Unholy Fire

by Robert J. Mrazek

  “No,” said the president, wearily shaking his head as the clock on the mantle chimed twice.

  “The company appears to have won procurement contracts in a number of different supply areas, including the gun carriages. Kit is currently involved in a case in which they may have illegally conspired to win a large commissary contract. Hopefully, we will soon learn the names of the principals and how they are connected.”

  “What would you have me do at this point, Val?” asked the president, laying the pages of the report on his lap and rubbing one of his bony ankles.

  “As we unmask the men responsible for the most serious crimes, you must get rid of them, no matter how powerful they are. That is the only way to control the epidemic.”

  “If they work for the War Department, it will be a relatively simple matter,” said President Lincoln. “And I will do it. However, I don’t have the power to get rid of corrupt senators and congressmen.”

  “We have our friends in the press to expose them,” said Val. “Then it’s up to the people.”

  “Yes, of course,” President Lincoln responded. “Well, one burning house at a time. Since the Peloponnesian Wars, men have preyed on others like this in times of war. I’m just glad you’re here to help, old friend.”

  The president shifted his careworn gaze to me again.

  “Well, Captain McKittredge, you have been conspicuously silent. What do you think of the way we are prosecuting this war?”

  I imagined Johnny Harpswell standing in the room with me—and Harlan Colfax.

  “Since you ask,” I said, “with all respect, sir … from what I have seen, the war is being run by idiots … particularly the generals you have appointed.”

  President Lincoln canted his head to the side as if he wasn’t sure he had heard me correctly; then he laughed out loud, the heartiest one he had yet enjoyed.

  Val shot a hard glance at me.

  “No, our young Apollo is right,” said the president.

  “I am no Apollo,” I said, in hot anger.

  His cavernous eyes became gentle.

  “I meant no disrespect, Captain.”

  “When I was with the Twentieth Massachusetts, Mr. President, I had a first sergeant by the name of Harlan Colfax. I owe him my life. The last thing I remember him saying to me was that if we could just swap generals with the Rebels, this war would be over in a month.”

  He smiled, and the lines in his face disappeared again.

  “A wise fellow,” he responded. “In fact, when the war started, I offered command of our army to General Lee. He turned me down.”

  When his eyelid began to droop again, Val stood up.

  “You know, we have a good one in the West,” went on President Lincoln, also getting to his feet, “General Grant. He reminds me of the mastodon here … Once engaged he never lets up.”

  As we were heading toward the door, President Lincoln took Val’s arm and gently stopped him in the middle of the room. I probably wasn’t supposed to hear what he said next.

  “Well, I have come to understand what you endured when you lost your family,” he said softly. “Willie was my favorite.”

  “I knew,” said Val. “He is in my prayers, Abe.”

  “I’ve never joined a church,” said the president. “I guess my philosophy was like my old friend’s in Indiana.… When I do good, I feel good … when I do bad, I feel bad. That was my religion … but I’ve sure thought long and hard about it since Willie died. It was so hard to lose him after Eddy. I can’t think of any greater pain I have ever endured. But with each passing day, he becomes an ever sweeter ache in my heart. It has become … bearable.”

  “Yes,” said Val, “bearable.”

  They shook hands again, and Val came toward the door.

  When I looked back for the last time, the president was gazing at us with his mouth turned up in a doleful smile.

  We slowly retraced our steps down the dark, silent corridors. Outside, the rain came unabated. We were in the coach and riding back to Mrs. Warden’s when Val asked, “Where is your friend Sergeant Colfax now?”

  “Harlan is lying in a soldier’s grave somewhere along the Chickahominy River,” I said. “He was killed while leading his men through the swamps near Fair Oaks during the Seven Days. His body was never recovered.”

  “I see,” he said, with resignation in his voice. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t mention that to him.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The trial of Simon Silbernagel resumed the next morning. Major Pease was called as the first witness of the day. He seemed close to tears when he talked about the death of Pvt. Ratliff Boone and stated repeatedly that he only wished he had come a day earlier to inspect the meat.

