The Lincoln Conspiracy (31 page)

Tinderbox, Temple thought. Tinderbox.

The Hibernians and their like stoked it, warning Irish lads and
other laborers that free Negroes would pour up from the South and steal their jobs. Temple watched this play out at Hibernian Hall and elsewhere and warned Matsell and Johnny Kennedy, the police superintendent, that it would come to a boil. Watch the firemen and watch the gangs, he told them. When things started to tip, it was the smokies who stirred it up first, with the crew from the Black Joke, Engine Company 33, stoning and then setting fire to the draft office on 47th Street. Johnny went up there for a look and, even without his uniform on, got thumped to within an inch of the abyss by Marty Sheehan’s firemen.

Temple and others had rousted enough policemen downtown to help hold back the rioters there, though several from the Hibernian spat at him and labeled him a traitor. Uptown, however, a bloody and unforgiving riot ensued, snaking around the streets in angry, malicious waves. White rioters openly beat Negroes in the streets; they chased one into an alley, beat him, and then hung him from a tree limb and set him on fire. They lynched ten others as well, one from a lamppost. They burned and looted the Colored Orphan Asylum on Fifth Avenue, though the police there helped evacuate more than two hundred children out of the back of the building without harm. Chasing down two white women who had married Negroes, a crowd beat them with clubs and bricks, leaving placards on their unconscious bodies that labeled them as “amalgamationists.”

Downtown remained largely safe, except near the docks on the East River. White longshoremen and black dockworkers there engaged in an epic set- to not far from the van der Donk building. Longshoremen destroyed bawdy houses, taverns, and tenements that served or housed Negroes and then stripped the clothing off the white owners of those establishments and paraded them through the streets naked.

In the end, the military entered the city and fired on the crowds, quelling the riot. The day it finally subsided, Temple was guarding the door of Daniel Lane’s dance house on Walnut Street in Corlears
Point, where three Hibernians had come to thump Mary Burke, a white adventuress who specialized in servicing Negroes.

“Come through the door, then you’ve got to come through me, boys,” Temple said to them.

Temple was known on the streets as a dangerous and perplexing brawler—for the unpredictable use he made of his cane and a prodigious strength unexpected in someone so lanky—and the group considered his warning and turned. On their way back down Walnut Street they waved their clubs and swore at him in a streak of creative obscenities that Temple found to be almost poetic and, at a minimum, musical. One of them cupped his hand to his mouth and emitted the long, plaintive howl of a dog. Temple decided there and then never to visit the Hibernian Hall again.

After he got Mary onto a horse and out of Corlears, he headed over to the docks to look in on the boardinghouse where some of the Negroes falsely accused in the van der Donk case lived. When he arrived, there was a crush of rioters at the door of the boardinghouse—hundreds more than had been in Corlears—and they were dragging screaming Negroes into the street. Two already hung dead from streetlamps, their feet bloody and dripping. Temple paused less than a quarter block away from the boardinghouse, uncertain of what to do. The rioters were as fearsome a lot as he had ever encountered, their eyes bulging and their voices bristling with rage. A wave of apprehension rippled through Temple’s chest and broadened into an immobilizing fear that he had never felt in his life until that moment. He imagined himself pounced upon by the mob, his head pounded into a pulp, and he stood rooted to his spot as the violence continued to unfold in front of him.

Cassius Marks, one of the Negroes who walked from jail a free man in the van der Donk case due to Temple’s handiwork, was hauled from the boardinghouse by two men, one of whom pounded Cassius’s back with a club. Cassius leaned back on his heels and tried to pull away as he was dragged deeper into the mob, but two other
men grabbed him around the waist and pulled him into the scrum. His eyes darted about as he looked for help from someone, and in a brief flash his eyes locked on Temple. A glimmer of hope washed across Cassius’s face and he nodded to Temple, leaning back again from the tugs of the mob. Two people tore his pants from his waist, but he remained fixated on Temple, nodding but unable to speak.

Temple couldn’t move.

Rioters knocked Cassius to the ground and swarmed around him, tying a rope around his scrotum and dragging him through the streets by it until he was unconscious; a fourteen-year-old boy then knelt on Cassius’s stomach and plunged a knife into his chest.

