The Lincoln Conspiracy (40 page)

“Mrs. Lincoln shared some of this with my wife.”

“These men wanted to forsake every principle behind the war so they could pursue their fortunes. It was an issue that split the family. Robert Lincoln was allied with Mr. Scott and the others. I think that crushed the president, frankly. His own son.”

Stanton began to wheeze heavily, and he peeled open the top of his shirt, slumping back in his chair. Sweat covered his chest and brow when he sat up again. His hands shaking, he drew deeply from a large cup of coffee on the table beside him.

“I struggle with asthma,” Stanton said. “A symptom, my doctors tell me, of the depressed state of mind I have had since my childhood.
They advise me that coffee will attack my malady. They have recommended tobacco as well, but I don’t enjoy smoking.”

“I still have the Booth photographs, Mr. Stanton,” Temple said. “You are in no position to simply dictate terms to me.”

“What do the photographs give you?”

“They clearly show that Booth had a journal in his breast pocket when his corpse was brought aboard the
Montauk
. The journal was never cataloged among his belongings. If the Congress were to be made aware of a missing diary, scandal would ensue.”

“What do you want?”

“Safety for my wife and for Alexander Gardner. Mr. Gardner wants to give up his business and travel west to photograph the railroads and the Indians, and he will need a final, lucrative commission. Grant him an exclusive commission to photograph the conspirators’ trial.”

“I can see to all of that. I assure you, I am not a murderer, Mr. McFadden.”

“You and yours killed my friend. That was murder.”

“Mr. Flaherty was a criminal. A counterfeiter, a—”

“You made great use of his skills,” Temple shouted. “If he was a criminal, why did your government employ him to make cogniacs out of Secesh currency?”

“Calm yourself, Mr. McFadden. You imperiled him yourself by hanging on to that damned diary. I have no regrets about trying to extract it from you.”

“Or about sending Lafayette Baker into Swampdoodle?”

“I would do it again. I know that’s not what you want to hear, but I would do it again.”

“Why did you try to get the diary out of the District to begin with?”

“I had no idea that anyone was trying to spirit the diary away. I had given it to a judge for safekeeping and thought that was that. Lafayette Baker hired Mr. Tigani himself, and the madness at the B&O that morning surprised all of us.”

“I want a guarantee of safety for my wife and friends. Including a
Negro whom General Custer apparently missed when he collected my wife at the asylum. His name is Augustus.”

“Your wife and friends will be kept safe, I promise you that. I will have them moved into the Willard.”

“I’d rather Mr. Pinkerton be kept under the impression that everyone is still detained. He’s inventive, and he’ll inevitably try to follow me. Keep him in a room at the Willard without a view to the street. I want safe and unencumbered passage for myself in the District and to New York.”

“You will have those.”

“If and when I return to the District, you’ll have the Booth photos. If I don’t return, the photos will pass on with me.”

“Fine. Where are you bound for now?”

“I have one more visit to make in the District, and then I plan to go to New York.”

“Will you be seeing Mr. Baker?”

“I will.”

“Mr. Baker made much of the fact—to my face he said this, mind you—that the Booth diary conveys the notion that Maestro controlled me. There is no truth in that. I would never have betrayed President Lincoln for an outsider.”

“But you still have a reputation to preserve. The diary has a power to stain people that goes well beyond the truth of whatever is written in it. So you have had ample personal reasons to keep it out of the public eye.”

“You are free to believe what you want, Mr. McFadden. Be that as it may, the diary, in fact, will never become public. Now, here, read this.”

Stanton walked to his desk and scooped two leather-bound dossiers from a shelf above it, passing them to Temple. Temple thumbed through both, pausing on certain pages and flipping more quickly through others.

“There are several copies of both dossiers,” Stanton said. “You may take these two with you.”

Temple took a quill from the inkwell on the desk and scribbled a note across the front of the first dossier, signing his name to it and blowing on it until it was dry.

“I’ll need funds as well,” he said.

Stanton removed a block of books from one of his shelves and pulled a strongbox from a hollow in the wall. He counted out $1,000, slipped it into an envelope, and gave it to Temple.

“I’ll be off now. Good night, Mr. Stanton.”

“Good night, Mr. McFadden.”

