The Sixth Conspirator Read online

  Julius Caesar. Oakes thought of the stone-faced Stanton, frozen in Puritanical paranoia—What did Shakespeare have Julius Caesar say about somebody like Stanton? “He loves no play, /As thou dost, Antony; he hears no music; seldom he smiles.” Just before midnight, unsmiling, Oakes pulled out his key at Number 20 and began to climb to his room on the fourth floor.

  The first two floors of the building were rented out to a group of recently hatched Harvard graduates who, with the sublime overconfidence of their class, were putting together a new political weekly called, modestly, The Nation. Their objective, according to their masthead, was to “Move the Reunited Country Forward.” Once in a while Oakes stopped in and listened to them argue about which way was “Forward.”

  On the third floor, the single big triple-spaced office was dark, though that was by no means a sign that it was unoccupied, because two of the rooms inside the office were darkrooms used for developing photographs. The incongruous Gothic script on the glass door said “Ingersol and O’Sullivan, Commercial Photography.”

  Ingersol and O’Sullivan were acquaintances of his, a little older, not army veterans but what might be called civilian-veterans. Oakes had met them both, when they were photographing battlefields for Matthew Brady’s archives. Now they were in business for themselves, taking “society” portraits of New York worthies and saving their money to undertake, one of these days, a much discussed, long-planned expedition west, to the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, the last true American wilderness, they said, before civilization washed over it and finished its job of plowing up the continent. They wanted to preserve—for the historical record—the way the forests and the mountains and the Indians looked, just as Brady had wanted to make the war into a history book of photographs, black and white and everlasting. And Oakes thought he would give just about anything to go with them.

  He paused on the landing. Ernest Ingersol was very likely to be inside even now, working on something. He kept late hours and he was always ready to drop what he was doing and talk about the technical side of photography—exposures, shadows, “points of light,” his favorite phrase. He also liked to reminisce about the war.

  Oakes climbed one more flight of stairs and put the key in his lock. It had been a grim, largely silent railroad trip up from Washington City. He’d had about all of remembering the war he could stand.

  Since mid-summer, when he decided to leave Boston and try New York, Oakes had rented two rooms on the fourth floor of Number 20—a bedroom and a sitting room with two wooden chairs, a bookcase from his father’s Guilford house, and a cheap desk where he spent long hours writing business plans and ideas on tablet sheets, then wadding them into balls of trash. At the window by the desk he could see that the rain was turning into a driving sleet. Farther north, in Canada, it would certainly be snow.

  There are some people you just love.

  You recognized her at once, Stanton had remarked drily, I suppose? Mrs. Slater? When they brought her into your office in Washington?

  Oakes watched the sleet swing back and forth in the wind, like a white curtain in front of a closed door.

  A foolish question, utterly foolish. He had recognized her in a heartbeat, even before the drunken sergeant had thrust her rudely forward, wrists manacled, and stood back to read his arrest report. He had known her walk when her face was still in shadow. He had known the cut of her shoulders and the swell of her bust and the sway of her hips. He had known her hair, though it was darker now, her cheeks, lips, all, all exactly the same. He had bent over his desk to sign the release, blushing like a schoolgirl, trying furiously to think of something to say, and when he had looked up again there was only the sergeant’s back and the top of her head going down the corridor again. But her face was an image long ago burned into his mind, a perpetual point of light. Next to her, other women were plain as cabbages.

  Why were they coming after her now?

  “MONEY,” KEACH SAID.

  Sharpe stopped in mid-sentence and turned to stare at him.

  “Money,” Keach repeated. “We haven’t talked about it yet. But I have to take time off from the bank to do this, General, and the bank won’t pay me for not working. I have a mother and two homely unmarried sisters in Rockaway to support. I’m not rich like friend Oakes here—I need to be paid.”

  Oakes started to open his mouth, but Sharpe waved him down. “Secretary Seward agreed to pay your salary, I thought I told you. The State Department will pay you seven dollars a day and your travel expenses, for as long as you’re gone. Quint will receive exactly the same.”

