The Fall: A Robert Falconer Mystery
Sean Moynihan
ISBN (Print Edition): 978-1-09838-360-2
ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-1-09838-361-9
© 2021. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
This is a work of historical fiction. Apart from the well-known historical figures and events, all persons, events, and names are products of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Also by Sean Moynihan
Here - A Robert Falconer Mystery
To Shaun Moynihan
1936 – 2020
Son, Brother, Husband, Father, Grandfather, Teacher, Cousin
Is cuimhin liom thú
I couldn’t have thrown that bomb. I was at home making bombs.
—Louis Lingg, Haymarket Bombing Defendant, 1886
For the anarchist himself, whether he preaches or practices his doctrines, we need not have one particle more concern than for any ordinary murderer. He is not the victim of social or political injustice. There are no wrongs to remedy in his case. The cause of his criminality is to be found in his own evil passions and in the evil conduct of those who urge him on, not in any failure by others or by the State to do justice to him or his. He is a malefactor and nothing else.
—Theodore Roosevelt, 1901
The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation. Crime is naught but misdirected energy.
—Emma Goldman, 1910
Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
Part I
Pittsburgh PA
July 23, 1892
1
The young man entered the waiting room outside the inner office of the notorious steel magnate and looked around. He saw several other men sitting there—obviously, hopeful suitors bent on securing a job with the wealthy industrialist, or perhaps simply angling to procure an investment from him—as well as a few clerks sitting behind a wooden barrier with a gate attached. As he looked around the room, he reached into his pocket and fingered his revolver delicately, as if to reassure himself that he did, in fact, bring it with him. He could feel sweat dribbling down his forehead, so he quickly dabbed at it with a handkerchief that was stuffed into his breast pocket.
Over at a small desk behind the barrier that blocked access to the office’s inner sanctum, he saw the wealthy man’s attendant sitting by dutifully.
Hm, he thought. A negro. Typical of such a capitalist master. Ordering this young fellow around just like the American slave drivers of yesteryear.
He took a deep breath and walked up to the attendant, and then coughed deliberately a couple of times to get his attention. The man looked up at him. “Yes, sir?” he asked.
“I am from New York,” the man replied in his rather broken English as he handed the attendant a faked business card. “I run an employment agency and I believe that Mister Frick could find use for my services, given the workers’ strike.”
“I see,” the attendant said. “Well, sir, let me go see if Mister Frick is available.”
“Thank you,” the visitor said as the attendant stood up and moved over to the door to the private office.
As the attendant went inside and started to close the door behind him, the visitor caught a glimpse of a distinguished-looking gentleman with a dark beard sitting in the back of the room. Then the door closed, and he stood there nervously amongst the other men and the clerks for what seemed to be an eternity.
The door then finally opened, and the attendant walked out. “Mister Frick is engaged,” he said. “He can’t see you now, sir,” and he handed the business card back to the visitor.
“Um, yes, I see,” the visitor said, as he placed the business card into a briefcase he was holding. “Thank you.”
He then turned and slowly walked out of the waiting room. Stepping out into the hallway, he took a deep breath, reached into his pocket for the revolver, and walked briskly back into the waiting area and through the gate in the long, wooden partition. The attenda
nt looked up from his seat with a confused look on his face and started to stand up, but the visitor simply brushed past him and opened the door to the private office. Stepping purposefully inside, he beheld the man with the beard sitting in an ornate chair at the end of a long, beautifully crafted table. Near to the man in another chair on the side of the table was another man, very trim and small of frame.
“What is this?” the small man demanded before starting to get up.
The intruder stood for a moment, unsure of what to do or say, after all those weeks of planning and preparing, all those sleepless nights spent thinking about this exact moment that would change the course of history for the working man in America. And then he yelled out the rich man’s name, but the look of dread on his intended victim’s face stopped him from completing the utterance: “Fri—.”
