The Anarchist (12 page)

Hyde turned his head and stared out the window toward the carriage house; small talk didn’t seem to put him at ease. “People just call me Hyde.”

“Your parents must be very religious to name you—”

“It was the nuns,” he said quickly. “The nuns in the orphanage gave me my name.”

“I see.” Rixey soaked a cloth in the water, and then began to gently daub at the encrusted wound. “It looks like some hair has already been cut away,” he said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Who did that?”

“A woman I know.”

“Did she put anything on it? Iodine, disinfectant?”

“She didn’t have any.”

“I see. Well, I do.”

Slowly the water broke down the encrusted blood, revealing a deep, crescent-shaped gouge in his skin. Most patients would have pulled away or at least winced, but Hyde only continued to stare out the window. “This is quite nasty,” Rixey said.

“It was a misunderstanding.”

“With the woman?”

“It was just a misunderstanding.”

“I see—”

“No, I don’t think you do, sir.”

After a moment’s hesitation Rixey took a jar of ointment from his bag and began to spread it over the wound. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mean to pry.”

There was a nervous tension in the young man’s face, and he seemed both undecided and angry. “The woman, she cleaned it as best she could, but she had no medicine.”

“Your girl, perhaps?”

“Not exactly. She’s a prostitute, and the misunderstanding—
if you want to call it that—was with this man that wants to kill the president.”

“He got away because of some bicycle mishap?”

“That’s right.”

“That’s how you got this cut?”

“No. Not exactly. It was earlier—it’s not important, not now.”

“Tell me something.” Rixey waited until Hyde looked up at him. “Norris says you’re an informant. Obviously, it’s dangerous. Why? Why do you do it?”

“I get paid,” Hyde said. “I get paid, and Norris said I might get to join the Pinkertons.” He began to turn his head away, but he looked back up at Rixey. His eyes were different now, not angry but vulnerable and sincere, like a child’s. “But I don’t trust Norris, not one bit. Or Savin either. You can’t trust any of them.” He seemed at a loss for words suddenly and looked as though he regretted having spoken at all. But then he went on, speaking with vehemence now. “But, you see,
somebody’s
got to stop Czolgosz. He wants to shoot the president—I
know
it. He’s an anarchist and he feels it’s his duty.” Hyde looked down, appearing weary and exhausted.

“So you’ve made it your duty, too,” Rixey said.

“I suppose I have,” he said regretfully. “Besides, I know what he looks like.”

As Rixey put the lid on the jar of ointment, he said, “To do this sort of thing, it takes fortitude, a rare kind of fortitude.” There was a notepad next to the telephone on the desk; he picked up a pencil and scribbled the phone number on it. He tore the page off and handed it and the jar of ointment to Hyde. “If I can help you—perhaps look at this wound again—you can always call me here at the Milburn house.”

Hyde stared at the jar and slip of paper a moment, and then he took the jar and stuffed it in his coat pocket. “Thank you, but I will not use this.” As he placed the slip of paper on the desk, he
smiled, revealing some embarrassment. “The truth is, sir, I have never used a telephone.”

NORRIS knew that Savin naturally resented the fact that he, Norris, had been brought in from Washington—perfectly understandable. But Savin was smart and circumspect. Rather than try to make Norris’s job difficult, he was too helpful. He sent numerous stoolies and collars to Norris, but they were bogus. Norris met with them in bars and cafés and at newsstands, and they all tried to sell him on plots: Italians planning to blow up city hall, Poles scheming to kidnap the mayor. A man who called himself Bluenose Brudnoy swore that he’d seen Emma Goldman on more than one occasion at the Pan-American Exposition, talking to a group of Russians about shorting the electrical system and setting on fire the Edison Company’s Electric Tower, which loomed above the grounds.

