AFTER THE FACT

by Fred Saberhagen

  One after another the cities and towns of the victorious North crept slowly past the windows of the train. Each town no matter how small was decked out in bright bunting. American flags were everywhere. And it seemed that each settlement had found at least one cannon of some kind with which to fire salutes to passing trains. And everywhere, in every town, the churchbells rang. They seemed to go on ringing from morning to night without interruption. Jerry could not always hear them, he could usually hear nothing but the train itself, but again and again he saw the bells dancing in their little church towers of wood or brick as the train rolled past.

  It all proclaimed that the War, after four years of blood and death, was over.

  All that Jerry could overhear among the other passengers confirmed it: the fighting had essentially ground to a halt, though still it had not officially or entirely ceased. In scattered places there were still Rebel soldiers in the field, and some of them were still capable of offering resistance. But the Confederate government had fled from Richmond days ago, just before the city fell, dissolving itself in the process; and now that Grants arch-opponent Lee had surrendered in Virginia, the back of organized resistance had been broken. Lee himself at Appomatox had scotched any idea of a prolonged guerrilla war, by saying to his men that if anything of the kind should happen he would feel bound in honor to give himself up to the Federal authorities as being in violation of the surrender agreement he had signed.

  It was necessary to change trains yet once again—for the last time, Colleen and the timetable promised. The next set of cars were more crowded. And, perhaps because they were now getting close to Washington, the talk aboard became ever more political. Jerry had it confirmed for him that Stanton, Secretary of War, was indeed a great power in the land; Stanton's name was mentioned even more than that of Lincoln. And Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's Vice-President, was evidently at best a non-entity. All Jerry could hear of Johnson were a few snickers at the way the man from Tennessee had disgraced himself by taking too much to drink before last month's inauguration ceremonies.

  And then at last, on Tuesday the eleventh of April, Jerry realized that the train was passing through Maryland, and Washington was very near.

  TEN

  The church bells of the city of Washington cried peace and victory with a thousand voices. The great national celebration, begun on Palm Sunday, was continuing. Not only continuing, it seemed to be picking up steam.

  The train that would convey Jerry and Colleen Monahan into Washington had halted at a watering-stop, and they, along with a number of other passengers, had got out to stretch their legs, and enjoy the feeling of solid silent earth beneath their feet once more. There was no town here, only three or four houses in the midst of Maryland woods and fields. The train, currently six or eight wooden coaches long, waited with most of its windows open. Birds sang amid spring foliage in a nearby grove; the stationary engine grumbled to itself as it drank from an elevated watering-tank beside the track.

  "How far from here to Washington?" Jerry asked in a low voice, squinting ahead along the track. They must be entering the South, he thought; here even the April sun was strong enough to make the distant rails shimmer.

  "Just about ten miles. Why?"

  Jerry didn't answer right away. He had been evolving a plan in his own mind, and he decided this was the time to put it into effect.

  When he spoke again it was to try another question: "Will Stan ton have anyone meeting us in Washington?"

  The two of them were strolling trackside, now far enough from the other passengers to let Colleen answer plainly. "Don't see how he could. He won't even know what train we're coming in on. No one but he and Peter Watson know he sent you to Missouri, or sent me to warn you and bring you back."

  Colleen had previously mentioned Peter Watson a couple of times, saying enough to let Jerry identify the man as some kind of high-level assistant at the War Department. Now he said: "Some of Baker's people obviously know about me now. And about you. Who we are, what train we're on."

  "Looks that way."

  Jerry had stopped walking, and was standing looking up and down the track. "We leave the train here," he said at last, decisively.

  She took his meaning at once. "All right, if you think best. What about our baggage? Just leave it aboard?"

  He hesitated. "I don't see how that would help. If anybody's watching us they'll know we've gone, whether we take the bags along or not. And it'll just take us a minute to get the things off the train."

  "If Baker still has an agent on the train, and he sees us go?"

