Secret of the White Rose Read online

  For Craig and Maddie, always

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is a tremendous pleasure to work with everyone at Minotaur Books, and I owe many thanks to my wonderful editor, Kelley Ragland. Thanks also to Andrew Martin, Matt Martz, and everyone else who has played a role in bringing this book into print.

  I want to thank, as always, my agent, David Hale Smith, whose friendship and encouragement are invaluable.

  Thanks to all family and friends for their unwavering support, with special mention to Natalie Meir, Mackenzie Cadenhead, and Mark Longaker for always helpful feedback.

  To D. E. Johnson for explaining the appeal of the electric motorcar, and to Julie Cameron for arranging my personal tour of Gramercy Square Park. Thanks also to the staff and holdings of the New York Public Library and New York University’s Bobst Library. Among the resources I found invaluable in writing this book, none was more so than Alex Butterworth’s The World That Never Was: The True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, and Secret Agents. His depiction of the rise of anarchism and nihilistic terrorism in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries offers a comprehensive overview of how noble ideals were transformed into violent acts.

  Most of all, thank you to Craig, whose partnership and input I rely on absolutely.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part Three

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Also by Stefanie Pintoff

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  Monday, October 22, 1906

  Judge Hugo Jackson was on edge—and had been, ever since the trial began.

  He was not alone. From the financial magnates of Wall Street to the ordinary shop workers at Macy’s, bond brokers at Bankers Trust to grocery clerks at Wehman’s: everyone was unnerved by People V. Drayson.

  The difference, of course, was that Jackson was the presiding judge.

  He felt nothing but revulsion for Drayson, who by neither word nor sign had shown any remorse for the lives he had taken. But this defendant would get a fair trial. It was the judge’s sworn duty, after all. Not to mention the fact that he didn’t want to give Drayson grounds for appeal.

  Still, he remained unsettled.

  Maybe it was Drayson himself—for it was disconcerting the way the defendant with the overgrown hair and beard sat mutely, staring at the judge day after day from behind thick wire-rimmed glasses. That sensation of being watched stayed with him for hours after he left the courtroom—though every time he turned to look behind him, no one was there. His wife would say he was growing dotty in his old age.

  All around him, crowds of people anxious for the latest news grabbed their copies of the World, the Tribune, and the Times straight out of newsboys’ hands before the ink was dry. They would read the details of how the defense had rested. Jury deliberations would begin tomorrow, and Drayson’s fate would be determined. Outraged by his crime, the public condemned the man as a monster and waited with trepidation for the guilty verdict that was sure to come. The verdict that must come if any justice was to be had in this world.

  At least, that was how most people felt. But as the judge knew too well, there were others. Even Drayson had his supporters.

  * * *

  When the judge arrived at his staid red-brick town house at 3 Gramercy Park West nearly half an hour later, he found his mail neatly stacked in a pile on a silver tray atop the entry hall table. He shuffled through the letters, pausing at one.

  Not again.

  He tore it open and glanced at its contents. Instinctively, he reached to loosen his necktie, which seemed to have constricted around his throat. He took a deep breath to steady himself. Then, without a word to his wife, he stuffed the entire stack of letters into his overcoat pocket, grabbed the large iron key that always hung by his front door, and crossed the street to the locked wrought-iron gate leading to the park—for only owners of those homes opposite the park had access to the small private oasis at the foot of Lexington Avenue.

  His hands trembled as he lifted the key and turned the lock.

  Cursing his raw nerves, he shut the gate behind him, and for just a moment he felt he had closed out all worldly evils. This was his private Eden: a place of peace and beauty. He walked the length of the park, past nannies pushing prams and gentlemen reading newspapers on the benches that lined manicured walking paths.

  Finally, he chose his favorite bench, one near the stone fountain at the western entrance. Its gurgling waters soothed his raw nerves, and he breathed more easily. His composure restored by the calm of the park, he brought himself to review the rest of his mail.

  It had to be done. Eden had never been immune to the presence of evil.

  This afternoon’s delivery had brought even more hateful, threatening letters. The first two he opened were filled with angry accusations that he was too sympathetic toward Drayson. Yet another proclaimed Drayson to be a martyr to the cause and threatened the judge’s life.

  He sighed, knowing he would have to call in the police. Again.

  Why did everyone attempt to influence him with regard to this trial?

  Drayson was a self-declared anarchist, but that fact alone was not responsible for the way New York City’s population was captivated by the events in his courtroom.

  No, Al Drayson was different.

