On Secret Service (46 page)

Hanna floated through the days and weeks in a haze of delicious anticipation. Grant hammered at Petersburg and threatened Richmond and everyone said the war would end by summer. Fred Dasher would take off his uniform and come riding up the Seventh Street road, and they'd sit on the porch, holding hands, and plan their lives.

Their few weeks together, their stolen moments at the house in the northern suburbs, had consumed her with physical pleasure and brought a womanly satisfaction she'd never experienced. Then one day he dropped from sight as abruptly and mysteriously as he'd appeared, though he sent a boy with a note saying he'd be with her soon after hostilities ended. He signed it,
Love always, Frederick.
She read the note so often, with such happiness, that whole lines had been blotted by tears.

On Saturday, March 4, she watched the inaugural parade under threatening skies. Crushed in the crowd below the steps of the Capitol, she saw the sun burst through like an omen as the thin and haggard President stepped to the iron table on the platform. The crowd buzzed with rumors that the new Vice President was drunk during the Senate swearing-in earlier. Florid and coarse as a peasant, Andrew Johnson sat blinking at the sky while the President spoke movingly of malice toward none, charity for all; of binding up the nation's wounds, and cherishing a just and lasting peace.

She spied Johnny Booth in the balcony above the President. She hadn't paid much attention to the guests and was startled to see him there. His eyes were feverishly dark in his pallid face. How had he gotten his ticket? Through the senator father of his inamorata, Bessie Hale? And why? The whole theatrical community knew he would be secesh to the end.

Hanna's father had paid an exorbitant ten dollars for a ticket to the inaugural ball at the Patent Office. She didn't ask whom he was escorting; some chippy, she assumed. He came home at eight the next morning, baggy-eyed and walking unsteadily, which he attributed to dancing too many polkas and schottisches and lancers.

Two weeks after the inaugural, Booth played a one-night benefit at Ford's for a fellow actor. Hanna attended. The theater was half full, probably because the papers had announced that the President and Mrs. Lincoln would be seeing
Faust
at Grover's.

Booth appeared in one of his famous roles, the villainous Pescara in
The Apostate.
Hanna found his performance flawed by fumbled lines, as though he lacked concentration or had imbibed. In the duel in the last act he misstepped. Booth's opponent raked the back of his hand with a stage dirk. He fell. The audience gasped.

Booth rose from his knee, threw a smile into the dark auditorium, and resumed the play with a bleeding hand. At the curtain the audience gave him an ovation. His smile seemed locked in place. Twice she saw his eye linger on the empty presidential box. She tried to get near him backstage to congratulate him, but the crush was so heavy, she soon gave up.

Washington's mood matched hers; the city felt a springtime exuberance. The major continued in unusually good spirits. He spent money freely on new clothes, frequented the city's gambling establishments, and once more promised Hanna better times to come, without explaining why. Then, with no warning, he failed to come home one night. She feared he'd been assaulted or killed in some deadfall.

Next morning she rushed to the War Department. A clerk said Major Siegel had sent a note yesterday, reporting that he was ill and would return to work when he recovered. She thanked the clerk and left. On her way out she passed a swaggering gentleman she recognized as Colonel Baker, the odious man whose secret police force terrorized anyone thought guilty of disloyalty.

That evening she ate alone. As she munched cornbread and absently ran her finger through crumbs on the plate, she struggled with the mystery of her father's absence. She washed the dishes in a tin tub using well water heated on the stove. As she finished and extinguished the lamp, she decided she'd report his disappearance to the Metropolitan Police tomorrow.

A spring wind out of the west battered the house as she prepared for bed. She was pulling her flannel gown over her head when a sound like a gunshot startled her. A door slammed by the wind? She'd latched the front and back doors. Her heart beat fast as she crept to the hall.

A lamp burned in the kitchen. A robber had broken in…

Ridiculous; robbers didn't announce themselves by lighting lamps. Barefoot, she stole to the kitchen door.

“Papa!”

“Hallo, Hanna.” He sat at the table, pulling off boots caked with mud. His felt hat and brown wool coat were thrown on the floor.

“Where have you been? I was so worried.”