Hyde was different. He wasn’t hawking his wares. He wanted the money, yes—they all wanted the money—but Norris felt he was holding something back. Unlike the others, who would say anything for another drink, Hyde was cautious and shrewd, qualities that were necessary to survive a childhood in an orphanage. And he was obsessed with this Leon Czolgosz. It was in his eyes; the man was playing a hunch and in his mind there was no question. He had conviction.

Norris needed to get closer to Czolgosz himself. He realized that Hyde and Czolgosz had one thing in common, so he went looking for the Russian prostitute. Buffalo was full of declared brothels and he had been to several of them. He would never have gone to Big Maud’s on his own. It wasn’t a bad place as such houses go—it was relatively clean and in the parlor the madam put on some air of Victorian gentility, which was ironic since
most of the girls and their customers were Slavs or Italians. But that was the kind of thing that attracted a certain client, the potted ferns, the player piano, a rug on the floor. The girls dressed up while they were downstairs, unlike in some houses where they just sat around in their bathrobes between sessions.

The girl’s name was Motka Ascher and she wasn’t exactly his style. He liked them bigger, more robust, probably because they reminded him of girls he knew when he was a teenager back in Iowa. But Norris spent the afternoon up in her hot room. Periodically, they would pause and she would have him sit on the straight-back chair in the middle of the room while she slowly sponged him down with cool water from the basin. The window was open and he could look out across the rooftops. On the sill was a paperback copy of
Looking Backward
.

“You read English?”

“I try,” she said. “I learn.”

She ran the sponge across his shoulders and up his neck to his scalp. “How many languages you speak?”

The girl shrugged. She seemed to enjoy bathing him. Her eyes were clear because she wasn’t using anything. Drugged girls had little enthusiasm for their work.

“Let me guess,” he said. “Your customers here are Russian, Polish, German, Croat, Italian, so you speak a little of each.”

“Si,
signore, parlo italiano un po’,”
she said. “And English.”

“You believe that crap?” he said, nodding toward the book.

Her hand paused and she smiled. A girl’s smile, still. Full lips and a mouth with all its teeth. “Utopia,” she said as she dunked the sponge in the basin. “The year 2000 is a long time away, so must we get it now in little pieces.”

“Well put.” He laughed. “You believe in utopia, you must be a socialist.”

“No.”

“No? Maybe an anarchist.”

“No,” she said. “No political.”

“You’re all anarchists, don’t kid me. You’d shoot Andrew
Carnegie right now if he walked in the door. I probably would, too. Those bastards own everything.”

“Maybe
you
are the anarchist,” she said.

“No. Worse.”

Her hand paused as she worked down his chest with the sponge. “How?”

“I’m going to show you in a minute, I’m going to give you another little piece of utopia.”

She smiled uncertainly.

“Let me see that,” he said, nodding toward the book.

She put the sponge in the basin on the bureau and went to the window. The faintest ridge rolled beneath the skin on her calf.

“It is difficult,” she said, handing him the book. “Not like reading a newspaper. I take a page or two at a time and do not understand all the words.”

“But you figure them out, don’t you. You’re smart and you can figure out what the words mean. It’s called context.”

“Context?”

“The words you understand around the words you don’t.”

She nodded and picked up the sponge again.

“I’m cool enough for now,” he said. “How about a drink?”

She opened the top bureau drawer, took out a silver flask, and handed it to him. He unscrewed the cap and took a swallow of warm whiskey.

“Nice,” he said, looking at the flask. “Somebody give this to you?”

“Left it.” He handed the flask to her.

“Couldn’t pay.”

“It was a gift.” She took a pull and swallowed without wincing.

“You like gifts?”

She nodded.

He held up the book. “This a gift, too?”

He watched the caution flood her eyes.

“Don’t calculate,” he said gently. “Just tell me who gave you the book.”

“What is ‘calculate’?” Norris waited. “Is it important?”

“It might be. Was it Leon Czolgosz? Or Fred Nieman?”

Leaning a hip against the bureau, she said, “Leon.”

