The Anarchist

by John Smolens

  “But we didn’t!”

  “You would be better than Emma Goldman.”

  “That woman in the newspapers? They arrested her in Chicago, yes?”

  “Red Emma,” Norris said. “She’s Russian, a Jew.” He watched Motka’s face, the sudden panic in her eyes. “You know what I’m saying, don’t you? In America it’s easy to believe that all of you Jews from Russia are anarchists. Every one of you, in on it. They want to believe that—they need to believe that. It’s called a conspiracy—you know that word, do you? They need to believe that killing the president was a conspiracy. Do you understand?”

  She shook her head.

  But he was certain that she did. “A conspiracy is necessary, Motka. It makes it easier for everyone to understand, to accept.” Her lips began to tremble. Norris leaned closer and whispered, “So you must tell me—just me, Motka—where is your brother?”

  “My brother?”

  “Yes, Anton.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “He is an anarchist.”

  “No.” But her eyes were doubtful now.

  “This, this is true, Motka. You know this is true, and it concerns you. He is in with them, a group that is working with an outside man from Chicago. Herman Gimmel. A man who has been associated with Emma Goldman. See, we know all about it. People talk. Eventually, people always tell us what we need to know. This is my point: you will, too. It’s just a question of method—”

  “Please,” Motka said, taking hold of his forearm. “Anton is not—”

  “Do you know what they did?” He looked down at his arm until she removed her hand. “Gimmel and your brother, they threw Clementine’s body in the canal.”

  “No, this cannot be?”

  “We have a witness. Someone saw them, Motka. So the only way to save yourself is to tell us where Anton is.”

  She lay very still, gazing up at him. He placed his fingertips on the hard bone between her breasts. Gently, he ran his hand down over her stomach, pausing at the depression around the navel, and then he let his palm rest over her hair, soft and damp.

  “I cannot,” she whispered.

  Norris moved his hand deeper, parting her thighs.

  “I do not know where Anton is. That is all I can tell the captain.”

  Norris took his hand away, held his fingers under his nose and inhaled slowly. “Yes, I believe that is all you would tell the captain. But as I said, the only difference between him and me is our methods.”

  She was trying not to be afraid now. In fact, she looked brave, and he had to admire that, and the way it made her beautiful. “All right,” he said, as he got up off the bed. He drew the bedsheet over her, and her hands clutched it beneath her chin. “All right, I’ll talk to him. Maybe we don’t have to bring you to police headquarters, not at the moment.” He went to the door, hesitated, and then looked back at her. “But I can’t make any promises about the future, you understand?”

  She only stared at him, her eyes glistening in the candlelight.

  IT took Hyde several hours to work his way along the canal, stopping in taverns and saloons to avoid sudden downpours. When he reached Black Rock Harbor, a dense fog had come in off Lake Erie, making it difficult to see across the water to Squaw Island. Dozens of barges were tied to piers and he found the Glockenspiel in front of the Grand Canal Warehouse. He heard footsteps coming toward him on the pier, and he recognized Bruener’s son, Josef, a tall, lean boy still in his teens. He was carrying a club.

  “Josef, it’s Moses Hyde,” he said slowly. “I need to see your father.”

  Josef held up his hand, indicating that Hyde was to remain where he was, and then he went back out along the pier, and climbed down a plank to his father’s barge. When the door to the pilothouse opened he gestured with his hands for a moment to someone holding a lantern, and then waved toward Hyde.

  Once Hyde was on board he saw that the man with the lantern was Klaus Bruener. He had known the big German for years, occasionally crewing on his barge, and they had often attended socialist meetings together in towns along the Erie Canal. “Anton Ascher is here, Klaus?”

  “Why?”

  “I have something for him from his sister. Money.”

  Bruener nodded and let Hyde into the pilothouse. “I hear she’s the prettiest cocksucker in Buffalo.” He grinned, revealing crooked, blackened teeth. “Too pretty to come down here to fuck canawlers.”

