The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  Josephine didn’t obey.

  The Colonel cleared his throat, took off his hat, and waved it to draw attention to himself. “Here, now,” he began tentatively. “I have something important to say.”

  A few faces turned toward them, and he cleared his throat again. But then a shout came from the men with the horse and the runaway, and all attention turned back to them.

  The bounty hunters had got the noose over the man’s head at last, and the instant it was fit in place and tightened against his throat, someone slapped the horse on the rump and it shied off. The black man fell from the saddle, and the rope caught around his neck. This time, after the long struggle, the crowd from the riverboat let out a big holler. The Colonel tried to push forward but couldn’t get through the crowd.

  In spite of her earlier promise to herself, Josephine looked away again. She didn’t look back until it was over.

  That night, the Colonel did something stupid. It was an elementary blunder for a professional riverboat gambler. He played cards while he was drunk.

  Josephine was upstairs in her room when it happened, first writing about the hanging, and then in bed, trying unsuccessfully to fall asleep. A few days later, when the Colonel had disappeared again, her mother told her what had happened.

  After tossing back a quantity of gin, the Colonel had joined a game of poker in the saloon with three men he’d identified as plantation-owning slavers, determined to take them for everything they had. For a time, he’d had some success, but then, being drunk, made a sloppy mistake. The Colonel, who had always declared himself a square player, was caught palming cards and dealing from the bottom—what they called “laying the bottom stock.” The outraged planters, already down several hundred dollars, had searched him at gunpoint. They found him in possession of all manner of cheats: a shiner for reading opponent hands, a poker ring with a needle for making indentations in the back of cards, and several other so-called advantage tools.

  Guns were drawn. Demands came for a second lynching.

  That’s when Josephine’s mother came down from the stage, where she’d been dancing. Wielding the pepperbox pistol she kept strapped to her inner thigh for fending off overeager suitors, she fired off three shots, hitting one man in the shoulder, while the Colonel wrestled free a pistol from one of his accusers.

  Josephine was still awake in bed when her mother and the Colonel came flying in. They locked the stateroom and dragged the bureau in front of the door. Claire reloaded her pepperbox while the Colonel threw open his trunk and recovered a bowie knife, which he set on his lap as he took a seat opposite the door. Neither of them would tell Josephine what was going on.

  The next morning, the captain of Crescent Queen eased up to the shore a few miles south of Hog Shoals, Missouri, where Claire, the Colonel, and Josephine were unceremoniously dumped with their possessions. A muddy farm road led through the woods and north along the bank toward Hog Shoals. Josephine sadly watched the boat huff upriver and around the bend with a blast of the steam whistle.

  “Well, then,” Claire said, gathering up her skirts and sitting on her trunk. “A sad end to that chapter of life.”

  “What do we do now, Mama?” Josephine asked nervously. “Can you get another position, or are you too old now?”

  Josephine was thirteen, with an overheated imagination that came from reading too many novels, and she had already imagined scenarios in which she was taught to dance for groping old men.

  “Heavens, Josie, I’m barely thirty years old, and I only fess to twenty-seven. Just last month, the owner of Cairo Red offered me a position and a bigger stateroom. I suppose that’s our next step, assuming we can find the confounded thing. It might be in Ohio, for all we know.”

  The Colonel ignored Claire and Josephine while he rummaged through his trunk. He filled his pockets with gold watches, coins, and silver snuffboxes. Then he took out a small wooden box with a black-lacquered surface and a curious, red-and-green-painted scene on the lid. He tucked it experimentally inside his jacket with a frown before glancing over to Josephine.

  “Here, why don’t you keep this until I get back.”

  The girl took the box and traced a finger over the painting, which was a mountain-lined harbor with Oriental boats. The box was empty.

  “Whatever you do, don’t lose it,” he said.

  “How would I lose it? I’m not going anywhere. Anyway, what’s so special about it?”

