The Fall

by Sean Moynihan

  “Hold on!” he yelled to her. “Here I come!”

  He clambered over some overturned logs and sizable rocks littering the entrance to the cave, and, finally coming upon her, clutched her about her shoulders. “Are you all right?” he said loudly into her ear.

  “Yes!” she replied, also equally loud. “But what about you? What happened?”

  “We’ll talk later!” he said. “We need to get moving down the shoreline because there are more of them up there! Are you okay to walk?”

  “Yes, fine!” she said. “Here, take your gun back!”

  He took the large revolver out of her hand and carefully placed it into his shoulder holster, then grabbed her hand and gently led her out of the little cave and back towards the shoreline.

  “Where are we going now?” she asked as they stumbled across the rocks and broken driftwood lining the shore. “Should we go up to the town and hop on another train back?”

  “No,” he said quickly into her ear. “They’ll be monitoring the trains, so we’ll have to get back another way.”

  “Well, how do we do that?” she asked as the sounds of the great falls slowly grew more distant. “Surely we can’t walk the whole way.”

  “No, we can’t,” he said, still clutching her by the hand as they navigated the jumbled path down the river’s edge. “So, we’ll have to go down the river by boat.”

  “By boat?” she asked. “What sort of boat are you meaning?”

  “I don’t know the answer to that yet, I’m afraid,” she said, “but there’ll be some boats down at the town’s marina. We’ll try to hire one and get down the river as far as we can. Then we’ll figure out something else. Does that sound all right to you?”

  “Anything to avoid those murderous ruffians back there,” she answered drily. “So, I’m all yours. Please lead the way.”

  27

  Falconer led Goldman along the Mohawk’s rock-strewn shore for about a mile. As they got closer to the town’s center, he could see large, industrial, brick buildings pushing up into the sky among smaller, wooden dwellings high up on their right. Every now and then, he could see people moving about near the buildings and wagons rumbling down the street closest to the shore. He looked ahead and saw a few short docks jutting out into the river with a host of boats tied up alongside them.

  “Here,” he said to her. “We’ll try to hire a boat up at these docks.”

  They walked another quarter of a mile and traipsed over to one of the docks. Various men were busy preparing fishing lines and nets on smaller fishing boats, while others were simply lounging about on sailboats that appeared to be meant for recreational purposes only. Falconer stopped mid-dock and surveyed their surroundings.

  “Do you see one that looks like a possibility?” Goldman asked him.

  “Yes,” he said slowly, settling his gaze on one, small sailboat that was docked farther apart from the others. “That one over there.”

  “You mean the small one with the black man tending to it?” she asked.

  “Yes, that’s the one,” he answered. “Let’s go inquire.”

  They walked down the dock and came upon a man coiling up some rope inside of a small catboat approximately fifteen feet long. The man did not look up at them, and instead, remained fixed on his task at hand. Falconer glanced at Goldman and then turned again to the man. “Pardon me, mister,” he said, “but we’re looking to hire a boat to take us down the Hudson a ways, and we were wondering if you might be willing to do that.”

  “Maybe,” the man said after a pause, still working with his rope. “Depend on how much you pay.”

  “Well,” Falconer said, “I can give you two dollars to get the lady and me down as far as you can. Would that do it?”

  “I suppose,” the man answered, looking up at Falconer finally. “Two dollars is pretty good. But I gotta’ say, you two lookin’ like you’re running from somethin’, mister. You in trouble with her old man, or maybe with the law?”

  Falconer and Goldman glanced at each other, then Falconer addressed the man again. “No trouble,” he said. “Just trying to get down to New York, but we’re a little tired of the view from the trains.”

  “Mister,” the man said, “two dollars’ll go a long way for anyone around here, and my apologies if I’m wrong, but I got the feeling you ain’t bein’ truthful with me. And I just don’t need no trouble, you understand? I think you’d better go find yourself another boat.”

  “We aren’t looking to cause you any trouble now,” Falconer said. “We’re just trying to keep from the crowds and see the river is all.”