  “He doesn’t need it,” Keach muttered. “But I do, I need much more than that. I wish I had Jefferson Davis’s gold.” Then he sniffed loudly and looked toward the lobby. “Who,” he said, “is that?”

  The Astor Hotel had two bars, one that opened onto Fifth Avenue, the other onto Sixteenth Street. Both of them were closed to women, partly because of tradition, partly because both bars were lavishly decorated with alternating nude plaster statues of Venus and Diana, peering lasciviously out between pots of yellowing palms; in the case of the Fifth Avenue room, the bar and the statues were also overlooked by a very large and badly executed painting of a Greek nymph reclining, as European women were widely thought to do, naked in a forest.

  Coming out of the Fifth Avenue bar now, in front of an indignant bartender, was a red-haired American woman in her early thirties, clearly not Greek, wearing a duck green dress, no bonnet, and a grim smile. She headed across the lobby toward the lounge corridor.

  Sharpe rose, Oakes rose, Keach twisted in his chair.

  “Miss Lawton, welcome.” Sharpe extended a hand, which Maggie Gail Lawton shook once, firmly. “I thought you had gotten lost.”

  “And I thought you would be in the Louvre Museum over there,” Maggie Lawton said, “restoring your tissues and enjoying the fine arts.” She sat down in the fourth chair around the table and signaled to a lounging waiter. “Long hair. Boyish eyes,” she said briskly. “You would be Captain Oakes.” She turned to her left. “And you would be Sergeant Keach. Sandy hair, not that much of it, unfriendly smirk. A pot of your best black tea,” she told the waiter. “Sugar, no cream. I see it brewing over there.”

  “This is Miss Maggie Lawton,” Sharpe said. “Her bark is worse than her bite.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Maggie Lawton said.

  “Miss Lawton,” Keach said. “You’re not married.”

  “Not even remotely.” She patted his sleeve. “So hard to choose.”

  “Miss Lawton worked for Pinkerton during the war,” Sharpe said. “I’ve asked her to join us.”

  “On our trip?” Keach bent forward across the table. “You don’t mean it. A woman?”

  “To Montreal and London, certainly.” Sharpe began the ominous tapping of his index finger on the table that was a sign of his temper. “There are a number of names to investigate on the list that Seward gave me. Many of the men escaped with their wives. And there was one unmarried woman. We don’t think she was accompanied by a man.”

  “Sarah Slater, also known as Kate Thompson.” Maggie Lawton craned her neck to track the waiter’s progress with her tea. “The lady courier in the Black Veil. She traveled with Booth and occasionally with John Surratt, sometimes staying in the same hotel. Quite the little hussy. I wonder how she paid for her escape? Perhaps flat on her back, in the usual female way.”

  “Maggie,” Sharpe said, almost primly.

  “We don’t need a woman,” Keach again.

  “We need Miss Lawton’s help,” Sharpe said. “In England there are certainly going to be doors that are closed to men.”

  “It’s bad luck.”

  “One woman to do the work of three men,” Maggie said. The waiter slid a silver tray with a Chinese porcelain pot and cup onto the table beside her. “About the right ratio.”

  Oakes laughed, Sharpe’s
finger stopped tapping. “Miss Lawton—Maggie—left Pinkerton’s six months ago. She came to me to ask for advice, since we had worked together on several missions in Richmond in ’64.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Oakes said.

  “He doesn’t tell us everything,” Keach grumbled. “He never did.”

  “Pauvre petit.” Maggie spoke to Keach but looked over the top of her teacup at Oakes.

  Margaret Gail Lawton was thirty-five years old, tall, thin, no beauty but something more than plain. Her left cheek was faintly scoured with tiny pockmarks, the result, Oakes guessed, of a flawed smallpox vaccination. She had indeed, Sharpe explained, served as a secret courier for him and for Alan Pinkerton’s Detective Agency, sometimes as a spy, and toward the end of the war, thanks to a slip-up on Sharpe’s part, she had spent four very difficult weeks in Richmond’s notorious Libby Prison before the Army of the Potomac marched in.

