The Lincoln Conspiracy (41 page)

Temple went back downstairs and gave two Indian heads to a boy peddling apples on the corner, asking him to run into the Brainard and say he had a message that he was to deliver personally to John Harrison.

The boy returned and told Temple that the hotel had said Harrison was a recent arrival and was confining himself to his quarters for the rest of the evening. The message could be delivered in the morning, but before nine, because Mr. Harrison was departing for a train then. Temple patted the boy on the head and gave him another Indian head.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, Temple waited in the Erie Railroad station and then followed Surratt onto the train to Canandaigua, sitting three benches behind him. Surratt was smoking a cigar and wearing a richly tailored maroon Oxford jacket and a round-top hat, clothing that was a considerable price above what he had worn the prior day. He began counting out Canadian currency in his lap, just as calm and fastidious as he had been in the Brainard, and the sight of the money put Temple into a disagreeable spin. Surratt was planning on heading to Canada, most likely to Montreal, where there still was an active movement of Secesh and where he could evade American authorities. He was not on his way to Manhattan, as Temple had hoped. He leaned back in his seat, cataloging his alternatives.

A conductor came down the aisle collecting tickets, followed by a newsboy selling papers and cigars. Surratt put the Canadian currency in his breast pocket, bought a paper, and laid it on the seat. He then walked to the end of the car, slid open the door that connected it to the adjacent cars, and passed through. Minutes later, another man—tall, thin, and mustachioed—entered the car wearing Surratt’s maroon jacket and hat. He sat down in Surratt’s seat, picked up the
newspaper lying there, and began reading. None of his fellow passengers, save one, was any the wiser that he wasn’t the same man who had been seated there before.

Temple bolted up from his seat and hobbled down the aisle, passing into the next car and the car after that until he spotted Surratt curled up against a window sleeping. He was wearing a simple gray coat now, topped off by a floppy cotton cap with a wide brim. Temple sat down at the opposite end of the car and exhaled.

When they reached Albany, Temple got off the train and watched the man in Surratt’s maroon jacket make a show of going to a ticket window to inquire about the best form of passage to Montreal. Surratt waited aboard the Canandaigua train another fifteen minutes, then stepped off and crossed the platform only minutes before the departure of the train that would carry him south to Piermont and then on to Manhattan. Temple followed him on board the train to Manhattan, settled in behind him yet again, and then used the rest of their journey together to contemplate the endgame.

A
FTER BOOKING A ROOM
at the Fifth Avenue Hotel for that evening, Surratt waited in Madison Square Park until a large black brougham carrying a driver and two other men pulled up at the northeastern corner of the square. Temple stepped back into the trees and shadows behind the Worth obelisk, watching them. Surratt didn’t move until two men stepped from the brougham, canvassed the immediate block, and then nodded to him. He scampered off his park bench and into the carriage. Temple waited until the driver had spurred his pair of horses before he stepped out of the trees, and then he watched the brougham depart. A carriage Temple had retained was waiting a block away and he stepped to the street to summon it. He wouldn’t need to follow Surratt too closely, because he knew exactly where he was headed.

F
OUR DIFFERENT ARCHITECTS
and three different contractors had been retained to build the mansion at 212 Madison Avenue, and it
was said to be even more elaborate inside than out. In addition to rumors that the interior and its nine bedrooms were lined with gold leaf and marble, there was persistent chatter that the owner had spent nearly $50,000 on a glass and iron dome for the mansion, which in the end he decided to reject because it didn’t conform architecturally with the rest of the estate. The entire home was outfitted for gas illumination—the first of its kind in New York—and the owner was said to have built a private railway depot adjacent to his basement.

Not in dispute was the fact that the owner had never been seen outside the mansion and had never extended an invitation to anyone in the neighborhood to visit him. Whispered in the most discreet fashion in what was agreed to be the most prestigious and expensive neighborhood in Manhattan was that the mansion’s owner was most likely quite mad.