“Took a little trip to Virginia.” He unfastened the clasp of a leather dispatch case. From it he took a brown envelope, which he opened. He riffled a stack of banknotes. “Fifteen hundred dollars. It was a quick sale.”

“Sale? A sale of what?”

“Plans. Plans of the White House.”

“You sold—? Papa, I don't understand.”

“What's to understand? I want to make money. The rebs have money to spend for information. I ain't got any idea why they wanted the plans, and I didn't ask.” He tossed the notes on the table. “Go buy yourself a new dress. And don't say nothing about this.”

Hanna slid into a chair opposite him. “Are you telling me that you betrayed the people you work for?”

“What do I owe them? They pay me dog's wages. This was business. Rougher than I expected, though. The rebs didn't want to pay me either, so they tricked me—tried to get rid of me. I had to fight my way out.”

“Against how many?”

“Five soldiers and a man with glasses and a mean look.” The wind overturned a porch chair with a crash. “That fellow you brought to the old house once, he was one of the soldiers.”

“Frederick?”

“I don't remember his name but I recognized him. Bad luck for him, he got in the way of a bullet. Casualty of war,” Siegel said with a shrug. “Any food left?”

Hanna dug her nails in her palms so she wouldn't become hysterical. “Papa, what happened to Frederick?”

“I shot him. What's it to you? Wasn't he just an acquaintance?” Siegel rummaged in a cupboard. “Goddam. All we got's soda crackers?”

“He was not just an acquaintance. He was my lover.”

Siegel dropped a cracker on the counter. “Since when?”

“Since last fall. I saw him nearly every day for a month. I never brought him home when you were here because he was spying for the other side. I don't know exactly what he was doing, just that he was in Washington secretly. We're going to be married when the war's over.”

The major seemed momentarily nonplussed. “Well, you got to change your plans.”

“Is he dead?” She ran to him, unable to keep her voice from rising. “Is Frederick dead?”

“I didn't stop to feel his pulse, but I think so. Hanna,
Liebchen
—”

She wrenched away. “Don't you touch me! Don't you lay a hand on me. You betrayed people who trust you and you killed the only man I ever cared about!”

He shouted at her, “Another damned reb! I shot him by accident. I didn't have no choice, I was saving myself. It's war, that's all. An act of war.”

“You're a murderer. A traitor and a murderer.”

Siegel grabbed her wrist, bent it. “I had about enough of this. I make money for us and all I get is a daughter screaming at me like a harpy.”

“Let go of me. You're going to pay for what you did. I'll report you to the authorities.”

His eyes bulged. He released her wrist. She almost fell but caught herself on the back of a chair.

“Don't talk like a crazy woman. You wouldn't report your own father.”

“You'll see.”

The major's expression seemed to shift rapidly from worry to anger and back to worry, as if he couldn't gauge her determination. Finally he made his judgment.

“Nah, Hanna, you won't. I'm sorry if you liked that reb, but I didn't know it. There's plenty other fish in the ocean. Go to bed. Cry yourself to sleep. You'll feel better tomorrow. We're fifteen hundred dollars richer. I got to find something to eat.”

 

Hanna locked the door to her room. She dressed, tied her cape over her shoulders, raised the window against the gale, and climbed out.

She lit a lantern and hitched up the buggy mare. The horse was fretful over turning out in the middle of a dark, windy night. Inevitably the major heard the mare whinny. He stomped to the porch as she took the reins to drive away.

The major had stripped to his breeches. A schnapps bottle dangled from his hand. “Where you going? Hanna, come back here. We'll talk.”

She whipped the mare cruelly and left her father standing in the wind, a pathetic, half-naked man with whom she no longer felt the slightest connection.

Because of constant telegraphic communication with the army in Virginia, the War Department kept its lamps burning all night. The sentry on duty refused her admission, saying Colonel Baker wouldn't arrive until six-thirty or seven. She pleaded. He relented and let her step into the reception hall, warning her not to move from there. She sat on one of the benches, staring into space. Upstairs, the telegraph receivers clicked like rattling bones.

 

Baker assigned two detectives to accompany her back to the house. One was named Sandstrom, the other Price. They had the look of men with a lot of hard experience and few scruples.