  Hyde said nothing. Bruener liked to bait people, egg them on, and draw them into fistfights. They went down the companion-way ladder to a tight cabin, where the air was thick with cigar smoke. Two men sat in a booth, a bottle of whiskey and glasses on the table. One of them stood—Anton. Hyde held up his bandaged hand, to which he had pinned the earring.

  Anton removed the pin. “So, my sister sent you?”

  The other man sitting in the booth wore a tattered frock coat and his hair was long, silky, and white, hanging well down below his shoulders. The right side of his face and neck was badly scarred, and his right eye was nearly closed beneath a lid that appeared to have melted. Hyde recognized him: his name was Herman Gimmel and he had given a speech at a meeting in Buffalo last spring. He was from Chicago, and word had gone around the hall where he spoke that he was a bomb expert. It was said that he had thrown the bomb that killed eight policemen during the Haymarket riot back in ’86. When he stood on the stage, his scarred face was testimony to years of devotion to the workers’ cause.

  Hyde took the two folded twenty-dollar bills from his coat pocket and handed them to Anton, who went back to the table and dropped the money next to the whiskey bottle. He said, “Told you I could raise some money, Gimmel.”

  “So you did.” Gimmel’s raspy voice was deep and humorless, and the words seemed to bubble up out of his throat. He got to his feet slowly and came over to Hyde. “And you know this fellow, Bruener?”

  “Moses Hyde’s as good a canawler as you’ll find,” Bruener said. “Always turns out for the meetings.”

  “I saw you speak here last spring,” Hyde said to Gimmel.

  As though he hadn’t heard, Gimmel turned Bruener. “You’re saying I can trust him?”

  “You come here from Chicago,” Bruener said. “Someone gave you a few names, men you could contact. You don’t really know any of us.”

  “They didn’t mention Moses Hyde,” Gimmel said.

  “When you came here you said you needed help,” Bruener said. “Since McKinley was shot, the police they been rounding up a lot of boys—canawlers, men from the foundries and the slaughterhouses. They’ve declared war on the workingman.” When Gimmel didn’t say anything, Bruener added, “He’s all right because Klaus Bruener says he’s all right.”

  “Well, he delivered forty dollars,” Gimmel said. “That tells me something. A lot of men would have disappeared with that much money in hand.” Gimmel shrugged and returned to the table, where he picked up the bills and added them to a wad that he took from his pocket. He tucked the money in his coat, sat down in the booth again, and poured more whiskey into his glass. His distorted face was illuminated by the lamp hanging above the booth. “Take a good look, Mr. Hyde,” he said. “Ten years ago I was teaching somebody how to make a bomb. I have often taught this fine art, but I’ve lost some of my best pupils before they could graduate.” His laughter was more a gurgle that seemed to originate in his lungs. He took a drink of whiskey and placed the glass on the table. “Now they send me here to organize a disturbance during the president’s visit. And to my surprise—to everyone’s surprise—this Leon Czolgosz up and shoots McKinley. This man, he is a true anarchist.”

  Bruener said, “He deserves to be free.”

  “We all do.” Gimmel took a piece of paper from inside his frock coat; it was a newspaper clipping, which he unfolded and spread out on the table. It was an article about the assassination attempt upon the president, with a large sketch of Czolgosz. “A few days ago, when the president seemed to be recovering, I was wondering if there
was some way we could get to him and finish the job. But with the security around that house on Delaware Avenue, that’s impossible. So then I considered the vice president. He moves about, in carriages, on trains, and he has a tendency to wander off into the woods—perhaps we might get close enough to him. But, again, security makes that unlikely. So I’m about ready to go back to the committee in Chicago and tell them that I’ve failed my mission, a distasteful task, to be sure. One hates to disappoint the committee. Frankly, I’d rather lose my other eye in a bomb explosion. But I was sent here to do a job. I haven’t exactly decided what yet, but we’ll just have to wait and see.”

  Hyde picked up the newspaper clipping. “You should have a photograph of Czolgosz. This sketch isn’t a very good likeness.”

  “You know that for a fact?” Gimmel asked.

  “I do.” Hyde put the clipping on the table.

  “You know Leon Czolgosz?” Gimmel said.

