The Lincoln Deception

by David O. Stewart

  Buckner protested his innocence again. This time Fraser sat through it, eyes cast down at the planking on the depot platform. When the man grew quiet, Fraser asked, “You’re done?”

  The man nodded.

  “You still see my friend there?” Cook hadn’t moved. “Now listen close this time. I would describe my friend as, well, moody. You might call him crazy. Different words, but the same point. You know he’s carved up white men before, don’t you? They should’ve told you that. I don’t know how many he’s done. What I know, and maybe they didn’t tell you, is that he doesn’t mind it. I don’t know, maybe he likes it.” Buckner shifted his weight.

  “You can see he’s close to losing his temper, and that’ll be worse for you than for me,” Fraser said. “You’re the only one can keep that from happening. Now why not say who sent you?”

  The gray man looked across the tracks.

  “Somebody hired you.” The man remained silent. Fraser sighed and stood. “That’s too bad. You give me a name and address, I can send word where your people can find you. You know, after.”

  Cook started walking toward them.

  “Stoneman,” the man blurted.

  Fraser signaled Cook to stop. “Okay.”

  “I didn’t sign up for no rough stuff. Not my line. It was this Stoneman, though, I done some jobs for him before, following guys, you know.”

  “Tell me about Stoneman.”

  “He’s a big fellow, works for some shipping company. You know, private police. Out of Baltimore. He was a cop there, a rough one. Proud of it.”

  “What company?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Has he got a first name?”

  “Jed, I think. Least that’s what they call him.”

  Fraser pressed him for a description. Stoneman was of medium height, broad across and without much hair. He favored a wide-brimmed hat. Buckner claimed not to know any others or to be able to describe them.

  “What’d he hire you to do?”

  The man looked over at Cook, who was about fifteen feet away, looking full of energy. “Does he have to stand so close?”

  “What were you supposed to do?”

  “I started about three weeks ago. Stoneman hired me and three others, three that I knew about. Told us to be watching for you two—a big yellow nigger with graying hair and a large white man, sandy haired.”

  “Why did he say you were watching for us?”

  “Didn’t say.” The man looked up at Fraser. “What do I care? I watch at train stations, ferry slips. When you two are together, you stand out a mile.”

  “So what’re you supposed to do when you find us?”

  The man shrugged. “Find out where you’re staying, where you’re going. Tell Stoneman. After that, I don’t know. Stoneman handles that. I’m just a guy who watches.” He looked over at Fraser. “You ought to know, it changed a few days back.”

  “What changed?”

  “Stoneman hired more guys. Said we weren’t going to let you leave New York. Said you stole some things.”

  “What?”

  “Books. He said one’s got a picture of a frog. I didn’t ask about it. Like I said, I’m purely a watcher.”

  Fraser tried more questions, but the man offered nothing more. Then Fraser had a thought. “When you saw us, did you send any kind of message about it, before you got on the train?”

  The man denied it, but Fraser didn’t believe him. They needed to get off this train platform. He waved Cook over. “Mr. Buckner here’s been talking.”

  Cook gave the man a hard look. Fraser added, “We’re at the part where he agrees to stop following us. Keeping after us would be a real mistake.”

  The man agreed emphatically.

  “You want to let him go?” Cook said. “Just like that?” Disappointment suffused his tone.

  “Unless you’ve got a better idea.”

  Cook shook his head and cocked a hip. “All right. Not as messy, I guess.” Lifting his chin, he said directly to the man, “Don’t let me see you again.”

  The man nodded and stood. Fraser shooed him with the back of his hand and Buckner scampered away.

  Cook began to smile. “Damn, Doctor, I’m thinking maybe you missed your calling, you should’ve signed up for something a bit rougher, collecting gambling debts and such.”

  Fraser smiled. “It wasn’t me he was afraid of. What’d you say to him?”

  They sat down on their trunks. “Nothin’.” Cook smiled again. “Saying nothin’, that can be real powerful. Also, showing a knife.”

