The Anarchist

by John Smolens

  “No, thank you.” Hyde sipped from his cup, and then sucked the beads of coffee from the bottom of his mustache.

  “According to the papers, the president smokes twenty of these a day,” Norris said as he studied Hyde. “You seem unimpressed. Let me guess. You’re in your late twenties. But there is nothing youthful about your face—the cheeks, already sunken and deeply creased. At the rate you’re going, most men wouldn’t make it to thirty-five.” He exhaled smoke, which hung in the air, coiling, slow and languid. “I like to think of myself reaching sixty, when I will retire to a wide front porch and smoke twenty cigars a day.”

  He took a cigar from his case and placed it on the table next to Hyde’s coffee cup. “For later on, then. You strike me as a patient man. You can wait to eat, you can wait for a Garcia—or perhaps you don’t smoke?”

  “No, I like a cigar,” Hyde said. “But usually at night.”

  “Yes, with a glass of beer. What else, Hyde? Whiskey?”

  “Not to excess.”

  “Not usually, you mean.” Norris smiled around his cigar. “Women? You like the women? Or maybe you’re married? Captain Savin didn’t say.”

  “I’m not married.”

  Norris moved his shoulders slightly. “You like the saloon dancers? The upstairs girls in the houses of assignation? You frequent places like Big Maud’s, a real palace of carnal pleasure, I understand, except one of the girls was found in the canal a couple of days ago.”

  “Clementine,” Hyde said. “I heard.”

  “Yes, it’s been in all the papers. She one of your girls?”

  “No.”

  “Never?” “Never.”

  “Any idea why someone would beat her to death and throw her in the Erie Canal?”

  “No idea.”

  Norris placed both elbows on the table. “I can tell you why. It had nothing to do with sex. She found something out about someone down there on the canal, and they killed her before she could tell me.” Norris leaned even farther over the table, speaking in a whisper. “It was anarchists. That’s why I’m here.”

  “She was working for you?”

  “Very good, Hyde.” Norris sat back now. “So Savin sends his men around to Big Maud’s and other places like that, and they question men who work on the canal. I know how that goes. When a man is afraid you can tell inside two minutes if he really knows anything.” Norris rolled the ash of his cigar on the edge of his saucer. “But you—Savin says you were different.”

  “I don’t know anything about Clementine.”

  “Tell you the truth, I’m not interested in a dead prostitute,” Norris said. “I’m interested in what she found out.” He paused a moment. “Savin sent you to me—he said you knew something, and you seemed willing to help. So tell me, Hyde, why is that?”

  Hyde glanced around the café, which was full, with most of the customers speaking Polish, and then he leaned forward and spoke quietly. “I was picked up when the police raided a workers’ meeting at a hall here in Polonia and they questioned me for a long time. At first Savin was—he was like all the police, but then he seemed to change his mind and had a meal brought in. He even offered me a cigar afterward.”

  “But it wasn’t a Garcia.”

  “He smokes a lot of cigarettes.”

  “You must have impressed him. You must have said something interesting.”

  “Savin was skeptical, like you.”

  Norris glanced down at the table a moment. “Your hands,” he said. “They’re unusually large, and calloused—powerful hands for such a lean man. You get hands like that from working on the barges. I’ll tell you, with the proper diet, I’m convinced America could be a country of strong men. This could be a great nation.” He regarded the smoke that hung in the air, and then asked, “You live on a barge?”

  “Depends. I have a room in a boardinghouse, when I’m in Buffalo.”

  “Certainly. Come and go. And you’ve been working on the canal for years?”

  “Since I was twelve.”

  “You ran away from this St. John’s Protectory.” Norris smiled. “And hid on the Erie Canal. It’s not much of a life.”

  “Being a canawler’s better than working in the slaughterhouses—I’ve done that, too.”

  “Granted.”

  There was a moment of silence. Norris seemed to be waiting, and Hyde finally said, “Savin said he knew someone who could help me.”

  “That’s right. You sure you wouldn’t like a cigar?”

