More Tales of the Black Widowers (26 page)

“He was a grandiose man,” said Fletcher, “given to doing everything in a flamboyant manner. He researched his superstitions. In fact, the discussion at the table as to the significance of Friday and of thirteen reminded me of the sort of man he was. He probably would have known more about the matter than any of you.”

“I should think,” said Avalon gravely, “that investigating superstitions would militate against his being victimized by them.”

“Not necessarily,” said Fletcher. “I have a good friend who drives a car frequently but won't take a plane because he's afraid of them. He has heard all the statistics that show that on a man-mile basis airplane travel is safest and automobile travel most dangerous, and when I reminded him of that, he replied, 'There is nothing either in law or in psychology that commands me to be rational at every point.' And yet in most things he is the most rational man I know.

“As for Joe Hennessy, he was far from an entirely rational man and none of his careful studies of superstition prevented him in the least from being victimized by them. And his fear of Friday the thirteenth was, perhaps, the strongest of all his superstitious fears.”

Halsted said, “What did the note say? Do you remember?”

“I brought a copy,” said Fletcher. “It's not the original, of course. The original is in the Secret Service files, but in these days of Xeroxing, that scarcely matters.”

He took a slip of paper out of his wallet and passed it to Halsted, who sat on his right. It made the rounds of the table and Avalon, who received it last, automatically passed it to Henry, who was standing at the sideboard. Henry read it with an impassive countenance and handed it back to Fletcher, who seemed slightly surprised at having the waiter take part, but said nothing.

The note, in a bold and easily legible handwriting, read:

Friday the 13th Dear Paddy,

It's a fool I am to be writing you this day when I should be in bed in a dark room by rights. I must tell you, though, the plans are now completed and I dare not wait a day to begin implementing them. The finger of God has touched that wicked man and we will surely finish the job next month. You know what you must do, and it must be done even at the cost of every drop of blood in our veins. I thank God's mercy for the forty-year miracle that will give us no Friday the 13th next month.

Joe

Avalon said, “He doesn't really say anything.”

Fletcher shook his head. “On the contrary, he says too much. If this were the prelude to an assassination attempt, would he have placed anything at all in writing? Or if he had, would the reference not have been much more dark and Aesopic?”

“What did the prosecution say it meant?”

Fletcher put the note carefully back into his wallet. “As I told you, the prosecution never saw it The note was uncovered only some ten years after the hanging, when Patrick Reilly, to whom the note was addressed, died and left it among his effects. Reilly was not implicated in the assassination attempt, though of course he would have been if the note had come to light soon enough.

“Those who maintain that Hennessy was rightly executed say that the note was written on Friday, June 13, 1924. The assassination attempt was carried through on Friday, July 11, 1924. It would have made Hennessy nervous to have made the attempt on any Friday, but for various reasons involving the presidential schedule that was the only possible day for a considerable period of time, and Hennessy would be understandably grateful that it was not the thirteenth at least.

'The remark concerning the finger of God touching the wicked man is said to be a reference to the death of President Warren G. Harding, who died suddenly on August 2, 1923, less than a year before the assassination attempt was to 'finish the job' by getting rid of the Vice-President who had succeeded to the presidency.”

Drake, with his head cocked to one side, said, “It sounds like a reasonable interpretation. It seems to fit.”

“No, it doesn't,” said Fletcher. “The interpretation is accepted only because anything else would highlight a miscarriage of justice. But to me—” He paused and said, “Gentlemen, I will not pretend to be free of bias. My wife is Joseph Hennessy's granddaughter. But if the relationship exposes me to bias, it also gives me considerable personal information concerning Hennessy by way of my father-in-law, now dead.

“Hennessy had no strong feelings against either Harding or Coolidge. He was not for them, of course, for he was a fiery Socialist, supporting Eugene Debs all the way—and that didn't help him at the trial, by the way. There was no way in which he could feel that the assassination of Coolidge would have accomplished anything at all. Nor would he have felt Harding to be a ‘wicked man' since the evidence concerning the vast corruption that had taken place during his administration came to light only gradually, and the worst of it well after the note was written.

