The Crescent Spy

by Michael Wallace

  Josephine glanced up to see the waiter approaching and pulled up a chair at the table. She took the menu and waited until the waiter was gone before fixing on Francesca again. “What do you want?”

  “At the moment? Lunch. I’m hungry.”

  “And I’m busy. I have stories to write, and I don’t need this nonsense. Did the Colonel send you?”

  “No. In fact, the Colonel begged me not to come.” Francesca shrugged. “‘Begged’ might be a strong word. He was uncomfortable with my purpose. And he doesn’t relish the thought of his precious Josie falling into trouble. But we have suffered setbacks of late, which calls for difficult decisions. Once I convinced him that any trouble was of your own making . . .”

  Josephine couldn’t stomp out of the restaurant until she knew what cards this woman held in her hand, but first she had to take control of the conversation. She’d been caught off balance when Francesca lowered the lorgnette, but she was regaining her wits.

  “When did you know it was me?” Josephine asked. “From the moment we met on the ship out of Havana, or not until that night at Congo Square?”

  “Neither. You looked terribly familiar when I first met you, but I was too excited to be meeting the famous Josephine Breaux. I still couldn’t place you until we were lying in the dark after the swamp man rescued us from the sand bar. Then you said that bit of bravado about not being afraid of the man groping you in the dark. It reminded me of someone I once knew—a girl with the swagger of a riverboat gambler. Someone also named Josephine. Hah. Pretty clever. Not you—me, for figuring it out.”

  “You sound quite self-satisfied,” Josephine said. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I already told the Colonel I don’t want to see him again. If you’re here on your own behalf, fine. If you’re here on his, you can forget it.”

  “I didn’t call you here for either of those reasons. You have something that belongs to us.”

  “No, I don’t. If you’re talking about the box, it was given to me. Anyway, I sold it on Exchange Alley, like I told the Colonel.”

  “I don’t believe it. The Colonel told me what was hidden in the box, how valuable it was. So tell me, if you didn’t sell it, how did you end up with all of this?” Francesca waved her hand at Josephine’s dress and gestured at the mother-of-pearl combs in her hair.

  “I work hard. I earn money for my efforts.”

  “I’ll bet you do. Money for all of your efforts. Be that as it may, you’re twenty years old. I was once twenty, and willing to do all manner of things to survive. But a young woman like you—mother dead, no money to her name, no family to search out and beg for help? She’s destined for the brothels or the dance halls. You’ve apparently done none of this.”

  Josephine bristled, in part because she knew it was true. She had no doubt that if left destitute now, she’d pick herself up and start over using her wits and confidence. But four years ago had been another matter. Without those gemstones, where would she be now? For that matter, if she interviewed the painted women in the Irish Channel, how many would she find who had once been full of hopes, every bit as clever and ambitious as Josephine?

  The waiter came, which saved her from having to respond, at least for the moment. Francesca ordered the lobster and filet. Fein would be delighted at that. Josephine asked about the haddock. Thankfully, it was not in stock, or Josephine would have felt obligated. Instead, she picked something chicken with a fussy French name.

  “We knew you had money,” Francesca said when the waiter had left. “But we couldn’t figure out where you kept it. That time you caught the Colonel was the second time we’d searched your rooms.”

  “How dare you? I should summon the police right now.”

  “Save me your sanctimony. So we’ve been following you. That’s why we were at Congo Square that night. It wasn’t a coincidence. Two other times we saw you there, meeting with that handsome man with the mustache. That same fellow was on the blockade-runner. Strange coincidence.”

  “And?” Josephine affected nonchalance. In reality, her palms were sweating. “I am allowed to have gentlemen suitors, am I not?”

  “Again, with the act. When will you drop it? You know the rest. I told it to your newspaper friend. Mrs. Otz spotted two people fleeing the conflagration at the Marine Hospital. One was a wounded man with a mustache. The other was you. Mrs. Otz, of course, was me. I couldn’t figure out why you’d gone to the hospital. So many questions I have.”