  After Fraser related what the man had said, Cook puffed out his cheeks and let out a long breath. “Okay. We’re riding the tiger here. Stoneman, Barstow, they aren’t fooling around. They want those books back. Funny that he mentioned the frog book.”

  “Don’t you see? That means we’re getting closer.”

  “Yeah, closer to getting killed.”

  They agreed on a radical change in their travel. Stoneman was watching train stations and piers, but he couldn’t cover every country road in New Jersey and Maryland. They would ship their luggage to Baltimore, buy a couple of horses, and ride there.

  Fraser made a face. “That’s a long ride. Why not just build a hot-air balloon and fly there?”

  “Balloons are damned easy to follow.” Cook grinned. “Come on, it’ll toughen up your backside.” As his grin faded, he added, “I don’t have a good feeling about Baltimore. That’s a Southern town, and it’s Stoneman’s hometown. We’re walking right onto his home field.”

  “You want to go back to Ohio?”

  “Just letting you know how I feel.”

  Chapter 19

  Cook didn’t mind hanging back while Fraser asked the farmers if they could sleep in the barn or shed. They never talked about doing it that way, having Fraser do the asking. First time they did it, Cook just let Fraser ride into the farmyard ahead of him. With his gentle manners, Fraser looked as harmless as the straw he was asking to sleep on. Farmers naturally liked blond, shambling Jamie Fraser. They wanted to help him get out of the weather. They trusted him not to burn the place down. So Cook stayed out of the way.

  The journey was proving more difficult than it sounded. Neither of them had spent much time in the saddle. They tried to buy horses in Elizabeth, but the ones they found were either half-dead or high-spirited—real high-spirited. When a stableman watched them spook their mounts into near hysteria, he spat tobacco juice and held out the money Fraser had just paid him.

  “Come on, come on,” the man called. “Get down off those things before you kill yourselves.”

  He told them to try mules. When Cook objected that mules would be slow, the stableman spat again. Drops of brown juice spackled his chin. “I got a conscience, you know, but you two are fully growed. You can choose. Slow or dead.”

  Fraser bought the mules, Annie and Dusty. Not that the mules knew their names or cared who was trying to ride them. In the man-mule relationship, Annie and Dusty took the leadership role. They set their own pace, a deliberate one. They stopped when they wished to graze and stayed until they were done. When an automobile roared up behind them, they trotted off in whatever direction promised the quickest relief from the machine’s thunder and smoke. After one encounter with an auto, Annie didn’t stop for more than a mile, leaving Fraser red-faced and even more saddle-sore. He and Cook learned to bend every effort to avoid motorized vehicles, which suited Annie and Dusty just fine. On the plus side, the mules didn’t mind the rain on the second day, though the riders found it dispiriting.

  Indeed, so long as their terms were honored—and the men had little choice in that matter—the mules proved willing partners. They walked steadily for up to ten hours a day, submitting without complaint to ferry rides over rivers. Crossing into northern Maryland on the third day, the men expected to reach Baltimore the next afternoon.

  They didn’t talk much on the road. The mules walked single file, which discouraged conversation. Fraser called
out remarks on the breeze, the sun, the clouds, but Cook mostly didn’t respond, neglecting Fraser into silence.

  In the evenings, they pulled out Barstow’s books and stared at them until fatigue got the upper hand. They made no headway with the frog book. Cook still insisted that some of the numbers stood for dates and others for dollar values, but they could pick out no patterns. They did better with the book in Confederate cipher. They puzzled out a flurry of references in early 1865 to Julius Spencer, who would become Barstow’s partner. They looked for a connection between Spencer and John Wilkes Booth, but found none.

  On the third night, Cook had some things on his mind. He waited until they finished their canned soup and loaf of bread. Neither of them was much for cooking.

  Staring into the dwindling fire, Cook started talking about the men who were chasing them. They were serious about this business, he said, serious enough to set traps for them. What did Fraser and Cook know about them? Did they know enough to figure out how to avoid them, or even stop them?