Had he cared to inform his neighbors or anyone else in Manhattan about his true preferences and tastes, the owner himself would have told all of them that he never would live in a home with marble walls and marble floors and that, instead, his estate featured mahogany, oak, and cherry so polished one could almost use the walls as looking glasses.

He also would have shown them, had they ever been welcomed inside, that in addition to modern gas tubing strung throughout the estate, he also had his own telegraph line; his own Otis elevators traveling between the mansion’s basement and three upper floors on a singular system of pulleys, counterweights, and hydraulics; his own elaborate gardens; his own stable of horses; his own library of nearly forty thousand titles; two wine cellars, three Raphaels, and a Caravaggio; six carved fountains that he had imported from Europe, South America, and Russia; and a collection of gemstones kept in a room of their own alongside glass cabinets stocked with Ming vases.

He could catalog these holdings with the same ease that he could count the fingers on his hand. But he would never bother enlightening
his neighbors about any of it because he had as little interest in their friendship as he did in their well-being.

“We are dedicated to serving only ourselves, are we not?” he said to his apprentice.

“That and nothing else, Maestro,” replied Surratt, who was seated beside a medieval fireplace brought over, stone by stone, from Warsaw. It was large enough for seven men to stand inside it, but because of the summer heat it was unlit and yawned like a deep black cavern across most of an entire wall.

The owner sat in a high-backed dark walnut chair with rosettes carved on its frame. He had, in fact, installed over his office a glass and iron dome similar to the one he’d rejected, albeit smaller, never having intended to cap the mansion as a whole with such a thing, and during the day shafts of sunlight danced in bars around his desk. On nights with a full, lush moon such as this, a purple glow bathed the top of his head.

“I have arranged transport for you this evening on a steamship to Liverpool, and from there you are going to go to the Vatican and serve as a papal Zouave. The Vatican is a state unto itself, and our authorities have no power to pluck you from there.”

“Thank you for arranging this, Maestro.”

“Thank you for your service in Richmond, Washington, Elmira, and Montreal. We plan to pay you well for all that you have done.”

Surratt stood up from his chair, measuring his words and his nerve as he listened to the sound of water trickling in the courtyard fountain outside. The low whir and rumbling of the mansion’s elevators rose and fell as the cars moved inside the walls.

“I want railroad stock,” Surratt blurted, rushing to get the words out before his legs grew rubbery again. “Judah Benjamin asked for the same when I met with him in Richmond in March. And he wired me in early April when I returned to Elmira to say that he had burned all records of the rail negotiations, as you wished. He said it was only right that he also receive a stock grant.”

The owner cleared his throat, assessing Surratt as if seeing him
for the first time. He appreciated men who could reduce discussions to money. If they were entitled to a claim, it made everything more rational. If they weren’t, well, then they weren’t and that, too, offered clarity.

“Of course you want stock,” the owner said, holding out his hand to Surratt, who stepped forward tentatively to take it.

In a corner of the room beneath a gaslight that cast an amber shroud around him, a slender, graceful man uncurled like a cat from a high-backed, tufted leather chair and began to stand up. He paused, frustrated, because his left leg, broken when he’d leapt to the stage after killing Lincoln, still couldn’t bear all of his weight.

He forced himself upright and reached back down to a tray by the chair to pull a cigar up to his mouth, chuckling and leaning against a wall to continue observing Surratt’s negotiation. He had pale skin that gleamed in the room’s half-light, large, sensual eyes, and a moustache and wavy hair the color of India ink. He waited until the throbbing in his leg subsided, then gestured with his cigar toward the middle of the room.

“I suppose, then, that I should request stock as well, Maestro,” John Wilkes Booth said. “I’d like something that gives me a deeper taste, a true financial partnership that reflects all that we’ve accomplished together.”

T
emple had used his time earlier in the evening to read through the second dossier that Stanton had given him at his home. Stanton’s spies had assembled it and probably added information that Wood had beaten out of his prisoners. It offered the barest description of the mansion at 212 Madison, along with a floor plan, a roster of how many guards were around it and when they changed shifts, and an outline of the comings and goings about the house.

