On Secret Service

by John Jakes

  “Veal’s all we got anyway.” With the exchange of recognition phrases out of the way, Retz tapped the boy. “Hiram, take a stroll. Buy an apple if you can find one.” He gave the boy a coin. The boy left, skipping. “I wondered when somebody would show up.”

  “I’ve been here since August. Major Allen sent two of us, posing as deserters.”

  “I hope you’re luckier than the one they hanged, Webster.”

  “We didn’t start out with very good luck. A reb caught us and killed my partner. He took me to what he called the depot prison.”

  “Libby. It’s an old chandler’s warehouse.”

  “It’s a hellhole.”

  “There’s worse. What’s your name?”

  “Lon Price.”

  “Sig Retz. That’s a little joke in English, huh?” He pantomimed a few puffs. He had an abrupt, breathless way of speaking. Lon liked him.

  “Come on in back. I got no customers, as you can see. When I stepped off the boat in Boston five years ago, I thought I’d make my fortune in America. I picked the wrong town.”

  Retz lifted a curtain so Lon could pass. The back room, lit by gas, contained a single bed, a chair and cushion, a stove, a small desk piled with ledgers, a lacquered ice cabinet, a tall stack of newspapers. For all its poverty, the room was immaculate.

  Greedy for news, Lon scanned an Enquirer from the top of the stack. The largest article inveighed against Lincoln’s proclamation of emancipation of slaves in “all states in rebellion,” to take effect January 1. He’d heard rumors of such a plan for months. Evidently the titanic battle in Maryland in September had given Lincoln the confidence to announce it. McClellan had partially redeemed himself at Antietam by turning back Lee’s invasion of the north. The Enquirer piece brimmed with purple wrath: phrases like egalitarian madness and mongrelization of the pure blood of our forefathers.

  “What do you think of that, huh?” Retz asked.

  “The proclamation? I’m for it.”

  “Yah, sure, just don’t say it too loud around here, they’ll hang you from a lamppost.” Retz wiped his hands on his stained apron. “You got anything for me?”

  Lon took a folded paper from under his shirt. “For Major Allen. I believe he’s back in Washington now.”

  Retz nodded, studying the penciled foolscap sheets. Lon had spent days gathering information, stealing a little extra time from each errand for the prison commandant. His several hundred words spoke of everything from the miserable state of the Confederate economy to the number and size of cannon defending the riverfront. He’d encoded the message using the Vigenère tableau and the keyword preacher. The first line read “EIMCGYIGDIX”; deciphered, it said “Price Report.”

  “How will this get to Washington?”

  “I pass it up the line. You don’t need to know any more.” Retz folded the sheets and hid them in a slit in the chair cushion. He tapped Lon’s manacle. “The warden give you the prison jewelry?”

  “Right, Lieutenant Turner. Mean bastard.”

  “Not half so mean as the one they shoved out last fall. Captain Todd. Half brother of Lincoln’s wife. A drunken hound and torture specialist. Papers said the Congress wanted to investigate him. Instead they transferred him. You want some beer?”

  “Thanks. I haven’t tasted beer in months.”

  Retz took a tin growler from the ice cabinet, filled a small stein. Lon savored the smell and taste of the brew, tepid though it was. “I like to hear about that bracelet.”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “I got no more ice. I got no good meat to sell. You see how many customers are storming my door. Time, now—that I got plenty of.”

  Colonel Mars had delivered Lon to the authorities on a sweltering August afternoon. For his trouble he would receive a bounty of one Confederate dollar. His greater reward came from parading Lon along Main Street. Lon’s uniform attracted a crowd of urchins, invalid soldiers, and well-dressed civilians. A one-legged veteran on a crutch threw stones. One gashed Lon’s forehead.

  The language of the crowd was amazingly foul. “Blue-belly prick!” “Lincoln whoreson!” The women were as obscene as the men. Mars let them have their way until they wearied of it and Lon’s face was dripping with their spit. Ever since Sledge’s murder, rage had built up in him, with no outlet. The gauntlet of hate turned the screw tighter.

  Their destination was Richmond’s receiving prison, situated in a district of warehouses, shanties, stables, and vacant lots. Three floors overlooked Cary Street, one block from Main. Nineteenth Street sloped downward from Cary to Canal Street; the Canal side had an additional floor. It was a fine old brick building, with LIBBY PRISON painted large on the outside.

