The Lincoln Conspiracy

by Timothy L. O'Brien

  “Of course you want stock,” the owner said, holding out his hand to Surratt, who stepped forward tentatively to take it.

  In a corner of the room beneath a gaslight that cast an amber shroud around him, a slender, graceful man uncurled like a cat from a high-backed, tufted leather chair and began to stand up. He paused, frustrated, because his left leg, broken when he’d leapt to the stage after killing Lincoln, still couldn’t bear all of his weight.

  He forced himself upright and reached back down to a tray by the chair to pull a cigar up to his mouth, chuckling and leaning against a wall to continue observing Surratt’s negotiation. He had pale skin that gleamed in the room’s half-light, large, sensual eyes, and a moustache and wavy hair the color of India ink. He waited until the throbbing in his leg subsided, then gestured with his cigar toward the middle of the room.

  “I suppose, then, that I should request stock as well, Maestro,” John Wilkes Booth said. “I’d like something that gives me a deeper taste, a true financial partnership that reflects all that we’ve accomplished together.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE DOSSIER

  Temple had used his time earlier in the evening to read through the second dossier that Stanton had given him at his home. Stanton’s spies had assembled it and probably added information that Wood had beaten out of his prisoners. It offered the barest description of the mansion at 212 Madison, along with a floor plan, a roster of how many guards were around it and when they changed shifts, and an outline of the comings and goings about the house.

  Of more interest was the skeletal biography of the owner, a man referred to in telegrams and correspondence as Maestro but with nothing more known about his real identity or past. It was unclear which banks he used or who his lawyers were. Tailors, food, furniture, and other deliveries came to the house, but guests rarely came and its owner never ventured out. He was believed to exercise control of a network of railroads and real estate, but his holdings couldn’t be traced. He communicated freely with Thomas Scott, though their means of communication couldn’t be discerned. He had a handicap, the result of an unknown accident: he had a prosthetic wooden arm capped with a steel hook to replace the one he’d lost.

  Temple had circled this last point, read through the dossier another time, then torn it apart and stuffed it inside a sack of offal near the kitchen door at the back of the hotel. After watching Surratt leave Union Square and head north to Madison, he instructed the carriage driver he had hired to proceed to Lexington instead and head north to the luxury homes and rolling, open spaces around 35th Street. There was a small carriage house behind 212 Madison, and at this hour there would only be a single guard inside it.

  He waited in the shadow of a small elm tree for about an hour until the guard came outside to piss. Temple recognized the guard as he stepped beneath a small, ornate gaslight shaped like the cowcatcher of a locomotive. He had been one of the men at the B&O the day that Stump Tigani got his throat opened up. He had stood over Temple with a metal bar and ordered him to give up the diaries. Temple hobbled over to the guard before he had finished emptying himself and dropped his cane on the ground.

  “Remember me?” Temple asked.

  The guard still had his hand at the opening of his trousers, and he jumped when Temple spoke.

  “Do you?” Temple asked before taking the guard’s head in his hands and twisting it like a top until the man’s neck snapped. It sounded like a handful of dice being crushed by a wagon wheel. The guard was so startled, he didn’t make a sound, other than a slight whimper right before his eyes went lifeless.

  Temple pulled a set of keys off the guard, made his way through the carriage house, and let himself in through the back door of the mansion. The only noise was the whirring of some sort of mechanical device in the walls and the sound of three men speaking upstairs.

  Temple climbed a huge circular staircase, pressing his back against the wall and trying to stay in the shadows that fell between the gas lamps above him. His bad leg throbbed, and he leaned on his cane when he reached the top of the stairs.

  He was staring down a double-width hallway lined with artwork. The gaslight burned brighter in the hallway, and he recognized several of the pieces: “The New Jerusalem,” by George Inness; “Peace Consoles Mankind and Brings Abundance,” by Eugene Delacroix; “A Vision of the Last Judgment,” by William Blake; three panels—each twenty feet wide—from John Banvard’s “Mississippi River Panorama”; two marble busts of Caesar; a bronze mermaid; and a nine-foot bronze of Hephaestus, fashioned so that the Greek god’s hammer rose a foot above his head and nearly touched the ceiling.

