Carter Beats the Devil (26 page)

His hands found the opening; he thought he could pull himself up
seconds later, but his muscles were so depleted he had to stay in the chimney, arms over his head, feet braced just so, until he had the energy to push, stagger, and then actually fall out, landing on the roof hand-first.

He squawked like a bird. His wrist! He pulled his arm close to his chest, rocking back and forth.

Then he remembered there was no fire escape.

His wrist meant he couldn’t use the clothesline. He walked around the edges of the roof, shuffling, really—one leg seemed to be asleep. Then, without even knowing he’d done it, he was sitting down.

The roof access stairs—they led inside the building. He lurched to the stairhouse, and threw the door open. It banged against the wall, ringing in his ears. Too loud! He half ran, half tripped down three flights of boardinghouse stairs, expecting doors to be thrown open, women to start yelling, or firing on him.

When he thudded to the street, light glowed from the basement windows, partially eclipsed by rotting wooden boards nailed over them. Griffin couldn’t stay in plain view—he was shirtless, and where he wasn’t blackened with soot, he was bleeding.

Then he saw the coal chute. A little reluctantly, he opened the hatch, and peered inside. It was empty, free and clear all the way to the bottom. Another cramped passageway tonight.

One last time, he cast aside all physical complaints, and began the part of his mission that would make him famous to a generation of Secret Service agents: he climbed into the coal chute. He slid on his own perspiration down to the bottom.

His luck had turned. The moment his shoes hit the door in the basement, the sound was muffled by applause coming from within. The coal chute, though chilly, was a far more comfortable spot for eavesdropping; Griffin could in fact huddle with his ear against the door and relax.

He was there for no more than twenty minutes. He heard a voice, Griffin’s age, maybe, declaiming in Midwestern English. Griffin heard some ideological talk. He’d been trained in such talk, but this speech still made no sense to him. He heard the sounds of a pointer hitting a corkboard, and he imagined there were diagrams showing the masses, the bourgeoisie, the wealthy, the merchants. The usual. At some point, Griffin began to pay more attention to the twinging in his wrist. The assignment seemed like a wash.

But the lecturer changed topics. In words Griffin was never able to accurately reconstruct, he began to present a plan to assassinate President McKinley.

Later, Griffin said that made him sit up and take notice, but the truth was, he so disbelieved his own ears, he had to hear it twice before he understood what he’d heard. Luckily, the speaker was poorly organized, and given to repeating every point he made: Gaetano Bresci had murdered King Umberto of Italy in the name of anarchy, and this deeply impressed the American anarchists, who’d been too often accused of enjoying the
glamour
of anarchy, but not the hard work. So, to show the Italians and the rest of the world, it was time to kill the President of the United States. At the agreed-upon spot. Griffin heard the sound of the pointer hitting the board. What spot? Where? He brought all his powers of investigation into focus and away went the aches and pains.

“The President will be in the crowd,” the lecturer said slowly, and Griffin moved, very slightly, to hear better. The coal chute creaked.

The voice stopped.

Griffin froze.

“Was there a noise?”

Griffin heard other voices he hadn’t heard before. There were five or six of them. He opened his mouth to breathe orally. He would not move. If they opened the chute, he would burst out and the door would knock the first man down. There had to be chairs in the room, and they made fine weapons.

“I heard a noise from the coal chute,” the lecturer said, and Griffin could imagine him, wild-eyed, suspicious, ready to shoot. And then something happened that made Griffin feel like he was on a ship swamped by a monstrous wave: the coal chute creaked again, though he hadn’t moved a muscle. More creaking, and then the sight of the evening sky as someone threw open the street-level hatch.

At the same time someone in the basement set the lecturer’s mind at ease.

“Don’t worry, Leon,” Griffin heard, “it’s the coal man.”

“At this time of night?” a second man asked.

“He steals it for us,” answered a third.

“Ahh,” said Leon—Griffin’s last bit of inductive reasoning that night told him the anarchist’s name was Leon—“then let us return to the matter. A man with a bandaged right hand will approach the President—”

A rumble, the sound of an approaching landslide, as the coal man made his delivery. Griffin threw his hands over his head and then a hundredweight of coal fell down the shaft, crashing into him like a steam engine, forty freight cars, and caboose.

He did not hear the rest of the plan.

. . .

When Griffin regained consciousness, the pain was indescribable. In a fetal position, he pressed against the metal door of the coal chute; all it took was a little shouldering, and he spilled onto the floor, registering the daylight outside, then landing, again, on his broken wrist.

He eventually limped away from the boardinghouse, and somehow found his way to Wilkie to make his report—in tatters, though that no longer seemed so heroic. He had learned much that night, but he had not learned everything, for he still believed he understood how the world worked. He believed in struggle, setback, reward, as if that process were as immutable a law as gravity.

Wilkie did not react as Griffin had expected. Because Griffin was the greenest of all agents, his story was not believed. Griffin swore he would prove himself, and would keep a steady eye out for a man with a bandaged right hand.