He then raised the revolver and saw the bearded man gripping the arms of his chair with both hands as if in a desperate attempt to stand up. The visitor then aimed the gun at the man’s head, but in the last second, the man turned his face away, and as the sound of the shot reverberated through the cavernous office, the now wounded man fell from his chair.
The shooter could no longer see his target, who had disappeared beneath the table, and so he walked a few steps closer to get a better look. His movements, however, were immediately halted when the smaller man leaped upon him and struggled with him over the gun.
“Murder! Help!” someone shouted. In his struggle with the smaller man, the visitor could tell that the anguished cries were coming from his victim, and so with all his might, he flung the small man off him and pointed the gun again at the wounded man now crawling across the floor.
“BLAM!”
The shot missed, however, for just before he pulled the trigger, the small man had managed to strike him in his hand, misdirecting the bullet. The two men then struggled feverishly across the room, yanking arms and pulling at hair. The visitor finally grabbed his opponent by the throat and spied the victim cowering behind a chair in the corner. He managed to get his shooting hand free and aimed just beneath the arm of the small man who still clung to him.
Nothing.
The gun misfired and failed to emit a bullet.
He attempted to fire off another round, but just before he could, he felt his head explode from something crashing into the back of his head. He dropped the gun and sank to the floor, semi-conscious.
“Where is the hammer?! Hit him, carpenter!” he heard a voice shouting through the chaos and pain swirling in his head. He also heard the voice of the victim over in the corner, moaning, and so he determined to finish the job by stabbing him with the dagger in his pocket. Reaching down, he extracted it and struggled mightily against the weight of the several men who know lay upon him, trying to impede his movements. Ignoring their commands to stop, he crawled closer to the wounded man and managed to stab wildly at the man’s legs, piercing them several times. But then he was lifted bodily up off the floor and his arms were pinioned behind him, and he could no longer move.
“Mister Frick, do you identify this man as your assailant?” a voice asked as the would-be assassin was held sturdily up in front of the bleeding businessman. The shooter then looked straight at the man whom he had intended to kill, and he saw the man slowly nod his head.
He then felt himself carried out roughly through the waiting room and down to the city street to a waiting police wagon.
I have failed, he thought to himself, as a crowd gathered in the street. My attentat failed to kill the capitalist monster.
A policeman then interrupted his despondent ruminations. “Are you hurt?” the officer asked him. “You’re bleeding.”
“I’ve lost my glasses,” he replied.
“You’ll be damn lucky if you don’t lose your head,” the officer replied.
Hester Street, Lower East Side of Manhattan
Evening, July 23, 1892
2
The grimy-faced thug peered around the corner of the brick building through the settling fog and whispered to his partner standing slightly behind him in the alley. “Ah…here comes one, Johnny Boy—a real baldy. Should have plenty of greenbacks on him. Get ready.”
The man pressed himself against the brick wall as his younger confederate did the same, and he could hear footsteps slowly approaching the opening of the alley where they lay in wait.
“Almost here, Johnny…almost here…get ready now, boy….”
He glanced to his left as the old man came up the sidewalk through the fog and into view where the alley opened onto the street, and as the old man walked by, the thief reached out quickly, grabbed him by his lapels, and swung him hard back into the alley against the brick wall.
The old man grunted loudly, and the veteran hoodlum slapped him against his head and shoved him violently into the alley. As the old man stumbled and fell to the asphalt, the thug motioned to his younger companion to help drag the stricken old man deeper into the alley away from any passersby who might hear their activity at this late hour of the evening.
“Come on, Johnny!” he growled at the younger accomplice. “Grab the sheeny bastard and bring him back here!”
The two men then dragged the older man another forty feet towards the back of the alley and threw him down in a heap near the back wall.
The lead assailant then straddled the whimpering man, slapped him violently a few times in the face again, and then leaned over him, placing his own face within inches of the old man’s. “Well, well,” he said as he rifled through the man’s coat. “What do we have here? Another old Shylock carrying some dough around late at night. You really shouldn’t do that, old man—you could lose it!”
