“I start in to playin’ ‘Dixie.’ You hear ‘Dixie,’ you know they’s trouble.”
“That park is dangerous after dark,” said Halsey, “so be careful.”
Jacob pulled out a leather blackjack filled with buckshot. “Don’t you worry. I know my way around. And my brother, Ezekiel—”
“The one who likes Dickens?”
“No. That was Daniel. He’s gone for a hero now.” Jacob looked down at the ground a moment. Then he said, “Our little brother’s over at the corner of B and Tenth, watchin’ from a saloon front where they’s friendly to colored. He’s playin’ his harmonica. If you hear ‘Dixie’ from either way, there’s trouble.”
Halsey said, “If there’s trouble, just move off. I promised your daddy this wouldn’t be dangerous.”
They walked a short distance together; then Jacob took a path into the Smithsonian Park.
Halsey crossed the canal on Seventh, then went west along B to the Tenth Street footbridge. He heard a harmonica playing “Lorena,” a song about longing and love that the soldiers often sang. He could not see Ezekiel, but that was for the best.
Then, out on the footbridge, a cigar tip glowed orange.
Halsey took a deep breath, scanned the shadows and pools of light, then looked up Tenth, which appeared as two parallel lines of streetlamps, meeting somewhere in the far distance. A few blocks up on the right, Samantha must have been taking her seat in Ford’s dress circle just then.
If all went well, Halsey would be joining her soon.
As he walked onto the bridge, he realized that McNealy had taken an advantage already. Halsey was framed by those Tenth Street lights. McNealy had come from the darkness of the Smithsonian Park, with its leafing young trees and the black hulking castle as his only backdrop.
The iron bridge echoed under Halsey’s feet.
McNealy’s hand went to his shoulder holster. But as Halsey drew closer, McNealy relaxed. He said, “I didn’t recognize you in your suit. Strange to dress in black on your resurrection day.”
Halsey stopped about five feet away. “The president dresses in black every day.”
“He should dress like an undertaker. For him, every day for the last four years has been a funeral.”
The bridge was arched. The men were now standing on either side of the apex.
McNealy said, “Are you alone?”
“That was the arrangement.”
“So those niggers playin’ music aren’t friends of yours? They sure look like the Bone boys. What’s left of ’em.”
“They’re watching for friends of yours.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“Not even Lafayette Baker.”
“He’s my boss but no man’s friend. He’s off in New York, scarin’ a few more dollars out of the feed brokers who charge the government for sixty-forty, oats to corn, but deliver forty-sixty. Bad for the horse, bad for the government, good for the broker.”
“The head of your service is a swindler?”
“He only swindles swindlers, but one thing’s for certain—” McNealy puffed the cigar. “—he was a power unto himself till he tapped Stanton’s telegraph line. Stanton wanted to fire him but shipped him off instead.”
“So, he watches his own boss, but he’s not watching now from the shadows”—Halsey looked around—“ready to spring once I hand over the goods?”
“He’s not here.” McNealy’s eyes shifted. The whites of them flashed in the dim glow from the city lights.
Halsey slipped his hand into his coat pocket and gripped the pistol.
McNealy noticed and said, “Are you loaded?”
“You didn’t think I’d come out here with nothing but a book to defend myself.”
“I figured the gun would make you feel better. But that’s a rare-caliber ball, thirty-one. Hard to get unless you know where to look.”
“Not impossible,” said Halsey.
“Even if you weren’t loaded, you’d say you were.” McNealy extended his hand. “Now, let’s have the ledger. I don’t want to stand over this stinkin’ canal all night.”
Halsey looked down into the water, as if he were thinking that over. He noticed something floating. A dead dog? A cat? He noticed something swimming. A rat? Definitely a rat. Appropriate, he thought. Then he looked at McNealy. “Diary first.”
“I get the ledger, you get the diary. You follow?”
