“Only water when I’m on duty, sir. Same as every night.”
“Then take the night off!” Taft insisted.
Captain Butt smiled, but as always his responsibilities came first. “Sorry, Will. There are some clouds on the horizon that could delay us a day. If I don’t get you back to Mrs. Taft before Monday, hell hath no fury like the maelstrom we’ll be descending into.”
Taft nodded, brimming with confidence in the man. “If anyone can steer this ship through Scylla and Charybdis, it’s you. Head back to the bridge and fly us home, Captain.”
“We’ll move like Mercury, Mr. President. Have a good night.”
“You too, Archie.”
Archie Butt disappeared down the airship’s vast corridor as Taft shoved open one of the four white doors to the Oval Office.
Chapter III
The Surprise
Taft’s personal workplace aboard Airship One was a facsimile of the new Oval Office he built into the White House’s West Wing. Modeled after the mansion’s grand Blue Room, the airy abode offered far more space than Theodore Roosevelt’s cramped nook. The office’s olive green walls with gold accents gave the room the charm of a poker table from the Old West. A matching green rug stretched over the room’s hardwood floor: a checkerboard of bleached oak and majagua from the Philippines. The office’s rich chairs and sofas were upholstered in red caribou leather with brass studs. Electric candles from a chandelier and brass wall sconces illuminated the room with a soft sepia hue. Across from the marble mantel, matching white bookcases flanked a duplicate of the massive desk that had faithfully served Theodore Roosevelt throughout his presidency. And behind the desk, an enormous chair surrounded by potted palms and green curtains awaited its owner. The chair was far sturdier than the one Taft destroyed his first few weeks in office.
For all its similarities, the Oval Office on Airship One differed from its Washington counterpart in three aspects—four if you count its “surprise.” Firstly, the airship’s design made any possibility of a working fireplace impossible, hence the mess of maps and papers inside it. All sensitive information had to go into special bags to be burned later. Secondly, the White House’s Oval Office had only one hanging portrait: a framed photograph of Theodore Roosevelt looking determined to knock his head through the wall. Aboard Airship One, Taft forged a path to his desk using a golf club to find a photograph of his beloved wife, Nellie, enshrined in gold rococo above the bookcase to his right. As for the room’s third departure, its triple bay window offered a spectacular view not of the South Lawn, but of the starry, sweeping landscape gently drifting past the president. Taft was flying six hundred fifty feet over the English Channel at eighty-eight miles per hour, with the Milky Way to his left and the setting moon shimmering over the southwest horizon. After scanning the night sky for one last glimpse of Halley’s comet, Taft settled for the next best thing and hopscotched to his Surprise cabinet.
One of the many surprises aboard Airship One was the president’s liquor cabinet, which was made out of timbers from the HMS Surprise. Taft opened the two doors of the cabinet, disguised as the bookcase beneath his wife’s picture, to reveal a cache of his favorite champagnes and spirits behind dummy books and rotating shelves. Taft chose a bottle of 1858 comet vintage already on ice, which he brought to his desk along with its ice bucket. After removing the cork with his new puukko knife, Taft held the bottle under his nose and took a deep breath of its heavenly air. The president reclined in his chair, taking swig after swig from the bottle like a victorious athlete, while holding a handful of ice against the welt on his face where that damned Welshman hit him. As the melting ice dripped down his cheeks like tears of sweet bliss, Taft closed his eyes and let the comet vintage take him away. He was floating … barreling down an endless kaleidoscope of comets and nebulae on a journey through time and space, interrupted only by a sudden desire for steak. A thick rib eye and some lobster à la Newberg to go with it. Steak and lobster. He nodded. And a Welsh rabbit.
There was a knock at the door.
“Go away!” Taft shouted. “I’m in a meeting!” Unfortunately, repeated knocking spelled a quick end to the president’s delectable fantasy. At the very least, Taft figured he would have to pass his order to the kitchen through someone. The president removed the ice from his face and opened his eyes. “All right, come on in.”
One of the office’s four white doors opened. Robert Todd Lincoln and John E. Wilkie stepped into the room.