  “Just keep it safe. Promise me that. No matter what.”

  “All right,” she said, confused.

  “So that’s it?” Claire demanded. “After I saved your life, got thrown out of house and home, this is how you repay me? And what about my girl? You’re going to leave her here in the woods? And with these heavy trunks, too. They have all of my clothing, Josephine’s books—everything we own in the world. What kind of man are you?”

  “Of course I’m coming back.” The Colonel came over and tried to kiss Claire, but she pushed him away. “But for all I know those men sent word to shore and I’ll find a half-dozen ruffians waiting to rob us and toss our bleeding, unconscious bodies into the river. I’ll make sure it’s safe and then send for you.”

  “You are a liar and no gentleman,” Claire said. “I saw you stuffing your pockets with gold. You wouldn’t have done that if you thought you’d be robbed.”

  “Don’t go away,” Josephine said sadly. She knew her mother was right, not just because of the gold, but also because of how he’d spoken about the box.

  Now he came to give the girl a kiss, this one on the forehead. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m being cautious. Two hours, that’s all you have to wait, then I’ll have a carriage back here to carry you into town. We’ll figure out what to do then.”

  He set off at a brisk pace up the road. Claire and Josephine stared after him.

  Two hours later the carriage came back, but not with the Colonel. When they got to Hog Shoals, they discovered that he’d jumped on another steamer and set off back down the river.

  Josephine wouldn’t see him again until the night her mother died.

  Josephine filed her first story about the hanging at Fort Jackson via the fort’s own telegraph office. It was a hastily sketched piece, with placeholders for details that some other staff writer at the Crescent would have to fill in.

  After that, she caught a ride upriver on one of the Confederate navy’s ships of the mosquito fleet, the converted revenue cutter Pickens. To her eye, a single shot to the flimsy deck would send the boat down to the mud, and it was weakly armed with a pair of twenty-four-pounder carronades and single eight-inch columbiad. Nevertheless, other boats in the river saluted Pickens with flags and waving hats as if she were the USS Richmond, a massive sloop of war with twenty-two guns lurking in the Gulf that could have outgunned the entire mosquito fleet on her own.

  Josephine took note of river defenses as Pickens struggled against the current, but the bulk of her effort was spent writing a longer story about the hanging. Unlike the incident in her childhood, this time she had forced herself to watch as the rope choked the life out of a man. She figured she owed it to Caleb Freedman. He was being hung as a Union spy, the same crime of which she was guilty. It was only by the grace of Providence that their positions weren’t reversed.

  Caleb had asked quietly for mercy as they led him into the yard, but he hadn’t cried or begged, and had barely trembled when they fit the hood over his head and slipped the noose into place.

  The entire eighty-two men of the fort had come to watch, as well as a few dozen from St. Philip on the opposite bank. Not a very impressive garrison. Some of the soldiers jeered, but Major Dunbar ordered them into silence and delivered a biting remark about how the man in the noose was showing more dignity than the lot of them.

  They hoisted Caleb up, where he struggled for two long minutes before falling still. After that, Dunbar, looking troubled, ordered the man lowered and buried in an unmarked grave in the swamp. When Josephine boarded Pickens,
she cast a glance up at the fort to see Dunbar at the parapet, staring downstream. To her eyes he seemed to be wrapped in a dark mood.

  Fighting against the current, Pickens made it barely halfway to the city before nightfall. It wasn’t until noon the following day that she unloaded on the levee outside Jackson Square. She took a cab to the newspaper to file her stories.

  Fein was in a sour temper—seemed Ludd had indeed telegraphed a story letting out that Josephine Breaux was in the city—but he cheered up when he looked over the ten pages of handwritten work she threw down on the table. There were four articles. The biggest was about the hanging itself, and full of speculation about spying in the city. The second and third were information about happenings in the Gulf that she’d picked up from soldiers, smugglers, and fishermen she’d interviewed at the fort and in the river. The final one was about the efforts to improve the defenses at Jackson and St. Philip. She’d left out her biting observations; those were in a final piece that she hadn’t written for the paper, but for other eyes.

