The First Assassin (35 page)

“She lost me,” gasped the lieutenant.

“Mrs. Tabard?”

“Yes.”

“What happened?”

“I followed her down to the Avenue, where she boarded a bus. I followed right behind. It was crowded, so I didn’t have a good view of her. But I know she got on, and I never saw her get off. Halfway to Georgetown, though, I realized she wasn’t there. She just vanished.”

Hamilton’s eyes dropped to the ground. Rook could tell the lieutenant was ashamed. But then, he deserved to be.

“She didn’t vanish. You lost sight of her,” scolded Rook.

“She must have gotten off the bus just as I was getting on. That’s the only thing that makes sense. But that would mean that she knew I was following her, and I was certain that she didn’t know. She never even looked in my direction.”

Rook pondered this. He knew nothing about Hamilton’s skills at shadowing subjects. He assumed they were unexceptional. But he knew that Tabard was a middle-aged woman who ran a boardinghouse. She was no savvy spy either. It was reasonable to suppose that Hamilton could keep tabs on her, as well as to suppose that even if she were to become aware of him, she would have trouble shaking him. Yet it sounded as if she had not only lost Hamilton but also that she had lost him with speed and efficiency.

“Very well, Lieutenant. Get some rest and report back here at midnight.” That would be Hamilton’s punishment: the late shift. Rook would find a role for him that did not involve following anybody.

As Hamilton loped away, Rook decided to get a better view of the boardinghouse. He walked to Eighth Street, almost two full blocks away from Tabard’s, and crossed H Street. He allowed himself to steal a quick look in the direction of the boardinghouse. The distance was too great to see much of anything. He merely confirmed what he already knew: in the middle of the afternoon, Tabard’s was no beehive of activity. The tenants would be at their jobs around the city.

Once Tabard’s slipped from sight, Rook maneuvered around the city block and entered an alleyway. He passed the back side of several narrow buildings, finally entering one close to Sixth Street. It was an apothecary’s shop. A sign on the wall promised “Remedies for All Ailments!” The shelves contained bottles of strengthening cordials for general heartiness, packages of cephalic pills for headaches, and something called “volcanic oil liniment” that guaranteed instant relief for painful sores. The proprietor waved as Rook charged up two flights of stairs.

He reached the third floor and stepped into a small room. The soldiers were seated. Two were positioned near a pair of windows while the third smoked a pipe behind them. All three rose when Rook entered.

“Nothing stirring, sir,” said the smoker. “We haven’t spotted anything since we got up here.”

“Sit down,” said the colonel. Through a window he could see Tabard’s across the street, and looking downward he had a good view of the front door and the window to Mazorca’s room—the one he had stood in just a day earlier. The curtains were shut, just as Grimsley had reported.

“Have you had your eyes on those closed curtains the entire time?”

“Yes, we have,” said one by the window. “If there’s a person in that room, he hasn’t touched the curtains.”

Rook continued looking out even though he did not see anything in particular. “Don’t get your faces too close to the window or you might be seen,” he said, mostly because he wanted to fill the silence. He had already warned the soldiers about this.

“Yes, sir. We know.”

A few more moments passed quietly.

“What do we know about the druggist downstairs?” asked Rook.

“He’s a Union man,” said the soldier with a pipe. “We made sure of that before we came up here.”

“Does he know Mrs. Tabard?”

“We didn’t ask because we didn’t want to give away our purpose. We just told him we needed to watch the street for a few hours. He was agreeable, but I think he’s curious to know what we’re doing.”

“That’s understandable,” said the colonel. “I’ll try to have a few words with him later.”

Rook considered the situation. The disappearance of Tabard troubled him. It suggested that despite appearances, she was no ordinary keeper of a boardinghouse. Perhaps she was in league with Mazorca. This led to another troubling idea. If Rook and his men couldn’t keep track of Tabard, then how could they hope to monitor Mazorca? He might slip from their grasp just as easily as Tabard, even though he was striving to prevent this. Rook reviewed the possibilities. Mazorca could be in Tabard’s right now. If he left, Rook’s men could try to pursue him, but they might fail and it would be difficult to locate him again. On the other hand, they could try to seize him in the boardinghouse. This could hurt their chances of breaking up a wider conspiracy. Mazorca nevertheless appeared to be at the center of everything. He was the man in the photo. The notion of capturing him and putting an end to his machinations, while it was still possible, was appealing.

