On Secret Service

by John Jakes

  They climbed down from the buggy in the crushed-stone driveway of Knudsen’s large white house. Hedges and tree branches were showing buds; a smell of spring earth sweetened the air. Hard to believe they were chasing a criminal.

  Webster observed carriages in both bays of the stable at the rear of the property. “We may have caught him home. I’d have preferred it otherwise. Keep a sharp lookout inside. Watch for anything unusual.”

  With the confidence of an experienced actor making an entrance, Webster marched up the porch steps and knocked loudly. A stocky young woman with a wide red mouth and enormous breasts under her white apron opened the door. Webster tipped his hat.

  “Good morning, miss. I am Mr. Bainbridge from the office of the county building inspector. This is my colleague Mr. Harris. We’re here for a routine inspection of this residence. Our credentials.” Webster showed the official-looking document for all of three seconds. “Is the owner at home? A Mr. Knudsen, I believe?”

  “Not here,” the young woman said in accented English.

  “Too bad. We’ll try to make short work of this.” Webster stepped across the sill, forcing her back before she could object. Lon noticed a small framed landscape hanging at a slightly crooked angle above the hallway umbrella stand.

  Webster flashed a charming smile as he looked around. He indicated the dining room. “In there, Mr. Harris, if you please. I’ll inspect the parlor. You’re welcome to follow us, miss. This is really quite routine.”

  “Hurry up,” she exclaimed, almost strangling on the words. She was frightened by guilt and fear of discovery, Lon guessed. That didn’t mean they’d find evidence.

  Every piece of dining room furniture was correctly placed and free of dust. Lon felt he was inspecting a museum. He went back to the parlor where Webster was jotting notes in a little book. “Everything satisfactory,” Lon said.

  “And here also. Let’s inspect the—what is it?” Lon was staring at a portrait of an older woman in a dark dress.

  “That’s the second crooked picture. There’s another in the hall. Everything else is in perfect order.”

  “Maybe I’ll have a look.” As Webster approached the portrait, the housekeeper bolted, crying, “Thorvald!”

  Webster pulled the picture from its hook, turned it over. The brown paper backing had been slit along one edge. “Something was hidden in here and removed in a hurry. Check the other picture.”

  Lon heard a commotion upstairs: pounding footsteps, a man’s angry voice. He inspected the landscape and ran back to the parlor. “Same thing. Do you think he hid the cash in the pictures?”

  “Yes, and I’ll wager there’s more in others he didn’t have time to cut.” They heard noise and jumped into the hall. A stout man in his sixties was lunging down the stairs, his vest and collarless white shirt unbuttoned, his thin gray hair disarrayed. Lon and Webster were in the direct line of fire of his shotgun.

  “Get out of my house,” he yelled, taking aim.

  “Knudsen, don’t be a fool, you’ll only harm yourself further,” Webster said. Lon groped behind him for a small enameled ginger jar, whipped it over his head in a throw that broke it against Knudsen’s forehead. Webster dove to the floor. Knudsen reeled against the stair rail, accidentally firing both barrels of the shotgun into the ceiling. Lath and plaster showered down. Upstairs, the housekeeper shrieked like a madwoman.

  Webster tackled Thor Knudsen, who was flabby and no match for him. Lon cut open the backing of another small oil in the dining room and pulled out bills of large denomination. Webster held the shotgun on the sobbing banker while Lon ran for the authorities.

  “You could have been killed,” Webster said to Lon later.

  “But I wasn’t.”

  “Don’t take chances like that too often. It isn’t professional.”

  “I hear you, Mr. Webster.”

  “Tim,” he said, a comradely arm across Lon’s shoulder.

  Back in Chicago, Pinkerton called Lon in. The boss congratulated him on his keen observation and quick thinking, which Webster had generously reported. Pinkerton gave Lon a handshake and an immediate promotion to operative. In the next few months Lon was almost too busy to see that sectional strife was pushing the country closer to a final confrontation over slavery.

  10

  March 1861

  “Papa, I can’t talk, rehearsal’s at five.”

