualties for not one foot of useless enemy territory. Early in the War, Crowley, an Englishman not welcome in his own country, had writt
en Anti-British propaganda for pro-German press. After the Titanic, he had reused the same articles as anti-German propaganda for the Kane papers. Now, he was whimsically influencing the conduct of the War. This was the man they were here to kill.
Crowley had agreed to meet Tom Buchanan because Nick, a distant cousin of the First Lady, had intimated that his friend's influence might secure for the mystic an honourary doctorate at New Haven, Tom's school. Nick knew Cross had drawn his plans carefully here, selecting precisely the right people to appeal to the Englishman's snobbery, cruelty and self-interest. According to the canny financier, Aleister Crowley must die if the administration, if a whole class, were to have the chance to survive. Nick had almost got used to the notion of being doomed, of everyone he knew being doomed.
It was a peculiar feeling to be doing something about the doom, but Nick still didn't care to feel like a cog in Noah Cross's machine. They were all cogs in Cross's machine. Nick, Tom, Vance. And Crowley's secretary, Louella Parsons, who had helped them get this close with some discreet, well-paid manipulation of the appointments diary. Even Crowley's neighbour and fellow Magus Adrian Marcato, who had delicately suggested that Tom Buchanan was a young man the Great Beast should meet, was a component of the machine. Crowley and Marcato were unashamed to declare themselves Evil Incarnate, but Nick thought Noah Cross fit the Horned Goat mask a sight more comfortably.
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They were discussing race now. Tom was hot on the Negro issue, and Crowley had prophesied a catastrophe in Texas if a single black face were found among the "army of the righteous" defending the state from Villa. Of course, the black regiments were about all the army had left over to hold the border, and their withdrawal had already allowed for a series of increasingly daring, insolent, German-advised raids against West Texas and Arizona. Nick guessed Cross was mainly annoyed that Crowley was better at influencing weak sister Kane than he was.
Tom suggested that Crowley and he drink a toast to Emily Kane. The Prohibition ordnance was in effect in New York, and Crowley couldn't offer them any of the brandy Nick knew he had stashed away. Philo Vance, who had effected the introduction between Crowley and Tom, produced a hip-flask from his inside pocket, and tossed it to Tom, who unscrewed the cap. This produced two small steel cups, one of which had been liberally smeared earlier with liquid potassium cyanide. Tom dextrously filled both cups, kept one, and gave Crowley the poisoned whisky.
