The Lincoln Conspiracy (42 page)

From the shadows the other man declared—in a voice that Temple found theatrical—that he didn’t give a damn what Surratt had settled for; he himself wanted railroad stock.

The blond man rose from a chair the size of a throne and stood by an ornate walnut desk, tapping it with the tip of his hook.

“Unfortunately, I don’t partner with anyone in that fashion,” he said. “I am a sole proprietor in every meaningful way. Moreover, you were a functionary in the assassination, not an architect.”

The man in the shadows snarled at this, his voice rising to an operatic pitch.

“I am the Brutus of this nation! I spared our republic the rule of a dictator. I am no mere functionary. I will be praised through the ages.”

He walked with a pronounced limp toward the blond man, his face now aglow from a thick candle that burned atop the desk. He placed his cigar in an oyster-shell ashtray on the desk and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, grinding bits of tobacco leaf into the smoke rising up from the butt.

The man was small and unusually handsome, with round, coal-black eyes, black hair that fell around his face in lazy curls, and a carefully pomaded moustache.

Temple gasped, loudly enough that the two men swiveled from the desk to stare back at him in the doorway.

“Well, Mr. Booth, this is not Mr. Surratt in our doorway,” the blond man said, amused. “It would appear we have a visitor.”

J
OHN
W
ILKES
B
OOTH
smiled.

Temple slammed the other door open and hobbled into the drawing room, his cane pounding the floor with each step he took toward the men.

“After all that we have evaded, someone decides to send a gimp after our worthy selves, Maestro,” Booth said, snickering.

“Beware, Mr. Booth. I believe we are at last face-to-face with Temple McFadden, and he is not a man to be trifled with. I have had astounding reports about him from Washington. I suggest we conclude our business posthaste.”

Temple swept a porcelain urn from a table and hurled it at both men. It sailed over the desk and crashed against the floor by the fireplace.

“Excellent, excellent,” Maestro said, rapping his hook against the desktop. “A display of passion and anger. A man wedded to the moment. But I have grown weary of your annoyances. Take him, Edgar.”

Another bodyguard had entered the room behind Temple and pressed the muzzle of a derringer into the side of his neck. It’s cold, Temple thought to himself. The end of a gun is cold.

“I don’t want him disposed of yet,” Maestro said. “I have questions for him.”

Booth considered Temple for a moment, then turned his attention back to Maestro.

“I am supposed to be cold and in the grave, sir,” Booth said. “All I need to do is turn myself over to Stanton’s people and explain your involvement. Your machinations and your use of me to carry them out will come to naught.”

Booth waved his hand around the room. “All of this will be taken from you,” he continued. “Unless I am given a portion of your empire. I aim to be a man with stock.”

“Of course. Your reasoning is sound,” Maestro said. “I would like your stay with us these past few weeks to end on more cordial grounds than this.”

“Then it would appear that honor is restored and we have grounds for an accommodation.”

“We most certainly do.”

Maestro came around the desk to shake Booth’s hand. As he neared Booth, Maestro swung his arm in a sweeping, upward arc across the actor’s belly, drawing a thick red ribbon of blood that spurted from a gash in his vest and drained the color from his face. Booth looked startled, as if a flawless line reading had been overlooked, and pitched forward onto the desk. Maestro wrapped his hand in Booth’s hair and turned his face toward him.

“You are neither Brutus nor an architect,” Maestro said. “You are a functionary and a fool.”

Booth slipped from the desk and fell to the floor in a pile.

Maestro took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the
blood from the metal hook protruding from his right arm. He bent toward Booth, waiting to see the life escape from his eyes, but was interrupted by a shriek from the other side of the room.

John Surratt stood in the doorway, eyes wide at the sight of Booth dying on the floor.

Edgar flinched when Surratt yelled, and the end of his gun slipped away from Temple’s neck. Temple grabbed Edgar’s wrist and turned it upside down and inward, squeezing Edgar’s trigger finger for him. The bullet tore out the bodyguard’s throat.