  “But I have excellent news.” The major had bounded into the house with greater energy and zest than he’d exhibited for months. His boots were dusty from walking, but his old sky blue military greatcoat and cape were brushed and presentable. The monocle he kept in a cigar box was squeezed into his left eye. “A position. A clerkship with the Department of War in President’s Park. I report next week.”

  Hanna leaped into Siegel’s arms and hugged him. “That’s wonderful. How did it happen? Didn’t you apply there before?”

  “Twice. I was treated like a cur. This is a new administration.”

  “Who hired you, the new secretary?”

  “No, not Mr. Cameron. Two assistants. They liked my military background. The secretary has none. There are jokes that his greatest experience consists of stuffing ballot boxes in Pennsylvania. Lincoln put him in the cabinet because he helped secure the nomination. I don’t care if he’s Satan himself so long as he pays me adequately and—ach, Hanna. Your clothes. Why do you dress that way?”

  The major was reacting to her shapeless gray wool coat and narrow trousers, castoffs given her by the wife of Mr. Spence, the black porter next door. Under her cotton chemise she’d wrapped and pinned strips of clean rag to flatten her bosom, and she’d cut her hair with old, dull shears, leaving it boyishly ragged around the ears.

  “It helps me get into the part. I play a girl disguised as the page of Duke Orsino.”

  “Those theatricals, your friends, they influence you in strange ways.” Shaking his head, he peeled off his old gauntlets. “I met a most interesting man while waiting for my appointment. A Mr. Baker, also seeking a position. In San Francisco, California, he led an informal military force he called vigilantes. They hung anyone who—”

  “Papa, I must go. I’m very happy for you.”

  “For us. We can remove ourselves from this neighborhood of swinish Negroes. Be careful downtown, the city is a madhouse.”

  And had been for days, in preparation for Lincoln’s inauguration on Monday, March 4. The hotels were full. Hundreds who couldn’t find rooms slept in doorways or simply staggered up and down the streets all night. One paper said the National Hotel was serving twelve hundred meals a day. But she really hadn’t appreciated the extent of the crowding until she reached Pennsylvania Avenue. Work gangs were scraping and raking the street for the entire length of Mr. Lincoln’s ride from the Capitol to the Executive Mansion. People milled on the sidewalk. She suspected many came from Illinois because they wore coarse dark clothing and gawked shamelessly. The manager at the Canterbury said the prairie men were notoriously cheap, never leaving tips.

  Hanna saw others, rougher men who swigged from bottles or flasks and pushed anyone who got in their way, women included. The town was flooded with the Baltimore plug-uglies come to disrupt the inauguration. When one stepped on her shoe, she glared and cursed him in her native language. He wasn’t intimidated. He called her a filthy name and swaggered on.

  A young man emerging from the National Hotel was mobbed by people with autograph albums. Hanna recognized Lincoln’s college-age son from a lithograph she’d seen. Some wag had dubbed him the Prince of Rails. Bob Lincoln signed his name without complaint.

  A bright flash drew her eye to the roof of a building she was passing. The March sun reflected from the field glasses of an Army officer observing the crowds. The director of her play said there would be sharpshooters along the parade route, because of death threats. According to one rumor, twenty ruffians from Texas armed with bowie knives were planning to slash a path through the District cavalry guarding the inaugural carriage
and stab the President to death.

  Other people said New York was about to declare itself a free city in order to trade with both governments. That President Lincoln would immediately call a peace conference with delegates from Montgomery, capital of the new Confederacy. That blacks were awaiting Monday in order to pay back their owners and employers. It was this kind of rumor that had sparked a regrettable exchange with Margaret when they last took supper together:

  “My brother, Cicero, swears that the Negro housemaid of a friend said she was going to slap her mistress’s face and spit on her as soon as Lincoln’s in office.”

  “Margaret, how can you believe such nonsense?”

  “I’m only telling you what I heard. My father says that once Lincoln and the black Republicans are in power, blood will run.”

  “What do you say?”

  “As little as possible. I hate the idea.”

  “You can’t sit on a fence rail forever. There’s going to be fighting. I wish I could enlist. I wish I were a man, so I could help the cause.”

