On Secret Service (5 page)

At Fourteenth Street, on the respectable north side of the Avenue, the hotel of the Willard brothers served meals to Washington's important people from daybreak till midnight. Between five p.m. dinner and the late supper hour, Willard's dining room offered a sumptuous tea. When Hanna had a night off in early February, she met Margaret there at half past seven.

As always, Hanna's friend was stylishly dressed. Hanna's own poor outfit shamed her. Over a heavily mended dress she wore her father's sack coat for warmth. A cloth workman's cap lay in her lap. Her one concession to femininity was black net stockings.

“I'm thrilled you have a part in
Twelfth Night
,” Margaret said. “May I come see it?”

“If you care to watch unpaid actors do Shakespeare in a damp church basement, certainly.”

“Viola's the young girl who impersonates the page Cesario, isn't she?”

“Yes. At least I have the figure for it.”

“Stop. You mustn't think so poorly of yourself all the time.” Hanna responded with a shrug and a rueful roll of her blue eyes. Margaret passed a gaudy handbill across the teacups and petits fours. “Here's a bit of theater for you. Father sent it in a letter yesterday.”

The handbill from Baltimore's Halliday Street Theater announced:
Mr. J. W. BOOTH, Scion of the Famed Family of Players, In His Startling & Lifelike Personation of the Bard's Immortal Villain RICHARD III. Three Nights ONLY! Positively NO Extension!

“Have you seen him?” Margaret asked.

“No, only heard about him. I don't believe he's appeared in Washington. He seems to prefer Charleston and the Southern circuit.”

“A rebel at heart? I like him already. Father said he's a better actor than his brother, Edwin, or the head of the family, Junius, when he was alive. ‘Fire, dash, and a touch of strangeness'—that's how Father described young Mr. Booth. Do you suppose he'll ever play locally?”

Hanna's tea had grown cold. She sipped the last. “I don't imagine he will unless someone opens a decent theater. An actor of his stature wouldn't play the music halls.”

Hanna was familiar with those establishments. She worked several nights a week at the Canterbury, a music hall that presented a bill of beefy dancing girls, jugglers, performing dogs, and blackface comics who told salacious stories. Though the work was hard, it helped Hanna and her father scrape by and allowed her an occasional nonpaying role with an amateur company. Hanna served ten-cent drinks and fended off loutish men who thought every girl in the place raised her skirts for a price. What an irony. Thus far in her life Hanna had experienced three short flings and gotten no satisfaction, physical or emotional, from any of them. Sometimes she doubted her capacity to love a decent man.

Margaret's mind was still on Booth. “Father says he's devilishly handsome, and has a reputation for chasing anything in skirts.”

“I'd love to meet him and judge his talent. Onstage, you understand.”

They both laughed. Margaret laid the handbill aside. “Since I never read the papers, can you tell me when our new President will arrive?”

“Later this month. He's making a long ceremonial journey by train from Illinois. He can't get here too soon. I hope he'll clear out all the Southern sympathizers.”

Margaret's smile was devilish. “Fie, Hanna. Do you want me driven out? I like Washington.”

“Of course I don't want that. We're friends. Sometimes I forget where your heart lies.”

“Not with either side, really. I hate the whole messy quarrel. I wish it would go away.”

Gravely Hanna said, “It won't until it's resolved.”

“But which way?”

“The right way, I trust.” Hanna averted her gaze, aware of annoyance in Margaret's vivid dark eyes. Being too forthright about abolition had ruined several friendships for her. She didn't want this relationship destroyed.

The waiter delivered the bill on a silver tray. Hanna put her hand in a coat pocket. She didn't own a proper handbag.

“Please let me pay my share this time.”

“You may contribute when some manager recruits a stock company to support a visiting star and you're engaged for a featured part, but not before. Oh, I forgot to ask about your father. Is there any news?”

“This afternoon he went to see the commandant of the Georgetown militia company. They advertised for an experienced drillmaster.”

“I'm always curious about why he left the Austrian Army.”

“He wasn't advancing fast enough, that's all.”

But that was not all. The story was sordid; Hanna guarded the secret. It was true that Anton Siegel, a fiercely ambitious man, hated the slow advancement and meager officer's pay in Austria. As commander of his regiment he was in a position to fiddle with the books, and to squeeze Army suppliers for extra money under the table. One of them had turned him in.