After leaving Stanton’s home, Temple rode to Noah Brooks’s office and slipped the first dossier under his door.

“L
IGHT A CANDLE
,” Lafayette Baker said.

“I can’t find a goddamn candle.”

“Then light your fuckin’ hair on fire, but I want to see.”

Baker’s man fumbled about at a table, finally finding a candle and a match to brighten the room. Pint stood in front of Baker, “Fidelity Construction” stenciled in the glass that the candlelight illuminated on the open door behind them.

“Get us some whiskey in the next room,” Baker told his man.

Baker waited in the doorway while Pint entered the offices of the National Detective Bureau and lit an oil lamp nestled in a wall sconce. A scrap of paper beamed up at Pint from a table under the lamp, and he bent down to read it: 217 Pennsylvania Ave.

Pint stumbled back from the table.

“What’s got into you?” Baker asked.

A bottle shattered in the side room, followed by some scuffling and the heavy thump of a body slamming into a wall. Then quiet.

“What the hell is going on in there?” Baker said.

“Your man is down,” Temple said, leaning on his cane as he stepped out of the side room.

“I am so fuckin’ tired of you,” Baker said. “You’re supposed to be in a cell. Only a dozen people in the District know where this office is.”

“Pint knows the address, don’t you, Pint? You wrote it down on that scrap of paper I lifted from your pocket in Jimmy Scanlon’s saloon.”

“It’s better to be a coward for a minute than dead the rest of your life,” Pint said.

“You broke my heart, Pint. Why’d you do it?”

“Pinkerton wanted you at the B&O that morning. I told him I knew someone on the police force, and he paid me to get you there. So I ginned up the story for you and Augustus about my shipment of Secesh silk and silverware to get you to come along. Pinkerton just wanted a policeman there as a diversion. He never counted on you throwing yourself into this like a whirlwind. You’re a surprise, Temple, a downright surprise. All he thought the presence of a policeman would accomplish would be to regulate old Baker here, to keep him from getting violent in a public space when Pinkerton’s men went for the diaries. Baker’s a surprise, too, though. I’m surrounded by surprises.”

“You sure are, you nuisance,” Baker said, pulling his LeMat from his waistband and blowing off the bottom of Pint’s jaw. “So quit your yabbering.”

He fired another round into Pint’s head as he crumpled to the floor, blood and tissue spraying against the wall.

“If I bribe the little bastard, he should stay with me, right?” Baker said. “I hadn’t the foggiest that Pinkerton was also paying him. There’s no more honor left in this town. Doesn’t bother me that he was entrepreneurial, mind you. What bothers me is that he was walking around the fuckin’ District with my address in his pocket. Can’t have dimwits in the organization.”

Baker turned to Temple and raised the LeMat again.

“And you and I are now officially finished,” he said.

Before Baker could pull the trigger, Augustus stepped into the room from the hallway and put his Colt to the back of Baker’s head, cocking back the hammer.

“Let go of the gun, Baker,” Augustus said.

“If I just shoot the cripple here, then what?”

“Then your brains will be on the wall next to Pint’s.”

Baker let his arm go slack, and Augustus pulled the LeMat from his hand, stepping back into the doorway.

“Do you know who Maestro is?” Temple asked Baker.

“He’s in the Booth diary, that’s as much as I know.”

“Liar.”

“He is an unknown. Why would I really need to lie about anything to you? You’re a nothing.”

“How’s the wrist?” Temple asked, tipping his cane at the bandage wrapped around the top of Baker’s right hand. “Impressive that you can still heft that toy gun of yours with your left hand.”

“You snapped my wrist at your darky’s house, and I killed your friend in Swampdoodle. Feel worth it to you? Happy with the swap?”

Temple lunged forward and swung his cane into Baker’s jaw, breaking it. Baker dropped to a knee, howling in pain. Circling behind him, Temple wrapped an arm around his neck, choking him.

“How does it feel, having the life squeezed out of you?”

Temple planted his left hand on the side of Baker’s head, pushing Baker’s skull against the weight and force of his chokehold so he could snap his neck. Baker began to scream as his broken jaw was turned. Augustus grabbed Temple by the shoulders, shouting at him to stop and pulling him off Baker.

“Don’t turn yourself into him,” Augustus said. “Don’t turn yourself into a murderer.”

