The Sixth Conspirator Read online

  “Booth had help,” Stanton said abruptly, back in his chair and looking down again at his notebook. He tugged at his enormous beard, faintly violet in color, and Oakes thought he caught a whiff of apple pomade. “Seward thinks the ultimate authorization came from that Hebrew traitor Judah Benjamin, but of course he would think that, since Benjamin was the rebel Secretary of State, his counterpart, and Seward, as you doubtless observed, lives in a hall of mirrors. I think otherwise. I think the whole vile conspiracy was dreamed up in Canada and then authorized in Richmond, probably by Davis himself. Benjamin would have been a major part of it, of course. Benjamin probably set it in motion. Now we have Davis in custody, but Benjamin is living in plain sight in London, protected by his fellow Jew Disraeli. We can look at him, but so far, without evidence, we can’t touch him. In any case, that still leaves open the question of who financed Booth and who else was part of the plot.”

  “Which is where we come in,” Keach said.

  Stanton stared at him through the imposing steel-rimmed glasses. Then he twisted in his chair and studied the corner of the President’s Mansion that was visible through his window. Below the window was a rickety wooden turnstile that marked the path between the two buildings, as if you had to pay a toll to go back and forth. “The President,” he said, “had a big pigeon hole cabinet over his desk that was always stuffed with papers, in no particular order.” Stanton squared the sheets of paper on his own desk. “They were reports of assassination plots. At any given time there were about eighty reports in that pigeonhole. I had twice that many over here, in a special file that I kept.”

  “Good Lord,” Keach said, “eighty.”

  “Did you know, General,” Stanton said, turning to Sharpe, “that after the election of 1860 some Secessionists sent jars of poisoned fruit to him? I saw them myself.”

  “I had heard it.”

  “You may believe it. There were plots abounding. I was a target, too. The night before the murder a man in a black cloak came to my door, then ran when my servant opened it. Grant was supposedly a target along with the President at the theater, but by some malevolent trick of Providence Grant didn’t go that night and the President did.”

  Stanton paused to flip a page in his notebook and Oakes recalled that by Stanton’s orders, Ford’s Theater had been shut down immediately after the assassination. When the owner, Ford, obviously innocent of anything, had complained he was losing business, Stanton had threatened to clap him in jail along with the other conspirators, and Ford was now reputedly bankrupt, living on a farm in Silver Springs and selling eggs by the side of the road. Oakes had walked past the theater yesterday afternoon and its doors were still locked and barred and the interior gutted.

  “There was, for instance,” Stanton said, “the case of Doctor Luke P. Blackburn. He was in Toronto. He wanted to infect northern cities with yellow fever. He gathered clothes from victims in Canada and sent them to various garment distributors in New York and Chicago, and he actually sent a valise full of infected shirts to Lincoln.” He pointed at the window. “Right over there. Hired a shipping agent to deliver the valise, but our people stopped him before he reached the door. I arrested four hundred people after the murder, and I still didn’t get them all.”

  “Well, Mister Stanton.” Sharpe shifted impatiently. “We have copies of your files with some of that unnerving material, and the files of Ward Lamon as well, and also Judge Baker. Mister Seward briefed us pretty thoroughly. We’re off to New York tomorrow, to start tracing Surratt’s movements. Then to Canada, then to Liverpool and London and Rome. If anybody else helped Surratt, we intend to find them. These were two of my best men in the Bureau of Military Information, all through the war. I just wanted you to meet them and impress on them, as you have, the importance of finding out the truth.”

  “The rebel South did this, and that is the truth, General. And the South, as the Scripture says, should ‘beware of the people weeping.’” He pulled a bell rope behind his chair. “This assignment of yours, gentlemen, is completely secret. No one knows of it except Seward, Grant, and myself, which is how I want it to remain, even when you’re abroad.”

  Keach, who had himself, Oakes thought, a capacity for rudeness almost Stantonian, had been obviously chafing under the Secretary of War’s curt manner. Now he gave one of his snorts.

