Improbable as a fairy tale though all this sounded, I could not resist the evidence of my own senses, which showed me the Abyssinian envoy there in the flesh. I knew, of course, that assassination has always been one of the recognised political methods of Asiatic and African States, but this alliance between a half-civilised despot and the extreme revolutionaries of Europe struck me as altogether without precedent in the history of the world. Certainly my own experience, fertile as it naturally had been in surprising incidents, had never brought to light a more singular intrigue than this.
My position now became an extremely difficult one. I had practically agreed to accept the commission to assassinate the King of Italy, but it was not that which troubled me. I foresaw that as soon as Menelik’s agent realised that he had been played with by me he would endeavour to find some other and more trustworthy tool. To denounce him to the police of New York would have been perfectly idle; in the first place he could buy the police, and in the second place no American court would punish a ‘political’ conspiracy, unless, indeed, it were against the United States.
I contented myself for the moment with formally undertaking the required murder. The Abyssinian arranged to bring the first instalment of the blood money to the watchmaker’s house on the following Saturday night, and we all three parted apparently on the best of terms.
The next day I sent off a long telegraphic despatch summarising the whole situation. The proposal I made was that the Italian Government should cable me authority and funds to enable me to have the Abyssinian envoy privately kidnapped, and returned to his own country, viâ Massowah.
They had the incredible folly to wire instead to their Minister in Washington, instructing him to demand the arrest and expulsion of Menelik’s agent.
The net result of this ill-considered action was to flood the Italian quarter of Jersey City for several days with sham detectives, to cause a thousand or two dollars to pass into the pockets of the local Tammany, and to compel me to hasten my departure for Europe on my supposed mission, in order to rebut the suspicions of the Anarchists—and, in fact, to escape their vengeance.
The night before my departure there was a little supper at the club, at which the four were present. No open reference was made to the object of my journey. But after supper the half-witted Bresci, who had been one of the party, asked leave to walk home with me.
‘I wish I were going with you,’ he said suddenly.
‘I wish I could put you in an asylum, where you would be taken care of,’ was my thought in answer. I said aloud that I had reasons for going alone.
‘I know those reasons,’ the enthusiast declared. ‘Let me come with you. I am not afraid.’