The Sixth Conspirator Page 6

  “Some days,” Sharpe said, rising from the table, “I completely agree with you.” He held out his hand for his hat and coat, and a waiter came hurrying toward him at a trot. “But I was in the Old Arsenal Penitentiary before they hanged Lewis Payne. He was an oaf and a lug, but he had a certain presence. When he heard who I was, he looked hard at me and said, ‘All I can tell you, friend, is that you haven’t got the one-half of them.’”

  He took his hat and coat. And in the gesture that Oakes thought he would always consider Sharpe’s characteristic movement, he turned on his heel and walked away.

  LIKE SO MANY RAILWAY JOURNEYS IN 1867, the trip from New York to Montreal was complicated by the anarchic competitiveness of the seventeen different train companies that served the city.

  In the first place, each company used a different time setting for their schedules, so that in the main Spring Street Depot there were seventeen different clocks, each showing a different time, arranged in two ranks across the platform gates—a bizarre situation repeated in train stations all over the country.

  And in the second place, to cover a distance of not quite four hundred miles, Sharpe’s party had to take three separate railroad lines, two of which used different gauge tracks. At the Spring Street Depot they clambered into a stubby Metropolitan Central second-class carriage, comprised of two parallel rows of unpainted wooden benches, an undersized but sulphurous pot-bellied stove in the center, and brass spittoons on both sides of the aisle. At the end of the carriage the railroad had fixed a line of poster advertisements, one for “Sozodont,” which cleaned teeth like a giant foaming broom, to judge from the drawing. In a gesture toward modern elegance, the Metropolitan Central had also laid down a garish blue and yellow floor of slippery new English linoleum.

  During the war, because of what Sharpe regarded as his cool New England competence with schedules and baggage, Oakes had served as Sharpe’s de facto transportation officer. On Sunday, January 13, as if nothing at all had changed since his army days, he supervised the loading and tagging of their valises and boxes, including one oversized trunk that Maggie Lawton cheerfully announced contained her lady’s “unmentionables.”

  Keach and Sharpe sat together on a bench close to the moody little stove. Maggie Lawton gestured to Oakes and brushed her skirt aside to offer him a place beside her on a bench near the front. For seven or eight minutes they sat in silence as the train rattled slowly northward. Then Maggie cleared her throat. “This part of New York,” she said, as they crossed Sixth Avenue for the second time, “is called the Tenderloin.”

  Like Sharpe, Oakes disliked being told things he already knew. He looked past her pointing finger and grunted.

  “It’s called that,” Maggie said, “thanks to a police captain named Clubber Williams. I met him before the war, when I first started working for Pinkerton. He was the crookedest old sack of guts in New York, and when he was transferred to the Sixth Avenue Precinct, he thought he had landed in whore and payoff heaven. He told the newspapers, ‘I’ve been living on chuck steak, boys, but now I’m going to get a little tenderloin.’”

  Oakes nodded and sat back and thought that Miss Maggie Lawton’s conversation was…unorthodox.

  “So, what did you and the dapper general find out in Elmira?” she asked.

  Oakes almost smiled. Sharpe was dapper. He was also a great believer in keeping his troops busy, whether usefully or not. On Friday, while Keach had closed down his desk at his bank and Maggie Lawton met with her two clients, he and Oakes had taken yet another train line—the Erie-North Central—to Elmira, a few hours northwest of the city. The idea had been to poke around the city where Surratt had last been seen, two days after the assassination.

  According to Stanton’s detectives, Surratt’s assignment was to plan a prison break en masse from the huge prisoner-of war-camp there and send the liberated soldiers south to join Lee’s army—another of Jacob Thompson’s hair-brained snow-addled schemes, Stanton had said. Elmira was four hundred miles north of Richmond. What were thousands of ragged, starving Southerners going to do, suddenly let loose to wander the New York countryside? And besides, anybody who could read a newspaper could see that in April 1865, the Confederate States of America were finished, were going to pieces, bit by bit, like a wreck in the sea.

  “Well, we learned that somebody had torn out the pages in the hotel register where Surratt stayed.”

