The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  A yellow splash of sunlight beamed off her pursuer’s hat, lighting the corner of Fiona’s eye. A patient man. She made a show of slipping her hand into the crook of the concierge’s arm.

  “I believe the heat is taking command of me, sir,” Fiona said. “Please secure a carriage for me with due haste.”

  FIONA ASSUMED THAT the man in the hat was behind her somewhere as her carriage rumbled down North B Street behind Reservation No. 1. She took the extra handkerchief from her shoulder bag, bunched it up, and stuffed it into her purse. She murmured a brief prayer to herself, wondering how long it would take for Temple to meet her at the Castle.

  The grounds of the Smithsonian Castle were wreathed in late afternoon shadow, and the building’s nine towers rose like red sandstone circus tents above the Mall. Dr. Springer held that Renwick had designed the Castle to look like the finest British universities, but Fiona maintained that the effect was closer to a carnival. Stepping down from the carriage and giving the driver his pay, Fiona noticed that even here the stench of the Tiber snared the air around her. Its odor wasn’t as thick as it had been when her carriage crossed the canal from B Street to the Mall, but it remained powerful fierce.

  She anticipated seeing another carriage or a horse behind her when she stepped down to the Castle’s parklike grounds, but other than a few couples strolling nearby there was nobody. Her pursuer had disappeared again.

  A fire had churned through the upper story of the Castle months earlier, and its windows were boarded while workmen made repairs inside. A maze of small rooms were scattered about the Castle’s first floor, containing an art gallery, a lecture hall, a library, and a chemical laboratory.

  Even on warm days, the Castle’s architecture kept the building relatively cool. Fiona and Temple came here at least once a month for a walk and the exhibits; they had decided that it would always be their place to rendezvous if they became separated. And when they hatched the humbug to divert Mr. Pinkerton, they agreed that this would be the best place to meet at the end of the day.

  Fiona stepped inside, pirouetting in a slow circle as she scanned the rooms. Again, completely empty other than an employee by the front door. Washingtonians still preferred drink, music, and theater to their only museum. Leaving the main hallway to view the other rooms, she kept an eye on the windows as she passed them. Coming around a shelf of books in the back of the library, she waited by yet another window; moments later, the man in the white hat stepped into the window’s frame outside, just feet away from her, separated by glass and the Castle’s heavy walls. He was shaded now, and for the first time she could clearly see his face: he had a single thick eyebrow forming a line below his forehead, angular cheekbones, a scar across his jaw, and a plump bottom lip. He stared at her blankly and then stepped away from the window again, disappearing. Her breath quickened and she gripped her bag more tightly, trying to stave off panic.

  She left the library and entered the lecture hall at the far end of the Castle, leaving her shoulder bag by the doorway. There was a single gaslight burning on one of the walls; she extinguished it, then crossed back past the doorway and pressed herself against a wall. She assumed she would have just one chance and that the opportunity would last only seconds. She pulled the extra kerchief from the Willard and the vial of chloroform from her purse and waited. Several minutes later her pursuer entered the lecture hall and picked up her bag, standing just inside the doorway as his eyes adjusted to the darkness.

  A sweet smell wafted from the bottle as she uncorked it. She doused the handkerchief and held it away at arm’s length, stepping toward her pursuer.

  “A strong tower of defense,” she said, and the man spun around to face her, looming above her and holding her shoulder bag with both of his hands. She pressed the kerchief into his face, covering his nose and mouth. He shoved her hand away and knocked her to the floor, the planks slapping Fiona’s back and shoulders as she dropped.

  “What are you aiming to do with that?” he asked, grabbing her wrist and tearing the kerchief out of her hand, tossing it onto the floor behind him. “I’m no harm to you. I’m just meant to be following you.”

  “I don’t like to be followed.”

  “I’m also obliged to examine your bag.”

  He began rummaging through it.

  “Please do not shatter any of the bottles that I carry. They’re valuable,” Fiona said.

  “Don’t give a shat about your bottles, missy,” he said.

