Never sleep, p.13
Never Sleep, page 13
The 9:20 from Perrymansville was ten minutes late and, as it was a Saturday, sparsely populated. Kate looked and looked at each face as it descended from the train and could not see her protégé’s among them.
“Sister?”
She turned at the sound of the voice just as the steam from the departing train dissipated. The girl Hattie stood beside her, her ghost rematerializing in exactly the same way she had disappeared from her vision at Havre de Grace. She was wearing the same green-and-white gingham dress, her golden hair was still done up in the same spiral bun on her head, but at the same time, everything about her was completely different.
“Sister! What a delight.” Kate half-expected the girl to dissolve into tears in her arms. Instead, she stood as straight as a flagpole as Kate took her hands and pulled her close for two prim pecks on her cheeks. “We have a few hours to kill before our appointment. As this is your first time in Baltimore City proper, I thought we’d get in some sightseeing. How does that sound?”
“As you wish, Flora.” As she tilted her head, Kate spotted a glint in her blue eyes that she had not seen before. That was it—that was the primary difference since Kate had seen the girl last. But because she could not identify the nature of the change, she did not comment on it; Kate simply cocked her elbow so Hattie could hook her arm into hers and led the girl out of the station.
Lady Detectives: Avoid any fight you do not know beforehand you are going to win.
They paid their twenty-five cents to enter the Baltimore Museum a block over from the City Hotel and gaped at the impossible-to-believe skeleton of a mammoth that was on display. They held hands through the magic-lantern show that took them on a journey to the forgotten epochs whence the great beast came; vivid paintings stretched back through the eons until their journey ended in a scene of the world as many great thinkers now believed it was moments after the Lord formed it: all volcanoes and fire.
“In those days,” intoned the projector operator and show’s narrator, “the earth was too violent for life.”
The more things change, the more they stay the same, Kate thought.
It was a ten-minute walk from the museum to the great ivory dome of the Baltimore Basilica, the first in America, and they were able to sneak a peek inside just as noon services were letting out.
At Lexington Market they saw the Rip Raps loitering around the bakery stall of an elderly Teuton woman. The gang mocked the woman with a nonsense patter of guttural sounds that were probably meant to sound German. They filled their pockets with strudel and steaming rolls off her counter with try-and-stop-me leers. She produced a rusty cavalry saber from beside her brick oven and charged; the gang ran off down Paca Street, whooping and skipping like naughty children.
As they walked, Kate waited patiently for Hattie to confess any deeper feelings of concern like the ones she had expressed in her letter, but the girl was maddeningly quiet—determined, it seemed, to wait her out. In fact, her only true comment, beyond grunts and affirmatives, was when a choleric man in a floppy hat barked, “Move your ass!” and then rattled past the two of them, pushing a heap of pineapples in a one-wheeled barrow.
“Pineapples!” Hattie cried. “Has anyone in Perrymansville ever seen a pineapple?”
Hattie even let out a barely concealed yawn when they arrived at their last stop, Westminster Presbyterian on Fayette, tall and Gothic and brick. Kate ignored the girl’s performance as this was the one site she most wanted to see. She led her companion through the grand Egyptian gate on the Greene Street side into the brick-walled graveyard.
“If it was just a hair warmer, I’d say we could lay down a blanket, have a lunch right over here,” Kate said.
Hattie made a face. “Here? In a graveyard?”
“You never did that? Perhaps it’s not a city custom. My parents used to take us to picnics all the time in the churchyard at Lockport. So well kept and quiet, a nice little island of calm in the bustle of town.”
“But—to sit down and eat? Over dead people?”
“The dead are everywhere we are, Hattie, all the time.”
“But there’s only one place you have to be reminded of it, so I’d rather break bread elsewhere, thank you.”
Kate made her way through the headstones and tombs, Hattie trailing a few paces behind, until she reached a tangle of brambles behind a row of low crypts. Though there was no marker, visitors before her had left behind three desiccated roses and an empty bottle of cognac by the roots. Kate knew she was in the right place.
