Unholy Fire (8 page)

My life was one of complete subterfuge and concealment. Every Saturday night I would leave the house by the backstairs dressed in an old slouch hat, a patched workman's coat, and denim overalls. By then, I had made contact with an army quartermaster named Spangler, who operated his private affairs out of a row house in the notorious area known as Swampoodle. Among the range of army goods he peddled, Spangler had crate upon crate of laudanum for sale.

I paid him four dollars a bottle, which was a small fraction of the money I had saved during all the months I had spent in the hospital. My monthly pay as a lieutenant, including the bonus I received for my wound, was just over a hundred dollars. Laudanum was my only personal indulgence.

Spangler had no idea that I was an army officer. If I had truly cared about my responsibilities as an investigator for the provost marshal general, I could have had him put in prison for twenty years. He was a far bigger thief than anyone I had investigated up to that time. Consumed with self-loathing every time I transacted business with him, I would ride back to Mrs. Warden's in a hansom, and carefully conceal the bottles behind the hay bales in the small livery stable that faced onto the alley behind her house.

Of course, I wondered whether Val Burdette knew of my condition. I also wondered why he had salvaged me from all the human detritus at the field hospital. Did some fellow officer of mine bring me to his attention? Did a surgeon of his acquaintance hear of my case and mention it to him?

He seemed to have the prescient ability to divine almost everything; but after getting me started in my job, I rarely saw him. He was in charge of prosecuting major fraud cases involving military procurement contracts, and the work often kept him traveling for days and even weeks at a time.

Being emotionally cauterized, it never occurred to me that he might also be concealing mysteries of his own until I overheard Tubshawe talking with one of the lawyers in the next office about him one day. I knew it was Val they were talking about since Harold had come to refer to him as Colonel Vagrant, due to the perpetually sad state of his uniform.

“I tell you he was absent without leave for more than a week,” said the other lawyer. “At first, General Patrick thought he might be the victim of foul play from someone he'd prosecuted. But then he just turned up again at his office. Everyone is talking about it.”

“He should be court-martialed,” pronounced Tubshawe, his cherubic face contorted in anger. “The man is a disgrace to the legal profession.”

“And to the army,” added the other lawyer.

They noticed me staring at them and went back to their work.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

One stormy night in mid-September, I was having supper with the other boarders when Captain Spellman came rushing in from his staff job at the War Office, his uniform cape streaming water.

“A great battle is taking place in Maryland,” he announced excitedly. “The armies have collided near some little village called Sharpsburg.”

Mr. Massey was still an unrequited believer in General McClellan, and he loudly proclaimed to us that this time Little Mac would completely annihilate Lee's invading force.

“Isn't it grand?” he said, with a triumphant smile. “This battle will surely end the war.”

“In that case, Captain Spellman, your wife will certainly be glad to have you back in Boston, won't she?” asked one of the civil servants, with a leering glance at Mrs. Massey.

The captain's smile disappeared as his eyes moved in her direction, too.

“Well, I won't be discharged right away, of course,” he said lamely.

At the asylum the following morning, the same air of excitement and anticipation filled the corridors. Every time another military van arrived from the War Office, a new rumor would sweep through the building. It was reported at around nine that Lee had been killed and Jackson was now in command of the Rebel army. Our boys had won a crushing victory, was the next one, and General McClellan was on his way back to Washington to claim the presidency by popular acclamation.

Considering the number of times our army had been defeated, the pendulum of emotion was capable of swinging from euphoria to panic in a heartbeat. As the day wore on, the tenor of the rumors began to change. By noon a report swept the corridors that General Hooker had been killed, and that the army was in flight toward Washington again. Tubshawe, who had never seen active service, left the asylum at around two o'clock to warn his family of the possible need to evacuate the city.

I happened to be looking out the window of my office late that afternoon when I heard the sound of galloping horses. As I watched, a troop of cavalry came pounding up to the entrance portico of our wing. In their wake came a large black brougham drawn by four white horses.