  The floor planking gleamed and reflected the gas lamps as buttery smudges. Halfway down the hall a tongue of light spilled out from beneath two oversized mahogany doors, each of them fronted with elaborate scrollwork depicting cotton bushes with branches bending beneath the weight of bolls cast from thumb-sized pearls.

  Temple crept to the edge of the doorway and waited by the statue of Hephaestus, listening. He leaned on the anvil tilting toward the god’s knees and could hear the sounds of three men speaking again on the other side of the doors.

  “You will not be given stock or any more cash, Mr. Surratt,” said one of the men beyond the doors, his voice deep, steady, and Southern, and only loud enough to register that what he was saying was both an order and a warning, not a request. “You will have protection, and as long as you keep yourself removed and in Europe, you will be permitted to stay alive. I assume now that our discussion is over?”

  “It is over,” said Surratt. “Will you arrange transportation for me to the docks?”

  “Certainly. Fetch one of my men in the carriage house to take you.”

  Temple stepped behind Hephaestus when Surratt yanked open one of the doors and burst through, barely concealing his anger. He scurried past Temple, swearing under his breath, and then rushed down the stairs.

  Temple peered around the edge of the door.

  One of the men inside was tall, thin, and blond, immaculately dressed, with a hook protruding from the cuff of his shirt. The other man stood in the shadows in a corner of the room, the tip of a cigar burning red in his hand.

  From the shadows the other man declared—in a voice that Temple found theatrical—that he didn’t give a damn what Surratt had settled for; he himself wanted railroad stock.

  The blond man rose from a chair the size of a throne and stood by an ornate walnut desk, tapping it with the tip of his hook.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t partner with anyone in that fashion,” he said. “I am a sole proprietor in every meaningful way. Moreover, you were a functionary in the assassination, not an architect.”

  The man in the shadows snarled at this, his voice rising to an operatic pitch.

  “I am the Brutus of this nation! I spared our republic the rule of a dictator. I am no mere functionary. I will be praised through the ages.”

  He walked with a pronounced limp toward the blond man, his face now aglow from a thick candle that burned atop the desk. He placed his cigar in an oyster-shell ashtray on the desk and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together, grinding bits of tobacco leaf into the smoke rising up from the butt.

  The man was small and unusually handsome, with round, coal-black eyes, black hair that fell around his face in lazy curls, and a carefully pomaded moustache.

  Temple gasped, loudly enough that the two men swiveled from the desk to stare back at him in the doorway.

  “Well, Mr. Booth, this is not Mr. Surratt in our doorway,” the blond man said, amused. “It would appear we have a visitor.”

  JOHN WILKES BOOTH smiled.

  Temple slammed the other door open and hobbled into the drawing room, his cane pounding the floor with each step he took toward the men.

  “After all that we have evaded, someone decides to send a gimp after our worthy selves, Maestro,” Booth said, snickering.

  “Beware, Mr. Booth. I believe we are at last face-to-face with T
emple McFadden, and he is not a man to be trifled with. I have had astounding reports about him from Washington. I suggest we conclude our business posthaste.”

  Temple swept a porcelain urn from a table and hurled it at both men. It sailed over the desk and crashed against the floor by the fireplace.

  “Excellent, excellent,” Maestro said, rapping his hook against the desktop. “A display of passion and anger. A man wedded to the moment. But I have grown weary of your annoyances. Take him, Edgar.”

  Another bodyguard had entered the room behind Temple and pressed the muzzle of a derringer into the side of his neck. It’s cold, Temple thought to himself. The end of a gun is cold.

  “I don’t want him disposed of yet,” Maestro said. “I have questions for him.”

  Booth considered Temple for a moment, then turned his attention back to Maestro.