“Edgar Poe is buried here,” she said. “In this general vicinity, I mean.”
“Is he a relation of yours?” the girl asked.
“Edgar Allan Poe?” Kate frowned at Hattie. “You’ve never heard of him?”
Hattie shook her head. “Should I have heard of him?”
“Why, he’s only the greatest writer this backwards country ever produced.”
“I see. If he’s so great, then why doesn’t he have a headstone?”
“Because, sadly, artistic genius too often goes unrecognized in one’s lifetime.”
“And after one’s lifetime. Because, you know. He doesn’t have a headstone.”
“Like a Greek tragedy. He died penniless and friendless on the streets of this city.”
“So he was a bum?”
“Hattie. Don’t be shallow.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Warn, I’m from Chicago. You die in the street without enough money for a headstone in my town, that doesn’t make you a genius, it makes you a bum.”
Kate felt the base of her skull get hot. “Are you trying to irritate me?”
“Not at all. Why does this Poe person mean so much to you?”
She took a moment to find the right words. “I felt like being near something legendary,” she said softly. “I myself would rather like to be legendary.”
The girl broke out into a loud, harsh, pealing laugh, like the ringing of an alarm bell, which made an old couple conferring in whispers beside a nearby tomb clutch each other and flee the churchyard.
“My sister, Flora, says the queerest things,” Hattie shouted in a singsong. “That’s what they always said when we were growing up together in Alabama, your big sister, Flora, my, she always says the queerest things.”
Then there was that look again, which, this time, Kate immediately identified:
It was Dawson’s cop look—I know you better than you know yourself.
“Are you sleeping with him?” Kate asked.
“What? With who?”
“Your ‘husband.’”
The girl flinched as if burned with a hot poker. “God, no.”
She considered this. “I think I might actually believe you.”
“If you fancy him, don’t worry—you can have him,” Hattie sneered. “Although if I did fancy him, it would not require much effort on my part to make him forget all about you.”
“Don’t be an idiot. You know he’s married, right? With children? Their oldest, I’d wager, is practically your age.”
“He sees through you, doesn’t he? You find that off-putting.”
“He’s smug in his assumptions. It’s not an attractive quality in any person. I’d just keep your drawers fastened in his presence.”
“You are becoming off-putting. Perhaps it’d be best if you just minded your own business.”
“My God, girl, what do you think we do for a living? We professionally mind other people’s business.”
“Well, I am not paying you to stick your nose into my affairs, so if you don’t mind—don’t.”
When Hattie stuck her chin in the air and tried to march out of the cemetery, Kate grabbed her by the arm and steered her around the other side of the church, where some of the oldest crypts and headstones were crumbling. The church had inexplicably extended itself over a patch of graves, which lay shrouded and cursed in a low gully beneath its brick bulk.
“I would remind you that I can make you or unmake you according to my whim, so you should take better care choosing your words.”
Hattie managed to wriggle free. “You hate me, and I know you hate me. And I’m not going to let you stamp me out!”
“Girl, are you touched in the head?”
“You hate me because you fear me,” the girl hissed, leaning in so close Kate could feel hot breath on her lips. “You fear I will surpass you. And so you want me meek and helpless. But I am more able than you think. I’ve already . . .” She stepped back. “You’ll see.”
Hattie’s words gave Kate pause. She swallowed. She made a considerable mental effort to tamp down her temper. It’s not the girl’s fault, she thought. She got thrown into the deep part of the pond too quickly, and now she thinks her swimming instructors are trying to drown her. But a mad dog is as useless as a spineless jellyfish to this work.
Kate snapped open her silver pocket chronometer, a railroad conductor’s precision timepiece that the Chief issued to his most trusted agents. “I do not have time to reexplain the entire world to you, and show how you misunderstand every blessed thing in it. Fortunately, our employer possesses the patience of a mountain, and we are almost late in meeting him. After he is done with you, be aware: I will have you again. And we will settle this.”
