The Blue and the Gray Undercover

by Ed Gorman

  “I’ll tell them I couldn’t find a maid and came down to the laundry to see if I could have a dress repaired. Of course, there will be nobody to repair it at this hour of the evening, but it won’t matter. I’ll just say I didn’t think. There are some advantages to having a reputation for stupidity.”

  “What will I say if they see me?”

  “You’ll say you were drunk and lost your way. You’re drunk enough to make that believable.”

  “You shouldn’t put on that tone and think nobody will mind it,” Mr. Corbinson said. “I’m not one of the darkies on your old plantation.”

  “I’ll be at the laundry room in five minutes,” Sarah said. “I’ll expect you to be there. If you aren’t there, I’ll find some way to make it clear to those two Union soldiers in the tavern just who and what you are.”

  “You’re the same thing,” Mr. Corbinson said. “You’re the same thing as me.”

  “They won’t believe it.”

  Sarah turned her back to him and walked away, down the entryway hall, all the way to the back where the laundry room would be. She could hear him breathing behind her. She couldn’t hear him walking. She blocked everything else out of her mind and concentrated on getting to where she was going without seeing anybody on her way. She imagined a stiff cold breeze of Canadian air against the sides of her face. They were all panicking, every one of them, even the ones like Mr. Corbinson who were too stupid to truly understand the magnitude of what was about to happen to them all.

  I will not be a martyr to the Cause, she thought, as she closed the laundry room door behind her. Then she stood immobile in the dark, listening to the sounds of the hotel creaking and clanging its way to dinner.

  * * *

  It took Mr. Corbinson a long time to come, so long that Sarah had begun to think she would have to take some other course to get what she had to have. Then she heard a shuffling in the yard and knew, immediately, that it was him. The colored women moved differently. The colored men were nearly silent. She had been sitting on a small stool. She stood up and held her hands in front of her. Her chest hurt when she breathed. Still, she had been right about this place. Nobody was here, and nobody would come here. A laundry room was in use most often at the beginning of the day.

  “Mrs. Thompson?” Mr. Corbinson said.

  “Don’t use my name,” Sarah said. “Come inside and be as quiet as you can.”

  “Some colored woman is going to come in here and catch us.”

  “Nobody is going to come in here. I’ve spoken to Mr. Surratt. He said he hadn’t seen you. Is that true?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to get to it. I’ll see him tonight at dinner.”

  “If you haven’t seen him, you haven’t handed him the money.”

  “The money is no business of yours. The money is business between me and Jacob Surratt.”

  “It is if you still have it. I don’t think you do. You’ve been out in the town all afternoon. I think you’ve been gambling.”

  “The only gambling I ever did in my life was on the Confederate army.”

  “And drinking.”

  “I can drink if I want to, I’m a free man.”

  “You won’t be if that money is gone. Twenty gold pieces. Did you think I didn’t know?”

  “The money is no business of yours,” Mr. Corbinson said, but he wasn’t belligerent any more. Sarah could hear the shuffle and the wheedle in his voice. She started to relax.

  “Here,” she said, pulling the stool out between them. “I want to see it. If you’ve got it, show it to me. Put it down on this stool so that I can look at it.”

  “You won’t see anything on that stool. It’s pitch dark.”

  “There’s light enough so that I can see.”

  Mr. Corbinson hesitated. Sarah held her breath. It really was dark in here. The only light came from the moon, which was full enough but too far away. Even the yard outside was dark.

  Mr. Corbinson reached in under his coat and came out with something not-white and limp—a handkerchief, Sarah thought, as filthy as the rest of him. He put it down on the stool and stepped back, leaving Sarah to open the cloth for herself.

  “It’s there,” he said. “It’s all there. I may not be a fool for the Confederacy, but I’m not a thief.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said.

  “I’m going to take it back now. I’m not going to give it to you to lose it and get me in trouble with Mr. Surratt.”

  “You can take it back,” Sarah said.