  “I am supposed to be cold and in the grave, sir,” Booth said. “All I need to do is turn myself over to Stanton’s people and explain your involvement. Your machinations and your use of me to carry them out will come to naught.”

  Booth waved his hand around the room. “All of this will be taken from you,” he continued. “Unless I am given a portion of your empire. I aim to be a man with stock.”

  “Of course. Your reasoning is sound,” Maestro said. “I would like your stay with us these past few weeks to end on more cordial grounds than this.”

  “Then it would appear that honor is restored and we have grounds for an accommodation.”

  “We most certainly do.”

  Maestro came around the desk to shake Booth’s hand. As he neared Booth, Maestro swung his arm in a sweeping, upward arc across the actor’s belly, drawing a thick red ribbon of blood that spurted from a gash in his vest and drained the color from his face. Booth looked startled, as if a flawless line reading had been overlooked, and pitched forward onto the desk. Maestro wrapped his hand in Booth’s hair and turned his face toward him.

  “You are neither Brutus nor an architect,” Maestro said. “You are a functionary and a fool.”

  Booth slipped from the desk and fell to the floor in a pile.

  Maestro took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the blood from the metal hook protruding from his right arm. He bent toward Booth, waiting to see the life escape from his eyes, but was interrupted by a shriek from the other side of the room.

  John Surratt stood in the doorway, eyes wide at the sight of Booth dying on the floor.

  Edgar flinched when Surratt yelled, and the end of his gun slipped away from Temple’s neck. Temple grabbed Edgar’s wrist and turned it upside down and inward, squeezing Edgar’s trigger finger for him. The bullet tore out the bodyguard’s throat.

  Surratt fled down the hallway, screaming.

  “IT IS A SHAME for you that derringers house only a single round, otherwise you’d have me at bay,” Maestro said. “But they are compact and elegant pistols. All of my guards have them. We gave one to Booth.”

  “So he could murder the president for you.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I entered through the carriage house.”

  “And my guard there?”

  “Dead.”

  “I have others here who can easily replace him.”

  “No, in truth you don’t.”

  “The men on my front door?”

  “Down. Tommy Driscoll slumbered both of them for me. Edgar was your last.”

  “Mr. McFadden, you are an amazement. You must come work for me. I can pay you twenty-five thousand dollars a year.”

  “Gold is good in its place, but living, brave, patriotic men are better than gold.”

  “You needn’t cite Mr. Lincoln’s bromides anymore. The man is dead.”

  “You arranged his murder. You’re going back to the District in cuffs, and you’re going to be hanged.”

  “Lincoln had but a marginal sense of enlightened progress; he couldn’t grasp the totality of it. He fancied a mighty railway west to unite the coasts, and he even put the government’s coffers behind the effort, but he somehow found it necessary to stand in the way of my interests in the Southern railroads. There is a new industrial order in this country, and it is establishing itself despite government intrusions. To the extent that the government becomes an obstacle it will be brought to heel or forced aside.”

  “Who are you?”

  “I am capital.”

  Temple rested his cane against a chair, and Maestro leaned back against his desk, holding out his artificial arm and rolling up the sleeve so that Temple could see the extent of it.

  “I was an orphan when a cotton gin near Memphis snared my arm; I like to think of it as my industrial baptism. You were a disabled orphan as well. I was born in Florence and you in Dublin. Now we are making our lives here. We have more intersections than you care to take into account, and it qualifies us as secret sharers.”

  “Prattle. I share nothing with you. Baker, Stanton, Scott, Pinkerton—do any of them know you?”

  “No one knows me. I don’t exist. They have only intimations of me,” he said. “Baker arranged Booth’s escape from the Garrett farm, but in his distressing thick-headedness he failed to empty Booth’s pockets before putting his clothing on a suitable double.”

  “They also didn’t want anyone examining the corpse too closely. The coloring around the bullet holes wouldn’t have been right. People would have suspected a substitute.”