With his left hand, Haley slipped the ledger out of his breast pocket and held it for McNealy to see; then he let it drop back. “Three years old but still juicy. There’s even dirt on Doc Wiggins, if he’s still alive. He paid Squeaker to steal quinine. The South needed quinine to fight malaria.”
“Now, most people in this city would like to put the war behind them and get on with things, including Doc Wiggins,” said McNealy. “You should’ve killed that fat bastard when you had the chance.”
And there they stood, on a gloomy night, on a slick footbridge, each waiting for the other to make a move.
Halsey cocked an ear, first for the low, droning twang of the Jew’s harp, then for the harmonica competing with a piano in a saloon near the corner. Then he said, “We’re out here for a reason. Who’s watching us?”
“Everyone.” McNealy’s eyes scanned both sides of the canal. “Your nigger friends, Doc Wiggins and his boys, maybe the Knights of the Golden Circle, who’ll be prayin’ from now till Jesus that the South can rise again, maybe even the Wood brothers. Except for the niggers, they’re all in Squeaker’s book. That’s why I want it.”
Halsey said, “How do they know they’re in the book?”
“Squeaker said so.”
“You and the Squeaker?”
“I told you, we recruited our detectives wherever we could. I ran Squeaker before I ran you. He went to those meetings in the Wiggins barn. He kept a record of all their dirty doings and dirty secrets. What else he did—”
“Like killing my cousin?”
“—was his own business. We looked the other way.”
Halsey was older now, not so easily shocked by the methods of men in business, politics, and war, but here was a government agency, sworn to protect Americans, allowing the Squeaker McDillons of the world to run loose.
“And you did all this for a higher purpose, I suppose,” said Halsey.
“I did it for the money. War kills a lot of people, and it makes a lot more rich. Just ask your cousin. He was tryin’ for the second and got the first.” McNealy reached into his pocket and pulled out the president’s daybook, showing it for about as long as Haley had shown the ledger.
Halsey said, “There are a million books like that in Washington.”
“That’s why we’re standing here, because you grabbed the wrong one three years ago, the one that I could have used to blackmail half the powerful men in Washington. If I’d gotten it, I’d be rich now, rich and gone back to Ohio, to a little dirt farm where a very pretty mama sits waitin’ with her little boys.”
“Save the sad story,” said Halsey. “Hold it out. Open it to the first page.”
“You want to see the signature?” McNealy held the book open.
Halsey stepped closer, but he was still keeping his distance. A. Lincoln was clear on the upper right corner of the endpaper, just as clear as it had been to Constance Wood when it flopped onto the floor of the Smithsonian.
Halsey said, “Flip to the back page.”
He remembered that the back page and the words, “The real problem with a general emancipation…” had been torn out. The words on the previous page mentioned sending the freed slaves back to Africa or Central America, and …
Halsey decided to be bold. Instead of pulling the gun from his right pocket, he pulled out a box of matches and struck one so that he could see the handwriting.
McNealy’s brow furrowed. “What are you doing?”
“Reading the last page. I remember it as if Brady had taken a picture of it.”
“Damn.” McNealy blew out the mat
ch.
At the same moment, the Jew’s harp stopped thrumming.
The sound of a rolling carriage traveled toward them from somewhere near the Smithsonian Castle.
The Jew’s harp delivered a few notes from ‘Dixie,’ then stopped again.
Two yellow running lights flickered through the trees, marking the movement of the carriage.
Then the harmonica stopped. The sound of a short scuffle was followed by fast feet pounding along B Street and a young voice singing out, “I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there am not forgotten.”
McNealy shoved the daybook into his side pocket and pulled out his gun. “All right, stupid. Give me the ledger, now.”
“Look away, look away … look away … Dixieland.…” The song was receding. Young Ezekiel was escaping.
McNealy said, “The match. It was the signal for Doc Wiggins to close in.”
Then the carriage and its lights rolled to a stop at the south end of the footbridge.
And Halsey heard footfalls behind him, coming from the north. A big man in a tall hat walked out onto the bridge and stopped, blocking Haley’s escape.
McNealy said, “That’s Mr. Jeffords. He’s your escort.”