  "If he follows us, we'll have a chance to see who it is. If he doesn't, he'll lose us." Jerry raised his eyes, looking for branching trackside wires. "There's no station here, no telegraph. He won't be able to send word on ahead."

  Colleen nodded. "Then let's get moving."

  Within two minutes the two of them had retrieved their bags from the train, and were hiking a path across a muddy field, in the general direction of the nearest house.

  "We'll hire a wagon here," Jerry decided. "Or else we'll walk until we find a place where we can hire one."

  And after they had found new transportation, Jerry added silently to himself, would come the next step. It might be trickier, but somehow he would accomplish it.

  Over the past few hours he had been thinking over his situation as intensely as the hypnotic jolting of the train would allow. In Washington, as Colleen had just confirmed, only Stanton himself, and probably his aide Peter Watson, were able to recognize Jim Lockwood on sight. Jerry's trouble was that he was not Jim Lockwood, and the best he could expect from his first meeting with the Secretary of War was to be thrown into a cell. There would be no prospect of getting out any time soon. Habeas corpus had been suspended for several years now, and the leaders of Lincoln's administration seldom hesitated to jail suspected traitors and subversives first and investigate them later. At best, Jerry would certainly be prevented from stationing himself inside Ford's Theater on Friday evening, three days from now.

  "Getting off the train is not enough," said Jerry presently, casting a look back to see if they were being followed. "We're going to split up here."

  Colleen was taken aback for a moment; this was the first time since she had met Jim Lockwood that he was making a serious effort to take charge. But her male partner's assertion of authority really came as no surprise. She only looked at her companion thoughtfully and did not argue.

  Jerry, who had his own argument ready, brought it forth anyway: "Baker's people know the two of us are traveling as husband and wife. Don't they?"

  Colleen, still thoughtful, nodded.

  "Then it makes sense for us to split up. You go on ahead as fast as you can, in the first wagon we can hire, and make your report to Stanton. I can give you some money for traveling expenses if you need it. I'll get to the War Department my own way, in good time."

  "Traveling expenses? I could walk there from here in three hours. And why don't you go first?"

  "I may get there first." Jerry, walking quickly, looked back again over his shoulder toward the train. A couple of the leg-stretching passengers were looking after the two deserters but so far no one appeared inclined to follow them. "But I want you to start ahead of me."

  "All right." But Colleen was plainly somewhat puzzled and reluctant.

  The second of the local houses that they tried proved to have a well-equipped stable, as well as a man eager to carry passengers into the city for a fee. Presently Jerry was waving Colleen on her way.

  Now, he thought, would be the ideal time for him to hire a horse, as she had suggested before they parted. If he only knew how to ride one.

  Rather than take that risk Jerry walked on, along the road Colleen's driver had taken. Luck was with him; in about ten minutes he overtook a wagonload of produce whose driver had stopped at roadside to mend a broken harness. For a few coins Jerry bought passage, and climbed into the rear of the wagon, where he would be able to lie almost conceal
ed among the burlap bundles of early asparagus, the crates of eggs and chickens. He gave his destination as somewhere near Pennsylvania Avenue—from his schoolboy visit to the modern city he remembered enough of the geography to know that White House and Capitol would both be in that area. That meant that necessarily there would be crowds into which an alien visitor might safely blend.

  He could remember someone, somewhere aboard the roaring confusion of trains between here and Chicago, claiming that there were two hundred thousand people in the city of Washington now. The listeners on the train, Jerry remembered now, had seemed impressed by that number.

  When the wagon had jolted on for a while—in blessed lack of soot, and relative silence—Jerry raised his head to look about him. And sure enough, there in the hazed distance was the dome of the Capitol at last. For a moment he could almost believe it was the modern city that lay before him.

