The Violent Peace (2 page)

THE clock over towards the Capitol had finished striking the hour of ten when John Wilkes Booth stepped softly into Box Seven of Ford's Theatre and approached the back of the horse hair rocker in which the President sat. The derringer was already in his hand and he leveled it to point at a spot midway between his victim's left ear and the top of his spine. As a burst of laughter rose from the audience, the assassin squeezed the trigger of the tiny gun.

“It's done, let's go.”

The English voice, speaking in a whisper, dragged the eyes of three men away from the stage. They were seated, close to the Englishman, near the rear of the theatre within easy reach of the exit doors. Whilst the remainder of the audience continued to chortle at the comic dialogue spoken by the on-stage actors, this quartet glanced furtively up at the shadowy movements in Box Seven. Then they rose and filed towards the exit. “Revenge for the South!” Booth shouted hysterically, then whirled and raced from the box. The actors faltered in their lines and, as a piercing scream rose from the State Box, hundreds of startled playgoers swung around to look for the cause of the interruption.

“Water!”

“The President's been shot!”

Another woman screamed, and slumped from her seat in a dead faint.

“Is he dead?”

“Please, get us some water!”

“Is he dead?”

The majority of people in the theatre seemed to have been struck dumb, paralyzed by the shooting, So that the pleas and questions yelled by a few sounded much like dramatic lines spoken before an awed audience.

“It was Booth. I saw him running with a gun!”

“Stop him! Stop that man!”

Suddenly, the mass numbness was over. The entire theatre was filled with wails, screams and shouts, each counter-acting another that nothing could be heard clearly. Then hysteria forced its victims into movement and there was a scrambling rush for the doors.

The four men who had been first to leave stood in  the theatre lobby, smoking newly-lit cigarettes, in the calm manner of innocent, playgoers who had stepped out for a breath of fresh air. Their appearance had captured the fleeting attention of the police and army captains standing by the carriages, but the officers had immediately lost interest when they realized the opening doors did not signal the end of the performance.

But suddenly the panicked mass exodus exploded in the lobby. An elderly man, his face as white as a sheet, was urged along at the head of the throng.

“The President!” he screamed at the four men. “The President's been shot!”

As the bringer of the news rushed out on to the street, repeating the same two phrases, his voice rising in pitch with every word, the four found themselves caught up in the crowd pressing in pursuit.

“He's not dead!” a woman wailed. “He can't be dead.”

While policemen and soldiers struggled to assimilate the awful announcement, the crowd of sightseers surged forward from the opposite sidewalk.

“Murderer!” a man shouted. “Assassin! Stop the assassin!”

“Mommy, mommy!” a small girl wailed from deep within the pressing crowd, “I wanna go home.”

“Who did it?” a woman demanded to know, tears streaming down her face. “Who was it?”

“It's the Johnnie Rebs!” a man shouted in response. “They've got Lincoln.”

The four men who had left the theatre early found themselves thrust out into the street. They, and many more, were shoved viciously aside as police and military personnel struggled to get inside the seething lobby.

The Englishman, a head taller than the others, launched a spiteful kick at the legs of a soldier who had levered him aside with a rifle stock. The soldier was prevented from falling by the mass of the people, but when he whirled to locate his attacker, the man was gone, he and his three companions elbowing their way towards the lights of Elmer's Barroom.

“In the head, goddamnit!” a fuming old timer bellowed. “Right in the back of the head. Blood everywhere.”

“He's not dead! I saw him when they lifted him. He was breathing.”

A hundred hopeful faces turned towards the giver of this news. On the edge of the crowd, a young man with only one arm stared at the milling people with a fiery gaze. “I'm glad the nigger lover's dead,” he muttered.

Fear leapt to his face and he stepped quickly backwards as the Englishman struggled clear of the crowd. The Englishman smiled at the one-armed youngster. “Amen to that, old son,” he said softly, and turned to look for his companions.

