The Lincoln Letter

by William Martin

  Professor Colin Conlon of George Washington University is the author of Lincoln at Law: The Legal Education and Political Birth of Abraham Lincoln. He received his B.A. from Princeton, his Ph.D. from Columbia. He is best known for his works on the eighteenth century, including the Pulitzer Prize winner, Ideals and Economies: The Roots of the American Revolution. His commentary has appeared in numerous periodicals, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is also director of the Conlon Center for Studies in American History at GWU.

  Peter pulled out a notebook and pen. This was going to be good.

  The auditorium held about two hundred, and every seat was taken. People were standing along the side aisles, too. It was another of those “crossroads of D.C.” crowds: white and black, rich and poor, young and old, student and professional, lobbyist and welfare mom, tourist and local.

  At three o’clock, Diana led the speakers onto the dais. She had changed into a yellow sundress that looked dazzling against her coffee-colored skin.

  Peter started taking notes.

  No one in audience looks “off”.… No Sorrel. No Bonnie Blue Flag ballcaps.

  Volpicelli—olive complexion, black hair, seersucker suit over pink Izod shirt w/collar up. Nervous smile. Eyes shift … expecting attack … verbal? Physical? Knows hostile audience when he sees one.

  Colin Conlon. Acts like Pulitzer-winner. Cool … condescending? Guys from Princeton always act like that, even without Pulitzers.

  Diana opens: “Our question today: How did a man who, by our lights, harbored racial beliefs more in line with the KKK than the NAACP, come to sign DC Emancipation Act, Emancipation Proclamation, and insist, even when he thought it would bring defeat in the 1864 election, that the Republican Party make the Thirteenth Amendment a plank in its platform, and—?”

  Conlon interrupts: “He did it because he was a political visionary!”

  Volpicelli counters: “He did it because he was a political cynic!”

  Fifteen minutes for each speaker … lines drawn in opening statements.

  V. speaks fast, facts in hand, even if interprets wrong … sounds like Midwesterner, despite Italian name.

  C. is typical prof, all “ums and ahs and on the one hand, on the other hand.” Not a sound bite kind of guy. Good reason only TV gigs are on PBS docs. Too boring even for C-SPAN. But always ready to jump on Diana when she makes a point. Is he the potbellied white prof on her tenure committee, even though he has no pot?

  Closing statements:

  C.: Lincoln a product of his times yet a man out of time. Nice but bland.

  V.: Lincoln, the railroad lawyer, a tool of the special interests: of big business investors who wanted him to sign transcontinental RR bill; of greenback guys who were happy to run up nat’l debt and take country off gold standard; of New England Repubs who wanted to tell everyone else how to live their lives. Preserving Union a euphemism for extending Federal power. Eradicating slavery a smoke screen. Juicy revisionism.

  Diana walks middle road.

  Now Q&A.

  Peter just listened. Some good questions. Some stupid ones. And throughout, he heard echoes of the modern debate: how much power to concentrate here, in the imperial city, and how much to leave in the hands of the people who live in the places where the issues live. It had been the debate over the Constitution in 1787, it had been part of the irrepressible conflict that led to the Civil War, and it never ended.

  Diana declared, “Last question!” and pointed to a guy with a bushy beard, jeans, T-shirt, ball cap, standing along the far side of the auditorium.

  Like half the people in the room, Peter was pulling out his iPhone. The event was all but over. Time to make sure he hadn’t missed anything important in the last hour. But as he scrolled through his e-mails, he heard this from the far side of the room:

  “Professor Volpicelli, in your book you mention a Lincoln diary.”

  Peter looked up. A diary? Wow. Forget the Lincoln letter. Then he looked at the guy and saw that his ball cap had a white star, just like the guy in the flea market.

  Professor Conlon sniffed into the microphone. “Let’s get two things straight: First, my debate partner is not a professor. Second, while more books have been written about Lincoln than about any human being except Jesus Christ, none of them talk seriously about a diary.”

  “Wrong again,” said Volpicelli, “at least about the diary, though it’s not exactly a diary, and it may not exactly be Lincoln’s, but—”

  “You see?” said Conlon. “I said, ‘talk seriously,’ and this is what you get.”