  At precisely four o’clock on the third Saturday of June, he had allegedly planted a dynamite bomb in a horse-drawn cab. His target had been none other than Andrew Carnegie, a wedding guest at the stately brick and stone town house at 115 East Forty-seventh Street. Yet from the outset, Drayson’s plan was badly conceived. Carnegie was a poor target—for however angry Drayson may have been about the treatment of workers at Carnegie’s U.S. Steel, the tycoon himself was now viewed largely as a philanthropist. He had vowed to give away his vast fortune before he died, and his endowments to Carnegie Hall and the Hero Fund suggested he was serious.

  “I acted for the good working people.” Since his arrest, Drayson had uttered those seven words and nothing more.

  But five innocents had died when his bomb exploded: the wagon burst apart in a conflagration of fire, wood, and nails, causing glass windows to shatter and bricks to crumble. While a number of wedding guests suffered abrasions and cuts, Drayson’s weapon wrought its most horrifying devastation on the street.

  A dynamite bomb is an instrument of death both indiscriminate and savage; mere words cannot convey the carnage it creates. In just a moment’s time, it transformed a pleasant June afternoon into a scene that more properly belonged on a battlefield, so great was the destruction of life and limb. The wagon’s horse lay dead in the gutter, his hindquarters blown off by the blast; a woman was slumped against the town house stoop, both of her arms gone; and a man with seared flesh sprawled awkwa
rdly on the sidewalk. Drayson had wanted to champion his cause by striking a blow to the capitalist system, but by killing innocent people with ordinary lives, he was forever damned in the court of public opinion.

  Then, of course, there was the child.

  The four-year-old boy had been walking home from church with his grandfather when the dynamite exploded. One of his shoes had been propelled onto a second-floor window ledge by the force of the explosion. It was the only intact reminder of the boy, and its image—a solitary child’s shoe, made of black leather and buttons, dangling forlorn on that ledge—served as a poignant reminder of what was lost that day. It circulated in all the major papers and entered the public consciousness in a way more graphic photographs never could have, had they even been permitted to run.

  And so Drayson, the man who wanted to be celebrated as a revolutionary, instead was reviled as the worst kind of common criminal: a child-killer.

  For that reason, the spectacle outside the courthouse had for weeks been nothing short of a circus. Many wanted to see Al Drayson convicted, and they came every day—often carrying photographs of the victims. Some carried newspaper clippings that pictured the child’s shoe. And the anarchists came, too, including the notorious Emma Goldman. Drayson had made mistakes, she argued, but the general goals of the anarchist movement remained sound. She succeeded in riling the crowds—sympathizers and detractors alike—with her incendiary speech.

  The judge was being scrupulously careful in the Drayson matter, which only made the threatening letters that much harder to swallow. He was tired of the shenanigans that tested his courtroom authority, and the politicizing of this trial—by all sides—strained his patience.

  The judge gathered his mail and returned home from the park, barely taking time to hang his overcoat before retreating to the library.

  He reached for the telephone. He needed to make two calls.

  The first was to a man he had known and trusted for years.

  “I received another letter.”

  “Like the others?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then. It is as we expected.” The voice on the other end of the wire was tired.

  “What should I do?” the judge asked.

  “The same as before. Just decode the message and follow the instructions.”

  “This cannot continue,” the judge said, his voice shaking. “We must figure out who learned our code. It’s been years since—”

  “Quiet.”

  They were silent for some moments. Then the voice continued in calmer tones. “We’ll figure out a way to stop it. But right now, just do as you’re told.”

  There was no choice, so he would. For now.

  He placed the black telephone earpiece onto its candlestick base. Almost immediately, he picked it up again and gave the operator the number for New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Bingham. As he waited for the connection to be made, he resolved to be careful.

  Prudent—and always careful.

  PART

  ONE

  Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

  Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

  —W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

  Tuesday, October 23, 1906

  Detective Simon Ziele

  CHAPTER 1

  171 West Seventy-first Street. 1:30 A.M.

  Despite my best intentions—not to mention an excellent cup of French roast—I had fallen asleep from sheer exhaustion. Lying on a gold and green paisley sofa, halfway through W. D. Morrison’s treatise Crime and Its Causes, I was startled awake by a ferocious pounding at my door. I bolted upright—causing Morrison to tumble to the ground, followed by my now empty coffee mug.

  I fumbled for my battered pocket watch. Half past one. At such an ungodly hour, most people would telephone. Thanks to the modern black and brass Strowger dial telephone installed in my new quarters here last month, I could be reached at any hour. That was a mixed blessing, of course—but I’d already come to appreciate the telephone as a more civilized method of interruption than the incessant knocking that disturbed me now.

  Why the devil was someone determined to wake me in person?

  I walked barefoot to the door over newly varnished hardwood that was cold and smooth against my feet. As I drew close, the pounding stopped, but an urgent voice called out my name.