The major never for a moment expressed remorse. Instead, furious because he was cashiered, he packed up his daughter and bought steerage tickets out of Hamburg. Thus ended Hanna's days in Vienna. All that was left of those times was a sad scrapbook of memories. Hot coffee with milk in one of the cafés on Stephansplatz. A luscious torte in the Sacher Garden. Quiet relaxation with a book under a leafy tree in the Stadtpark…

Father and daughter had reached Washington with no prospects and almost no funds. They nearly starved for three months, until Hanna found work. They weren't doing much better now.

“Papa's dreadfully melancholy these days,” Hanna told Margaret as they stepped from the hotel to the Avenue's brick sidewalk. “He's drinking heavily again. I pray he had some success in Georgetown.”

“Well, I'll gladly second that if it will take the strain out of your face.” Margaret gave a tip to the doorman, who whistled a horse-drawn cab from the corner. “Send me a note when you're free again. We must ride in the country as soon as this dismal winter's over.”

“Yes, we must,” Hanna agreed. They embraced and Margaret left in the hansom, waving.

Hanna walked rapidly to Tenth Street and turned north. It was a cold, cloudless evening, the stars sparkling like ice chips. She faced a long trek to the district called Nigger Hill—she never uttered the offensive name—because paying for transportation was out of the question.

On her way up Tenth she avoided a drunkard vomiting over everything within three feet of him; heard a volley of shots; saw two men brawling bare-fisted in front of one of Washington's many “boardinghouses.” Several daughters of Eve hung from ground-floor windows, cheering the fighters on with foulmouthed enthusiasm. Prostitution was a necessary industry in a town filled with single and married lawmakers away from home.

The Siegels rented a scabrous little shotgun house, three tiny rooms, at the end of a dirt lane in a seedy section of town called the Northern Liberties. To reach it Hanna passed a neat cottage owned by a black man named Spence, a porter on the Baltimore & Ohio. Through a parlor window she saw Mr. Spence romping with his two little daughters. Hanna and her father had never shared that kind of affection and companionship. As a child roaming Vienna by herself, she'd hardened herself against wanting it, though occasionally she could be bitterly jealous of people such as Margaret or Mr. Spence who were part of a loving family.

Hanna let herself in. The door was never locked. The neighbors knew the major kept a side arm and a saber close by at all times.

The small front room, her bedroom, was dark. They couldn't afford to waste candles. The next room belonged to her father. There he slept, and stored his moldering uniforms, his Clausewitz and other books on the art of war. It too was dark. A light showed in the back room. She moved slowly toward the feeble yellow glow.

The major slouched at the deal table. The top was scarred and filthy despite Hanna's efforts to keep it clean. A brick propped up a broken leg.

Siegel's cropped blond hair was turning white. His cheekbones were broad, his jaw strong. A long dueling scar from his cadet days marked his left cheek under his eye. He wore old uniform trousers, maroon with a gray stripe, but nothing else. His braces hung below his hips.

He heard her come in. He acknowledged her by extending his hand until the palm was two inches above the flame of the candle. Neither his hand nor his muscular arm showed a tremor. He was drunk; an empty schnapps bottle stood between his bare feet. A cockroach crawled around the bottle.

“Papa?”

Siegel withdrew his hand. With a smile he showed his palm, unhurt. Hanna took off her workman's cap.

“What happened in Georgetown, Papa?”

Because his English was imperfect they spoke in German. “Another got there before me.” He groped under the chair, found the bottle empty, cursed, and threw it against the wall. It bounced and rolled.

“A stupid scarecrow half my age. Served in some rural militia company in Pennsylvania. But of course—of course!—he was an American. My experience counted for nothing. Also, behind my back, someone said I sounded too foreign. I hate this filthy democracy. I hate the mudsills who think they're equal to people of breeding. They aren't fit to clean up my shit.”

Hanna wanted to weep. “Won't you please put on a shirt?”

“I'm not cold. Go to bed.” When she hesitated, he beat the table with his fist. “Go to bed.” His shout sent the roach scuttling.

“I will if you won't drink anymore.”

“Tend to your own affairs. Close your door and give me some peace.”