“He may have left by now,” Hanna said as they drove up Seventh Street. “I don't know whether he'd try to bluff it out at work. He has pretty strong nerve sometimes. He thinks I don't.”

Price said, “We'll take care of it.”

On the porch, Hanna stood aside as Price drew a gun from a holster under his coat. He eased the door open. “Stay here, miss.” He signaled the other detective to follow.

Three minutes later Price walked out shaking his head. “Not in there. Bed's unmade. Coffeepot's still warm on the stove.” His eyes shifted past her. “The barn.”

“And the privy,” Sandstrom said.

They stole toward the barn as a neighbor's hen ran through the yard, pecking at the ground. Price was reaching for the barn door to roll it back when Sandstrom said, “There he is.” The major came out of the privy with his galluses on his hips and a newspaper in hand.

“Siegel, you're under arrest,” Price called. The major spied Hanna in the blue shadow on the porch. She expected rage and was surprised by his unemotional stare. He dropped the paper and bolted for the rutted street.

Sandstrom caught him in three strides. The detective swung a fat leather bag on the end of a cord, smashed it against the back of the major's head. The major dropped to his knees, his scalp bleeding. Sandstrom hit him again, unnecessarily. Price held his arm.

“That's enough. Put the manacles on him.”

Lying on his side, the major whimpered, “I got to get dressed.”

Sandstrom sneered, “Right, you need to look your best for Old Capitol. Get up.”

The major staggered past Hanna without looking at her. She sat in a porch rocker where Frederick had rocked on sunny afternoons. She stared at her hands until the detectives came out of the house with her father. He looked clear-eyed and spruce in his best brown suit and checked waistcoat. An improvised bandage wrapped around his head lent him a piratical air. A short chain dangled between iron cuffs on his wrists.

Price said, “I think it's best that you don't go with us, Miss Siegel.”

“All right.”

Sandstrom pushed the major. “Wait, I got to say something.” Sandstrom started to object. Price's look silenced him. The major faced his daughter, shoulders back, eyes prideful despite his predicament.

“I never thought you'd do it. Not for a minute. I wronged you. For a lot of years I thought, ‘She's just a girl. Soft, weak like all the rest of them.' A mistake on my part. A grave mistake.” An odd, almost melancholy smile appeared.

“I raised a soldier after all.”

Sandstrom said, “March.”

Hanna heard the buggy leave but didn't watch. The noise faded behind the chatter of neighbor children bound down the road to school. The hen returned to peck at dirt. Hanna swept her hands up to her face and cried out, one long, shattered wail of pain and defeat.

THE UNION TRIUMPHANT!

Thanks to God, the Giver of Victory!

Hang Out Your Banners!

Rebel Arms, Artillery and
Property Surrendered.
Officers and Men Paroled
and Allowed to Return Home.

_________

War Department, Washington
April 9, 1865—9 o'clock
P.M
.

Margaret learned of the Palm Sunday surrender the next morning, April 10. An artillery battery near President's Park fired off salutes at daybreak. The noise woke her. She sat up and brushed hair off her forehead. Her eyes focused on the two large windows opposite the end of her bed. Both were cracked.

So it was over. On her last night with Lon, late March, he said it wouldn't be long. He'd been assigned to guard the President, who was traveling down to City Point on the steamer
River Queen
to confer with Grant in the war zone. Lincoln took his wife along, and his boy Tad.

She stared at the damaged windows with mingled disappointment and relief. She'd come to believe that the South's cause had probably been foredoomed even when the Carolina fire-eaters were celebrating the fall of Fort Sumter. Over the past months, introspection had destroyed her old, unthinking loyalty to the South and its peculiar institution that had brought on secession, and all the bloodletting that followed.

Booming guns proclaimed the victory throughout the day. Church bells tolled. Newsboys shouted that the government would again celebrate with great illuminations on public buildings.

Only last week, a similar orgy of patriotism had lit up the city when Petersburg and Richmond had fallen and Jeff Davis fled. Then, freedmen had danced on the lawn of the old Lee mansion in Alexandria. Republicans held a rally on the steps of the Patent Office. Speakers reviled the Confederate leaders, and the Military Academy where many of them had trained. A District supreme court judge demanded that “those fed and clothed and taught at public expense be the first to stretch rope.” Vice President Johnson, choleric but relatively sober, reviled the fugitive Davis until the mob screamed, “Hang him, hang him!” Margaret had read of it in the
Star
with a feeling of foreboding. Lincoln, who continued to promote a spirit of forgiveness, now had almost as many enemies in the radical wing of his party as he had once had in Richmond.

