The Other Teddy Roosevelts by Mike Resnick Page A

with vampires at various times and places.

    Well, when it comes to real historical characters my first choice is always Teddy Roosevelt, and if there was a vampire in Manhattan in the mid-1890s, he was just the man to deal with it, as he was the city’s Police Commissioner from 1895 to 1897.
    ***
    Things had not been going well for New York’s Commissioner of Police. He’d started like a house afire, cleaning up most of the more obvious crime within a year—but then he came to a stone wall. He’d never before met a problem that he couldn’t overcome by the sheer force of his will, but although he had conquered the political world, the literary world, and what was left of the Wild West, Theodore Roosevelt had to admit that after making a good start, his efforts to conquer the criminal elements of his city had come to a dead halt.
    He’d insisted that every policeman go armed. In their first three shoot-outs with wanted criminals, they’d killed two bystanders, wounded seven more, and totally missed their targets.
    So he’d made target practice mandatory. When the city’s budget couldn’t accommodate the extra time required, almost a quarter of the force quit rather than practice for free.
    He’d begun sleeping days and wandering the more dangerous areas by night—but everyone knew that Teddy Roosevelt wasn’t a man to miss what he was aiming at, or to run away when confronted by superior numbers, so they just melted away when word went out (and it always went out) that he was on the prowl.
    1896 drew to a close, and he realized he wasn’t much closer to achieving his goal then he’d been at the end of 1895. He seriously considered resigning. After all, he and Edith had four children now, he had two books on the bestseller list, he’d been offered a post as Chief Naturalist at the American Museum, and he’d hardly been able to spend any time at his beloved Sagamore Hill since accepting the post as Commissioner. But every time he thought about it, his chin jutted forward, he inadvertently bared his teeth in a cross between a humorless smile and a snarl, and he knew that he wasn’t going anywhere until the job was done. Americans didn’t quit when things got rough; that was when they showed the courage and sense of purpose that differentiated them from Europeans.
    But if he was to stay, he couldn’t continue to depend on his police force to do the job. Men were quitting every day, and many of the ones who stayed did so only because they knew a corrupt cop could make more money than an honest businessman.
    There had to be a way to tame the city—and then one day it came to him. Who knew the criminal element better than anyone else? The criminals themselves. Who knew their haunts and their habits, their leaders and their hideouts? Same answer.
    Then, on a Tuesday evening in January, he had two members of the most notorious gang brought to his office. They glared at him with open hostility when they arrived.
    “You got no right to pull us in here,” said the taller of the two, a hard-looking man with a black eye-patch. “We didn’t do nothing.”
    “No one said you did,” answered Roosevelt.
    The shorter man, who had shaved his head bald—Roosevelt suspected it was to rid himself of lice or worse—looked around. “This ain’t no jail. What are we doing here?”
    “I thought we might get to know each other better,” said Roosevelt.
    “You gonna beat us and then put us in jail?” demanded Eye-Patch.
    “Why would I do something like that?” said Roosevelt. He turned to the officers who had brought them in. “You can leave us now.”
    “Are you sure, sir?” said one of them.
    “Quite sure. Thank you for your efforts.”
    The officers looked at each other, shrugged, and walked out, closing the door behind them.
    “You men look thirsty,” said Roosevelt, producing a bottle and a pair of glasses from his desk drawer. “Why don’t you help yourselves?”
    “That’s damned Christian of you, Mr.