Never sleep, p.16
Never Sleep, page 16
Ferrandina mounted a stage for musicians at the rear of the chamber, in front of an enormous mirror covering the entire wall. His masked retinue filed in behind him and stood perfectly still, holding their pillows forward. The capo jutted his chin out in that self-satisfied Corsican way and quelled the crowd with a flat-palmed gesture. He waited until the attendees fell completely hushed. Then he broke the silence.
“Gentlemen, I need not relitigate the necessity of our meeting here tonight. We wish only to live in peace with our Northern neighbors, but they want the peace of us in our graves. They seek to destroy the greatest and most productive civilization the world has ever witnessed. And so they have left us no choice but to act, and act decisively. They dare to parade their president—yes, I say their president—through our streets and expect us to take it lying down like dogs, for that is how they are accustomed to treating their own people. But soon they will know the depths of their error.”
“Hear! hear!” Howard shouted, and the crew began to clap loudly again. This time Hill didn’t feel like joining them.
“The plan,” Ferrandina declared, “is simplicity itself. The tyrant has to switch lines in Baltimore, and the inaugural car will be pulled by horses from Calvert Street Station through the city center until it reaches the Camden yard. Around the tyrant’s car, I am assured by those in a place to know, there will be a . . . minimal . . . police presence.” Laughter rippled across the room at this reference to Police Marshal George Cain, conspicuous in his absence. “The streets surrounding Camden Station are, as you know, quite narrow. There will be enough of us to halt further passage with our bodies, allowing no retreat by man or machine. By the time he realizes it, the despot Lincoln will be surrounded not by his usual sycophants and Black Republicans, but by free men who know the true value of liberty and who will not hesitate to buy it with blood.” Ferrandina pounded his chest with a fist.
Hill could barely repress a smile. It was so amusing, how these people cared about things so fiercely. Smartly dressed waiters passed with trays of wine, and he downed glass after glass. He looked at the face of each rich young man in the ballroom, the young man he had been expected to become. He was almost grateful he had given it all up for the prospect of 160 acres upon honorable discharge.
“Who will deliver the final blow, Captain?” called out a young worthy from the crowd.
“Let it be me!” called another.
“No, me!” Hill added his voice to the chorus, playacting at giving a fig, and soon every man in the room was doing it. The cream of Baltimore, these fair-haired boys from the best families, these ruddy-cheeked cherubs, were begging for the privilege of murdering a man they had never met.
“Who will deliver the blow, Captain?”
“Let it be me!”
“No, me!”
These entreaties echoed off the walls of the ballroom, entered the voice tubes mounted all around the chamber for the use of the serving and cooking staff, and filtered down to Barnum’s sprawling kitchen, which served all the restaurants and parlors in the City Hotel at once. Ensconced at an impromptu dining table below the terminal points of these open pipes, which dangled from the wall like the tentacles of a slain squid, Kate sat listening to a tube held to her ear with one hand and toasting Mrs. Anna Cain with a tall flute of pure Catawba with the other.
When Anna and Kate had returned to the Cain home from the City Hotel’s barbershop, armed with the place and time of the Palmetto Guards’ secret congress, Anna had her maid open a bottle of Mumm’s Cabinet champagne in the parlor. Anna and Kate squealed with laughter at the various schemes they concocted to sneak inside. They considered donning masculine garb and false mustaches and simply showing up to the event as if they had been invited. Anna was a primary patron of the Front Street Theatre after all, and its costume department could be dragooned to her will. Nevertheless, they rejected this plan as excessively Shakespearean since half of the men in attendance had been entertained in the Cain home at one time or another, so the risk of discovery was prohibitively high. Other intrigues were considered and discarded, including hiding behind a Japanese-style screen erected in the ballroom or renting out the room above for the night and drilling a hole through the floor.
At last, Kate suggested what she had already researched to be the best plan all along, which was that Anna leverage her friendship with the hotel’s manager to enlist his help in playing a bit of a prank on her husband. Anna could ask in such a sweet and innocent manner to remain above suspicion of anything sinister. The huge kitchen in the bowels of the City Hotel serviced all the various eateries in the building and therefore would be providing refreshments for that evening’s meeting.
It was a bonus that the waiters served their unwanted guests the meal of their lives. Kate was feeling adventurous, so she ordered the braised calf’s head, an unrecognizable gray mass of bone and gelatin that still provided some of the most tender veal she had ever placed between her lips. This main dish was complemented by a tart vinegar sauce in a small cup on the side and some peeled, boiled potatoes. Anna enjoyed haricot de mouton, lamb shoulder served in a small casserole tray and smothered in plump beans.
Between bites Anna leaned in to listen to the bodiless male voices that funneled their way through the tubes. One held court about Confederate foreign policy—“Great Britain’s textile plants would sit idle without Southern cotton, don’t you know, they’d have to support the Cause against the Lincolnites or their economy would be ruined”; another had put considerable thought into how to reclaim fugitives who might escape to the now separate country of the United States after secession. Anna had opinions about all these weighty issues of the day, of course, and they were all far superior to whatever anyone else upstairs was saying, and she had Kate here as a silent, receptive audience, nodding in manufactured fascination with each bit of wisdom and insight that dropped from the other woman’s mouth. Anna imbued her oratory with as much gravitas as if she had been formally invited to the meeting, and invited to speak there as well.