  During the long hours spent staring out the windows of one jolting railroad car after another, Jerry had considered that once he had escaped from Colleen he might hide out in the suburbs until Friday. Either in the actual suburbs of Washington—they had to exist in some form, he thought—or on some nearby farm. But he had never been satisfied with that idea. A stranger who didn't know his way around, particularly one who behaved in any way oddly, would be bound to be conspicuous anywhere in countrified surroundings. In the center of the city, though, say between the White House and Capitol, right in the middle of the crowd, there ought to be more strangers, including foreign diplomats and visitors, than anyone would bother counting. This was, after all, the capital city of a sizable nation.

  There would also be plenty of Baker's men in town, Jerry assumed—but the point was that even if some of those men could recognize their fellow secret agent Jim Lockwood, they still wouldn't know Jerry Flint from Adam. And no one would be passing around photographs.

  Except, of course, that the two men who had tried to kill him on the train had known whom they were after, and they might be able to recognize him again. One of those men, at least, had fallen from the speeding train and might well be dead now, or at least in no shape for action. And Jerry doubted they could be here already—but if they were, they were. Trumping all other arguments, he, Jerry, was basically a city man, and he trusted the instinct that urged him to seek out a crowd in which to maneuver.

  Staying low in the wagon, surrounded by the bundles of asparagus and the crated chickens, Jerry didn't see much of the city as it grew up around him. The sound and rhythm of the horse were soothing after days of trains—anything would be soothing after that, he thought. He could hear the gradual increase of the traffic round him, music, human voices, roosters crowing. Once a squad of blue-clad Union cavalry came cantering close past the wagon, the faces of men neither old nor young looking down at him incuriously. Then the cavalry was gone.

  It was something of a dirty trick he'd played on Colleen, Jerry mused, leaning back on a sack of produce and watching the formation of spring clouds overhead. He could only hope she'd had no more trouble with Baker's people. At best she would be reporting to Stanton a success that would fail to materialize, and Jerry felt rotten about that. But he considered that he had had no choice. He was committed to serve that tricky snake who called himself Pilgrim, in some plan that Jerry didn't really understand at all. How could Lincoln's life be saved by transmitting a signal, operating a beacon of any kind, at a moment when the fatal bullet was already on the way to its target? And supposing Lincoln's life could be saved in such a way, wouldn't a lot of familiar history necessarily be lost?

  The tops of some relatively tall buildings, three and four stories high, were now coming into sight above the piles of produce that surrounded Jerry. At last the wagon stopped. The farmer's bearded face came into view, as he twisted round from his seat to stare at his passenger in silence. Jerry sat up straight; a quick glimpse of the Capitol dome assured him that he was at least somewhere near the destination he had bargained for.

  He scrambled to his feet, handed over another coin as had been agreed, and hopped out of the wagon with his carpetbag. The wagon rolled away. A few passers-by, black and white, cast curious glances at the young man who had thus arrived in their midst, and now stood on the sidewalk dusting himself off. But no one said anything. Surveying the crowd, Jerry saw more blacks here than he had seen anywhere en route; some of them looking happy as if they were high on drugs, others wretched. All of them presently in sight were very poorly dressed.

  Jerry hoisted his bag and walked off briskly, joining the flow of pedestrians where it was thickest. Here, he noticed, the sidewalk was made of brick. Washington was quite the metropolis.

  He circled around the block, first clockwise and then counterclockwise, making sure to the best of his ability that he was still not being followed. Then, after one false start, he made his way to Pennsylvania Avenue, which as he remembered ran between the Capitol and the White House, which last structure now seemed blocked from view by red-brick office buildings under construction. The Washington Monument came into view, surprising Jerry by being in an obviously unfinished state, much shorter than he remembered it.

  His next surprise was the sight of a horse-drawn rail car, carrying a crowd of passengers down the middle of Pennsylvania Avenue. He soon discovered that brick sidewalks were by no means universal here; they had been laid down in a few places, but as in the towns and cities of Illinois, wood or mud prevailed everywhere else. Here too poultry and livestock were in the streets, pigs rooting in the mud.