  Mr. Corbinson moved in on the stool. Sarah stepped away, into the dark edges of the room. Mr. Corbinson took the handkerchief and folded it around the gold pieces, very carefully, as if he could break them if he handled them with roughness.

  Sarah put her hand into her string bag and felt the edges of the knife. The kitchen was just next door, and there was a cacophony of sound rising out of it that she hadn’t noticed before. The air was full of noise. She could have let out a full-throated scream without anybody being able to hear. She got the knife out and unwound the cloth she had used to protect the bag. There was enough moonlight so that she could see the edge of it, glinting.

  “I’m not a thief,” Mr. Corbinson was saying. “They treat you no better than dirt, these people, North and South, it’s all the same. They treat the coloreds better than they treat a man like me.”

  Mr. Corbinson put the handkerchief back inside his coat. He peered into the dark in her direction, but Sarah knew there was nothing he could see.

  “I’m not a thief,” he said, and then he turned his back.

  She had been thinking about it all morning—thinking about it, really, for most of the last two days—what it would take to get the money off him. She had known from the beginning that she wouldn’t be able to steal it. She had imagined herself plunging the knife into him. She had thought of herself as emotionless and cool.

  Now the knife seemed to have taken on a life of its own. It had possessed her hand, like some kind of malevolent ghost. It had a very long blade, so that she had had to work to make it fit inside her string bag. It was a man’s knife, not a woman’s, and that had been important to her to. What frightened her was how much she loved the feel of it. She plunged it into his back and saw him reel. She drew it out and felt the stickiness of blood against the side of it. She plunged it in again, and then he began to pivot and reel, rounding on her.

  She stepped back just in time. She had no idea what it took to kill a man. She thought a bullet could do it in a single shot, but she hadn’t been willing to risk the noise of a gun. He fell on his back and took the knife along with him. She leaned down to roll him over and then stopped. She didn’t want to roll him over. She wanted his money. She put her hands inside his coat and felt around. She felt the heavy weight of the gold but no way to get into it. She tore at the fabric until it came apart in her hand.

  “Mr. Corbinson?”

  He didn’t answer. Sarah put her hand down on his chest and felt for his heart. She felt nothing—but that might not mean what she thought it meant. That might not mean anything. She put the handkerchief back down on the stool and opened it up.

  “Twenty,” she said, counting. She wiped her hands on the handkerchief and took a single gold piece out to leave on its own in the dirt. She could make do with nineteen pieces instead of twenty. The important thing was to make them all believe that Mr. Corbinson had been robbed, and probably by one of the colored men who worked in the yard. It didn’t really matter what they thought, as long as they never suspected her.

  She opened up her string bag again and let the gold pieces drop inside. She would have to find a couple of handkerchiefs to stop them from clinking against each other, but her carpetbag was full of handkerchiefs. They wouldn’t be hard to find. She pressed the toe of her boot against Mr. Corbinson again. He rocked when she pushed him, but he didn’t move at all when she stopped.

  “Good,” she said.

  Then she went to the door of the laundry room and looke
d out into the hall. Nobody had seen her go in. Nobody would see her go out. She thought about all that gold in all those banks, up in Canada, and the papers she had folded in her dress, which were the only way to get to it. It was odd what men were willing to do for money.

  * * *

  Half an hour later, when the dinner bell rang, Sarah came down the long front staircase into the lounge, looking for Jacob Surratt. There were not many people in the hotel, and what few there were looked shabby and tired. The Yankee soldiers had come out of the tavern to join the guests. They would be having dinner, now that they were drunk enough not to care if they made outright fools of themselves.

  “They wouldn’t behave in that way if they were soldiers of the Confederacy,” Mr. Surratt said, but he kept his voice low enough so that he wouldn’t be overheard.

  Sarah wanted to tell him that they would, most certainly, behave in that way if they were soldiers of the Confederacy. Soldiers behaved like soldiers no matter what army they belonged to. They loved and hated like ordinary men. Their lives depended on women like her, and on men like Mr. Corbinson and Mr. Surratt.

