The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  The Cajun fed them beans and crawdads for supper. By now it was dark, and after supper the three women lay on one side of the room, while their host lay down on the other side. He was asleep at once, snoring.

  Francesca edged over to Josephine. “I know you’re concerned, but I won’t let that swamp man touch us. I have a pepperbox pistol. You know what that is?”

  “Like a riverboat gambler carries for when he’s caught with marked cards.”

  “Exactly. You’re the youngest and prettiest—he’ll go for you first. If you wake up to find that ruffian handling you, give a cry and I’ll put a ball in him.”

  “Thank you.” Josephine didn’t know what else to say. The swamp man had seemed a rough sort, all right, but the only thing he seemed keen about getting his hands on was the ship owner’s silver.

  Francesca patted her hand in the dark. “Good. Now don’t you worry.”

  “I was never worried. Anyone touches me and he’ll regret it.”

  “You don’t say.”

  The Kentucky wife groaned and muttered an unladylike oath. “Will you two shut your traps? I’m trying to sleep.”

  “Sorry,” Josephine said. “We’ll be quiet.”

  Josephine was glad to be quiet. There had been something in Francesca’s tone that sounded like she’d been winding up to ask more personal questions.

  Sleep seemed out of the question. The snoring, the mosquitoes, the hard wood floor, the heat, the smell of sweaty bodies—it was all too much. Add to that the cacophony of animal voices: frogs, buzzing insects, little lizards chirping on the walls around them. Nevertheless, she drifted off a couple of hours later, and woke at dawn when some swamp bird flew overhead with a cry like a strangled cat’s.

  It had taken five days to cross six hundred miles of open ocean from Havana to the mouth of the delta, but it was a full four days more before they were out of the swamps and steaming north on the river again. Josephine paid special attention to the two forts that guarded a defensible bend in the river. She glanced across the deck of the ship to see Franklin watching keenly.

  Francesca came up beside her. “You have your eye on that one. He certainly seems an eligible young bachelor.” There was an implied question in the statement.

  Josephine looked away, as if bashful. She hadn’t spoken to the Pinkerton agent since the mishap in the bayou. “Now you sound like my mother.”

  “And where does your mother live? Here in New Orleans?”

  Josephine glanced back, suddenly sure Francesca was toying with her, that she had figured out who she was—knew perfectly well that Claire de Layerre had died on the Mississippi and this was her daughter.

  “My family lives in South Carolina,” Josephine said. She chose her words carefully, knowing that she’d be stuck with whatever lie she concocted. “My brother is a volunteer with the First South Carolina Rifles, and my father is a colonel in the militia. Defensive coastal work only, they say. He’s not a young man anymore.”

  “Ah, a colonel. I knew you had the look of a cultured young lady. I’ll only be a night and a day in New Orleans, but I’d be honored if you’d join me for supper. Where are you staying?”

  “The Paris Hotel. In the Quarter. Do you know it?”

  “That’s where I’m staying! They have a fine restaurant. You really must.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Hancock,” Josephine said with a sinking feeling. “That would be lovely.”

  Once in New Orleans, the two women collected their belongings and took a hansom cab up the muddy streets, past the Cabildo onto Chartres Street, to the fading elegance of the Paris Hotel, where its four stories rose over the French Quarter.

  Franklin had telegraphed from New York to reserve Josephine a room, but the hotel claimed they had no room under Mrs. Hancock. What’s more, all available rooms had been taken by a group of gentlemen militia called down from plantations upstream, who had been marching back and forth between Jackson and Lafayette Squares for the past two days.

  Francesca argued with the man at the desk, alternately blaming the hotel and her husband’s slipshod memory. The whole situation seemed contrived, and Josephine started to worry that the next step would be for the older woman to turn with affected embarrassment and ask if she could share a bed. Oh, and confound it all, I seem to have lost my money. I promise I’ll repay you. It was a card the Colonel might have played against Josephine’s mother.

  The hotel manager arrived. He didn’t seem overly pleased at the two women in their dirty clothes and hair, bedraggled after their crossing and their misadventure in the swamp. Francesca kept pleading.