Rook kept looking across the street. He and the other watchers would have seen anybody who stood beside one of the windows or passed by it. The only exception was Mazorca’s room, where the curtains were shut. They were open everywhere else.

Why were his closed? The day before, when Rook was in the room, they had been left slightly open. The only time Rook had ever closed a curtain in the middle of the day was to sleep. If Mazorca was dozing, he might be secured without a fight.

Rook mulled it over and decided to act on what his gut was telling him to do. “We’re done waiting,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

Polly brightened when the soldier waved to her on Pennsylvania Avenue, outside Willard’s Hotel. She might have worked for Violet Grenier, who could say all kinds of terrible things about federal men, but Polly rather liked how they looked in their blue uniforms. The idea that one of them had actually noticed her made her heart beat a little faster.

“Hello, ma’am,” said the soldier, a private who was about Polly’s age.

Polly smiled coyly. “Hello,” she replied.

“May I show you something?” He held out a card.

It was a peculiar approach, but she had no intention of complaining. She took the card and realized that it was not a card at all but rather a photograph. Polly owned several about the same size. They were mostly pictures of handsome actors who toured the country and occasionally came to Washington.

The image was not sharp. Polly could tell it had not been taken in a studio. It certainly did not appear posed. A man was in the center of it, viewed in profile. His ear was disfigured. It did not make him ugly, but he sure was not as fine looking as the men Polly had admired from the balcony at Ford’s Theatre.

“Have you seen this man?” asked the private.

Disappointment washed over her. The soldier was not interested in her but in what she might know. This was not a casual rendezvous. That was all right, she realized, because he was not as handsome as her favorite actors either.

She looked down at the picture again. “No, I’m afraid not.” She tried to hand it back to him.

“Keep it,” he said. “I’ve got a whole stack, and I’m supposed to get rid of them all.” Polly saw that he held about a hundred of them in his other hand. “Take it back home. Anybody who has seen this man should report to the Winder Building as quickly as possible. He may be dangerous.”

“Okay,” said Polly. She tucked away the photo. “You be careful,” she said as she walked away.

“Yes, ma’am. I will,” said the private. He winked at her and smiled.

Polly decided that he was not bad looking after all. She would have to find an excuse to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue again soon.

In the middle of a weekday afternoon, H Street did not exactly hum with activity—and Rook waited until it was positively deserted before he crossed it from the apothecary’s shop. Six uniformed soldiers followed him, and they made directly for Tabard’s boardinghouse. Anybody watching them would have understood that it was not a social visit.

The door to Tabard’s was unlocked. Rook pushed it open, removing a pistol from his holster at the same time. The soldiers gripped their own guns. Even though H Street was empty, they had not wanted to draw their weapons until they were actually entering the building. To their backs, above the apothecary’s shop, a pair of soldiers leaned out of a third-story window and aimed their Sharps rifles. Several other soldiers were positioned at the intersections of Sixth and Seventh streets, and a few more guarded the alley in the rear. The boardinghouse was surrounded by armed men.

The door swung open. The foyer was vacant except for a rug on the floor and a few small pieces of furniture pushed against a wall. Rook stepped inside and made straight for the staircase, without even a glance at the other rooms on the ground floor. This time, he did not bother with the key in the kitchen. There was nothing surreptitious about what he planned to do. Behind him, three soldiers spread out on the first floor. The other three went up the steps with him.

On the second floor, Rook positioned himself outside of Mazorca’s room. He pressed his ear to the door and listened. No sounds came from within. All was silence except for the rustlings of the soldiers below as they moved around the first floor’s dining room, kitchen, and Tabard’s personal quarters. They were trying to keep quiet, but Rook could hear their muffled footfalls. They had orders to conduct a thorough search, opening closet doors, checking pantries, and looking beneath and behind curtains and anything else that might hide a person who did not want to be found.

