Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow [85]
The grenade that was thrown, after the shouted warning by Younger Brother, had ripped up the sidewalk and left an enormous crater in the street in front of the Library gates. At the bottom of the crater a broken water main bubbled like a spa. Windows had been blown out all up and down the block. There was a brownstone across the street, a private residence, that had been particularly hard-hit by the blast. Its owners had fled and had given the Police Department permission to establish its headquarters on the ground floor. The police discovered that they could run up and down the brownstone steps with impunity and move freely along that side of 36th Street if they did not attempt to step over the curb. The house filled with Police Department officials and other city authorities, and gradually, as the nature of the confrontation became clear, one authority after another ceded his responsibility to one higher. Until finally, with lieutenants and precinct captains and inspectors and the Police Commissioner, Rhinelander Waldo, all present, the control of the operation fell to the District Attorney of New York, Charles S. Whitman. Whitman had gained considerable fame prosecuting a corrupt police lieutenant named Becker and securing for him the death sentence for ordering four thugs—Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Whitey Lewis and Lefty Louie—to murder a well-known gambler named Herman Rosenthal. This monumental case had made Whitman a natural candidate for governor of New York. There was even talk of his eventual nomination for the Presidency. He had been about to leave New York with his wife for a vacation in Newport at the forty-room summer cottage of Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish. He had recently been introduced to society by Mrs. O. H. P. Belmont. He valued these connections but could not resist dropping over to 36th Street when the news reached him. He thought it was his duty as President-to-be. He liked to be photographed at the scene of the action. Upon his arrival everyone immediately deferred to his judgment, including an enemy of his, the choleric Mayor William J. Gaynor. He thought this was a significant acknowledgment of political realities. He looked at his watch and decided he had a few minutes to take care of this matter of the mad coon.
Whitman called for the plans of the Library from the architectural firm of Charles McKim and Stanford White. After a study of these he authorized a reconnaissance by a single athletic patrolman who was to gain access to the Library roof and look in the domed skylight over the central hall and the East Room to determine how many niggers were in there. A patrolman was found and dispatched through the garden that separated the Library from the Morgan residence. Whitman and the other officials waited in the improvised headquarters. No sooner had the officer entered the garden than the sky flashed and there was a loud report followed by an agonized scream. Whitman went pale. They’ve got the goddamn place mined, he said. An officer came in. From what anyone could tell, the patrolman in the garden was dead, which was his only bit of luck because nobody could have gone in to get him out of there. The police officials were grim. They looked at Whitman. He now knew that the numerical strength of Coalhouse’s band was not crucial intelligence. But he called the press around and announced that they numbered a dozen and perhaps as many as twenty men.
36
In the hours following, District Attorney Whitman conferred with several advisers. The colonel in command of the New York militia in Manhattan urged a full-scale military action. This so alarmed one of Mr. Morgan’s curators, a tall nervous man with a pince-nez who held his hands clasped at his chest as if he were a diva at the Metropolitan, that he began to tremble. Do you know the value of Mr. Morgan’s acquisitions! We have four Shakespeare folios! We have a Gutenberg Bible on vellum! There are seven hundred incunabula and a five-page letter of George Washington’s! The colonel waved his finger in the air. If we don’t take care of that son of a bitch, if we don