The Anarchist (45 page)

“It’s time, Leon,” Mead said.

He got up off the cot as Collins unfolded a piece of paper. His fingers were old and his nails well manicured. He put on a pair of spectacles, cleared his throat, and began reading: it was the death warrant, which sounded like the legal nonsense they had read often at the trial. When he was finished, he looked up and nodded his head.

Czolgosz stepped out of the cell. One of the guards took him by the left arm—it was almost a friendly grasp. A small man in a brown suit knelt down and with a pair of scissors cut his pants
legs from the cuffs to the knees. Czolgosz felt the slightest chill rise from the concrete floor and spread up his shins.

“Can I see my brother again?” he asked the warden.

“No,” Mead said.

“I want to make a statement.”

Superintendent Collins cleared his throat. “What do you want to say, Czolgosz?”

“I want to make a statement with a lot of people around.”

Mead looked at Collins, who shook his head.

“Well, then, I won’t talk at all,” Czolgosz said.

When the man had finished cutting the pants legs, he stood up and said, “Lean forward and lower your head, please.”

Czolgosz did so and felt the man begin to cut away the hair on the crown of his skull. No one spoke and there was only the sound of the scissors. He watched curly tufts of hair drift to the floor.

When the small man was finished, he stepped back. Czolgosz straightened up and watched another guard come forward and take his right arm. They walked three abreast down the hall toward a brick archway. There was small threshold beneath the archway and Czolgosz caught his foot on it; he would have stumbled but the guards held him up. He paused a moment, and then walked on without difficulty.

The room was about twenty-five feet long and almost as wide. There were two windows; as in his cell, they faced the front gate and were covered with bars and surrounded by ivy. In the center of the room a group of men sat on wooden chairs in a semicircle facing the electric chair, which stood on a low platform in front of the far wall. There were more leather straps than he had expected. The platform, he realized, was covered with rubber. They reached the end of the room and the guards released his arms. He immediately turned and sat down. The men sitting in the semicircle stared back at him, their eyes curious, somber. A few lowered their heads and avoided looking at him. It seemed odd that someone would agree to attend an execution and then refuse to watch.

The guards began to fasten the straps about his chest, arms, and legs. One guard’s hands were shaking and he had difficulty with the chest buckle. Finally he got it done, and he seemed greatly relieved. When all the straps were fit snugly about him, the guards stepped back and another man in a suit proceeded to wet Czolgosz’s scalp with a sponge. The cold water ran through the hair on the back of his head and down his neck, sending goose bumps down his back. The man then picked up a metal cap with wires, fit it on Czolgosz’s head, and secured it with a strap under his chin. It was heavy and uncomfortable. The metal was cool on the place where his scalp had been shaved and wetted.

“I am not sorry,” Czolgosz said. He spoke calmly but loudly so that everyone could hear him. “I did this for the working people.” For a moment some of the men facing him appeared confused, while others seemed disturbed that he had spoken at all. “My only regret,” he said, “is that I haven’t been able to see my father.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Czolgosz saw movement as Warden Mead raised his arm, held it there, and then let it drop.

IN November, while on a hunting trip in the Appalachians, the president took two deer. It snowed the day they broke Camp Roosevelt and traveled twenty miles of mountain trail on horseback to the nearest train depot. By evening the president’s entourage of more than forty men—mostly government officials, foreign envoys, and journalists—had taken over the Larchmont Hotel in Charleston, West Virginia, as though they were holding a forward position in battle.

Despite Dr. Rixey’s reservations, the president insisted that they all take a walk through town after dinner. Roosevelt had, to say the least, a prodigious appetite, and vigorous and lengthy constitutionals were part of his daily regimen. He led the party
through the streets, despite thunder, lightning, and cold rain; half an hour into their trek they were briefly pelted with hail. At the head of the column, the president’s frequent laughter was eerily high and gleeful. By the time they returned to the hotel, everyone was drenched and exhausted. After they changed into dry clothes they convened in the lobby, which soon filled with the smell of port and cigars.

Rixey noticed that when George Cortelyou finally reentered the lobby he was followed by two porters who proceeded to set up a motion-picture projector and a screen. Chairs and sofas were arranged before the screen and the men settled down. A couple of times Rixey caught Cortelyou’s eye, but his expression seemed to say,
Don’t ask
.

Rixey was one of the last to sit, near the back, and when he looked to his right the man who nodded to him was Detective Norris, whom he recalled meeting briefly in the Milburn house in Buffalo.

The lights were turned off in the lobby and as the projector whirred to life, Roosevelt stood up and said, “Gentlemen, this short film is compliments of Mr. Thomas Edison. This is a simulation, I’m told, produced by his company.”

As the president sat down, images flickered on the screen: a train sliding by a high wall, and some buildings in the distance. The clarity of the film was poor and the images blended into one another, but this seemed to lend a surprising artistry to the production. The film cut to a group of men standing in front of a wall. The men appeared deeply somber and their movements were stiff. There was no sound to the film. The rhythmic clattering of the projector reminded Rixey of a train. Occasionally the images jumped forward, as though a small piece of time had been cut out of sequence. The prisoner, wearing a dark jacket, was led to an oversized wooden chair with armrests, which was entangled in a series of straps and wires. Voluntarily he sat in the chair and the guards proceeded to fasten the straps about his torso, legs, and arms. When a metal bowl-shaped contraption sprouting
wires was fit on the prisoner’s head, one of the journalists sitting toward the back of the lobby whispered, “It’s a coronation.” There was a moment of subdued laughter, but as there was no response from the front row, where the president sat, there quickly followed a tense silence.