  “All the same,” the man said, “I think it best if you go hire one of them other boats. You’ll have a fine time with them.”

  “Sir,” Goldman interrupted, “if you could see your way to assisting us, I’m sure we could come up with additional funds for your fee. We have friends in New York who will see to that, I can promise you.”

  The man looked at Goldman for a moment and appeared confused. Then he got up out of the boat and walked a little closer to her on the dock, as if to examine her face. After a few seconds staring at her, his face then erupted into a large, bright smile. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. “You that anarchist woman from the papers. Yes, yes, I recognize you from your pictures. You’re the lady they been talkin’ about lately since that fella’ got shot up in Pittsburgh.”

  Goldman paused and then turned to Falconer. “Well, it appears that our cover is blown,” she said glumly. “What do we do now?”

  “Listen, mister,” Falconer said to the man, stepping closer towards him and showing him his badge. “The fact is, you’re right about this lady, and I am the police, actually. The truth is, there are some men up near the falls who have been trying to hurt Miss Goldman here, and I need to get her safely down to New York. I’m not going to commandeer your boat here, but our offer still stands. If you could take us downriver a bit, it would be much appreciated.”

  The man stood silently on the dock, and after several seconds, Goldman turned to Falconer. “I’m afraid we’re out of luck,” she said. “Let us go find different means of escape.”

  She turned and started walking back towards the shore, but the man then spoke out to her. “Hold on there, Miss Emma Goldman,” he said.

  She turned to face him, appearing surprised to hear her name exclaimed in such a remote, bucolic setting.

  “Yeah, I know your name, miss,” he said. “I may be just a river man up here, but I do read the papers, too, like I said. And I know all you do to help them workin’ men in Pennsylvania and New York City, and how you stand up to all them rich fellas’. You one of us, Miss Goldman, and I ain’t about to let some group of hostile men come down from those hills there and put harm to you or to this here police detective. You got yourself a deal, miss. I’ll get you downriver, no doubt. But I can’t go too far. I got a family to deal with here. I can bring you down as far as Albany and then you can catch a day line steamboat from there. The ‘Albany’ or ‘New York’ will be running by there in a couple of hours, and we can make it if we leave soon. Is that all right?”

  Goldman walked back towards the man, extending her hand. “Why, thank you very much, mister….”

  “Lloyd,” he replied, shaking her hand. “Tom Lloyd.”

  “Thank you ever so much, Mister Lloyd,” she said to him. “You don’t know what this means to us.”

  “Yes, thank you, Mister Lloyd,” Falconer said, walking up to him and shaking his hand, as well. “We’ll see to it that you are recognized for your assistance to us.”

  “It’s okay, folks,” Lloyd said. “Whoever those men are that been botherin’ you up there, they can’t be on the good side of the law, and I’m not about to make their life any easier, if I can help it.”

  “Are we able to shove off soon?” Falconer asked him. “The men you’re speaking about aren’
t far behind and will be looking around here soon.”

  “Yes, indeed, detective,” Lloyd replied. “And what’s your name, sir?”

  “Falconer—Robert Falconer with the New York City Police Detective Bureau.”

  “Well, Detective Falconer,” Lloyd said, “I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourself into, but it sure don’t look good, so we’d best get movin’ past the islands and out onto the Hudson. There’s washrooms for men and ladies just over there on shore, and I got food stuffs and water stored on the boat. Let’s be leavin’ in about ten minutes.”

  “Right,” Falconer answered. “Ten minutes. Oh, and one thing, Mister Lloyd. Do you know how I can get a telegram sent to my colleagues down in New York? It’s important.”

  “Why, there’s a telegraph office at the freight depot just up the hill here on Oneida where it hits the railroad tracks,” Lloyd answered. “Ain’t too far at all.”

  “The only problem, is, I should probably avoid town for obvious reasons,” Falconer said. “I don’t suppose you know anyone around here who might drop the telegram for me for a fee?”

