The Blue and the Gray Undercover

by Ed Gorman

  * * *

  Webster got in touch with Pinkerton who, while he realized that Webster could learn more and more, decided not to take any chances. He told Webster to close the group out at the next meeting.

  “Put an end to it, Tim,” he said, “and let’s be on to something else.”

  “Is that official, sir?”

  “It is.”

  * * *

  At the next meeting Webster entered the room and looked around at the other men in attendance. It was actually a good night to close them out, as this was as large a gathering as he had been at since joining. While he recognized many of the faces, there were many more still which he did not. Then he saw a man approaching him with such purpose in his stride that he sought out the man’s face, which was familiar to him, but not immediately—and then he knew!

  Mike Zigler, the man who had attempted to denounce him in a saloon earlier in the month.

  “You!” Zigler shouted, drawing the attention of the others. “You are here you traitor?”

  Webster wondered if he should draw his pistol and shoot the man dead before he could say anything more, but how would he explain it?

  “This man is a Yankee spy!” Zigler shouted, frothing at the mouth, such was his anger. He glared at Webster and said, “You are among my people now, Webster, not yours. There’s no help for you here.”

  “What are you saying, Mike?” It was the slight man who had invited Webster to join. Webster had discovered that his name was Rufus Blight. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he is sent among us to spy,” Zigler shouted.

  “Can you prove this?” another man called out.

  “Mike’s word is good enough for me,” someone else called.

  “Me, too.”

  Zigler’s eyes shone as shouts of support continued to pour forth. He looked at Webster and a triumphant glint appeared in his eye, for this night he would have his revenge for the previous humiliation.

  Zigler produced his knife, and as Webster went for his pistol his arms were seized and pinioned behind him.

  Webster had no time to shout the words which were to have been a signal for Scully and a troop of Union soldiers to break in. He’d finally gotten himself in too deep, as friends and colleagues had said he someday would.

  Unless he could talk his way out.

  “Listen to me!” he shouted. “Zigler is lying. I am not—”

  “None of your silver-tongued oratory will save you now,” Zigler said, drowning him out. “Tonight I’ll carve me up a spy.”

  Zigler came forward, his blade held low, and as Webster felt the tip of the blade prick him there was a crashing sound and suddenly men were shouting, pushing and shoving. His arms were released, but someone pushed him and he gasped as Zigler’s blade went into his side.

  A squad of Union infantry swept into the room and began herding the frightened, surprised Knights of Liberty against the wall.

  Webster brought his hand down and clamped it around Mike Zigler’s wrist. The knife had gone in barely an inch, but Zigler was trying to push it farther. They were jostled and the knife sliced sideways, opening a gash in Webster’s side that bled freely. However, it also brought the knife free of his flesh and now he twisted and, with his great strength, snapped Zigler’s wrist so that the man cried out in agony and released the knife.

  Suddenly someone grabbed Zigler and pulled him away, pushed him against the wall with the others. Webster, his knees weak from relief and shock, felt his legs go out from under him, felt hands catch him and lower him easily to the floor.

  “John?” he said, looking up at Scully.

  Scully pressed his hands to Webster’s wound and shouted to a Union soldier, “I need a medic, fast!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “John,” Webster said.

  “I’m here, Tim,” Scully said. “You’ll be fine. It’s a tear, lots of blood, but you’ll be fine.”

  “No signal…” Webster said.

  “It took too long,” Scully said. “When there was no signal I just had the soldiers break down the door.”

  “Looking after me?” Webster said, with a weak smile.

  Scully nodded to his colleague and said, “Which is just what I am supposed to do.”

  * * *

  In the days that followed the word got out that the Knights of Liberty had been captured, with only a few exceptions. Among those who had escaped was Timothy Webster. No one was surprised, for wasn’t Webster a true and amazing son of the South, and wasn’t he always able to escape the clutches of those damned Yankees?