Hanna returned to the front room and shut the door. Before she undressed she went out to the reeking privy where she sat with her drawers around her knees. How she wished she could give her father greater support, greater comfort. But of course he wouldn't have it from her; she was a woman. She remembered his drunken rages after her mother had died bearing her. “Liesl failed me. Your mother failed me. I wanted a son who could be a
soldier.
” Hanna carried a deep wound of guilt and insufficiency, from hearing that so many times.

A year ago, in a secondhand bin at Shillington's popular bookshop, she'd discovered an 1844 novel,
Fanny, the Female Pirate Captain
, authored by some forgotten hack. The heroine was a buccaneer whose lover declared, “By my soul, thou shouldst have been a man.”

Thou shouldst have been a man.
She never forgot the line. In the story, it was ardent praise. Her father would scream it as accusation. She should have been a man. Sometimes she desperately wanted to be. Could that be why none of her short and clumsy love affairs had satisfied her?

She trudged back to the house and crawled in bed in her undergarments. The house was frigid; she couldn't buy stove wood until the Canterbury paid her for the week. Every night before sleeping, it was her habit to whisper all of Viola's speeches, but tonight she was too upset. Through the door she heard Siegel's mumbled litany of profanity. He cursed his luck, the Georgetown militia, American democracy—and he probably cursed her as well. She pulled a tattered blanket over her head and gave herself up to silent tears.

Sledge worked his gold toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “God damn it, how long are they going to argue in there?” Lon couldn't help a twinge of guilt. His preacher father had been fierce about the sanctity of the Lord's name.

An Army officer, Captain John Pope, stood outside the suite to which Sledge referred. Lon and Sledge guarded the hallway between the suite and the staircase of the Jones House in Harrisburg. Captain Pope watched them with unconcealed suspicion.

“Maybe forever,” Lon said. “Colonel Lamon doesn't like the boss, that's plain.”

Sledge bent his knee and rested his boot heel against the pale wallpaper, where it left a mark. Lon stretched and yawned, using the move to edge closer to the suite. Under the gas jets he and Sledge looked pasty and worn. They'd been up since daybreak Thursday, when they left Baltimore for Philadelphia. They'd been ordered there to help protect Lincoln, his wife, sons, friends, and political cronies on the official train.

Because of death threats, Pinkerton wanted to spirit Mr. Lincoln to Washington immediately. Lincoln refused to cancel his Friday schedule. He'd raised a flag at Independence Hall to display the new star for Kansas and celebrate Washington's birthday. Following that he'd made a quick rail trip to Trenton, then came on to Harrisburg to meet with the Pennsylvania legislature and Governor Curtin. Lincoln had been summoned upstairs from the hotel banquet room at six o'clock, at Pinkerton's insistence. It was now half past eight.

Contentious voices were raised behind the double doors. Nicolay, the new President's secretary, was in there. Norman Judd, a stout Illinois politician, was in there, along with two more officers charged with guarding the President-elect. The argument had gone on since last night, when Frederick Seward had arrived at the Continental Hotel in Philadelphia with a letter of warning.

“I say we should implement the plan.” That was Pinkerton, refusing to yield. “We had rumors of an assassination attempt as early as a month ago. Last night we had independent confirmation, sent from Colonel Stone's Baltimore agents to General Scott, thence to Senator Seward, who dispatched his son with the letter. The evidence is strong, sir. I urge you to follow my plan.”

Lamon interrupted. “No, I object. We still aren't sure.”

“Ward, hold on.” That was Lincoln. His was a thin, light voice that occasionally rose up high, most unpleasantly. Ward Hill Lamon was a lawyer, Lincoln's closest friend among all those riding the special train to Washington. “Nobody wants to see the President-elect sneak into town like a thief in the night. I don't. Since the election I've become familiar with death threats. I try to ignore them. But Seward and Scott are not alarmists. I do admit that both of them, and you, Mr. Pinkerton, could be reacting to the same set of rumors. Trouble is, we just don't know.”

“I don't believe in a Baltimore plot and I never have,” Lamon said.

“But the Baltimore gangs are notoriously lawless.” That was old white-haired Colonel Sumner, regular Army.

“Doesn't matter. These so-called detectives are just promoting themselves with phantom conspiracies.”

Pinkerton said, “Lamon, that's an insult. If duels were still allowed, I'd call you out. I've been undercover in Baltimore for a month, together with five of my best operatives. We were invited by Mr. Felton, president of the Philadelphia, Wilmington, and Baltimore, because of threats against his line. I've gained the confidence of leaders of the Southern faction, especially that barber at Barnum's Hotel, Ferrandini. He's part of a secret group called the Knights of Liberty. I have men planted inside the organization. Do you know what Ferrandini told me after I convinced him I was a secesh from Georgia? ‘One thing will save the South. Mr. Lincoln's corpse.'”