Temple fell back from Baker and stood up, his arms shaking. He dug his heel into Baker’s back and toppled him over. Crouching back down, he whispered into Baker’s ear.

“Listen closely, Baker. Noah Brooks has a thick file on you prepared by Edwin Stanton’s staff. You’ve been tapping into Sam Morse’s National Telegraph line on the second floor of the War Department. You’ve been listening in on President Johnson’s private correspondence and confidential Secret Service traffic. That’s a crime. Noah’s going to put this on his front page tomorrow afternoon,
and Stanton’s going to cashier you because of it. You’ll be lucky if they don’t send you to the Old Capitol as Wood’s guest. At the very least, you’re done in the District and you’re done in the government. You’re going to spend the rest of your days looking over your shoulder, afraid of who might be coming after you. Enjoy living with your ghosts.”

Temple stood up and brought his cane down on the back of Baker’s head, leaving him in a pile on the floor as he and Augustus departed for the Willard.

F
iona brushed off Temple’s jacket the next morning outside the Willard as he prepared to join the military escort taking him to the B&O on horseback. She squinted into the sun and peered up at his face, and he pulled her hand up to his lips and kissed it.

“You’re always with me, Fi.”

“And you with me.”

Temple hugged Alexander and Augustus in turn, and Augustus leaned in toward Temple’s ear.

“I should have stayed at the asylum longer,” Augustus whispered.

“Had you done that, you wouldn’t have been able to meet me at Baker’s office.”

“If I had stayed back, they might not have gotten the diary.”

“They were Union troops. You saved my life. Had you not followed me, I’d be dead. If you vow to stay off your smoke, I’ll vow to stop my cards.”

The troops took Temple to the B&O, where, still in his Union blues, he boarded the train for New York. He transferred in Baltimore and arrived in Manhattan late that evening.

The following morning he bought a new pair of black trousers, a black jacket, and a white shirt for $10 at Moore & Sons, leaving his uniform neatly folded at the end of his bed when he left the St. Nicholas Hotel. A day later, he got a New York and Harlem train at Grand Street and then transferred onto the Erie in Piermont, heading north to Elmira.

• • •

A
FTER RENTING A ROOM
in the Brainard Hotel in Elmira, Temple spent the next three days downstairs at a table from sunrise until the doors were locked at night, eating, reading, and eyeing traffic in and out of the lobby until John Surratt finally arrived at the front desk to collect his keys.

Surratt was much taller than Temple had expected, and he was more emaciated than he appeared in the carte de visite that Fiona had taken from his mother’s cell, his face so gaunt that his cheekbones formed fine ridges on either side of his face. A long, thin moustache drooped down on either side of his lips, and his hair was wispy and thinning. He was deliberate and calm as he went about his business, and he didn’t bother to survey the lobby before going upstairs.

An hour later Surratt returned, and Temple followed him out the door, crossing the hurly-burly of wagons, horses, and people on Baldwin Street to the opposite corner so that he could observe Surratt as he walked down Water Street. Surratt lingered by the window at Schwenke & Grumme (
LOUNGES AND LOUNGE BEDS MADE TO ORDER; HAIR, SPRING, STRAW AND HUSK MATTRESSES CONSTANTLY ON HAND; LOOKING GLASS AND PICTURE FRAMES READY FOR YOU
) and then stopped at Preswick’s Book Store at 16 Water. He unlocked and entered a side door leading upstairs. A sign above the second-floor window announced the enterprise nominally operating below: “J. Harrison: Land Surveys, Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, Photographs, Etc., Etc.” A shade snapped down in the window a moment later.

When Surratt came back downstairs and headed toward the Brainard, Temple crossed the street, picked the lock at J. Harrison, and went upstairs. It was nearly empty in the office, save for a large drafting table in the middle of the room. On it were several maps and detailed sketches of the prison camp on the edge of town that, until recently, had been holding Confederate soldiers in conditions that the newspapers said were nearly as bleak and horrific as Andersonville. A number of reports, written in longhand and offering accounts of the conditions in the camp and in Elmira, were stacked
neatly on the floor nearby. A knife bearing an elegant etching of a black locomotive across the length of its blade rested atop the papers, and in a lone box on a shelf was a stack of calling cards: “John Harrison, Surveys & Ambrotypes.”