  He crouched down next to the bag and pulled out its contents, standing the vials on the floor and patting the inside of the bag.

  “I’m told you might have a book or a journal of some sort in here,” he said. “Where is it?”

  “I don’t have a journal in my bag.”

  He fished around inside the bag again until he was satisfied it was empty. Scooping up her bottles and other belongings, he poured them back into the bag and stood up.

  “I’m taking this with me,” he said. “You stay right there.”

  He turned to the door but had only taken a step before his knees wobbled. He leaned against the wall.

  “My mouth,” he said, pawing at his lips and jaw. “It’s burning.”

  “I’m afraid the chloroform scorched your skin. You’re a large man and I had to douse my kerchief. You’ll heal.”

  “Form-a-clore?”

  He tried to pull at his jaw with both hands, his arms so rubbery that his aim betrayed him and his arms crisscrossed on separate journeys. Fiona retrieved her kerchief from behind him and the chloroform bottle from her bag and prepared another dose. She held it over her pursuer’s nose and mouth again, this time pressing it into his face for several seconds.

  “The vapors won’t hurt you—they’ll just put you to sleep,” she said to him as his head began to flop. He slumped back into her arms, and she let him slip to the floor. She looked out the entrance; the hallway was still empty, and nothing that had happened in the abandoned lecture hall had stirred the guard’s interest. She returned to her pursuer, grabbing his ankles and straining to slide him across the wooden planking and into the dark gap between two rows of seats.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE BORDELLO

  It was good to be free of the diaries, Temple thought. A weight lifted. Augustus was looking after the journals’ transit into the alleys, and all that was left for the day was to check in at police headquarters and then meet Fiona at the Castle.

  Temple had walked the entire way from Tiber Island, and by the time he reached City Center, between Louisiana and E, he was thirsty and sweating. He could stop in for a drink at a saloon, but there was always beer in the precinct house. There were always drunks in there, too. Banning drink was Sergeant Miller’s monthly cause on E Street, but few of the officers had given it up.

  Two policemen were stationed outside the precinct house facing Louisiana and, doing as they were told, stood rigid and in the full uniform adopted when the force had been organized four years earlier: blue cavalry hats adorned with cap plates that read POLICE; navy blue waistcoats and, despite the heat, overcoats with brass buttons; gray or navy trousers; fat leather belts with buckles that read DC; Colt Navy 6’s tucked inside their belts and under their coats; billy clubs in the left or right hand but never tucked away; and badges pinned to their left breast pockets and secured with a small chain linked to a button on their overcoats.

  They were municipal toughs proud of their station and on patrol, really, to keep the District in order in a way that Stanton and the other federals found comfortable and reassuring. Insurrection and dissent had already split the Union. No reason to tolerate it in the District itself.

  Temple never wore the uniform and carried his badge inside his trouser pocket. Instead of a billy club he had his cane; he never carried a gun. Sergeant Miller let him follow his own course because Temple was one of the few who wasn’t a drunk and who kept regular hours. And because, when Temple first arrived in the District from New York, Tommy Driscoll, the
greatest detective of them all, had vouched for him.

  Outside the City Center precinct, and not far from where the two policemen stood, was a tall, thick whipping post where slaves were once shackled and disciplined, either for trying to escape or for merely looking to the sky when they should have been staring at the ground. Now riders used the post to hitch their horses.

  Temple would have marched right past the whipping post and into the precinct, but even at two blocks he recognized the saddle strapped atop an enormous, muscled stallion tied there. It was a rich brown saddle ornamented in silver with long stirrups meant to hoist a very large man. It was the same saddle he had sat upon when he raced away from the B&O mornings ago, but now atop a new horse equally as impressive and majestic as the one that had been shot out from beneath him.

  Lafayette Baker was visiting the precinct.