Surratt fled down the hallway, screaming.

“I
T IS A SHAME
for you that derringers house only a single round, otherwise you’d have me at bay,” Maestro said. “But they are compact and elegant pistols. All of my guards have them. We gave one to Booth.”

“So he could murder the president for you.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I entered through the carriage house.”

“And my guard there?”

“Dead.”

“I have others here who can easily replace him.”

“No, in truth you don’t.”

“The men on my front door?”

“Down. Tommy Driscoll slumbered both of them for me. Edgar was your last.”

“Mr. McFadden, you are an amazement. You must come work for me. I can pay you twenty-five thousand dollars a year.”

“Gold is good in its place, but living, brave, patriotic men are better than gold.”

“You needn’t cite Mr. Lincoln’s bromides anymore. The man is dead.”

“You arranged his murder. You’re going back to the District in cuffs, and you’re going to be hanged.”

“Lincoln had but a marginal sense of enlightened progress; he
couldn’t grasp the totality of it. He fancied a mighty railway west to unite the coasts, and he even put the government’s coffers behind the effort, but he somehow found it necessary to stand in the way of my interests in the Southern railroads. There is a new industrial order in this country, and it is establishing itself despite government intrusions. To the extent that the government becomes an obstacle it will be brought to heel or forced aside.”

“Who are you?”

“I am capital.”

Temple rested his cane against a chair, and Maestro leaned back against his desk, holding out his artificial arm and rolling up the sleeve so that Temple could see the extent of it.

“I was an orphan when a cotton gin near Memphis snared my arm; I like to think of it as my industrial baptism. You were a disabled orphan as well. I was born in Florence and you in Dublin. Now we are making our lives here. We have more intersections than you care to take into account, and it qualifies us as secret sharers.”

“Prattle. I share nothing with you. Baker, Stanton, Scott, Pinkerton—do any of them know you?”

“No one knows me. I don’t exist. They have only intimations of me,” he said. “Baker arranged Booth’s escape from the Garrett farm, but in his distressing thick-headedness he failed to empty Booth’s pockets before putting his clothing on a suitable double.”

“They also didn’t want anyone examining the corpse too closely. The coloring around the bullet holes wouldn’t have been right. People would have suspected a substitute.”

“We bribed the doctor and dentist who went aboard the
Montauk
to identify Booth’s body, and we thought that once Baker had resecured the diary, we would be done with this matter. But then you happened upon the B&O that morning and introduced chaos.”

“What of Thomas Scott?”

“His interests and mine align perfectly, though he knows me only as a conduit for investments in the Pennsylvania Railroad. I am partnered
with Warren Delano in the opium trade, but he doesn’t know who I am. I have similar relationships with the Morgans in banking and Eliphalet Remington’s sons in arms and munitions.”

Maestro walked to the fireplace and pulled a long black poker from a brass canister sitting near the hearth.

“I’ll miss you,” he said to Temple.

“You’re going back to Washington with me.”

“I have absolutely no intention of doing that.”

Maestro lunged around the desk at Temple, brandishing the poker. He swung once; the tip missed Temple but sliced across the candle on top of the desk, sending it end over end into the curtains. They burst into flame, and the face of a bronze cherub on a table next to the curtains glowed orange.

“I don’t care if any of it burns,” Maestro said. “There is always more to be had.”

The flames raced up the curtain and spread in tongues across the ceiling. Maestro came at Temple again with the poker, and Temple blocked it with his cane. With a second thrust he flipped the poker entirely out of Maestro’s hand.

Maestro dove at Temple and punctured the top of his hand with the hook. Temple screamed in pain and dropped his cane, snapping Maestro’s head back as he grabbed his neck. The pair tumbled out of the room and into the hallway. Black smoke was pouring out of the drawing room.

Maestro was gagging at the end of Temple’s arm and swung wildly with his hook, trying to impale Temple’s arm or shoulder. They collapsed together on the floor, each of them kicking and punching as the flames spread around them.

