The Sixth Conspirator Read online

  The reason was even more obvious than his yellow waistcoat. The same night that Abraham Lincoln was shot, Booth’s co-conspirator Lewis Payne had forced his way into Seward’s bedroom and slashed his face and neck so terribly with a knife that for weeks Seward’s life hung in the balance. A specialist dentist had made a jaw splint for him out of vulcanized rubber that was fastened by screws driven into the teeth—which must have been an incredibly painful process, Oakes thought. Even now, General Sharpe had warned them, the Secretary sometimes had to hawk loudly and drain saliva out of his cheek with a tube, and the best policy was to look away while this operation went on. But in the cold afternoon light of the window, it was hard to avoid seeing the long, loose flap of discolored skin on his right cheek, or not to notice that Seward made a special effort to keep his profile turned the other way. The Fifth Conspirator, Oakes thought, ought not expect much mercy from Seward’s quarter.

  And none at all from Daniel Keach, who was staring openly at Seward’s scars. During the war, Keach, the son of an impoverished Irish immigrant, had never risen higher than sergeant, though he petitioned regularly for a field commission. After the war, thanks to his cleverness with numbers, he had found a job in a New York City bank, but dealing with widows and orphans’ savings hadn’t changed one atom of his innately violent nature. “I wouldn’t bother bringing him back,” Keach said, “if it was up to me. I’d drop him overboard in the middle of the Atlantic and feed him to the sharks.”

  “And what about due process?” Seward asked without looking around. “Trial by jury? Habeas corpus?”

  “I would appeal to a higher law,” Keach said, and smirked.

  Seward gave his raspy chuckle again and turned back from the window, and Oakes had to nod in grudging admiration of Keach’s nerve. If William Seward was famous for anything among the general populace of the United States, he was famous as the author of two remarkable phrases. The first was his prophetic description in 1858 of the coming “irrepressible conflict” between the North and the South, and the second was his claim nine years earlier that, although the Constitution sanctioned slavery, there was nonetheless an appeal open to a “higher law.”

  “Stupidest damn speech I ever made,” he said now, and settled back behind the elaborate custom-built desk chair that they had spent the first five minutes of their visit admiring. It contained, they had been shown in detail, special hidden compartments for cigars, ashes, pens, ink, all linked and concealed by hidden panels. Not a bad image, Oakes had begun to think, for Seward’s own secretive and compartmentalized mind.

  There was also a small swiveling writing board carpentered onto the right armrest of the chair, which the Secretary began to work thoughtfully back and forth as if pondering a decision.

  General Sharpe didn’t care for silences.

  “When they shot Lincoln on April fourteenth,” he said, slapping the cardboard folder closed, “Surratt went straight to Canada, with that one stop in Elmira.” He began tapping the folder with his index finger, in a slow, maddening, unstoppable rhythm Oakes remembered from the war, when Sharpe’s temper would begin to rise. “It says here he traveled from New York to Montreal on the train, and he stayed in some kind of convent or monastery there, then took a ship to Liverpool. Then he went to London and stayed some months. Then he went to Paris and Rome and finally godforsaken Egypt. Where the hell were the British police? Or the French?”

  Seward stopped fiddling with his special chair. He planted his elbows on his desk and stared straight ahead at Oakes.

  “What do you make of all that, Captain Oakes?”

  “He had to have help,” Keach answered for him. “Surratt was an unemployed, penniless clerk. He couldn’t possibly have traveled to all those places without somebody helping.”

  “Captain Oakes?”

  “There was money and there was help,” Oakes said. “There was a Sixth Conspirator, and that’s why you called us here.”

  THERE ARE SOME PEOPLE you just love.

  Quintus Horatius Flaccus Oakes, whose Latin-besotted father had much to answer for in giving him that knotted kite’s tail of a name, put down his second glass of mediocre claret and allowed himself a small but thoroughly genuine smile. Out in the lobby he could see General Sharpe briskly making his way between the reception desk and a row of sickly yellow palms that the management of the Willard Hotel mistook for ornamentation.

