On Secret Service (7 page)

“Get out of my house,” he yelled, taking aim.

“Knudsen, don't be a fool, you'll only harm yourself further,” Webster said. Lon groped behind him for a small enameled ginger jar, whipped it over his head in a throw that broke it against Knudsen's forehead. Webster dove to the floor. Knudsen reeled against the stair rail, accidentally firing both barrels of the shotgun into the ceiling. Lath and plaster showered down. Upstairs, the housekeeper shrieked like a madwoman.

Webster tackled Thor Knudsen, who was flabby and no match for him. Lon cut open the backing of another small oil in the dining room and pulled out bills of large denomination. Webster held the shotgun on the sobbing banker while Lon ran for the authorities.

“You could have been killed,” Webster said to Lon later.

“But I wasn't.”

“Don't take chances like that too often. It isn't professional.”

“I hear you, Mr. Webster.”

“Tim,” he said, a comradely arm across Lon's shoulder.

Back in Chicago, Pinkerton called Lon in. The boss congratulated him on his keen observation and quick thinking, which Webster had generously reported. Pinkerton gave Lon a handshake and an immediate promotion to operative. In the next few months Lon was almost too busy to see that sectional strife was pushing the country closer to a final confrontation over slavery.

“Papa, I can't talk, rehearsal's at five.”

“But I have excellent news.” The major had bounded into the house with greater energy and zest than he'd exhibited for months. His boots were dusty from walking, but his old sky blue military greatcoat and cape were brushed and presentable. The monocle he kept in a cigar box was squeezed into his left eye. “A position. A clerkship with the Department of War in President's Park. I report next week.”

Hanna leaped into Siegel's arms and hugged him. “That's wonderful. How did it happen? Didn't you apply there before?”

“Twice. I was treated like a cur. This is a new administration.”

“Who hired you, the new secretary?”

“No, not Mr. Cameron. Two assistants. They liked my military background. The secretary has none. There are jokes that his greatest experience consists of stuffing ballot boxes in Pennsylvania. Lincoln put him in the cabinet because he helped secure the nomination. I don't care if he's Satan himself so long as he pays me adequately and—
ach
, Hanna. Your clothes. Why do you dress that way?”

The major was reacting to her shapeless gray wool coat and narrow trousers, castoffs given her by the wife of Mr. Spence, the black porter next door. Under her cotton chemise she'd wrapped and pinned strips of clean rag to flatten her bosom, and she'd cut her hair with old, dull shears, leaving it boyishly ragged around the ears.

“It helps me get into the part. I play a girl disguised as the page of Duke Orsino.”

“Those theatricals, your friends, they influence you in strange ways.” Shaking his head, he peeled off his old gauntlets. “I met a most interesting man while waiting for my appointment. A Mr. Baker, also seeking a position. In San Francisco, California, he led an informal military force he called vigilantes. They hung anyone who—”

“Papa, I must go. I'm very happy for you.”

“For us. We can remove ourselves from this neighborhood of swinish Negroes. Be careful downtown, the city is a madhouse.”

And had been for days, in preparation for Lincoln's inauguration on Monday, March 4. The hotels were full. Hundreds who couldn't find rooms slept in doorways or simply staggered up and down the streets all night. One paper said the National Hotel was serving twelve hundred meals a day. But she really hadn't appreciated the extent of the crowding until she reached Pennsylvania Avenue. Work gangs were scraping and raking the street for the entire length of Mr. Lincoln's ride from the Capitol to the Executive Mansion. People milled on the sidewalk. She suspected many came from Illinois because they wore coarse dark clothing and gawked shamelessly. The manager at the Canterbury said the prairie men were notoriously cheap, never leaving tips.

Hanna saw others, rougher men who swigged from bottles or flasks and pushed anyone who got in their way, women included. The town was flooded with the Baltimore plug-uglies come to disrupt the inauguration. When one stepped on her shoe, she glared and cursed him in her native language. He wasn't intimidated. He called her a filthy name and swaggered on.