  “Well,” Fraser started, “we know Barstow’s in the middle of it—”

  “More like at the top.”

  “—and we know something about Stoneman. And we know they call themselves the Sons of Liberty.”

  “They could call themselves the Knights of the Second Coming,” Cook said. “The name don’t mean anything. That’s just how they fancy themselves.”

  “I think it matters. The Sons of Liberty means something to them. They think they’re defending a cause, liberty.”

  “Brother, all it means is they’re defending themselves. From us. This has to be about assassinating Lincoln, right? They’re making sure to keep that covered up, making sure the trail always ends at Booth, the mad killer. If you were involved in killing Lincoln, thirty-five years don’t make you any safer than you were the day he died. Someone finds out you did it, you’re going to hang.”

  “Okay, fair enough. How does that help us find them?”

  “Can’t think of anything helps us find them. They don’t always wear red shirts or blue hats, or work in a building with a sign saying ‘Sons of Liberty’ out front. The ones we’ve seen have just been regular-looking white men, right? Could be anyone on the street.”

  Fraser smiled. “That one back at the train station. You scared the willies out of him.”

  “He should’ve been scared.”

  “It isn’t like we were going to do anything right there on the depot platform.”

  “That what you think?”

  Fraser lifted his eyes from the fire. “Shouldn’t it be?”

  Cook took his time answering. “I think you all should be scared of me.” Cook met Fraser’s gaze. “Playing ball, they got to be scared of me. I liked that, used it to beat them. People who’re scared don’t think straight. They didn’t like being scared of me, a colored boy, but dangerous all the same. Maybe more dangerous because he’s colored. They thought maybe I was playing some different game than they were, that it mattered more to me, that I’d do something they wouldn’t. They were right.”

  “What different game?”

  “You know how you felt up on that bridge, swinging in the wind? Like you were trapped, nowhere to turn, nothing you can do, every move going to get you in worse trouble, even get you killed?”

  Fraser nodded.

  “That’s being colored. Trapped. Nowhere to go. Can’t afford to step wrong. Not once.” Cook stared into the fire. “Throwing me out of baseball probably saved my life. I was going to start something, sooner or later, and I would’ve ended up dead. I didn’t know it, but they knew.”

  “Must’ve been hard, giving up something you’re really good at.”

  Cook fed the fire some wood he had split with the farmer’s ax. “I was hot about it, but it was out of my hands. Every ballplayer knows it’s coming one day, the day you’re too slow, too weak. I wasn’t there yet, but I could see it.”

  “I’ve been feeling that way about doctoring.”

  “Doctoring? No such thing as too slow for doctoring. That’s something old men do.”

  Fraser smiled. “Not too slow, maybe, but losing the fire. Since my wife, Ginny, died, it feels different. Not as important. I still want to help people, get to know them. When they get sick, some people seem to become more who they really are, more than at any other time. It’s like they’re stripped bare. They don’t have the energy to pretend. It’s a privilege to know them that way.” Cook was nodding. “But with Ginny gone, when things go bad, I can’t let go of it. I could talk to her about those times and get out from under them. But not now. They weigh on me. I don’t know if I can keep on with it.”

  “There’s a big world out there, lots of things to do, ’specially for a large white man like yourself.”

  Fraser laughed. “Don’t you ever stop thinking about race?”

  “Nope, that’d be dangerous, dangerous for any colored. You might end up acting uppity, get sassy.” They watched the fire flicker and pop. “So,” Cook started, “when I was through feeling angry and sorry for myself, that’s when I decided to start this newspaper.”

  “Have you ever done that kind of work?”

  Cook smiled. “I’ve read a whole heap of newspapers and I’ve known lots of newspaper men. Doesn’t look all that hard.” His face grew stern. “I’m through with sitting around bellyaching while the world goes to hell in a handbasket. I’ve got a voice and an arm, and I can lift them both against all this injustice I’ve been swimming through my whole life. I’ve got something to say. It doesn’t matter how much I get to say or how many days I get to say it. The Lord never lets you know how many days you’ll have. But I’ve got to start.”