  It was 10:15 p.m. by the big round railroad clock over the bar, nearly five hours after their meeting with Secretary Seward had ended—ended with some acrimony—and Sharpe was half an hour late, which was unlike him in the extreme. The shoulders of his elegant black civilian overcoat, Oakes could see, were dusted with snow where, two years ago, the epaulets and stars would have been. His gray slouch hat was turning dark in spots. For a small man, Oakes remembered, the general somehow always cut a broad swath through a crowd. On either side of him, people were stepping back quickly to let him pass. Two Negro porters bowed in unison. The white assistant manager behind the desk called out a greeting.

  “You’re going to have to change your mind, Quint,” Sharpe grunted as he pulled out a chair and sat down. “And get your hair cut, too.” He twirled his finger in the general direction of the hair that, since the war, Oakes had let grow down to his collar.

  Oakes let his smile fade. He loved General Sharpe, but he often thought that some men are born to gruffness, some have gruffness thrust upon them, and some just go way the hell out of their way to achieve it.

  “The effect aimed at is rhapsodic and sublime, General, like Lord George Byron, one of your favorite poets.”

  “Well, you look like Lord George Custer, the jackass.”

  Sharpe tossed a small brown paper sack on the table, and Oakes picked it up and found that it contained several dozen palm-sized pasteboard cards. Each card had a photograph printed on one side, with a caption at the bottom. He turned over one of John Wilkes Booth in a formal black coat and ribbon necktie, posed with his gaze tilted theatrically to the sky, his right hand on a bust of Shakespeare. There was a more prosaic one of Lewis Payne in the hat and coat he had worn on the night of the assassination. Yet another showed a youthful Mary Surratt in a striped dress, and on the reverse side, Alexander Gardner’s photograph of her shrouded body hanging from the gallows.

  “They sell this filth down the street,” Sharpe said, “as ‘souvenirs.’ I bought every one they had.”

  He leaned back while Mike, the Willard’s strangely famous headwaiter, deposited a brandy smash on the table in front of him and another glass of wine for Oakes.

  “You still have that old wood stove back in your cloakroom, Mike?”

  “Yes, sir, General.”

  “Take this sack and burn it.”

  Although everybody in Washington knew he had been born and reared in Bethesda, Maryland, the famous headwaiter affected a thick Irish brogue. “In the fee’er, sir,” he said. “Right away, faith.”

  Sharpe watched his retreating back and then turned in his chair to study the row of faces lined up in the mirror behind the long bar. Oakes leaned back and studied Sharpe’s own face.

  Not that there was any need to. He had seen it almost every day for the last two years of the war. For weeks at a time he had sat opposite Sharpe—when Sharpe was still a colonel—at a folding table in a big, leaky, remarkably foul-smelling tent that accompanied the headquarters brigade of the Army of the Potomac wherever it went, down the muddy back roads and alongside the slow, melancholy blood-stained rivers of Virginia, from the Rapidan at Fredericksburg, all the way to the stately James, where it dropped south toward Appomattox. He also had in his rooms in New York two photographs of the General left over from the feature story he had once helped a reporter named Dana cobble together for the New-York Times. Oddly enough, they were also on pasteboard cards.

  In the first one, taken early in the war, Sharpe stood with his hands in his po
ckets, long European-style moustaches curving down to a clean-shaven chin. His eyes glared imperiously from beneath his garrison cap. He looked every inch a swashbuckling warrior, the beau ideal of a modern soldier. This was the photograph the Times had used as a model for their engraver to sketch. The other one showed Sharpe hatless, nearly bald. It had been taken two years later, and in it his moustaches drooped, without the virile curve of the first picture. His eyes were not fierce, but gentle, thoughtful. He was still in his colonel’s uniform, but now he looked like the chaplain of the regiment, not the commander, certainly not the ruthless, superbly effective, and much-feared founder and spymaster of Ulysses S. Grant’s Bureau of Military Information. When Oakes had briefly studied painting in Paris—one of his several misadventures in trying to find a path in life—he had been shown a novelty drawing of a rabbit that flickered back and forth as you looked and mysteriously became, if you stared long enough, a snarling bear. Which picture was Sharpe? Whichever one you chose, he thought.

