The Lincoln Conspiracy (9 page)

Augustus paused and caught his breath. A few dogs barked outside the warehouse. The cogniacs fluttered. He pressed his hand to the side of his head, closed his eyes briefly, and read again.

“She doesn’t write very much after this,” Augustus said. “Most of the entries are brief, except for the last, and it’s barely a week old.”

“It ends there,” Augustus said. “It stops.”

Several minutes passed before Temple stood up. Nail moved closer, bending over to examine the diary.

“You can read!” he said to Augustus.

“Negroes read,” Augustus replied. “A self-taught mathematician and Negro—Benjamin Banneker—surveyed and helped design
Pennsylvania Avenue here seventy years ago. We can read and we can add.”

“You mistake me,” Nail said. “I mean, you read beautifully. All I can read are banknotes. I cannot read as you read. I can’t read books.”

“Augustus is the son of free Negroes who fled Texas after the Alamo,” Temple offered. “He is educated and he is a teacher.”

Nail nodded, smiled, and extended his hand to Augustus. But Nail pulled back his hand when a fury of howling and scratching erupted around the warehouse’s entry, interrupting him. Then a fist pounded against the door.

“In!” Nail shouted.

One of Nail’s men opened the door a crack. The tip of a rifle peeked through the gap and the snouts of two dogs pushed through, snarling, around the man’s legs. He bent his head farther inside and looked across the warehouse to where Nail and the others were standing.

“ ’Sall right!” Nail hollered.

The door closed again.

“There’s still the other,” Augustus said.

The three men looked down at the two diaries stacked on the floor.

“You’ve done it once before, Temple. Open it again,” said Nail.

Mary Todd Lincoln’s diary was almost perfectly square, appearing as new and fresh as it was the day it was bought, and it was heavy with thick pages and a sturdy binding. The second diary, like the first, was bound in leather, but it was distinct in every other way. It was long and slender, and its red cover was faded and spotted. Some of the pages hung loosely, close to falling out. The script inside was a man’s, and the writing was tight and small, with none of the looping curves that marked Mrs. Lincoln’s notes. But the language, while not as florid as Mrs. Lincoln’s, was just as self-absorbed.

Temple sat down and began reading aloud:

Temple looked up at Augustus and Nail. Augustus didn’t say a word. Nail’s eyes met Temple’s and Nail grimaced, shaking his head. Temple read on:

Across the top of a following page, in bold, printed letters that departed from the tight script elsewhere, was the lone word that Temple had spotted at the railroad station: “assassination.”

Temple stopped.

“Temple, you’ve gone pale,” Augustus said. “Is that all there is?”

“No, there’s more,” Temple said, quietly.

“Tha’s the shooter,” Nail said. “Johnny Booth.”

Temple closed the journal and slipped it inside his breast pocket, where it sat comfortably, he thought, in exactly the same place John Wilkes Booth had probably kept it the night he shot Mr. Lincoln.

“I think Augustus and I need to move on before the morning wears long here, Nail,” Temple said. “For now we best go where we don’t complicate your day any further and where I can find Fiona.”

“You walk through that door, Temple, you and Augustus, hanging on to those diaries, and you both walk out into a world of pain. You can’t walk away from it after that.”

“You told me I wasn’t born in the woods to be scared of owls.”

“That was before all of this reading. Those diaries are desired. They speak of a slain president. Leave them with whoever is after them and go on your way. It all smells of blood, and you’ll bleed, too. You already have. More will follow.”

Nail looked down at the floor in front of him. A vein pulsed on his neck, and he wrung his hands, the muscles in his forearms twitching like banjo wire.

“World of pain,” he said.

“You’re still with me?” Temple asked.

“I am,” Nail replied. “Pinkerton and Baker hate one another, you know.”

“And why?”

“Because of Stanton. Dueling allegiances.”

“I want to move these diaries to a different place, and I want to set about learning more about something that’s here in the second. I’ll be back to you tomorrow.”

“And you’re off to where?”

“To a place that would be as much a mystery to them as Swampdoodle.”

“Neither of you should come back here at night, if you need to come back at all, and Augustus should never come alone,” Nail said. “Those men and dogs out there recognize neighbors and nobody else. None of them will tolerate a nig … none of them will tolerate a Negro on his own, day or night.”

Temple shoved the Lincoln diary into the satchel.

“Ta for all you’ve done, Nail.”

“Nothing of it, Temp.”

Nail turned to Augustus and paused. Then he shook his hand.

When they got to the warehouse door and flung it open, a blast of ripening heat rushed in. The dogs barked wildly outside, straining at their leashes. Temple limped down the stairs at an angle, favoring his bad leg. As he and Augustus moved past the dogs, Temple turned to look back. Nail was watching them depart, hands on his hips, the ink stains that Augustus had mistaken for tattoos now a cobalt blue in the late morning sun.

Temple closed his eyes for a moment, thinking about the queen of spades and a faro game at Mary Ann Hall’s. He needn’t worry about any bet he made in a card game at Mary Ann’s, not when he’d have the queen of spades. No coppers in his game, no betting the turn. Just smart flat bets. Winners.