  At the conclusion of his testimony, Mr. Silbernagel’s lawyer had a chance to cross-examine him. After receiving the court’s approval to produce an exhibit, he had two hindquarters of newly slaughtered beef brought into the courtroom on a trolley. One of them, he told the military judges, had been determined by army inspectors to be ulcerated in several places, while the other was merely bruised, and, therefore, still suitable for human consumption.

  He then asked Major Pease to look at the two samples and identify which one was ulcerated. Harold Tubshawe immediately objected, but since Major Pease had made the determination that Mr. Silbernagel’s beef was ulcerated, the presiding officer of the tribunal allowed the question to stand.

  After examining the hindquarters for almost ten minutes, the major mistakenly identified the ulcerated hindquarter as the bruised one. Following the ensuing silence, Harold pointed out to the court that Private Boone had died from eating the beef, and that there could be no refutation of that truth. On that note the presiding officer of the tribunal declared that the court would recess for lunch.

  In spite of the fact that I had not tasted either laudanum or alcohol for nearly a month, my brain had found a number of ways to signal me of its continual craving for both. Without warning, I often broke into a cold sweat, and my hands would begin to shake. Thankfully, it rarely led to uncontrollable tremors.

  After fortifying myself with a bowl of soup in a nearby restaurant, I went back to the court. No one else had yet returned, so I stretched out on one of the benches in the empty chamber and promptly fell asleep. It may have been the product of my troubled mind, but I dreamed that I was again in the blood-soaked pasture back at Harrison’s Island. I lay on the ground in the darkness, surrounded by shapes that were once rational men but now just members of our hideous wailing chorus. Over their cries, I thought I heard Sergeant Colfax calling my name.

  “John McKittredge,” I heard him call out, and I came tearing up from the depths of my haunted soul, the dream still clinging to the outer reaches of my mind. I opened my eyes to the sight of a man standing by the bench next to my head staring down at me. Startled, I sat up and looked around. We were alone in the court chamber.

  Still unnerved from my dream, I could feel the sweat running down my face and into my eyes. Pulling out a handkerchief, I dried myself. The man took off his hat and sat down on the bench next to me. His curious languid eyes slowly traveled down my rumpled uniform to my unpolished boots. There was a stillness about him, no excess movement of any kind.

  “Captain McKittredge,” he said calmly, “do you have any idea what you are doing?”

  Although his voice was very subdued, there was something in it that made me strain to listen. I knew he wasn’t one of the participants in the Silbernagel trial. By then, I had seen them all.

  The man was wearing a beautifully tailored gray pinstripe suit with starched white linen and looked like he had just come from the boardroom of a bank or a brokerage house. A heavy gold watch chain connected the pockets of his matching vest.

  “Do you have any idea what you are doing?” he repeated, his lips barely moving.

  Perhaps forty, his thickly pomaded salt-and-pepper hair was brushed straight back over a broad, leonine forehead. His eyes were almost colorless, of
the palest amber. He was powerfully built, with the rugged physique of a blacksmith.

  “What does it look like I’m doing?” I replied, with sarcasm in my voice.

  The man’s skin was even paler than his eyes, as if he had never been exposed to the sun.

  “I think you are a sick man,” he said. His amber eyes were now focused on mine. They were no longer languid. “I think you should immediately take leave until you are well.”

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “I am someone who is fully aware of your meddling in this matter,” he said next. Without ever raising his voice, the menace behind his words was clear. “And I can assure you that it has not gone unnoticed at the highest military levels.”

  Even to my laudanum-craving brain, it was obvious he was somehow involved in the official corruption that Val was secretly investigating on behalf of President Lincoln.

  “You mean the Silbernagel case,” I said.

  “If you proceed in your efforts, you do so at your own peril.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “I am just an interested citizen who is trying to do you a favor, Captain,” he said, with a taut smile. “You are about to enter a maze from which it will be impossible to extricate yourself.”