When Rook heard one of them coming up the steps, he finally pulled away from Mazorca’s door. The soldier looked at Rook and shook his head to indicate that they had found nobody. A moment later, a soldier who had gone upstairs came back down with the same report: the common areas were free of people.

With his pistol still in hand, Rook reached for the knob on Mazorca’s door and gently tried to turn it. The thing refused to budge. The colonel took a step back, squared himself to the door, raised a leg, and kicked. The sole of his black boot crashed into the door, ripping its latch and flinging it open. His gun entered the room before he did, ready to fire upon anybody who wanted to put up a fight.

The light inside was dim. What illumination there was came from the edges of the closed curtains. He scanned the room rapidly, his head jerking around like a bird as it tried to spot predators. On the bed, a blanket covered a lump the size of a body. Rook had hoped to catch Mazorca napping. Yet he knew that nobody could have slept through the sound of the door smashing in.

The soldiers swarmed in after Rook. One of them opened the curtains. As light fell on the bed, Rook saw the dark stain. He leaned in for a closer look. It was red and fresh. One whiff and Rook knew it was blood. The body was a corpse.

The blanket was not tucked in. Instead, it had been tossed on top of the body in haste. Beneath it was Tabard. She lay on her right side, but her head was twisted unnaturally to the left. Her chin rested on her shoulder, and her face looked up at the ceiling. Her eyes were wide open. If it had not been for the huge gash in her neck, Rook might have thought that she was still alive. He could tell that she had not been dead for long. The blood glistened in the sunlight. It had soaked into everything—the blanket, the mattress, her clothes. Rook had seen men die in battle before. It always amazed him to see how many buckets of blood could fill a human body.

He pulled back. “Mazorca did this,” he said to nobody in particular. “And we don’t know where he is.”

He told the soldiers to clear the entire building—to open all of the doors that were closed, to investigate the guest rooms, and even to check the roof. Rook’s own attention turned to the trunk. He opened it and reached in. To his mild surprise, the rifle was still there, exactly as it had been before. Rook wondered why an assassin would leave behind his weapon.

Rook descended the steps onto the ground floor. From above, he heard knocking on doors, and then the bangs and cracks of forced openings. Yet he was not really listening. He walked into the dining room, passed through the kitchen, and entered Tabard’s bedroom.

It was small and neat—the private chamber of a woman whose life had revolved around her guests. Rook imagined Tabard coming in here at the end of each day, worn out from hours of cooking, cleaning, and conversing, and collapsing into the cool sheets of her bed.

Across the room, a closet stood wide open. It appeared as though someone had ransacked its contents. A few dresses hung from a rack, but several others lay in a heap on the floor. Rook called for the soldier who had entered it just a few moments earlier. When he appeared, Rook pointed to the closet.

“Did you do this?” he asked.

“No, sir. I found it like this.”

“Right,” said the colonel. “At least it’s one mess we aren’t responsible for.”

It was exactly as Rook had feared: his men had arrived in time to capture Mazorca, but Mazorca had outwitted them. Their failure to act sooner or more intelligently had cost Tabard her life—and now it might cost the president as well. They had gone from having the assassin within their grasp to having no clue about where he might have gone. He could be anywhere.

The colonel walked outside the boardinghouse. When he realized that he was still holding his pistol, he holstered it. Across the street, the sharpshooters were gone from the windows. A few other soldiers, sensing that something had gone wrong, made their way toward Tabard’s from their posts. Rook knew that he would have to explain the events of the last few minutes and issue new orders. He would have several men gather whatever information they could from Mazorca’s room, tell the boarders half-truths about why the doors to their rooms were smashed in and their landlady was dead, and question them in detail about Mazorca.

Those were the easy orders to give. The hard ones involved figuring out how to find Mazorca again. Rook wanted time to think about it. He wished he could talk to Springfield, who had been his confidant on these matters for weeks.