  “Not much of a secret, in my opinion, sir. People saw us come into the office, some secretary wrote up our letters, somebody else copied out our orders and God knows how many people saw General Sharpe walk in here this morning. You can’t keep a secret in Washington City, sir.”

  Stanton inflated his torso slowly, like a squat gray bearded frog, and leaned across the desk. “You would be Sergeant Keach, I assume.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You would be the banker from New York who’s going to assist in tracking the money Surratt got.”

  “I work in Ward, Hilliard in New York, yes sir, but I wouldn’t call myself a banker.”

  “Nor would I call you a member of the President’s Cabinet, with executive responsibilities. You will pass your reports—and opinions—to the General, not me.”

  Keach smirked. Sharpe sighed. At the door, as he waited to let the other two go in front of him, Oakes heard Stanton call his name.

  “Stay here, Oakes. You can catch up to them later.”

  IN THE CORNER OF HIS OFFICE nearest the big window, Stanton had an eight-foot-long library table covered, in the latest fashion, with a garishly red and blue Turkish carpet. Unlike Seward, who kept his reports and files out of sight in hidden compartments, Stanton evidently piled them helter-skelter along the table, in the kind of conspicuous disorder that suggested its creator knew exactly where to find each and every individual scrap of paper.

  Now he closed the outer door firmly and walked over to the table. Oakes hesitated, then sat back down, uninvited, in what had been Sharpe’s chair. Stanton pulled a blue cardboard folder from the stack. He placed it on his desk and returned to the table.

  “I don’t like Mister Keach,” Stanton said, with his back still turned.

  “I don’t like him either, sir. But he was a very effective member of the Bureau.”

  “The Bureau of Military Information,” Stanton said in a flat voice and continued shuffling through papers at the table. “You went to Harvard College, Mister Oakes, and you belong, I understand, to an old and influential New England family. Governor Urian Oakes was your father. Keach is the son of an Irish immigrant who attended no college and who has had to work his way up in life without family or, I should imagine, given his manners, friends. It would be surprising”—Stanton turned and went to his own chair behind the desk—“if you liked him. Or he liked you.”

  Oakes felt his face begin to burn. Stanton took no notice. He opened the folder and spread it on the desk.

  “In any case, what we are about to discuss is not to be divulged to Mister Keach. He is to be kept, as General Sharpe requests, in the dark. For what will be obvious reasons. There is enough tension between you two already.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You are acquainted with one Sarah Antoinette Gilbert, I believe?”

  Oakes took a deep and, he thought, inaudible breath. “No, sir.”

  Stanton lifted his head and peered over the steel rimmed spectacles. He looked like a man made out of ice.

  “Sarah Slater then,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t use the word ‘acquainted,’ Mister Stanton.”

  Stanton bared his teeth in an astonishingly unfriendly smile. “Are you, Mister Oakes, like Shakespeare, to whom Doctor Johnson said a quibble was like a luminous, irresistible vapor?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You went to Harvard College Law School”—Stanton rapped the folder—“twice. You left both times without a degree. Do not, Mister Oakes, attempt to play the lawyer with me. Do not quibble. You grew up in the
town of Guilford, Connecticut, as did she. You knew Sarah Gilbert very well. Some sources claim that you were sweethearts, very serious sweethearts, but the difference in your stations—her father gave dancing lessons—prevented that from going further. Your father sent you off to Europe to put a stop to it.”

  “It was a long time ago,” Oakes said. “I haven’t seen Sarah Gilbert in years.”

  The smile grew even colder. “A pity you left law school, Mister Oakes. The ability to lie in a forthright and honest manner is the hallmark of a good lawyer.”

  Stanton rose and walked to the window and frowned down at the President’s Mansion. “Or perhaps,” he said, “you were so well trained in the Bureau of Military Information that deceit is second nature now?”

  Oakes decided to say nothing.

  Stanton turned from the window and walked up to Oakes’s chair, and Oakes, looking up at him, remembered that according to rumor, Stanton had once made George Custer, a two-star general, stand at attention in his office while he inspected the general’s posture.

  “You were present at the Washington Navy Yard on April eleventh, 1865,” Stanton said in a nearly conversational tone of voice.