This was all Anna wanted, of course: To belong. To have her ideas and theories treated as if they had as much validity as those of her dullard husband and his inner circle of preening fatheads.
Lady Detectives, let another person live out her fantasies, and in return she will give you anything and everything she possesses in reality.
Listening to Anna hold court as her entourage of one, Kate realized why she had an innate distrust of politics: unfortunately, almost no one who wanted that much control over the lives of their fellow human beings did so for any good reason. Anna already owned half a dozen human beings over whom she held the power of life and death. But was that good enough for her? No. She wanted the whole damn country too.
When the Palmetto Guards moved to nominate an assassin, Anna let go of the tube in her hand and brought her fist down on the table. The hotel employees—who were bustling about in a clatter of dishes just cleared out from the ballroom—froze. Anna half-rose in fury.
“Shut your damn lips, this isn’t Congo Square at Christmastime,” she hissed at the help.
Nonetheless, both Kate and Anna had to lean forward to hear the Corsican’s reedy voice through the tubes:
“In truth, you are all manful enough to commit the deed, so there is only one way to decide which one of you receives this sacred mission. We will let fortune decide—it shall be done at random, but we all know that the goddess Nemesis, patroness of vengeance, shall guide the hand of fate.”
At those words, a murmur coursed through the ballroom. The barber held out a mahogany box into which a round hole had been cut.
“Here is the method that has been decided upon,” he said. “In single file you shall collect a ballot at random from this box. Once we have all chosen, as a group we shall look at the hand the goddess has dealt us. Do not make a single sound or indicate in any way what you have drawn. So none of us may betray the others, the identity of the worthy among you will not be publicly revealed. Whoever has drawn the red card will be the one tasked with liberating the Confederate States of America from slavery.”
Kate rolled her eyes at Anna. “We’re not going to actually see who’s going do it, are we?”
“I suppose not.” Anna tossed a fork on her plate with a clang. “A whole lot of buildup, leading to a giant nothing-at-all. I don’t know why I expected anything else. Men! Their stewardship has ruined this world.”
“I don’t blame you. Their Gothic posturing is exceedingly tedious.”
Kate could have told Anna that the true work of espionage was drudgery a long time ago, had she been so inclined. Instead, she lied. “I may use the necessary before we leave. If you’ll excuse me.”
Kate had spied the narrow staircase spiraling up from the kitchen when they first arrived. She now made a great show of acting like she didn’t know where she was going, much to the further annoyance of the headwaiter, until she was sure a cook blocked Anna’s view of her. Then Kate pirouetted and practically sprinted for the spiral staircase. Once she pushed her way inside, she hiked her skirts up to her calves and took the steps one at a time as quickly as the constriction of the corset around her rib cage would allow.
Hill fell into the murder queue with the others. The whole thing felt like a dream, enhanced by the dim candlelight. After Hill drew a folded square of paper out of the ballot box, he stood off to the side in agonizing suspense, heart pounding, while the other members of the crew drew lots for themselves. He couldn’t help but notice Winans watching all of them from the center of the ballroom, hands clasped over his waist, rocking back and forth on his heels and nodding self-satisfactorily like a chess master on the verge of checkmate. Of course, a man such as Winans would never deign to draw a card himself. This was why he had fought and clawed his way through society’s strata, so he could make other men claw and fight for him.
What Hill did not manage to see was one man—gaunt and hollow-eyed, neither a rich guest nor a servant, with one empty sleeve pinned to his shabby jacket—lingering in the shadows at the edges of the hall, watching him. The flash of gold thread on Hill’s uniform had attracted this man’s eyes, and they did not move from him at any point in the ceremony.
Kate crept to the balcony’s edge to peer over its side at the well-dressed collection of conspirators below. She stood on a high, narrow gallery, unoccupied and unlit. She had made sure to wear a dark-blue, almost funereal gown so her presence was naturally absorbed into darkness. Unless one truly studied the gloom, she would be just another shadow.
The mysterious cards had been distributed, and the masked man walked back toward the stage with his box. The moment of revelation was at hand. All her patient waiting and listening, her wearing a strained smile and numbing her outrage at slavers’ outbursts of cruelty—this suffering was about to be justified by its reward. Goose bumps sprang up on the backs of her wrists.
The Palmetto Guards lined up like a choir before Ferrandina, who drew a gleaming dress sword and stabbed at the air. “Gentlemen. You may see whether or not Nemesis has smiled upon you—now.”
Somehow, Hill knew. He knew before he looked at the card. This had been the story of his life. He had been gambling late at night at a roadside brothel in Prince George’s County when old Stiles had finally tracked him down with the news that his father was dead and that a wave of debt was crashing directly onto his head, and his alone. Even before he had heard the butler’s knock on the door, Hill had perked up in the middle of a hand.