  “I’m not frightened of you,” I said.

  At that moment my hands began to shake, and I moved to clasp them together. From the disdain in his eyes, I knew that he had seen my weakness.

  “Then you must do what you must, Captain McKittredge,” he said, standing up. “Perhaps we will meet again.”

  He began walking toward a door that led to the side entrance of the court chamber. Determined to find out who he was, I stood up and followed him across the room, arriving at the door a few moments after he went out. Incredibly, the corridor beyond the chamber was empty. Five offices opened onto the hallway, each one belonging to a senior officer of the court. Their names were posted on cards affixed to the doors. The first four were all locked. The last was empty. I went back to the court chamber.

  While waiting for the trial to reconvene, I considered the recent chain of events and began to pose a set of questions to myself. What if Major Pease had used his supposed inspection tour to substitute ulcerated meat for Mr. Silbernagel’s beef in order to justify canceling his contract? And what if Private Boone had been an unfortunate casualty of his plan, solely because he had a fondness for raw steak? Upon his death those involved in the criminal conspiracy would have had no choice but to bring murder charges against Silbernagel. Based on the facts, the idea seemed plausible.

  If my hypothesis was true, there was probably a connection between Major Pease and Consolidated Supply and Manufacturing. I hoped that the report from the Provost Marshal’s Office in Philadelphia would provide the information I needed to pursue this important link in the possible conspiracy.

  When the court resumed its deliberations, Harold continued his questioning of Major Pease, which lasted through the remainder of the afternoon. That night I wrote up a summary of the day’s events for Val, including a full description of the man who had threatened me. Knowing that Val must already be down in Falmouth, I put it on a packet boat the next morning.

  The trial continued at a snail’s pace for the next two days. The stranger did not reappear. Neither did I receive my report from the Provost Marshal’s Office in Philadelphia. I sent another wire to the colonel in charge of that office asking where their inquiry stood.

  It was late on a Friday when Harold produced a witness who had seen one of Mr. Silbernagel’s drovers deliver a heifer to the slaughterhouse along with a shipment of steers. I nodded off as his testimony dragged on, only waking again to hear Harold’s loud, exasperated voice saying, “I am asking you again Mr. Dobkin … did you see Mr. Silbernagel’s drover butcher that heifer?”

  “No, sir,” said the witness. “I seen a heifer hanging from one of the hooks in the slaughterhouse, but I don’t know whether it went to the army or to a private customer.”

  At that moment, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I turned to see a private soldier standing behind me.

  “Captain McKittredge?” he whispered.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Could you follow me, please?”

  When we reached the hallway, he removed an envelope from his tunic and handed it to me. I opened the envelope to find a message from Val Burdette.

  “Urgent you join me at Army Headquarters in Falmouth,” it read. “Have arranged transportation for you at Washington Navy Yard via Aquia Creek. Come as soon as you receive this. Val.”

  “I have a carriage waiting outside,” said the private. “I am instructed to escort you to the Washington Navy Yard by five o’clock. Is this the address of your billet?”

  He handed me a sheet of paper that had the address of Mrs. Warden’s on it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Then there is sufficient time for you to go there first to pack any items you might need for the trip.”

  A few minutes later, we were racing pell-mell across the city as if the fate of the nation rested on my new mission.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  At Mrs. Warden’s, I packed a satchel bag with extra linen, underclothes, and a spare uniform. I was no sooner in the coach than the driver whipped the reins over the horses’ backs, and we were on our way again. It was a few minutes past five o’clock and the sky was already dark when the carriage rolled up to the docks of the Washington Navy Yard. The shoreline was shrouded in mist, but I could see the twinkle of oil lamps on several naval vessels as they rode at anchor in the Potomac Basin.

  A naval officer even younger than me was waiting on the wharf when the carriage pulled to a stop. Introducing himself as Captain De Vries, he led me to a long jetty, where a side-wheeler named Phalarope was standing ready with a full head of steam. I was obviously the only passenger he was expecting because, as soon as I was aboard, the gangplank was removed and the boat immediately headed out into the basin. We were soon producing an impressive wake as the speedy craft headed down the Potomac River.