“My escort?”
“Give me the ledger and I’ll tell you the next step.” McNealy was carrying a Colt Wells Fargo, single action. He cocked it. He meant business. “Give me the ledger, or I will shoot you and take it and your nursie-girl will die.”
“My nursie-girl?”
McNealy stepped closer. “The ledger. Now.”
Halsey pulled it from his pocket but held it.
McNealy said, “That man behind you was in the barn the night that Constance was murdered. He’s one of Doc Wiggins’s associates. They’ve been plotting in this city for three years. And paying me for the privilege of doing their business, whatever it is … running deserters, smuggling quinine, cutting telegraph lines.”
“Then you’re a traitor?
“I’m a profiteer, just like that cousin of yours. Except I’ve known where to make my money. I’ve also known that the South was doomed since Atlanta fell. And nothing anyone in Washington could do, good or bad, would change that, not with Lincoln resolved to spill every drop of blood left in America if he had to. So—”
“You played everyone?”
McNealy nodded. “You are gaining knowledge with your experience after all. I would like one more score, while my friends at either end of the bridge would like no evidence of their earlier wrongdoing. More than that, they know Squeaker’s book contains evidence of the foibles of Benjamin Wood, who suspects them in the murder of Harriet Dunbar. If Wood has something on them, they should get something on him.”
“An age-old tradition,” said Halsey. “Did you kill her?”
“She had the daybook. She was going to give it to the Wood brothers just before the Democratic convention. She thought it would be a good tool to use in the election. No one else did … just then.”
“So you killed her?”
“Her killer is now sitting next to your nursie-girl in Ford’s Theatre. As soon as he knows we’ve made the exchange, he’ll take the seven-inch blade in his sleeve and return it to his boot top, instead of sliding it between her ribs and into her heart and leaving her dead in the seat.”
“So it’s the ledger for the daybook?” said Halsey.
“No, it’s the ledger for your nursie-girl.” McNealy held out his hand.
Halsey knew now he should never have brought himself into this, but here he was. He had no choice. He handed over the ledger and kept his hand extended. “Now, the daybook?”
McNealy put the ledger into his side pocket and pulled out the volume that had started it all.
“Give it over,” said Halsey.
McNealy smiled, showing teeth in that nest of beard. Then he held the daybook over the canal and … dropped it.
Halsey let out a wordless cry of shock.
The daybook fluttered down and splashed, right next to a dead cat … or a live rat.
McNealy was turning on his heels and marching toward the carriage at the south end of the footbridge. And he was laughing as Halsey had never heard him laugh before, laughing out loud, not the usual snicker or sneer, but a full-bellied roar.
Then McNealy shouted, “I have the ledger, Doc! We have a deal.”
Halsey could not move. He felt as he had when he was shot, stood up straight from the force of the blow but just about to collapse.
Should he chase McNealy? Should he jump in after the daybook? But it had sunk already. So, he feared, had the future that appeared so bright a short time ago.
He took a few steps after McNealy and the voice behind him said, “Just stay where you are. We can see them from here. That’s why the sidelights are lit.”
Doc Wiggins sat in the carriage and his Negro driver held the reins.
Halsey turned back to Jeffords, who wore a top hat and a well-tailored claw-hammer coat.
“Once we know that Doc has the ledger and McNealy has the daybook,” said Jeffords, “we’ll go up and rescue your girl.”
“The daybook? But McNealy just dropped it into the canal.”
“That was a dummy, mostly blank, to make you play nice.” The man looked beyond Halsey and said, “This here’s a three-part deal. You give up the ledger to McNealy. He gives it to Doc, who gives him the daybook, which we took off Harriet Dunbar in her barn. And you get your girl.”
Halsey watched McNealy and Doc Wiggins make their exchange in the lantern light. “So McNealy gets the daybook?”
“He figures he can get a fine price on it, because it shows what Lincoln was really thinkin’ about the niggers when he started this war. Good oil to pour on a new fire, now that everyone’s talkin’ about reconstructin’ the South with niggers as full citizens.”