“Which is his real name. He must be fond of you. When’d you see him last?”

She shrugged.

“It was last night, right?”

“Yes, and Czolgosz cracked Hyde’s skull.” She looked nervous now. “You know all about this,” he said. “You knew about Czolgosz and his gun, and the lump on Hyde’s head.”

The girl stared back at him.

“Here, it happened here, didn’t it?”

She didn’t say anything.

“All right. Good. This is very good,” Norris said. “Czolgosz goes around giving books like this to little Russian sluts like you, talking about utopia and workers’ paradise and, my favorite, free love.” As he raised his voice he could see that she was becoming more frightened. “You believe in
free love?”
he nearly shouted. “You ever give a man a piece of utopia for
nothing?”
He got up off the chair and moved toward her.

“You do not have to pay,” she said, frightened. “We can have this free love now.”

“No, I have money,” he said. “I don’t mind paying. I’m an
American
. I
believe
in capitalism, see?” He hit her on the top of the head with the book, and then tossed it on the bed. He was impressed that she didn’t start to cry. “Where is Leon Czolgosz now?” he said, then louder: “You know—don’t you?” She shook her head. “You
know
what he’s going to
do?”

“I
don’t
know where he is, please. He was gentle. Like a boy.”

“And he brought you that damn book about utopia.”

“To teach me to read.”

“I’ll teach you.” Grabbing her by the upper arm, he pulled her over to the open window. “Now put your hands on the sill.”

She resisted but he got her bent over so she had to put her hands on the sill or fall out the window. He entered her from behind and took hold of her hips, and each time he shoved she gasped as her head and shoulders went a little farther out the window. Looking down into the fenced yards behind the houses, he saw two boys staring up at the window with their mouths open. With each shove, she cried out in pain. Toward the end he tried to knock her right out into midair, but her arms were strong, braced against the sill.

It was early evening when he went downstairs, where Big Maud greeted him in the vestibule. “Everything was satisfactory, I trust, Mr. Norris?”

“There some place we can talk?”

She raised a hand and touched her hair. “Of course. Is there a problem?” When he didn’t answer, she led him down the hall to an office that was appointed with book-lined walls, a mahogany desk, leather chairs. “Sir, I gather that you’re not with the police, because we are on good terms with—”

“No, the Pinkertons.”

“I see.”

“This isn’t some shakedown for money,” he said. “It’s your girl, Motka.”

Big Maud gestured toward one of the leather chairs. “Please, sit down, sir.”

He sat down and waited until she was seated behind the desk. “I understand that Motka has entertained two men recently—”

“I’m sure you appreciate, Mr. Norris, that we respect the privacy of our clients—”

“I do, but in this case you’re going to make an exception. Because it involves security issues of the highest order.”

“Security?”

“National security,” Norris said.

“I see. Who are these two men?”

“One’s named Hyde—one of your regulars.” She nodded. “And Leon Czolgosz.”

“I don’t know this—”

“He also goes by Fred Nieman.”

Big Maud placed her elbows on the desk and pressed her palms together as though in prayer. “Nieman. Yes, he has been here.” She stared back at Norris with the cold eye of a seasoned cardplayer.

“He and Hyde, together?”

“Yes.”

“Recently?”

She wetted her lips. “Well—”

“Motka says last night.”

“Did she?” Big Maud sat back, looking slightly offended.

“Was she lying?”

Big Maud took a deep breath for effect. “The fact is, sir, something rather strange occurred during the night. And I will tell you in the strictest confidence.”

“Of course.”

“This man, Fred Nieman or Leon Czolgosz, at first he came here with Hyde—but last night he was by himself and he arranged to spend the entire night with Motka. She is one of my most popular girls, and the cost of such services is—well, he produced a fat roll of money. But that is not what’s peculiar about all of this. Early this morning I came out of my suite—here, next to the office—and who do I see coming down the stairs from Motka’s room on the third floor? Hyde.”