  A block away from City Center rose the First Presbyterian Church. Temple went inside, pulling himself along on a banister and hip-hopping—good leg, bad leg, good leg, bad leg—up the stairs to its cupola so that he could look down on the precinct. About an hour later, Baker emerged with Sergeant Miller in tow. The two men talked amiably, their heads nodding. Baker slipped an envelope into a pocket of Miller’s coat, patting it gently. Well, the sergeant might rail against drink, but he cared not a jot about hard-earned graft. Temple watched Baker mount his horse, and then he descended from the cupola.

  The precinct was no longer safe.

  MARY ANN HALL sat in a high-backed leather chair in a corner office, her left arm entwined in the arm of a lovely Negro girl in her twenties perched on the edge of the chair and naked except for a small diamond bracelet dangling from one of her ankles. Mary Ann tipped the glass of champagne in her hand toward Temple, offering him a sip. He smiled and shook his head.

  “You have faro debts with us, Detective McFadden. My dealers confide that you are twenty-five dollars in arrears. And you have thirty dollars in debts from hazard.”

  “The fashion now is for folks to call it craps, not hazard.”

  “I shall call the dice what I want to call the dice when they are rolled in my establishment.”

  “Your privilege indeed, Mary Ann. And I’m not here to argue with you.”

  “Nor are you here to pay your debts, I take it.”

  “I’m interested in one of your guests.”

  “The gentleman you scuffled with at the B&O?”

  “The same.”

  “He beats some of my women,” she said, stroking the girl’s cheek and tipping her champagne flute into her mouth. “If he never patronized us again, we wouldn’t miss him.”

  “It may get noisy upstairs.”

  “We shall not hear a thing, Detective.”

  THERE WERE HUNDREDS of registered and perfectly legal bawdy houses in the District, but few, Temple thought to himself as he limped up yet another flight of stairs, could rank themselves as bordellos. And even among the bordellos, none compared to Mary Ann’s. She’d been conducting business in her three-story brownstone for more than two decades, growing independent and wealthy due to grit (word was that she had sliced the throat of a competitor who opened an establishment next door on Maryland Avenue) and location (she was only two blocks away from the Capitol and just several more from the B&O).

  But in four short years the war had made Mary Ann far richer than she had ever been before, swelling the city’s size and the amount of cash and men flowing through and allowing her to become one of the District’s wealthiest women. She catered to Washington’s elite: generals, congressmen, foreign diplomats, Georgetown tobacco traders, actors, railroad executives, and New Yorkers on weekend sprees. She also took in large shipments of Piper-Heidsieck imported from France, charging guests $15 to uncork a bottle; fed her patrons fish, fowl, beef, and berries on gilt-edged porcelain; and maintained twenty parlor girls who were healthy, conversant, and nimble and wore little more than dressing gowns.

  My only books

  Were women’s looks,

  And folly’s all they’ve taught me.

  A gleaming silver spittoon rested on a marble-topped table at the foot of the staircase leading to the third floor, and Temple paused to listen. Mary Ann had rebuilt her walls thick, and other than fragments of laughter, conversation, and occasional moans as doors opened and closed, he could hear little beyond piano strains rising from the first-floor foyer. At the end of the second-floor hallway a small, naked woman balanced a pewter tray larded with food and drink on her shoulder as she knocked on one of the doors. Temple placed his cane on the first step leading upstairs and began climbing again.

  That matters had now tumbled into Hall House was his first drop of serendipity, he thought to himself. One of the sentries at City Center’s entrance said that Baker had boasted to Sergeant Miller that he was on his way to Hall House for amusement, inviting Miller to join him. Ever industrious, Miller declined. Baker’s choice relieved Temple. It was only a brief walk from City Center to Mary Ann’s, which meant he wouldn’t need a horse. More important, the madam was well disposed toward him.

  When reformers had indicted Mary Ann a year earlier as a “public nuisance,” Temple suggested she let slip the notion that some of her patrons’ names—including those of the police superintendent and leading politicians—might find their way into the Evening Star. The indictment disappeared, much to the disgust of Augustus and Fiona, who regarded bawdy houses as havens of sexual slavery. Temple reminded them that Mary Ann funded the escape of slaves, including several whom Augustus had helped, but they held firm. Temple didn’t tell them that Mary Ann was also one of his most reliable threads for District gossip.