  I stood at the stern, enjoying a last view of the lights of Washington as the city disappeared into the mist. Then the wind came up and the cold began to make my wound ache. Captain De Vries invited me to join him in the wheelhouse, where a small coal stove provided welcome warmth. Through the course of that night, we made our way steadily down the Potomac, rarely seeing another vessel. As the Virginia coastline sped by in the darkness, I could occasionally spy a flickering light from some lonely outpost along the shoreline.

  At around two in the morning, it began snowing so hard that Captain De Vries decided to anchor until daylight. For the remainder of that night, we were no more than twenty feet from the Rebel shoreline, and I didn’t sleep well at the thought that we might be boarded in that lonely roadstead and taken prisoner.

  It was still snowing as we continued the journey the next morning. When we arrived at Aquia Creek, it was to a sight that filled me with astonishment. Next to the newly constructed wharf, which was fully one hundred yards long, we cruised past more than twenty large transport vessels, all waiting in the channel for a place to unload their cargoes. Captain De Vries joined me at the rail as I gazed at a scene of total pandemonium on the wharf.

  There were six large steamers already tied to the pilings, and hundreds of stevedores were surging in and out of them in a steady stream. A line of empty wagons stretched off to the left, their teamsters slowly inching toward the wharf as space became available. Another long line of wagons, already loaded, was winding its way toward a phalanx of newly built warehouses that covered the high ground above the wharf as far as I could see. From a cleared space off to the right, a mountain of forage rose forty feet into the air.

  “We have already shipped fifty thousand horses and mules down here,” said the young captain, as I shook my head in wonder.

  A hard-faced corporal from the Provost Marshal’s Office met me at the wharf. The snow was showing no sign of waning,
and I was glad to see he had commandeered a coach rather than an open wagon.

  We waited more than fifteen minutes to enter the stream of transport vehicles heading down to Falmouth. There was a long train of artillery units, with siege guns, cannons, and wagons full of gunpowder and shells. Behind them came freight schooners, their massive wheels sunk almost a foot into the road mire, carrying barrels of flour, crates of hardtack, and other necessary staples.

  When an opening finally appeared in the line of traffic, we started south. Along both sides of the road for the first mile were successions of open horse pens, each holding hundreds of animals. Then came fields dotted with crude log huts that had been dug into the ground and covered with canvas sheets.

  “Those are for the teamsters. They have it good compared to us,” said the corporal disgustedly. “If we don’t break through at Fredericksburg, the army will probably be here all winter.”

  We passed into open country. It was mostly flat, with low melancholy hills in the distance. The landscape had been stripped of trees, fences, even saplings and brush. It reminded me of mange on a dog’s back.

  The road stretched ahead of us across the plain as straight as a spear. We passed men unstringing telegraph wire from huge wooden spools, and up ahead of them, a team of laborers who were erecting the poles to carry the wire. The corporal pointed across the road to where other laborers were laying track for a new railroad line that was being constructed to expedite the movement of supplies down to Falmouth.

  Perhaps it was the rawness of the day, or more likely the fact that my brain was still craving its merciless mistress, but I began shivering against my will. The tremors continued for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, the shaking and quivering ended, leaving me feeling weak and defeated.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the corporal staring at me before he turned away. I knew the look on his face without actually seeing it. I had seen it often enough in the hospital, the look that said I was already used up at the age of twenty-one.

  As we continued south, the terrain became even more desolate. In the distance I could see a stately mansion house on the brow of a hill. When we came closer, I saw that it was merely a shell, a burned-out ruin. One of the gigantic chimneys stood in solitary splendor, but it was no longer connected to anything. Two enterprising soldiers had built a fire in the open hearth and were sitting on a sprung couch in front of it, frying their salt pork at the end of long sticks under a canvas shelter.