The Sixth Conspirator Page 3

  The other time—

  “Where are you staying, Quint?”

  “The National, just down the Avenue. And I have a train back to New York in the morning, General, which I do mean to be on.”

  Sharpe nodded and led them across Sixteenth Street and into the President’s Park—a dark, open rectangle of sycamores and oaks about a city block square, facing the President’s Mansion. For some reason people had taken to calling it Lafayette Square, though for as long as Oakes could remember the center of the park had been not a statue of the great Gallic “Friend of the Nation,” but a big equestrian statue of that most un-French of all the presidents, Andrew Jackson. Tonight, even under a crust of frozen snow, the old Tennessean looked ferociously hot and angry, an ancestral figure eternally prophesying war.

  “Curious thing,” Sharpe said, halting before the statue. Oakes looked around at the houses on three sides and the deserted park itself and realized that Sharpe had, characteristically, led him to a place in the middle of the city where, of course, there was nobody at all to overhear their conversation.

  “I’m staying there”—Sharpe pointed toward windows on the southeast corner—“as Seward’s guest. He was telling me this morning that before he bought it the place was called the Old Club House, but the club disbanded after Dan Sickles shot Frank Key”—Sharpe waved a gloved hand in front of the statue—“right about here, and the neighbors carried him into the Club House to die. It was over a woman.”

  “Sickles’s wife,” Oakes said. “They were having what you call a dalliance and Sickles’s lawyers got him acquitted on something new they dreamed up and called ‘temporary insanity.’ We studied that in the law school.”

  “Did you know one of Sickles’s lawyers was Stanton?”

  “No.” Oakes turned his heel on the slick snow and looked over toward the President’s Mansion, where gas lights flickered in the living quarters and downstairs in what he knew was the Blue Room and which was, he now remembered, the third place he had ever seen the President, stretched out in his coffin with the blue-gray bullet wound and bruise on the left side of his head still visible, despite the undertaker’s art. Edwin Stanton was Lincoln’s Secretary of War, and now Andrew Johnson’s, though Johnson was trying to throw him out for being too harsh on the unreconstructed rebels.

  “Stanton and Grant,” Sharpe said, “those are the only people who know about Seward’s plan.”

  “And us,” Oakes said, “and I told you, General, I don’t have time and I don’t think the plan makes any sense—you and Seward want to retrace every step Surratt took from the day the President was shot till the day they picked him up in Egypt. And you want to do it right now, while you think the trail is hot. But that trail is long cold, long dead. And the other problem is, you don’t really know exactly where Surratt went after Booth was caught—Canada, England, Rome. I was listening when Seward read us those reports and laid out all those papers. You really don’t know where he went or who was hiding him, much less how he paid for any of it.”

  “We know he went to Liverpool, then London. Maybe Paris. Paris was riddled with Confederate agents.”

  “And if he went from there to Rome and the Vatican helped him, then Keach, I hate to say it, is right and you’re going to be shadow-boxing with the Pope, and my irreverent father used to say they should have a sign over the Vatican door, ‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.’”

  “‘Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,’” Sharpe translated. He had also lived in Rome. “And keep your damn voice down.”

  The snarling bear was definitely in the ascendant, Oakes thought, remembering the novelty drawing. He started to circle the big equestrian statue slowly. Sharpe stayed just where he was, like the fixed foot of a drawing compass, erect military posture, slouch hat low over his forehead against the wind.

  Oakes reached the other side of the statue and looked up at its grim, cast-iron features. Somebody had tried to assassinate Jackson too, he remembered—the first president that anybody ever tried to murder. In 1835 a man named Lawrence had fired two pistols at Jackson as he was walking out of the Capitol and missed both times. They had locked him away in an insane asylum. No conspiracy talk back then, no dead trail, no Vatican. Surratt, he remembered, was Catholic. Surratt’s mother was Catholic.

  “I’m sorry, General,” Oakes said. “But—”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Quint,” Sharpe said. “I want you to do this.”