  Hyde picked the cigar up off the table. “All right.”

  “I find they steady the nerves.” Norris slid the penknife and matches across the table. “Now let’s talk about what you told Savin. If he was too skeptical, he wouldn’t have recommended you to me.”

  As he lit his cigar, Hyde surveyed the café once again. “You Pinkertons—you’re always looking for someone on the inside.”

  “Inside the workers’ movement, yes. You are one of them and they trust you.” Norris hesitated. “And you told Savin, who smokes a lot of cigarettes, that you met a man who talks about assassinating the president.”

  “I did.”

  Norris waited, and finally said, “He has a name.”

  Hyde looked out the window a moment, and then back at Norris. “Leon Czolgosz. Very quiet usually, but then sometimes he starts to boast about changing history. He talks about how it should be our duty to kill the president. That’s his word, duty.”

  “And you believe him.”

  “I rarely believe what people say, but I believe their eyes. And he has these pale blue eyes. They are—they tell you he’s very quiet, but inside there’s a great deal, you know, going on in his head.” Hyde leaned over the table slightly and whispered, “Savin said I should tell you this because you’re here to help protect the president.”

  “That’s why I was sent out from Washington. McKinley will visit Buffalo next month.” “What will you do?”

  “It depends,” Norris said, “on whether I believe you.”

  Hyde leaned back, insulted.

  Norris took his cigar from his mouth and smiled. “At heart, you’re honest, and you’re a realist, Hyde. I don’t think you’d make this up. The number of death threats against the president has increased considerably since he began his second term last March. Anarchists are trying to kill leaders here and in Europe. Last year they shot the Italian king, and that has only made them more determined.”

  “So if Czolgosz is a threat, you can arrest him?”

  “You’re talking about a potential threat. If that’s the case we should arrest half of Buffalo—and Cleveland, and Paterson, and entire neighborhoods in Chicago, too. But where do we start? With the Italians, the Russians, the Hungarians, the Jews? No, we should watch this Leon Czolgosz—see what he does, who he associates with. If he is a threat, he can’t be doing this alone. That will be your job.” Norris worked on his cigar for a moment. “The fact is, Hyde, I don’t want you to do anything different from what you’re doing now. Keep your ears open down on the canal and at Big Maud’s. Continue to go to workers’ meetings. Read Free Society, and listen to impassioned speeches about the virtues of socialism and communism. Keep close to these people. And if you can get Emma Goldman in the sack, which I understand isn’t too difficult, give her a good poke for me.”

  Hyde removed the cigar from his mouth. “You want to know what they talk about? But you already know this. They talk about improved working conditions, better wages—they talk about freedom.”

  “Fine, let them talk all they want—it’s a free country and people can be as stupidly idealistic as they want,” Norris said. “But people like Czolgosz talk about presidents and kings. The reason you’re here is because you have come to the realization that you’re not dealing with idealists. What would you call them, these people who plot to kill their leaders?”

  Hyde considered the tip of his cigar. “Wrong. They are wrong.”

  “Absolutely. And your worker is going to remain cold, hu
ngry, and sick, no matter how many speeches Red Emma gives. These people, they don’t want to earn anything, they just want it handed to them. We’re really talking about taking responsibility for one’s own life, Hyde. Then freedom will follow. I believe that, and I think you do, too—that’s what you did when you ran away from that orphanage. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be here now.” Norris cleared his throat. “I can give you five dollars a week to start.” He leaned back as though he himself were stunned by such a figure.

  “That’s not enough,” Hyde said.

  For the briefest moment, Norris’s eyes turned hard, and then he smiled. “What can you make working on the canal—four, five dollars a week? Listen, show me what you can do, and then we’ll see what you’re really worth.”

  Hyde turned his head and stared out the window. The vendor who had been selling chickens was pushing his cart down Market Street, the wooden wheels leaving deep furrows in the mud.

  “You know the Pinkerton motto?” Norris asked.

  “‘The Eye Never Sleeps,’” Hyde said, still gazing out the window.

