The Judges of the Secret Court (7 page)

he recited to himself. That was Cibber, bettering Richard III. But what was the name of the aspiring youth that fired it?

He could not remember.

For some reason that annoyed him. He must hurry. He was already late. Out of the theatrical trunk he took a variety of things he would need, for he planned well. This life is largely a matter of appearances, and though he was impeccably dressed as the booted avenger, in order to reach the South he might have to play other roles along the way. It seemed to him altogether natural, therefore, to pack a false beard, a dark moustache, a wig, a plaid muffler, and a make-up pencil, for wrinkles and lines of anxiety, should those be called for. As a last precaution, he snatched up two revolvers, for though the deringer would do for the theatre, being small, dainty, and formal, for a chase one would need something heavier. To lean out of the saddle to fire a pocket deringer, apart from the difficulty of reloading it, would look silly.

There remained only the choice of some phrase appropriate to the action. This was a serious matter, and Shakespeare was the source there. Unfortunately he could not think of anything from
Julius Caesar, Richard II, Richard III
, or
King Lear
, the only Shakespeare he really knew. The immortal assassination line in
Caesar
unfortunately belongs to Caesar. Payne's
Apostate
, his other good role, though a good role, was certainly not immortal verse. Besides, if the words were to have any dignity, they must be in Latin. They must have a certain imprimatur, if that was the word.

Sic semper tyrannis
, out of his little stock of Latin tags, seemed the best. It sounded well, and it was the motto of Virginia, his favourite state. Therefore it was easy to remember.

Sic semper tyrannis
, he said to himself, before the pier glass. He was a little hoarse this evening, but he looked well.

He went downstairs and left his key at the desk.

“Are you going to Ford's Theatre?” he asked the clerk. The clerk said he had not thought of doing so. The clerk, who did not like the theatre much, was accustomed to dealing with actors. He was in particular accustomed to dealing with Mr. Booth, who, though making him uneasy, also amused him.

“Ah, you should. You will see some fine rare acting,” said Booth, and the randy little man strutted across the lobby and out of the door.

Did actors have no gestures of their own? wondered the clerk. That finger waggle of Mr. Booth's came out of the second act of
Apostate
. No matter who might play Pescara, the finger waggle was always there.

Booth was annoyed. The clerk had not been properly impressed. He went off to find his little company. The night was fantasticated by mist. Through the mist, the gas lights of the Capitol dome hummed as inimically as a dynamo. A parade was forming. This was Good Friday, an appropriate day, since Lincoln chose to pose as Jesus in Washington City as well as Richmond, but the crowds were still on their first bender after the war.

What a dreadful thing to celebrate, and yet the mob does not care what it celebrates. Booth, who had fetched his horse, sat above the crowd, like a public statue, and saw nothing.

The conspirators met on horseback. In the way they held their seat you could see their nature. The horses looked through the misty night larger than they had any right to be. Atzerodt, that miserable scraggly haired dwarf, like a statue of Loki in cheap plaster, almost hung on to his horse's mane. He was a dreadful Neanderthaler, a drunk given to tugging at the coat-tails of people who would have none of him. Murder, he said, was more than he had bargained for. He wanted out.

David Herold, with his young and affronted look, had scarcely the wit for conspiracy. Atzerodt might whine to cut and run, but Herold was the type to sidle away instead. Whatever he might be saying to you, you knew he was thinking of his 'coon dog, the one with the twisted curl to the tail, and of duck hunting early of a morning, in the sedges of Maryland. But he would do to hold the horses.

Arnold, Michael O'Laughlin, and John Surratt were not there. Booth did not care. They were ribbon clerks got up as gentlemen, and so would not be missed.

Booth cleared his throat and told Atzerodt that he had no way out. He would be hanged in any case. He explained about the letter to the
National Intelligencer
, that explained the plot in all their names. So Atzerodt would have to shoot Vice-President Johnson. Atzerodt was desperate for friends, and that was the price of friendship.