  “I envy your passion.”

  “Mrs. Cook says it doesn’t make me easy to live with.”

  Fraser smiled. “I can see her point.” He sat up straighter and stretched his spine. “Time to talk about Baltimore?” Cook said nothing, so Fraser pressed on. “The people there—the Surratts and Sam Arnold—they’re not going to be eager to talk with the likes of us. I figure John Surratt is least likely to cooperate. He never did show any remorse, just stuck to his story that the Booth conspiracy was exactly that—the Booth conspiracy. So let’s start with him. Why don’t we run at him first?”

  “He should be last,” Cook said. “The others’ll clam up as soon as John Surratt passes the word. He’s the hard case. Think of it. He’s the one who ran off to Europe and never looked back while they hanged his mother for his crimes. A man who turns his back on his own mother—he ain’t about to make a spontaneous confession. Not ever.”

  Fraser offered a compromise. They could start by checking out John Surratt. He was the only one they knew where to find, courtesy of Townsend. Surratt might lead them to his sister, or to something else.

  “No matter where we start,” Cook said, “Stoneman’ll be looking for us. And he’ll send men who aren’t just watchers. He’ll send the doers next time.”

  The fire was down to embers. A half-moon gave the land a ghostly pall. A mule snorted and kicked the ground.

  “You figure there’s any chance we work this out,” Cook said, “we actually get proof of what really happened? And that anyone will believe us if we do?”

  Fraser lifted an eyebrow an inch. He shrugged even less.

  Cook figured that was as good an answer as there was. Lying back on his blanket, he didn’t expect to fall asleep, but he did right off.

  Chapter 20

  Cook didn’t think Annie and Dusty would walk as far into Baltimore as they did. The mules’ objections to traffic could no longer be ignored when two autos rumbled down a street at the same time, triggering a spasm of head shaking, shying, and even the beginnings of rising on back hooves. Cook persuaded Fraser to dismount and stable their steeds. They could manage the rest of the way on foot.

  Baltimore didn’t compare to New York as a city, but after four days on the road, Cook felt the lure of its conveniences. They found a rooming house with that b
edraggled look he prized. Domestic thoughts washed over him: a hot bath, a kitchen-cooked meal, clean clothes from their trunks. He pushed those thoughts out of his mind.

  According to Townsend’s wire, Surratt worked for the Baltimore Steam Packet Company, which should be easy to find. It was bound to be a nest of former Confederates. “This,” he declared, “is one Southern town. I’m telling you, it’s no place to be colored.”

  “You say that about every city,” Fraser pointed out.

  “That don’t make me wrong.”

  They split up, since they were so easy to pick out when together. Fraser went to claim their luggage from the train depot. Cook wanted to look over the shipping company.

  He found its terminal on Light Street, facing the harbor. A steamer, the Georgia, sparkled in the sunshine. At the front of the vessel, white-jacketed staff guided passengers coming down the gangplank. At the rear, a Negro freight gang shouldered bales of cotton. After hoisting a bale, sometimes teetering briefly, each man would center himself for the tramp down to the pier and a waiting wagon. The sun was strong and the air thick with humidity. The men’s dark skin shone with sweat and their shirts clung damply. Cook watched from a shady spot on the street.

  During a lull in the stevedores’ efforts, Cook fell in with a group of them as they drained pails of beer from a nearby tavern. He said he heard the company was hiring.

  “Where’d you hear that?” The question came from a medium-sized man, older than the others.

  Cook said he heard that a fellow by the name of Stoneman said so. A wordless buzz passed through the group. The silence was thick. The men finished their beers and began to move back to the ship.

  Cook followed the man who had spoken to him. “What’d I say? Haven’t had that kind of effect since I farted in church.”

  The man stopped and looked off into the middle distance. “If you’re a man for Stoneman,” he said, “then don’t none of us need to be with you.”