“Have you ever wondered,” said Hay at last, “what might have been if he’d lived?”
“Hardly a day passes that I don’t,” said Henry.
“I cannot tell you how often I’ve longed to see him again,” said Hay, “if only for a moment or two. How often I’ve craved his wisdom, his guidance. There have been heavy days, Henry, far too many heavy days, when I have craved that reassuring hand on my shoulder. Those nights he couldn’t sleep, when he would wander into our office past midnight, pull up a chair, and tell us stories until the sun rose. Make us laugh. Make us forget the war. Make himself forget. That high and hearty laugh, Henry… do you remember it?”
I did. And I’d longed for it. I’d longed for all of the same things. Grieved for him the same way. But my grief—my longing for my lost friend—had always been tinged with a layer of guilt. Unlike Hay, Abe and I hadn’t parted as friends. But what could I have said—“Yes? Yes, I missed his company so much that I broke into his crypt, stole his corpse, and made him immortal against his wishes?” That I’d listened to his screams as he burned himself alive? But that was my burden, and I had to bear it alone.
“Yes,” said Henry. “I remember it well.”
Hay rubbed a finger under his right eye again.
“Funny,” he said. “I can still hear it so clearly… but it was a lifetime ago.”
“For some,” said Henry as they neared the White House. “And for some, it feels as if he could be waiting on the other side of those doors.”
They reached the base of the South Portico. Henry paused and pulled down on his coat, making himself presentable.
“This new one, Roosevelt,” said Henry. “Any words of advice?”
Hay smiled. “Hold on to your hat.”
Teddy Roosevelt had been born into privilege in New York, a sickly, lonesome boy with dreams of far-off adventures and wild frontiers. Over time, he had willed himself into the picture of masculinity, becoming a boxer, a cowboy, and a big-game hunter. He’d served as a sheriff’s deputy in the Dakotas, hunting down outlaws—an experience that he later credited with helping him serve as New York City’s police commissioner. In 1897, President McKinley had appointed the thirty-eight-year-old Roosevelt assistant secretary of the navy, a post that he resigned a year later to fight in Cuba during the Spanish-American War. He became colonel of the famed Rough Riders—a cavalry unit he helped found by recruiting friends from the dusty plains of the Dakotas and the bricks of Manhattan brownstones alike.
Roosevelt made a name for himself during the war, becoming something of a national hero. On his return in 1898, buoyed by his image as a “scholarly soldier,” he was elected governor of New York, promising to root out corruption. He proved so effective that the corrupt establishment sought a way to get rid of him, so that a more cooperative governor could be installed in his place. The opportunity presented itself in 1900, when President McKinley was campaigning for a second term. McKinley’s first vice president, Garret Hobart, had died in office, and he was looking for a new running mate. The corrupt Republican machine put Roosevelt’s name forward, and six months into his second term, McKinley was assassinated by Leon Czolgosz, and Teddy Roosevelt was sworn in as the twenty-sixth president of the United States. He was just forty-two years old when he took the oath. The youngest man to ever hold the office.
Hay and Henry were ushered to the second floor, while the policeman and Hay’s aide waited downstairs. As they walked the wide second-floor hall toward the president’s office, they passed a large painting of Abraham Lincoln.
Not the Healy7 one that became famous later on, but the portrait that William Cogswell had done. There was Abe, looking serious and presidential, standing with one hand on a chair back, and a rolled-up paper—the Emancipation Proclamation, probably—in the other. Looking down on us from a gilded frame. Maybe it was the nerves of meeting a new president, or the strange feeling of being back in the residence after so many years, but I let a little snort escape at the sight of the painting. It was so wrong—so opposed to what Abe would have wanted a portrait of himself to look like—that I had to laugh. Hay looked at me like I’d lost my mind, then realized that it was the painting that I was laughing at and laughed along with me. “Terrible, isn’t it?” he said.
Hay stopped at the door to Roosevelt’s office.