Herold he despatched with Payne. Someone had to lead Payne out of the city. One of the horses whinnied and her flank rippled with the cold, with that same motion a pool has, when one casts a pebble into it, a little hurried, but customary. Then she was placid again. She was a good bay mare. Booth cleared his throat.

It was Payne's part to murder Secretary Seward while Herold waited with their horses.

Payne said nothing. He loomed immense there, without a hat, in black trousers and a dirty cast-off white duster, which Booth had once given him, which was why he wore it. His enormous clumsy black Conestoga boots were exposed, by the angle of his leg, to the calf.

“Yes, Cap,” he said, in that low-pitched, heavy, emotional voice of his. He did not seem to be listening. But he would do it, Booth knew that.

For an instant he hesitated, he did not quite know why. Payne disturbed him. It was Payne's suggestion that he come with Cap. Booth could not have that. One had to go to fame alone. Yet as the conspirators broke up, and when Payne was gone, for a moment, as that bulky silhouette nudged its horse down the alley, he felt futile, and perhaps a little lost.

Then he, too, rode on.

The time was 9:15.

The first member of the Presidential party to arrive at Ford's Theatre was Parker, the Secret Service guard. He came to his post highly recommended, if only because that was the only way his employers could pass him along to the next poor devil to be saddled with him. He had that capon look of any policeman who has been in the force longer than a year, slow, servile to his betters, and insolent when he could be, much given to feeling the slights of this world, very lazy, and addicted to prostitutes and drink. He had been selected for duty tonight by chance, and he was bored. Nothing would happen anyway, and who cared whether the President was shot or not? He had no intention of losing his life for another man; he did not relish being reduced to the status of an usher of the great, when he loomed in his own world quite large himself; and he badly wanted a drink. When at last the Presidential party arrived, he ushered them into the theatre. As the President was on his way to his box, Laura Keene, from the stage, improvised a patriotic joke; the patrons in the dress circle stood up and began to applaud; the rest of the theatre did the same; and Professor Withers, in the orchestra pit, lurched into yet one more performance of
Hail to the Chief
.

Mrs. Lincoln, for once, did not seem to be wearing white, though there was something white about her, the lining of her bonnet, perhaps. Both she, and the President in his rocker, sat well back out of view.

Whenever the stage action paused, those in the front seats of the theatre could hear the creak of the rocker. But it was a very faint sound. If it disturbed anyone, it was only to make him smile. It had to be admitted, whatever his vices, and they were many, that at least the President was picturesque and quaint.

The performance continued. Though she was no actress, Laura Keene could play herself to perfection, and the part suited her. The audience settled down to watch.

Parker was bored silly. He left the theatre and went round to a pot house to cadge a drink.

Atzerodt was also drinking. That was because he was terrified.

He knew he could not do it, but it took as much courage not to do it, and courage, as time had taught him, came only out of bottles for such men as he. No matter what he might look like, Atzerodt had had the usual shanty backwoods education. He had read the
Bible
and
Pilgrim's Progress
, but they had given him no place in the human parable. He felt displaced and lonely.

Usually, at least in a bar, he could strike up some sort of acquaintance. He would stop at nothing to have at least the illusion of friendship. But he stopped at murder. Booth, he saw now, had not been his friend, but only Asmodeus, leading Christian astray.

All this talk of tyrannicide and the nobility of democracy, which is what his displaced liberal German relatives talked about in the old country, but never mentioned here, meant nothing. Murder was murder, no matter how praiseworthy the cause. It was a hanging offence.

By the time he left the Kirkwood House bar he was a little crazy. They had given him all these knives and guns. What did he know about knives and guns? He had not served in the war. He had killed no one. He was a coach painter by trade. He did not want to hang.

He staggered out into the nightmare streets, got caught up in the crowd, was carried along he knew not where, and threw his knife down furtively in the street. He did not want to be caught with these weapons.