As if they had been waiting at the door, three white-jacketed orderlies came rushing out as the carriage pulled to a stop. The coach door opened, and two soldiers in the brougham gently lowered a sedan chair to the men waiting on the ground. Strapped to the chair was an inert form wrapped in hospital blankets. The orderlies carried the sedan chair inside. A minute or so later, I heard them coming down the hall toward the convalescent suites at the end of our corridor. Silence returned and I thought nothing further about it.

When I arrived for work the next morning, unofficial reports from General McClellan's headquarters near Sharpsburg, Maryland, had finally reached Washington. The general was claiming a great victory. Based on similar inflated press accounts in the past, I remained skeptical.

“As I recall John Pope claimed victory last month,” I said to Harold Tubshawe. He had taken the precaution that day to wear a large pistol on his belt, as if the Rebels might storm the asylum at any moment.

“There is no way those barefoot vagabonds can defeat us again,” said Tubshawe fiercely.

That morning, General Patrick, the provost marshal general, had called an emergency meeting to address the rash of desertions that had recently beset the army. The desertion rate usually increased fivefold or more just before a major battle, particularly in the units that had a high percentage of bounty men. All of us were ordered to attend the meeting.

Ordinarily, I would already have consumed at least two cups of laudanum by then and been ready to go for several hours without replenishment. However, while shaving that morning, I had discovered to my chagrin that the new bottle I had brought from the livery stable was mislabeled and contained only castor oil. By then it was too late to replace it with one of the others.

Upon arriving at work, I went directly to the washroom down the hall from my office. Unfortunately, an officer was washing at the sink, and I left without gaining access to the bottle hidden there.

General Patrick's staff meeting dragged on all morning. At around eleven I excused myself and made another foray to the washroom. This time a cleaning attendant was mopping the floor, and I was forced to abandon that attempt as well. When the meeting finally adjourned for lunch, I rushed back to the washroom only to find a group of men attending to their ablutions. In my increasingly demented state, I was almost convinced that some maniacal force was at work.

It was two o'clock when the staff meeting finally ended, and I had another chance to try for the laudanum. By then my uniform was soaked with sweat, and I could feel the onset of another bout of the tremors coming on. I hastened down the dark corridor to the washroom. There was no noise behind the door, and I silently prayed that the room would be empty.

I swung open the heavy door. There was no one at the dripping sinks, and I went straight to my hiding place. Without pause, I removed the bottle from its crevice. Normally, I would have transferred it to a cup and then headed for one of the thunderboxes. In my haste I just removed the cork, tilted it to my mouth, and swallowed. When the grain alcohol began to sear my throat, I paused for a few seconds, and then tipped the bottle again.

“Is there enough for everyone?” came a loud voice behind me. It so startled me that I almost dropped the bottle as I turned around. A tall man was standing in front of the door to one of the thunderboxes.

He was wearing a purple silk bathrobe that had gilt dragons sewn all over it. Beneath the robe he wore white silk pajamas. His shoulders were resting on a pair of padded wooden crutches, and I could see that his right leg was wrapped in linen bandages. I immediately knew that he must have come from one of the convalescent suites farther down the hall and was therefore a senior officer.

“What is your pleasure?” he asked pleasantly.

Handling the crutches as if they were new to him, he came slowly forward until we were four feet apart. The man was as tall as I, but with a more strapping build. Clean shaven, he appeared to be about forty, and had thick, flaxen hair, a sharp pointed nose, and a dimpled chin.

“I'm sorry?” I responded.

He must have read the guilty look on my flushed and sweaty face.

“What are you drinking, Lieutenant?” he asked, his voice taking on a harder edge.

“Medicine,” I said.

“Medicine,” he repeated, with a lazy-eyed grin, “from a bottle that says disinfectant?”