  Volpicelli just laughed. “I’ll bet you haven’t even read my book.”

  “I have no interest in reading politically motivated claptrap.”

  “Spoken like one of the Lincoln flame-keepers.”

  “I don’t even know what that is,” said Conlon.

  “Let me explain.”

  “Please don’t,” said Conlon.

  Volpicelli kept smiling. “Diana Wilmington admits that Lincoln was a racist. She bases her whole thesis on it. So she doesn’t light a candle and genuflect before the Lincoln altar. She’s no flame-keeper.”

  “Just the author of inflammatory rhetoric designed to sell books,” said Conlon.

  “But,” said Volpicelli, “you’re one of those academic historians who refuse to see Lincoln from a fresh perspective.”

  “The perspective of John Wilkes Booth, you mean?” Conlon began to shuffle papers.

  Volpicelli said, “I’ll ignore that.”

  “And you should be ignored. I don’t even know why you’re here. You’re just a guy with a word processor and some right-wing money behind you. You have no training and no degrees. I have tenure at a major university. And Assistant Professor Wilmington defended her positions among her peers”—then Conlon gave her a pointed look—“even if she has the kind of extreme ideas better aimed at the television networks than the community of scholars.”

  Yes, thought Peter, Conlon was the spurned suitor.

  “Extreme ideas,” said Volpicelli, “and pretty, too.”

  Then someone spoke from the far side of the room: deep voice, Midwest accent. “Mr. Volpicelli, this business about a Lincoln diary … what’s your primary source?”

  The smile fell from Volpicelli’s face like a sheet of glass hit with a hammer.

  Peter turned and scanned the crowd behind him.

  A guy in a Hawaiian shirt and jeans was staring intently at Volpicelli. He had a skinny face, a mustache and chin strap, a sort of elongated soul patch popular in the Civil War. He looked like he could have stepped right out of the nineteenth century, but for the giant orchids on the shirt.

  Volpicelli’s voice lost all its cocky conviction. He fell back on authorspeak. “Buy the book and find out.”

  A few people hissed; a few more laughed.

  As if she sensed that things were breaking down, Diana stood. “Now, folks, we’ll be signing our books in the lobby. You’ll know me because I’ll be sitting in the middle.”

  That brought more laughter, then applause, then people were standing, buzzing, pushing forward to talk to the speakers, because they didn’t want to wait in line or didn’t want to be embarrassed into buying a book in order to get some face time.

  Peter caught Diana’s eye and made a gesture—I’ll see you outside—then he turned up the aisle with lots of excuse mes and looked across the auditorium for the Hawaiian shirt. He had to find that guy or the one with the star on his hat.

  But neither of them was in the foyer or hanging in the hallway.

  So Peter decided to look outside.

  He stepped from the air-conditioning into the hot little plaza dominated by the sculpted head of George Washington. He looked up and down the street. Then he saw the shirt.

  The guy was standing by the statue, studying his iPhone.

  Peter said, “Excuse me.”

  The guy looked at Peter, then at his phone, then said, “Are you the big-de
al book man from Boston?”

  “My fame precedes me. So … who are you?”

  “No one you need to know. Just stay out of our way.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You knew enough to go snooping at the flea market.” The man held his phone up.

  Peter saw a picture of himself, perusing The Killer Angels. He said, “That’s my bad side. I should have had him take another one.”

  The guy looked to be in his forties. His face was long and sallow from forehead to chin, sunburned on the sides …

  Peter said, “Someone just mentioned a Lincoln diary in there, which prompted a question from you.”

  “That was bait, to see who’d rise. And here you are, a few hours after your girlfriend rides the train with two of the other players.” He swiped his thumb across the screen and brought up a picture of Evangeline and two people on the Acela Club Car.

  Peter said, “I don’t know who those people are.”

  “The congressman and the lobbyist? You don’t know who they are? Then why are you here?”

  “I came for the seminar. Lifelong learning.”

  “It can be a short life if you don’t learn the right lessons.”

  A black Chrysler 200 pulled up, and Mr. Civil War Soul Patch headed for it.