“Aren’t you coming in?” asked Henry.
“He wanted to meet you alone,” said Hay. “Man to man, as it were. It’s the way he prefers doing things.”
Hay lifted his thumb and index finger, mimed touching a brim, and shot Henry a smile. Hold on to your hat. The usher opened the office door, and Henry stepped in.
The president was standing on a bearskin rug in the center of his office, repeatedly bending over and touching his toes. Henry had seen Teddy Roosevelt before, across the dining room at Delmonico’s and in the newspapers. But up close, he looked more like the caricatures in recent political cartoons. Neatly trimmed mustache. Gold pocket watch chain dangling from the vest of his three-piece suit. Pearly white teeth the size of tombstones. Spectacles clinging to the bridge of his nose. At five feet ten inches, he was taller than average but looked shorter because of his large head and round middle.
Everything about his appearance projected strength. Every fiber in him seemed to ache for contest and conflict. When he eventually died of a heart attack in his sleep in 1919, Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said, “Death had to take Roosevelt sleeping, for if he had been awake, there would have been a fight.”
An usher closed the door behind Henry, leaving him alone with the president of the United States. No aides. No guards.
“Mr. Sturges,” said Roosevelt, bending forward and exhaling, “I understand you’re a man, if I may use the term, who can be reasoned with.”
“I like to think—”
“I’ll do the talking, Sturges.”
He had no shortage of confidence—I’ll give him that. He’d attained the office suddenly, and through an unlikely series of events. But unlikely president or not, it had taken him precisely four seconds to grow into the role.
“Mr. Hay speaks highly of you,” Roosevelt continued, pausing occasionally to exhale or grunt from the strain of his exercise. “He says that of all the vampires he’s ever met… you’re the one he trusts above all others. To which I replied, ‘Calling a vampire trustworthy… is about as big a compliment as calling a thief… honorable.’ ”
Roosevelt stood fully, his face flushed from the exertion. “I don’t like cats, Sturges. Untrustworthy creatures. Disloyal creatures, sneaking around in the dark without making a sound. Nine lives, they say. Tell me, would you trust something that was still walking around after you’d killed it eight times? No, Sturges, cats are in league with the devil; make no mistake about it. And yet… I find myself in a predicament. You see, I’ve inherited a house that’s overrun with mice.”
His analogies were about as subtle as the rest of him.
Roosevelt came forward. He looked Henry over, chewing on his bottom lip from the inside, a nervous habit.
“How old are you, Sturges?”
Henry raised his eyebrows and pointed to himself. Is it my turn to speak?
“Yes, yes,” said Roosevelt. “Go on, go on.”
“Three hundred and thirty-eight, sir.”
“Bully!” cried Roosevelt, with a hearty laugh. “A man older than an oak tree! It fascinates me. It absolutely fascinates me! Tell me, Sturges, are you a fighting man?”
Roosevelt in Africa, hunting some of the “bigger game” that he bragged to Henry about.
“When the fight is just.”
“All fights are just, Sturges. All the great masterful races have been fighting races, you know. No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumph of war. That…,” said Roosevelt, wagging a finger at Henry, “that is something your beloved Lincoln never understood. He was a timid man. Mark my words, if he had lived in a time of peace, no one would know his name.”
I couldn’t hold my tongue at hearing a friend slandered.
“A ‘timid’ man, sir? Perhaps you wouldn’t have thought so if you’d seen him take the heads of countless vampires with his ax.”
“A primitive weapon, for a primitive man! He was an unschooled woodsman, and I don’t mind saying that he was unfit to hold the highest office in the land!”
“I apologize, sir,” said Henry. “I didn’t realize that you’d been personally acquainted with him.”
Roosevelt glared at him through those little lenses, framed in perfect circles of gold wire. “I do not argue that he was a man of great will,” said Roosevelt, “or that he accomplished great things. But he was not a gentleman.”
“If he was not a gentleman,” said Henry, “then no man is.”