  Oakes felt anger flash across his face. And if I don’t, he thought, what are you going to do? Have Daniel Keach grab my fingers with his pliers, or fill a bucket with water and shove my head in it? Which was what George H. Sharpe did, did cruelly and ruthlessly, when the bear was ascendant, in the war. Even if you loved him, George H. Sharpe could be a hard, hard man.

  He swallowed the disloyal thought, but not the anger. “Not even for you, General.”

  Lincoln used to keep official letters and papers of all kinds tucked away inside his stovepipe hat—it was one of the things everybody knew about him. Sharpe, on the other hand, kept all his letters and papers tucked neatly away inside his specially tailored overcoat, in a series of hidden pockets not unlike the compartments in Seward’s desk. He was clearly angry in his turn now. He turned on his heel and walked away from Oakes toward the nearest gas street lamp. When Oakes caught up to him, the general had pulled two sheets of paper from the coat. Instinctively they both waited until another horse-drawn streetcar clopped past on Pennsylvania Avenue, churning up a little cloud of floating snow.

  Then Sharpe handed him the papers. The first one was simply a long list of dates, cities, and hotels, beginning with the Grand Hotel du Nord on Parker Street in Montreal, April 15, 1865. Each entry was followed by different capital letters of the alphabet.

  The second sheet of paper was a short list of names. Oakes held it up to the light. Snowflakes were drifting over from the street, and he brushed them away from the paper with a gloved finger.

  “Read the third name,” Sharpe said.

  Oakes read it and closed his eyes.

  In the blankness of his mind he could hear Sharpe’s footsteps crunch on the snow, and he knew the general had turned his back on him and started to walk away. The crunching sound grew fainter, but he kept his eyes closed. The wind pushed his long, unmilitary hair against his neck and collar. He let his hand find and crumple the now useless train ticket for tomorrow in his own coat pocket. When he opened his eyes, he saw Sharpe’s back on the other side of the park, across the street from the Old Club House, where somebody had been killed over a woman. The general paused for a moment under a street lamp and then, like the tick of a clock or the beat of a pulse, he disappeared into the shadows.

  SOME EIGHT HUNDRED MILES to the north, a person known in certain State Department documents only as “S” was standing at a window watching the snow come down in winding sheets across the dreary, deserted expanse of what was, in Montreal’s brief and excited summer, the flowery rue Saint Jacques.

  Sarah Slater disliked snow. She sometimes joked to the nuns down the road in Saint Liboire that snow, in her opinion, wasn’t really natural. To which joke the nuns, although they understood her Parisian-accented French perfectly well, always lifted their puzzled faces and frowned like tranced cows.

  She had disliked snow in Connecticut, too, where she and her mother would also stand at the window of the little house on Sachem’s Head and peer at the sugar-powdered road down which, eventually, her father would come trudging home from Guilford. She had disliked it less in North Carolina, where she had stood at yet another window and watched her boy-husband play with his sled and the neighbor’s children; but of course, she told herself, there had been less snow in the South to dislike.

  She had just turned to go to her writing table by the fireplace when there were three soft raps on the door. She opened it to find the little boy from the porter’s
cloakroom downstairs, grinning up at her. He had his cloth cap in his hands and his thumbs on a tiny square of paper spread across the cap, and he read the few words printed on the paper in a slow, careful monotone.

  “Come to desk when received.” He folded the paper and added in much more natural voice, “Signed, Lee.”

  Sarah grinned back at him. He was nine years old—a nine-year old boy, her father had once told her, was the height of human felicity—and she liked little boys very much—no doubt the reason she had married Rowan Slater.

  “Tell him that I’ll be there in five minutes.” She placed a coin on the cap. “Et pour toi, merci, cher monsieur,” and was rewarded with a bow.

  But it took her much longer than five minutes to put away her writing material, damp down the fire, and change into clothes warm enough for the short walk down the rue Saint Jacques to the Saint Lawrence Hall Hotel. And if part of her was surprised and tense at the thought that a message that came so late at night, and from Benedict Lee, must portend difficulties, another part of her was simply glad to be stirring, to be doing something, anything.