When the guards stepped back from the prisoner in the chair, Rixey leaned forward until he could see Roosevelt. The president’s head was tilted slightly so that he appeared to be watching the screen with his right eye. Rixey knew that he was having increasing difficulty with his left eye; he had informed the president that he feared he might lose sight in that eye, particularly if he continued to spar in boxing rings. The president accepted this prognosis with unusual reticence, but then he told Rixey that under no circumstances was there to be any mention of his eye to anyone. The doctor had complied, and to his knowledge the only other person to be aware of the president’s condition was his wife, Edith.

Rixey sat back and looked at the screen again. For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen. The prisoner sat in his chair, facing the camera. Lines and dots then flashed through the film, giving the air around the condemned man what appeared to be an electrically charged atmosphere, as his body went into several brief spasms, and then he slumped down in the chair, dead.

The film ended and there was absolute silence in the lobby. Clearly, the men were uncertain whether or not they should applaud. They just sat there and no one seemed to think of turning on the lights.

Finally, the president got to his feet. He stood and his burly physique was silhouetted upon the blank white screen. Every other man in the lobby remained absolutely still, staring at Roosevelt. Rixey had noticed this on numerous occasions, how this man by his mere presence could somehow transfix everyone around him. His effect upon them was peculiar—there was fear, to be sure, and yet they were also helplessly drawn to him. Since he had moved into the White House—no longer to be called the Executive Mansion—everything had changed, everything was new, and
despite the constant whispered reservations and doubts, it was clear that all those who worked around Roosevelt could not deny that he had already projected a resolute and unbridled energy that would affect the entire country. After a moment, the president squared his shoulders and walked across the room, and every head turned to watch him go. A waiter opened the door for him, and he disappeared.

“Simulation,” Norris said in disgust. “In the film, he didn’t even look like Czolgosz.”

Norris got to his feet with effort, and using a cane he favored his left leg—clearly, there was restricted articulation of the ankle—as he walked toward the lobby doors. Rixey got out of his chair as well and accompanied him to the sidewalk. They stood beneath the awning over the hotel entrance and smoked cigars in the cool, damp air.

“Ever see a moving picture before?” Rixey said.

“Once.”

“Really? What was the subject?”

“A man and woman copulating,” Norris said. “Every position imaginable.”

There was a silence that Rixey found awkward, and finally he managed to say, “Next thing you know, men will be flying.”

“If they want to make use of motion pictures, they should have set the camera up in right in front of Czolgosz and filmed the whole thing as it happened. Let every American see it, let them see how justice is done.”

Rixey stared down at Norris a moment. He didn’t seem quite as beefy and imposing as he had in Buffalo; however, there was something even more arrogant and pugnacious about him, as though he’d been dealt an indelible slight for which he could find no proper redress. It was beginning to rain, and Rixey was inclined to bid the man good night and return to the lobby, but then he said, “I heard that you had some real trouble with anarchists out there.”

“We got them, Doctor,” Norris said tightly. “We got them in the end.”

“Yes, well, you Pinkertons have that reputation.”

“I’m no longer with them.” Norris’s voice was now both proud and resentful. “My leg, you know. And they didn’t like the fact that I shot them. Point-blank, unarmed. They said they could have been brought to justice. I said they received what they deserved, shot while crawling away on their bellies.” He put his cigar in his mouth and clamped his teeth down on the soggy end. “Even the Pinkertons are going soft.”

“I see,” Rixey said. “What are you doing now?”

“Can’t really say.” Norris looked as though he wanted to smile but couldn’t quite bring himself to it, so he merely worked his cigar over to the other side of his mouth. “I’m employed by the government now.”

“Spies, that sort of thing?”

“Security,” Norris said, disappointed.

Rixey realized that he really was no longer the brutal, ruthless man he had appeared to be in Buffalo. “Tell me, that spy I met in Buffalo, that young fellow with the bruised head, what happened to him?”

Something in Norris’s shoulders froze and he refused to look away from the rain, which was coming down harder, drumming on the awning overhead. Norris clearly didn’t want to address the question, and seemed insulted that it had been raised at all.

“Hyde, wasn’t that his name?” Rixey said. “Yes, I believe it was—Moses Hyde.”

“You have a good memory, Doctor.” Norris looked directly at him, and then took another puff on his cigar before tossing it out into the street. “You know who Herman Gimmel is?”

“Of course. They’ve been hunting him for years and it finally appears that the man drowned—strange, there wasn’t much about it in the papers.”

“Hyde stopped Gimmel.” This seemed difficult for Norris to say. “Killed him.”

“Killed him?”

“In Auburn.”

“Sounds to me …” But then Rixey went on, feeling that it had to be said. “Moses Hyde must have done something rather heroic.”

Ever so slightly, Norris rocked back on his heels, using his cane to maintain his balance. He lowered his head and murmured, “Perhaps.” Turning slowly, he went back toward the hotel doors and for the brief moment that the doorman swung open the brass door there was a burst of warmth and light and the smell of port. Norris paused and glanced over his shoulder, his eyes deep pools of resentment, and then the door was closed behind him.

Out on the sidewalk there was only the rain, now pouring in a steady sheet off the edge of the awning and splashing on the curbstone—Rixey loved the sound of it. The water created an absolute wall, solid yet moving, and he could feel its cool mist on his face.