  Above all here in Washington, there were many uniforms, more than anywhere else. Bodies of troops marched or rode horses through the streets, others appeared standing around or joining in the general flow of pedestrian traffic.

  Long hours on the cars spent listening to others' conversations had provided Jerry with a great many fragments of information. One pertinent item he had filed away was that Willard's Hotel was the most prestigious place for a traveler to stay in Washington. It stood on Pennsylvania Avenue, no more than a couple of blocks from the White House, just across the street from a large structure called the Armory, and a little over a mile from the Capitol at what appeared to be the other end of Pennsylvania. Standing on the sidewalk outside Willard's now, Jerry considered that if the lobby was any indication the place had to be overcrowded. All the better, from his point of view. He had money—at least Pilgrim had not stinted on that. If he couldn't bribe his way into a room, he couldn't, but he thought that it was worth a try.

  A sign outside the hotel boasted that all its rooms were equipped with running water. After five days—or was it six?—of steady railroad travel, that decided matters.

  Making his way in to the desk, Jerry learned from a clerk that it was very doubtful that there were any rooms available. But at that point a twenty-dollar gold piece laid unobtrusively on the desk worked wonders. On impulse he scratched his name on the register as Paul Pilgrim, of Springfield, Illinois.

  The upper room where Jerry found himself was small, but otherwise luxurious. It did indeed boast running water in a small sink, and a flush toilet in an adjoining private closet, but hot water was something else again; maybe only the luxury suites had that piped in. No great problem for the wealthy guest. A few more coins brought a procession of black men to Jerry's door carrying a portable tub, along with hot kettles and steaming pails. In a few minutes the tub, resting on his thick bedroom carpet, was filled and steaming.

  Jerry spent a few moments in unpacking his bag. Then he stripped and shaved and soaked in the hot tub, trying to ease the endless jounce and chatter of rails out of his joints, to remove from his skin the layers of grease and grime and soot.

  Out of the tub and dressed in clean, if wrinkled clothing, he made arrangements with the porter concerning laundry. When he went downstairs at last, he remembered to check the local time by a clock in the lobby. Then he carefully, for the first time, reset his watch, opening the face and moving the hands exactly as Pilgrim's video tutorial had directe
d. Exactly how knowing the exact local time might help him on Friday night, he could not be sure. But he felt better for having made at least a vague commitment to exact timing.

  Just off the lobby of Willard's was a magnificent and crowded bar, where Jerry now repaired for a beer. This struck him as the perfect means of sluicing the last of the railroad soot out of his throat. As he enjoyed the first gulp he realized that there was something peculiar about the crowd of men around him; and a moment later he understood what it was. In the whole bar there were, to his initial amazement, no uniforms. Then he read a faded notice on the wall, warning everyone that in Washington liquor service to members of the military was illegal. That was something to keep in mind; it meant that there would have to be a lot of back rooms, somewhere.

  After that one cold delicious beer he took himself to dinner, which at Willard's seemed to be a more or less continuous affair; the entrance to the dining room had been busy since he first saw it. Crowds of a density that made Jerry feel secure surrounded him as he sought and obtained a table, and after days of subsistence on what amounted to box lunches, a serious meal improved his morale enormously.

  After he had eaten, he strolled through the lobby, wondering if after all he should try a cigar. At last he did buy one and got it lighted. When it went out he was content to chew on it a little—if the enemy who were looking for him now had spent much time observing him on the cars, they might well be convinced that the man they were looking for didn't smoke.

  Jerry was restless, unable to stop walking. The lobby soon proved too confining, and he went outside. The cigar was starting to make him queasy now, and he threw it into the muddy street. Judging by appearances, anyone who objected to littering here would be put away as a lunatic.

  The crowds on the sidewalk were tending irresistibly in one direction, toward the White House. Jerry wondered why.

  Mr. Lincoln was at home again, he heard somebody say. Home from where? he wondered. Oh yes, there had been something about the President visiting the fallen Rebel capital. Richmond, as Jerry recalled, was not very far away.