  Maggie made a dismissive snorting sound. “Very sinister.”

  “And we found out Surratt had been buying a twenty-dollar tweed overcoat when the clerk told him Lincoln was dead, and he threw down the overcoat and bolted out the door.”

  “He probably ran all the way to Montreal.”

  By the stove Keach suddenly raised his voice and they could hear him clearly, arguing for more money. He had responsibilities, he said, the government was rich, the government owed him.

  “Radix malorum cupiditas est,” Maggie said.

  Oates looked up, surprised.

  “Don’t make that face,” Maggie said. “A woman can know Latin. I learned it at school, with my brother.”

  “Your brother?” Oates didn’t know when he had sounded so stupid.

  “He was killed at Antietam, which in turn killed my father. My mother was already dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Maggie shifted on the bench and looked at him steadily. Hunter’s eyes, Oakes remembered somebody saying about the implacable U.S. Grant. “So, former Captain Oakes,” she said, “do you think he had help? John Surratt? Or are we all wasting our time?”

  On that subject, Oakes’s thoughts had not changed at all. “Well, somebody helped him, nobody disputes that. He went from Elmira to Montreal and after three or four months, it seems, to Liverpool and then London and Rome, finally Egypt, all without visible funds. We know that at least one Catholic priest gave him shelter in Montreal, and another one in Liverpool—so Seward’s probably right that Confederate sympathizers knew who he was and took him in and hid him anyway, and paid his bills. But that just makes them sympathizers, not conspirators or assassins.”

  “I wake up every morning,” Maggie Lawton said, “furious at Abraham Lincoln.”

  Oakes stared at her.

  “It was,” she said slowly and firmly, “a senseless, unnecessary war. I wake up every morning furious at him. He should have let those godforsaken secessionists go. I would have let them go.”

  She turned and looked out the window. “Dulce bellum inexpertis,” she said.

  Oates started to object, then stopped. What about slavery? He would have asked. What about treason? But he had no taste for political argument, no taste at all for arguing with Maggie Lawton, who had lost a brother and been in prison. And in any case, some deep hidden part of him knew that he would have been on shaky ground.

  “War is sweet for those not in it,” she translated. “Like Congressmen and Presidents.” She nodded cryptically to herself. The cityscape, blanketed with dirty snow, unrolled outside like a spool of canvas on a stage.

  At Peekskill they crossed the Hudson and changed to the New York Central line. And at Saratoga Springs, as night came on, they switched to yet another railroad company, the Delaware and Hudson, and settled into a comfortable parlor car where food was served and a pale, lanky Ichabod Crane lookalike sat folded in a corner and played waltzes on a violin.

  A little past eight that evening they stopped at Champlain for a perfunctory Customs inspection, and ten minutes later they crossed over the border and entered what was technically still known as British North America.

  OR CANADA, AS EVERYBODY now called it.

  Or Our Lady of the Snows, as Sarah Slater called it, the eternally frostbitten end of the world. “‘The ice was here, the ice was there,’” she muttered, looking at the gray metallic sky, “‘the ice was all around.’” Whoever wrote that old poem, she thought, had grown up in Canada
.

  As she moved off the porch and into the courtyard, the cold air struck her face like a slap. It was like living at the North Pole. Why hadn’t the powers in Richmond set up their foreign bureau in someplace warm, like Mexico? If she never saw another red plaid lumberjack jacket in her life, she told herself, she would be content.

  “Be careful with that,” she said sharply in French to one of the two bearded giants upending her steamer trunk. The equally gigantic horses in front of the wagon shivered under their blankets and bobbed their heads.

  The nearer giant said something impatient back to her, in the strange Canadian French that her father used to say reminded him of a woodchuck gnawing a sausage. Over by the convent gates she could see Sister Marie-Therèse waddling out into the snow toward her. Sister Marie-Therèse had been crippled since birth and heaved her bad left leg along with the help of a thorn crutch. Another of her father’s sayings came back to her—“she was so fat that she was taller lying down than standing up.” Sarah arranged her face in suitably humorless Canadian piety.