  “Wait.” Peter took a step. “Are you the hackers?”

  And the barrel of a pistol popped out the back window. The guy with the bushy beard, the one who had asked the first question, was holding it. And it looked like the camera guy from the Eastern Market was driving.

  “That’s a Navy Colt,” said the man. “A repro, but it works. Forty-four-caliber ball. Tear you to pieces.”

  Peter looked at the gun, then at the guy, and decided, as he usually did, that discretion was the better course. “You have a nice day.”

  The car sped away, but not before Peter pulled out his phone and got a shot of the plate. Then he turned to go back inside and bumped into Diana.

  “What was that?” she asked.

  “A player. A big player. And a Civil War reenactor, I think.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “The sides of his face were sunburned, but not the front, as if he had been wearing a brimmed cap, like a Bonnie Blue Flag ball cap or a kepi.”

  “Kepi?”

  “A Civil War cap,” said Peter. “He also wore that mustache and chin strap. And he threatened me with a reproduction Civil War pistol.”

  She said, “Did he say anything more about a Lincoln diary?”

  “He said I should stay out of it.”

  “The wrong thing to say to you.”

  “And a violation of the rules,” he said.

  “I thought you said there weren’t any rules.”

  “Unless I’m making them up as I go along.” Peter typed an e-mail address onto his phone and attached the picture of the license plate. Then he clicked SEND.

  Diana looked over his shoulder. “Where’s that going?”

  “To a friend of mine in New York, a private detective. He’ll run that plate.”

  Two or three students approached and told Diana how much they had enjoyed the panel. An older black woman came up and asked her to sign a copy of her book, which Diana did with a smile and some friendly chitchat. Diana’s student assistant brought a bottle of water out to her and said that the department head wanted to talk to her.

  “Tell him I’ll be right along.” Diana turned to Peter. “I’d better see to this.”

  Peter asked her, “Where’s Volpicelli?”

  “He didn’t stay. I think he wanted to split before someone took a poke at him.”

  “And Professor Conlon?” asked Peter.

  “I asked him to have a drink with us, but he was more blunt than Volpicelli.”

  “Blunt?”

  “He said he didn’t want to drink with a scholar who had prostituted herself to popularity. He envies my book sales and notoriety.”

  “He’s on your tenure committee, isn’t he?”

  She just gave him a long look.

  That was enough. Diana and Professor Conlon.

  She said, “The only way I’ll get tenure is to do something really original, something from a primary source that no one’s ever seen.”

  “Like a Lincoln letter?”

  “Or a diary.” Then she looked at her watch. “This should only take a few minutes. My department head is an ally. I need him on my side.”

  As she went off, Peter made a decision. He might be less conspicuous if he went to see Sorrel alone.

  Diana would be angry at him, but she’d have to take a number.

  * * *

  The cabbie took M Street through Georgetown, the oldest and the youngest part of D.C. Georgetown had been there in the eighteenth century, before they decided to build the nation’s capital on the marshes and hillsides to the south. Now M Street was lined with restaurants, bars, bookstores, and fancy shops. The famous Jesuit college sat on top of the hill. The best people, or the wealthiest, lived on the leafy slopes around it.

  And the worst bottleneck in the city, which was saying a lot in a city of bottlenecks, may have been the left from M Street onto the Key Bridge. The meter must have clicked up a dozen times while they waited.

  So Peter took the time to text Douglas Bryant, the bookseller with the ponytail:

  Set aside the book by Benjamin Wood. We will discuss it tomorrow. 10 A.M.

  A moment later he received this answer:

  Five hundred and you got a deal.

  On the Virginia side, the cabbie caught the Lee Highway and found his way out to a neighborhood of single-family homes on one of the hills that rolled back to the river. Sorrel’s address put him directly across the street from Fort C. F. Smith Park.

  Peter Googled Fort C. F. Smith: “built during the Civil War, one of seventy earthworks that ringed the city and protected the roads, railroads, and bridges.” A few of the forts still remained. A few had been restored with plaques and plugged cannon. But where once they had been surrounded by cleared fields of fire, these ramparts now looked out on sweet suburbia, middle-class colonials and fifties ranches.