The two robbers chuckled as they took the old man’s cash and started counting it. “Not bad, Johnny Boy,” the leader said as he finished counting the bills. “Looks like this old bastard had forty bucks on him tonight—a decent haul.”
“Yeah,” Johnny Boy replied with a smile. “Pretty good for one job, ain’t it, Nick?”
“Sure is, Johnny,” the older thief replied as he stuffed the old man’s bills into his pockets. “And these old Hebrew pin-heads just make it so easy.”
A sound of footsteps suddenly came from back closer to the street, and the men froze. They both looked back to where they had initially grabbed the old man, and the footsteps appeared to be getting closer.
“Step back, Johnny,” Nick said as he moved back away from the wounded man lying on the ground and peered forward into the thick fog enveloping the alley. “Be ready for anything.”
The two men kept looking until a figure slowly appeared: a man, on the tall side and dressed in dark clothing with a dark bowler atop his head. He was beardless and was walking very slowly until he came into full view approximately fifteen feet away from the two criminals. Then he spoke: “Evening. What seems to be the problem here?”
Nick stepped forward with a menacing look. “Nothing’s doin’ here, friend. We were just looking over this boozed-up old coot…making sure he’s okay.”
“I see,” the stranger said. “So, you two aren’t the men I saw grabbing him from the street a moment ago? I couldn’t quite tell—I was watching from down the street a piece.”
Nick looked over to his young friend, and then turned back to the stranger. “Nah,” he said, pulling out a switchblade and opening it with a flick of his wrist. “That ain’t us. So, you’d best be moving on, guy, or you might have trouble, see?”
The stranger looked at the blade in Nick’s hand and frowned slightly. Then he spoke again: “You know, a man pulls a blade on me like that—I usually pull out my revolver.” The stranger reached into his jacket and pulled out a large pistol, and the two thieves moved back quickly. “But tonight, I thought I’d bring something else along,” the tall man continued. His left hand, which had been hidden behind his back throughout the entire encounter, now came out
brandishing a policeman’s two-foot-long, wooden billy club.
“Do you know what one of these things can do to a man’s head if used correctly?” the stranger asked, holding the club up in front of him and gazing at it. “It’s not pretty, I can tell you that.”
“Hey, listen, mister,” Nick said. “Are you a cop or somethin’? If so, we can give you some of our loot here. There’s plenty to go around if you know what I mean.”
The stranger looked at the two men and then walked slowly towards Nick. “You know,” he said, “there are basically two kinds of people in this city. There are the hardworking, law-abiding kind who do what they have to do to feed their families, whether it’s working fourteen hours a day in some darkened shop with no windows like this old fella’ lying here, or handing out papers on the street corner, or maybe even making important decisions in a boardroom of one of those big companies uptown. Those people get up in the morning, go to work, and generally mind their own business. They want to contribute to the world and not bother the next guy in line.
“And then,” he continued, “there are…the troublemakers. Those guys are out just to cause mischief and bother other people. They don’t hold jobs, they expect a free hand-out, they take what they want, and they don’t mind hurting people at all. In fact, they go out of their way to do it. And you know what, ‘friend?’”
The stranger slowly jabbed the end of the nightstick directly into Nick’s nose, pushing the thief’s head back hard against the brick wall.
“You are a troublemaker, pal,” the man said. “I could spot it a mile away. Just like your friend over here is a troublemaker, too.” The stranger gazed over at Johnny standing nervously to the side.
“Detective Sergeant Falconer?!” a voice suddenly yelled from back towards the street. “You there?!”
“Yes!” the stranger answered back loudly. “Back here in the alley. I got ‘em here with our victim!”
Moments later, two young men came running up breathlessly. Nick looked at them and noticed that they had badges affixed to their coats and were brandishing revolvers.
“Arrest these men, Detective Waidler,” the stranger instructed one of them. “And Jimmy, help me out with the gentleman here.”
The Fall Page 1