  “You’ll take me in to dinner,” Sarah said, not asking it. Mr. Surratt held out his arm.

  It was a wonder, Sarah thought, that she hadn’t done something like this before. It was a wonder she hadn’t asked herself yet if she would be able to get away with it more than once.

  Ray Vukcevich’s first novel is The Man of Maybe Half a Dozen Faces from St. Martin’s Minotaur. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Rosebud, Aboriginal Science Fiction, Pulphouse, Talebones, and several anthologies including Twists of the Tale, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror (Twelfth Annual Collection), and both volumes of Imagination Fully Dilated. His latest book is a collection of short fiction called Meet Me in the Moon Room, from Small Beer Press. He is currently working on another novel.

  The Swan case, which involved the notorious Confederate spy Rose Greenhow, is another famous Civil War spy case, although the ending in this story is entirely fictional.

  THE SWAN

  Ray Vukcevich

  ONE

  I came to Indiana hoping to settle a question that had occupied me for over twenty years. An informant had sent a clipping from the May 12, 1885 Muncie Daily Monitor to my New York office.

  The grand opening of the Imperial Roller Rink in Muncie will feature a promenade of couples on skates, a Wild West show, barrel races, and a special appearance by Mary Elizabeth Swann, known professionally across the state of Indiana and around the world as “The Swan.” Mary is renowned for her unusual aspect and unearthly grace.

  I very much wanted to see Mary in regard to the spy Charles Wyatt Swann. I had become involved in the Swann case in 1861 while working under Allan Pinkerton in Washington. Pinkerton had had a tremendous success peeking into the windows of Mrs. Rose O’Neal Greenhow’s house on the corner of Thirteenth and I Streets, a fashionable neighborhood not far from the White House. He was eager to do it again. Mrs. Greenhow was a member of Washington high society and had connections everywhere. Her Confederate sympathies were well known, and it was widely believed she had given Beauregard information about McDowell’s forces that resulted in the devastating rout of the Union Army at Bull Run. Pinkerton probably already had all he needed to arrest her, but it would be eight days after his first observations before he closed in. In the meantime, he repeated his bold move of looking in her windows several times.

  One afternoon the duty of holding him up so he could see into her parlor windows, which were set quite high up from ground level, fell to me and a man named Will Jones. I did not know Jones well. In fact, I was new to Pinkerton’s operation in Washington and didn’t know any of his male and female operatives in any but the most superficial ways. A railroad man who had worked with my father in the gold fields of California had arranged for me to meet with Pinkerton in Chicago. I had done some law enforcement work in San Francisco, and I thought I could better aid the Union as a detective than as a soldier. Pinkerton agreed, but with some reservations. It soon became obvious that I would start near the bottom in his operation. He hadn’t yet given me a chance to do anything exciting, and I was eager for an opportunity to prove myself.

  Pinkerton’s success in his first peeking had convinced him to do subsequent observations himself. The front door of Mrs. Greenhow’s house was at the center of the building and opened onto the street. Visitors approached it by way of a flight of stairs. We sneaked into the shadows beneath a parlor window to one side of those stairs, and Pinkerton took off his boots. We boosted him to our shoulders so he could see inside.

  No one had commented upon the difference in height between Jones and myself, but it soon became apparent that the difference would be a problem. Since I was perhaps a foot shorter than Jones, Pinkerton standing on our shoulders listed badly to one side. In his attempt to straighten up, he was forced to put all of his weight on my shoulder, and that proved to be too much for me. I sagged and Pinkerton fell. He snatched at the sill for a handhold but only managed to slow his fall. He sat down hard in a puddle. Jones and I seized him under the arms, and we had only time to drag him away and hide under the stoop before the blinds were thrust away and Mrs. Greenhow poked her head out.

  “I don’t see anything,” she said to someone in the room. “Perhaps an animal.” She pulled the blind back into place. She looked matronly and a little older than I had been led to believe. Stories of her using her female endowments to enchant so many men may have been exaggerated.