Temple never moved.

The mob swelled uptown from the docks, leaving blood smears, bits of clothing, and several bodies, including Cassius’s, scattered about the streets. After they had gone, Temple walked to the piers, leaned out over the East River, and vomited.

He spent the next two weeks gambling, drinking, and sleeping during the day. On two nights he awoke to find Cassius sleeping next to him, bleeding and looking at him with the same soundless, plaintive stare he had given him at the docks. One afternoon, as a runaway horse bolted down Broadway and galloped past Temple, Cassius bounced along on his back at the end of a rope tied to the stallion. Cassius stared at Temple again, looking for help.

Toward the end of his bender, after a night of faro on Bond Street, he stopped by his father’s one morning for breakfast. When his father didn’t answer, Temple let himself in and made his way to the small room his father had converted into a study and where he read the newspaper each day. He found his father slumped in a chair, with a bullet hole in his head and the gun he had used to kill himself on the floor by his foot. The muzzle was still warm and Temple could smell gunpowder. There wasn’t a note or any other explanation for his father’s suicide, and Temple collapsed on the floor, burying his face in his hands.

About a week later, when word arrived that President Lincoln needed New York detectives to populate his newly formed police department in the District, Temple contemplated his current disgust for Manhattan and pursued the request. His handlers at the police department all approved the move, and in short order he was off to Washington.

His dreams never journeyed closer to the present than after the moment when he separated from New York and the riots and Cassius and found his way to Washington and Fiona.

And his dreams of New York, lately, were always dreams of his father.

Step back and dodge the fist, Temple. Dodge it
.

Slap.

He couldn’t dodge it.

Slap. Slap.

Temple awoke in a cell, his arms bound behind him to the chair he sat upon, facing a small man covered in clouds of white whiskers and white hair who was slapping him to get him to stir. Slapping him hard.

“Stop!” Temple shouted.

The man grinned from within his whiskers, his teeth tangled and yellow.

“We have the mick’s attention,” the man said, nodding to a Union soldier who stood behind him in the cell. “You are in my prison at the wishes of the war secretary and we mean to have chats with you, sir. I would have you understand that we take these matters seriously and that our time is limited.”

Temple pressed his wrists outward, testing his coils and the strength of the chair. There was little give in the rope and the chair was thick and sturdy; breaking it was going to require acrobatics and would be noisy, so that wasn’t for now. He was, for the time being, a prisoner.

“I have met too many a new person in these recent days and
weeks and I am dizzied with names. What might yours be and where am I?”

“William Wood. Old Capitol Prison.”

Temple knew the name, if not the man. Nail had occasionally mentioned Wood as one of his handlers during the war, when Nail was drafting cogniacs of Secesh currency. Temple also knew now that his cell was inside the District’s most infamous prison.

Several stories of brick and bars, its bottom third painted with a heavy white band, the Old Capitol was a former boardinghouse now serving as a lockup for Confederate officers and other high-value prisoners. Two of those accused of conspiring to assassinate President Lincoln were being held there: the widow and boardinghouse owner Mary Surratt and Samuel Mudd, a doctor said to have attended to John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg and given him shelter at his Maryland home after the assassination.

The Old Capitol had also been a stronghold for the Union’s spy services during the war, and the men who worked in the building carried out Edwin Stanton’s directives against enemies in the South and those closer to home, in the streets and salons of Washington. Nail and Alexander had both told Temple that William Wood was an intimate of the war secretary’s and the steward of the Old Capitol—and therefore one of Lafayette Baker’s overseers.

Temple looked about his cell, which was cramped and furnished only with his chair and a simple plank bed. The ceiling was high in the middle and sloped at a sharp angle where it joined a short, three-foot wall on the other side of the floor; they had him on the highest floor of the prison right beneath the roof. There was a single window in the room, more than halfway up the cell’s largest wall, and it was fitted with four thick iron bars. His boots and cane were in a corner.

“Yes, we had the courtesy to remember your cane,” said Wood, following Temple’s gaze around the room. “We are benevolent men who do not want to overlook your severe handicaps, Mr. McFadden.”