L
AFAYETTE
B
AKER WAITED
outside the tents at Camp Fry, watching the teenager tie up the back of his rucksack. Good soldier. Neat, responsible. Follows orders. Even listened to the Met at the B&O
when he told him to charge my boys. Neat, disciplined, and a little bastard.

“Son, come here,” Baker said.

The soldier slung his rifle over his shoulder and walked over.

“Recognize me?”

“No,” the boy replied.

“I recognize you.”

“From where, sir?”

“The dustup at the B&O a few days ago.”

“It was a mess there, sir.”

“Your name?”

“Priston, sir. Damien Priston.”

“Damien, I’ve been authorized to bring a reward here to you in Foggy Bottom this morning, for your bravery at the B&O, but I can’t be handing out banknotes in front of other soldiers.”

“The street’s naked here at this time of day, sir, not a soul about.”

“I know, I know, but you never can tell. Everybody is always watching somebody in the District. Follow me.”

Baker walked into a nearby alley and pulled a wad of notes from his belt.

“So you don’t know me, correct?”

“That’s right, sir, other than you have officer’s decorations on your uniform.”

“Did you know the man who ordered you to draw down on some of the gentlemen at the B&O that day?”

“No, didn’t know him either, sir.”

“But you chose to get involved anyway—to interfere?”

“Sir?”

“You chose to get in the way, to intrude, didn’t you, you little rat bastard?”

“I’ll be going now, sir.”

“Yes, you will.”

Baker slammed his elbow into the soldier’s throat. As the boy
gagged, Baker brought a knee up into his crotch and shoved him into a wall. He pulled a blade out from his belt and sliced it across the boy’s throat. Then he kicked his feet out from under him. The boy collapsed, gurgling through a pink mass of bubbles foaming around his mouth. Baker pressed the heel of his boot into the boy’s face, silencing him until his eyes rolled back and his breathing stopped.

F
iona pressed her face against the twin lenses of the stereoscope and focused her eyes on the image propped up several inches away on the other side. In three dimensions she saw a V-shaped trench filled with dead soldiers, their legs, arms, rifles, and bayonets draped willy-nilly over one another.

“It’s from Gettysburg,” said Gardner. “The stereos are a fine sight better than Mathew Brady’s humdrum daguerreotypes. Timmy O’Sullivan and I got to Gettysburg days before Brady did.”

Gardner unclasped the Gettysburg card from the clip that held it and swapped another into its place. In three dimensions again, Fiona saw another of Gardner’s images from the war. Abraham Lincoln was sitting inside a tent at a small table, across from General McClellan. Even seated, Lincoln dominated the commander of the Army of the Potomac.

“That one’s earlier, from Antietam,” Gardner said.

“Did you ever converse with the president?” Fiona asked, her body still bent at the waist as she looked through the stereoscope.

“A fair bit,” Gardner said, a note of sadness piercing his brogue. “The president was a gabber. He asked more questions than you could ever answer, and he had good, kind eyes. He was curious about photography. And he and his generals let Brady and me have the run of the battlefields. Here now, I’ll show you something special, Fiona.”

As Fiona straightened up, Pint hurried into her spot and looked through the lenses of the stereoscope, whistling aloud as he did so.

“Everyone can live forever in these pictures,” said Pint. “It’s a modern miracle. You can’t be erased or forgotten.”

“We’ll all be erased and forgotten, just like the rotting soldiers in those trenches,” said Gardner. “Maybe not Lincoln, but the rest of us aren’t going to be saved by glass plates, chemical baths, and some hocus-pocus that stragglers like me perform with light and shade.”

“There are other ways to be saved,” said Fiona.

Gardner didn’t respond to her. He reached up to a broad, locked cabinet and opened it with a key he pulled from his trouser pocket. Inside were several shelves, each filled with glass plates that were neatly ordered and alphabetized. The names on the plates offered a catalog of the celebrated and the powerful in Washington who had visited Gardner’s studio to sit for a photograph: Burnside, Morse, Sumner, Hooker, Chase, Farragut, Grant, Seward, Meade, Whitman, Douglas, and, of course, Lincoln.

They all came to have Brady’s protégé record their images for posterity. The high and mighty, as Gardner called them, paid him $750 for his work. For soldiers, students, and Washington’s working folk he charged $10. He had earned enough to keep his wife and children in a comfortable clapboard house near Georgetown. But he spent little on himself, often slept on the floor of his 7th Street studio, and sent large chunks of money back to Scotland with relatives, earmarking a portion for writers at the
Glasgow Sentinel
, which, although he owned it, he hadn’t read in years.

On a shelf of its own inside the cupboard was a mahogany box, which Gardner carefully removed and then opened on a nearby table, placing it next to
Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the Civil War
, an oversized compilation of his work. He had spent the better part of the last eighteen months adding and subtracting photographs from the book, and aimed to spend another year with it before he let his publisher have it. Gardner flipped open the mahogany box and removed a large glass negative draped in a piece of yellow cloth. He slipped off the cloth and then fanned the fingers of his hand toward his chest, gesturing for Fiona to have a look.