  “You can’t expect me to explain everything,” Josephine said. “There are enemies in New Orleans. Union agents who wish to punish me for the spying in Virginia I did for the cause.”

  “Oh, you’re a spy, all right,” Francesca said. “But not for ‘the cause,’ as you put it.”

  Josephine started to push away. “I won’t sit and listen to this slander.”

  “Sit down or I will go at once to General Lovell and tell him who destroyed the arsenal.”

  Josephine stopped and pulled herself in to the table again. “You’re more wrong than you can imagine.”

  It wasn’t a very effective lie, and they both knew it. Nevertheless, she was forced to commit to her position, like a gambler on a bad run of luck who throws down all his money on a single hand.

  “But my work is important enough that I’m willing to listen,” Josephine continued. “I can’t risk the Yankees learning what I’m doing. What do you want? Money?”

  “The Colonel wants to see you. That’s the first thing. He wants to meet you at Jackson Square in front of the Cabildo and talk.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He’d also be mighty grateful if you’d loan him a hundred dollars so he can get back in the game. But frankly, he has lost his touch. We earned a thousand dollars blockade-running, and he lost it in two nights of faro. A bit of silver falls into his hand and he’ll be off to ride the tiger again.”

  “Done. A hundred dollars. One meeting with the Colonel.”

  “You misheard me,” Francesca said. “I said that would satisfy the Colonel, but I’m not so forgiving. Those gems didn’t belong to you—”

  “If there were gems, they wouldn’t have belonged to you, either.”

  “But I am his wife now. So yes, they did.” The woman waved her hand. “But never mind the gems, or the ill-gotten money you received from selling them. You are a spy and a traitor. A woman like that should pay for her crimes.”

  “And by ‘pay’ you mean money in your palm. How much?”

  “Six thousand dollars.”

  Josephine drew her breath. So much. She’d been thinking a few hundred, maybe a thousand. “I don’t have it.”

  This much was true. She had a little less than four thousand remaining. But it was true that she’d received nearly six from the sale of the gemstones, after her donation to the Sanitarium for the Burned and Indigent. She had spent a fair bit of it getting established in Washington: taking courses in etiquette, buying books on grammar and rhetoric to perfect her writing skills, and a wardrobe befitting her assumed station. And then there was the money she’d spent to move back and forth between Union and Confederate lines, and the supplies she’d donated to General Beauregard’s camp to convince him she was a secessionist from Maryland. Since arriving in New Orleans, her expenses and her income had more closely matched.

  “Then get it,” Francesca said. “I’ll give you three days.”

  “That’s impossible. How do you propose I do that?”

  “You’ll find a way,” Francesca said firmly. “We’ll meet again on Wednesday. Same time, same restaurant. When you’ve paid me, you can go to the square, where the Colonel will be waiting.”

  “This is preposterous. I most certainly cannot do what you suggest.”

  “No? Then I’ll go to General Lovell and tell him the truth. Miss Josephine Breaux was seen fleeing the arsenal after the fire in the company of a wounded man recently arrived from the North. Here is the description of the wound to his head. If you look, you will no doubt find him hidin
g in or near the home of Mrs. Nellie Gill, whose husband serves with the army in Tennessee.”

  “Don’t do this,” Josephine begged.

  “Six thousand dollars. You have three days.”

  The waiter appeared with their food. He put down Francesca’s lobster and filet first, then slid in Josephine’s plate with a flourish.

  “Good news, mademoiselle. The chef found a final piece of haddock in the icebox.”

  On Monday morning, Josephine returned to her room with two hardboiled eggs taken from Nellie’s kitchen, some hard cheese, part of a bun, and a jar of fig preserves she’d swiped from the pantry. She served them to Franklin on a copy of yesterday’s Crescent, while she retreated to her desk to compose a telegram.

  Urgent.

  F.G. injured in blast.

  Enemy knows where hiding.

  Must evacuate by Wednesday.

  C.S.