The Confederates had torched Richmond before they abandoned it. Margaret didn't know whether Cicero had survived the capital's apocalyptic end. She hoped he was safe and would come to his senses. Perhaps with the help of a pastor or a doctor he could drag himself out of his slough of hate. She harbored the hope even though she didn't think it likely to be realized.

Throughout Monday and Tuesday, carriages draped with flags and patriotic bunting rolled past the town house, the celebrants hollooing and waving wine and champagne bottles. Negroes congregated outside Secretary Seward's residence on the other side of the square. They serenaded the house with spirituals and “The Battle Cry of Freedom.” A carriage accident had broken Seward's arm and fractured his jaw; he was still convalescing.

Lincoln had returned from City Point and Richmond on Sunday, but there was no word from Lon. She assumed he was weighed down with duties. Before he left, he'd said he'd be with her the moment he could, but if he was in the city and she needed him, she was to leave a message with a man named Mapes who tended bar at the National. “Send it, or if it's urgent, take it yourself. You won't mind that respectable women are never seen in the place,” he said with a sardonic smile. For his sake too, she wanted the war over. Lon had a strange, almost dead look in his eyes of late. He walked and spoke like a man exhausted in body and spirit. His clothes bagged on him; he ate little.

In the wake of the surrender, Union soldiers streamed from the piers and across the bridges and were immediately offered liquor, handed laurel wreaths and flowers, hugged and kissed by grateful ladies of the town. Margaret went out on Wednesday and pushed through mobs of returning veterans. Oddly, many Confederate soldiers wandered the streets too, unmolested. On the Avenue, a band composed of four walking cadavers in rebel gray drummed and tootled “Dixie.” Listeners whistled and clapped and, when the band finished, pleaded with them to play it again.

Wednesday's
Star
said General Grant would arrive on Thursday to confer with the President. Thursday afternoon, after an excursion to buy some groceries, Margaret returned to Franklin Square on foot. From a half block away, she saw a stout Union soldier reading a book on the stoop of the town house. The man's blue blouse and trousers were filthy with mud. She hurried toward him, ready to send him packing.

He heard her coming, glanced up from the small leatherbound book stamped in gold. A New Testament. He held it in his left hand; the angry red line of a healed knife wound showed between his thumb and ragged cuff.

He scrambled up, whipped off his kepi in an obsequious way. His face was pale as rice paper, his eyes a curious yellow-brown behind small round spectacles. He could have been a church sexton or a country lawyer except for those eyes.

“Mrs. McKee? We've been waiting for you.”

“Excuse me?”

After swift looks up and down the street he whispered, “The name's Cridge, Humboldt Cridge. A gentleman you'll want to see is waiting inside. He posted me on lookout.”

Bewildered and alarmed, she climbed the stoop ahead of him. “Hold this, please.” She gave him the grocer's sack containing turnips, snap beans, and a small roast wrapped in brown paper.

“Happy to oblige.” He ran his eye over her figure in a way that made her flesh crawl. “Needn't use the key, madam, it's open.”

The downstairs hall smelled of closed rooms, dust, and a strong cigar. The cigar smoke came from the parlor. Before she stepped through the arch she knew who would be waiting.

“Cicero.”

He sat on her best sofa in a dirty blue uniform. Somehow he'd forced a boot onto his crippled left foot, a boot with a loose sole and a run-down heel he rested on an embroidered footstool. Bits of dried mud littered the delicate needlework. He looked thoroughly comfortable with a long cigar tilted up between his teeth. “Sister dear. Greetings.”

She tried to smile. “You certainly make free use of my houses.”

“But you installed new locks here. However, I came well equipped, as usual.” He jingled his ring of keys.

“Hardly a visit I expected,” she said, trying to cover her uneasiness.

He gestured with his cigar, leaving a smoke tracery in the air. “You've met my lieutenant, Mr. Cridge. Cridge, this is my sister, Margaret.”