A young man emerging from the National Hotel was mobbed by people with autograph albums. Hanna recognized Lincoln's college-age son from a lithograph she'd seen. Some wag had dubbed him the Prince of Rails. Bob Lincoln signed his name without complaint.

A bright flash drew her eye to the roof of a building she was passing. The March sun reflected from the field glasses of an Army officer observing the crowds. The director of her play said there would be sharpshooters along the parade route, because of death threats. According to one rumor, twenty ruffians from Texas armed with bowie knives were planning to slash a path through the District cavalry guarding the inaugural carriage and stab the President to death.

Other people said New York was about to declare itself a free city in order to trade with both governments. That President Lincoln would immediately call a peace conference with delegates from Montgomery, capital of the new Confederacy. That blacks were awaiting Monday in order to pay back their owners and employers. It was this kind of rumor that had sparked a regrettable exchange with Margaret when they last took supper together:

“My brother, Cicero, swears that the Negro housemaid of a friend said she was going to slap her mistress's face and spit on her as soon as Lincoln's in office.”

“Margaret, how can you believe such nonsense?”

“I'm only telling you what I heard. My father says that once Lincoln and the black Republicans are in power, blood will run.”

“What do you say?”

“As little as possible. I hate the idea.”

“You can't sit on a fence rail forever. There's going to be fighting. I wish I could enlist. I wish I were a man, so I could help the cause.”

“Your cause, not mine,” Margaret said with obvious irritation.

Redness rushed to Hanna's cheeks. Both women looked away. Their waiter, a white man like all waiters in the fine hotels and restaurants, saw a spat in progress and went to another table.

Hanna laid her hand on Margaret's sleeve, a gesture of conciliation. Hanna's nails were blunt, broken in places, in contrast to the buffed perfection of Margaret's. Margaret spoke first.

“That was rude and thoughtless. Forgive me?”

Hanna said, “Of course.”

“We mustn't get so heated. We're friends.”

“Yes, indeed. Forever.”

But friends, if they have character, take a stand, or they should,
Hanna thought. Just as families, states, and the nation were dividing rancorously, so it was with Margaret. Hanna hated to see it and yet sensed a certain inevitability. They parted politely, without their usual display of affection.

 

Hanna's little company of amateur actors performed on a curtained platform in the basement of an Episcopal church behind the Capitol. The rector enjoyed theatricals and allowed the group to rent the basement so long as they kept it tidy. The church congregation teemed with Southerners and those who sympathized with them.

As usual, the actors were running about and cackling like barnyard chickens when she arrived. Today was their first rehearsal in costume. The director was a talented but rather prissy shoe salesman named Derek Fowley.

When Hanna walked into the dressing room, Zephira Comfort was in her underwear, struggling with her corset strings. “Oh, bother. Would you do me up, dear?”

“Certainly, dear.” Zephira Comfort was fat, with bosoms like cannonballs. She was a poor actress, but Derek lived with her, so she was always cast.

Hanna loved the part of Viola, one of Shakespeare's women played by young men in Elizabethan times. Shipwrecked on the Illyrian coast, Viola disguises herself as a soft-cheeked male to protect herself from harm. Malvolio describes her as “not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy.” Viola is soon in service as Cesario, page to Orsino, who sends her to the lady Olivia to woo her in his place. In the fifth and last scene of Act 1 Hanna made her first entrance in page's finery—a green silk coat and knee breeches, with tiny yellow flowers edging the coat lapels. Hanna liked the snug feel of her white hose, the scent of her powdered wig. Zephira Comfort played Olivia in a heavy veil, until the text required her to reveal herself to the eloquent page.

Zephira clasped hands at her bosom and gushed. “How does he love me?”

Hanna's answer was more contained, realistic, and as a result, believable. “With adorations, fertile tears, with groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire!…If I did love you in my master's flame, with such a suffering, such a deadly life, in your denial I would find no sense.”