  “Seward,” the actual man in front of him said as he turned back from the bar, “was not very happy with you, Quint.”

  “For a diplomat he made that pretty plain.”

  “Two months is what he’s asking,” Sharpe said. “Three at the most. People don’t tell Seward ‘no.’”

  “It’ll take six months to do what he wants and you know it, General. And if they delay Surratt’s trial, that’s another six months. Too long, much too long.” Oakes pushed his wine glass to one side in as obvious a gesture of impatience as he could permit himself. “I have plans, anyway.”

  “Seward said he knew your father years ago, back in Connecticut.” Sharpe took a sip of his brandy smash and wiped his moustache carefully. Now he looked like a cat, Oakes thought, and remembered that yet another complication of Sharpe’s character was the rugged spymaster’s incongruous love of cats. In his home in Kingston, New York, he and his wife kept a regiment of them underfoot, in the dining room, in the guest room. Oakes hated cats.

  “Everybody knew my father,” he said shortly. He pulled his wine glass back and brought it up to his mouth, then put it down again without drinking. “And as everybody reminds me, he was the best lawyer in New England, except maybe for you, and the best governor in the history of Connecticut. If he hadn’t been too old to join up, he would have undoubtedly been the best general in the army. And the stubbornest, just like you.”

  Sharpe smiled. Oakes expected to see him bring up his paw and lick his whiskers.

  “I learned one thing from my father, General, and one thing only. The first time I went to law school, or maybe the second, he took me aside for a serious father-son talk, and he told me that the secret of his success as a lawyer was very simple. He never let a client leave his office without figuring out the answer to the only question that mattered—what does he want? Not what he says he wants—what does he really want?”

  “This is leading somewhere,” Sharpe said, “I trust.”

  “Vengeance,” Oakes said. “What Seward wants is vengeance. You heard him talk—that rug in his office he brought from his house because it reminded him of how Lincoln would wander over to visit him in the evenings, and Seward would drink brandy and Lincoln would eat apples, core and all, just like a horse. And the photograph of Lincoln on the desk, and the funny stories about Lincoln’s funny stories—Booth killed Seward’s hero, and almost killed him too, and Seward hasn’t had enough blood yet. What he really wants is more vengeance.” Oakes leaned back to avoid any swipe of the paw. “And that’s what you want too.”

  There was a clatter behind them, angry murmurs and a general scraping of chairs. At the long bar, under the twelve gas-lit globes of light, every head was turned toward the door. A woman about thirty years old stood at the entrance, of medium height and possessed, Oakes would have said if he were still trying to be a painter, of a slim, perfect, Botticelli-like figure. She wore a black fur-collared coat and a pale blue dress that set off her blonde hair, and her lips were curled in a kind of teasing smile. The very tall, beautifully dressed older man beside her had an expression of disdain that was turned not on the woman, but on the roomful of muttering men.

  “No ladies in the bar!” The famous Mike was hurrying forward, wringing his white towel between his hands. “Ladies served in the lobby, please, or the dining room, not here.”

  The woman took two more steps inside the barroom and looked slowly around, from table to table, amused and defiant. Mike crossed his arms over his chest as if to stop her. Her companion said something sharp that Oakes couldn’t hear, and the old headwaiter visibly deflated.

  “Bring us,” the woman said quite clearly, “a bottle of champagne, please.” She smiled and patted his crossed arms. “In the lobby.”

  When she turned to walk away, every man was still watching. Oakes found he was straining to follow her figure until it disappeared behind one of the disreputable potted palms.

  “Kate Chase,” said General Sharpe. “Or rather, Kate Sprague. She’s married to William Sprague of Providence.”

  “Ah.” Oakes had seen William Sprague several times during the war, when he was known as the boy general. Before that he had been known as the boy governor of Rhode Island. Before that, he supposed, the boy boy. As an act of patriotism, but also because his cotton mills were running out of raw cotton from the South, Sprague had raised one of the first volunteer infantry regiments in the Union Army and as a reward Lincoln had made him a brigadier general. He was known to be a heavy drinker, extremely near-sighted, and, as Oakes could attest from personal observation, very short and slight of build. He had once watched Sprague review his troops outside Richmond and he had thought Sprague looked like a mouse in a yellow-plumed hat.