“My, my,” Lincoln said with a weary amusement. “Hotheaded, those Latins.”

“The dago ought to be shot.” That was the other colonel, Ellsworth. He commanded a regiment of Zouave militia.

Pinkerton's conviction strengthened his voice. “Ferrandini's an ignorant lowlife, but I take him seriously. In Italy he was allied with the man who almost killed Napoleon the Third. Furthermore, gentlemen, you don't know this slavery crowd as I do. No crime's too heinous to preserve their ungodly system. Hang every adult male in the South and we'd all be better off.”

“Every one? That's a pretty uncharitable view, Mr. Pinkerton,” Lincoln said.

“Nevertheless I hold to it, sir. I loathe and distrust the lot of them. The hour's late. We have a one-car special waiting, to connect with the eleven p.m. sleeper out of Philadelphia. My agent Mrs. Warne has reserved space in the last car. You will travel as her invalid brother. Mr. Felton's posted nearly two hundred men along the line, ready to signal if the track is sabotaged.” It was the same plan Pinkerton had proposed last night. The President-elect had seen hundreds of thousands of well-wishers on his long rail journey from Springfield. The crowds were friendly. Baltimore was the feared exception.

Lincoln sighed. “All right. We can't slice this bacon any thinner. If ridicule is the only thing deterring us, I'm disposed to go along with the plan.” Lamon started to object again. “No, that's it, Ward. I'll change out of this funeral suit.”

“I have a hat and traveling shawl ready,” Pinkerton said.

Lamon burst into the hall and strode away with a glare at the detectives. He was an imposing fellow, with a dragoon mustache and a self-important air. Lincoln liked his singing and banjo playing, especially his rendition of “The Blue Tail Fly.” Lamon wore two concealed revolvers at all times.

Pinkerton rushed into the hall, flushed with excitement. He herded Sledge and Lon toward the stairs, away from the too curious Captain Pope.

“We'll be on our way in half an hour. No other rail traffic will be allowed out of town until morning. Men are standing by to cut the telegraph wires. By six a.m. I'll have the President safely at Willard's Hotel. The rest of the party will travel through Baltimore tomorrow as planned. You two will accompany them.”

With his white tie undone, Lincoln poked his head out the door. He was a peculiar-looking man, almost ugly. He had sad, sunken eyes, straggly chin whiskers, and a rough, dark complexion. Woefully unpresidential, Lon thought.

“Pinkerton, I won't go until Mrs. Lincoln's told.”

“I'll inform her personally, sir.”

Lincoln disappeared. Lon and Sledge exchanged looks as the boss marched to an adjoining suite, knocked, entered. Lon liked to be charitable; his father had taught him it was a virtue. But a day in the company of Lincoln's haughty and sharp-tongued wife had overcome the training. They heard Mary Lincoln's hysterical cry:

“I won't have it. I won't, I won't!”

“Madam, he has agreed to go. He will be safe, I swear to you.”

“And who are you? A tradesman. Nobody! I demand that Colonel Lamon accompany you to protect my husband.”

“Acts like she's First Lady already,” Sledge whispered. Captain Pope was rigid with embarrassment. They heard Pinkerton pleading:

“For pity's sake, madam, keep your voice down. I accede to your request. Colonel Lamon may come with us.”

“And Robert.” Bob was the Lincolns' oldest son, eighteen.

“No. Only Lamon.” Mrs. Lincoln's shrill reply was lost under the voice of her son Bob trying to soothe her.

Lon wondered about Baltimore. It lacked a central depot, and an old ordinance prohibited locomotives from running through the central city. Passengers from the north had to travel a mile and a quarter from Calvert Street Station to catch the Baltimore & Ohio for Washington. Individual cars were pulled over horse-car tracks, but it had been planned for Lincoln to ride in an open carriage. In Baltimore, Pinkerton had been told that a group of conspirators would create a diversion, drawing off the police, while a smaller group closed in to shoot or stab Lincoln. The danger was heightened because of the police chief's open support of the Confederacy. Lon didn't sleep well that night.

