AFTER THE FACT

by Fred Saberhagen

  Jerry mumbled something in the way of thanks. Then the proprietress had him by the arm and was steering him away toward the rear of the house, giving orders to black servants as she passed them, in the way that someone of the late twentieth century might punch buttons on a computer.

  Now he was given into the care of the servants, who sized him up, welcomed him with professional sweetness, and worked on him efficiently, without ever seeming to look at him directly. In a matter of seconds they were leading him into a room where a hot bath waited, that seemed to have been prepared for him on miraculously short notice. He wondered if they kept a steaming tub ready at all times, in case a customer should feel the need of cleansing.

  Two teenaged black girls wearing only voluminous white undergarments—voluminous at least by twentieth-century standards—introduced themselves as Rose and Lily. The pair, who looked enough alike to be twins, helped Jerry get his clothes off, and saw him installed in the tub. Lily, who helped him ease off his coat and shirtsleeves, shook her head at the sight of his arm. Frowning at Anna Surrat's amateurish poultice, she peeled it off and threw it into a slop jar. The lump on his wrist was bigger and uglier than ever, and the arm still pained him all the way down into the fingers, but Jerry was beginning to hope that it wasn't really getting worse; the injury might not be all that much worse, really, than some batterings his forearms had received in practice.

  With a show of modest smiles and giggles his attendants helped him—he didn't need help but he was too tired to argue—into the tub, where he sat soaking his hurts away, along with the smell and feel of prison. Presently Lily went out, she said, to get some medicine. Meanwhile Rose dispatched another servitor with orders to bring Jerry a platter of cold chicken and asparagus spears, along with a glass of wine.

  Waiting for food and medicine, he leaned back in the tub, eyes closed.

  Delicate fingers moved across his shoulder and his chest. Rose evidently viewed him as a professional challenge. "Like me t' get in the tub and scrub you back? Bet ah could fit right in there with you. Might be jes' a little tight."

  He opened his eyes again. "Ordinarily I would like nothing better. Tonight… I think not."

  She rubbed his shoulders therapeutically. "If you change yoah mind, honey, just say the word."

  Jerry closed his eyes again. All he could think about was what was going to happen tomorrow night, when someone was very likely to get killed.

  If he looked at it realistically, he himself was a good candidate. Probably the best, besides Lincoln himself. Perhaps the best of all. Oh, of course, he had been assured that he had his special powers. What had Pilgrim said? Not ordinary danger, even of the degree that you confronted on the train. It might be more accurate to say that only death itself can activate them. Getting killed would be hardly more than a tonic stimulus. He wished he could believe that.

  He ducked his head under the water and began to wash his face and hair. Lily, back again, giggling, rinsed his head with warm water from a pitcher. Then Jerry's food arrived, the tray set down on a small table right beside the tub, and he nibbled and sipped. His spirits rose a little.

  After a little while, when the water had begun to cool, he made motions toward getting out of the tub. The two girls, who were still hovering as caretakers, surrounded him with a huge towel. When they were sure he was dry, the one playing nurse anointed his arm again, with something that at least smelled much better than the previous ointment.

  Having put on the most essential half of his clothing, Jerry gathered the rest under his arm, making sure as unobtrusively as possible that he still had his watch and theater tickets with him. He bowed slightly to his two attendants. "And now, if you would be so kind as to show me where I might get some rest?"

  It was nearly midnight by Pilgrim's watch when they escorted him to a small room, with a small bed. There was some tentative posing in the doorway by his attendants on their way out, but he let his eyelids sag closed and shook his head. When the door had closed he opened his eyes and found himself alone.

  There was the bed. Jerry lay down with his boots on, meaning to rest for just a moment before he undressed. Somewhere the violin was playing, almost sadly now.

  He awoke in pale gray dawn to the sound of distant battering upon a heavy door and angry voices shouting that the police were here.