  They passed a street corner sentry box and entered through a heavily barred door. Armed guards patrolled the hall. Lon looked into a communal kitchen with several stoves. A frail bald man came out of the commandant’s office a few steps farther on. “Thank you for your time, sir. If you suspect any prisoner of being more than he seems, turn him over to us.”

  The man put on a brown felt bowler. His left leg was crippled, making him tilt as he walked. A thick-soled shoe scraped the floor. The man stared at Lon as he passed by.

  The commandant, Lieutenant Turner, was a severe young soldier of twenty or twenty-one. Clean-shaven, he wore his hair short. “Name and rank?” he said in a rumbling bass voice.

  “Private Albion Rogers.” Lon gave the numbers of his regiment, division, and corps. Turner’s clerk wrote them in a large book.

  “We’ll process you as soon as we can. Yankee deserters are sent to Palmer’s Factory at Castle Thunder. The prisoners named the place. Something about the wrath of the gods falling on every man there. They’re right; compared to Castle Thunder, this is a ladies’ academy. We have one paramount rule at Libby. Stay three feet from windows at all times or you’ll be shot. Our capacity is four hundred prisoners. We are warehousing three times that. If you die, you do us a favor. Orderly!”

  A stripling in uniform sauntered in. “Hand this man over to the sergeant of the second floor.” Turner said to Lon, “He isn’t really a sergeant. We call him that because we put him in charge.”

  “Second floor, yes, sir.” The orderly whacked Lon’s elbow with his truncheon. “Step lively, Mr. Abolitionist.”

  Lon balked. “Look here, Lieutenant. I had to swallow their damn oath when I enlisted, but I deserted because I sure God don’t want to fight so niggers can strut around pretending they’re good as white men. When do I get a chance to serve the right side?”

  “In the future. Perhaps. Take him out.”

  On the way to the stairs the orderly jabbed Lon with his truncheon. Then again. And a third time. Lon wheeled around, red-faced.

  “Something griping you, blue belly?” The orderly hit Lon’s ear with his truncheon. Lon reeled to the stairs, grappling for a hold on the sticky rail. “You piece of Yankee shit. Will you stand up or do I knock your head off right here?”

  Lon stood up.

  According to Mathias Price and his fellow clergymen, Satan’s domain lay somewhere below the surface of the earth. Lon found hell a different way that day; he ascended to it.

  The staircase wall was a tapestry of squashed insects, scribbled oaths, obscene drawings of sex organs. Starting upstairs, the smell of human excrement was noticeable. At the first landing it was strong. Going farther up, it was sickening.

  A crowd of prisoners waited on the second floor, whistling and shouting, “Fresh fish, fresh fish!” The prisoners were cadavers; filthy, shrunken shells of men. They poked and squeezed Lon. One whispered, “Got any money? You can have me for a dime.”

  “Shut your fucking traps, ladies,” said someone at the rear. The inmates fell back like the Red Sea, revealing a stout soldier. On his blue blouse he wore a medal cut out of tin. A red bandanna tied around his forehead gave him a piratical air. His right eye had a disconcerting tendency to wander toward his ear. Lon was nearly sick from the smell of an inner room
where prisoners had relieved themselves on the floor. He saw a soldier lying with his head in some of it. The stout man pointed this out to the orderly.

  “Sonny died last night. Most likely the nostalgia got him. Been staring at the ceiling and crying for near a week.”

  “Form a detail and move him downstairs,” the orderly said. He poked Lon. “This here’s your floor sergeant, Private Griff.”

  The orderly went down the stairs. Lon and Griff stared at one another. The other prisoners looked on. Griff’s eye wandered again. He extended his hand, twitching his fingers.

  “Shoes. Take ’em off and hand ’em over. Think of it as paying your second-floor membership dues.”

  Lon had an urge to attack the bastard. He didn’t want to be put in irons his first day, so he sat on the steps and pulled off his broken shoes. Mars had warned him that most personal property was confiscated, either stolen by guards or by inmates. Once he knew the ropes, Mars said, he could steal what he needed from others.