  “Yes.” Hyde looked at Anton and said, “Ask his sister, Motka. Ask her who brought Czolgosz to Big Maud’s not long before he shot the president.”

  “Big Maud’s.” Gimmel looked at Bruener. “That’s where that whore was from, no?”

  Bruener nodded.

  Gimmel leaned so close to Hyde now that he could smell the whiskey on his breath. “You know what happened to that whore Clementine?”

  “She went in the canal.”

  “You know why?”

  Hyde hesitated. “I gather it wasn’t because she refused a gentleman’s advances.”

  Gimmel’s laughter was a combination of a cough and a wheeze, all coated in thick phlegm. “You’re right, Mr. Hyde. No, it was because she couldn’t be trusted. She knew who I was and she was going to use it, sell it to some policeman.” Gimmel leaned even closer to Hyde. “Know how I know? It was in her eyes. Something about her eyes that couldn’t conceal her true intentions.” Gimmel studied Hyde’s face for a long moment. “Anarchism, Moses Hyde, asks only one thing: loyalty. Loyalty—not to church or government, not to some meager form of employment, or the confines of the institution known as marriage. All those fetters must be broken if we are to be truly free. Only one thing requires our loyalty—anarchism itself. We are not socialists or communists, who merely offer an alternative form of enslavement for the workingman. Our purpose, our only purpose is to destroy that which imprisons us. Break those bonds and we’ll find a new world. One day I will die for that purpose. We all will. Do you understand that? We will not live to see that new world, but it won’t come into being without our sacrifice. Is that why you’re here, Moses Hyde?”

  “Yes, that is my purpose, too.”

  “Interesting,” Gimmel said, leaning away from Hyde now, as though to get a better look at him. “Maybe it’s the climate, the hard winters. I’ve never met so many men willing to die for the cause. You put the intellectuals in Chicago and Paterson to shame.”

  “I’ll do whatever’s necessary,” Hyde said.

  “Even if it kills you?”

  “Something will, eventually,” Hyde said.

  Gimmel glanced at his bandaged wrist. “What happened?”

  “It was cut during a misunderstanding.”

  “A lot of men say they’re willing to die,” Gimmel said. “Few are willing to do so limb by limb.” He went to the table, poured whiskey into another glass, and held it out to Hyde. Looking down at the sketch on the table, he said, “Maybe you can be useful, Mr. Hyde. We could use someone who knows what Leon Czolgosz looks like.”

  IN the middle of the night Czolgosz listened to a woman shrieking. His mother screamed like that when she was giving birth to his sister Victoria. He was ten years old and they were living in a lumber town in northern Michigan, and he knew from the sound of her voice that his mother had to be dying. They had sent him out of the house. It was snowing and he stood in the small barn. His mother’s cries were agonizing, like nothing he’d ever heard before, and he prayed because that’s what he’d been taught to do. He prayed for everything. For his food. For the weather. For all of his brothers and sisters. But at that moment he prayed for his mother’s pain to end. He begged God to let her die. She did but not quickly. He listened to her for several hours, until it finally exhausted him, and he went up into the hayloft and fell asleep with a blanket over him. When he awoke the wind had stopped. Everything smelled of horses and manure. Weak sunlight streamed through gaps in the barn roof. Such sunlight, he believed, was the hand of God. Then he realized there was silence.

  He went over to the house and found his brothers and sisters sitting around the kitchen table. The smaller ones were crying. His older brother Waldeck looked angry, and he shoved Leon’s shoulder, saying, Where you been? Eventually, the children were allowed into the other room, where their parents slept. A neighbor woman named Zajac, who always attended births, sat in a chair by the window, a baby in her arms, wrapped in a blanket. Their mother lay on her back in bed. There was no color in her face. She looked content. She was not in pain.

  Ona jest w niebie, Mrs. Zajac said in Polish.

  Leon stared at his mother’s face, her long hair, which was mostly gray. No she’s not, he said, and one of his sisters drew in her breath in horror. She’s not gone to heaven.

  Ona jest z Bogiem, the woman said, rocking in the chair.

  No, Leon said, she’s not gone to God.