  “We bribed the doctor and dentist who went aboard the Montauk to identify Booth’s body, and we thought that once Baker had resecured the diary, we would be done with this matter. But then you happened upon the B&O that morning and introduced chaos.”

  “What of Thomas Scott?”

  “His interests and mine align perfectly, though he knows me only as a conduit for investments in the Pennsylvania Railroad. I am partnered with Warren Delano in the opium trade, but he doesn’t know who I am. I have similar relationships with the Morgans in banking and Eliphalet Remington’s sons in arms and munitions.”

  Maestro walked to the fireplace and pulled a long black poker from a brass canister sitting near the hearth.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said to Temple.

  “You’re going back to Washington with me.”

  “I have absolutely no intention of doing that.”

  Maestro lunged around the desk at Temple, brandishing the poker. He swung once; the tip missed Temple but sliced across the candle on top of the desk, sending it end over end into the curtains. They burst into flame, and the face of a bronze cherub on a table next to the curtains glowed orange.

  “I don’t care if any of it burns,” Maestro said. “There is always more to be had.”

  The flames raced up the curtain and spread in tongues across the ceiling. Maestro came at Temple again with the poker, and Temple blocked it with his cane. With a second thrust he flipped the poker entirely out of Maestro’s hand.

  Maestro dove at Temple and punctured the top of his hand with the hook. Temple screamed in pain and dropped his cane, snapping Maestro’s head back as he grabbed his neck. The pair tumbled out of the room and into the hallway. Black smoke was pouring out of the drawing room.

  Maestro was gagging at the end of Temple’s arm and swung wildly with his hook, trying to impale Temple’s arm or shoulder. They collapsed together on the floor, each of them kicking and punching as the flames spread around them.

  Temple freed himself and lurched up, but Maestro kicked at his bad leg and knocked him back to the ground, pouncing on him and slashing at his face with his hook. Temple rolled his head to the side and the hook caught the plank where his cheek had been.

  Temple brought his left knee up and pressed his foot against Maestro’s chest, launching him backward into a rail that ran around the opening of the stairwell. The rail cracked and Maestro tilted over the shaft, spinning his arms furiously to keep his balance. Temple managed to get to his feet and charged Maestro, the pair of them plunging over the rail and down
the stairs into the basement.

  They both lay crumpled and exhausted on the floor below. Blood pooled near Maestro’s ankle, where a piece of wood had punctured it.

  “I won’t go to a prison!” Maestro screamed as they unwound themselves from one another.

  “Then you’ll burn here,” Temple said, slamming his right hand against Maestro’s jaw.

  A rafter split above them and fell from the ceiling, pinning one of Maestro’s legs to the floor. He batted at it with his arms, trapped.

  Temple got to his feet and scrambled on his hands and knees up the staircase and into the front hall. He pulled his jacket over his head to protect himself from the flames, then stopped.

  Shouts rang up from the basement. Or just more rafters snapping?

  He turned back, but the entire entrance to the stairwell behind him was engulfed in flames and impassable. Hephaestus loomed along the wall, in his element, before the floor gave way beneath the statue and it disappeared.

  Temple hobbled through the smoke and flames in the hallway and out the front door, past the dead bodyguards, and into a small courtyard that fronted on Madison, where he collapsed.

  Flames were bursting from every window on the first and second floors by the time the initial group of firemen arrived. Shortly after that, the entire side of the mansion collapsed.

  TOMMY DRISCOLL WAS KNEELING over him, wrapping a bandage around his head and mopping his face with a wet cloth, when Temple’s vision first came back into focus. The pounding in his head began to subside. Tommy had arrived at the mansion about fifteen minutes before the fire started, waiting outside for Temple, as Temple had asked him to do, regardless of what he saw or heard happening inside. After Temple spilled from the front door and collapsed, Tommy got him onto the back of a wagon before the press or the rest of the police arrived. He had flashed his badge to clear the way so that he could get Temple out.