  Benedict Lee, she thought, studying her figure in the wardrobe mirror. One of the South’s apparently inexhaustible supply of Lees, a second or third cousin of the revered General Robert E. He could easily have written a longer message for the boy to carry. But of course, he wanted to see her in person.

  Despite the cold and the snow, she thought, she would wear the green silk dress with the very low décolleté. She wasn’t as blonde and apple-bottomed as most of the women Lee notoriously, comically pursued. But at thirty she was still slender, lithe. Heads still turned as she walked by. If her belly was a shade too prominent, she told herself, that was only the result of poor posture—she smoothed down the silk and almost laughed. Married to the son of a dancing master, and she had indisputably the worst posture in the county. One way or another, she thought, still smiling, picking up her heavy wrap, always a rebel.

  On the street she walked briskly, purposefully. The snow was falling in great fat flakes that plopped against the street lamps like frozen moths. As usual, the breeze from the Saint Lawrence River carried just a hint, just the faintest tang of salt from the seaway. She could smell it from half a mile away, salt water flowing east and north toward Quebec City, past Quebec City, toward vaunted Europe.

  At the corner of rue de Lille she waited for a pair of big lumber wagons to lurch by, on their way even at this time of night to the warehouses by the docks. There were a few other people on the sidewalks, hurrying home, hunched against the weather. When she used to come here during the war, when she would arrive carrying her valises full of letters and “greenback” dollars, in those days the streets, day and night, would have been teeming with people she knew, men, women. In those days General Edwin Lee—another Lee!—ran the Montreal Bureau of the Confederacy, and agents, bankers, refugees, detectives, every kind of person who could be of use to Richmond, swarmed around him. A whole great Roman circus of scheming humanity had made Montreal buzz. In those days she never stood and looked for hours out a window, alone. She touched her chest. She thought of Guilford, Connecticut. I am here, she thought. Come find me.

  At the lighted portico of the Lawrence Hall Hotel, the snow seemed to draw back for a moment and the night slipped into a deep silence. Farther down the block a cobweb of telegraph lines stiffened overhead in the cold. The idea came suddenly to her that Lee’s message was almost certainly relayed from Washington City.

  THE NEXT DAY WAS TUESDAY, January 3. At eight o’clock, Oakes came out of the absurdly elaborate marble-pillared front doors of the National Hotel and started to walk up Pennsylvania Avenue. The snow had stopped falling about midnight and now, in clear, brittle sunshine, he could see all the way across the Potomac to the blue hills of Virginia, where a distant flash of white marked the stately columns, not marble but painted brick, of Robert E. Lee’s old family home.

  No escaping the past, he thought, ever. In Washington City the past was a flashing light, bright enough to blind.

  At Seventh Street, while he waited for a horse car to navigate the slushy turn from Louisiana Avenue, he glanced back at the Capitol, the new dome towering over everything at this end of the Avenue. Proximity to the Capitol was the main reason, apart from its low prices, that the National Hotel had always been more popular than the Willard with Congressmen, especially with Southerners. Before the war the sidewalk in front of the National had been a customary gathering place for their slaves, who loitered outside while their masters, in their wide-brimmed planters’ hats, loitered inside at the bar.

  Then its popularity plummeted, Oakes remembered, because in 1859 a sewer pipe leaked into the kitchen storeroom and before the leak was found, hundreds of guests became violently ill, among them President Buchanan’s nephew, who actually died of the National Hotel disease. Naturally, the Southerners had blamed the epidemic on a Republican plot to poison their leaders. Plots—and leaks—were the order of the day in 1859.

  1859, Oakes thought, not even ten years ago. At the corner of Fourteenth Street, he met Sharpe, who was just coming up the block, elegant and pink-cheeked in his fur-collared overcoat and neatly brushed gray slouch hat. He carried six or seven morning newspapers under his arm, and automatically Oakes glanced down Fourteenth Street, where the massed sidewalk hoardings and a great latticework of telegraph wires announced the start of Newspaper Row.