“You think you can intimidate me?” asked Roosevelt. “I’ve hunted bigger game than you, sir! Creatures with far bigger teeth and tougher hides!”
Roosevelt refused to break eye contact. Refused to blink. He chewed on his lip some more and squinted.
“Bully!” cried Roosevelt at last, breaking into laughter. “Good man, Sturges! Good man! Yes, that’s what we need! A fighting man! A spirited man!”
He perplexed me. He was so brash. So self-assured. Yet in time, I would learn that this was the same man who enjoyed curling up with Tolstoy. The same man who was so grief stricken over the death of his first love that he wrote “the light has gone out of my life” in his diary the day she died and never spoke of her again. He was a cowboy with the soul of a poet. To this day, he is the most American American I’ve ever met.
“Do you know what an ‘anarchist’ is, Mr. Sturges?”
“Of course.”
The word “anarchist” was a staple on the front pages of 1901 newspapers. McKinley’s assassin, Leon Czolgosz, had been a self-described anarchist, after all. It was an ideology on the rise, its fires stoked at rallies, where speakers decried the growing gap between the ultrarich and the desperately poor. Proposals were made for a world without leaders, without governments and armies. A world in which monarchs would be dragged from their palaces and their wealth distributed among the people equally.
“It’s a poison,” said Roosevelt. “A cancer that infects the minds of the desperate and the frightened and the just plain stupid. The king of Italy, murdered by an anarchist. The president of France, murdered by an anarchist. The president of the United States, murdered by an anarchist.8 Unrest on the streets of Chicago. Tides of rebellion and civil war in China and Russia. Do you think it a coincidence? Do you think that this disease of discord has spread without a source? No, sir. Its seeds are being sown by your kind.”
According to [Roosevelt], the anarchist movements in Europe and the United States were, in fact, part of a “veiled vampire resurgence,” with aims to overthrow governments that had become increasingly hostile toward vampires in the wake of the Civil War. With their numbers dwindling, these vampires had taken advantage of an existing movement, recruiting young, ideological, and easily manipulated minds to their cause. And not just in the United States.
The president added that among all the disparate anarchist movements, one name kept coming up. An invisible leader, pulling the strings of chaos:
A. Grander VIII.
“He wishes to drive the world into war,” said Roosevelt. “To destabilize it, so it’s ripe for the picking. His forces may be too small in number to do it with an army of their own, but they’re well on their way to recruiting an army to do it in their stead. We must cut this cancer out of the world body before it spreads any further, Mr. Sturges. Before it infects America at the dawn of her greatest century.”
“They’ve tried to take America before. We ran them out.”
“Ran them out, yes. But you didn’t finish them, Sturges. There’s a mile of difference between deporting and destroying.”
“All the same, they wouldn’t dare attack America again.”
“They don’t want America, Sturges. America is too small a prize in their twisted view.”
“With all due respect, sir, if they haven’t the strength to take America, how can they possibly take the world?”
“Intrigue, Mr. Sturges. Foreign intrigue. They mean to destabilize the governments of the world. They mean to foster rebellion in the streets. They mean to plunge us into darkness, and in that darkness, they mean to take their hold. My predecessors have lived by a policy of ignorance. Doing nothing because they were too afraid to do the wrong thing. Well, I shall not be ignorant of this threat! I shall not shrink from it and pray that it resolves itself! At San Juan Hill,9 more of my men died from malaria than from bullets or machetes. I asked a doctor with our unit, a man named Gorgas,10 how in the hell we could stop the disease from spreading. ‘Easy,’ he said. ‘Just kill every mosquito in the swamp.’ ”
At first I thought he was testing me again. Saying something absurd to see what kind of reaction it elicited. But his expression never changed, and I realized that he was deadly serious.
“I’m going to kill every bloodsucking mosquito in the swamp, and you’re going to help me do it.”
“You’re talking about war.”