“In fact, if there was a President whom Hennessy hated furiously, it was Woodrow Wilson. Hennessy had been born in Ireland and had left the land a step ahead of English bayonets. He was furiously anti-British and therefore, in the course of World War I, was an emphatic pacifist, opposing American entry on the side of Great Britain. —That didn't help him at the trial either.”

Rubin interposed, “Debs opposed entry also, didn't he?”

“That's right,” said Fletcher, “and in 1918 Debs was jailed as a spy in consequence. Hennessy avoided prison, but he never referred to Wilson after American entry into war by any term other than that wicked man.' He had voted for Wilson in 1916 as a result of the 'He-kept-us-out-of-war' campaign slogan, and he felt betrayed, you understand, when the United States went to war the next year.”

“Then you think he's referring to Wilson in that note,” said Trumbull.

“I'm sure of it. The reference to the finger of God touching the wicked man doesn't sound like death to me, but something else—just the touch of the finger, you see. As you probably all know, Wilson suffered a stroke on October 2, 1919, and was incapacitated for the remainder of his term. That was the finger of God, if you like.”

Gonzalo said, “Are you saying Hennessy was going to finish the job by assassinating Wilson?”

“No, no, there was no assassination attempt on Wilson.”

“Then what does he mean, 'finish the job,' and doing it even at the cost of every drop of blood in our veins'?”

“That was his flamboyance,” said Fletcher. “If he was going out for a bucket of beer he would say, I’ll bring it back if it costs me every drop of blood in my veins.'“

Avalon leaned back in his chair, twirled his empty brandy glass, and said, “I don't blame you, Evan, for wanting to clear your grandfather-in-law, but you'll need something better than what you've given us. If you can find another Friday the thirteenth on which the letter could have been written, if you can figure out some way of pinpointing the date to something other than June 13, 1924—”

“I realize that,” said Fletcher, rather glumly, “and I’ve gone through his life. I've worked with his correspondence and with newspaper files and with my father-in-law's memory, until I think I could put my finger on where he was and what he did virtually every day of his life. I tried to find events that could be related to some nearby Friday the thirteenth, and I even think I've found some—but how do I go about, proving that any of them are the Friday the thirteenth? —If only he had been less obsessed by the fact of Friday the thirteenth and had dated the letter in the proper fashion.”

“It wouldn't have saved his life,” said Gonzalo thoughtfully.

“The letter couldn't then have been used to besmirch his memory and give rise to the pretense that the trial was fair. —As it is, I don't even* know that I've caught every Friday the thirteenth there might be. The calendar is so dreadfully irregular that there's no way of knowing when the date will spring out at you.”

“Oh no,” said Halsted with a sudden soft explosiveness. “The calendar is irregular, but not as irregular as all that. You can find every Friday the thirteenth without trouble as far back or as far forward as you want to go.”

“You can?” said Fletcher with some astonishment.

“I don't believe that,” said Gonzalo, almost simultaneously.

“It's very easy,” said Halsted, drawing a ball-point pen out of his inner jacket pocket and opening a napkin on the table before him.

“Oh, no,” said Rubin, in mock terror. “Roger teaches math at a junior high school, Dr. Fletcher, and you had better be ready for some complicated equations.”

“No equations at all necessary,” said Halsted loftily. “I'll bring it down to your level, Manny. —Look, there are 365 days in a year, which comes out to fifty-two weeks and one day. If the year were 364 days long, it would be just fifty-two weeks long, and the calendar would repeat itself each year. If January 1 were on a Sunday one year, it would be on a Sunday the next year and every year.

“That extra day, however, means that each year the weekday on which a particular date falls is shoved ahead by one. If January 1 is on a Sunday one year, it will fall on Monday the next year, and on Tuesday the year after.