  Jane Haddam is the pseudonym of Orania Papazoglou, who is best known for her series featuring retired F.B.I. agent Gregor Demarkian, who has appeared in more than a dozen novels. She had worked in publishing long before turning to writing fiction, with stints as an editor at Greek Accent magazine and writing freelance for Glamour, Mademoiselle, and Working Woman. She has written books under her own name (Graven Image and Arrowheart) but it is the Demarkian series that continues to garner the most attention.

  During the Civil War, men fought for various reasons, honor and their country among them. Women, however, took the war much more personally, for various reasons of their own. Although the character in the following story is fictional, it would be easy to imagine a woman taking matters into her own hands upon uncovering a traitor.

  PORT TOBACCO

  Jane Haddam

  Sometimes, falling half-asleep in the corner of the carriage while the wheels rattled and jerked against the ruts in the road, Sarah Gilbert Slater wondered how long it would be before this war was over. Not long, she thought. There had been fighting for weeks in Virginia, and not just in Virginia, but right up close to Richmond, right there, so that you could stand on the terrace of the President’s house and smell the dead. The smell made her head ache. If she had been another kind of woman, it might have made her faint. She thought of herself in Connecticut, before the talk had started, climbing the big tree in the yard of their house at Hartford. She could hang upside down by her knees for half an hour at a time, high up, when her brothers wouldn’t even dare to try it. Then she would climb down and sit on the branch next to her father’s “consulting room” window. Those were the days when her father had called himself “doctor” and made patent medicines in the cellar. Women came to him from the better streets in Hartford. Her mother sat in the parlor and sewed samplers as the women went in and out. Sarah could have told her mother the truth, but for some reason she hadn’t wanted to. It had felt like a betrayal of her father. She wasn’t sure why, but it would have been better if her father had been having his way with those women. Instead, he had sat in his chair against the wall and the women had talked, endlessly, in words Sarah had never been able to make clear. In the branches above her head, the leaves had shivered and hissed. The birds had called to one another. The squirrels had fought it out over nuts and acorns. There had been no smell of the dead.

  The carriage shuddered, and rocked, and then hit hard ground: cobblestones or brick. Sarah leaned forward and tried to get a look out the carriage window, but there wasn’t much of anything to see. The sun was too high in the sky, too hot and too bright. The women on the wooden walkways in front of the small stores looked as if they had been painted over with dust. If she stayed at the window long enough, she would see the thing that fascinated her the most about Port Tobacco, Maryland. She would see the nuns. What she saw instead was a soldier in Yankee blue with a rifle slung over his shoulder and a piece of fruit in his hands. The fruit looked raw and painful, like something bleeding. She sat back.

  “You can’t go looking out the windows now,” Mr. Corbinson said, from the seat he had taken, facing her, all the way back in Virginia. His voice was high and pinched and hysterical. “You can’t go looking at what the women are wearing now. You’ll get us all in trouble, my Kate.”

  “Mrs. Thompson,” Sarah said automatically. “My name is Mrs. Thompson.”

  “Mrs. Thompson,” Mr. Corb
inson said.

  “I was looking for the nuns,” Sarah said. “Did you know there were nuns here, in Port Tobacco? Papist nuns.”

  “You’re not looking at nuns. You don’t have anything to do with nuns. You have a job to do in Port Tobacco.”

  “They have a house where they live together. A convent. There are ten of them, in those long black dresses and the white around their faces. I’ve seen them over and over again. When they walk, they look at the ground.”

  “You’re not looking at nuns,” Mr. Corbinson said, looking stubborn.

  Sarah gave it up. They were too close to the center of town by now for her to see the nuns. She felt along the edge of her dress until she came to the two stiff folds of paper that had been sewn between the layers of fabric in the sweep of skirt just underneath her waist. Then she put her hands in her lap and folded them, as if she were one of those nuns she had missed, in prayer. Instead, she was kneading the soft pouch of her string bag, feeling the edges of the knife she had put there before she left Richmond. It was a good knife, sharp enough so that she had had to wrap the blade in muslin to keep it from poking through. This time, she had not wanted to feel as if she were out in the world with no way to fight for herself, and only Mr. Corbinson—or Mr. Surratt—to protect her.