  Peter got out, flipped open his notebook, looked around, and pretended to jot a few things down. If anyone was watching, they’d think he was just another Civil War buff come to visit that old relic of an earthwork.

  He stopped to read the Army Corps plaque at the entrance:

  THE REMAINS OF FORT C. F. SMITH, A LUNETTE BUILT TO COMMAND THE HIGH GROUND NORTH OF SPOUT RUN AND DEFEND THE PERIMETER OF THE ARLINGTON LINE …

  He walked into an enclosure of grass-covered mounds, a few cannon, and an old limber. Neat walkways twined across a landscape sloping gently to a collar of woods that blocked the view of the Potomac.

  Peter did not know what was waiting for him at Sorrel’s house, but if he had to make a quick escape, this huge, quiet stretch of parkland would be perfect.

  Now he turned back to observe the house, but he tried not to be too obvious. He found another plaque and read:

  … CONSTRUCTED IN 1863 ON LAND APPROPRIATED FROM WILLIAM C. JEWELL …

  Look up briefly. The house was mid-Atlantic cottage style on a corner lot, with a detached garage on the right, a big sycamore on the left. Look down again.

  … PART OF THE OUTER PERIMETER DEFENSES THAT PROTECTED THE AQUEDUCT BRIDGE …

  Second-story dormers, a big front porch, half screened. Look down again.

  … CONTAINED TWENTY-TWO GUN EMPLACEMENTS, EIGHT OF WHICH ARE PRESERVED …

  Pull out a handkerchief and blow your nose. Most of the shades were drawn, the front door was closed, and the air conditioner made no telltale hum.

  THE ACCESS ROAD TO THE FORT CROSSED SPOUT’S RUN NEAR MASON’S MILL AND PROCEEDED UP THE HILL …

  Was anybody home? And … was that somebody watching him?

  … BUILDINGS IN WHICH THE GARRISON ATE AND SLEPT WERE LOCATED TO THE EAST …

  In that car … about twenty yards
down the hill, Nissan Versa, Maryland plate. Somebody was sitting in the driver’s seat.

  Look down at the plaque. Think. Had the car been there when the cab dropped him?

  … PERIOD PHOTOGRAPHS SHOW ARLINGTON’S LANDSCAPE DENUDED OF TREES …

  Plenty of shade now, big limbs hanging over the quiet street, a gentle rustle of sound as a breeze puffed up from the Potomac.

  Peter crossed the street and stepped onto the porch. He listened for the sounds of a television or radio or voices inside the house: nothing.

  Then he heard a sudden, explosive roar.

  He almost jumped, but it was just the guy next door, starting his lawn mower.

  As the noise filled his head, Peter rang the bell. Then he waited … and counted.

  Ten seconds, twenty, thirty.

  The lawn mower sputtered to a stop. The man cursed. Then he pulled the starter cord again and the mower kicked over. He gave Peter a glance and went back to work.

  Peter looked down the hill at the Nissan Versa. Still there. Guy still in it.

  He rang the bell again.

  Then he pulled out an Antiquaria business card (RARE BOOKS, DOCUMENTS, AND EPHEMERA, BOUGHT, SOLD, AND APPRAISED), and he wrote on the back. Whatever your plan, I can help w/the Lincoln letter. Please call. Peter Fallon.

  The lawn mower sputtered and stopped. The man cursed.

  Peter shoved the card into the mail slot. Then he turned and saw the lawn mower man standing at the bottom step, looking up. “He’s not here.”

  Peter took the guy in quickly: about sixty; blue T-shirt, baggy shorts, sweat glistening through his comb-over, which was dyed a sickly red orange. And from the way that his potbelly was heaving up and down with each breath, he was worn out by a few minutes of work.

  “Did he tell you where he was going?” said Peter.

  “Who’s askin’?”

  Peter smiled his best book-scouting smile and introduced himself.

  The guy raised a brow and wiped away a bead of sweat.

  Peter watched the eyes. Did the lawn mower man recognize him? Was the name of a Boston bookseller an item in Mr. Sorrel’s neighborhood, too?

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to talk Mr. Sorrel.” Peter kept his tone calm, professional. “It’s business.”