  SIXTEEN

  Jerry rolled out of bed, looking groggily for his boots. Only when his feet hit the floor did he realize that he still had the boots on; hastily he donned shirt and coat—Booth's coat. He had slept through most of the night without taking off anything that he had put on after his bath. He picked up his hat now from where it had fallen on the floor, and put it on his head.

  The banging and the shouting from below continued, augmented now by several octaves of screaming female voices. Jerry thought he could recognize Lily's generous contralto. Most of the noise was coming from the front of the house.

  Taking stock of the situation, Jerry decided that if he were in charge of conducting a police raid, he'd surely have people at the back door before he started banging on the front. Dimly realizing that he was somehow not quite the same Jeremiah Flint who had driven into Springfield looking for a job, he concluded that with a house as tall as this one, and with so many trees around it, quite possibly all was not lost. Jerry was already opening the single window of his room. A moment later he had stepped out over the low sill, onto a sloping section of shingled roof, his appearance startling a pair of frightened robins into flight. Peering over the edge of the roof at shrubs and grass below, he confirmed that he was about three stories over the back yard.

  There were plenty of tree branches within reach; the only question was which one of them to choose. In a moment Jerry had got hold of a limb that looked sturdy enough to support him, and had swung out on it. He had left the roof behind before it occurred to him to wonder whether his left wrist was going to be able to support its share of his weight. He looked down once; his wrist, impressed on a cellular level by the distance to the ground, decided it had no choice but to do the job.

  Hand over hand Jerry progressed painfully toward the trunk. He wasn't going to look down again. He shouldn't have looked down even once. Instead he would concentrate on something else. What kind of tree was this, an elm?

  Eventually, after six or eight swings, alternating handholds, he was close enough to the trunk to be able to rest his feet upon another branch. Now he could look down again, and did. Men in derby hats, three or four of them or maybe more with pistols in their hands, were swarming through the yard below. They appeared to be running from front to back and back to front again. So far the raiding party seemed to be trying everything but looking up. The new spring leaves sprouting between those men and their potential victim in the tree were thin and fragile, and so was the screen they made; silently Jerry urged them to grow quickly.

  Edging his way toward the trunk, he reached it at last and went around it—this far above the ground the stem was slender enough for him to embrace it easily. The next step was to choose a direction and start out, one booted foot after another, along another branch, meanwhile still gripping upper branches to keep his balance. His chosen course was going to take him toward the alley that ran in back of the house, and was divided from the back yard by a tall wooden fence. The fence had a long wooden privy butting up against it, the planks of both constructions being freshly whitewashed, as if Tom Sawyer lived here.

  Now, with a sinking feeling, Jerry became aware of the fact that there were people sitting on horses out there in the alley, their faces upturned in his direction.

  This discovery made him pause, but, after considering the alternatives, he pressed on. One of the people who so silently observed his progress was a chestnut-haired young woman, wearing trousers underneath her full skirt, who sat astride her horse like a man.

  The branch under Jerry's boots grew ever more slender the farther he got from the trunk, and bent ever lower with his weight. The higher branches t
hat he clutched at with both hands were bending too. Now Jerry's boots were no more than five feet or so above the slanting, tar-papered privy roof. A goat, tethered in the yard near the back fence, was looking upward with deep interest at Jerry's acrobatics.

  By now the branches bearing his weight had sagged enough so that he was partially screened, by tall hollyhocks and bushes, from the back door of the house. In that direction cries of triumph and screams of outrage signalled that the police had at last managed to force entry. With relief Jerry released his hold on the branches, half-stepping, half-falling to the roof of the outhouse. He would not have been surprised to put a leg through the roof of the privy and get stuck, or—God forbid—plunge to the very depths. But no, the wood beneath his boots was solid.

  And a good thing, too. He had just begun his next move, a vault over the fence and into the weed-grown alley when a gunshot sounded from the direction of the house, and a bullet went singing over his head.

  Then he was on his feet in the alley. Colleen Monahan and two men, all three of them mounted, were with him, and someone was urging an unoccupied horse in front of him. All Jerry could remember about riding was that for some reason you had to get on from the left side; not that he had ever tried to get aboard a horse before. He wasn't doing very well at it now.