“The only complication is that every four years we have a leap year in which a February 29 is added, making 366 days in all. That comes to fifty-two weeks and two days, so that a particular date is shoved ahead by two in the list of weekdays. It leaps over one, so to speak, to land on the second, which is why it is called leap year. That means that if January 1 falls on, say, a Wednesday in leap year, then the next year January 1 falls on a Friday, having leaped over the Thursday. And this goes for any day of the year and not just January 1.

“Of course, February 29 comes after two months of a year have passed so that dates in January and February make their leap the year after leap year, while the remaining months make their leap in leap year itself. In order to avoid that complication, let's pretend that the year begins on March 1 of the year before the calendar year and ends on February 28 of the calendar year—or February 29 in leap year. In that way, we can arrange to have every date leap the weekday in the year after what we call leap year.

“Now let's imagine that the thirteenth of some month falls on a Friday—it doesn't matter which month—and that it happens to be a leap year. The date leaps and lands on Sunday the next year. That next year is a normal 365-day year and so are the two following, so the thirteenth progresses to Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, but the year in which it is Wednesday is a leap year again and the next year it falls on a Friday. In other words, if the thirteenth of some months is on a Friday of leap year, by our definition, then it is on a Friday again five years later—” Gonzalo said, 'I’m not following you at all.” Halsted said, “Okay, then, let's make a table. We can list the years as L, 1, 2, 3, L, 1, 2, 3 and so on where L stands for leap year, coming every four years. We can label the days of the week from A to G, A for Sunday, B for Monday through to G for Saturday. That will, at least, give us the pattern. Here it is—”

He scribbled furiously, then passed the napkin round. On it was written:

L123L123L123L123 ACDEFABCDFGABDEF

L123L123L123L GBCDEGABCEFGA

“You see,' said Halsted, “on the twenty-ninth year after you start, A falls on leap year again and the whole pattern starts over. That means that this year's calendar can be used again twenty-eight years from now and then again twenty-eight years after that, and twenty-eight years after that, and so on.

“Notice that each letter occurs four times in the twenty-eight-year cycle, which means that any date can fall on any day of the week with equal probability. That means that Friday the thirteenth must come every seven months on the average. Actually, it doesn't because the months are of different lengths, irregularly spaced, so that there can be any number of Friday the thirteenths in any given year from 1 to 3. It is impossible to have a year with no Friday the thirteenths at all, and equally impossible to have more than three.”

“Why is there a twenty-eight-year cycle?” asked Gonzalo.

Halsted said, “There are seven days in the week and a leap year every fourth year and seven times four is twenty-eight.”

“You mean that if there were a leap year every two years the cycle would last fourteen years?”

“That's right, and if it were every three years it would last twenty-one years and so on. As long as there are seven days a week and a leap year every x years, with x and 7 mutually prime—”

Avalon interrupted. “Never mind that, Roger. You've got your pattern. How do you use it?”

'The easiest thing in the world. Say the thirteenth falls on a Friday in a leap year, where you remember to start the leap year on March 1 before the actual leap year. Then you represent it by A, and you will see that the thirteenth of that same month will fall whenever the A shows up, five years later and six years after that, and then eleven years after that.

“Now this is December 13, 1974, and by our convention of leap years this is the year before leap year. That means that it can be represented by the letter E, whose first appearance is under 3, the year before L. Well then, by following the E's we see that there will be another Friday the thirteenth in December eleven years from now, then in six more years, then in five years. That is, there will be a Friday the thirteenth in December 1985, in December 1991, and in December 1996.

“You can do that for any date for any month, using that little series I've just written out, and make up a perpetual calendar that runs for twenty-eight years and then repeats itself over and over. You can run it forward or backward and catch every Friday the thirteenth as far as you like in either direction, or at least as far back as 1752. In fact, you can find such perpetual calendars in reference books like the World Almanac.”