“And what else do I get? A bullet? A visit from the Provost Marshal?”
Jeffords said, “We wanted to kill you after the exchange, but McNealy said we’d do it this way and let you live. He says you’ve murdered a few people yourself, so you won’t go singin’.”
“Honor among thieves and killers, then?” Halsey reached for his pocket.
The man dropped a derringer from his sleeve and pointed it at Halsey’s forehead. “Keep your hands where I can see them.”
Suddenly, Jeffords’s hat flew off and flew toward Halsey. At the same time, his arm swung wildly and his derringer went off.
Halsey felt the shot whiz past his ear. An instant later, the horse on the Wiggins carriage screamed and reared, hit in the haunch by a bullet. Then the horse bolted and went careening toward the lights of Seventh Street.
Jeffords was turning toward a shadow behind him, and something smashed him in the face. He stumbled back and collapsed.
Noah was the shadow. The something was a leather blackjack. He stepped over Jeffords and said to Halsey, “I told Ezekiel to go home. Jacob’ll know to hide. Now, you just git what you come for.”
“Thank you. Thank you, Noah.”
“You said this wouldn’t be dangerous. I didn’t believe you.”
Jeffords stirred, and Noah brought the blackjack down fiercely on the white man’s skull.
Halsey turned and ran over the footbridge. It was not much more than thirty feet from end to end. In a few strides, he was over the arch and flying downhill.
McNealy still had a book in his hand and was raising the Colt Wells Fargo, pointing it straight at Halsey, who was trying to pull his Adams from his pocket.
McNealy pulled the trigger. The hammer snapped. Click. Misfire on a misty night.
Before McNealy could squeeze off another, Halsey flew into him, right at the south end of the footbridge. Hats flew. Book flew. Gun flew. They smashed off the wrought iron and spun out onto the gravel drive.
McNealy jammed his knee into Halsey’s groin.
Halsey hit the ground and crumpled with the pain that shot up his flanks and exploded in his kidneys. Then McNealy aimed a
vicious kick into his left side, right into the healing wound. The sound of it made a hollow thumping, as if Halsey were just a huge melon about to split apart.
McNealy began looking around on the ground. For his gun? For the book?
Halsey crawled to his knees and told himself that whatever pain he felt, he had to fight through it, get up, get out the gun, and … Goddamn but the gun and the fabric of a strange coat were all tangled. The barrel caught as he tried to clear it.
And McNealy kicked him again.
He fell onto his back but the gun tore free of the fabric. He raised it and pointed it, and another kick sent it flying into the shadows.
McNealy went to pick it up when they both heard the shrill screech of police whistles in the Smithsonian Park.
McNealy turned toward the sound.
And Halsey, despite the pain in his gut, lifted himself and drove his shoulder into McNealy, drove him backwards, drove him right over the low parapet wall. And they fell together, ten feet down into the filthy, black, crotch-deep water.
McNealy was underneath, so he cushioned the fall for Halsey.
But there was power in the little man. He burst from the water, lifting Haley all the way up and out, slamming him hard against the black, slime-covered granite wall on the south side of the channel.
Halsey wobbled.
McNealy pulled back with his right fist and shot it straight at Halsey’s face.
But Halsey ducked, and McNealy’s punch hit granite.
Halsey grabbed him by the lapel and pushed him through the water, through the shit and garbage and offal, and slammed him against the other wall.
McNealy swung with a leg and knocked Halsey off his feet. Then he flew knee first into Halsey’s chest, grabbed his lapels, slammed him under the water, then pulled him out. “Did you think you could drown me, you Boston pansy boy?”
Slam … back under the water. Then up and out again.
“You come to Washington with your holy notions about savin’ the niggers and savin’ the Union, and good men on both sides end up dying.”
Slam.
“And for what? For what?”
Slam.
And the fourth time he rose from the water, Halsey heard the police whistles directly above them.
The Lincoln Letter Page 44
