The Anarchist

by John Smolens

  “You’re going to hang us?” Feeney said.

  Gimmel looked at Feeney, disappointed. “But of course you know that in New York State they don’t hang convicts any longer.”

  Feeney glanced over at Norris, who only nodded in an effort to show calm. “In New York,” Norris said, “they use electrocution.”

  “Right,” Gimmel said. “Very modern, efficient, and—”

  “Expensive,” Norris said.

  “It requires Thomas Edison.”

  “So,” Feeney said. “How? How you going do it?”

  Gimmel studied Feeney with detachment now, but he didn’t say anything, and Feeney began to rock from side to side in his seat—until Gimmel said to Anton, “Take him forward.”

  Feeney was still, his face childishly horrified. “You ain’t gonna to tell me?”

  Gimmel said to Anton, “Tie him up good, hands and feet.” Anton didn’t move for a moment, and then he asked, “What about—”

  Gimmel considered Norris and then said, “No, he stays here.”

  Feeney’s head moved quickly now as he looked at Norris, at Gimmel, at Anton, who came to the table. At first, it seemed that Feeney would resist because there was something childlike and desperate in his face. His eyes sought something—anything—from them that might save him from this moment.

  Anton took hold of his upper arm and said, “Come on.” His voice was frightened, too, and even apologetic.

  Feeney held still, looking as though he would fight any effort to make him stand up.

  “You come,” Anton said, pleading. “No much trouble, okay?”

  “Feeney,” Norris said, “don’t.”

  But Feeney’s face was turning red as he breathed in short desperate gasps, and he began to writhe as though some foreign, evil agent had taken possession of his body. He pulled away from Anton’s grip and spittle streamed from his mouth. When Anton took hold of his arm with both hands, Feeney released a high, keening wail that didn’t sound human. He kicked the table legs until the iron pot went over the edge, its contents spilling across the floor.

  Anton stepped away from him, his boots and pants covered with gravy, but still Feeney twisted and kicked in his seat, and Gimmel came toward him now, yanking out the monkey fist from inside his belt. Norris stood up quickly and swung both arms together so that his bound fists struck Gimmel’s face. Gimmel staggered backward, but then caught his balance. Blood ran from his disfigured nose. He swung his arm low, and the monkey fist hit Norris’s stomach hard. Norris doubled over, the wind knocked out of him, and he fell to his hands and knees. For a moment he was in such pain and so desperate to breathe that he wasn’t aware of anything else in the cabin. But then he raised his head and watched Gimmel beat Feeney with the rope.

  “You’ll kill him,” Anton said.

  Feeney was on his knees, his face pulpy and bloodied, but Gimmel didn’t stop hitting him. Overhead, there were running footsteps on the deck, and the large German, Bruener, scuttled down the companionway, shouting for Gimmel to stop. Bruener caught the arm holding the monkey fist, and then pulled Gimmel away from Feeney.

  Everyone was suddenly still, and the cabin was filled with the sound of their gasping for breath. Finally, Gimmel shook himself free of Bruener’s arms. “All right,” he said. He jammed the monkey fist back inside his belt and tugged at the bottom of his coat. “All right, you get him up in the bow, or I’ll kill him right here.”

  Anton and Bruener hoisted Feeney by his arms, and dragged him through the door.

  Gimmel dropped into the seat Feeney had occupied and put his arms on his knees. He wiped his nose and mouth with the back of his hand, and then sat back, exhausted. “That man,” he said, a little laugh gurgling in his throat, “has an inordinate fear of death.” When he caught his breath, he said, “It’s curious. There’s been no mention of either of you in the evening papers.”

  Norris studied Gimmel, realizing what they had in common. They were both capable of sudden violent outbursts, yet as soon as they were finished it was as though nothing had happened. Norris had discovered this about himself when he was young, and he recognized that it was a valuable tool; often it made other men circumspect. “Are you disappointed?” he asked.

  “No, but perhaps you should be,” Gimmel said.

  “I suppose it could mean that two Pinkerton detectives really have no worth.”