  Leon, his father said. He stood in the corner and Leon wouldn’t look at him. Somehow he knew his father was responsible for this. He had watched his mother’s belly grow over the months, and it was his father’s fault. His mother kept saying, How are we going to feed another one? What are we going to do with all of you?

  And his father would reply, They’ll work. They’ll grow up strong and work, and that’s how we’ll get us a piece of land to farm.

  And that was why I was born, Leon told Father Dubchek one day during Sunday school. Not to worship God but to work so Father could buy land. That’s the real meaning of dust to dust. You work for dirt.

  Father Dubchek came to the house and spoke to his father, who said, The boy’s too smart. He reads. He’s not like the others. He read the entire Bible in Polish.

  This greatly concerned Father Dubchek. He would keep Leon after class on Sundays and try to explain things to him. There were certain things in the Bible children should not read, he said. You might take it to be literally true. He had an enormous nose with horrible burst veins, and he leaned close and asked, You know what that means, literally true? When Leon nodded, the priest sat back in his chair, defeated.

  Leon stopped going to mass. His father would beat him, and he would hide in the barn for hours, his fanny stinging and his eyes smarting with tears.

  His father remarried, not two years later, and his new wife was hard on all the children, which was how his father wanted it. Leon would run away and stay in the woods for several days. He’d catch a fish, cook it on a stick over a fire. He imagined getting on a train that would take him south. Look at a map—Michigan was hard to get out of because it was surrounded by so much water. You had to go down through Indiana, get around the bottom of Lake Michigan to Chicago. When Waldeck would find him hiding in the woods—it was always Waldeck who found him—he’d return to the house and none of them would speak to him. He would take his dinner plate and go out and eat in the barn with the horses. Sitting in the barn, he’d hear again his mother’s screams, but now he was convinced that she wasn’t in heaven, she wasn’t with God. She was dead. He decided people desperately wanted to believe in God because the thought of death was too great to bear. They were wrong. They were fools. They were weak. Once you knew that there was no God, life became more important—it was life that became sacred. He believed in death. To live life you had to believe in death.

  HYDE and Anton kept watch, the rain drumming on the pilothouse roof. The wind pushed the barges about; dock lines groaned, dray horses and mules kicked in their stalls. Josef had gone forward to sleep in his hammock. Bruener had taken Gimmel up to McShayne�
��s Tavern, near the Austin Street bridge. They returned and sat in the pilothouse, passing a bottle of whiskey and finishing their cigars.

  “Word is,” Bruener said, “the police are rounding up men from the canal, foundries, slaughterhouses.”

  “We got to keep moving,” Gimmel said. “People talk to the police and they’ll come looking for us. At McShayne’s they mentioned someone named Quimby—”

  “What about him?” Hyde asked.

  “Got himself hauled in by the police,” Bruener said. “They was all kept in the cell there, until the police take him down to another room. And they had a fine chat. It’s always the dandy like Quimby, with his fancy talk. He’s disappeared—last anybody saw him he was in the train station, buying a ticket.” Bruener cleared his throat and hawked a wad of spit out into the canal. “There are no fucking tickets out of Buffalo.”

  “They’ll come looking for us,” Gimmel said. “Eventually. That’s why we got to move quickly—tomorrow.”

  Hyde and Anton stared at Gimmel as he stood up and went to the stern of the barge. He undid his trousers and pissed in the canal.

  “Tomorrow?” Anton asked.

  “We just learned something interesting,” Bruener said. “Tomorrow afternoon they’re moving Czolgosz, bringing him from the women’s penitentiary to the prison across the street from city hall.”

  “How do you know?” Hyde asked.

  Bruener said, “Met me cousin at McShayne’s. He’s a farrier and knows just about every teamster in Buffalo. He tells us that the police are moving Czolgosz, tomorrow, while the president’s lying in state at city hall. They’ve arranged for two carriages.”

  Gimmel finished up and returned to the pilothouse, his wet hair plastered to his skull. “There will be guards at both prisons,” he said. “But when they move him it will be very simple—maybe just the two carriages. Nothing to draw attention to itself.”