  “Your cause, not mine,” Margaret said with obvious irritation.

  Redness rushed to Hanna’s cheeks. Both women looked away. Their waiter, a white man like all waiters in the fine hotels and restaurants, saw a spat in progress and went to another table.

  Hanna laid her hand on Margaret’s sleeve, a gesture of conciliation. Hanna’s nails were blunt, broken in places, in contrast to the buffed perfection of Margaret’s. Margaret spoke first.

  “That was rude and thoughtless. Forgive me?”

  Hanna said, “Of course.”

  “We mustn’t get so heated. We’re friends.”

  “Yes, indeed. Forever.”

  But friends, if they have character, take a stand, or they should, Hanna thought. Just as families, states, and the nation were dividing rancorously, so it was with Margaret. Hanna hated to see it and yet sensed a certain inevitability. They parted politely, without their usual display of affection.

  Hanna’s little company of amateur actors performed on a curtained platform in the basement of an Episcopal church behind the Capitol. The rector enjoyed theatricals and allowed the group to rent the basement so long as they kept it tidy. The church congregation teemed with Southerners and those who sympathized with them.

  As usual, the actors were running about and cackling like barnyard chickens when she arrived. Today was their first rehearsal in costume. The director was a talented but rather prissy shoe salesman named Derek Fowley.

  When Hanna walked into the dressing room, Zephira Comfort was in her underwear, struggling with her corset strings. “Oh, bother. Would you do me up, dear?”

  “Certainly, dear.” Zephira Comfort was fat, with bosoms like cannonballs. She was a poor actress, but Derek lived with her, so she was always cast.

  Hanna loved the part of Viola, one of Shakespeare’s women played by young men in Elizabethan times. Shipwrecked on the Illyrian coast, Viola disguises herself as a soft-cheeked male to protect herself from harm. Malvolio describes her as “not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy.” Viola is soon in service as Cesario, page to Orsino, who sends her to the lady Olivia to woo her in his place. In the fifth and last scene of Act 1 Hanna made her first entrance in page’s finery—a green silk coat and knee breeches, with tiny yellow flowers edging the coat lapels. Hanna liked the snug feel of her white hose, the scent of her powdered wig. Zephira Comfort played Olivia in a heavy veil, until the text required her to reveal herself to the eloquent page.

  Zephira clasped hands at her bosom and gushed. “How does he love me?”

  Hanna’s answer was more contained, realistic, and as a result, believable. “With adorations, fertile tears, with groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire!…If I did love you in my master’s flame, with such a suffering, such a deadly life, in your denial I would find no sense.”

  At the end of the scene Derek leaped up from his stool, clapping. “Zeffie, you are superb. Don’t let down. Dear little Hanna—that’s a handsome outfit, but threadbare. A seam under the left arm is gaping like a chasm. Have the wardrobe girl sew it up.”

  “Yes, Derek.”

  “I do compliment your performance. If I met you as a stranger, I’d think you were a man. Pitching your voice lower helps immeasurably.”

  “Thank you, Derek.”

  “Five minutes, everyone. Then we press on.”

  Hanna went outside. The pale sun was sunk behind the unfinished dome of the Capitol to the west. Heavy shadows clogged the street. She heard horses approaching at a gallop.

  She leaned against the church’s brick wall and put a match to a handmade cigarette. Hanna liked the smell and sensation of tobacco. She spat a flake off her tongue as a half dozen cavalry, booted and spurred, charged through the purple gloom. Studying the way the darkness and their baggy uniforms tended to blur their individuality, she was struck by a new thought.

  If I’m so convincing as a man, why couldn’t I dress as one? Follow a regiment into the field? I’d like that. And Papa would have his soldier after all.

  She was excited, though not a little fearful of the potential risks. But she was a clever actress, wasn’t she? If she didn’t strip naked, why couldn’t she carry it off? She was so absorbed in the fantasy, she didn’t hear Derek’s call for Act 2. She had to be escorted inside by the grumpy stage manager.