  It gave her a small thrill to sign it thus. C.S.—the Crescent Spy.

  When Josephine finished, she folded it in an envelope, retrieved the curious pocket watch from the Oriental box, and stuck both envelope and watch into her satchel. When she looked up, Franklin was watching with a scowl. He’d taken a bite from one of the eggs, but set the rest of it aside.

  “I don’t want you sending that,” he said. “It’s an unnecessary risk.”

  “You don’t even know what it says.”

  “Something about bringing me a doctor, am I right? I’ll be fine. By Friday when your landlady comes, I’ll be able to get out of here on my own.”

  “That’s not what it says, and you won’t be up and about by then anyway.”

  He swung out of bed, wincing when he tried to put weight on his injured leg. “Let me see that.”

  “Get back in bed,” she said. “That’s an order.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

  “I have new information—don’t give me that look, I’m not telling you what—and you need to trust me. You’re injured, so for now, I’m in charge, and I’ll make the decisions.”

  She set the satchel by the door and returned to push him back into bed. He didn’t resist, but called to her again as she opened the door, still sounding uncertain. She ignored him and went downstairs and into the street to hail a cab.

  Franklin’s instructions had been to enter the Cabildo in the afternoon, so she couldn’t send the telegram for several hours. Instead, she went to the offices of the Crescent. There, she found the newsroom racing ahead under full steam. Editors and writers hunched over desks, scribbling, while typesetters assembled copy, their hands flying across the mold, arranging letters.

  Solomon Fein was berating Harold Keller in loud terms and slapping him with a rolled up sheaf of papers. “You know how many more copies the Picayune sells because of this? The Bee, the True Delta—they’ll all make us look like fools.

  “Thank God you’re here,” Fein said, spotting Josephine. He shoved Keller’s pages at her. “Please tell me you can make something of this.”

  “Keller’s story of the arsenal explosion?”

  “Presumably. You tell me. Might be a story of Caesar’s invasion of Gaul from all I can make of it.”

  She skim-read the story. Keller had buried the most important information at the bottom of the story, had placed the hospital on the wrong side of town, and claimed that it had been guarded by fifty men of the Tenth Louisiana Infantry, a company that had shipped to Virginia last summer. Apart from that, the writing was dull, uninspired. He didn’t have a single description of the explosion or the fire. The story’s only redeeming value was a quote from Keller’s cousin, General Lovell. Assuming that was accurate. The rest he’d apparently invented whole cloth.

  “It’s a mess,” she said.

  “That’s what he said,” Keller burst out. “But nobody has explained to me what is wrong with it.”

  “You!” Fein said, pointing to the door with a scowl, as if Keller were a naughty puppy that had piddled on the rug. “Out!”

  When Keller had slunk away, Fein turned back to Josephine. “Please tell me you can fix this mess.”

  “How long do I have?”

  Fein consulted a pocket watch. “Seventy-two minutes.”

  “It won’t be pretty. Workmanlike, at best.”

  He gave a sigh of relief. “That will do. I’ll run your Otz story on the front page and push this piece of garbage to the back.”

  “About that,” she began. She’d felt a little smug to see Fein’s poor decision about the arsenal play out as expected, but now her satisfaction faded. “I don’t have a story.”

  Fein’s eyes widened. “You don’t? Oh, God.” He slapped a hand to his forehead. For all his theatrics, she’d have thought he’d entered the offices to discover an angry mob smashing the presses.

  “This Otz woman is a glory-seeking liar,” Josephine said. “She didn’t see anything. She doesn’t know anything. Trust me, I’m good at sniffing out such sorts.”

  “What does that matter?” he said desperately. “Take what you have and wrap it in equivocating language. Throw in your own speculation. We’re trying to move papers, not testifying in court.”

  “I don’t have anything. Not a word.”

  “Josephine, why? You didn’t write me anything at all?”

  She reached into her satchel. “I have this.”