  “Swell. Now turn out your pockets.”

  “I don’t have anything but this.” Lon showed his ivory-handled jackknife, which Mars had allowed him to keep, calling it “the prisoner’s essential.”

  Griff said, “Fine, I’ll take it.”

  “The man who captured me said prisoners always keep their knives.”

  “I don’t give a rat’s tit what he told you, mister. I can trade a nice blade like that.”

  Lon shook his head. “Sorry, no.”

  Griff sighed as if dealing with a witless child. “Now listen, fish.” He stepped in close. He raised his knee up suddenly, ramming Lon’s privates. Lon doubled over.

  Griff yanked him up by the hair. “I said let me have—” Lon closed his fist around the jackknife and swung a roundhouse right at Griff’s head.

  Griff windmilled into the wall. The other prisoners scrambled away. One yelled, “Hot damn, Paddy, here’s a donnybrook.”

  Griff lumbered at Lon like a maddened bear. Lon was half blind with sweat and rage. He remembered leaping in with both fists up, but he remembered nothing else until he came out of a fog, hearing applause and whistling. Guards hauled him up by his shoulders. Griff lay on the landing, his crotch stained, his nose flattened, blood bubbling on his lips. His right leg was bent beneath his left. Lon looked wonderingly at his own bleeding knuckles.

  A guard held him against the wall at pistol point. Another tried to straighten Griff’s bent leg. Griff screamed. Lieutenant Turner ran up the stairs to investigate the commotion. The astonished reb kneeling over Griff said, “I think his leg’s broke, sir. I think this one did it with his bare hands.”

  Lon’s eyes glared from the thicket of his hairy face. “Son of a bitch tried to take my jackknife.”

  To Retz he said, “I thought I was a goner. The commandant threw me in a detention cell in the basement, dark as a cave. No food or water for three days, not even a bucket to pee in. Then they sent me back to the second floor and I found Turner had elected me sergeant of the floor in absentia. I behaved myself. I organized the details that bring food from the kitchen twice a day, I stopped fights, I wrote letters for some who couldn’t. Presently Turner called me in and said he needed another orderly, someone who wasn’t a fool or a crazy bully. If I was trustworthy, if I wanted to serve the Confederacy the way I said, I’d be released for short errands, then longer ones. Turner set one condition.”

  Lon showed his left wrist. The iron manacle gleamed in the gaslight.

  “Anyone who sees this knows I’m a fish. Trusted a little more than some, but a fish. I had to take a loyalty oath. I didn’t like it, but my boss sent me to do a job, so I went along. They fitted me out in gray so I wouldn’t get knocked in the head every time the lieutenant sent me somewhere. A couple of weeks ago I felt it was safe to start gathering information. That’s the story.”

  “Yah, sure, quite a tale,” Retz said, his admiration evident. “You spies are smart fellas.”

  “Only by accident. There’s nothing smart about this war, Sig. It’s a bunch of wild animals tearing at each other. My dead partner taught me that.”

  “You going to keep bringing me messages?”

  “As often as I can.”

  “You want more beer before you go?”

  “No, thanks, but I would like to sit a few minutes with those newspapers. Prisoners aren’t allowed any, except for a little handwritten sheet they publish themselves.”

  Sig Retz gestured. “Be comfortable, stay as long as you like. I got to see what’s become of Hiram. I might get a customer. Pigs might fall out of the sky too.”

  Lon dropped into Retz’s cushioned chair. It amused him to sit on a coded report that could get him executed.

  On page two of a Richmond Dispatch, next to a jeremiad about food shortages and outrageous prices, he spied an item that hit him harder than any fist. At a reception hosted by Britain’s consular representative, J. Cridland, Esq., the guests included another citizen of that country, businessman Donal McKee, Esq., of New York City. Mr. McKee, who has substantial commercial interests in the Confederacy, is temporarily in residence in rented quarters on Church Hill, together with his wife.

  41

  November 1862

  At the foot of the stairs Margaret said, “Has Mr. McKee come down yet, Eudora?”