  It was a tribute to the complexity and reach of Sharpe’s mind—his deviousness, Keach would say later—that neither Oakes nor Keach, Sharpe’s two closest aides, had ever heard her name or known of her presence behind Confederate lines. But as Sharpe began to lay out the details of their journey and slip their passports and train schedules across the table, it was clear that she and the general had gone over everything before, and clear as well that her mind was as sharp as her tongue.

  “I had my office telegraph ahead to Montreal.” Maggie opened her passport and made a face at Seward’s enormous swirling signature. “Good grief. Jupiter Pluvius wouldn’t write his name this big.” She creased it closed and shook her head. “Seward,” she said. “Stanton, Surratt, and Slater, and Sharpe, of course. All these names that start with ‘S.’”

  “Another conspiracy,” Oakes said.

  Maggie raised one eyebrow and a corner of her mouth. “I reserved three rooms at the Brainard House Hotel, General, one for you, one for me, and one to be shared by the young gentlemen.”

  Keach made no effort to keep the sneer out of his voice. “Your office?”

  “Miss Lawton owns a female detective bureau.”

  “Open six months,” Maggie said. “Two clients. That’s why I need the General’s money. My office is the front room of my apartment. And besides, unlike the strong, silent Captain Oakes here, I’ve never traveled outside of this country, unless you count the South.”

  “I’ve never traveled either,” Keach said.

  Maggie Lawton’s not quite plain face became animate with mischief. “We’ll be comrades in arms, Friend Keach, two peas in a pod.”

  THERE WERE, IN FACT, TWENTY-FOUR NAMES to investigate on the list Sharpe now began to pass around the table. Most of them were American citizens currently living abroad, some of them had been officially named by President Andrew Johnson as co-conspirators. Two of them stood out, Maggie Lawton said, like spiders on an angel food cake.

  The first, the most notorious, perhaps the most hated Rebel of all, was the Confederate Secretary of State, Judah Phillip Benjamin—a Jew and oddly enough, a British subject by birth. As part of his official duties, Benjamin had directed all Confederate clandestine operations. Among his links to Booth, quickly uncovered by Stanton’s detectives, was a $200 payment in Montreal for “unspecified purposes.” And at the bottom of Booth’s trunk in the National Hotel in Washington City, searchers had found a cipher code identical to the cipher codes used in Benjamin’s office in Richmond. And more, John Surratt himself had been personally hired by Benjamin as a courier to Canada and reported directly to him, though all correspondence between them had apparently been lost in the siege of Richmond, or cannily destroyed. No one doubted that John Wilkes Booth himself had also reported directly to Judah Benjamin.

  And no one doubted that every incriminating slip of paper linking them had long ago been burned to cinders by “Mister Davis’s pet Jew.” For millions of God-fearing Americans, Judah Benjamin, the “Mephistopheles of the Rebellion,” as the New-York Times called him, was without doubt the sinister, murdering puppeteer behind the crazed, fanatical actor.

  To blacken his infamy, Benjamin also was widely believed to have made off with a very large sum of Confederate treasure. Certainly, as he was fleeing Richmond, Davis had loaded the second car of his escape train with, according to the manifest, a “special cargo”—gold ingots, gold double eagle coins, silver coins, silver bricks, and Mexican silver dollars—virtually all the capital of the doomed Confederacy. Benjamin was on the train. When it reached Danville, Virginia, chaos and Union cavalry overtook it. Some of the treasure was hidden in sugar barrels and steamer trunks and spirited away into Georgia. But the bulk of the gold mysteriously vanished—along with Benjamin. Who more likely to have stolen it than the Jewish banker?

  Oakes had given a certain amount of thought to Judah P. Benjamin.

  By one of history’s more mischievous coincidences, Lincoln had been assassinated on Good Friday, 1865. On the following Easter Sunday, ten thousand northern preachers proclaimed to their congregations that the dead president had been martyred, crucified, slain by the forces of Satan. Lincoln’s death was like the death of Christ. He had given his blood for his country, just as the Savior had given his blood for the world.

  The Jews had carried out that first murder. Now, the churches announced, they had done it again, thanks to the black arts of “Judas Iscariot Benjamin,” who had betrayed the President, not for thirty pieces of silver, but for a boxcar of gold.