  “Stanton can see us at nine,” the General said. “Did you have breakfast?”

  “Buttermilk cakes and honey, and sausage and hominy grits with two kinds of red-eye gravy. The National still specializes in fine Southern cuisine.”

  Sharpe shook his head in feigned Yankee incomprehension.

  At Fifteenth Street the mud and slush were so deep that Negro boys stood on each corner with wide, unpainted boards in their hands and, for a small coin, either carried pedestrians across or skillfully constructed a kind of moving duckboard. At Sixteenth Street they passed the President’s Mansion opposite the park, and then at the next block turned and walked up to the offices of the War Department.

  The State Department, where they had met Seward yesterday, was located in temporary quarters far out on S Street, in the old Protestant Orphan Asylum building—a sure sign, Washington savants said, of Seward’s fall from favor with the new President. But Stanton’s War Department—and Stanton was so far out of favor with Andrew Johnson that the two were said not even to speak to each other—Stanton’s War Department still occupied the same building Oakes had known in the war—a four-story brick structure with yet more marble columns and a third-story balcony that mimicked the portico of the President’s Mansion.

  “You came here before, I think,” Sharpe said as they walked up three steps to the porch, “for some of Stanton’s mornings.”

  “Once.”

  “Once was probably enough.”

  Oakes almost smiled, but he was still furious with Sharpe, he reminded himself, still there in Washington City against his will, still back in the army against his will.

  Stanton’s office was on the third floor, in a corner looking down on the President’s House. The suspicious and harried-looking secretary in the ante-room told them they were early and would have to wait next door in the reception room. As they entered, Oakes recognized it as the same room where Stanton had held his notorious mornings.

  Oakes had come up from Grant’s headquarters in late 1864 on some now-forgotten and pointless errand. But he remembered with shocked clarity the room and the scene. Every weekday morning during the war, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton had given over an hour to the public. He was a short, portly man, whose rudeness to all and sundry was legendary. At nine o’clock precisely the Secretary materialized through a side door and took his stand behind a high writing desk that reached all the way to his shoulders, so that the various petitioners and clerks crowded into the room saw little more than his enormous g
ray beard and his flashing steel-rimmed spectacles.

  He looked, Oakes had thought, like either a perpetually irritated schoolmaster, or a mottled gnome.

  The room fell silent. Orderlies moved among the crowd, whispering names and taking notes, and one by one Stanton summoned the politicians, job-seekers, army officers, widows, and contractors to his desk. There, in a brusque moment or two, he disposed of their cases. Oakes remembered nothing of what the Secretary had said to him, only that the woman in front of him, clutching a handful of official-looking papers, had left the writing desk in tears. Stanton was reputed to be a particularly devout Christian, who had been so undone by the death of his first wife that he had dug up her body from her grave with his own hands, to see her face again. After that, so far as anybody knew, Stanton had never loved anybody else in his life except Lincoln, and even Lincoln Stanton had once famously called the “original gorilla.” It was Stanton who stood over Lincoln’s corpse in the house across from Ford’s Theater and pronounced the remarkable words, “Now he belongs to the ages.”

  Except, Oakes knew from a fellow army officer present in the room, what the pious Stanton actually said was, “Now he belongs to the angels,” a phrase the calculating and much less pious Seward later revised for the newspapers.

  At two minutes to nine Daniel Keach, the former sergeant turned bank clerk, sauntered into the room and gave them both a mock salute. And at nine, just as the reception room clock began to chime, the Secretary’s secretary poked his head through the door.

  At his desk, Stanton continued writing in a notebook for about half a minute, then he stood up, offered his hand to Sharpe, and pointed to three straight-backed chairs. He nodded once to each to Keach and Oakes and that, Oakes realized, was going to be the extent of their introduction.