  That didn’t seem to require an answer either.

  “Just come up from Appomattox, right after Lee surrendered,” Stanton said.

  “I was bringing confidential messages from General Sharpe to General Halleck.”

  “And because of the confusion and excitement of Lee’s surrender, you were filling in that afternoon for the duty officer, who was, I gather, profoundly drunk.”

  “Profoundly.”

  “Two enlisted men brought in a prisoner they thought was a Confederate courier, and since you were the duty officer they turned her over to you and presumably went off to get profoundly drunk themselves.”

  Oakes rose abruptly from his chair, without permission, and walked over to the window himself and stared down at the President’s handsome mansion. He didn’t see what was so goddamned interesting down there.

  “She was traveling then under the name ‘Kate Thompson,’” Stanton said, “to take care of your quibble about her name, and she was alone when she was arrested. She told the two enlisted men she was going from southern Maryland to New York, but she had a large steamer trunk and a smaller traveling bag. The traveling bag had a newspaper from Richmond and an envelope with Missus Mary Surratt’s name and address on it—Sixth and H Street, Washington City.”

  “I didn’t open her bag, Mister Stanton.”

  Stanton gave his frosty smile again and Oakes found himself wondering why the older man’s face and beard didn’t freeze and shatter like ice.

  “No,” Stanton said. “You let her go.”

  In the long silence that followed, Oakes remained just where he was, leaning against the windowsill, arms folded across his chest.

  “Sarah Antoinette Gilbert married one Rowan Slater in May, 1858, in Salisbury, North Carolina. Neither family approved.” Stanton looked up from the folder on his desk. “Her husband appears to have been a remarkably charming and incompetent young man. He got himself killed at Ball’s Bluff, early in the war, one of the few Confederates to have suffered even a scratch in that wretched little skirmish. After that, his widow was at loose ends, without much money, disliked by her late husband’s family as both a Northerner and a foreigner. She was not a political person, that is, she held no particular views about the war. But because her father was French and she evidently speaks the language perfectly, she somehow drifted into working as a courier between Richmond and Montreal, a very well-paid occupation.”

  Oakes thought of General Sharpe. “This is leading somewhere,” he said, “I trust.”

  “As best I can establish,”—in an exaggerated, leisurely manner, Stanton turned another page in the folder—“Sarah Slater or Kate Thompson is said to be a very attractive woman, though it’s hard to be sure because she always wore a veil or some kind of disguise, in the North. People knew her as the ‘Lady in the Black Veil,’ which sounds like trashy fiction but is true. She would be a little over thirty now, about your age, no doubt less attractive than before, older. But in late 1863, if not before, she caught the eye of Booth. Twice she traveled with him from Montreal to New York and stayed at the same hotel. At least half a dozen times she came to this city with Surratt.”

  “I went over this with General Sharpe, yesterday.”

  Stanton slammed his fist on the desk and shot straight up. His face was no longer icy cold, but burning red, furious as Mars. “She knew what Booth was doing! You stupid, stupid man! She had to know what was happening, she could have told us—and you let her go!”

  Oakes studied the floor.

  Stanton came around the desk. “And you let her go.” He planted his feet in front of Oakes. “She traveled with Booth, she lodged at the Surratt house, she was in Washington exactly two days before the murder. She must have known what Booth and Surratt were planning, and she knows who else in the South helped him do it, and you let her go.”

  Stanton wheeled and returned to his desk. “General Sharpe says you are a highly intelligent, highly intuitive person, and—this is his word, which I find sentimental and vague—‘lost.’”

  Oakes looked up and frowned. “Lost?”

  “Lost. You leave law school without a degree. You change employment. You’re in New York City with no visible plans to work at anything. Lost. I think you let Sarah Slater go in a moment of romantic or sexual weakness—I don’t use vague or sentimental language—and I find nothing so far to persuade me that you’re intelligent. But the two enlisted men who arrested her have long since disappeared, nobody has a photograph of her, or if her family in North Carolina does, they refuse to cooperate. That leaves you. You are actually the only person I can command who knows what she looks like.”