As the three forced themselves clear, an old black man stretched his arms high into the air. “They shot him!” he cried. “It was all for nothing.”

His fat wife dropped to her knees in the street and clasped her hands together. “He can't die. God won't let him die!”

The Englishman and his three followers stepped up on to the sidewalk in front of the bar and looked across the heads of struggling crowds, swelling to enormous proportions as news-hungry people came running from every direction.

“Guards!” a distraught doctor yelled. “Guards - clear the passage!”

Soldiers and civilians linked arms in two lines, enforcing a corridor through the press of sightseers.

“God Almighty, get him to the White House!” a man implored as four artillerymen appeared, the limp form of the President slung between them.

“He'd die on the way,” a second doctor responded, waving aside the captain who stepped forward to jerk open the door of the state carriage.

The captain swung around and slapped the Colt from his holster, waving it in the faces of the shocked people on the other side of the carriage.

“Out of the way, you sons of bitches!” he demanded.

The crowd parted and the captain led the soldiers with their burden, followed by the doctors, out on to Tenth Street. A woman stood in an open doorway, craning to see what was happening in front of the theatre.

“That house!” one of the doctors instructed squeezing between the soldiers and the crowd, then angling towards the opposite sidewalk. “He must be allowed to rest.”

The woman swallowed hard and fell back before the advance of the doctor and the wan-faced men behind him. President Lincoln was carried into the house in which he would die.

“He looks bad,” the Englishman said with mock  gravity, keeping his voice low as a silence settled over the crowd.

“Reckon he'll get worse?” one of his companions asked in the same tone.

“Let's go and drink to it,” another suggested.

A third pushed open the doors and they filed into the fetid warmth of the bar. It was a little more crowded than when Booth had left to shoot the President. The dapper man with a damp shoulder was still the sole customer standing at the bar, having decided to risk another bourbon. The drunk continued to snore beneath the table, clutching at the empty bottle as though it was a life-line, The poker game had ended, the cards in disarray on the table, the players having switched from beer to whiskey to try to calm shattered nerves. But now several other tables were occupied, by men in pairs, trios and quartets: all of them drinking in quiet contemplation.

“Terrible thing,” the dapper man muttered, sipping his whiskey, his face heavy with sadness in vivid contrast to his earlier good humor.

“That's a great man, one hell of a great man.”

The bartender looked anxiously up from his glass-washing chore towards the newcomers.

“Hey, Elmer,” the Englishman called. “Service, please.”

He led the others to the bar and they all bellied up to it, hooking boot heels over the brass rail. The dapper man looked at them with a melancholy expression and nodded. He drew no, response.

“Four whiskeys,” the Englishman requested.

He was a tall, slim man in his late twenties, with handsome, evenly-tanned features out of which blue eyes looked with an air of superior self confidence. He was dressed in a well-cut suit with a gold watch chain slung across his velvet vest. There was something military in the neatness of his dress and his upright bearing.

“Coming right up, Mr. Carstairs,” Elmer replied with a hint of deference, quickly setting out four shot glasses and tilting a bottle over them.

“You hear what happened over at the theatre, mister?”

The old man who had been hit so badly by the tragedy at the theatre realized he was being addressed and turned to look at the newcomer standing next to him. “We heard the shouting,” he answered, and gestured with a motion of his head. “Then some gentlemen came in and told us about it. Terrible thing.”

“Here you are, Jack,” Carstairs said, sliding one of the brimming glasses along the bartop.

Jack Logan was twenty-two, short and fat with a round, unintelligent face. His suit was too small and looked like a hand-me-down. As he surveyed the man in the cape beside him, he pulled absently at the crotch of his tight-fitting pants, trying to relieve the pressure.

“Here's to the capture of the bastard that did it to Lincoln.”

