The Lunatic Fringe: A Novel Wherein Theodore Roosevelt Meets the Pink Angel

by William L. DeAndrea

  “What?” Tommy Alb said. “What?”

  Baxter flicked a finger against the bandage, causing Tommy to scream. “I want you both awake for this,” Baxter said. “Open your eyes!” He reached under Cleo’s long hair, grasped one of her delicate ears, and twisted until she complied.

  “You are going to die, now,” Baxter said. He picked up a coil of fuse from the stack of dynamite sticks, and lit the free end. “Bryan will escape, but you are going to die in his place, you two, and Roosevelt, and the rest. And in dying, you are going to enable me to carry out the plan.”

  With the coil of fuse still hissing, Baxter picked up two sticks of dynamite. He started to push them down between the two bodies and the ropes.

  “Look,” the bandaged man said, “I like a joke as much as the next guy, but I don’t know as how this is too funny. If you’ve got something against the gal, here, that’s got nothing to do with me.

  “Shut up!” The sniveling coward. Baxter would have beaten him senseless, but he wanted him conscious when the dynamite went off.

  Still, he had a point. It was the woman who should suffer. It was she, with her soft body and her soft looks who had bewitched Hand, and later Crandall. Yes, and even Baxter himself, that night he’d found her flushed and breathless in the carriage house. She’d soiled him. Just by being what she was, she had doomed the plan before it had ever had a chance.

  Baxter pulled the dynamite from the ropes.

  “That’s better,” Alb breathed, almost hysterical with relief. “Shut up!” Baxter said again.

  Cleo’s eyes went wide with horror as Baxter took the hem of her skirt in his hand and lifted. “No, oh, please no, oh, dear God ...”

  Her gentle, pleading voice almost softened Baxter’s heart. Until she had mentioned God. He had no more time to waste on these two. He reached beneath the woman’s bound limbs, and forced the two sticks of dynamite between her body and the cushion. She’d never be able to dislodge it; at least not in time.

  Baxter grabbed Cleo by her long black hair, and kissed her cruelly on the mouth. “Turn your head away, will you? Goodbye then.” He picked up the hissing coil, then touched the end to the fuse of the dynamite. He had figured five feet would give him the time he needed. Now that fuse was hissing and jumping on the floor between the woman’s feet. Baxter gathered up the remaining seven sticks of dynamite and left.

  XXI.

  Roscoe had blacked out again, but the sound of the screaming brought him to. It was the woman again, along with a man this time. Screaming for help as though they would go mad. Roscoe wished they’d be quiet and let him sleep, but they wouldn’t. Roscoe sighed. He’d have to shut them up himself. He took a deep breath and went back to work on the lock.

  Even as she screamed, she knew she was wasting her breath; the last breaths she would ever draw. Already the fuse had disappeared under her skirts. She could feel a sensation like little pin pricks as the sparks burned through her stockings and scorched her legs. She tried to make her peace with God, but each time she closed her eyes, she was presented by a vision of the obscenity the dynamite beneath her would make of her body. And she began to scream again.

  Upstairs, Roscoe was making progress; indeed, he had made progress before, but his weakness had made him give up. Now, with his back braced against the back of the closet, he pushed with ever-increasing force with his short, muscular leg against the door, just below the lock.

  Soon the wood began to groan; a few cracks showed on the surface.

  Now, Roscoe pistoned his leg against the wood in a series of explosive kicks. On the fourth kick, the door flew open, and fresh night air revived him more. Roscoe staggered out into the hall, weary, but triumphant. He was astonished to realize he even knew where he was; he was at Hand’s mansion. There was a girl to rescue. He was here with the boss. No! he was here with Muldoon, that was it. Where was Muldoon?

  Well, that didn’t matter. There was a girl screaming. She had to be the one to rescue. Man screaming, too. Maybe that was Muldoon. He’d find out soon enough. Now, if he could only find the stairs.

  Cleo had a plan. Though her ankles were tied to the lion’s-paw legs at one end and the middle of the love seat, there was sufficient slack for her to close her thighs together. If she could stand the pain, perhaps she could smother the fuse, stop the hissing that, she knew, must soon drive her mad. The fuse had burned up to the cushion now; Cleo could smell burning silk and horse hair. She pulled her thighs tight together.