At the end of the scene Derek leaped up from his stool, clapping. “Zeffie, you are superb. Don't let down. Dear little Hanna—that's a handsome outfit, but threadbare. A seam under the left arm is gaping like a chasm. Have the wardrobe girl sew it up.”

“Yes, Derek.”

“I do compliment your performance. If I met you as a stranger, I'd think you were a man. Pitching your voice lower helps immeasurably.”

“Thank you, Derek.”

“Five minutes, everyone. Then we press on.”

Hanna went outside. The pale sun was sunk behind the unfinished dome of the Capitol to the west. Heavy shadows clogged the street. She heard horses approaching at a gallop.

She leaned against the church's brick wall and put a match to a handmade cigarette. Hanna liked the smell and sensation of tobacco. She spat a flake off her tongue as a half dozen cavalry, booted and spurred, charged through the purple gloom. Studying the way the darkness and their baggy uniforms tended to blur their individuality, she was struck by a new thought.

If I'm so convincing as a man, why couldn't I dress as one? Follow a regiment into the field? I'd like that. And Papa would have his soldier after all.

She was excited, though not a little fearful of the potential risks. But she was a clever actress, wasn't she? If she didn't strip naked, why couldn't she carry it off? She was so absorbed in the fantasy, she didn't hear Derek's call for Act 2. She had to be escorted inside by the grumpy stage manager.

Inauguration day came in sunny but chilly. A gusty wind nipped the cheeks and numbed exposed hands. The military presence was enormous. District cavalry to accompany the parade and militia infantry to guard the route were supplemented by companies of regulars forming up in F Street, north of the Avenue, as Lon and Sledge started for the Capitol at half past nine. Militiamen with rifles perched on Avenue rooftops like so many vultures waiting for a corpse.

Felton, the railroad executive, had hired the Pinkerton detectives as a special patrol for the inauguration. It was a private act of patriotism. General Scott was in charge of security and wouldn't have authorized civilian intrusion. Old Fuss and Feathers lived on I Street. There, it was said, a French caterer supplied all his meals. Lon figured Scott ate five or six a day, because he was grotesquely obese, his arms and legs swollen by dropsy. He had to be hoisted into his carriage by noncoms. At seventy-five he was too old for supreme command, but he had it.

“Don't seem very happy, these people,” Sledge said as they moved past civilians already crowding the curb. Lon had noticed the same thing. There was noise—boys hawking papers, vendors waving lithographed portraits of Lincoln—but not a lot of enthusiasm. He saw anger on some faces, anxiety on many more. Shutters on shops and upper windows were closed, probably as a protest.

They walked around the Capitol on the south side, to the east portico. Several hundred people were already waiting behind the reserved chairs set in front of the flag-draped platform. Under the platform, Pinkerton said, fifty armed soldiers would be hiding.

Lon and Sledge found Tim Webster in the crowd. He assigned Sledge to the northeast quadrant of the park, Lon to the southeast.

People shivered and complained about the wind. Lon turned up the velvet collar of his secondhand coat and held onto his black felt hat. He drifted, studying faces, watching for anything that might signal a demented person. He saw no one like that but still felt nervous. Why must an assassin look strange? Why couldn't he be handsome, or simply ordinary?

A few athletic types had climbed the park's bare trees. City police swarmed on the grounds, and a soldier with a rifle looked out of every window of both wings of the Capitol. Would any of them be fast enough to stop a determined sharpshooter?

The crowd grew to several thousand. Shortly after twelve, distant music reached them; the Marine band, marching up the Avenue. Lincoln and Buchanan had left Willard's in their open carriage, surrounded by their guards. According to the latest rumor, if the new President wasn't assassinated before he was sworn in, a squadron of Virginians would gallop across the Long Bridge and abduct him from tonight's inaugural ball.

Lon's eyes kept moving, searching for signs of trouble. Walking backward, he stumbled into a young woman and knocked a book from her gloved hand.

“Ma'am, I'm terribly sorry.”

“I should hope so.”