  “You can’t command me.”

  Stanton looked up from the desk, and there was a look of surprise on his face that made him seem almost vulnerable. “But guilt can,” he said, with the tone, Oakes thought, of someone who knows all about guilt. “You might have prevented the murder of the greatest human being this nation has ever seen, but you were weak and you let Sarah Slater go, and if you hadn’t done that we might have stopped Booth. Now you can at least help bring Jefferson Davis and Judah Benjamin and all the other filth to justice.”

  “I told General Sharpe I would help him for three months.”

  Stanton began to leaf through the papers on his desk again. “You’re dismissed.”

  Oakes walked to the door and stopped. “What if we find her and she won’t talk?”

  Stanton continued to leaf through his papers. “Your friend Keach and the General have experience in making rebels talk.” He paused. “Keach especially.”

  Oakes felt his own face turn to ice. “What will you do with her, after that?”

  “Hang her,” Edwin Stanton said, and turned a page.

  IN 1867 TRAINS FROM WASHINGTON CITY to New York still terminated at a waterfront station in Hoboken, New Jersey. Passengers who wanted to go on to the city had to take a ferry across the Hudson River to lower Manhattan and disembark at the Battery Depot, near Christopher Street.

  It was a little past eleven that same night when Oakes, Sharpe, and Keach slung their bags over their shoulders and hurried through the Hoboken station and out onto the docks and into a cold, steady January drizzle. Twenty minutes later, still ducking under the rain, they clattered down the ferry’s gangplank and shoved through a crowd of passengers stampeding, as usual in New York, the other way.

  Oakes stuck out an elbow, clamped his hat down with one hand, and followed Sharpe’s squared shoulders out to a waiting line of miserable wet horses and rain-soaked cabs. Keach muttered good night and set off north toward Broadway, to disappear under whatever rock he was using these days. Sharpe climbed into a hansom. And Oakes switched hands on his hat and hea
ded toward Vesey Street.

  No visible plans to work at anything, Stanton had said, you are perfectly free, Mr. Oakes, to do exactly what I tell you.

  Oakes’s father the governor had been a non-drinker the last ten years of his life. Oakes could still remember the big white “T” on his vest for “Teetotaler,” the official insignia of the Connecticut Temperance Union. But Oakes had no particular reverence for filial loyalty. He liked to drink. He liked bars.

  Just before Vesey Street he pushed open the double doors of a dreary, almost empty saloon and ordered a “razzle-dazzle,” a brandy and seltzer decoctum he had first tasted a few months ago with a Harper’s Magazine editor when he was half-heartedly trying to find a job.

  Not much razzle or dazzle. He gulped it down and wiped his mouth on the moustache towel and ordered another. At the other end of the bar a man about his age was drinking beer from a tomato can, which was the usual crockery in this kind of establishment because it was cheap and not dangerous in a fight. His right arm stopped at the shoulder. A veteran.

  Oakes turned the other way to look between the curtains at the rain coming down. A little thunder and lightening now, to complete the atmosphere; everything, he thought, except “Enter three witches.” War amputees like the man at the bar were a daily sight in New York, on the streets, on the sidewalks, begging usually; human detritus, mutilated glory.

  But there were other kinds of physical reminders of the war as well. Across from the saloon, behind a gas streetlamp, loomed the dark burned-out shell of one of the Lottery Centers set on fire in the Anti-Draft Riots of early July, 1863—ironically enough, only days after the great Union victory at Gettysburg.

  And a few steps down Vesey Street, he knew, was another reminder, the ruins of the old Lenox Hotel, where Confederate agents had crept down from Canada in late November 1864 and planted a phosphorus bomb in one of the rooms. They had planted such firebombs all over the city, in fact, sixty of them. Most of them simply fizzled harmlessly and died out, but a few had done spectacular damage, including one at a hotel next to the Winter Garden Theater where, in one of the Muse of History’s smug little japes, John Wilkes Booth was playing Brutus in Julius Caesar, the perfect incarnation of treachery and assassination.