  "He's hurt," Colleen was saying sharply, mistaking his clumsiness for weakness or physical disability, "You, give him a hand!"

  Somehow Jerry was pulled and pushed up into the saddle. He had barely got his feet into the stirrups when they were off, heading down the alley at what felt to him like a gallop. More gunshots sounded, somewhere behind them.

  Another horse and rider were close beside Jerry on each flank, and someone was holding his mount's reins for him. Bouncing fiercely up and down, he clung to the front of the saddle, where there was supposed to be a horn, wasn't there?—no, he had read somewhere that only western saddles were so equipped.

  Coming out of the alley, the four riders thundered southeast on Ohio Avenue, then across one of the iron bridges that crossed the foul canal, leading them into the half-wild Mall. To the west, on their right, the truncated Washington Monument rose out of the morning fog, balanced by the bizarre towers of the Smithsonian a few hundred yards to the east. Fog was rolling north from the Potomac now, coming in dense billows, and once they were a hundred yards into the Mall Colleen called a halt.

  The small party sat their horses, listening for immediate pursuit, One of the men with Colleen was black and one was white. Both were young and poorly dressed; Jerry decided that he had never seen either of them before.

  "Nobody comin'," the black man said after they had been silent a while. He appeared to be unarmed, though the white youth had a pistol stuck in his belt. The horses snorted and shifted weight restlessly, ready for more early morning exercise.

  "They'll be looking," said Colleen, Her frivolous little lady's hat had fallen back off her head with the riding, but was still held by a delicate cord around her sturdy throat. She looked at Jerry with what he read as a mixture of sympathy and despair. "How bad are you hurt? Did they hit you back there?"

  He realized she was talking about the gunshots, and shook his head. "I'm bruised, that's all. From talking to Lafe Baker. But I don't think I can ride very far."

  "All right." She gave the white youth a commanding stare. "Ben, ride back to the War Department, learn what you can—then report back to me."

  The young man—he really was very young, maybe sixteen, Jerry saw now—nodded. He started to speak, evidently found himself inarticulate, and departed with a kind of half-military salute to her and Jerry.

  Colleen turned to the young black. "Mose, take the rest of these horses and put 'em away. Then return to your regular job. Bakers people will be looking for a mounted group, so Jim and I will travel on foot."

  She swung down out of her saddle, the long skirt immediately falling into place to cover up her trousers. Jerry dismounted also, without waiting to be urged. It proved to be a lot easier than getting on.

  "Yas'm." Mose looked Jerry in the face steadily for a long moment, as if he were seeking to memorize his features, or perhaps to find something; it was the most direct gaze Jerry had received from a black person since his arrival in this era. Then Mose dismounted too, gathering all of the horses' bridles into his hands.

  With a motion of her head Colleen led Jerry eastward through the mist. When they had walked twenty yards through the long grass of the Mall, Mose and the horses were already invisible behind them.

  "So it's bruised you are, is it?" she asked, looking sideways at him as they moved on. "I hear that Lafe Baker himself is bruised this morning, a great black shiner underneath one eye."

  "I expect he is. But how did you find out?"

  "I have my ways of knowing things. Men, you may have noticed, often don't take a woman seriously. The colonel might have gone back to New York by now, I don't know. Well, you're a strange man, Jim Lockwood, but it appears that in some ways you can be a marvel."

  "You'd better watch out for Baker," Jerry warned her grimly. "He asked me if I knew you. I told him no, but…"

  "I've got my eye on him, never fear. When I heard he was planning to raid Bella's this morning, I thought it just might have something to do with you. And if anything happens to me, Mr. Stanton'll know who to blame. Let's try going this way."

  For a moment Jerry wondered if he had been followed after all. But he was sure he'd gotten away unnoticed. One of Booth's people? He gave the problem up as unsolvable.

