The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt

  “Law—and order.”

  “Mr. Hummel,” I said, “the Major’s idea of law and order is much different from mine. He works for Pierpont Morgan, keeps Morgan’s enemies in check, and does favors for his friends.”

  “Now, now,” said Silent Abe, “that’s a touch unfair. Not one bank messenger has been waylaid since the Pinks arrived.”

  “Yes, they’re busy lads. The Pinks have tossed tenants into the gutter . . . and broken the backs of innocent cigar makers.”

  “Innocent?” Taggart said with a smirk. “They’re all rabble. They’ve been inciting riots. They spend whatever time they have manufacturing diabolic stink bombs and tossing them at their own bosses. . . . Commissioner, you are reviled in your own town, while we are cheered wherever we go.”

  “That’s not how I recall it,” said Sergeant Raddison. “I had to save one of your own lads from the mob.”

  “That’s a laugh,” said Silent Abe. “Does the mob dictate law and order, TR? Then we might as well surrender to savages.”

  My girl secretary, Miss Minnie, with her coquettish eyes and brilliant black hair, brought around biscuits and cups of hot coffee, pampering the Major with marmalade and spoons of sugar.

  “Thank you, Minnie, dear,” said Silent Abe Hummel with a biscuit crumbling in his mouth, while the Major stood aloof. He’d posed with his war wagon in several gazettes, and was much too fine for Mulberry Street.

  “We will win, Roosevelt, we always do,” said the Major. “Even McKinley is on our side. And so is the Mayor. Your midnight rambles haven’t changed a bloody thing. Roundsmen still gamble during their tours and enjoy a pail of beer. My men never drink. We aren’t open to bribes. Headquarters will be cluttered with ghosts in another six months. Mark my word. . . . Come, come,” he said to his lawyer in the pink shirt. “We will get no satisfaction here.”

  “Ah, but reasonable men have to be reasonable,” said Silent Abe, nibbling on a biscuit like a rodent. “Surely we can arrive at an agreement. . . . We’ll divide the turf. Major Taggart will have his little kingdom, TR, and you will have yours.”

  Hummel stared right through my pince-nez and saw that he couldn’t arrange a truce between Taggart and Mulberry Street. Silent Abe was certain of his own powers, but not of a Pinkerton with dead eyes. Taggart was a bit sinister, wearing a mustache that hid a face full of scars.

  Hummel sighed, sensing his own defeat. Yet Howe & Hummel never deserted a client. “Ah, a compromise, right here. Miss Minnie, will you put down the biscuits, please, and supply us with a steel-tipped pen and a bottle of ink?”

  Taggart wasn’t buying any of Silent Abe’s silk. He had faith in his war wagon and the fealty of his detectives.

  “Hummel, can’t you tell that the little tin czar is on the way out? We don’t require compromises with TR’s detectives.”

  “Then why did you offer to come?” asked Silent Abe.

  “To count the cobwebs on the wall.”

  And he left with his drag-foot, winking once at Miss Minnie.

  “Then it will be civil war and a long, long stretch in the courts,” said Silent Abe, as he trundled out, looking for Taggart.

  Meanwhile, Miss Minnie did her best to hide her affection for the Major out of loyalty to me. His cruelty didn’t seem to frighten her at all. Perhaps she was on a holiday of sorts, drawn to macabre detectives with a covenant to kill. It was a dream marriage, and I did not disabuse Minnie of her phantom love affair. Taggart had sized her up for another reason. He wanted to occupy my chair, seize Mulberry Street for himself.

  TAGGART MARCHED WITH THE Fenians, scraping along with his drag-foot, had lunch with the Mayor, and was the lion of Newspaper Row. Reporters and photographers flocked to Taggart, followed him and his war wagon from place to place. It didn’t seem to matter much that the Pinks trampled upon innocent grocers who were in arrears, smashed their windows, tossed their produce into the streets, and posed with each and every culprit on a pile of foodstuff turned to flotsam on dry land. The Pinks also had their own supply of stool pigeons and made spectacular arrests. They appointed themselves civilian sheriffs, and the courts upheld their right to do so. They captured pickpockets and highwaymen who had come from crime schools in Chicago and Baltimore, plucked them right off the ferry docks and train depots, men in homburgs and fur hats, like bankers wearing handcuffs. They swooped down on a team of burglars in the midst of a prodigious robbery, while my lads at Mulberry Street looked like bunglers and no-accounts—I was the Commissioner of nothing, nothing at all.

