Pulitzer_ A Life in Politics, Print, and Power - James McGrath Morris [252]
Harding took matters in his own hands. On October 23, he made his own nighttime trip into the U.S. legation while the minister was dining at the presidential palace. A young clerk, who claimed he knew where an incriminating letter by John Hay was, agreed to take Harding to the file room. As they began opening document folders, the minister’s son discovered them and sounded the alarm. Luckily for Harding, he was not prosecuted. The Colombians were unlikely to care, and putting Harding into custody to return him to the United States would be nearly impossible. Instead, the clerk was fired, Harding and Guyol were declared persona non grata, and a letter of complaint was sent to the World.
Not one to give up, Guyol made one last attempt to discover their Holy Grail. He spotted the official whose keys he had borrowed leaving the legation with a valise in the company of St. Croix. He followed them across Colombia, plotting all the way how to steal the valise, convinced it held the wanted documents. His first plan was to grab it when they boarded a riverboat and then jump into the river and make for shore, but since he had only one arm, this plan seemed doomed from the start. Luckily, he had a better opportunity when the locked leather duffel bag was unloaded from a train. Finally alone with the bag, he broke it open, to discover that it held nothing of value. All he brought back with him to Harding were broken ribs from falling off a horse during his pursuit of the two men.
With that, the far-flung search for evidence of corruption involving the canal came up empty-handed. Keeping their boss from prison would now rest solely on the legal skills of his lawyers.
Chapter Thirty
A SHORT REMAINING SPAN
In late September 1909, Pulitzer and his personal staff of sixteen settled for the autumn in one of the fashionable districts of Berlin, near the famous Tiergarten park and the city’s elegant opera house. As usual, the landlord had been required to make numerous alterations to please his tenant. Thick plate glass was added to the bedroom windows, heavy carpets were laid down, and all the windows and door hinges were well oiled.
After disagreeable stays in Paris and London over many years, Pulitzer found Berlin to be just right. For once he managed to shed his woes, attend concerts and operas, and eat out with friends. He was the most content he had been in a long time. “With due reserve,” Thwaites wrote to Seitz in New York, “I may say that Berlin is a great success and serenity of our daily tenor is positively uncanny.” Over the past three years, Europe had become Pulitzer’s new home. If he was not at sea, he was in Aix-les-Bains, Cap Martin, London, or, now, Berlin.
Europe had also become the home of Joseph’s brother Albert. Since his departure from New York fourteen years earlier, Albert had wandered around the continent, staying in fashionable hotels, occasionally returning to the United States, and living from the proceeds of the sale of his Morning Journal. He and Joseph had not spoken or written to each other since their confrontation over Albert’s refusal to merge his newspaper with Joseph’s. In a way, Albert had been revenged. Each day, as Joseph waged a life-and-death struggle with Hearst, he had been competing with the newspaper that Albert created.
Albert had also cut his ties with his former wife, Fanny, years before her death that summer, and his son Walter, who was trying to make a living as a writer in New York. At the World, Walter was persona non grata because of his father. “There were strict orders that under no circumstances was he to be identified as related to or connected with the Joseph Pulitzer family in any way, shape or manner,