  “And no, that’s not Sprague,” Sharpe said. “That’s Roscoe Conklin, Congressman from your adopted city of New York, and nobody in Washington is much scandalized anymore by their”—Sharpe hesitated and circled around to find the right word—“dalliance.”

  Oakes nodded and continued to watch the door. Sharpe wasn’t scandalized, but he didn’t approve. Sharpe was happily married to a woman his own age from his own hometown, and though during the war Oakes had seen women practically throw themselves at him, or his uniform, the general had been thoroughly self-disciplined and chaste. The general had always been, Oakes thought, something of a Puritan.

  “Then Sprague is going to want vengeance too,” he said and added, just to be saying something, just to be avoiding the subject of the Sixth Conspirator, “Cherchez la femme.”

  “Qui cherche, trouve.” Before the war Sharpe had lived three years in Europe, one of them in Paris. He folded a dollar bill under his brandy glass and stood up. “Come outside,” he said.

  THE MAIN ENTRANCE TO THE WILLARD HOTEL was at the corner where Pennsylvania Avenue met Fourteenth Street, just two hundred yards down and on the opposite side of the street from the President’s Mansion. Back in the dim, distant administration of James Monroe, the Willard had been little more than a modest boarding house for commercial travelers, but over the decades it had added five new floors and sprawled rapaciously outward until, having swallowed every other building on the block, it had become Washington’s largest, ugliest, and most important hotel. Few Washingtonians could cross its celebrated lobby without stopping two or three times to murmur a word to one of the influential but unelected men seated in the big leather chairs by the fireplace or next to the potted palms.

  Sharpe certainly couldn’t. Oakes waited by the front door, beside a mountain of travelers’ luggage, while the general paused at one chair for a laugh and a handshake, paused at another for a fraternal squeeze of the shoulder, and made a third stop at the marble registration counter, where a clerk handed him a fistful of letters.

  “Did you hear the name Grant gave those people back there?” They stepped out onto the Pennsylvania Avenue sidewalk and Sharpe slapped on his gray slouch hat again. “‘Lobbyis
ts,’ he calls them. I thought that was pretty good for somebody the newspapers are always calling illiterate and stupid.”

  “We never thought he was stupid,” Oakes said.

  “No.”

  The snow had stopped falling, but the streets were covered with an inch or so of white carpet. A horse-drawn streetcar went by, jingling madly. The wind whipped up a pair of ghostly, spinning miniature vortexes coming along the sidewalk toward them. Sharpe turned right and started walking in the direction of the President’s Mansion.

  “You never knew him,” he said as they reached Fifteenth Street and the Mansion came into view. As before, Oakes didn’t need to ask who “he” was. Lincoln.

  “I saw him,” he told Sharpe. “And spoke to him. At least twice. I saw him when he came down to talk with you after Cold Harbor, and one other time.”

  “Richmond, April fifth, 1865,” Sharpe said with his near-perfect lawyer’s memory, which was of course correct. After the fall of Richmond, Oakes had followed Abraham Lincoln down the main street of the Confederate capital—for the life of him he couldn’t remember the name of the street—while up ahead, guarded by twelve very anxious sailors with carbines, calmly walked the President in his tall stovepipe hat, holding the hand of his young son Tad and inspecting the bombarded city. For the first few minutes the street had been empty, practically deserted, though from the windows of the office buildings still left standing you could hear the faint buzz of voices. Then slowly the sidewalks had begun to fill with faces, white as well as black. By the time they reached the end of the street, the crowd was enormous, men and boys were clinging to every telegraph pole, eager to get a glimpse of Old Abe or to curse him, and the jubilant blacks were cheering and singing. And just as Lincoln turned to go into the Capitol, a strong wind came out of nowhere and blew thousands and thousands of sheets of paper, government documents, out of a ruined warehouse, so that briefly it looked as though, in the month of April, Lincoln was already a ghost walking in a snowstorm.