  Yet I wasn’t idle. Manhattan now had twelve exchanges and fifty thousand telephones, and I made sure that headquarters was connected to every precinct, every municipal department, including the Mayor’s office, every merchandise mart, and every significant family, the only ones that could afford the subscription price of five hundred dollars. Thus we had our own umbilical cord to certain select souls. We could steer the flying squad into riot areas in a matter of minutes. But my wheelers never seemed to get there first. The Pinks arrived before Sergeant Raddison did. They had an uncanny gift to be at a riot or the scene of a crime.

  The Major was either a magisterial detective, or he was privy to information that shouldn’t have been in his pocket. He had a source inside Mulberry Street. I wondered if that source was my celebrated secretary. Was Taggart romancing Miss Minnie on the sly? I had Sergeant Raddison follow her, I’m ashamed to admit. He went wherever Minnie went. He waited outside the stoop of her Brooklyn tenement, rambled behind her at market stalls, even bumped into Minnie once.

  “Why, Sergeant, what are you doing here? Are you in training?”

  “Indeed,” he said. “I like to track beautiful girls.”

  The vigil ended right there.

  “Sir,” the Sergeant said, “it’s not your Minnie—unless she and that killer have an unbreakable code.”

  There was only one other source—the telephone dispatcher at Mulberry Street who directed calls to the precincts. We had a look at his bankbook. Sergeant Fleischer, a former roundsman, was suddenly awash in cash. I did not sit in judgment, relieve him of his pension or his rank. I had to be as wily as the Pinks.

  I sat Fleischer down in my office and shut the door.

  “When did Taggart first approach you?”

  I’d frightened the poor fellow out of his wits. His eyes seemed to recede into his skull, and I could see nothing but two bloodshot balls. “Your silence condemns you, Fleischer. Speak!”

  He patted his lips with a crumpled handkerchief, and his mouth opened like a raucous melody.

  “It was on the very day the Pinkerton visited headquarters, sir. He slipped an envelope under my seat.”

  “Laden with cash,” I said. That was Taggart’s motive in coming here. It wasn’t about any mythical truce. He meant to bribe as many coppers as he could.

  My former roundsman wasn’t a fool. “I think I will need representation, sir—Howe & Hummel.”

  “Fine,” I said. “Have your Hummel. But you’ll step into my Commissioner’s court and I’ll fleece you of everything you own. Hummel is not that fond of paupers.”

  So Sergeant Fleischer began to sing like a Mulberry Street canary, and thus we had our little ruse. But there was a complication, alas—a fog had settled in and refused to burn off, even in brilliant patches of sunlight. Our bicycle cops banged into civilians and members of their own illustrious unit, but I couldn’t permit the fog to let the Pinks slip into their own camouflaged oblivion.

  Here I was, sworn to protect the populace as Police Commissioner, and I faked a robbery—at a bridal shop on Grand. I had my dispatcher call this fake crime in to the Pinks. His voice was trembling, but he gave no other signal to Taggart.

  “The Major will murder me,” Fleischer said.

  “He will not. A crime was reported, and you dispatched it to the nearest precinct.”

  I couldn’t be bothered with Taggart’s spies, crime reporters from the World, who had their cubbyholes across the street fro
m headquarters. What could they discern with their binoculars in such ruinous weather? I’d never catch Taggart on my own. I had to join Raddison and his flying squad as an undercover agent. I borrowed a bicycle, the squad’s striped trousers, a woolen cape, and a nautical cap. And we vanished into the fog. We all had our whistles, and our billies tucked under our belts. We had our lamps on; the meager glow didn’t do much good in that miasma. Our bicycles were equipped with bells, but the piercing peal was swallowed up by the fog. Our whistles worked. Their shrill bleat seemed to carve a path into the descending dark. Wagons lurched out of our way, as we raced along Mulberry Street. A pushcart went flying—soggy sausages floated in the still air. We avoided pedestrians by Sergeant Raddison’s own strange aeronautics. He rose up on his rear wheel like a bronco and was a pinch more visible than the rest of us. And so he was our guide and our compass needle. He had an uncanny gift to locate where we were.

  “Mr. Roosevelt, sir, a little to your left, or you’ll crash into that horse cart.”