“A war? No… No, wars are fought on battlefields, with rifles and horses. If I could declare war on this enemy, I’d do it this very minute; then I’d march out of this office and saddle up. No… This, sir, this is simple diplomacy. You’ll be delivering personal messages, on behalf of the United States. Nothing more.”
“And what message might I be delivering?”
“The same message Benjamin Franklin printed on the eve of America’s Revolution: Join or die. America is going to give the vampires of this earth a choice: either they can join us, or they can die. But mankind will not live another hour in quiet fear.”
“And I assume none of this will be officially sanctioned.”
Roosevelt smiled. “No,” he said. “You will receive no commendations for your service, beyond the thanks of a grateful president and the knowledge that you have served your nation proudly. But that’s not to say you’ll be alone, either. We’ll share whatever intelligence we have. Give you access to our friends abroad.”
“And access to a mortician, should I fail.”
“Ha! That’s the spirit!” cried Roosevelt. “Take the bull by the horns, and do it with a smile on your face. Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory or defeat.”
It was a rousing sentiment, but I couldn’t help feeling like the army dog who’s patted on the back as he’s sent off to walk through a minefield.
“When compared with the suppression of this vampire agenda,” Roosevelt continued, “every other question sinks into insignificance. To destroy this invisible government, to dissolve the unholy alliance of your kind, is the first task of the statesmanship of the day, and you, sir, are to be my newest statesman.”
“An honor, sir, to be sure. But why me? What you’re asking is the very purpose of the Union and the sworn duty of its members.”
“Ha!” shouted Roosevelt. “And a fine job you’ve done of it! Sitting idly, drifting off as the enemy marched through your front door and assassinated your president. You and your ‘Union.’ You call yourselves patriots! Congratulate yourselves for standing up for the North in the war! Yet you live somewhere outside the margins of citizenship—loyal to your little brotherhood before your country. Addicted to soft living and averse to your patriotic duty! Well, I won’t tolerate it! I won’t tolerate any sort of damned fifty-fifty allegiances! Either you’re an American and nothing else, from your boots to your hat, or you’re not an American at all!”
“What you ask is too much for one man.”
“That’s why I didn’t ask a man to do it.”
A fair point, thought Henry.
“Do you love this country?” asked Roosevelt.
“I have loved her since before she was born.”
“Then serve her.”
“Are you asking me to betray my oath to the Union, sir?”
“I’m not ‘asking’ you anything. A man’s obedience to his country isn’t asked as a favor; it’s demanded! And if that means choosing sides between the needs of your country and the needs of your social club, well, then you’d damned well better make the right choice, or I’ll have you stuffed and mounted!”
Roosevelt’s face had turned bright red again. This time, he wasn’t testing Henry’s mettle. This time, his anger was sincere.
“Look me in the eye, Sturges. Tell me… are you an American or aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“Well, I am the president of the United States of America. And from this moment forward, you work for me.”
EIGHT
The Mystic
War means an ugly mob-madness, crucifying the truth tellers, choking the artists, sidetracking reforms, revolutions, and the working of social forces.
—John Reed
SECRET INTELLIGENCE SERVICE
Memorandum
CLASSIFIED
Date: November 26th, 1916
To: Secretary of State Robert Lansing
From: Director, SIS
Subject: Possible withdrawal of Russian troops
It has come to our attention that TN21 is currently considering a complete withdrawal of Russian forces. The result of such a withdrawal would prove disastrous to Britain and France, as it would allow the Germans to abandon the eastern front and redouble their attacks on our lines in the West. As we have seen at Verdun, our forces are able to fight the Germans to a stalemate, at best. We believe the judgment of TN2 has become compromised, and that he has fallen under the influence of , who, as we have stated in previous communications, we believe to be a . Upon consultation with , PMG2 urges you to consider sending your asset, , to rendezvous with ours, to coordinate and enact a solution to this problem as expediently as they are able.
The Last American Vampire Page 20