But a thought made Kate’s hand tremble as she snapped her chronometer shut. What if the girl was just a little bit right?
“Have we been followed?” Kate Warn abruptly asked in Hattie’s ear as they turned onto South Street.
“Have we . . .” Hattie looked up and down the street as discreetly as she could.
On one corner a line of men and women wielding cleavers, straight razors, and scissors queued up for the knife-sharpening man, who was grinding their dull blades back into keenness with his foot-operated, wheel-propelled grindstone. On the other corner, a wagon festooned with wooden bowls and cups was parked. The vendor and his horse took turns biting off the end of the same large carrot.
Mrs. Warn allowed Hattie to gape until a streetcar clanged past. The older woman grabbed her by the arm and turned her abruptly down an alley. One wall advertised a dentist’s office in fading paint.
Hattie bent her head to Mrs. Warn’s ear. “Who would be following us?”
“At the moment, no one.”
On the other side of the dentist advertisement was a door that Mrs. Warn abruptly opened and all but shoved Hattie inside.
“But you should always be asking yourself the question. And you should always already know the answer.”
Hattie’s cheeks flushed. She’d seen puppies granted more autonomy. And just when she was starting to feel a little guilty about giving Mrs. Warn a piece of her mind too.
Now Hattie became aware of a bunch of beards and hard masculine eyes turned in her direction as she stumbled through the office doorway. The small hairs stood up on the back of her neck. They were apparently inside of an office, a riot of crisscrossing telegraph wires and stacks of ledgers. Directly facing her on a blank wall over a cot were scrawled the words “we never sleep,” under which someone had added a large, unblinking eye that seemed to be looking directly at her, judging her every move.
Mr. Pinkerton, Chief of the National Police Agency, crossed the room to Mrs. Warn and said, “The French Embassy in Washington City answered your query of the other day. It was, as you expected, in the negative.”
Mrs. Warn nodded. “I will inform the interested party at the earliest convenience.”
Hattie had not laid eyes on Mr. Pinkerton since the train platform in Philadelphia, and he seemed just as tall and intimidating as ever. Now he turned to acknowledge that he and she breathed the same air. “Miss MacLaughlin, yes, thank you for coming in. Have a seat, why don’t you.”
An aide moved a stack of city directories off a chair so Hattie could sit down. Mr. Pinkerton sat on the edge of a desk with one foot up, like the father she had never had, or wanted. Mrs. Warn hovered over his shoulder.
“So, Hattie, are you getting on in Perrymansville?”
“Just so, I suppose.”
“Mr. Dawson is treating you right, yes? No difficulties to report there?”
“He has been a perfect gentleman. Perhaps overly so.”
“Ah. Well. Then.” Mr. Pinkerton looked back at Mrs. Warn, then at the floor. “I had been led to believe you were having some troubles, that, uh . . . that maybe you’d like to share with me?”
She blinked. What had been infuriating had become comic. She laughed. “I’m sorry, did you . . .” She looked to Mrs. Warn. “Did you think my expressions of distress were genuine?” She looked to Mr. Pinkerton. “I . . . in case the post was being watched, I needed a defensible reason to visit Baltimore City, did I not?”
Mr. Pinkerton looked stunned, then amused, then covered his smile under the cover of scratching his beard. Over his shoulder Mrs. Warn very slowly turned red from her cheekbones and chin to the roots of her hair. It was a more glorious sight to Hattie than a sunrise.