  She handed him one of the spare articles that she’d stockpiled in the past week, written during one of her feverish writing sessions. It was about the sale of Confederate war bonds in the grog houses and brothels, full of amusing anecdotes, like a redheaded whore nicknamed Molly Bricktop, who had been freely offering her company to any man who purchased a hundred-dollar bond. Molly Bricktop proudly claimed that more than forty patriotic gentleman had already purchased the requisite bonds.

  Fein skim-read it. He grunted. “Hmm. Not bad. But not front page, either. Maybe I could move Upton’s piece to the lead and put this in its place. You can hack something out of Keller’s dreck, and we’ll put that below. When did you write this?”

  “As soon as I had endured Mrs. Otz’s fanciful tales, I spent a couple of hours trying to make something of it before I gave up. There was just enough time left in the day to go around to the Irish Channel, where I was sure I could dredge up something. I got up early this morning and wrote the story.”

  He grabbed her right hand and turned it over. A skeptical look passed over his face. “You have barely any ink on your fingers and none on the edge of your palm. You haven’t been writing this morning.”

  “All right, I admit. I never even tried. I knew Otz was nuttier than a Vermont squirrel, and I threw out everything she said. I was sitting on this bond story already.” That was somewhat closer to the truth.

  “Never sit on a story. Whatever you have, whenever you have it, I want it. I’ll never have too much. I could fill the whole blasted paper with your work.” He pointed to Keller’s article, still in her left hand. “Now sit down and make something of these chicken scratches. Then go out to the hospital and see if you can get anything more.”

  “Should have sent me in the first place.”

  Fein only grumbled at this and hurried off.

  Keller’s story really was a mess, and it was closer to ninety minutes before she came up with something satisfactory. By the end, Fein was pacing back and forth behind her, looking over her shoulder and asking if she was finished if she so much as stopped to compose a sentence in her head. She finally told him that if he didn’t leave her alone she was liable to smash a bottle of ink over his head. Her final version was still weak, and she refused to let her name appear next to the story, but Fein seemed satisfied.

  He ordered her off to the hospital to get the eyewitness accounts that Keller had failed to deliver, but she didn’t go. For one thing, she didn’t want to risk running into the nurse who’d given her and Franklin a bed in the officers’ ward. Not now, less than two days from the blast, when the woman’s memory would be sharpest. For another, it w
as already early afternoon, and she didn’t know if she could make it to the hospital and then back down to Jackson Square before it would be too late to send the telegram. Today was Monday, and she only had two more days to get Franklin out of Nellie’s house before Francesca made good on her threat.

  Instead, Josephine traveled to the Quarter, where she sat in the square, writing her article about the destruction of General Lovell’s arsenal. No need to go back out; she’d witnessed it. She’d caused it. She described the boom, the column of fire. She told about the mad flight from the hospital, explained how windows had shattered blocks away and how the explosion had shaken buildings all the way to the levee. She also inserted misdirections fabricated from her own imagination. A nurse claimed she’d spotted two soldiers sitting on a barrel of powder, smoking. Someone else thought it was boys from the Alley who’d broken in to steal supplies and somehow set off the detonation. But of course one couldn’t discount Union spies. Two men with Boston accents had been sniffing around the hospital two days earlier.

  When she finished, she took out the pocket watch with its curious design of crescent and star. It was after three. She crossed the square to the Cabildo, the mansard-roofed building constructed by the Spanish as their government offices and still used by the city. Inside, she sat on a bench next to an overly talkative old woman who was knitting socks. The woman claimed that she’d already delivered sixteen pairs, the wool purchased with her own pin money, and the socks knitted with her own hands. Josephine kept up a pleasant conversation, while checking her watch every time a black man passed.

  The old woman left. A young soldier took her place, and confound it if he wasn’t also talkative. Josephine gave him a false name when he got too friendly. She’d brought a copy of Ivanhoe in her satchel and tried to read the book to show she was disinterested in conversation, but he was persistent. She was relieved when the clerk finally called him in to see the magistrate.