“Mr. Lincoln!” Taft welcomed them with outstretched arms, splashing champagne from his bottle. “Mr. Wilkie. To what do I owe this surprise visit?”
“Good morning, Will,” Robert greeted. “We saw your fight.”
“Ah! What did you think?”
Robert’s silver beard hid the faint hint of his smile. “With no disrespect to Jack Johnson, I think we just witnessed the real fight of the century.”
“Oh, that’s the ticket!” Taft clapped. “Between you and me, I think Jack Johnson could have mopped the floor with those featherweights!”
“Between you and me, I think you’re cockeyed,” the Secret Service chief huffed.
“Ha! That’s rich coming from a man who smokes cigars on a zeppelin!”
“Wilkie’s upset someone threw a knife into the Bucket of Blood,” Robert intermediated.
“The hell I am! There’s no way anyone could have slipped a shiv past my men. Someone planted it there.”
“Wilkie, I have a better theory. It’s called Occam’s razor!” Taft stabbed his puukko knife into the Roosevelt desk to punctuate this. “Someone brought a Finnish blade to a fight, and I finished him. End of story. Happy ending, too! I needed a new office knife. You wouldn’t believe how many letters I’ve been getting since I tossed that ball at the Nationals game!”4
The Secret Service chief sneered at the weapon sticking out of the fine tabletop. “I’m afraid I have to take that, Will. Fingerprints.”
“I won’t allow it. It’s a souvenir!”
“It’s evidence.”
The president fell back into his chair, rolling his eyes. “John, why is everything an assassination attempt to you? First it’s a bomb in the White House, then it’s anarchists at Carnegie Hall, and then it’s Mexican revolutionaries out to kill me and President Diaz. Not even Teddy Roosevelt was in as much danger as you tell me I am! I think all that yellow journalism you used to write has rubbed off on a lot more than your fingers.”
Wilkie chewed his cigar and narrowed his eyes. “Colonel Roosevelt didn’t receive as many threats as you do. He wasn’t such a big target.” A big fat target, in Wilkie’s private opinion.
“Wilkie, if you want this hard-earned knife to go with that hard-boiled attitude of yours, it’ll cost you a penny. That’s how it is! In fact, I’m surprised a Treasury agent like you doesn’t know that.” Taft took a long guzzle from his champagne bottle while Robert studied Wilkie’s reaction.
Incensed, Wilkie pawed through his pocket and flipped a shiny new penny onto the table—so as not to cut whatever remained of his threadbare friendship with the president. But as the Secret Service chief reached for the puukko knife with a saffron handkerchief …
“By the way, you may want to put out that cigar,” Taft recommended. “Since you’re so concerned for my safety.”
Wilkie took a long, hard look at the man he was sworn to protect but deep down could barely stand. Taft wasn’t a president; he was a puzzlewit. A flubdub. A fathead with brains of about three-guinea-pig power. He was an unworthy successor to Theodore Roosevelt philosophically, psychologically, and unquestionably physically. Horses—full-grown horses—had collapsed under his weight. The man was so fat he couldn’t even bend over to set a golf ball on a tee. His presidency was an unmitigated disaster that threatened to destroy the Republican Party. And his wife? Dear lord, his wife …
“Ticktock,” Taft prodded.
Wilkie took one last puff from his cigar and flicked it into the ice bucket on Taft’s desk. It
extinguished with a long, unhappy hiss.
“Mr. President.” Wilkie nodded.
“Yes, Mr. President,” Taft reminded.
The Secret Service chief fumed out of the Oval Office with the puukko knife in his pocket. “I think he got the point,” Robert observed. The door slammed in response.
“Oh, he’ll be back to his old self halfway between here and the men’s room. He just needs to cool off.” Taft put his champagne on ice, smothering the Secret Service chief’s cigar beneath the bottle. “So tell me, Bob, what can I do for you?”
Robert looked around the messy office. “May I sit down?”
“Of course! Make yourself comfortable.” Robert took a seat in the only armchair not covered with papers. “Sorry about the mess. Norton’s been working overtime to cover our tracks this past week.”
“Yes, I saw him in the wireless room on my way over. You know we probably won’t arrive home in time for your vacation, I’m afraid.”