Less than a week later, at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, President McKinley greeted a large crowd at the Temple of Music. Griffin, guarding him, noticed the President shaking a swarthy man’s left hand—his right hand was bandaged. At once, Griffin dove for the man, knocking him down, and putting the President into a direct line of sight, at point-blank range, with Leon Czolgosz, who assassinated him.

. . .

Soon after, the Secret Service received its charter to begin protecting the Commander in Chief from all enemies foreign and domestic. Griffin received a commendation, at a nearly silent ceremony that no other agents chose to attend. There are few sights from which the world turns its head faster than a golden boy who has died. The old stories about Griffin ceased; the new ones he never heard to his face.

He began a twenty-year cycle of drinking, and probation, and menial duties, still trying to understand what lesson—for he persisted in believing that life was a series of lessons—he had learned in the coal chute. Be more ambitious? Surely he’d been ambitious enough, leaping from roof to chimney to basement in an evening. Show caution? No amount of caution could have caused the coal to arrive an hour later. He had similar problems believing the lesson related to piety, intelligence, stamina, courage, fortitude, or even developing a philosophy.

And yet, as he grew older, he did not leave the Service. When asked why he stayed—and some agents did indeed ask this—his answers “Why not?” or “They’ll have to drag me out by my blue, blue heels” were not the whole story. He was still an agent because he held out
hope
.

His notes, which usually spelled out duty rosters and expenses, also speculated about sacrifice. There were lists of assassination methods (poison, bombs, a sabotaged boat) matched with lists of fates that would befall the dedicated agent (coma, mutilation, drowning). The opportunity to die justly gave him a reason to live. No matter how hard he was hammered at, Agent Griffin still felt this small, flickering hope.

CHAPTER 2

WEDNESDAY AUGUST 2, 1923—FINAL REPORT—EYES ONLY (cont’d)

THURSDAY AUGUST 3, 1923—FINAL REPORT—EYES ONLY

HERE ENDS REPORT—

(signed)
Jack Griffin,
Investigating Agent

When President Harding’s funeral train departed from San Francisco, Griffin was left behind. His official duty was to keep the presidential suite sealed to discourage souvenir hunters. Immediately after Harding’s body was removed, and the Duchess escorted to a new room, Griffin sealed the doors of room 8064 with wax, stamping them with the scales-over-key Treasury Department seal. The maids weren’t even allowed to take away the sheets.

On Saturday, as Coolidge was sworn in by lamplight in Vermont and dignitaries began to arrive in Washington for the funeral, and the search for Charles Carter aboard the
Hercules
continued, other agents were removed from San Francisco. But with each roster, the same letters were posted by Griffin’s name: “MPP”—Maintain prior position.

To show he was game, Griffin took extra four-hour shifts, but still had nothing to do for most of each day. Other agents frequented the diners and speakeasies of the Tenderloin, so Griffin frequently walked instead to North Beach, where he could be anonymous as he sat in a hash house, reading the newspaper, doing the crossword puzzle, or reading and rereading the front pages for any slip of information that he didn’t already know. His old boss had died; the new boss hadn’t yet requested his services. Griffin read stories about President Coolidge over lunch, filling in each
o
with blue ink, and looking at photos of the new President with some compassion. If he, Griffin, were President, he wouldn’t want a two-time loser guarding him either.

No one talked to him about it directly, but no one had to. He knew that in the classrooms and train cars, older agents befriended the new ones by telling them legends of the Service. He’d learned to intercept the glance of the rookie—at an organizational meeting, they saw his fringe of reddish-grey hair grown long and combed over his bald spot, his trim, underfed mustache, his two gold teeth, his bulbous nose, his awkward posture (the joke was that he walked like a man hit by a ton of coal), and they knew who he was: bad luck.

As of Saturday, the President’s death was still, to him, inadequately explained. He asked if he might investigate the departure of Charles Carter—who was at that time still thought to be bound for Greece. (Griffin was still several days—and a vicious beating—away from Starling’s invitation to find Carter in Oakland.) Each roster, with its “MPP,”
was a kind of rebuke. He was to keep Harding’s room sealed, and that was all. It was unclear to him whether his guard duty was designed to wear his spirit out.

He played solitaire on his bed. He used a deck he’d bought intending to play poker or hearts, but so far there was only solitaire. At some point he began to use the game to bargain against doing his duties. Cracking open the deck, he told himself he could play only until he had a complete game, or had reached a certain number of points. When he exceeded that limit, he set a new one. His eyes began to hurt, and when he closed them, he saw cards flashing by, red and black, until he felt vertigo.

His room was oppressively dark. His only personal effect was a tinted photograph of his daughter, now grown, whom he hadn’t spoken to in months. It was an old photo, back when she still hunted; rifle in one hand, she kneeled next to a deer she’d shot and dressed. He had it set up in a frame but during one especially bad spell of solitaire, he put the frame facedown on the table.