  “Do you know who this is? This is Josephine Breaux. From the papers! Heroine of our great cause.”

  Josephine cringed. The manager’s eyes widened. The obvious rejoinder was that the so-called heroine had a room already, but the man now checked the books with greater motivation. Almost at once he discovered that a guest had left early, supposedly annoyed by the hard-drinking, gambling planter militia. There was a room, after all. And to Josephine’s surprise, it turned out that Francesca had the money to pay for it. She’d begun to worry that her mother’s old friend would attach herself to Josephine, barnacle-like, attempting to extract money.

  The two rooms were on opposite sides of the hotel, thankfully. Josephine paid the extra money to have a bath drawn up and sent her soiled clothes off for cleaning. She dressed in an evening gown with a hoopskirt. She was fighting exhaustion (the bed seemed comfortable, and the sheets clean) and might have skipped dinner if not for her earlier promise. She found Francesca already downstairs at a table beneath the hiss and warm glow of a gas lamp. She’d also cleaned up. With her rouge and powder fresh and her hair in place, she retained much of the charm of her singing and dancing days. Francesca reminded Josephine of her mother, and the young woman felt a pang of loss.

  Francesca pressed for more personal information as they ate. Her behavior straddled the line between the quick, easy intimacy typical of riverboat denizens, and suspicious prying. Josephine refined the story about her supposed family in South Carolina, while trying not to embellish details to the extent she would struggle to remember them were she to encounter Mrs. Hancock again. Hopefully, this was their last encounter.

  It turned out that Francesca’s riverboat wasn’t leaving the city for several days. If Josephine didn’t know the city, she could accompany Mrs. Hancock in seeing some of the fine houses and gardens of uptown New Orleans, maybe even visit Congo Square if she weren’t too afraid of blacks. Unfortunately, Josephine said, she had determined to stop in at the Crescent her first moment in New Orleans. She was anxious to turn her energy to the war effort. That started a new round of questioning, this time about spy work in Washington. This time Josephine played coy. She’d love to discuss details, she said, but loose lips could endanger the cause.

  At last, she was able to escape to her rooms. She was supposed to be the newspaper reporter turned spy, in Confederate territory to glean information about troops and river defenses, yet so far she had given up more than she’d gained. Fabricated information, admittedly. Instead, she should have been pumping her mother’s old friend for anything useful. The woman must know all sorts of things: the state of fortifications up and down the river, the effectiveness of the blockade, the morale and attitude of the people who lived and worked between St. Louis and the mouth of the river. Instead, Josephine had come away with nothing.

  From now on, she vowed, she would be in charge of such encounters, and not reactive. But not with Francesca Díaz Hancock. It didn’t matter how tired she felt, Josephine was determined to leave the hotel the next morning before the other woman awoke.

  Josephine used the trip to the Crescent to regain her confidence. She picked up a copy of the paper, plus one of its rivals, the Picayune, before leaving the Paris Hotel. A cab carried her away from the hotel, driven by a striking man wearing a long black coat with tails and a top hat that made him look like a young mulatto Abraham Lincoln.

  It
had rained during the night, which had cleared some of the filth from the gutters, and the air was fresh enough that she was able to lower her kerchief from her mouth and nose as they clopped up the street, so she could concentrate on reading the news.

  The date was August 20, 1861—yesterday’s papers. The rebels had apparently won a significant battle in Missouri on the tenth, which had reversed Union gains in the border state. The Crescent crowed that Missouri was about to join the Confederacy, but this sounded fanciful. In the east, the nearest she could parse through the sneers and false rumors, General McClellan had organized and strengthened the Union Army of the Potomac and was preparing another push south toward Richmond. The US Navy had captured two forts in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, tightening the blockade.

  In short, the stalemate continued. Four months since Fort Sumter and the men on both sides of the Mason–Dixon who had boasted of a short war now looked like fools. It was hard to imagine the conflict ending any time soon. Maybe it would last all the way through 1862 and take several more bloody battles before the South came to its senses.

