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Isaac Bell set his squad on a search for foreman Russo.
8
Brewster Claypool was a slim-as-a-wisp, graceful Southerner who reminded people of the witty and stylish Oscar Wilde. Slouching languidly from the Metropolitan Opera House in white tie and tails, drifting down Broadway like an elegant parenthesis, he peered into the darker cross streets with a connoisseur’s appreciation of New York’s Tenderloin. Brightly lighted Broadway was lined with fine hotels and restaurants, but the rest of the district was devoted to sin. If a vice could be imagined, the Tenderloin offered it in gambling dens, dance halls, saloons, and bordellos priced for every purse. The Progressives called it Satan’s Circus. Brewster Claypool called it Heaven.
He mounted the steps to the Cherry Grove bordello, a lavishly furnished elite house known as the Ritz of the Tenderloin, and rang an electric bell. A three-hundred-pound door guard ushered him into the sturdy brick mansion with great respect. A dazzling young woman in a red evening gown greeted him warmly. “Upstairs, Mr. Claypool?”
“I think I’ll pop into the club first.”
A group of top Wall Street men had formed a private club inside the whorehouse. The Cherry Grove Gentlemen’s Society membership requirements were: extreme wealth and no blue noses. The house rules: No conversation or event left the room. No women were allowed in wearing more than two garments—neither garment could exceed the surface area of a dinner plate; a measuring stick was kept handy to settle disputes.
Claypool found his brother members lounging in vast leather armchairs, drinking champagne and whiskey cocktails. John Butler Culp, a vigorous big-game hunter and yacht racer who maintained the physique of a college pugilist and football hero, was cursing President Roosevelt.
“This wild, arrogant man, who only became president when the radicals assassinated President McKinley, will inflict fatal injury on our nation.”
Culp was a Wall Street titan—sometimes partner, often as not rival, of J. P. Morgan, Judge Congdon, Frick, Schwab, and J. D. Rockefeller. He combined cunning financial strategies with strict management to spawn railroads, mines, and mills, to consolidate wealth into great wealth, and to sharpen great wealth into power. He had the ear of Supreme Court justices, United States senators in his pay, and the confidence of presidents, but not this one. Late at night, alone with fellow “Cherry Grovers,” he allowed his animosity free rein in a cold voice brimming with righteous fury.
“President McKinley defended property rights. This Roosevelt is a socialist rabble-rouser snatching our property.”
“Teddy claims he won’t run again,” a banker interrupted.
“He lies! America is doomed if this darling of the Progressives serves this full term. Men of means will have no place in this country if he hangs on long enough to get reelected in ’08.”
Culp delivered this last with a glance at Brewster Claypool, a flash of dark eyes under heavy brows, so swift that none of the others noticed.
Claypool waved languidly to a raven-haired beauty in no danger of violating the dress code. She hurried to him with a crystal Old Fashioned glass and a bottle of Bushmills. “Just a splash, my dear. I must be on my way.”
“Aren’t you coming upstairs?”
“Not tonight, I’m afraid. I would be too distracted to be amusing.”
He took his drink into the small library off the main room, settled into an armchair, and prayed that Culp would join him.
Claypool was “Culp’s man,” and he had heard enough to know that he had just received his marching orders. Truth be told, he had seen this coming since Roosevelt was elected in ’04. Culp was afraid. In fact, he was terrified, which made him very dangerous.
President Roosevelt was breathing down his neck. It wasn’t only that TR was leading the Progressive reform attack against monopolies, oil and railroad trusts, and stock manipulation—all sources of Culp’s booming fortune—but down in the Isthmus of Panama, Teddy was “making the dirt fly,” digging the ship canal to connect the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And he had vowed, as only Teddy could—loudly and publicly—to prosecute business men who profited illegally from his canal.
Which, of course, Culp had—having financed a revolution to secure the route from friendly natives, rigged the Panama Canal Treaty to keep the canal out of the hands of those same natives, stolen millions from investors, and maneuvered Congress into paying millions more for canal rights that lined the pockets of Culp and his friends.
Claypool’s lawyers and lobbyists were working round the clock to disarm the canal time bomb. But if the President ever discovered that J. B. Culp had also masterminded the notorious Ramapo Grab—a private water company swindle that had almost won out over then-Governor Roosevelt’s Catskill Aqueduct project—Teddy would not rest until Culp was in prison.
So Claypool was not surprised that J. B. Culp wanted the President of the United States removed from office. Culp needed the President removed from office. Unfortunately, impeachment was not possible. TR might exasperate and TR might unsettle, but even voters who didn’t love him were at least fascinated, and two-thirds of the Senate was not was about to rile them by kicking out the President they had elected fair and square.
All of which meant that J. B. Culp wanted the President dead. As Culp’s behind-the-scenes fixer, it was Brewster Claypool’s job to find someone to kill him, while separating them from the crime by layer upon layer of isolation.
Unless he could talk Culp out of it.
Claypool nursed the whiskey until the glass was bone-dry, and he had almost given up hope when, at last, Culp lumbered in and loomed over his chair. He was a big man who used his bulk to intimidate.
“What are you waiting for?”
“An opportunity to talk sense. Would you please sit down?”
“My mind is made up. The man must go.”
Claypool rose to his feet. “May I point out that he’s not just a man. He is the President of the United States.”
“I don’t care if he’s the King of England. Or the bloody Pope. Or the Almighty Himself. He will destroy us if we don’t get rid of him.”
