The sixth conspirator, p.27
The Sixth Conspirator, page 27
Like a good general, Natalie had stationed herself close to the front lines. In Paris she was indulged as an American—and therefore somewhat exotic—hostess, less formal and rigid than most French women. Once, she had hired dancers from the Jardin Mabille to teach the cancan to her guests, including (people said) the Emperor himself in disguise. And though the spectacle of Paris’s social elite kicking their legs in chorus had been considered “delirious” and “magic,” in the aftermath polite shock set in, and Natalie was cautioned never to be quite so exotic again.
Tonight, she simply stood decorously at the entrance to her grand salon and welcomed her guests with becoming commiseration—“Such a rain!”—and an elegant, sympathetic gesture toward the display of champagne and lobster by the window. As the crush of people grew and the room became nearly impassable, she quite forgot about Sarah Slater.
Which suited Sarah. She was not a shy person. She held her own now in the rapid Parisian French that had at first tripped her up. She felt easy enough among strangers. But her mind was busy elsewhere, picturing the next morning, the ship’s pitch and roll, the long Mediterranean horizon that would mark the end…She hardly knew what it marked the end of—being a fugitive? John A. Slidell, expatriate Confederate, shuffled up to her.
“Hiding among the flowers, my dear Miss Slater—‘herself a fairer flower.’”
Sarah smiled at the compliment, but then Slidell spoiled it by adding like a schoolmaster, “Paradise Lost, Book IV. John Milton talking about Proserpine.”
“Is your beautiful daughter here, Mister Slidell?”
Slidell was wearing a silk crimson cravate, which he now twisted violently to one side of his neck. “Damned French clothes,” he muttered. “Just as soon bloody strangle you. Language, beg pardon. No, my son-in-law wanted to come, but she wouldn’t budge.”
“Because of the rain?”
Slidell had turned away, scanning the crowded salon. Two of the flutists had come together beside Natalie Benjamin for an impromptu duet. Champagne sailed by on trays held high above a sea of powdered and pomaded hair, and the old man raised his finger toward a waiter.
“Not the rain,” he said. “She heard General Dix was coming, and that horse-faced daughter of his, and then some other people from the Embassy, too. She can’t stand Dix. I speak to him, but I don’t shake his hand.” He snagged two glasses from a passing tray and handed one to Sarah. “Tell me more about when you were living in Richmond.”
But Sarah knew General Dix by sight, from the war, and she saw him at that moment stepping inside the room, extending his hat and gloves to a servant. She had no more desire than Slidell’s daughter to meet him. With a murmur of apology and a touch on the old man’s sleeve, she turned and slipped away.
Daniel Keach saw her leave but had no idea who she was. The whirl of her blonde hair made him think for a moment of gold.
Then he said, “Don’t just stand there, Oakes. Give the man your hat.”
Oakes, who was looking in the other direction, turned and gave his hat to a servant. General Dix frowned back at them, seemed to count, and over the rising and falling noise of the room asked loudly for Sharpe.
“Finishing a letter,” Maggie Lawton told him. She planted herself next to Dix, hooked his right arm over her elbow and smiled across his middle-aged rotundity to Mrs. Blake on the other elbow. “General Sharpe never stops writing reports. He’ll come, but he’ll be late.”
“My father’s the same way. He says the best things are written in anger.”
“And I’m always angry.” Dix beamed complacently at the room and acknowledged with a nod his hostess on the other side of the room. “I like what the Duke of Gloucester said to Gibbon—‘Another damn’d thick square book, eh, Mister Gibbon? Scribble, scribble, scribble!’ Sharpe’ll have trouble getting through that excavation mess outside.”
“Don’t you like Miss Lawton’s gown, Captain Oakes?” Mrs. Blake said. “Emerald green, with her red hair, so daring!”
Oakes scarcely heard her. His mind was still back in the hotel lobby, where Maggie had said she would cry because he cried. But he made a little bowing motion that he ruined by frowning.
Then he stepped away toward the center of the room, followed closely by Keach. If it hadn’t rained, half the guests would have been outside, strolling among the flowers and lanterns. Now they were all inside, packed shoulder to shoulder. The men pulled their elbows in and the ladies’ skirts swayed like bells.
Natalie’s house, thoroughly modern, had gas lamp fixtures. But either because of the storm or because of the forthcoming puppet show, these had gradually been dimmed and given way to candles in sconces along the walls, so that against a background of turning shadows the faces of the partygoers looked like white petals floating in a vase.
Keach planted himself on Oakes’s left. “Go away, Keach.”