  In the last month before his own death in early 1866, Oakes’s father had written him a long letter about the assassination, and though the senior Oakes was a Lincoln supporter and a devout and abrasive Protestant, even he expressed misgivings about the comparisons of Lincoln to Christ. He had nothing but contempt for Andrew Johnson’s repeated attacks on “that miserable Jew, Benjamin.” The whole country, his father wrote Oakes, in a phrase Oakes had never forgotten, was “Christ-haunted.”

  On the other hand, his father said, it was impossible to believe that one man, acting alone, had killed the president.

  ***

  The other outstanding name on Sharpe’s list, though not a Jew, had been Benjamin’s protégé.

  At the beginning of 1864 Secretary of State Benjamin had signed over $900,000 in gold and bonds to one Jacob Thompson, a former governor of Mississippi, who was to settle in Toronto and use the money to launch aggressive, subversive operations across the border of neutral Canada. His assignment was to weaken and destroy Northern morale, and thereby sabotage the re-election of President Lincoln.

  To that end Thompson planned a number of attacks on Union prisoner of war camps in New York and Illinois, and on various federal arsenals, where weapons and ammunition could be found and carried off somehow to the South. From there he proceeded to what Sharpe always called “black warfare.” He underwrote the infamous scheme to spread yellow fever in the North through dirty linen. He tried to introduce smallpox into several small border cities. He twice sent agents to poison the drinking water in New York City’s Croton Reservoir.

  Then “black warfare” seemed to turn into comic opera. In August 1864 Thompson authorized a special railway shipment to Confederate sympathizers in Chicago, where Federal agents duly found and captured four thousand revolvers in hundreds of boxes marked “Sunday School Books.” Later that month he underwrote a spectacularly inept and unsuccessful plan to storm the USS Michigan on Lake Erie with a fleet of rowboats. (The ship’s captain was to be given drugged champagne.)

  After that, to replenish his coffers, Thompson launched a raid on the little town of St. Albans, Vermont, where his raiders robbed three banks of almost $200,000 and set fire to a hotel. But the gold proved too heavy for their horses to carry in saddlebags, the Confedeerates had brought no wagons to transport it, and in a matter of hours, volunteers from Vermont had dashed across the border and seized them.

  Judah Benjamin now lived comfortably in London, openly practicing law
. No matter what Stanton thought about the brotherhood of Jews, Benjamin, whose parents were British and who was born in Saint Croix in the British West Indies, was still a British subject. The ties to Booth and Surratt that Stanton’s men had so far untangled were far from strong enough to make the British government yield such a person up to extradition. Sharpe’s orders were to circle him, quiz him, harass him, turn him upside down and shake out his pockets in the hope of finding something. Gold, maybe.

  As for Jacob Thompson, he had left Canada in April 1865, only a few days after the assassination, using a passport signed by Benjamin. Where he was today, no one knew.

  The other names on the list, apart from Sarah Slater, meant nothing to Oakes. Keach recognized someone named Thomas Courtenay, but couldn’t remember why. Maggie Lawton knew the name George Nicholson Sanders and had once seen him when she was in prison in Richmond, but that was all.

  Sharpe cleared his throat to signal that the meeting was almost over. Then he put away his brisk, efficient spymaster’s face and put on a sober professorial mask. “I have a somewhat philosophical view of this mission,” he said quietly. Something in his voice made Oakes stiffen in his chair. Maggie Lawton paused her cup of tea halfway to her lips.

  “After great, unthinkable Providential events like the assassination of the President,” he said, “it’s human nature to search for explanations that make it less mysterious, that bring it back to the human scale.”

  “Conspiracies, in other words,” Oakes said.

  “Conspiracies.”

  “I remember,” Keach said with one of his unhealthy laughs, “while they were hunting Booth, all over the country they were arresting anybody with pale skin and a long moustache. One fellow in Massachusetts was arrested four times in a week, till he finally just locked himself in his house. It was all a farce then and it may be a farce now. I told you and I told Stanton, if there were any more conspirators—and probably there weren’t—they’re long gone now.”