  “Came down, ate, and left.” Eudora whisked her feather duster over an ornate Chinese jar decorating the foyer. She was a full-bosomed black woman in her early thirties. Her beige complexion suggested a white forebear or two. Eudora cooked and cleaned; her brother, Morris Thompson, did the other chores. Both were slaves. They belonged to the fine ten-room house on Twenty-fourth Street, Church Hill. The house belonged to the estate of a bachelor attorney who had died the previous December. Donal had leased the house for six months. It was a dusty old place, unnecessarily large, though it had a lovely garden planted with cherry and apple trees, and trellises heavy with sweet Carolina jasmine.

  “Did my husband say where he was going?”

  “Exchange Hotel, for a meeting.” More likely another marathon card game. Sometimes they ran on all night. When the sun rose, Donal and his new friends would go home, bathe, and freshen their linen before resuming play.

  Margaret found it hard to believe that four months ago, a giant Union army had stood six miles from Richmond; so close, people said, the watch fires of the enemy were visible from the city’s hills. The Yankees were turned back, the war moved north again, and an elite class of Southern gentlemen carried on with business and pleasure as though other men were not fighting and dying for them. If you chanced to drive too near Chimborazo or Winder hospitals, the screams and lamentations of the injured reminded you of the fact.

  “Is there any real coffee?”

  “No’m, only the mix with parched corn. I’ll bring it to the dining room. You brother be here again?”

  “We have breakfast every Wednesday, Eudora, you know that.” Finding Cicero safe and well in the Confederate capital was one of the few good things about this enforced stay. “He should arrive by nine. Please be ready to serve him.”

  “All right, ma’am.” Eudora’s lovely brown eyes reflected the dislike the two women felt for each other. From the first night, all of Eudora’s smiles and pleasantries had been lavished on Donal. She was plainly taken with him, and jealous of Margaret or anyone else with a claim on him.

  Which perhaps explained why, in late September, Eudora had whispered to Margaret about a trip she’d made downtown in search of food. Leaving a grocery that had nothing to sell, she saw Margaret’s husband drive by in an open carriage with an attractive white woman Eudora knew to be a widow. Jealousy distorted Eudora’s pretty face as she passed the tidbit to Margaret, who promptly reprimanded her. Ever since, Eudora had been not merely her rival but her enemy.

  Margaret hoisted the skirt of her beautiful morning dress of amber silk and walked to the dining room. The dress was part of the Paris wardrobe Donal had bought her before they came South.
<
br />   Although the coffee was partly substitute, it took away some of the lingering torpor of sleep. Outside the window, crimson maple leaves drifted down. A woman passed with a market basket on her arm. Miss Van Lew was a well-off spinster of the neighborhood, an odd little creature with ringlets and an unlovely big nose. Eudora cheekily dismissed Miss Van Lew by saying, “Folks call her Crazy Bet.”

  The whole city was a bit crazy in Margaret’s opinion. Its masses of wounded and crippled depressed her, as did its empty shelves and indifferent storekeepers and resentful housewives. With an air of desperate gaiety, young ladies continued to attend hops at the better hotels, or visited Camp Lee, the old fairgrounds, toasting marshmallows at campfires and singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag” or “Lorena” in the purple dusk. Jefferson Davis’s wife, Varina, a gracious, olive-skinned woman whom Margaret liked, openly said she found Richmond a standoffish place, lacking the friendliness of the Mississippi frontier where she’d grown up. Margaret hoped it wouldn’t be too long before they embarked from Wilmington or Charleston on a risky run through the blockade squadron.

  Still, she preferred a beleaguered Confederate city to New York, in Yankee territory. Wherever they were, Donal would find pliant women; she was resigned to it.

  Happily for Margaret, Rose Greenhow and her daughter were in residence at the Ballard House. Rose was writing a memoir of her imprisonment. She had a certain weary gauntness now, was less ebullient than Margaret remembered. Her hair showed a great deal of gray. Little Rose was growing and developing and taking an interest in boys.

  Rose said Jefferson Davis had personally paid her $2,500 for services in Washington, claiming that but for her, the first battle of Manassas would not have been a victory. Mary Chesnut, the sharp-tongued wife of a Confederate congressman, spread a story that Seward or Stanton had sent Rose to Richmond to spy. Margaret heard it from Varina Davis, who laughed. “Of course Mary thinks ill of nearly everyone. She keeps a diary, you know. I pray I’m not in it.”