She was about his age, tall and handsome, with sparkling dark eyes and a full, rounded bust. Her clothes spoke of money and good taste. Over her skirt she wore a plush pelisse of dark amber. Her matching bonnet was trimmed with ostrich plumes. She was an inch taller than Lon.

He knelt and swooped up the book.
The Woman in White.
He brushed bits of winter grass from the cover.

“I haven't read this but I hear Wilkie Collins is a good writer. He and my favorite author, Charles Dickens, are friends.”

She stared.

“I hear there's a detective in this novel.”

She stared at his hat. Caught short, he swept it off. “Here you are, then. My compliments.”

She took the book. “Thank you, but I don't need compliments from a Yankee.”

Annoyed, he snapped at her. “What about accepting compliments from an American?”

Lowered lashes hid a flash of amusement. “My, you're full of sass. What does a man like you do for a living, may I ask? Slave in one of those dark, filthy factories under the illusion you're free?”

“No, and let's not start on how plantation slaves are better off than wage slaves, it's a specious argument. A factory hand can walk away. A slave walks away, they whip him, brand him, or worse.” He should have ended it there, but her challenging eyes and haughty chin provoked him. “I suppose you disapprove of our new President too.”

“I do. He's nothing but an uncouth rustic from Illinois.”

“I'm from Illinois.”

“Really. It's no recommendation. If Abraham Lincoln had so much as a thimbleful of common sense, he'd preach conciliation, not conflict.”

“Not while the South's hell-bent on tearing up the Constitution to protect its peculiar institution. You secesh think your way's the only—”

“Sorry I left you so long, my dear.” An older man who'd come up behind her grasped her arm. “Ran into an old friend. Do you know this gentleman?” The man had an affected way of speaking. Not British exactly, but crisp enough to establish his superiority and patronize a listener. He was smartly turned out in a long coat with brown velvet lapels, stand-up collar, bow tie, top hat, gloves, and a walking stick.

“No, Donal. The gentleman bumped into me and knocked my book on the ground. At least he had the courtesy to retrieve it.”

“Well, thank you very much, sir,” Donal said in a faintly sarcastic way that withheld sincerity. The man moved the young woman away, guiding with a firm hand on her arm. Lon wondered how such an attractive girl could be taken with a man with gray hair and a weak chin. He was probably rich. As she left, the young woman glanced over her shoulder. Lon couldn't say whether the look was inquisitive or scornful.

What galled him most wasn't her sharp tongue; matter of fact, he rather liked her spunk. He was infuriated with himself because he'd given antagonism right back, instead of trying to charm her into liking him. The moment he saw her, admired the curve of her cheek, the shimmer of her hair, he wanted her to like him.

Don't waste your time. That's a road you'll never travel.

Too bad. He couldn't say he'd fallen in love with the attractive stranger in such a short time, but something in his young man's heart had opened to the possibility.

Lon had never been in love. He'd enjoyed brief, superficial flirtations with a number of young women, and three episodes of sex. The last time, Sledge had taken him to a Chicago brothel and paid for the girl. Lon found it a mechanical, even sad experience. He didn't tell Sledge, because Sledge would have scorned him as a bookish romantic.

Walking away, he saw a colorful paper bookmark lying on the ground where she'd been standing.
Another good book from SHILLINGTON'S.

He'd visited the popular bookstore. He picked up the bookmark, certain that it hadn't fallen out of the Wilkie Collins. Why had she dropped it? He searched for her in the crowd, as if by finding her he might find the answer. She was gone.

And he didn't even know her name.

He tucked the bookmark into an inner pocket and went back to work.

 

Shouts and commotion on the north side of the building signaled the arrival of the official party, bound for the Senate chamber and the swearing-in of Vice President Hamlin. Presently the official party of congressmen, Supreme Court justices, friends, and family emerged from the rotunda and came down the steps to the platform. There was Lincoln, sad-eyed as before, disappointingly ordinary. He took a front-row chair, his gold-knobbed cane across his knees. Senator Baker of Oregon stood behind a cheap little table to introduce him. Lon was fascinated by old Taney, the robed chief justice, seated to Baker's left. Taney had written the famous Dred Scott decision saying slaves were not citizens, therefore not entitled to protection of the law. Lon disliked the man without knowing anything else about him.