Temple freed himself and lurched up, but Maestro kicked at his bad leg and knocked him back to the ground, pouncing on him and slashing at his face with his hook. Temple rolled his head to the side and the hook caught the plank where his cheek had been.

Temple brought his left knee up and pressed his foot against
Maestro’s chest, launching him backward into a rail that ran around the opening of the stairwell. The rail cracked and Maestro tilted over the shaft, spinning his arms furiously to keep his balance. Temple managed to get to his feet and charged Maestro, the pair of them plunging over the rail and down the stairs into the basement.

They both lay crumpled and exhausted on the floor below. Blood pooled near Maestro’s ankle, where a piece of wood had punctured it.

“I won’t go to a prison!” Maestro screamed as they unwound themselves from one another.

“Then you’ll burn here,” Temple said, slamming his right hand against Maestro’s jaw.

A rafter split above them and fell from the ceiling, pinning one of Maestro’s legs to the floor. He batted at it with his arms, trapped.

Temple got to his feet and scrambled on his hands and knees up the staircase and into the front hall. He pulled his jacket over his head to protect himself from the flames, then stopped.

Shouts rang up from the basement. Or just more rafters snapping?

He turned back, but the entire entrance to the stairwell behind him was engulfed in flames and impassable. Hephaestus loomed along the wall, in his element, before the floor gave way beneath the statue and it disappeared.

Temple hobbled through the smoke and flames in the hallway and out the front door, past the dead bodyguards, and into a small courtyard that fronted on Madison, where he collapsed.

Flames were bursting from every window on the first and second floors by the time the initial group of firemen arrived. Shortly after that, the entire side of the mansion collapsed.

T
OMMY
D
RISCOLL WAS KNEELING
over him, wrapping a bandage around his head and mopping his face with a wet cloth, when Temple’s vision first came back into focus. The pounding in his head began to subside. Tommy had arrived at the mansion about fifteen minutes before the fire started, waiting outside for Temple, as Temple
had asked him to do, regardless of what he saw or heard happening inside. After Temple spilled from the front door and collapsed, Tommy got him onto the back of a wagon before the press or the rest of the police arrived. He had flashed his badge to clear the way so that he could get Temple out.

“You could have done something besides fireworks to let me know you were back in New York, Temple,” Tommy said, propping his friend’s head in his lap in the back of the wagon. “You’re lucky you survived that.”

“Got any water to drink?”

“Nope. Whiskey.”

“Give me some.”

Tommy poured it down his throat, but Temple spat it back up.

“How many bodies, Tommy? How many bodies on Madison Avenue?”

“The entire mansion is burned down, and there’s no way to identify anybody in there. There were three bodies outside.”

“Any bodies where the drawing room was?”

“Two, but so deep-roasted, no one will ever know who they are.”

“Any in the basement? With a hook?”

“With what?”

“A hook. An artificial limb.”

“No, Temple, no hooks, from what I heard. Not a single one.”

“How are my boots?”

“What of ’em?”

“How do they look?”

“They’re all torn up. There are shards of glass in ’em.”

“Dammit.”

“Go back to sleep now.”

Tommy took Temple to the St. Nicholas Hotel and left him in a room overlooking Broadway. In the lobby, Tommy sent a telegram to Fiona to inform her that Temple was alive and well but needed rest.

• • •

O
NCE THE POUNDING
in his head subsided, Temple sat at a desk in his room and began to write a letter to Fiona, explaining the last days to her.

He crumpled the letter into a ball and swept it off the desk.

Later that day, he tried again.

Nail is dead, too, Temple thought. Maestro could well be alive. Were the timbers in the mansion cracking in the flames or was I being laughed at?

He crumpled the letter again and dropped it to the floor.

He tore this sheet of paper in half, left it on the desk, and went to his window to stare at the throngs on the street below him.

T
HE NEXT DAY
he went to the front desk of the St. Nicholas and paid for a telegram.