  “Ziele! Open up.”

  I turned the lock and withdrew the chain. By the flickering light of the gaslight lanterns that lined my hallway, I recognized my friend and colleague: criminologist Alistair Sinclair.

  The normally poised and garrulous professor staggered into my living room, collapsed onto my paisley sofa, and looked up at me helplessly. “Ziele, I need your help.” He managed to rasp the words, before he succumbed to a fit of coughing.

  “What’s happened?” After I closed and locked my door, I lit the additional oil lamps in my living room, then surveyed Alistair closely for signs of an injury. I saw none.

  Not once in our acquaintance had I ever seen Alistair in such a state. His dark hair, heavily lined with silver, was not smoothly coiffed; rather, it stood up on end as though he had run his hands through it repeatedly. His expensive cashmere-blend coat was torn at the sleeve and splattered with mud. But most disturbing was the blank expression in his blue eyes when he looked at me. Clear as ice, and always too cold for warmth, his eyes normally blazed with intelligence—yet tonight all I saw was emptiness.

  I brought him a glass of water. He accepted, saying nothing.

  The lanterns flickered, the result of a draft that perpetually ran through the room, and I pulled my dressing gown tighter. Then I sat in the overstuffed green armchair opposite Alistair.

  My professional demeanor was carefully practiced for times such as these, so my voice was calm when I asked him what had happened. But my manner belied my deep private concern—for whatever had undone his usual composure had to be significant. My immediate worry centered upon Isabella, Alistair’s widowed daughter-in-law who assisted him in his research into the criminal mind—and who preoccupied more of my own thoughts than I usually cared to admit.

  “A man was murdered tonight,” he finally managed to say. “Someone I once counted among my closest friends.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and meant it.

  We were silent for several moments while he composed himself.

  “Who was he?”

  “Hugo Jackson. He’d gone to Harvard Law with me, class of ’seventy-seven.” With a quick, wistful smile, he added, “We’d not spoken in years, but we were close once. In fact, he was the best man at my wedding.”

  “You had a falling-out?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing like that. We simply drifted apart. We made different friends, developed varying interests, saw each other less often…”

  “You’re certain it was murder?” Now wide awake, I crossed my arms and regarded him soberly.

  “Without a doubt. His throat was slashed from ear to ear.”

  “If you weren’t close, why are you among the first to know?” A long-ago relationship of the sort he described wouldn’t merit his involvement. Or explain why he was so broken up about it.

  “Our wives had developed a friendship that lasted through the years, even as our own waned. In part, that’s why Mrs. Jackson called me immediately.”

  “And the other part?” I asked, knowing that what Alistair didn’t say was usually more important than what he did.

  “There were unusual circumstances.” Alistair lowered his voice instinctively, though no one was here but us. “Mrs. Jackson found him in the library, slumped over his desk in a pool of blood.” He frowned and grew silent, lost in some thought of his own.

  “Go on,” I urged.

  He passed me his water glass. “You don’t have a stiff drink, do you, Ziele? Something to buck up our strength?”

 
; All I had was the Talisker single-malt scotch that Alistair himself had given me for my birthday last summer—a souvenir from a recent trip to Scotland’s Isle of Skye. I poured him a generous glass, neat, then waited for him to continue.

  He swirled the tawny mixture, seemingly more content to smell its earthy essence than to drink it.

  “There was a Bible next to his body—not the family Bible but one his wife had never seen before. And my friend’s right hand was resting on top of it,” he said at last.

  I tried to envision the scene as Alistair described it. “Like the way you take an oath in court?”

  He nodded, adding, “My friend was a judge.”

  “But don’t judges usually administer oaths, not take them?”

  “Exactly.” He gave me a meaningful look. “And, given it was a Bible unfamiliar to his wife, we might presume his killer brought it with him to the crime scene.”

  His hand trembled, forcing him to put his drink on the table.

  I leaned in closer, more concerned now. I’d never seen him so shaken up.

  “We are,” I reminded him, “discussing a crime scene neither one of us has actually seen. But you already believe it signifies something of importance?”

  “What do you think, Ziele?” he said, bursting out with an exasperation suffused with grief. “Have I done nothing this past year to convince you of the importance of crime scene behavior?”

  He was right: it had been nearly a year since the Fromley case, when he first waltzed into my office and announced that he could use his knowledge of the criminal mind to help me solve a brutal murder. He had not been entirely correct, of course. But as he himself would say, knowing the criminal mind is as much an art as it is a science—and I never doubted that he understood more about criminal behavior than I ever expected to.

  He shook his head. “There’s more: a single, white rose was placed next to his hand.”