  Yet we managed to arrive on Grand without a single collision. Grand Street was still Lower Manhattan’s great shopping district. The Williamsburg ferry brought a flurry of passengers from Brooklyn in search of bargains and exotic merchandise. They were like a bunch of prowlers, with money in their pockets. They seldom smiled; shopping, it seems, was almost a crime.

  We’d come to the land of bridal shops, with an explosion of veils and gowns in window after window. I had selected the Glass Slipper, at Orchard and Grand, as the site of our fictitious crime, because it was the Cinderella of bridal shops. It had an assortment of mannequins that reared up out of the fog like living creatures in their bridal veils.

  I dared not dwell too long, not while I wore a billy and was with the flying squad. We hadn’t notified the clerks at the Glass Slipper of the little communion with the Pinks that was about to take place. These clerks might have warned the Major. And so they were mystified at the sight of wheelers in front of their mannequins.

  “Raddison, what if Taggart doesn’t show?’

  “He will, Mr. Roosevelt. He wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

  I doubted Raddison for a moment. And then I heard the distant rumble of Taggart’s war wagon—it cut through the fog like an ironclad turtle, an amphibious creature that might prosper both on land and on sea. Taggart was the first to leap down, even with his limp. His agents followed right behind him. He’d brought a battery of reporters and photographers to re-enact his arrest of bridal veil thieves, as he imagined a robbery in progress at the Glass Slipper. He dangled half a dozen handcuffs like exotic pieces of jewelry. And he did a curious dance with his drag-foot, a stuttering cakewalk.

  He stopped right in the middle of his dance when he saw my wheelers. We should never have arrived first. He couldn’t believe that he had been outmaneuvered by a bunch of bicycle boys. But he was nimble enough to shift gears.

  He clapped his hands in that infernal weather and looked me in the eye. “You staged this whole affair,” he said. “I should have figured—a bridal shop on Grand Street.”

  And he had to decide how much his private police force was worth. He had his coterie with him. But reporters seemed much more interested in my nautical cap than in a monstrous turtle on wheels and a little lord with a drag-foot. He scattered the reporters and squinted hard at Raddison’s broad shoulders. He couldn’t risk a battle on Grand Street, with clerks floating about and wax brides in the window.

  He returned to his war wagon.

  “Roosevelt,” he said, “you wasted the city’s resources. You’ll suffer for that.”

  And suffer I did.

  There were no immediate squabbles with the Mayor’s office. But I was summoned to Senator Platt’s headquarters. I’d given my bicycle back to the flying squad, and I couldn’t race to the Fifth Avenue Hotel in this dense, sepulchral shroud. I stumbled along and arrived on Fifth Avenue by some mysterious fate—it was like wandering into a wet wall, with my lungs a paper windlass about to collapse.

  Boss Platt had no petitioners this afternoon. I found him in his Amen Corner, dining on trout almondine and glazed carrots, while he guzzled champagne.

  “Will you join me in a glass? Ah, I forgot. You’re a teetotaler.”

  I had to outmaneuver him, if only this once. “Senator, I’ll have a sip.”

  “Boy!” the Easy Boss rumbled with a forkful of carrots and fish in his mouth.

  A bellboy in his fifties, wearing a soiled maroon jacket, arrived with a slight case of the trembles. He must have been a lost cousin of Platt’s. “Will you bring the Commissioner a flute of the bubbly, for Christ’s sake?”

  The bellboy disappeared and returned with a flute of champagne.

  We drank a toast, the Senator and I. “To peace and war!”

  Platt winked. “To our peace and other men’s war!”

  He took another forkful of trout, while the champagne drummed inside my skull. “Bravo,” the Senator said, clapping his exquisite, half-female hands. “Roosevelt, you’re on the wrong track. Mulberry Street is not for you. You’re too visible in the worst sense—staging robberies in downtown bridal shops to undermine the Pinkertons. That won’t stick. We have to put you where you can do less damage. I just talked to the President. He agrees. He doesn’t want to look at any more cartoons of you in a cowboy hat, lassoing some poor devil of a Republican. You will have another outpost—the State, War, and Navy Building. Congratulations. You’re the new Undersecretary of the Navy.”

  I did not feel enlightened. “And I’m the last to learn?”

  Platt had been ten moves ahead of me all along. “That’s politics, son. Remember—if you start a war in your first six weeks, you can expect the guillotine.”