“The National Volunteers are organized into four companies, each with a different point person at a different critical juncture point along the Pee Dubya Bee,” Hattie said. She and Mr. Dawson had earlier agreed that she would deliver both of their reports at once. “Mr. Esau Broddle, the Perrymansville foreman, is headman there, and Mr. Dawson has been made his second. They have brought him completely into their confidences. They’ve been drilling as a general militia, but also practicing set-fire drills on the major bridges. Whether the rails are to be cut off before or after President Lincoln’s train comes through, I cannot say. The full extent of their plans has yet to be revealed, I think, because they are unsure of the best way to proceed. They tried to buy arms from crooked purchase officers in the army, but that attempt has resulted in failure thus far. There can’t be more than fifty of them, because that’s how many badges and uniforms we in the Women’s Auxiliary have been asked to sew. If you bring a map of the county, I can show you where Mr. Dawson says each of the companies is to be deployed along the line. I have them committed to memory.”
Nobody moved. Their stunned silence was delicious.
Hattie’s stomach grumbled. She looked to Mrs. Warn with a frown. “We are getting lunch after this, aren’t we?”
Twenty minutes later, they were having lunch at the General Wayne Inn on the corner of Baltimore and Paca: young pigeon braised with mushrooms and stewed turtle with old port.
“You clever little minx,” Mrs. Warn suddenly said.
Hattie gasped. “I beg your pardon?”
“Your letter was dated Monday. But the meetings you referred to in your report occurred on Tuesday and Wednesday.” Mrs. Warn pointed her fork accusingly. “The letter and the despair it expressed were genuine. But after you sent it, you discovered useful intelligence the Chief could use, and so you passed off your original overture as a ploy.”
Hattie slapped her silverware down with a clang. “I do not know what divine spirit has filled you with pure and spontaneous knowledge of all things, but I do hope it visits me one day.”
“Oh, no, please do not misunderstand me. I am impressed. And proud. Huge, heaping gobs of both. You made me underestimate you. Excellent! You listened during our first talk. You really listened. Maybe you really will surpass me. Bravo, Madame Wilson. Bravo.”
Mrs. Warn raised her glass of wine, and Hattie raised hers of milk. They clinked together. Hattie could already feel her cold rage thawing.
“And you didn’t reveal your sources. That’s wise. Your secrets are your most valuable treasures. Keep them close until necessity demands they be revealed.”
Hattie let out a grateful sigh. Mr. Dawson still thought the Prophet was a useless side diversion. Her instinct was to keep her misgivings to herself until she had more evidence to the contrary. It wouldn’t do either of them any good for her to just get laughed at.
“I . . . I just want to do a good job, Mrs. Warn.”
Irritation flickered briefly across the other woman’s face. “You know, I’m not that much older than you. You could just call me Kate.”
Later, Kate was still bubbling with pride at her pupil’s performance when Lieutenant Hill arrived at the City Hotel to escort her to the Front Street Theatre.
The play was utter rubbish, a loose dramatization of the John Brown affair called The Assassin’s Legions. Kate was vaguely aware that the Chief had known Brown—and, at one point in the antislavery fanatic’s career, harbored him—because of their joint activities in the Underground Railroad. On the day the news broke that Brown and a mixed troop of white and Black rebels had tried to seize the national armory in Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, she had been sitting next to Pinkerton at the National Police Agency HQ back in Chicago. The Chief had launched into a series of invectives, the likes of which she had never heard pass his lips before or since. Apparently, Brown had confessed his plans to Pinkerton, and the Chief had tried to convince him of the impossibility of success, but to no avail. Kate could not pry any more details out of him.
The play did not enlighten her any further in that regard. The basic structure of Brown’s attack on Harper’s Ferry was retained, but a romantic subplot was haphazardly inserted involving a young guard at the armory and his sweetheart, waylaid by Brown’s Negroes—all of whom were white stagehands slathered in blackface—en route to warn her beloved about the attack.
So Kate’s mind found it easy to wander toward the future, toward her founding of the Ladies’ Branch of the National Police Agency. She would be the headmistress of a finishing school for petticoated schemers who would fan out across the country, across the world, stymieing the wicked with intrigue. They would know the latest substitution ciphers as well as any cross-stitch, and the best way to disadvantage an assailant as dearly as the latest waltz.