He was struck by the same sinking feeling now. When he opened the ballot and saw the red spot dabbed there as if on a dirty bandage, he surprised himself by obeying Ferrandina and not making a single sound. But beneath skin, beneath muscle, beneath bone, he heard the roar of collapse—like a great sheath of ice carving away from a greater arctic mass, dropping into black water, sinking into darkness, never to see light again.
A few men stiffened, a few men quailed, a few coughed inadvertently, but when the cards were revealed, most made no reaction at all.
From Kate’s vantage point in the gallery, looking down on the ballroom floor, Kate could see more than half of them. It was so dark that she couldn’t make out any man’s face, but what was on the cards was vivid enough that she could see them plainly even from her high perch.
She almost broke the hush by laughing. She had to hand it to the Corsican: he had an imagination. He was going to make sure he chose someone who would not balk at landing the final blow when the hour of peril came.
Even though she did not see every ballot, she saw enough for one thing to be clear: every man in that room was holding a red card.
Kate could see lantern light blazing behind the papered-over windows of the closed dentist’s office. When she slipped in through the alley entrance, she discovered the Chief in the center of the room, holding a gas lamp high, while his underlings set themselves to breaking down the telegraph machine and winding up its wire, taking reams upon reams of reports and setting them into neat valises, which were then boxed up into crates. A junior detective was desperately trying to soap off the “we never sleep” and all-seeing eye on the wall without much success.
“Ferrandina is planning on setting every single one of his Palmetto Guards on Lincoln’s train car as soon as it arrives at Camden Station,” Kate said without a hello. “One of them will find his mark.”
The Chief didn’t look at her. “I know,” he said.
“I know you know, I just told you.”
“You know what I mean.”
Her cheeks flushed. “Oh, good. I was worried that all the effort and risk I took getting into that meeting wouldn’t prove to be completely superfluous.”
The Chief appraised her coolly. “For most detectives, being such a complete and utter harum-scarum would be considered a detriment.”
“But what, because I’m a woman it’s utterly charming?”
“No. It’s clearly the fire that drives you. If it cooled, you wouldn’t be half as effective.”
“Effectively redundant, it sounds like.”
“My dear, half of Baltimore was invited to that meeting. If I didn’t have anyone else inside, it would reflect poorly on the agency.”
“Who was it? I didn’t see Dawson or any of the other cousin-kissing legionnaires.”
He just looked at her.
“I see.” She smiled bitterly.
“You’re overreacting.”
“It’s what drrrrives me,” she said in an overdone Scottish burr.
“If it makes you feel any better, they don’t know about you either.”
“It doesn’t.”
One assistant sat on a crate lid while another nailed it shut.
“So that’s it,” Kate asked. “We’re wrapping up shop here?”
“I feel we have reached the limits of what we can learn in Baltimore. We now need to bring the president-elect and his people into the fold. I’ve tried to inform them of our progress as best I could along the way, but secrecy has rendered our communications necessarily oblique. A face-to-face meeting is required. I’ll need to confer with the Pee Dubya Bee first, though.”
“And am I to remain here in my nightgown, eating dainty little cucumber sandwiches and perfuming my hair?”
The Chief’s eyes flashed; she had finally gotten to him. Good. “Don’t be daft. I’m going to Philadelphia to see our client, Mr. Felton. You’re going to New York.”
“Why New York?”
“Because that’s where Mr. Lincoln will be. I need you to convince him and his people that under no circumstances can he travel through Baltimore.”
The Prophet declared it was commonsensical to assume someone would try to put out the fires on the bridges the National Volunteers lit afire. Whether they came from the railroad, the army, or the sheriff’s, it did not matter: the Volunteers would have to turn them back, or failing that, put them down. The Volunteers would wait in the trees, “like savages defending civilization,” he intoned, only to emerge whooping.
After drilling all afternoon, the men reconvened after supper and after sunset for a little exercise to test their ability to act as a group, using Bleeding Kansas–style guerrilla tactics. They fanned out downriver from Little Gunpowder Falls and waited for the signal. The Prophet bid Hattie sit beside him alone in a thicket. This made her uncomfortable enough, but as the clouds retreated and the moon was left to shine its cold light down on them, her jaw began to tremble. The Prophet reached out and hooked a hand around her shoulders and pulled her close. It was all she could do not to scream.
They crouched on the river slope for far too long. Hattie fantasized that her hatred and anger gave her divine strength to topple the trees all around them and crush the Prophet and his flock, shatter their limbs, and cave in their skulls. She could bite into the oak behind her and rip it out of the ground like a chained dog pulling its stake from the ground, then maraud up and down the frozen banks of the river and smash the Prophet and his men into paste where they huddled in their hiding places.
Suddenly, a pair of forms stole out of the forest. At first, Hattie thought maybe they were among the Volunteers, but after clinging close to the edge of the wood, the pair rushed toward a canoe beached along the riverbank. The duo barely had time to register that the bottom of the boat had been smashed out before a transparently phony bird cry whistled out of the darkness and the Prophet’s men rushed forward with a holler.
