The Lincoln Conspiracy
Page 34
“You could have done something besides fireworks to let me know you were back in New York, Temple,” Tommy said, propping his friend’s head in his lap in the back of the wagon. “You’re lucky you survived that.”
“Got any water to drink?”
“Nope. Whiskey.”
“Give me some.”
Tommy poured it down his throat, but Temple spat it back up.
“How many bodies, Tommy? How many bodies on Madison Avenue?”
“The entire mansion is burned down, and there’s no way to identify anybody in there. There were three bodies outside.”
“Any bodies where the drawing room was?”
“Two, but so deep-roasted, no one will ever know who they are.”
“Any in the basement? With a hook?”
“With what?”
“A hook. An artificial limb.”
“No, Temple, no hooks, from what I heard. Not a single one.”
“How are my boots?”
“What of ’em?”
“How do they look?”
“They’re all torn up. There are shards of glass in ’em.”
“Dammit.”
“Go back to sleep now.”
Tommy took Temple to the St. Nicholas Hotel and left him in a room overlooking Broadway. In the lobby, Tommy sent a telegram to Fiona to inform her that Temple was alive and well but needed rest.
• • •
ONCE THE POUNDING in his head subsided, Temple sat at a desk in his room and began to write a letter to Fiona, explaining the last days to her.
Dearest Fiona:
I have become what I had loathed.
He crumpled the letter into a ball and swept it off the desk.
Later that day, he tried again.
Dearest Fiona:
I have encountered Surratt, Booth, and Maestro at a mansion here on Madison Avenue. Surratt has escaped, but I believe that Booth and Maestro are dead.
Nail is dead, too, Temple thought. Maestro could well be alive. Were the timbers in the mansion cracking in the flames or was I being laughed at?
He crumpled the letter again and dropped it to the floor.
My darling Fiona:
I am unsure now of what we have accomplished. I am so sorry for involving you and Augustus in all of this. I am undeserving of you.
He tore this sheet of paper in half, left it on the desk, and went to his window to stare at the throngs on the street below him.
THE NEXT DAY he went to the front desk of the St. Nicholas and paid for a telegram.
To: Fiona McFadden, Willard Hotel, Washington
From: Temple McFadden, St. Nicholas Hotel, New York
I’m coming home.
Then he walked out into the city to buy a new pair of boots.
On the train for Baltimore later that day, he watched porters scramble on the platform for luggage, and then he settled back into his seat as the locomotive left the station, wheel upon rail, wheel upon rail, wheel upon rail.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The literature and online resources surrounding Abraham Lincoln, his assassination, and the social, political, and economic upheavals of the Civil War era are vast and I can’t cite everything that I read or dipped into online and off as I did research for this novel. But in addition to acknowledging digital and print records at the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Museum, the Historical Society of Washington, D.C., the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and The New York Times, I’m particularly indebted to the following books: Mary Todd Lincoln by Jean H. Baker; Alley Life in Washington by James Borchert; The Age of Lincoln by Orville Vernon Burton; The Irish in America by Michael Coffey and Terry Golway; Lincoln by David Herbert Donald; The Lincolns by Daniel Mark Epstein; The Secret War for the Union by Edwin C. Fishel; Reconstruction by Eric Foner; Freedom Rising by Ernest B. Furgurson; Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin; American Brutus by Michael W. Kauffman; Behind the Scenes by Elizabeth Keckley; The American Irish by Kevin Kenny; Throes of Democracy by Walter A. McDougall; A Nation of Counterfeiters by Stephen Mihm; Police in Urban America, 1860–1920 by Eric H. Monkkonen; Washington Through Two Centuries by Joseph R. Passonneau; Old Washington, D.C. by Robert Reed; The Grand Review by Georg R. Sheets; The Trial edited by Edward Steers, Jr.; Book of Poisons by Serita Stevens and Anne Bannon; Lincoln by Gore Vidal.
A special thanks to Lieutenant Nicholas Breul of the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C., who gave me a primer on the history of policing in Washington and also gave me a copy of an 1893 history of the department, DofC Police.
For my wife, Devon Corneal,
who spins the wind
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I hope every writer winds up with an editor as graceful, smart, genuine, and committed as Mark Tavani. I know they won’t, because Mark is unique, but everyone deserves a creative partner like him. I probably didn’t deserve him, but I got him anyway. This book would have been much shallower without Mark’s involvement.
I landed in Mark’s hands through the efforts of Linda Marrow, who descended upon this work like an angel, because she is an angel. As the world turns, Jim Impoco led me to Linda, as he has to many other good things.
Andrew Blauner has been my agent for fourteen years and a friend for even longer. He is unwavering and decent and manages to be so in Manhattan, where the hunger to be otherwise can sometimes run deep.
My friend Mark Alexander and my brother, Michael O’Brien, read and helped improve early drafts of this novel.
Other than Mark Tavani, my closest and most important reader was my wife, Devon Corneal, who always arrives, eyes shining, with gifts of every stripe, including laughter, children, patience, and warmth.
When I was ten years old, my father’s uncle, Arthur Mahony, gave me Carl Sandburg’s three-volume biography of Abraham Lincoln for my birthday, and that’s where much of this began for me. A hat tip to you, Unc, with gratitude for teaching me early on that one of the best things I could do for my lovely sons, Jeffrey and Cooper, was to give them books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TIMOTHY L. O’BRIEN is the executive editor at the Huffington Post, where he oversees all of the site’s original reporting efforts. Tim edited a ten-part series about severely wounded war veterans, “Beyond the Battlefield,” for which the Huffington Post and its senior military correspondent, David Wood, received a Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2012
Prior to joining the Huffington Post, in early 2011, Tim was an editor at The New York Times, where he oversaw the Sunday Business section. Tim helped direct a team of Times reporters that was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize in Public Service in 2009, for coverage of the financial crisis. The Times series that emerged from that work, “The Reckoning,” was also a winner of a 2009 Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Journalism.
Prior to becoming Sunday Business editor in 2006, Tim was a staff writer with the Times. Among the topics he has written about for the paper are Wall Street, Russia, Manhattan’s art world, cybercrimes and identity theft, geopolitics, international finance, digital media, Hollywood, terrorism and terrorist financing, money laundering, gambling, and white-collar fraud. He was part of a Times team that won a Loeb Award in 1999.
O’Brien has a BA cum laude in literature from Georgetown University. He also has an MA in U.S. history, an MS in journalism, and an MBA, all from Columbia University. He has lived and worked in Europe, South America, and Asia. He currently lives in Montclair, New Jersey, with his wife and children.
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