Temple didn’t respond.

Wood sat in silence, too, staring at him. He raised his right hand and snapped his fingers, prompting the soldier in the room to leave. The metal door clanged shut behind him.

“We are alone now and we can speak with each other directly, as men. I would loosen your bonds, but I am told that despite your limp and your distaste for guns, you are a singularly dangerous man. That you have even kept Lafayette Baker at bay, and he is an individual not to be trifled with.”

Temple remained as he was, staring down at the floor.

“Mr. McFadden, you must have respect for our needs and priorities. We have successfully prosecuted a war. The country will be remade and the South will be absorbed into the national plan. President Lincoln has been cruelly and unjustly murdered and we have his assassins incarcerated. We want completion. We want to move forward. Why do you insist on standing in the way?”

Temple didn’t look up.

“I once worked with your friend Jack Flaherty. Then he changed. He stood in the way. He was killed yesterday, while you were harassing Mr. Stanton at the parade.”

Temple’s head snapped up and he strained against the ropes.

“Ah, some emotion from you at last. Yes, Mr. Baker saw to it that your friend Nail was gunned down. He did so most efficiently, with our new Gatlings. In a way, you’re responsible for Flaherty’s death. He would still be counterfeiting greenbacks among that motley tribe in the swamps had you not swept him up into this folly. Really, consider yourself and consider your circumstances. What are you trying to accomplish? Do you want to see your wife dead, too?”

Temple roared, stooping forward and raising the chair off the ground behind him as the ropes around him dug into his arms, chest, and wrists. He swore aimlessly, spittle flying from his mouth, but without his cane he couldn’t take the weight of his body or the chair, and he spun in a half circle before tumbling backward onto the floor. The ropes hadn’t loosened, the chair hadn’t cracked, and Wood
stepped into the space above him, his head framed by the beams on the ceiling.

“Lafayette Baker searched Swampdoodle for the Booth diary, upending floorboards and beating several residents for information. But he couldn’t find it. I want that diary,” Wood said, looking down at him. “I understand you have Mrs. Lincoln’s diary as well, but the widow is of no threat to us. Her son Robert has already promised us that he will see his mother committed to an asylum in Illinois. She is quite mad, and no one takes her claims and howlings seriously anymore. Whatever case you fancy yourself building regarding the president’s assassination will not rest upon his widow’s proclamations.”

Wood lifted his right hand again and snapped his fingers. The metal door swung open and the soldier stepped back in.

“Sit him upright,” Wood said. “And get him some water.”

After the soldier hoisted him back up, Temple returned to form, staring silently at the floor.

“I want to know where the Booth diary is, and you won’t be leaving here until I have it,” said Wood. “I know much about you, Mr. McFadden. Your father, for example, the immigrant doctor. He put a bullet in his head two years ago, shortly after the draft riots in New York, did he not? I assume you’re wrestling with similar demons, which makes you a threat to society.”

Wood turned away and walked to the door. As he yanked it open, Temple cleared his throat, and Wood froze in the doorway. Then Temple spoke for the first time.

“Who is Maestro?”

Wood bowed his head for a moment, then stepped out, slamming the door behind him.

T
HE GUARDS LEFT
Temple tied to his chair for the night, and that was the condition in which Edwin Stanton found him when he arrived at the cell the next morning. Stanton turned on his heel in a fury and called in the guards to unbind Temple. They protested, pointing out that they were merely carrying out William Wood’s
orders and that Mr. Wood urged caution given the prisoner’s strength and cunning. Stanton exploded again, telling the men that they could stand guard in the cell, weapons at the ready, and were free to fire should the prisoner attempt an attack or an escape.

“I’m sorry to find you like this, Mr. McFadden. It is not my preference that you be treated so.”

Temple said nothing. After his ropes were loosened, he brought his arms in front of his body, slowly and painfully, for the first time in more than a dozen hours. He stretched his legs toward the wall, but didn’t look up.

“You are inserting yourself into issues and among men that will only pollute you,” Stanton said. “There were mighty forces circling around President Lincoln, and I regret that I did not see them sooner, but I know them now. I beg of you, do not pollute yourself further in this entanglement.”