Beneath him, the Street continued to fill with people. Taxis were unable to move, and horns began to blare.
The bell struck 3.
Swelling with confidence, the man thought, There is no system, no institution, greater than the marshaled thoughts of a singular man in the pursuit of Right.
The bell tolled again and again, soon to 7, 8, 9...
And now Justice shall be done.
The church bell struck 11. The man put the tips of his forefingers in his ears, closed his eyes, and, in preparation for the colossal explosion, hunched into his body.
But there was no explosion.
All was as it had been.
The Morgan Building was not destroyed. The executives therein had not been killed.
The unsavory crowd of co-conspirators to the folly of Wall Street continued to surge from buildings, many bypassing his horse and wagon. These included the postal inspector who had sold him information crucial to his deceit, and the German who had been vital to the construction of the bomb. He had agreed to meet them at the entrance to the Morgan Building precisely at noon.
Stunned, the man hurried down the steps.
Mauro wiped his nose with the handkerchief his mother had given him, and he struggled to return it to his back pocket. Doing so, he looked between his legs at the device, which rested on a bed of sawdust. He had been thinking of the sound of the horse as it trod cobblestone, and of the magnificent bridge that, an hour or so ago, had been high as the moon above his head.
The bells had stopped.
Dodici? he thought, having lost count.
Could have been twelve.
He shrugged. He was hungry and, in the fog of his mind, reasoned the man would not return until his chore was complete.
He looked at the red cable in his hand and gave it a hardy tug.
He was instantly blown to atoms.
A yellow-green mushroom cloud rose in his stead.
The wagon was obliterated, and the bay mare flew into the air. It landed, dead and disemboweled, in the center of the Wall and Broad streets intersection, at least fifty feet to the west
A block away, the Broadway trolley line leaped its tracks, pinning a messenger boy beneath its wheels.
The iron bars that defended the Assay Office bowed inward.
Shrapnel more deadly than a thousand machine-gun bursts propelled forcefully in every direction. The bomb had contained thirty pounds of TNT packed beneath approximately one hundred and fifty pounds of sash weights, pieces of which landed as far away as the Trinity Church grave-yard.
Riders emerging from the IRT station were greeted with a spray of viscera, and a human leg and foot landed in their midst.
A woman’s severed head, hat still in place, stuck momentarily to the façade of the Morgan Building, where blood was splattered to a height of a dozen feet.
Glass and stone rained from buildings within a half-mile radius of the blast site. The windows of the New York Stock Exchange were destroyed, and several employees therein were shredded to ribbons. The American flag flying above its entrance caught fire, as did awnings throughout the district, several as high as twelve stories above ground.
Ambulance surgeons arrived to find bodies of the dead and dying strewn about. Blood pools reflected the midday
Fifteen people were killed instantly. Among them was the man with hair lighter than the color of straw, who was caught full in the chest by the force of the blast.
Others died within the hour, victims of the whirling, white-hot steel bits. Thomas Joyce, Morgan’s chief clerk, was violated by shards of glass from the building’s cathedral windows. He was the only Morgan employee to perish, though the first floor of the building was wrecked.
Upon hearing a report that the Assay Office and Sub-Treasury had been attacked, the men of the Twenty-Third Infantry stationed on Governors Island were rushed by ferry to the Battery, from there they marched in double-time to the district, bayonets fixed.
When they arrived, they reported a stench in the air that recalled the battlefields of France. Burlap sacks placed the blood-soaked bodies could not contain the smell of death.
The streets were swept clean overnight, as Sanitation Department employees helped police comb for clues, as well as matter to aid in the identification of victims. The smallest body parts were gathered in wax paper.
Blood was dispatched by water hose to the nearest sewer, and men took steel wool to the remnant stains.
Well before sunrise, large sheets of canvas were stretched over the glassless windows at the Morgan Building. Similarly, bunting covered the broken windows at the Stock Exchange.
Both institutions opened promptly at 9 o’clock, the appointed time. Many employees arrived dressed in bandages.
The infernal machine had exploded at one minute past noon, and the banks and exchanges regularly closed at 3 o’clock, so the terrorizing demonstration had caused only a three-hour delay in the transaction of the district’s vital business.
Edwin P. Fischer, a former championship tennis player, was arrested in Hamilton, Ontario. He was said to have predicted the bombing in a series of postcards sent to various officials of government.
Mr. Fischer’s brother-in-law, Robert A. Pope, said Mr. Fischer was not involved in the attack, but had known of them via “mental telepathy.”
Arrangements were made for Mr. Fischer’s immediate transport to New York City for questioning. The police were well aware of his erratic behavior. He had fled north to avoid being committed to an insane asylum, as per his family’s wishes.
When Mr. Fischer arrived from Canada at the Grand Center Terminal, he was wearing two business suits, one atop the other, over tennis whites, on the chance that a game might opportune.
That evening, The News, which, as “New York’s Picture Newspaper,” was obligated to publish several gruesome photos of the aftermath of the attack, announced in its headlines that Wall St. Ignored Warnings. Another read, Trace Crank in Bomb Outrage. On its front page, the latter featured a photo of the troubled Mr. Fischer.
Entering the terminus of the Hudson Tubes on Church Street, the waiter T.J. O’Neal Jr. of Nutley, New Jersey accepted a copy of the paper from a newsy, but did not look at it until he had boarded the train. Then, to no one, he said, “That’s not him. That’s not Fischer.”
The waiter reported immediately to the Old Slip police station. His statement was added to the mountain of testimony the police had already compiled, much of which only served to confuse the inquiry.
The Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Morgan’s men had already decided the attack was the work of anarchists. But the New York Police Department did not agree, at least not yet. They stood by the statement that had been given to the Evening Post: “It may have been the work of a single criminal lunatic mind spurred on to its fiendish act by we know not what influence.”
The carcass of the horse provided the clue of greatest value, and through unmitigated industry, the police identified John L. Haggerty of Finnegan & Kyle, 82 New Chambers Street, as the man who had shod it.
A taciturn man with wire spectacles and the requisite sinewy arms, Mr. Haggerty took pride in the belief he could identify any horse he’d ever shod. The condition of a horse’s hoof, he said, was as distinct as a human fingerprint.
He watched while a policeman unwrapped a length of canvas containing part of a horse’s foreleg, including the hoof and shoe.
“Dark bay mare. Ten years old if a day,” Mr. Haggerty said, as he ran a calloused finger across the mark of the International Union of Journeymen Horseshoers. “Stood right for shoeing.”