  “Sure, I got someone,” Lloyd said. “Little Willie Jones is around here somewheres, and he’ll do it if I ask him. Give me a second here.”

  Falconer watched as Lloyd walked away and hopped off the end of the dock onto the shore. He continued walking another fifty yards to a barn-like structure that appeared to be a general maintenance shed for the boats and then disappeared. Moments later, he appeared again with a young black boy perhaps ten years old or so in tow. They both walked onto the dock and approached Falconer and Goldman.

  “This here is Willie,” Lloyd said, pointing to the boy. “He’ll get that telegram to the office for you, detective.”

  “Thank you, Mister Lloyd,” Falconer said, as he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the small notepad and pencil that he always carried with him. Placing the notepad onto a tall crate that stood empty nearby, he wrote down several lines and then folded it up and handed it to the boy. “Willie,” he said, “I need you to get this to the telegraph man up on the hill there. It’s very important. Can you do that for me?”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said shyly.

  “Good,” Falconer said. “Here’s a dollar. Give this to the telegraph operator and you keep whatever change he gives back to you. Understand?”

  “Yes, sir, I do,” Willie said.

  “All right then,” Falconer said. “Thank you.”

  “You get goin’, boy,” Lloyd said to Willie, “and make sure that telegram gets sent.”

  “Yes, sir,” Willie said again, and then he ran off down the dock and sped up the hill.

  “All right, folks, you get yourselves ready and we’ll leave in ten minutes,” Lloyd said.

  “Ten minutes,” Falconer replied. “Understood.”

  28

  Tom Lloyd eased his small sailboat out into the narrow portion of the Mohawk that ran between the town of Cohoes on one side, and Simmons Island on the other. The morning breeze caught the vessel’s sail and propelled it southwards towards the much larger Van Schaik Island on the left, and then around a sharp curve in the river towards the wide expanse of the Hudson River in the distance.

  “You’ve been sailing the river long?” Falconer asked Lloyd from his seat near the bow.

  Lloyd nodded as he manned the tiller and chewed on some sunflower seeds. “Yup,” he replied. “Ever since I was a kid, to be honest.”

  “Do you just give sight-seeing tours? That sort of thing?” Falconer inquired.

  “No, I do some fishin’, too,” Lloyd said. “Anythin’, really, s’long as it pays.”

  “Well, this part of the river certainly is very picturesque, Mister Lloyd,” Goldman interjected. “It’s a lovely part of the country.”

  “It is indeed, Miss Goldman,” Lloyd said. “It is indeed.”

  “How far down to the Albany dock?” Falconer asked.

  “Oh, ‘bout ten miles,” Lloyd answered. “I think we get maybe five knots or so with this wind and we’ll be there in under two hours. I think you’ll make your steamboat. It moves on at eleven o’clock.”

  “Well, thank you again,” Falconer said. “This is a big help.”

  “Ain’t no problem,” Lloyd said. “Plus, I get to meet a world-renowned, famous anarchist. Ain’t that right, Miss Goldman?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t say world-renowned, Mister Lloyd,” Goldman replied. “But you are right—the newspapers are making me a little more notable lately. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing, frankly.”

  “Yeah, you ‘bout the most famous person I ever seen up close, I’d say,” Lloyd said. “Well, exceptin’ for President Grant.”

  “You saw the president?” Goldman asked.

  “Yup,” Lloyd said. “He done come through Cohoes on the train on his way to that mountain cabin of his back in ’85. The man was dyin’ for sure, but he still come to the window and waved to us all in the crowd that day. Yes, sir, a good man, that President Grant. A real good, decent man.”

  “Yes, he was,” Falconer said, and then he turned to gaze down the river in the morning sunlight, down towards the city of Albany, where he and Goldman would start the next leg of their journey back to Mulberry Street headquarters, as the questions about Goldman’s mysterious pursuers swirled within his troubled mind.