  The single impressive building of the Smithsonian was close before them now, a dream-castle of reddish stonework rising out of mist, longer than a football field and topped by a profusion of mismatched towers. Here paths had been built up with gravel above the level of the ubiquitous mud. In this area the grass was shorter and better cared for, and spring flowerbeds surrounded the building with early blooms.

  A bench loomed out of the fog. Jerry sighed. "No one's chasing us right now. How about sitting down for a minute? I suspect I'm going to have to do a lot of running yet today."

  "And I suspect you're right."

  They settled themselves on the park bench, side by side, as any strolling couple might. "Colleen. Why did you think the raid on Bella's might have something to do with me?"

  "Wilkes Booth's doxy lives there, when he's not entertaining her at his own hotel. She's Bella's sister, by the way. And for some reason he's also in thick with those folk at Surrat's boardinghouse. I know you went there, but I don't know why. Are you going to tell me?"

  "You knew I went there? How?"

  "I tell you, I can find out things. What were you doing mixed up with those people? Someone in the War Department, I'm told, had a report six weeks ago that they might be up to no good."

  Jerry leaned back on the bench, groaning quietly, trying to think. He could feel the history he was supposed to protect slipping out of his grasp like a handful of water. And he was acutely aware that Colleen was watching him intently.

  When he spoke it was without looking at her. "Sorry about running out on you like that."

  "I was wondering when you would get around to an apology. And I'm lookin' forward to hearing the best story you can come up with to explain what you did."

  "And I don't know if I can explain something else to you. I mean why I was there at Bella's—"

  "Don't try to change the subject." Colleen's anger was becoming more apparent in her voice. "I know why men go to brothels. I'm tired of lookin' forward, I'd like to hear the reason now, why you ran out on me."

  He turned his head, hopelessly meeting her accusing stare. He shrugged. "There was another mission that I had to perform," he said at last.

  "Another mission, more important than seeing Stanton, bringing him the facts he needs about Lafe Baker? Come on, now! If it weren't for several things that identify you as Jim Lockwood, I'd say—but that's no good, you have to be Jim Lockwood!"

  "Yes, I do, don't I?" He thought again, the
n said: "All I can tell you is this—there's something, a job I'm charged with, that even Stanton doesn't know about. I couldn't tell you any more than that if you were to pull out a gun and threaten to shoot me for refusing."

  Having said that much, Jerry waited. He had already seen this particular young lady pull out a gun and shoot.

  For a long moment Colleen only stared at him, apparently suspended between rage and sympathy. Then the latter, for some reason, won. "Oh, you madman!" she cried out softly. She put out a hand and gripped his right arm—fortunately not his left—where it lay extended along the back of the bench; she squeezed his arm and shook it, as if he were her brother and she was trying to shake some sense back into him.

  "You madman! If Stanton hadn't been so busy that I didn't have to tell him the whole story, he'd probably have me locked up by now. I told him that I'd got you back to Washington safely, and—he just brushed me off and told me I'd have to make a full report later! With the war ending, he has even more worrisome matters than Colonel Baker on his mind. He'll be wanting to get back to that problem soon, though. I'm going to bring you to him this morning, before you disappear again."

  "I don't think I ought to see him," said Jerry, leaning back again and closing his eyes.

  "You're into something, aren't you? Something that's against the law. And you're going to tell me what it is. You can't be a Secesh agent. You can't, not now, when there's no Secesh government left. What is it, then? Smuggling?"

  "Nothing."

  "Liar. I'm bringing you to Stanton. Unless of course," said Colleen's voice, a new thought bringing both hope and alarm, "we'd both be worse off if he did see you."

  Jerry sat up and opened his eyes again. Then he got out his—Pilgrim's—neatly ticking watch, flipped open the lid, and looked at the position of the hands. Twenty minutes after seven in the morning. The show at Ford's started at eight in the evening. Some time after that hour—exactly at what moment Jerry had never yet been able to determine—Wilkes Booth would enter Lincoln's box and kill the President. Promptly at eight, still almost thirteen hours from now, he, Jerry, had to be in his seat at Ford's, and free of interference.