  John Surratt’s first hideout after fleeing Elmira had been in the private home of one John Porterfield, a Nashville banker who was part of the Confederacy’s loose organization of schemers and saboteurs planted in and around Montreal by Jacob Thompson. Sarah had seen Surratt once at Porterfield’s house, when she was invited for tea, and she had heard him curse Stanton and Seward and especially Booth, whose wretched ineptness, he whined, was going to send his mother to prison—no one believed they would have the nerve to hang her.

  But then Surratt’s own ineptness in repeatedly showing his face around town had forced him suddenly to abandon Porterfield’s comfortable guest rooms and scuttle some thirty miles east to a monastery where the pro-Southern monks, knowing full well who he was, had kept him hidden another two months.

  “That is a very big trunk,” Sister Marie-Therèse said suspiciously. “Quite heavy. What do you have in it, guns?”

  Sarah placed herself carefully between the old woman and the trunk. “I left a purse in your office,” she told the old woman. “The money in it should more than pay for the time you kept my things.”

  “Fifteen months. Over a year’s storage. A big trunk. That’s a long time.” A significant pursing of the lips.

  “The money should be plenty.” Sarah was no longer much surprised by clerical greed. It was clearly a substitute for more carnal appetites, suppressed by their ungodly godly vows.

  “It’s not Confederate money, because that’s worthless.”

  “It’s coins, double eagles.”

  “Because the Americans are coming back.”

  “I didn’t say that, Sister.”

  “You don’t need to. Why else would you come out here for your trunk in January, after all this time? Why else would you leave your hotel and hire these galoots to carry you up to Quebec? They’re coming back for you, the Americans.”

  The old woman pivoted on her crutch and glared south in the general direction of the border. When the war started, Sarah remembered, most Canadians were vaguely sympathetic to the North. But little by little they had come to believe that once the Union had subjugated the South, its murderous, perfidious gaze would turn north. Seward had talked openly of annexing Canada. One chuckleheaded senator from Michigan had introduced a bill to send two hundred thousand troops into Quebec to exact “reparations” for the cost of the war, and thirty fellow senators had signed on to it, a plan that may or may not have died with Lincoln.

  The other reason for their hostility was, of course, the Church. Canada was inflexibly Catholic. After he left Porterfield’s house, Surratt had been passed along from monastery to monastery by what amounted to an underground railroad of Catholic priests—droll thought, an underground railroad for a rebel—who all considered the militant Protestantism of the North far more distasteful than slavery. Then too, Surratt was Catholic, like his mother, and had once studied to take holy orders. A nice joke, that, Sarah thought, considering his ruttish behavior when she had been forced to travel with him.

  The galoots had finished strapping the trunk onto the wagon, and the slightly less mountainous one had taken a seat behind the great golden Clydesdale horses, who began to snort and stomp their readiness to jingle out into the open highway.

  She walked a few steps out into the road and sighted up and down, as if to judge its condition. A solitary figure, visible for half a mile in either direction. I am here. Find me if you can.

  “No river boat service to Quebec in January,” Sister Marie-Therèse, still looking south, told her. “Too much ice in the water in January.”

  “I didn’t say I was going to Quebec, Sister.”

  “Didn’t have to. After Quebec, are you going to Paris?”

  Sister Marie-Therèse kept a large printed map of Paris on the wall of her classroom and often taught her girls by having them memorize its street names and neighborhoods and monuments. People said she could have gone around the city blindfolded, so well and so long had she studied it. But Sister Marie-Therèse, Sarah thought, looking at the old woman’s crutch and withered leg, would never have that chance. Paris would remain her distant, unreachable Celestial City. Some people she knew would have had witty thoughts about the sad irony of the Sister’s life, or about the strong likelihood that Paris would have turned out to be more Vanity Fair than Celestial City.

  Sarah had lied so easily and so often during her three years as Confederate courier that she scarcely heard herself saying, “No, not Paris. Nowhere near Paris.”