 

“Must be a thousand out there,” Sledge said.

“Two or three times that,” Lon said as the passenger car creaked along the tracks. Lincoln was safe. An early-morning telegraph had brought word that “Plums,” Pinkerton, had arrived in Washington with his charge, “Nuts.” Lon laughed at the silly code names. Sledge said, “Careful, the boss probably made 'em up himself.”

They'd just left Calvert Street with a mob trailing them. In the station the mob was relatively controlled. Their ringleaders organized three cheers for the Confederacy, three for its new president, Davis, and three long groans for Lincoln. At this Mary Lincoln collapsed on a plush seat and wailed. Bob, the Harvard student, vainly tried to comfort and quiet her.

A plodding team drew the car through the gray winter afternoon. Occasional spatters of rain streaked the windows, some of which were open because of the mild temperature. Men ran along both sides of the car, spitting, cursing, yelling.

“Kill the gorilla!”

“That's his wife in there!”

“Dirty whore!”

“Mama, what's that mean?” The Lincolns' youngest son, Thomas, called Tad, pressed against his mother's side, round-eyed. Mary Lincoln's powder had run down her face, melted by tears. She reminded Lon of a demented clown. She was a short, stout woman who might have been attractive once, in her days as a Kentucky belle.

A rock sailed in, ricocheting off a spittoon. “Close the blasted windows,” young Colonel Ellsworth yelled, and proceeded to lower the first one. Old Colonel Sumner and John Nicolay sprang to help. The windows went down, bang, bang, and then the curtains were drawn, but not before men spat tobacco on several panes and smeared one with something brown that looked like feces.

Lon and Sledge stood at the car's rear door. The Army officers guarded the front. Lon's hand clamped tight on the Colt .31 in his pocket. Tad and his older brother Willie, ten, had pestered Lon incessantly till he showed it to them. They were handsome boys, but they were spoiled and undisciplined.

Someone beat on the car with a stick. Others joined in. Mrs. Lincoln pulled Tad and Willie against her bosom, clutching their heads and heaving out deep sobs. Colonel Sumner shouted at the man driving the horses from the front platform, “How much further?”

“Another two blocks.”

“Go faster, Mrs. Lincoln's in grave distress.”

Lon felt the car sway as the mob pushed the sides. Someone broke a window with a rock; glass fell out beneath the curtain. The chanting went on.

“Whore, whore!”

“He ain't gonna live to be president!”

“My God, they're madmen,” Lon whispered, never even thinking of his father's disapproval.

Suddenly, through a small window in the door, Lon saw two men with mean faces and soiled clothes climb over the chain and mount the steps to the platform. A third stood on the rear coupler, ready to climb over the railing. Lon tore the door open, jumped outside.

The first man on the steps swung a billy. Lon jerked his head back, banging his skull painfully on the car wall. Sledge crowded past him, aimed his revolver at the man with the billy. The man immediately shoved his partner aside and leaped off the train.

Lon meanwhile was dealing with the man standing on the coupler. The man slashed out with a butcher knife, tearing Lon's trouser leg and raking his calf. Enraged, Lon pistol-whipped the man's face. The man fell off the coupler, his nose spouting blood. He lay across the tracks with his head at an odd angle.

On the steps, the last man watched Sledge extend his arm, point the Remington, and ask, “What about you, you son of a bitch?” The man jumped off like the first.

“Fucking cowards.” Sledge holstered his piece. The car pulled away from the crowd surrounding the man on the tracks. “I think you broke his damn neck. Congratulations.” Lon's guilt lessened when the fallen man was lifted to his feet, dazed but upright. “Better get inside and take care of that leg.”

The flesh wound was more bloody than painful, but it seriously wounded Lon's purse. He couldn't afford to replace a pair of trousers right away. He bandaged the wound with cloth the porter found. He was still shaken from the fight.

The Pinkertons and the Army men kept the mob at bay until the car reached the other depot, where Mrs. Lincoln gradually calmed down. Rain fell steadily. As they crossed the border out of Maryland, Bob Lincoln led everyone in singing “The Star Spangled Banner.”

Lon didn't sing with enthusiasm. Baltimore was a stinging lesson. The Southern partisans were a hundred times more violent and dangerous than Pinkerton had said. They had to be whipped, broken, prevented at all costs from spreading their murderous anarchy. He thought his father would have been proud of his resolve.