  “Good. You can become a part of that, if you handle this for me.”

  “The eye that never sleeps grows weary, tired.”

  “Not if there’s enough of us looking—then we grow vigilant and strong.”

  “We become a great nation.” Hyde finally turned to Norris.

  “Very good,” Norris said. “You are a patient man, Hyde, and patience is a useful quality in this line of work. It keeps the mind clear, the eyes sharp.”

  Hyde crushed his cigar out in his saucer. “So does hunger.”

  THE air in the crowded hall was stifling hot, smelling of sweat and damp wool clothing, yet windows were kept closed for fear of alerting the police. The speaker, Johann Stefaniak, was a glassworker from Milwaukee whose forelock danced on his damp brow as he thumped the podium with his fist. People forgot their discomfort in the heat, raising their arms, cheering, and applauding as Stefaniak raged on about wages, eight-hour workdays, and better conditions in mills and factories. He might have been a preacher at Sunday meeting, the way he led the crowd like an orchestra, building it to a fevered pitch, only to bring it back down to absolute silence, so that when he whispered the name of J. P. Morgan there was a collective horrified gasp, as though he had spoken the name of Satan himself. When he was finished, everyone was standing as they shouted with fists raised—and then it was over, and, exhausted, they began to file out of the hall.

  Leon Czolgosz remained seated on a wooden bench next to a window near the back of the hall. He liked to let the others leave first; something about the emptiness of the room appealed to him. Same thing on a train—he was often the last to leave.

  He turned to Hyde and said, “Been listening to speeches like that since I was a boy.”

  “This was a good one,” Hyde said. He sat with his arms folded as he stared toward the now empty stage.

  “There used to be gatherings in the room above my family’s grocery store in Cleveland,” Czolgosz said. “The entire neighborhood would come to hear some socialist or communist. It wasn’t like the Catholic masses we attended—this was the true passion play.”

  “At least the police didn’t break things up tonight.”

  “If any blood would be drunk, it would be our own.”

  They were alone now except for a few old women who swept the floor and collected discarded handbills. “Well, it makes me thirsty,” Hyde said as he got to his feet. “A speech like that makes you want a cigar, a beer, and whiskey—the good whiskey.”

  “Right, top-shelf,” Czolgosz said. “Who has time for that five-cent stuff?”

  “Ta hell with the temperance people.”

  Czolgosz continued to stare at the podium. “He was good tonight, but he’s no Emma Goldman.” “So we’ll drink to her.”

  Czolgosz turned toward the window next to him, and he could see himself dimly reflected in the glass. There was an unusual grace to the angle of his jaw. His hair, parted on the right in the reflection, was blond, and most disconcerting was how his lips appeared full and even curvaceously feminine. But it was the eyes, his pale blue eyes, that often seemed to transform people, as though he possessed some unique, perhaps even magical power over them. Standing up, he said, “Yes, a dram for Emma Goldman.”

  The cool night air was a relief as they walked through Polonia. Mud caked their boots and there was the smell of horse manure, chimney smoke, stale beer, and cooked sausage, onions, cabbage. Voices burst from open saloon doors—places with names such as Mick Pickle’s Palace and the Erie Strutters’ Dance Hall, where English was seldom heard. The alleys were littered with pickpockets and prostitutes, lingering in the shadows.

  “You know I heard Goldman speak in Cleveland last May,” Czolgosz said. “I’m telling you, she can set an audience on fire. She often causes riots and the police have to break them up.”

  “She could make a man commit murder,” Hyde said. “She convinced Alexander Berkman to try to kill Carnegie’s manager, Henry Clay Frick.”

  “What a botched job. Berkman gets into Frick’s office in Pittsburgh with a gun—but he can’t even shoot straight! Then he pulls a knife and stabs the man, but still he lives. When workers struck at the Homestead mill, Frick sent in the scabs and hundreds of Pinkertons to protect them. And because he survived the assassination attempt, Frick became a hero. So how do you get close to them? Men like Frick are surrounded by guards all the time now.”