“Yes, sir, we had a pleasant exchange outside.”

“We need a safe haven to conduct some business, Margaret. Ordinarily we wouldn't trouble you, but our regular meeting place, a boardinghouse on H Street, isn't available to us. The poor landlady is so devastated by the surrender, she's turned her boarders out and locked herself away to mourn.”

“How did you manage to get into the city?”

“There was absolutely no difficulty. The Signal Service, alas no longer operating in Richmond, maintained a warehouse of Yankee uniforms taken from dead prisoners. Cridge and I were welcomed here like conquering heroes. We won't trouble you for long, though we may need the premises again later tonight.”

“How can I deny my own brother?” she said, though she very much wanted to do just that. “Would either of you like to wash? Are you hungry?”

Cridge perked up but Cicero answered for both of them. “No. Make yourself comfortable, Cridge. I'll speak to my sister privately a moment.” Cicero gripped Margaret's elbow harder than was necessary, all but shoving her into the long, musty hall leading to the kitchen.

Angered, she wrenched away. “I don't understand why you're in Washington again, but I hope it has nothing to do with the work you did in Richmond. The war's over.”

“Not for me.”

“What are you—?”

“Kindly don't ask questions. Don't implicate yourself.” She remembered his unsubtle threats of before.
Anyone
could be sacrificed.

“We'll use your house while we must, then we'll disappear. If anyone inquires afterward, we were never here. You saw nothing, heard nothing.” He ran the index finger of his scarred hand over her wrist, a caress that made her shudder. “I have one last mission to complete.”

“For Davis?”

“The cowardly Mr. Davis packed his bag and ran while Richmond burned. This mission is mine.” He waited a moment. “The tyrant will be punished.”

“Tyrant?” she repeated, afraid that she understood him too well.

“I believe I would like to wash my hands. If you'd be kind enough to brew some tea for us, that would be excellent. We've had a long walk, and frankly I'm quite worn out from all the adulation I received from the populace.” His mouth twitched in a ghastly attempt at a smile.

“I'll brew the tea. I must say I don't care for your companion.”

“Cridge? He's a fine soldier. A Christian gentleman. I'm not sure which of us hates Lincoln the more.”

He patted her, as though she were a wayward child. “Bring the tea, then we'll sequester ourselves. One more visitor should arrive within the hour. I'll admit him. I think it's best if you remain upstairs. In fact I insist.”

She turned and walked stiffly to the kitchen.

Ten minutes later she carried a tray to the parlor. Cridge looked up from his Testament and smiled in a smarmy way. She thought of Lon, wished he'd walk in suddenly, then realized it would be catastrophic. He might fall on Cicero and tear him apart.

“Thank you kindly,” Cicero said from the window where he watched the square. “I'll pay you a more leisurely visit when the campaign's over.”
Campaign. Lieutenant. Mission.
My God, did he fancy himself some kind of soldier, fighting on like General Joe Johnston off in North Carolina?

Upstairs, in the lowering twilight, she sat with a book Lon had given her,
The New Eldorado of Wealth and Health
by T. Fowler Haines. The pages extolling California might as well have been printed in Russian. Her eyes blurred. Her palms sweated. She heard every tick of her bedroom clock.

Lamps burned all around the square when noises in the lower hall announced the visitor's arrival. She tiptoed to the stairs and craned around the newel post.

Cicero had limped to the hall to receive the caller. He clasped the hand of a well-dressed gentleman, then gestured him to the parlor. The visitor swept off his wide-brimmed hat. Margaret recognized the dark hair and profile of the actor, Booth. Both men disappeared. The parlor doors rolled shut.

She gazed through the cracked windowpane at blue and red fountains of fireworks splashing the sky. The explosions thudded; the colored lights flickered on her drawn face. After an hour, she saw three men in the street below. Two of them, wearing blue uniforms, shook hands with Booth before they went opposite ways. She counted to twenty and hurried downstairs.

The silver teapot was empty. Mud speckled the fine carpet. The reek of cigars lingered.
Cicero, don't do this. The war's over.

She saw his shiny bald head, his queer, sad eyes, his ruined body. Heard him say,
Not for me.

She knew what she had to do. She prayed that God would forgive her afterward.