  11

  March 1861

  Inauguration day came in sunny but chilly. A gusty wind nipped the cheeks and numbed exposed hands. The military presence was enormous. District cavalry to accompany the parade and militia infantry to guard the route were supplemented by companies of regulars forming up in F Street, north of the Avenue, as Lon and Sledge started for the Capitol at half past nine. Militiamen with rifles perched on Avenue rooftops like so many vultures waiting for a corpse.

  Felton, the railroad executive, had hired the Pinkerton detectives as a special patrol for the inauguration. It was a private act of patriotism. General Scott was in charge of security and wouldn’t have authorized civilian intrusion. Old Fuss and Feathers lived on I Street. There, it was said, a French caterer supplied all his meals. Lon figured Scott ate five or six a day, because he was grotesquely obese, his arms and legs swollen by dropsy. He had to be hoisted into his carriage by noncoms. At seventy-five he was too old for supreme command, but he had it.

  “Don’t seem very happy, these people,” Sledge said as they moved past civilians already crowding the curb. Lon had noticed the same thing. There was noise—boys hawking papers, vendors waving lithographed portraits of Lincoln—but not a lot of enthusiasm. He saw anger on some faces, anxiety on many more. Shutters on shops and upper windows were closed, probably as a protest.

  They walked around the Capitol on the south side, to the east portico. Several hundred people were already waiting behind the reserved chairs set in front of the flag-draped platform. Under the platform, Pinkerton said, fifty armed soldiers would be hiding.

  Lon and Sledge found Tim Webster in the crowd. He assigned Sledge to the northeast quadrant of the park, Lon to the southeast.

  People shivered and complained about the wind. Lon turned up the velvet collar of his secondhand coat and held onto his black felt hat. He drifted, studying faces, watching for anything that might signal a demented person. He saw no one like that but still felt nervous. Why must an assassin look strange? Why couldn’t he be handsome, or simply ordinary?

  A few athletic types had climbed the park’s bare trees. City police swarmed on the grounds, and a soldier with a rifle looked out of every window of both wings of the Capitol. Would any of them be fast enough to stop a determined sharpshooter?

  The crowd grew to several thousand. Shortly after twelve, distant music reached them; the Marine band, marching up the Avenue. Lincoln and Buchanan had left Willard’s in their open carriage, surrounded by their guards. According to the latest rumor, if the new President wasn’t assassinated before he was sworn in, a squadron of Virginians would
gallop across the Long Bridge and abduct him from tonight’s inaugural ball.

  Lon’s eyes kept moving, searching for signs of trouble. Walking backward, he stumbled into a young woman and knocked a book from her gloved hand.

  “Ma’am, I’m terribly sorry.”

  “I should hope so.”

  She was about his age, tall and handsome, with sparkling dark eyes and a full, rounded bust. Her clothes spoke of money and good taste. Over her skirt she wore a plush pelisse of dark amber. Her matching bonnet was trimmed with ostrich plumes. She was an inch taller than Lon.

  He knelt and swooped up the book. The Woman in White. He brushed bits of winter grass from the cover.

  “I haven’t read this but I hear Wilkie Collins is a good writer. He and my favorite author, Charles Dickens, are friends.”

  She stared.

  “I hear there’s a detective in this novel.”

  She stared at his hat. Caught short, he swept it off. “Here you are, then. My compliments.”

  She took the book. “Thank you, but I don’t need compliments from a Yankee.”

  Annoyed, he snapped at her. “What about accepting compliments from an American?”

  Lowered lashes hid a flash of amusement. “My, you’re full of sass. What does a man like you do for a living, may I ask? Slave in one of those dark, filthy factories under the illusion you’re free?”

  “No, and let’s not start on how plantation slaves are better off than wage slaves, it’s a specious argument. A factory hand can walk away. A slave walks away, they whip him, brand him, or worse.” He should have ended it there, but her challenging eyes and haughty chin provoked him. “I suppose you disapprove of our new President too.”

  “I do. He’s nothing but an uncouth rustic from Illinois.”

  “I’m from Illinois.”

  “Really. It’s no recommendation. If Abraham Lincoln had so much as a thimbleful of common sense, he’d preach conciliation, not conflict.”