  To no avail. The fuse still had oxygen enough to burn. Yet Cleo kept her thighs together. She could stand the pain. She welcomed the pain; cherished it. She concentrated on the flesh-searing pain of the fuse until it filled her mind, and blotted out all thought of what was about to happen to her.

  Roscoe gave up on thinking—every time he tried to figure out where he was, he got lost. He decided to trust his ears, and follow the sound of the man’s screams for help (for the woman’s screams had stopped) no matter where they led him.

  They led him to the parlor. Roscoe kicked at the door twice before it occurred to him to see if it were locked. It wasn’t. He threw open the door and ran in.

  Cleo opened her eyes. “Roscoe!” she said.

  “You’re Cleo, right?” It seemed very important to Roscoe to get things straight.

  “Roscoe, listen.” It was the bandaged man speaking. It wasn’t Muldoon. “There’s dynamite under Cleo’s dress!” The voice kept breaking with fear.

  Roscoe had heard that from people; still it didn’t seem like a very gentlemanly thing to say in the woman’s presence.

  “Really, Roscoe, please look, it’s all right. Hurry,” the woman said, “or we’ll be blown to bits!”

  It wasn’t her words, so much, that made Roscoe look, as it was the fact that Cleo’s dress was smoldering, the smoke drifting upward in a thin grey spiral.

  The sight of the actual dynamite cleared the last traces of Roscoe’s befuddlement. He had used dynamite plenty of times in his criminal days, and a fuse that short meant trouble.

  Indelicate it might be, but Roscoe reached with a rough hand and pulled the two sticks from under the woman. “Thank God!” she breathed.

  It was a little soon for that. Roscoe sprinted across the parlor toward the window; then the fuse disappeared, and the hissing stopped. Roscoe said a rude word, and hurled the explosive through Hand’s imported glass.

  XXII.

  Baxter grinned as he heard the explosion. The little slut’s body had hardly muffled it at all. Baxter waited for the piping voice of Mr. Theodore Roosevelt to command the police to charge the house.

  That was all he wanted to hear. He knew the explosion would bring them running. He had clear sailing to the reservoir, now. Of course, it was possible the gates were being kept under guard. Baxter didn’t mind; he would make his own gate.

  Baxter emerged from the bush he’d been hiding behind. He placed a stick of dynamite under the fence, lit it, then stepped back as it blew. He emerged onto Forty-second Street.

  It was in the nature of their characters for Theodore Roosevelt and Dennis Patrick Francis-Xavier Muldoon to be the first on the scene. Hand was just regaining consciousness, but they had ignored him after a quick glance, and left him to the officers who followed.

  The Commissioner bent over Roscoe. “Get this man to a hospital,” he ordered. One of the officers went to telephone for an ambulance.

  Muldoon ran to the couch to untie Cleo. He saw where her dress had been scorched. “Angel,” he said anxiously, “are you hurtin’ badly?”

  “I have been burned, Dennis, but it is nothing to what might have happened. Roscoe saved all of us.”

  Tommy Alb said, “Muldoon!” Muldoon saw that to Alb’s other injuries had been added bruises high on his throat.

  “What?” Muldoon replied.

  “Muldoon, you’ve got to stop that Baxter. He’s crazy. I don’t know what he’s planning on, but he’s got enough dynamite on him to blow J. P. Morgan’s bank. Seven
sticks of it.” Muldoon gave him a puzzled look. “I want you alive,” Alb explained. “I’ll be out in ten, fifteen years, and I’ll settle with you then.”

  Muldoon told him he had a deal. He deputized a man to take over the untying. It didn’t matter much now, Cleo being fully clothed. He turned to go follow Mr. Roosevelt, who had left, apparently to chase Baxter.

  Cleo stopped him. “Dennis,” she said.

  What is it, me darlin’?”

  “Kiss me.”

  It wasn’t seemly, but these seemed extraordinary circumstances. He kissed her, and it was wonderful, and he didn’t care if Mr. Roosevelt found out or didn’t.

  “Thank you,” Cleo said. “I had given up hope that that would ever happen. Take care of yourself, Dennis.”

  Muldoon answered by kissing her again, quickly, then running for the front door.

  He caught up with the Commissioner before he was even out of the house. Roosevelt was in the hallway telling Hand he had a lot to answer for.