The crowd carried him well beyond the place where he had discarded the knife. He wanted to cut and run. He wanted to cry. But he was already too drunk to run, though tears came easily enough. He watched the clock on the wall. The hands stood at ten to ten. He had no friends in this country. He knew no one. Where could he hide?

He went on drinking.

Booth was also watching the hands of a clock. Somehow this evening, his habitual gestures did not satisfy him as they usually did. The bar was Taltavul's. Of the two bars which flanked the theatre, this was the one he preferred, for the other got mostly actors, who did not pay him as much deference as workmen did.

Brandy was not quite what he needed now. He ordered a set up of whisky and water instead. Taltavul thought that unusual and would remember it.

Booth had the eerie feeling that he was doing everything for the last time. He could not shake it. No doubt it was because an assassination, unlike a performance, is a unique act. It cannot be repeated.

There were too many drunks in the bar tonight. One of them lurched against him, lifted a glass, and said, “You'll never be the actor your father was.”

That jolted him. It was ages since he had thought of his father, that benevolent madman with the sagging calves and flopping belly. Junius Brutus the Elder may have played country squire like Farmer George, but it was he the Booths had to thank for their illegitimacy, hushed up though that matter was. One could only be a gentleman by forgetting all about him.

The thought of that firmed Booth's purpose. “When I leave the stage, I will be the most famous man in America,” he said.

“Hell, for all you act on it, I thought you left it months ago,” said the drunk. “Croak something for us.”

Taltavul knew how to handle a drunk. He handled this one fast. But it was funny, come to think of it, but it was true, Booth had not acted for months. And what was all that blarney about leaving the stage, anyhow?

To his relief, Booth said nothing more, drained his glass, and left the bar.

In the theatre it was hot. The house was almost full, and the audience had been sweating there for over two hours. Booth watched for a moment, and then slipped into the corridor leading to the boxes, closing and bracing the door after him with a length of wood he had stowed there earlier in the day.

In the State Box, Mr. Lincoln took his wife's hand. He was feeling romantic and contrite for having been irritated with her earlier in the day. She might now be merely a pretty pudding, but in the half light she looked as young as she liked to pretend she was; they had been together a long time; and she was his wife, after all.

Booth was watching through the eyehole he had drilled in the door that afternoon, but did not see the gesture. He had not been able to get the stage carpenter, Spangler, to hold his horse, but since Spangler was a drunk, that was perhaps just as well. A boy was holding it.

It had impressed him, walking down the stage box corridor, that the walk to the scaffold is much the same as the criminal's march to the crime. It has the same inevitable pace. Yet the corridor was empty and he was no criminal. He was the hero, girding himself for an heroic act. He could only deplore that the setting was so shoddy. Still, he could see the damnable villain's back.

Opening the door, he slipped inside, took out his deringer, cocked it, and shot the President. The time was 10:15.

Payne dismounted in Madison Place and handed the reins to Herold. There was a fog, which increased the darkness of the night. Two gas lamps were no more than a misleading glow. He might have been anywhere or nowhere.

The pretence was that he was delivering a prescription from Dr. Verdi. Secretary of State Seward was a sick man. The idea had come from Herold, who had once been a chemist's clerk. The sick were always receiving medicines. No one would question such an errand. The bottle was filled up with flour.

Before Payne loomed the Old Clubhouse, Seward's home, where Key had once been killed. Now it would have another death. From the outside it was an ordinary enough house of the gentry. He clomped heavily up the stoop and rang the bell. Like the bell at Mass, the doorbell was pitched too high. It was still Good Friday, after all.

A nigger boy opened the door. Payne did not notice him. He was thinking chiefly of Cap. If their schedules were to synchronize, there was no point in wasting time. He pushed his way inside.

For a moment the hall confused him. This was the largest house he had ever been in, almost the largest building, except for a hotel. He had no idea where Seward's room would be. In the half darkness the banisters gleamed, and the hall seemed enormous. Above him somewhere were the bedrooms. Seward would be up there.