  At the Saint Lawrence Hall Hotel, she stopped by to gather her much smaller and lighter trunk of clothes and papers. As usual, Benedict Lee was behind the reception desk, and as usual he made a slow, leering inspection of her bodice as she approached, though she was bundled like an Eskimo against the arctic cold and still, she assumed, radiating apple-cheeked wholesomeness from her visit to the convent. “Uomo es sempre cacciatore,” her father used to say in Italian. “Man is always a hunter.” Then he would laugh and add in French, “And woman is always an actress.”

  Sister Marie-Therèse had been right, of course. She was going to Quebec, and not by the river. The trunk on the wagon was much too heavy to risk on a boat in the middle of a black, ice-cluttered river. Her two giants were going to drive her all the way to the Quebec City docks, where big, anonymous ocean-going steamers now braved the Atlantic crossing every month of the year.

  “We are all very sorry to see you go,” Lee said with syrupy gallantry. “Very sorry indeed, a lovely person like yourself.” He made an exaggerated moue and then motioned her toward the alcove a few steps away from his desk. There, glancing around furtively enough to catch the attention of everyone in the lobby, he stood very close to her shoulder and murmured down into his gloved hand. “They arrived late last night. They’re at the Brainard House, four of them.”

  “All right, good.”

  “Don’t you want to know their names?”

  Sarah was already turning away, peering through the windows at her waiting wagon. “I’m leaving Montreal,” she said. “Forever and for good. I really don’t care who they are.”

  IN THE WAR KEACH HAD BEEN the cruel interrogator—prisoners of war, spies, hapless civilians, young, old, it made no difference to Keach. In the war at least, Keach had an unhealthy nature. He stood, his prisoners sat. He lowered his face to theirs and screamed till they were covered with spittle. He ordered wounded, frightened, thirsty men—boys, really—tied to trees with their arms pinned over their heads or had them splayed against a spare wagon wheel, where they baked bareheaded for hours in the unforgiving Virginia sun. He had men strung up by their thumbs. He brought out big oak tubs of filthy water for head dunking, which could go on for an hour or more. And not often, but sometimes…Once, outside Richmond…

  Sharpe, on the other hand, was a lawyer. He gave Keach his orders. He turned his back and left the room.
Sometimes, when he permitted himself the question, Oakes wondered who really had the unhealthy nature.

  At their first breakfast in Montreal, Sharpe assembled them in a private room and marched them methodically, in his meticulous lawyer’s way, through the names on Seward’s list. Individually or in pairs, they were to visit hotels where Confederate agents like Jacob Thompson had stayed. They were to talk with friendly Canadian passport clerks and look over passenger shipping manifests. Oakes was to go to the nearby village of Saint Liboire, where a truculent pro-southern Catholic priest had sheltered Surratt for ten weeks, knowing full well who he was. Keach, the banking expert, on a tight leash now, was to burrow about in Canadian banks that had handled Confederate funds.

  On the third day, Oakes and Sharpe traveled together to the home of one Clement Claiborne Clay, in the town of Lac Saint Louis just south of the city. Clay—a third cousin of the great Kentuckian, Henry Clay—had been a United States Senator from Alabama, but resigned with a flourish from the Senate in 1861 when Alabama seceded. He was reportedly a charismatic, highly-competent person, and at first Jefferson Davis wanted him to serve as his Secretary of War, but Clay, talkative as well as competent, decided he had rather be a senator in the Confederate Congress. In 1864 his portrait would be engraved on the Confederate one-dollar bill.

  In 1864 he also came to Montreal to work with Jacob Thompson, and subsequently—here was his interest for Sharpe—his signature appeared on one of the checks that Booth received when the kidnap plot was in the planning stage.

  Because of that one signature, Clay had spent a year in Fortress Monroe Prison in Hampton, Virginia, until his wife, Virginia, browbeat President Johnson into conceding that Clay had nothing to do with the assassination. Now the Clays were in Canada again, looking to restart their lives. But still furious at his vindictive, humiliating year in prison, the erstwhile senator refused to speak with Sharpe, and his wife spat on their boots as they left. Two other former Confederates refused even to answer the door.