  Halfway down the third-floor hallway, a lone Union soldier stood outside one of the doors.

  “I have a telegram for Mr. Baker,” Temple said to the soldier as he approached the door.

  The soldier held out his hand to receive the message, and Temple grabbed his wrist, pulling the man toward him. “My apologies,” he said, driving the rounded brass top of his cane into the corner of the soldier’s jaw. Temple stepped over the soldier’s body and turned the knob. No locked doors permitted in Hall House. One never knew when a gentleman, fired in the loins like an Arkie, might get out of hand.

  Temple stepped into a lavishly appointed suite. A red plush settee and matching chair occupied a corner, next to a mirror-fronted wardrobe that offered a reflection of a tall, tired man leaning on a cane. Against the far wall was a massive bed, adorned with several feather bolsters and a plump feather and shuck mattress. Oysters, coconut, turtle, beef, and red wine were untouched on a table at the foot of the bed.

  A girl, perhaps a teenager, was bent over the side of the bed, naked except for a single feather stuck inside a band around her forehead. Lafayette Baker’s pants were around his ankles and he was mounting the girl from behind.

  “She’s playing a squaw,” Baker said, not bothering to interrupt his thrusts. “First we take the Secesh, then the army takes the Injuns. One country.”

  Temple didn’t reply as he moved farther into the suite.

  “You’re not going to leave this room alive, I hope you know,” said Baker, backing away from the girl and hitching up his trousers. The rest of his uniform and the LeMat were in a pile on a chair.

  “You wear costumes and your adventuresses wear costumes,” said Temple. “When we met at the B&O, Baker, you were dressed like a gent, and now you’re wearing a uniform. Which is it?”

  “Very good work—you know my name and I still don’t know yours. We need to get to know each other better. If we don’t, I’ll have to force the information out of you.”

  “I think we need to converse alone. Your lady can go.”

  The girl pulled a blanket from the bed and wrapped it around herself, fleeing through the door. Baker eyed his gun on the chair.

  “I wouldn’t,” said Temple.

  “I won’t need a gun, gimp.”

  “Then sit down.”

  “No, I won’t be doing that,
either.”

  Baker looked even larger than he had at the B&O, and his shoulders and arms were knotted with muscles.

  “Why were there two groups of men at the B&O?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “My questions first.”

  “We had competing interests.”

  “Why?”

  “Have you read the diaries?”

  Temple didn’t answer.

  “Ah, I can see in your eyes you read them. You’re afeared. You know what you have and you can’t contain it.”

  “Why did you want them?”

  “My question. What’s your name?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be answering that,” Temple said.

  Baker charged Temple, yanking the oyster tray off the table at the foot of the bed. He had taken Temple’s cane in the forehead once before and this time he was prepared, holding the tray near his shoulder like a shield. Temple swiveled to the side on his good leg and grabbed Baker by the back of his trousers as he rushed past, thrusting him along. Baker’s head slammed into the mirror on the front of the wardrobe and the glass shattered.

  Shaking his head to clear it, Baker touched his forehead, where blood ran out of a gash. He picked a long shard of the broken mirror from the floor and rounded again, facing Temple.

  “I’ll slice you up now, fingerlicker.”

  He charged, and Temple brought his cane up into Baker’s crotch. Baker yelped, dropping the glass. But he swung an arm around Temple’s neck and hauled him down to the ground with him. He tightened his arm into a hammerlock. Temple began to choke, the air in his lungs trying to escape in clipped bursts. He slammed the butt of his palm twice into Baker’s throat, and Baker rolled to the side gagging.

  Temple hauled himself up and retrieved his cane. He grabbed Baker’s LeMat from the chair, pushed the uniform off the seat, and sat down.

  “There now. If you won’t sit down, Mr. Baker, I will,” Temple panted.