  “Very good, very good,” he said, reading through. He dipped a pen in red ink and slashed through two lines, scrawling something in the margins. “Colorful. You have a way with words.”

  She peered over his shoulder. “What are you scratching?”

  “This part about the spy’s sister and her consumption.”

  “Don’t scratch that. It paints a picture.”

  “A sympathetic picture. We don’t want that, not for a condemned spy they tossed in an unmarked grave. Anyway, you’ve got plenty of human detail. This part about Dunbar’s irritation in not getting those rifled cannons is good. Stirs up the blood of any true patriot.”

  She grumbled as he made more marks. He left in the part about bayou fishermen selling their wares to the Union ships but made red slashes through the paragraphs explaining that the fishermen had suffered the loss of their secondary trade because of the blockade. With that taken out, the fishermen became nothing more than greedy profiteers.

  Finally, he looked over her sketches. “Remedial. A shame. Otherwise, you’d be the perfect reporter.”

  “I never claimed to be an artist.”

  “No, but a fellow can hope. No matter. I’ll get Schmidt to draw them up fresh and pretty.”

  “What do you want from me now?”

  Fein polished his eyeglasses with his handkerchief. “You’ve earned a few hours’ rest. I’ll send a message boy to the hotel with your next assignment. Maybe more about the mosquito fleet. You’ve got a good eye for military details. And as a woman and true patriot, you’ll no doubt get access to all sorts of interesting people.”

  “That didn’t help me at the fort. If anything, my questions made Dunbar more suspicious.”

  “Oh, really? Ludd’s piece claimed you were flirting shamelessly with the major. That you used all the advantages of your sex to get what you wanted.”

  “That’s a lie!”

  Fein grinned. “What, I shouldn’t have believed the publisher of a rival newspaper, the man who calls me ‘the Rabbi’ in print and accuses me of spying for the Yankees? The man who no doubt tried to hire you away the instant you met him?”

  As quickly as it had flared, her anger now fizzled. “He calls you that? Ludd is lucky you don’t challenge him to a duel.”

  “A duel! The only dueling I do is with the pen. But that reminds me of our most important newspaper policy. The name Stanley Ludd will never appear in the pages of the Crescent. Should you ever need to refer to the man in print, we always call him Stinky Lard.”

  She couldn’t help but laugh. “That is the most childish thing I’ve ever heard.”

  “I know! That’s why we do it.”

  Josephine went back to the hotel and finished writing her observations for Franklin. She expected to have a note waiting at the desk or to see the Pinkerton agent at supper, but he didn’t appear. A message came in the morning, but it was from the paper.

  After Fein’s comment about the mosquito fleet, she’d hoped the paper would send her to the shipyards to see the progress on Manassas. It was a powerful tugboat being reinforced with railroad iron, meant to break the blockade, and rumor of its construction had reached the eastern papers way back in July, a few days before the battle after which it had been named. But instead of covering Manassas, Fein wanted her wandering through St. Thomas Street and Corduroy Alley to watch for hungover officers and enlisted men. Under no circumstances was she to approach the district after dark.

  She soon found out why. The cab driver refused to carry her into the area known as the Irish Channel, so she had to walk the last two blocks over broken cobbled streets. Shacks with low gable roofs lined the streets, built of torn-apart flatboats and broken cypress planks and looking like they would collapse if not held up by their neighbors. It was still morning, and this was a place that would only come to life in the evening, but the few people she saw let her imagination fill in the rest. She found an empty crate to sit on, took out her pad, refilled her fountain pen with a dropper, and began to write furiously.