  “With your light hair, you could almost pass for a Pinkerton.”

  “Men like me, or you—we are not going to be mistaken for those bastards.”

  “You really think so? Then how do you get close enough? You must have help.”

  “Not necessarily. You blend in—you become Mr. Nobody,” Czolgosz said. “Nobody but Poles can pronounce my name, so I tell people my name is Fred C. Nieman. Then they don’t even see me. This is a war of ideas. Invisibility can be a weapon.”

  “True,” Hyde said. “But be careful, Fred Nieman, or Emma Goldman will make a good weapon out of you.”

  “I would like that,” Czolgosz said.

  “Really?” “Really.”

  “You’ve mentioned this before, that it’s your duty,” Hyde said, “and sometimes I think you’re—”

  “It is my duty,” Czolgosz said. “We defeated Spain in Cuba and the Philippines, and now America’s preparing to conquer the world. But look around us! To walk through these neighborhoods it appears that the world has sent its defeated to Buffalo. And it’s the same in Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago—they’re importing a whole new slave class. Industry thrives on our cheap labor.”

  “This is true, and this is why the socialist and—”

  “A few more pennies per hour is not the solution. Socialism, communism—they don’t …” Czolgosz stopped walking. “Do you know what historians will make of 1901? They’ll say Americans were a hardworking, industrious people. They’ll remember men in boiled white shirts and stiff collars, and women in satin gowns with their hair tied up under a big hat with a plume. They’ll remember Anna Held and Gibson girls. They’ll hardly mention the conditions in the factories, children working all day instead of going to school. The socialists and communists, they’re just talk, they’re just speeches and handbills. The anarchists—they’re something else, and they’re not talking about a few more pennies.”

  “I work for pennies,” Hyde said. “And right now I just want to think about a strawberry blonde—not so much on the plump side. But still, you know, with nice high ones, and hips like this—” He carved the figure of a woman with both hands. “Sometimes you should concentrate on something else, Leon—a glass of whiskey or maybe a girl’s hips.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “It’s not exactly free love.”

  “No—more women should practice free love.” Czolgosz seemed baffled, embarrassed, but then he blurted, “There is no such thing as ‘free love.’ You’re talking about a decent woman, you’re ta
lking about marriage. That’s neither free nor love. It’s just procreation, making a bunch of babies who will grow up and go to work for you—listen, I come from a family of eight, and there would have been more except that my mother died at forty when she was giving birth to my sister Victoria. The family as a capitalist unit—create your own workforce. That’s the only way to survive.”

  “Then maybe it’s better to simply pay for it.” Hyde seemed to be smiling, though it was difficult to tell with his full mustache. “What do you say?”

  “Do you—pay for it?”

  “Sometimes,” Hyde said, and he nodded toward the clapboard house at the end of the block. “It’s run by Big Maud, and it’s certainly not free. But it’s honest—at least until all women are like Emma.”

  BIG Maud’s house had a bowl of fruit—peaches, grapes, oranges, and an enormous banana—crudely painted on the clapboards above the front door. As they stood on the front stoop, Hyde could sense Czolgosz’s reluctance. But then the door was opened by Mr. Varney, the bouncer, and Big Maud welcomed them in the vestibule; she wore a bustle and seemed to drift across the floor without actually taking steps. In the parlor “Hello, Central, Give Me Heaven” was being hammered out on the player piano, which was in need of tuning. The room was smoky, and the heavy, tasseled drapes suggested a hint of pageantry. Hyde and Czolgosz ordered whiskey at the bar and within minutes the available girls hovered around. They concentrated on Czolgosz, knowing that Hyde was interested only in the strawberry blonde named Motka Ascher. By the time Hyde finished his whiskey, Czolgosz had been maneuvered to a stuffed chair next to a large potted fern. A stout redhead with a creased neck sat on the armrest talking in his ear, but he didn’t seem to be listening; instead, he stared at the carpet and held his glass as though he could crush it in his fist.