“That’s what Archie told me,” Taft lamented. “But I don’t think it will cause too much harm if we’re late. I’ll just have Archie drop me off on the Mayflower while it’s at sea. Nellie couldn’t possibly stay angry at me if I arrived on the yacht with a bottle of her favorite champagne!” On that subject: “Ooh! Care for some bubbly water? Or something stronger, perhaps?”
“Just some coffee, please. Very black.”
An amused Taft pushed a brass button under his desk. “NORTON! Bring my friend here some coffee strong enough to float an iron wedge!”
Robert, who knew every inch of the airship, noted, “That’s not a radiophone.”
“It isn’t?” The confused president looked at the button. “What does it do?”
“I don’t know.” Robert shrugged. “It was on the original Roosevelt desk. We think it fired a pistol concealed beneath the tabletop.”
“Oh.” Taft drew his hand back. “That’s odd. I’ve been using this thing to page Norton for months.”
“If you were shouting for him at that volume, I imagine he heard you through the walls.”
Taft raised his eyebrows in shock. “I thought the walls were soundproof in this office!”
“They are, but only on the inside,” Robert explained. “It’s an electromagnetic device Dr. Tesla invented. After your incident with the chair, we had to ensure that the Secret Service agents outside could hear you in the event that you needed assistance.”
Taft twitched his mustache. “Ah, well. I guess that means you’ll be getting coffee soon enough. So, what shall we talk about?”
Robert adjusted his chair, preparing to give the most difficult report in his life. But then he remembered: “Oh, by the way, how’s Nellie?”
The jovial air around Taft disappeared. “She’s better, she’s getting better,” his voice tumbled out. “It’s been over a year since her illness robbed her of so many things. My dear Nellie…” Taft looked at her photograph with eyes awash with emotion. “Fortunately, I believe the worst is behind us. Her sisters have been a godsend, and Helen has been so good to play hostess at the mansion while her mother recovers. With their help, Nellie has been walking and talking again for months now. She has such vast reservoirs of strength, Bob. At times, she makes me feel so small.” The somber president sipped from his bottle with eyes downcast.
Taft considered mentioning how disastrous his wife’s illness had been for his presidency, but Robert already knew this better than most people. Nellie had spent her whole life with her mind fixed on the White House, having vowed as a girl not to marry a man unless she was convinced he would be elected president someday. William Howard Taft was that man, and through her husband, Nellie became one of the most powerful political minds in the country. She engineered Taft’s whole career, from Cincinnati to Washington to the distant Philippines. She even vetoed then-President Roosevelt’s offer to make her husband chief justice of the Supreme Court even though it was something Taft had longed for his whole life. Nevertheless, when William Howard Taft was inaugurated the twenty-seventh president of the United States in 1909, it was his brilliant, daring Nellie who shattered all precedent by riding alongside him to the White House. Nellie, his dearest love. His closest confidant. His madam president. And that’s when she wasn’t drinking beer, smoking cigarettes, playing poker, driving fast cars, bobsledding, bathing in the rivers of Philippine jungles, or surfing at Waikiki Beach. That’s right, Nellie surfed.
But then, two months into Taft’s presidency, a sudden illness nearly took Nellie from him. She could not speak, half her body was lifeless, and her face—her dear face—was frozen in a horrific contortion. Taft did not know what to do. All the best doctors in the country were unable to help her. For all his powers, President Taft felt like the most impotent man in America as he stood at her bedside. And to make matters worse, Taft’s presidency was crippled without his wife’s guidance. Every major decision in his life had always been part of Nellie’s design. Everything. Even the airship and automaton were ultimately Nellie’s creations: trinkets to keep her husband amused and out of the mansion while she expertly steered the nation into the twentieth century.
It was unfair to have so much hinge on the loss of one person, but Taft did not need to explain this to Robert Todd Lincoln. As the only son of Abraham Lincoln to reach adulthood, Robert knew all too well what life and loss was like in the White House.
The president took a deep breath, and the pained expression on his face faded. Such are the powers of comet vintage. “Where were we, Bob?”