  But he wasn’t finished with me, not yet. “You’re an infant, Roosevelt. The presidency has nothing to do with reform. It’s a paradise of patronage. And don’t you forget that. We’re kicking you out of Manhattan.”

  The Senator smiled warily, as much as a cadaver could, among his cortege of henchmen, hacks, and vigilantes—the Senator’s Stranglers had silk wires; they got rid of you without much of a trace, sent you into political purgatory.

  I swallowed his insults, his taunts. I would never have guessed it, but the muck-a-muck had given me a ticket out of Police Headquarters. I could reform the Navy. Perhaps he and President McKinley didn’t care, as long as I was tucked away in the War Department’s monolithic castle, kept out of sight.

  One of the Stranglers now approached and whispered in his ear. The Senator nodded and picked up the telephone receiver on his desk. “Roosevelt, it’s Mulberry Street.”

  A female corpse had been found floating in the East River. Normally it wouldn’t have been my concern. I seldom visited the morgue at Bellevue. But this corpse had been carrying items that did relate to me—letters and a cigarette case from my departed brother. I could tell who it was without a glimpse of her bloated body. Mrs. Valentina Morris. I’d paid her bills religiously. She still had her suite at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, and she chose to take a swim. My own personal roundsman, who looked after me in police matters, asked if I wanted to claim whatever belongings she had of my brother’s.

  “Commissioner,” said my roundsman, “she could be listed as a Jane Doe, and I could collect her stuff.”

  “No,” I said into the mouthpiece of Boss Platt’s silver phone. “She deserves better treatment than that. I won’t have her shoveled into a paupers’ grave at Hart Island.”

  I didn’t lie. I told Senator Platt the sordid tale.

  “An apparent suicide, sir. My brother left his wife for this Valentina woman. She loved him. I’m sure of that. She was residing at your hotel.”

  “Penniless, I suppose,” Boss Platt said, stroking his chin with those splendid fingers.

  “I took care of her without meddling too much.”

  I couldn’t seem to placate him.

  “That’s all fine, Roosevelt, but we can’t have our new Under­secretary associated with
this very sad affair. Go to the morgue, son. Collect whatever you can. But she’ll have to be buried as a Jane Doe.”

  MY ROUNDSMAN SUMMONED A patrol wagon to the Fifth Avenue, and we rode that car right into the heart of an hallucination that was like a blizzard in the Badlands, but without the ice dust that could freeze you in your tracks; we were lost for a while in the lurid atmosphere, a climate in which men and wagons seemed to float. We did arrive at those iron balconies near the East River, where madmen paraded until they were whisked by ferry to Blackwell’s Island. Bellevue had its own labyrinth of pavilions. We went right to the morgue, which had a magnificent loggia and a skylight that could have been a dark lozenge in this mysterious patch of weather.

  Mrs. M. was lying on a table with a lamp over her and a shower head. She was wrapped in a grubby silk blanket with a tiny part of her bosoms showing. She wore a locket around her neck, a silver locket with a silver chain. The morgue attendant, who wanted to please me, tried to rip the chain from her throat.

  “Don’t put your filthy paws on her,” I shouted in that echo chamber, my voice booming off the walls.

  My anger was misplaced, and I bowed to the morgue attendant. But I was much more interested in the chief coroner, who was wrapped in a wrinkled white muslin coat and had a pince-nez with a tassel, like my own. I’d grabbed him away from Philadelphia, offered him a princely sum, far beyond our budget. The Mayor didn’t dare intervene. New York’s Finest deserved the finest of pathologists. He’d cracked cases on his own, had uncovered significant clues. He lectured everywhere, trained young coroners about the lessons and quirks of morbidity. He’d become a myth among other coroners, this Dr. Ferdinand Jessup. His eyesight was almost as poor as mine, and his origins were obscure. He’d been a morgue attendant until he trained at a medical college. He didn’t have a Harvard degree, and was no Porcellian brother of mine, but I liked Jessup. I always imagined him as one of my father’s protégés, though I doubt he had ever lodged with newsboys.

  I squinted at Mrs. M. on the slab, disturbed by her evanescent beauty; drowning hadn’t disfigured her, not at all—her mouth had a vivid wetness; her nostrils were perfectly pink, and seemed to stir in the semidarkness. I couldn’t help myself, as I imagined Elliott nuzzling her mouth.