  “True. Or they don’t want to inflate your value—because you know what journalists would do with such a story.”

  “In that case I guess I should be flattered.”

  “Somebody’s keeping this quiet. Who would that be, Norris? Would there be somebody who would know what you and Feeney are really worth?”

  “You mean somebody to negotiate with?”

  “Yes, perhaps.”

  “I see. That would be Captain Lloyd Savin. He organized Czolgosz’s transfer.”

  “Do you think he’d negotiate?”

  “Not if he were a Pinkerton. We don’t negotiate with anarchists,” Norris said. “But Savin’s Buffalo police—so I can’t say.”

  Anton and Bruener came back into the cabin, and Bruener said, “I told you we should throw these shit-ass Pinkertons in the lake.”

  “No,” Gimmel said. “I think we’ll contact this Captain Savin of the Buffalo police department. I would be interested to know what two Pinkerton agents are worth, if anything.” Anton came over to Norris with the sack, but Gimmel held up his hand. “Norris, another outburst like Feeney’s and you’ll get more than a beating.”

  He nodded to Anton and the sack was yanked down over Norris’s head.

  AFTER the public viewing, the president’s coffin was returned to the Milburn house Sunday evening. The staff was served a light supper in the dining room. Cortelyou discussed the final preparations for the train journey to Washington in the morning. It had been an exhausting day and most everyone retired early; however, shortly after ten o’clock Dr. Rixey requested that a carriage be brought around. He was taken back to city hall and admitted to the prison directly across the street.

  “You’ve another visitor, Leon,” the guard said almost apologetically as he unlocked the cell door.

  The prisoner lay on a cot suspended from the stone wall, his hands folded behind his head. He didn’t move as the door swung open on a dry, creaking hinge. Rixey said, “Thank you, officer.” When the guard didn’t move, the doctor added, “I’d like to be alone with him.”

  The guard smiled, as though they shared a private joke. “You want to go inside there? You’re one of those, eh? No, I don’t mind.” And looking in at Czolgosz, he asked, “You mind, Leon?”

  The prisoner still didn’t answer, didn’t move on the cot.

  The guard walked to the table farther down the corridor, where the other guard was sitting, reading a newspaper.

  Rixey removed his hat. He was taller than the cell door and he ducked as he stepped inside the cell, where he could straighten up—his head came to within a couple of inches of the stone ceiling. He sat on the stool, the only piece of furniture in the cell, which couldn’t have been ten feet long. “I’m Dr. Presley Rixey,” he said.

  “I seen all the doctors I need to see.” Czolgosz’s voice was flat, lifeless. “They already decided I was sane.”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  Czolgosz lay still for a moment, and then suddenly he swung his legs off the cot and sat up, leaning his back against the wall. “I don’t have to talk to you.” He stared straight ahead at the opposite wall.

  “No, you don’t.”

  Rixey let his right shoulder rest against the stone wall and he sat still, facing the end of the cell, where there was a bucket on the floor beneath a small window. There was the sound of rain outside. Rixey didn’t move. He simply sat there, his forearms resting on his thighs, holding his hat in his left hand.

  Minutes passed, and it brought about a curious silence from the two guards, who realized that there was something unusual going on inside
the cell. At one point the guard who had unlocked the door whispered, “They just sitting there?”

  “Shut up,” the other said. He folded his paper and put it down on the table.

  After that all four men were still, except for the occasional creak of a chair as one of the guards shifted his weight.

  Dr. Presley Rixey.

  This doctor just sat on the stool and neither of them moved. It went on so long Czolgosz could tell it was making the two guards nervous. He thought he could wait the doctor out.

  Dr. Presley Rixey.

  Czolgosz had seen or heard that name, but he couldn’t remember where.

  After a while it was clear that Dr. Presley Rixey wasn’t going to move from that stool, he wasn’t going to give in. Czolgosz finally looked at him. He was a tall man with a full mustache, and his eyes were weary, yet clear and intelligent. It was nearly dark in the cell, and beads of water on his overcoat caught the light from the corridor. They made Czolgosz think of pearls.