  29

  Waidler sat at his desk in the Detective Bureau on Mulberry Street. It was 8:30 in the morning and his shift was just starting. He hadn’t heard from Falconer since the detective sergeant had left under cover of darkness with Emma Goldman two days earlier, and he assumed that this meant things were quiet up at the safe house and that Falconer would just wait things out for a few days and then give an update when convenient.

  He looked at the various papers strewn about his desk and pondered his other pending cases that were piling up—a thirty-nine-year-old woman who had fallen, or perhaps jumped or been pushed, out of a twenty-fifth-floor window on 39th Street; a 12-year-old boy found strangled to death behind a drug store on Fulton Street; another young woman—always, always it seemed to be young women—who had disappeared without a trace three weeks earlier.

  He thought of these cases and of the many others, and of how difficult it was sometimes to solve them, and how this inability to crack the cases continually gnawed at him and made him perhaps a little difficult to deal with at times. But his broodings in this vein were suddenly interrupted when a young clerk from the telegraph office approached him with a paper in hand. “Detective Waidler,” he said, “a telegram just came in for you. It’s from Detective Sergeant Falconer.”

  Waidler took the telegram quickly from the clerk, thanked him, and then carefully unfolded the paper as the young man departed. He scanned the message quickly and felt perspiration suddenly appear on his forehead. He looked down at the telegram and read it again, just to be sure he had read it correctly:

  Cabin attacked by multiple gunmen this morning. Escaped by sail. EG and I unhurt. Will seek to board day line steamer 11 AM from Albany. Rendezvous w us at Bear Mountain this evening. Falconer

  He was wondering what to do first in view of Falconer’s alarming news when Jimmy Halloran ambled into the bureau, coffee in hand. “Morning, detective,” he said. “How’s the day looking?”

  Waidler looked up at his young colleague. “Well,” he said, “we’re off to Bear Mountain up near West Point. It seems Detective Sergeant Falconer and Miss Goldman were attacked again up at the safe house and they need us to meet them on the docks up there.”

  He then got up and grabbed his jacket off his chair and started walking to the door to the hallway as he heard Halloran’s short response coming from behind him: “Wait—what?”

  30

  Falconer looked at the docks of Albany jutting out into the river just ahead as Lloyd angled his sailboat over towards the shore.
A large, white-colored paddle steamer was moored to a dock, and hundreds of people milled about the dock or upon its decks.

  “Is that our boat, Mister Lloyd?” Falconer asked.

  “Yup, that’ll be her,” Lloyd replied. “The New York—sister boat to the Albany. See? I knew we’d get you down here on time. You got about twenty minutes before she pulls out.”

  “It certainly is a grand vessel,” Goldman said. “So new looking.”

  “Been in service since eighty-seven,” Lloyd said. “She runs about 300 feet long and can hold 1500 people. And oh, how she looks on the inside—mmmmmmm. That’ll be one of the fanciest boats on the river—like you’re in some millionaire’s mansion or somethin’.”

  “Well, thank you again for getting us down here,” Falconer said. “We’re grateful to you for this.”

  “It’s no problem, detective,” Lloyd said. “Like I said, it’s an honor to have Miss Goldman here on my boat.”

  “Thank you, Mister Lloyd,” Goldman said, turning to him. “And I shall not forget this little adventure of ours on the high seas.”

  “No, miss,” Lloyd said. “Me neither.”

  He turned the boat slightly and headed directly towards a smaller dock that ran parallel to the longer dock holding the New York steady in the water. Soon, they were sidling up next to the wooden pilings, and Lloyd and Falconer fastened the vessel to some dock cleats screwed into the wood.

  “That’ll do,” Lloyd said. “You just go up to that building there and get yourself some tickets. You got a little more time yet.”

  “I’ll do that,” Falconer replied, extending his hand. “And thank you again.”

  “My pleasure,” Lloyd said, shaking Falconer’s hand. “And Miss Goldman, I’ll be readin’ about you in the papers now—hopefully, good things.”

  “Yes, hopefully,” she answered, shaking his hand, as well. “Thank you ever so much for your assistance this morning. I don’t know what we would’ve done without you.”