  Pinkerton had regained his dignity by this time. “The man’s name is Charles Wyatt Swann,” he said. “This looks like a simple business deal. He’s trying to get her interested in his invention which seems to be wheels you put on your boots. He’s got them in a box.”

  “Roller skates?” I asked.

  “You’ve heard of them?”

  “I read something about bar girls serving beer in Germany on wheels,” I said.

  “Well, she doesn’t seem interested,” Pinkerton said. “If it doesn’t have to do with the war, she doesn’t want to hear it. I’ll bet this one doesn’t get a good night kiss.”

  He retrieved his boots and put them on. I thought we’d be leaving but I was wrong. Later I concluded the reason he did not resume the surveillance himself was that he would be presenting to the street his muddied backside. “Daggett,” he said to me, “since you’re the expert on wheels for your shoes, get up there and see if they do anything we should know about. Give him a hand, Jones.”

  When it became clear Jones and I would continue the surveillance on our own, I pulled off my boots. Jones cupped his hands together, and I stepped into them. He boosted me up and I grabbed the windowsill and worked my way around until I was standing on his shoulders. I lifted the sash a little and carefully turned the slats of the blinds and peered inside.

  Mrs. Greenhow and Charles Wyatt Swann sat in overstuffed chairs near the fireplace. Both were turned my way and I could hear much of their conversation quite clearly. I lost words only when they turned aside or leaned in to speak in softer tones.

  Now that I had leisure to study her, I changed my assessment of Mrs. Greenhow. She was a fine looking woman of perhaps forty, and there was a kind of animal energy about her that made her very attractive.

  Swann was a small man with a full black beard. The beard made him look older, but nonetheless, I judged him to be in his mid-twenties, a man no older than myself. His hair was much too long to be fashionable and was tied back with a black ribbon. If I had passed him on the street, I might have thought him a mountain man who had been wedged into a city suit for some special occasion. He held the box Pinkerton had mentioned in his lap. It was wooden and perhaps a foot and a half long and half that wide and deep.

  “I don’t see how I can help you, Mr. Swann,” Rose Greenhow said.

  “As I’ve explained,” he said, “I am confident the skates will be granted a patent in
the North, but I am concerned about their protection in the Confederacy.”

  “I think you misunderstand my concerns, Mr. Swann,” she said, “This is not a place to negotiate Confederate business propositions.”

  “I do understand that, Mrs. Greenhow,” he said, “but surely you can see the potential of my skates.”

  “Potential?”

  “Someday this will be the ultimate in refined exercise. There will be huge establishments called ‘Roller Rinks’ where people will come to skate and socialize. Polished wooden floors as large as a city park. Everyone who counts will be doing it.”

  “I would judge you’ve not been spending much time with anyone who counts, Mr. Swann,” she said and looked him up and down. “What would your father have said?”

  He did not reply to her question, but asked one of his own. “Surely we do not want the Confederacy to be denied this opportunity?”

  “Frankly, Mr. Swann,” she said, “I see this only as an opportunity for you. You want your skates patented on both sides so you win no matter what happens. What do we get out of helping you?”

  “Have you considered the military implications of my wheeled skates, Mrs. Greenhow?”

  She laughed and her laugh was high and gay. Now it was easy to see why she had power over men. She was laughing at him but in such a way that he could not take offense. It was a captivating laugh.

  Strangely, he didn’t seem captivated. “I’m not joking,” he said.

  “Very well,” she said, “explain how these wheeled skates of yours will help us win the war.”

  “Imagine what you could do to unsettle the populations of Northern cities,” he said.

  I had interviewed liars on more than one occasion, and I realized at once that Swann was inventing military uses for his skates on the spot. It was difficult to tell if Mrs. Greenhow shared my opinion. “Go on,” she said.

  “Imagine soldiers,” he said, “swooping down the streets of New York, for example, faster than the fastest runner, firing pistols and yelling like demons. Surely you can see what a demoralizing effect that would have on the citizenry. Think about it.”