  “I’VE never seen a pearl,” Czolgosz said finally, “except in a photograph.” He stared intently at Rixey’s right shoulder. “They come from the sea.”

  “I believe they do.”

  Czolgosz’s eyes turned doubtful. “That’s what they say.”

  “I’ve seen it while on duty in the navy. We were in Valparaíso, our ship taking on supplies. There were these local boys, they dove off these rocks into the ocean. The water was so clear that you could see them swim to the bottom. They’d stay down for a long time, several minutes—I’ve never seen anybody stay under water that long—and they’d come up with this little sack in their fist. If they’d found a pearl, they’d hold the sack above their heads triumphantly and shout to the other boys on the rocks.”

  “It’s just a grain of sand, right? In a shell, a clam shell.”

  “That’s right. It all starts with a grain of sand.”

  Czolgosz thought about this a moment, and then nodded his head slowly. “I never seen one,” he said. “Why are you here?” Before Rixey could answer, Czolgosz said, “All you doctors. You want to know why I did this thing, but you can’t know. It’s not something you can ever understand. You may have all kinds of education, but you can’t know this. It’s beyond you. I am a free man. Even though I sit in the cell, I am freer than you will ever be. And you will never understand it.”

  Rixey gazed down at his hat, which rested on one thigh. It seemed that to look directly at Czolgosz now would somehow push him back. “You’re right,” he said. “I don’t understand. That’s why I’m here.” His fingers stroked the satin band in his hat.

  “You never worked in no wire factory, did you?” Czolgosz said. “You never blew glass, you never felt the heat from those ovens. Hours, day after day. You never put in a day like that. All you can do is survive it, hope to get some rest, and go back again the next day, and the next. And when they don’t need you, or when you’re injured or sick, or when you raise any question about how little you’re being paid, or how many hours you work, they let you go. They just let you go, Doctor. But not me, they never let me go because I was useful, I was a good worker and I could fix machines. Did you know that? I can fix just about any machine, always could. But there’s no hope to it. I never been somewhere that a boy can dive under water and come up with a pearl in a shell.” He thought a moment, staring straight ahead intently. Rixey had read about his eyes, his blue-eyed stare, but he’d never seen anything like the way they seemed illuminated from within by some pale, mystical light.

  When Czolgosz spoke again, it startled the doctor. “And a man ought not walk around well fed and with soft, clean hands while there are people fixing machines for barely enough money to live on. Not even the president. Particularly the president. That’s why I done this thing, and I don’t give a damn if it don’t make sense to you. It’s the truth.” He folded his arms as though he were chilled.

  “Are you cold?” Rixey asked, but Czolgosz shook his head.

  There was a blanket, neatly folded at the foot of the cot. Rixey was certain that Czolgosz was not a slovenly man, that he cleaned himself when given the chance. He had a sense of order and tidiness about him. He followed a regimen. He was, really, like many of the sailors Rixey had known in the navy, solitary men who lived according to clearly defined rules, men who performed their expected tasks. Men that Rixey had learned to trust to do their jobs efficiently, which was necessary aboard ship. But as an officer he had not been one of them. He wished it had been otherwise.

  Rixey leaned forward on the stool and slowly got to his feet. Czolgosz became very still, as though he might leap. Rixey picked up the blanket, let it unfurl, and carefully draped it over the prisoner. “This rain—you’ll catch a chill,” he said, sitting on the stool again.

  “Emma Goldman can explain it. She understands it. She knows what’s in our hearts, and when she speaks it’s as though she pulls it right out of us.” He looked toward Rixey suddenly, and the doctor turned his head and stared back at him. “They’re holding her in Chicago and it’s wrong. She had nothing to do with this. I’ve said before: you can’t find her guilty for having ideas. Can you?” Rixey didn’t move. “You can’t,” Czolgosz said, louder. “If you believe that, you are no better than the rest of them.”