  On his side of the carriage, Mr. Corbinson looked filthy and tense and afraid. The smell of him filled the carriage, choking and thick. There was dirt crusted into the folds of his skin around his eyes, and dirt under his fingernails. There was so much dirt in his heavy wool coat, it was stiff.

  “I don’t like Port Tobacco,” Mr. Corbinson said. “I don’t care if they did want to be on the right side in the war.”

  “All you need to do is to see me safely into the hands of Mr. Surratt,” Sarah said. “Then you can go back to Virginia.”

  “I’m not going back to Virginia. Ain’t none of us going back to Virginia. Don’t you know that?”

  Sarah put her head back and closed her eyes. She was only twenty-two, and slight. That was what made them think she needed an escort, at least in the South. She hated these endless Mr. Corbinsons, who spent half their time telling her she wasn’t capable of doing what she had already done a dozen times before, and the other half gloating about the fact that they were holding all the money. She wondered what was happening now, up in Canada. Then she imagined herself at forty, full-figured and fair. She would be one of those women who ran Charitable Societies and ruled their husbands and sons the way overseers had once ruled slaves. She would be the one who was holding the money.

  Somewhere in the trip through the short, pocked streets, she fell asleep. She dreamed of herself standing on a scaffold in a wide prison yard. The ground around her was dry and dead. No matter where she looked, she could see no sign of trees. If I had only been holding the money, she thought.

  Then the carriage bounced and jerked again, and she was much too wide awake.

  * * *

  For the longest time, the Brawner Hotel in Port Tobacco had been an unofficial outpost of the Confederacy, a place where blockade runners and secret agents met, a place for plotting and sedition. Now it looked oddly empty and dispirited. The wide double-deck front porch seemed to sag in the corners. The rail fence had been replaced on one side by pickets. The front walk was full of grass. The carriage stopped and Mr. Corbinson got out to look around. Sarah wondered what he thought he was looking for. Maybe he expected Yankee soldiers to come marching down the street at them. What struck her was how quiet it all was, dead quiet, as if all the people who had ever lived here had turned to ash and blown away.

  I would feel better if I had been able to see the nuns, Sarah thought. Then she smoothed her wide black skirt and prepared to let herself out of the carriage on her own, if only so she wouldn’t have to touch Mr. Corbinson’s hands. The hoop under her skirt was so stiff, she couldn’t force it through the carriage door without crushing it. The material of her dress was brittle and rough. She was always careful to dress as a widow, even though she wasn’t one. More women than not were widows these days, or worse, and soldiers didn’t stop widows even if they were widows for the other side. It was strange, the way that was. It was as if agreements had been made in secret that couldn’t have been made in the bright open air.

  Just as she hit the ground, she realized that the cobblestones weren’t very well anchored in the dirt. Her soft slippers plowed into sand. Dust rose around her in puffs of half-bleached brown. Mr. Corbinson turned from where he had stopped halfway up the path to the Brawner’s front door and rubbed the palms of his hands against the sides of his coat. Dirty hands. Dirty coat. Dirty face. For one frantic moment, Sarah thought she could still smell him, the way she had been smelling him, all those long hours in the carriage. The smell made the air thick. It seemed to pattern and snap.

  “Hey there,” Mr. Corbinson said. “Are you coming now, Mrs. Thompson? We don’t want to keep the carriage man all day.”

  Sarah felt the papers sewn at her waist again. She adjusted her bonnet on her head. Jumping down from the carriage, she had dislodged it, The stiff edge of its crown was digging into her ear. She wound her hands around her soft string bag and checked automatically for the hard thing inside it.

  “Hey there,” Mr. Corbinson said again.