Robert leaned forward in his chair. “Will, I’m relieved to hear that Nellie is recovering, but—”
“Thank you. And I hope Mary and your daughters are well.”
Robert ignored this. “Will, we need to discuss something that will not be easy for either of us.”
“I understand.”
“No, you don’t, Will. This situation, it’s…” Robert shifted anxiously in his chair. “I think it’s unlike anything we have ever dealt with.”
“You mean you and me personally?”
“No. I mean ‘we’ as a nation. Maybe even as a people.”
As a people? Taft’s whiskers perked. “Bob, what do you mean by that?”
Robert shook his head with frustration. “I don’t know. The whole world looks upside down to me lately.”
Taft could not help smiling coyly. “Bob, what could possibly have you so wound up? World war?”
Robert’s eyes widened. “Will, I hope to God not!” He pushed himself up from his chair and walked across the room. Taft watched in bewilderment; his friend was moving like a man with a gun to his back. As Robert approached the bay window, he clasped his hands behind his back and studied the stars.
“I think I will have a drink after all,” Robert decided.
“Ah, that’s the spirit! Help yourself to whatever you like from the cabinet.” Taft went back to suckling his bottle while Robert poured himself a large glass of aged brandy. Robert downed the stuff quickly, but it did not dent his sobriety.
“Will, do you remember that scare we had with Halley’s comet?” Robert stared into his empty glass as he spoke.
“What do you mean, do I remember? Of course I do. It was all over the papers.”5
“Yes, well…”
Taft raised an eyebrow, hoping he was not going to hear what he was expecting. As he anticipated, Robert Todd Lincoln remained silent. “Bob, that better not be what this is about.” Taft snickered. “Five months ago, in this office, you convinced me the world was going to end. You said, standing there silently just as you are now, that Halley’s comet was going to gas everyone on this planet like termites.”
“How could I have said that if I was standing here silently?”
Moving along. “There was panic in the streets, Bob, but the world did not end. I thank God it didn’t, but frankly, I had more than enough on my plate this Valentine’s Day without bringing Armageddon into it. You’re a brilliant man, Bob. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a second
Leonardo da Vinci, but even great men make mistakes. Just ask Thomas Edison. He said something about perspiring and taking credit for other people’s inventions. I don’t remember.”
An ashamed Robert glanced at one of the room’s electric lights. “Will, I know the duress I caused you could not have come at a worse time, but you have to believe me when I say that our caution was not taken in vain. I found something, Will. Something that changes everything.”
“Whatever it is, Bob, it’s probably nothing. Everything that was keeping you up at night turned out to be a big fat nothing. Halley’s comet came and went, and we’re still here. Earth won!” The president lifted his bottle with cheer and guzzled the remains of its contents.
“Will,” said Robert, looking straight at the president, “my father’s assassination was not nothing.”
Taft froze, trying with all his ability not to spit his champagne. He unplugged the bottle from his mouth and sat up in disbelief. What could Robert Todd Lincoln possibly be talking about? Was he mad? Was he beginning to go down the same sorry path as his mother? Not knowing what to say or how to say it, Taft’s eyes wandered to the copper coin Wilkie flipped onto his desk earlier. It was one of the Treasury’s new Lincoln cents resting heads-up as if the ghost of Abraham Lincoln had placed it there to eavesdrop. Taft looked up at Robert, the last living heir of the greatest president in history. He had his father’s prominent nose, large ears, and pensive, intelligent eyes. They were eyes this president knew he could trust.
“Please continue,” Taft urged.
With his glass still in hand, Robert paced the Oval Office as he spoke. “Two months ago, I put out a wire asking universities, observatories, Army bases all over the country to monitor their skies in case Flammarion was right about Halley’s comet producing enough cyanogen to wipe out all life on Earth. Fortunately, the bulk of Flammarion’s fears were unfounded. The cyanogen was too dispersed to harm us when we passed through the tail of the comet. However, there was one part of North America that showed unusually high readings of … something in its atmosphere. Something strange. Whatever it was, Will, it was definitely not cyanogen.”
The Great Abraham Lincoln Pocket Watch Conspiracy: A Novel Page 3