  He was so young. His face was still that of an adolescent. People would find him pretty, innocent-looking. They would never look at him and say, Here is the face of an assassin, someone who changed the course of history. Here is someone so tortured, so angry, so full of conviction that he would shoot anyone, even the president of the United States. It was confusing—appalling, really—the way this man looked. But the eyes, those bright, fathomless eyes, they were deep set, and the skin around them was dark. Clearly, he was under great strain.

  “They tell me I will go to court tomorrow,” he said.

  “Yes,” Rixey said. “While the president’s body will be placed on a train bound for Washington, you will be arraigned and charged with his murder.”

  “I’m guilty—I do not dispute that, so there is no point to a trial.” His hand drew the blanket tighter around his shoulders. “You will testify in court?”

  “I have not been asked to, and frankly I’m glad of that. Other doctors will testify. I will accompany the president’s body and look after his wife. That is my job.” Czolgosz didn’t seem to understand. “I am the McKinleys’ physician,” Rixey explained.

  Something changed in the boy’s eyes, a recollection, it seemed. “The bone felon,” he said. “It was you that treated her for the bone felon. I read about it in the newspaper. Out west last spring, when they were traveling, she had this problem with her finger and you treated it. She almost died, and all of the president’s plans were canceled.”

  “Yes,” Rixey said. “That’s right.”

  “I don’t know what that is, a bone felon.”

  “A growth, an abnormal growth. It can become infected.”

  “Then they spent the summer at their house in Canton. She recovered, and he was rescheduled to come here, and then I knew what I had to do.” After a moment, he added, “You know I’m from Ohio, too?”

  Something seemed to flood Rixey. A sorrow. An acceptance. This boy from Cleveland reading in the papers that the president would reschedule his trip to Buffalo, and his conclusion was to kill him. Rixey had been right—it was too dangerous for McKinley to attend the exposition. But Cortelyou was right, too: you can’t keep the president from the people. That simply wasn’t acceptable. McKinley understood that. Few people knew that about him. He understood their need to see him, to hear him. Furthermore, he needed to see them. “It was a terrible sacrifice,” Rixey said.

  Czolgosz didn’t seem to understand. He looked curious.

  “I was with him as he dressed the morning you shot him. The president was … He was in such a good frame of mind. I realize now why he seemed content, even jovial that morning: he would be meeting citizens, ordinary Americans. You have no idea how isolated a man like tha
t is. He joked—I remember this now—he joked about having very little money in his pocket, not even two dollars, and he joked about the president being caught dead with so little money on him.”

  “I didn’t rob him,” Czolgosz said. “And to some people two dollars is everything.”

  “You’re missing my point.”

  “You’re missing mine. Those boys, diving for expensive pearls—were they paid well? I don’t think so.”

  “I’m not talking about pearls,” Rixey said. “There are things that you don’t understand—you don’t understand the sacrifice involved.”

  For a moment the young man’s eyes were angry. “I have understood sacrifice for a long time. I done my duty.”

  “Is that what this was, duty?”

  “Yes.”

  Rixey shook his head.

  “Yes.”

  “Another president has already been sworn in. You killed the man, a good man, a man I much revered, but there is still the president. You could not deny this country that. Its citizens, you see, they made him president. The presidency still exists—you could not take that away from us.”

  “And I would kill that one, too, if I had the chance.”

  “I believe you.” Rixey was suddenly sweating, and his hard collar was uncomfortably tight. “Now I do believe you.”

  “And the next one after that.”

  Rixey moved his feet, intending to stand up.

  “I know sacrifice,” Czolgosz said. “I have known it for a long time. I seen it many years ago. When I was a boy my mother died giving birth to my sister. It was her eighth child. She died at forty, when I was ten years old. That was how I learned sacrifice.”

  Rixey got to his feet, the stool legs scraping the floor, and leaned over the cot. He slapped the boy’s face. Then he straightened up, stunned by what he had done. The boy didn’t move, wrapped in his blanket, nor did the guards in the corridor. There was only the sound of the rain outside the stone walls.