“May I ask whom I am addressing?” I responded with spirit, having learned during my last months in the hospital how to avoid direct questions about my drug use.

“You're addressing someone who outranks you,” he said, with a sudden haughtiness. His eyes were a remarkable purplish blue, but they were anything but soft.

“You are out of uniform, sir,” I said next.

“I am out of uniform after sustaining an honorable wound, Lieutenant. But, of course, you have probably never gotten close enough to a battlefield to see one,” he said, his voice now filled with contempt. “What are you … a clerk? No, even worse … you're probably an army lawyer from down the hall. Am I right?”

“I've seen my share of honorable wounds,” I said.

“Really,” he came back, “and where would that have been?”

“At Ball's Bluff.”

He held my eyes for a moment, as if trying to decide whether or not I was a liar.

“What is your name, Lieutenant?”

“John McKittredge,” I said.

He nodded, once.

“I am currently residing in the third suite down the hall, Lieutenant McKittredge,” he said. “Report to me there at five o'clock this evening.”

“Yes, sir,” I said, and turned to leave.

“Leave the bottle on the sink,” he added.

I went back to my office, and sat down at my desk to await my fate. I had managed to finish only a few swallows of laudanum before he interrupted me, but it was enough for the temperature of my skin to cool and for the shaking in my hands to stop. I asked Tubshawe if he knew who was occupying the convalescent suites.

“I heard General Martindale was recuperating in there last week for his piles,” he said.

For the next hour, I tried to think through all the possibilities of what could happen to me. There was no doubt the man was a senior officer. Since he had been wounded, he was obviously in a field command. Based on my own experience with line officers, he would probably have little or no tolerance for a clerk who was addicted to opium, and it would be easy to confirm what the bottle contained. If I was also accused of stealing it from a military hospital, a long term in a military prison could be in store. At around four I felt the tremors begin again and wandered over to the hospital wing of the asylum.

It was at exactly five o'clock when I arrived at the door of the third convalescent suite. There were two sentries posted on either side of it. A burly major with the shoulder straps of a general staff officer was smoking a cigar in the hallway in front of the door. He looked up as I approached.

In all my twenty-one years of life, he was the first human being I had ever taken an active dislike to from the first moment I saw him. Perhaps it was the arrogance in his eyes or the barely controlled hostility in his manner. I had had my fill of staff officers in the first year of the war, but it was more than that.

“What do you want?” he demanded curtly. The man had a well-sculpted face with wavy black hair. His unnaturally long eyelashes gave his eyes a feminine cast. His lips were shaped in a Cupid's bow.

“I was told to be here at five o'clock,” I said.

He stared at me for several seconds and said, “This corridor is off-limits, Lieutenant. Now turn around and get moving.”

“I was told to be here at five o'clock,” I repeated.

The major stepped close enough for me to smell the cigar on his breath. He was three or four inches shorter than me but much broader in the chest and arms. His uniform looked freshly pressed, and the tan leather gauntlets tucked behind his sword belt appeared new.

Looking over his shoulder, I saw that one of the sentries by the door was staring at me. As I watched his eyes widened as if he was trying to communicate something. The next thing I felt was the major's hand on my wrist. Like a coiled spring, he spun me around, pinning my right arm behind my back, and then shoving me forward. At the same time, he extended his boot in front of mine, causing me to trip and pitch headlong to the floor.

“You're not very good at following orders, are you?” he said.

I regained my feet and slowly began walking back toward him, only wanting to wipe the arrogance off his face. He must have seen the murderous look in my eyes.

“You keep coming and I'll have you arrested, Lieutenant.”

“I was ordered to be here at five o'clock, Major. That's how good I am' at following orders,” I said, halting in front of him.

I saw the first hint of doubt come into his eyes.

“Who ordered you to be here?” he said.

“A blond-headed man on crutches wearing a bathrobe with gold dragons all over it,” I said.

He stepped backward as if I had pushed him.