  Up on the top level of the Brawner’s double porch, a man had appeared next to the railing: Jacob Surratt. Sarah caught his eye, and nodded, and then went up the path to where Mr. Corbinson was finally waiting. Maybe the hotel would really be as empty as it appeared to be. Maybe, when the time came to do what she had to do, she would actually be alone.

  The Brawner’s front door swung open and a colored woman came out, but Sarah didn’t notice her. There were colored women everywhere. Nobody paid attention to them.

  * * *

  From the beginning, Sarah Gilbert Slater’s job in the war had been exactly what it would always be. She would wait patiently in a boardinghouse in Richmond, until a man would come to tell her she was wanted at the War Department. In Richmond, everybody thought she was the widow of a man who had died in glorious martyrdom. They had no other way to explain why an insignificant child, a half-woman living on her own in a way no respectable woman ever could if she were under the age of forty, was invited so often to Jefferson Davis’s house. For her part, Sarah lived quietly and without entertainment. She came down to dinner at the boardinghouse every night and sat in the parlor afterwards, discussing the war news and the blockade runners and how difficult it was to get tea and spices now that the war had gone on for so very long. Sometimes she sat looking at her hands, making a show of grief, so that the other women couldn’t see how much they frightened her. They did frighten her, too. All the women she had met in this war scared her silly. The men were fighting out of principle or loyalty or inertia. The women were true fanatics. If you listened to them long enough, you could hear the blood in their voices.

  When she got to the War Department, there was always a woman waiting for her, silent and steady, ready to sew her dress. She was not a colored woman—or rather, she was not any more. In the beginning, the seamstresses had always been colored and sullen and stout. Sarah had found herself drinking once or twice that it would take nothing at all to prod them to bloody murder. They seemed to be on the edge of it. Later, it was an older white woman with thick white hair and eyes the color of slate who did the sewing, and when Sarah asked why she only said, “It doesn’t hurt to take precautions.”

  What they sewed into her dress at the War Department were “dispatches,” and sometimes other papers that were needed by Friends of the Cause in Montreal. They sent her to Montreal because she could speak French so well, she could claim French citizenship if she were ever caught. None of them ever asked her why she was willing to go. Every time but one it was the same. The papers were sewn into her clothes. She was introduced to her escort, a man who carried twenty gold pieces to see them through the trip and who knew nothing else about it, except that it would help the Confeder
acy win the war. They traveled North, first to Port Tobacco, then to Washington, then to New York, then to Canada. In Canada there were people waiting for her, who did know what it was all about. She delivered the papers to them, and they did what had to be done. Once, they organized a raid on a small border town in Vermont. They wanted to bring the war home to the Yankees who had up to then been able to fight it as if it weren’t happening at all. Once, they paid the Canadian government to release three of their soldiers who had been jailed as spies. The Canadians were supposed to be neutral. When they were faced with the obvious, they had to do what they were expected to do or risk being invaded themselves. Time after time, it was always the same, except for that once. The air got colder and colder the farther North they rode, even in the summer, and her hands got more and more chapped. Sometimes she wondered what they would think of her if they knew why she was doing what she was doing. She didn’t care for the Cause at all. She only cared not to be living at home with Mr. Slater, whom she had married because it was the only way she had of holding onto her reputation. She only cared not to know any more of the secrets of the marriage bed.

  The one time it was different, she had carried not papers, but gold, and not on her person, but in two big traveling trunks that had been fixed to the top of a carriage bought and outfitted for the purpose. That time, she had been with Mr. Surratt, too, and nothing had been left to chance. There had been no waiting around at inns, hoping for a coach to come in that would carry them on the next leg of their journey. There had been no free afternoons in New York to go shopping, or free evenings in Washington to see a play. There had only been the purpose, stark and unembellished, so that in the end she had not been able to keep herself from looking. Sitting alone in a room on the top floor of Mr. Surratt’s mother’s boardinghouse in Washington, she had opened the trunks and run her hands over the solid yellow bricks. She had even picked up one in her hands and felt its weight. She wouldn’t have believed it before then, but gold had a voice. It sang to you.