At the close of the introduction Lincoln stepped forward. He acknowledged the applause and laid his cane across the table. He took off his hat, moved as if to set it down, hesitated. A few snickered at his awkwardness. Up jumped Senator Douglas, the Little Giant. Smiling, Douglas took Lincoln's tall hat from him. He sat down with the hat held carefully on his knee. The crowd liked the symbolism of last fall's political opponents united.

The President's voice was no different on this occasion. It was thin, high-pitched, and, Lon hated to say, disagreeable. Yet Lincoln's rhetoric slowly drew him in.

Lincoln raised the issue of secession, then immediately said such a thing was impossible; the Union was perpetual. It could not be dissolved by individual states. The secession ordinances were null and void.

“And I therefore consider that, in view of the Constitution and the laws, the Union is unbroken. To the extent of my ability, I shall take care, as the Constitution itself expressly enjoins upon me, that the laws of the Union be faithfully executed in all the states.”

The crowd held so still, you could almost hear the clouds sailing across the sky. A man behind Lon whispered, “Damn fool means to go to war if the South don't retreat.”

Gravely, Lincoln told them there would be no violence or bloodletting unless it was forced on the national government. “In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war. The government will not assail you. You can have no conflict without yourselves being the aggressors. You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the government, while I have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.”

His melancholy eyes held the crowd. “Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

After the applause, Justice Taney brought out a Bible. He swore in the President and it was done. Without violence, thankfully. The phrase “bonds of affection” lingered in Lon's mind along with a sense of loss.

 

Before Allan Pinkerton and his men left Washington on Wednesday, Lon called at Shillington's bookstore. After almost a year as an operative, he could present a story convincingly.

“A young woman dropped a copy of
The Woman in White
in President's Park on Monday. I found it but she disappeared before I could hand it back. I'd like to return it if she wasn't an out-of-town visitor, but I don't know her name or where to find her. A bookmark from your store told me she must have bought it here.”

Lon's guileless expression and his blue eyes overcame any suspicion on the clerk's part. He fetched a tin box. “We sold quite a few of the Collins since it was published last year, but we keep cards on local customers. Will you describe her?”

Lon did. The clerk found her card. “Miss Miller.” Lon had trained himself to read handwriting upside down. First name Margaret. The clerk's thumb hid the address.

“From Washington?”

“Baltimore. But her family keeps a second residence in Franklin Square.” The clerk showed him the number. Something jogged the clerk's memory hard enough to bring a smile. “She's not afraid to talk politics with some of our gentleman customers. She's a hot secesh.”

“That's Baltimore,” Lon agreed, tipping his hat.

He dashed away and after dark went to Franklin Square in a rainstorm, only to stand soaked and disappointed on the stoop. Not a light showed anywhere. He backed down the steps with rain dripping from his hat brim. She must have left. He was leaving in the morning. Damn. No chance to meet her again or even put his toe in the door.

 

On the westbound Baltimore & Ohio, the passenger car was overheated, the weather outside damp and dismal. Windows steamed up. Pryce Lewis sat next to Lon, going through the Washington and New York papers. “By God, they're rattling the sword down South. Listen to this from Arkansas. ‘If declaring the Union perpetual means coercion, then Lincoln's inaugural means war.' The
Montgomery Advertiser
said, ‘War, war, and nothing less than war will satisfy the abolition chief.' I fancy we're in for—Lon, what on earth are you doing? Who is Margaret?”

Lon smeared away the name traced in the steam on the glass. “Just a lady I met at the inaugural.” He rested his chin in his palm and stared through the hole in the steam at rain falling on the winter woods. They looked as forlorn as he felt.