  The lecture was cut short by the sound of the explosion from outside, as Baxter left the grounds.

  This much is to be said for Ozias Herkimer: when he saw Baxter blow the fence and run from the Hand estate, he forgot his fury and his being under arrest, and ran forward with other police officers to try to capture him. And with them, he was knocked senseless from the concussion of another stick of dynamite.

  Baxter disappeared around the corner of Fifth Avenue. A few yards down the block, he found the metal rungs in the reservoir wall, and began to climb.

  Those police who were still able to chase him ran right underneath—it never occurred to them the fugitive would want to get anywhere but away.

  Roosevelt and Muldoon and other policemen arrived on the scene. Listerdale was standing under a gas lamp, shaking his head in disbelief at the scene.

  “Where has Baxter gone?” the Commissioner demanded. Listerdale pointed to the corner. “Come on, Muldoon,” Roosevelt said.

  “No, sir,” Muldoon told him. Before the Commissioner could gather enough air for a suitable explosion, Muldoon was explaining. “He’s climbin’ the reservoir, sir. I’m sure of it. He’s plannin’ to light off that dynamite he’s got, and blow the reservoir.”

  “Not that dynamite,” Roosevelt said. “He’s been planting a mammoth charge there for days, if not longer. Remember the night he caught Cleo in the carriage house, how she noticed his sleeves were wet?”

  “Sir,” Muldoon replied, “I don’t know nothin’ about dynamite except you need a fuse and a match to light it off, but I think that’s just what Baxter is goin’ to do, if I don’t get up there and stop him.”

  “It’s too dangerous,” Roosevelt said.

  “I haven’t been asked,” Listerdale said, “but I don’t think there’s much of a choice. I—I don’t want to die.”

  “Well, blast, don’t say that as though you’re ashamed of it! I don’t want to die either. Very well, Muldoon here’s what we’ll do: I will have men posted at the base of every ladder to the walkway at the top of the reservoir. You climb the Sixth Avenue side, while my men and I launch a diversionary attack on the Fifth Avenue side.”

  “Yes, sir,” Muldoon said. “I’ll be gettin’ him for you.” Muldoon sprinted down the block, while Roosevelt assembled his men.

  Baxter had reached the walkway at the top of the wall, as wide as some Greenwich Village streets. By climbing to this point, he had gotten past most of the length of the fuse—if he lit it where he was now, he would still have some ten minutes to get away. He brought the fire to the fuse, and it hissed to life, showing itself from the fissure at the inside of the low wall that surrounded the walkway. Baxter had hidden it well—at any other time, even by daylight, it would have been invisible.

  It was burning well. Now to get down. He looked over the edge, to Fifth Avenue below, saw the policeman, and cursed. Roosevelt himself was down there. And he had a rifle—

  Baxter saw the puffs of smoke and felt the shock of a bullet before he heard the reports. There was a horrible, searing pain on his left, where his neck joined his shoulders. He didn’t seem to be bleeding too badly, and the bullet hadn’t hit bone, but Baxter knew he couldn’t get down that way. He wouldn’t panic—he’d leave the other way. After all, he could run around the bulk of the wall. And he would delay them further.

  Though the pain in his left side made it difficult, Baxter’s great strength enabled him to light two more sticks of dynamite, and send them arcing over the wall. Blood was dripping from one of Baxter’s unwrinkled ears, he noticed. Roosevelt’s other bullet had ruined it. Baxter never felt it.

  He raced the burning fuse down the walkway.

  Muldoon heard the latest explosions, but tried not to pay attention to them, except to count. That was four. Tommy Alb had said Baxter had seven sticks when he left the building—that meant he had three left. It occurred to Muldoon that lying about the matter would be an effortless revenge for the ex-copper.

  Muldoon forced the thought from his mind. Hands and feet. Rung after rung. That’s all that was important.

  About five rungs from the top, Muldoon pulled his revolver from his pocket. He’d be ready to fire as soon as he reached the top.

  But Baxter was waiting for him when he reached the top. Muldoon pulled the trigger almost by reflex, and the same second Baxter kicked the gun from his hand. Served him right, Muldoon thought, the bullet never would have hit him otherwise. As it was, it grazed his side.