  Twenty minutes later her hands were dirty with newsprint, and as she entered the big open room of the New Orleans Daily Crescent, she felt immediately at home. The clip-clip-clip sound of the presses hummed through the building. Men hunched over tables, scribbling furiously with ink-stained fingers. Others gave dictation to women with notepads. A man with round glasses thumbed through line drawings with an artist chewing on his pencil. Others were writing ad copy or hauling bundles of paper tied with twine.

  Josephine decided that the man with the round glasses was in charge, and walked over to wait until he was done with the artist.

  “He looks dead,” he told the artist, slapping down one drawing, which showed a man lying in the street, with bystanders surrounding him. “I want him drunk. Put an empty bottle of whiskey in his hand; make these people more amused than shocked. Put a few whores in the crowd.”

  “The alderman was found on the levee,” the artist complained, “not the Irish Channel.”

  “I know that. It says so in the confounded article. But that doesn’t matter. Make it look like the Irish Channel. It’s more lurid, will get the outrage flowing.”

  Josephine had apparently found David Barnhart’s New Orleans counterpart. Scandal sold papers everywhere.

  The artist hurried off, and she cleared her throat.

  The man pushed back his glasses. He had dark, curly hair, a face smudged with ink and newsprint, and a sharp gaze that ranged over her with a skeptical look.

  “Are you the new stenographer? Jenkins’s girl? So help me God, you had better be faster than that Irish woman. That was an insult.”

  “I’ve come for a writing job.”

  “Oh, you have, have you? And what makes you think you’re qualified?”

  “My name is Josephine Breaux,” she said. “Perhaps you’ve heard of me.”

  The man’s mouth dropped open. Conversation stopped in the tables nearby, and from there, whispers rippled across the newsroom. Soon, everyone was staring.

  The sudden attention made her nervous, but at the same time her heart was pumping with excitement. This was the reception she’d hoped to earn up north, an entire newsroom dropping their work to swoon when she entered. If only it were for her writing and not this other thing. This false reputation she’d earned.

  The man adjusted his glasses again. “The Josephine Breaux?”

  “The same,” she said, and raised an eyebrow and glanced around the room at the gaping men, mostly young, who rose from their seats and edged over. “I seem to have lost my employment up north and am wondering if you have a reporter position available on staff.”

  “Well, I’ll be a whiskered catfish. Josephine Breaux.” He wiped his hand and held it out. “I’m Solomon Fein, publisher of this rag. And of course you’ve got a spot. Hell, if I need to, I’ll fire one of these hacks.”

  She took his hand for a vigorous shake and found herself grinning back at his smile and enthusiasm.

  There was a bit of New York in his accent, mingled with a trace of old Europe. German, maybe? New Orleans was a mélange of immigrants, creoles, free blacks, and Northerners, in addition to the usual fire-breather secessionists, but if there was any hesitation about the war, it wasn’t coming from this publisher. The partisanship in the Crescent had made her old paper, the Morning Clarion, seem like a paragon of impartial reporting.

  “In fact,” Fein said, “I’ve got work for you right now, if you’re up to a boat ride downriver. There’s business at Fort Jackson I need to cover. How fast can you grab your personal effects?”

  At the fort? This was almost too perfect. Franklin had wanted her at the fort posing as a nurse. This would be even better.

  “Fast enough.”

  “Very good. Very good.” Fein looked across the newsroom. “Delaney, you’re off the hanging. You’ll be on the murdered Spaniard who turned up in the Algiers Canal. His landlady owns that boarding house above the gin mill on Gallatin.”

  “Ah, come on, boss,” a young man protested. “Last time I went to Gallatin I almost got knifed.”

  “What, you think I’d send a lady into that filth hole? It’s her first day! Go now, when all the drunks are sleeping it off, and you’ll be fine. Now get to it. Quick as a cat. The rest of you monkeys, back to work. We’ve got a deadline.”

  Fein took Josephine’s arm and led her back toward the pressroom. The humming presses shuddered to a stop, and the last paper came off the press for the folders, who were busy supplying a crowd of dirty, print-stained newsboys for their last haul of the day. They came and went through the back doors into the alley behind, hauling wheelbarrows filled with paper bundles tied in twine. Confederate dollars changed hands between the men running the press and the newsboys. Nobody paid Fein and Josephine any attention.

