The Anarchist (26 page)

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.”

“What exactly are we going to do?” Hyde asked.

“We’re going to free Czolgosz.” Gimmel stared at them. “Understand? Nothing would serve the cause better than freeing Leon Czolgosz.”

“Free
him?” Anton said.

“That’s right,” Gimmel said. “And if it doesn’t look like we’ll succeed, at least we can make a martyr out of him.”

Hyde said, “I thought you wanted to blow up city hall, with the president in it.”

“What’s the point?” Bruener said. “He’s already been killed. And think of the security there—all them police and military. After what Czolgosz done, they’ll be on their toes, you can bet. No, this could be easier.”

“How?” Hyde asked.

Bruener said, “They’ll come down Trenton Avenue.”

“You know when?” Hyde asked.

“No,” Gimmel said, “and we don’t know for sure what the carriages will look like, though I’m sure they won’t be police wagons, just ordinary carriages. So we’ll have to spread ourselves along the route, and signal ahead when we think we see them.” He turned to Hyde. “You know what Czolgosz looks like, so you should be nearest the penitentiary. If you see which carriage he’s in, you
signal on down to”—he looked at Anton—“you, and you’ll pass the signal on to Josef, Bruener, and me.”

“How will we stop the carriage?” Anton asked.

Bruener said, “My cousin said that when they moved him out to the penitentiary on Friday he was taken in one carriage, accompanied by only one detective. Didn’t even handcuff him—they just walked out of police headquarters and got in the carriage, and nobody takes notice.”

“If we do get him,” Hyde asked, “then what?”

“We take the carriage.” Gimmel tossed the stub of his cigar into the canal. “Josef will drive.” He waited, glaring at Hyde, and when he was met by silence, he said, “The police are worried about a mob getting Czolgosz. That’s why they’ll keep it simple. They’re not expecting anything like us.” He started down the companionway. “We must get some sleep now. Bruener, you get your boy to come up and stand watch now.”