  Baxter grabbed the new wound (Muldoon saw he had a couple already) but that didn’t stop him from kicking at Muldoon’s head. Muldoon, made desperate by the prospect of falling to the sidewalk below, switched hands on the top rung, and with the undamaged one, caught Baxter’s foot at the next kick and twisted. When Baxter fell heavily to the stone of the reservoir, Muldoon scrambled up.

  It did him no good, however, because as he gathered his feet under him, he stepped on something round, and fell backward. He hit his head on the stone, and lay still.

  Baxter’s laugh was wheezy, because of his wounds. He stooped (because he could not bend) to pick up the cylindrical object the officer had fallen over—a stick of dynamite Baxter himself had dropped when Muldoon tripped him. With the toe of a shoe, he rolled Muldoon’s body into the waters of the Croton Reservoir. He gave the wheezy laugh again. Dynamite didn’t have to blow a man up to do him in.

  Baxter threw back his head to straighten the path for air into his lungs. It still seemed to come raggedly. Baxter faced the fact that he couldn’t escape. He didn’t want to anymore. He would stay here, with his three remaining sticks of dynamite, and see that no one tried to put out that fuse. The fuse. The flood. The plan. In the name of humanity, it must be done.

  Down below, T. Avery Hand had been revived. He was standing (along with the officer who had him in charge) under the gas lamp on Forty-second Street with Listerdale, a shaken but unhurt Captain Herkimer, and Cleo.

  There was nothing to see, and very little to hear going on at the top of the structure, but Cleo had her eyes fixed at the edge where the wall met the black August sky. She twisted a handkerchief around her fingers when she wasn’t using it to wipe tears of worry from her soft brown eyes.

  Hand watched her, saw how she cared for this big Irishman, this hero, Muldoon. Hand had been right all along, to be worried about him. But that was about all he’d been right about, back to the days he thought his locomotive improvement would make him rich, and that being rich would solve all his troubles forevermore.

  That was the moment that Peter Baxter, atop the reservoir, made light-headed by exertion, slow seepage of blood from his wounds, and the knowledge that in two minutes or less it would be all over and his job would be at last done, decided to stand up and peep over the wall. He wanted one last look at it. He wanted to imagine the wall of water sweeping it away.

  He looked carefully over the grounds. He remembered angrily, but with a touch of pleasure, the lesson he had taught the little slut in the carriag
e house.

  Then he saw the group standing under the gas lamp.

  Baxter went insane with rage. He ran stiffly to the point on the wall directly above that gas lamp. As he ran, he lit a stick of dynamite. He noted, without even thinking, that the fuse had perhaps one minute to burn on the main charge. If he’d thought, he would never have done what he did; it made no sense.

  For the first time, Baxter reared up above the wall, his black butler’s uniform blending with the night sky behind him, only his face visible, floating like a ball of Saint Elmo’s fire. Policemen drew revolvers and fired, but none seemed to be able to hit Baxter.

  Baxter held the sizzling explosive at arm’s length, pointing at the group in the gaslight: Cleo, Herkimer, Listerdale, the patrolman, and Hand.

  Baxter’s face was opening and closing like a blacksmith’s bellows, and he was yelling something, over and over. “The sentence is death!” he cried. “The sentence is death!” And he threw the dynamite with all his might at the middle of the circle of lamplight.

  No one would ever know why, once the group under the lamp had scattered and the dynamite lay on the pavement, T. Avery Hand tore loose from the grip of the policeman who held him, and ran forward to pick it up.

  Those who saw him later said he raised his arm as if to throw it. But throw it where? He couldn’t be expected to throw it hard enough to get it back up to Baxter. And if he wanted to throw it away for safety’s sake—well, he could have been much safer if he’d just kept running clear.

  Perhaps he didn’t think of that. Perhaps he didn’t think of anything. Perhaps he knew Cleo was watching.

  In any event, he did run forward, and he did pick it up, and he did raise his arm as if to throw it, and that was the instant it went off. Between shock and loss of blood, Hand was dead within half a minute.

  But while all this was going on, Muldoon had dragged himself out of the water and gone to work on the fuse. Because Muldoon hadn’t been badly stunned when he landed on his head. Lord knew, he had sustained worse blows in the course of the investigation. He had been about to rise when Baxter kicked him into the water.