Of more interest was the skeletal biography of the owner, a man referred to in telegrams and correspondence as Maestro but with nothing more known about his real identity or past. It was unclear which banks he used or who his lawyers were. Tailors, food, furniture, and other deliveries came to the house, but guests rarely came and its owner never ventured out. He was believed to exercise control of a network of railroads and real estate, but his holdings couldn’t be traced. He communicated freely with Thomas Scott, though their means of communication couldn’t be discerned. He had a handicap, the result of an unknown accident: he had a prosthetic wooden arm capped with a steel hook to replace the one he’d lost.

Temple had circled this last point, read through the dossier another time, then torn it apart and stuffed it inside a sack of offal near the kitchen door at the back of the hotel. After watching Surratt leave Union Square and head north to Madison, he instructed the carriage driver he had hired to proceed to Lexington instead and head north to the luxury homes and rolling, open spaces around 35th Street. There was a small carriage house behind 212 Madison, and at this hour there would only be a single guard inside it.

He waited in the shadow of a small elm tree for about an hour until the guard came outside to piss. Temple recognized the guard as he stepped beneath a small, ornate gaslight shaped like the cowcatcher of a locomotive. He had been one of the men at the B&O the day that Stump Tigani got his throat opened up. He had stood over Temple with a metal bar and ordered him to give up the diaries. Temple hobbled over to the guard before he had finished emptying himself and dropped his cane on the ground.

“Remember me?” Temple asked.

The guard still had his hand at the opening of his trousers, and he jumped when Temple spoke.

“Do you?” Temple asked before taking the guard’s head in his hands and twisting it like a top until the man’s neck snapped. It sounded like a handful of dice being crushed by a wagon wheel. The guard was so startled, he didn’t make a sound, other than a slight whimper right before his eyes went lifeless.

Temple pulled a set of keys off the guard, made his way through the carriage house, and let himself in through the back door of the mansion. The only noise was the whirring of some sort of mechanical device in the walls and the sound of three men speaking upstairs.

Temple climbed a huge circular staircase, pressing his back against the wall and trying to stay in the shadows that fell between the gas lamps above him. His bad leg throbbed, and he leaned on his cane when he reached the top of the stairs.

He was staring down a double-width hallway lined with artwork. The gaslight burned brighter in the hallway, and he recognized several of the pieces: “The New Jerusalem,” by George Inness; “Peace Consoles Mankind and Brings Abundance,” by Eugene Delacroix; “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” by William Blake; three panels—each twenty feet wide—from John Banvard’s “Mississippi River Panorama”; two marble busts of Caesar; a bronze mermaid; and a nine-foot bronze of Hephaestus, fashioned so that the Greek god’s hammer rose a foot above his head and nearly touched the ceiling.

The floor planking gleamed and reflected the gas lamps as buttery smudges. Halfway down the hall a tongue of light spilled out from beneath two oversized mahogany doors, each of them fronted with elaborate scrollwork depicting cotton bushes with branches bending beneath the weight of bolls cast from thumb-sized pearls.

Temple crept to the edge of the doorway and waited by the statue of Hephaestus, listening. He leaned on the anvil tilting toward the god’s knees and could hear the sounds of three men speaking again on the other side of the doors.

“You will not be given stock or any more cash, Mr. Surratt,” said one of the men beyond the doors, his voice deep, steady, and Southern, and only loud enough to register that what he was saying was both an order and a warning, not a request. “You will have protection, and as long as you keep yourself removed and in Europe, you will be permitted to stay alive. I assume now that our discussion is over?”

“It is over,” said Surratt. “Will you arrange transportation for me to the docks?”

“Certainly. Fetch one of my men in the carriage house to take you.”

Temple stepped behind Hephaestus when Surratt yanked open one of the doors and burst through, barely concealing his anger. He scurried past Temple, swearing under his breath, and then rushed down the stairs.

Temple peered around the edge of the door.

One of the men inside was tall, thin, and blond, immaculately dressed, with a hook protruding from the cuff of his shirt. The other man stood in the shadows in a corner of the room, the tip of a cigar burning red in his hand.