The speaker, who lifted his glass and tipped down the drink at a swallow, was named Edward Binns. He was a foot shorter than Carstairs, but his build was broader. His age was the same as the obvious leader of the group, but his face was more ravaged by the elements and his meaty hands - showing traces of grimed-in dirt - suggested he was a manual worker. Although his suit fitted him well, he nonetheless seemed to be uncomfortable in it, as if more used to less formal attire. He had a shock of black hair on which a derby was balanced precariously.

“Right,” the fourth member of the group grunted.

Like Carstairs and Binns, Frank Monahan was in his late twenties, but that was the only similarity he shared with them. He was short and wiry, with a thin face that had been altered from its natural line by a broken nose. His mean eyes and the determined set of his sharp jawline suggested a man well able to defend himself against anybody who mistook his size as a sign of weakness. In contrast to the others, he wore a black shirt with a bootlace tie and a sheepskin jacket and his pants were Levis with twin holsters tied down to his thighs. A matched pair of Colt revolvers fitted snugly into the holsters.

“They reckon as how it was an actor guy who done it,” Binns announced, gesturing pointedly with empty glass.

Elmer began to pour him a new drink.

“Fellow named Booth,” Carstairs augmented, savoring the taste of the whiskey.

Elmer stopped pouring. The man in the cape and the four at the poker table all stared at the Englishman in wide-eyed surprise.

“John Wilkes Booth shot the President?" the sullen-faced Elmer gasped.

“In the head,” Logan replied.

Carstairs nodded in confirmation, still the centre of attention. “That's right, Elmer. He was seen, Escaped through a side door into an alley after firing a derringer at Mr. Lincoln.”

The man in the cape sensed a pair of eyes burning into the side of his face and turned slowly to find the bartender staring at him with blatant distrust. He tried to ignore it; and lifted his glass.

“That's sure how it happened, Elmer,” Binns said into the stilt tense silence filling the bar. “Rumor that there's a conspiracy to kill all the top men in the Government tonight. Host of Johnnie Rebs reckons as how Appomattox didn't finish the war - not really.”

Binns seemed about to continue, but caught sight of Elmer's suddenly venomous stare. His own eyes swiveled to discover the object of the barman's loathing and settled upon the smartly dressed old man. In their turn, Logan, Monahan and Carstairs became aware of the mounting unease in their midst and turned their heads to find the cause. Beyond the group at the bar counter, the other patrons felt the tension and craned their necks to see the old man's discomfort as the silence forced him to look up.

“Something you boys want?” he asked nervously, blinking as he surveyed the faces of the men around him.

The barman's suspicion had expanded into hatred. The others were confused as they alternated their attention between Elmer and the old man.

“You ever hear a man speak who sounded, more Deep South than him, Bill?” Elmer asked, flicking his eyes momentarily towards Carstairs.

“Can't say that I have, Elmer,” the Englishman allowed, puzzled. “Why do you ask old son?”

“Ed talked about a conspiracy,” Elmer answered with heavy menace. “Now, just a few minutes before Mr. Lincoln got shot, John Wilkes Booth was in this very bar, drinking. Right alongside this here southerner.”

Confusion was replaced by intrigued interest on the faces of the watchers. The old man set down his glass on the bartop and a sudden spasm in his hand toppled it and set it rolling. The sound it made was like a rumble of thunder in the menacing stillness.

Carstairs reached out a well-manicured hand and caught the glass with cool ease as it dropped over the edge. The old man made a small move to push himself away from the bar, but the Englishman's voice halted him.

“What are you trying to tell us, Elmer?” he asked evenly, putting down the glass.

Elmer picked it up, dunked it in a pail of water beneath the bar and began to wipe it with a cloth. “I'm telling it like it was,” he answered, refusing to unlock the stare fixed upon the old man's fear-clouded eyes. “This here southerner suddenly goes outta his way to point out what time it is. Then Booth goes outta my place like he bad a mighty important thing he had to do. But on the way, he kinda bumps into this here southerner—”