  “Your salary is four bucks a week. You cover a murder or enter the Irish Alley, the swamp, or have to run the gauntlet at Girod or Gallatin Street, you get a bonus of two bits.”

  “Make it eight dollars. Plus bonuses and expenses.”

  Fein’s eyes widened behind his round glasses. “Is that what they paid you in Washington?”

  “No. They paid four fifty. But that was in silver. I figure you’ll be paying in greybacks. Four Confederate dollars is about two bucks up north. Anyway, I’m worth more than I was three weeks ago. You get something smuggled past the blockade, you’ve got to pay a premium.”

  “So much for Josephine Breaux, patriot and heroine of the Southern cause.”

  “Says the New York Jew who has doubled the price of his paper since I was last in New Orleans.”

  “Touché.” Far from looking irritated, Fein seemed delighted by her banter. He dodged a moving cart of newspapers. “Eight dollars? It’s piracy. Wartime profiteering.”

  “I could check the other papers, see who’s hiring.”

  “Hah. I’d sell my business to Abe Lincoln himself before I’d see your byline pop up on the Picayune. Very well, Miss Breaux. Eight dollars a week, all expenses approved in advance.”

  “Good.” She shook his hand.

  “Now I’d better get back there and knock heads, make sure not a word of this is breathed on the street until your first story comes off the press. Then I’m going to personally deliver a copy to those lying, illiterate fools at the Picayune. I can’t wait to see the look on Ludd’s face when he sees who I’ve snagged. You’ve got what you need? Deadline is midnight tomorrow. I had a steamer arranged to drop off Delaney and another to pick him up tomorrow—you can take his place.”

  “What kind of writing do you want? Straight facts or something more embellished?”

  “Gimme real rabble-rousing, the kind of press that makes old ladies trade their silver for worthless bonds, and sends Quaker ministers running to the nearest recruiter. You weren’t just a spy, you can actually write?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “The most important qu
estion of all.”

  “When your friend Ludd reads my piece, he’ll fold up his rag and surrender his press to his creditors.”

  Fein grinned. “I like you, Breaux. You’ll go far on this paper.” He pumped her hand again. “Now get downriver and cover that hanging. I want to see every drop of sweat on the scoundrel’s forehead when he swings.”

  She traveled on an outgoing side-wheel blockade-runner carrying bales of cotton. They huffed downriver seventy miles, reaching the forts by afternoon. Fort St. Philip appeared first, on the east bank. It stretched along the waterfront, made of stone and brick, the walls covered in sod. She’d spotted it when passing with the runner but now paid it closer attention. It bristled with at least three dozen guns that she could count. Men watched from the walls beneath a Confederate battle flag, which hung limp in the still, humid air.

  The half mile of river between St. Philip and the larger fort downriver was filled with dozens of boats: flatboats drifting in the current, keelboats closer to the bank, poling their way laboriously upriver, and a pair of steamboats whose side-wheels left a distinctive hatched wake trailing behind them. But there were no gunboats of any kind. No fire rafts to come roaring with the current to burn enemy ships to the waterline. And no chain barricade to block the river. A strong Union fleet could have steamed right up from the delta and passed them on its way toward New Orleans.

  The boatmen put her to shore at the docks upriver from the second of the two forts. This was Fort Jackson, set roughly a hundred yards back from the levee. It had stone bastions radiating outward to provide the widest possible angles for its cannons, which jutted like dark snouts from the casemates.

  Josephine took in the defensive posture of the fort as she approached on foot, and was unimpressed. Even from a distance she could see that the cannons were small and old, which meant they were likely smoothbore and not rifled. They’d be no match for Union gunboats. The earthworks were partially eroded by time and the elements, and the embrasures and parapets had extensive unrepaired damage. Josephine had personally toured the fortifications being built in northern Virginia and in and around Washington, and what she saw here was inferior. It brought to mind the unprepared state of national defense in the days before the war began.