  The buildings of the Channel are as disreputable as the thieves, footpads, drunks, and other unsavory characters who gather within. Presenting a slouching, slovenly appearance, they lean against each other for support like drunkards, each one more dilapidated than the last. Every building is either a grog house or a bordello. Men lie in the alleys, drunk to stupefaction and as often as not robbed and beaten while they lay senseless in their inebriation.

  She stopped as a man in a butternut uniform staggered onto the porch of a building whose gas lamp flickered behind panes of red glass. He squinted against the morning light and clutched his temples as if they threatened to burst. When he had recovered, he cast furtive glances up and down the street, and there he spotted Josephine. He straightened his jacket and tried to look nonchalant as he strolled away. Josephine scooped up her belongings and sprang after him.

  “Good sir,” she cried, hurrying to catch up. She lifted her skirts to dance over and around something that looked like a combination of dog filth and the contents of a drunk man’s stomach. “My husband has gone missing. Please help.”

  This bit of deception caught his attention, and the poor fool tried to be helpful as she asked about where she might find the supposed husband.

  The uniformed man was a captain in a rifle militia. He claimed to have entered the Irish Channel to look for one of his men who had failed to report for duty. Even as he made the claim, it was obvious he didn’t expect Josephine to believe the fiction. Indeed, he looked downright ashamed, and she determined not to publish his name or regiment in the paper. Soon, she sent him on his way.

  By the time the Irish Alley began to rouse itself a few hours later, she had enough material for several stories—filled in with the type of in-article editorializing that Fein seemed to like. It appeared that much of the clientele of the brothels and grog houses were military men who were supposed to be in the city to protect it from attack. Instead, they were drinking, gambling, and whoring in the Channel.

  She retreated from the district to find a cab, figuring that if she hurried back to the hotel to finish her work, she could file a story in time for tomorrow morning’s edition. Fein would be surprised to see more work so soon. But when she was halfway back, she belatedly remembered her true purpose in the city. She ordered the driver to take her up to Lafayette Square instead. There, she watched a company of militia marching back and forth across the square. The energy was torpid. More so when compared to the feverish environment in Washington in the days leading up to and following the battle at Manassas. Even the drummer struggled to keep a sufficient pace, his sticks seemingly as heavy as lead.

  A woman who stood among the watchers told Josephine that the army had ordered the best units to Virginia already. The ones left were mostly immigrants, backwoodsmen, and others with suspect motives.

  Over the next week, Josephine reacquainted herself with every corner of the city. She was feted for her supposed spy wo
rk up north by a widow named Mrs. Dubreuil in the Garden District, who lived in a fine house and served food and drink in such quality and quantity that it was as if the blockade did not exist. That gave Josephine an article questioning whether the wealthy of the city were prepared to sacrifice to win the war. And what were their motives, anyway? Should Union troops suddenly appear, no doubt the rich would cheer their appearance, because it would reopen the river to the flow of luxuries.

  Of the dozen stories written since leaving Fort Jackson, this was the only one Fein killed. Well, he published it in the end, but only after he’d handed it to another writer to abuse and torment. The young man could barely string two sentences together. And when he finished, the story was full of glowing praise for the great and wise leadership of New Orleans. Josephine knew why Fein had killed her article, but she didn’t like it and insisted he strip her name from the byline.

  Apart from that, Fein praised her work and gave her prominent placement day in and day out.

  By mid-September it would have been impossible to write a story like the one in the Irish Channel, because the captain in the bordello would have known her. The people of the street rarely recognized her, but New Orleans society came to know her by sight. She would be walking along the street when a carriage would pull up and some gentleman or lady would insist on driving her to her destination, no matter if that were on the other side of the city.

  But people also told her things, and her fame opened doors to interview military officials, blockade-runners, railroad officials, and telegraph operators. Even Governor Moore invited her to see him after news came that the Confederates had been pushed out of the western counties of Virginia. Moore delivered a twenty-minute diatribe about Union aggression and expected her to print the whole of it. She gave him two sentences, buried in an article about the Union blockade.