“You’re not skipping out, Captain. Think of me as glue.”
The flutists brought their duet to an end, and servants began to arrange three rows of oval-backed chairs. While they clattered about and herded guests out of its path, to a gasp of pleasure, two footmen rolled out a portable stage.
This was no more than a wagon about six feet long, such as might be seen at any open market in Paris, resting on four differently colored wooden wheels. Its panels were cleverly decorated with bright, busy paintings of puppets and dolls. Above the wagon box, blue curtains extended up another three feet, supported by brass uprights. An open square in the center revealed a black velvet interior. Suddenly a pretty girl wearing a jester’s cap ducked behind the wagon. An instant later two thin poles snapped up high above the topmost curtain, stretching between them a scroll with the flaming red words—“Les Pupazzi de Neuville!”
Quickly, excitedly, chattering like sparrows, the ladies besieged the chairs. The men pushed forward behind them. Out of somewhere—to the evident disdain of the flutists—an accordion player appeared and began to caper and play. What the tune was, Oakes had no idea. But most of the audience recognized it, and some started to applaud, while others waved champagne glasses and shouted Bravo! A smiling Natalie emerged from the foyer.
Oakes circled the room restlessly, going in a clockwise direction. Keach kept a steady, unfriendly stare on him. Meanwhile, the accordionist swung his instrument over his head and with a burst of chords and a wild whoop, M. de Neuville himself bounced out of the shadows like a jack-in-the box and into the circle of candlelight around his stage.
Oakes stopped far off to one side of the wagon. Natalie’s grand salon had the usual tall French windows, but twice the normal height, it seemed. The curtains had been roped back to the window jambs and the glass panels propped slightly open. The damp night air was creeping in, making him shiver. Distant thunder rattled the glass.
At almost the same moment the little curtains in the center of the stage closed and snapped open again, and three big, silly puppet heads popped up. As they started to slap and punch each other, the audience broke into loud, knowing laughter.
Oakes had read that de Neuville’s satirical puppets were all supposed to be contemporary French politicians and notable boulevardiers. He wouldn’t understand the jokes and, in any case, he disliked puppets. He had always disliked—even as a boy—manipulation, strings, hair-trigger violence; puppets were far more lifelike than any actor.
A plump, not unhandsome woman came to the side of the stage, poised and self-delighted, clearly their hostess. Her smiling face drifted through shadows.
Another face appeared beside her and stopped, frozen in a point of light.
TWO THOUGHTS FLASHED like pistols.
Sarah Slater hadn’t seen him.
Keach had.
And not only Keach. Anyone watching Oakes would have caught the sudden stiffening, the arch backward as if he had been stung or shot. From the other side of the room, Keach started forward. Behind Keach, Maggie Lawton stared.
Oakes had been standing on the left side of the grand salon, near the half-open window. Sarah had appeared exactly opposite him next to the wagon-stage, where the puppets, to everyone’s delight, were now pummeling each other with brooms.
Impossible to cross to her in front of the puppets. Oakes took two steps slowly to his left, and as soon as he dared, bent his head and circled fast behind the stage. In a blur he saw a man’s crouched back, hands working the puppets. The girl with the red jester’s cap knelt beside him. A burst of laughter drew every eye to the stage and Oakes stepped out from the shadows on the other side, beside a startled Natalie Benjamin, who turned and spoke to him in surprise. Whatever she said was drowned out by another burst of laughter, but next to her Sarah Slater caught a sound, a movement and she too turned, wide-eyed, toward Oakes.
If he thought he had found her, if he thought she would rush into his arms in a burst of light—nothing happened—nothing had ever happened as he imagined, except the war. Without a word she spun about and pushed through the laughing crowd. Annoyed or puzzled faces looked back as she passed, then closed ranks again and pressed closer to the puppets.
Oakes dodged around Natalie Benjamin. Not quite running, not quite walking, he shoved past the stocky figure of John Dix and elbowed his way into a hallway. He saw carpeted stairs and and an open window where rain hissed on an awning. At the second floor landing he saw a door begin to close. He pushed it open again, and when he entered the room he saw Sarah Slater by a gas lamp, a shadow come to life.
By the time he reached her, six years had passed. In a gesture so natural, so perfect and unexpected he would never forget it, she lifted her right hand to his cheek and rested it there a moment.
“I never gave up hoping,” she whispered, “I left messages,” and if it was a lie, he never had time to ask. He bent toward her and the door behind them slammed shut.
“Captain Oakes,” Keach said. “And Miss Thompson Slater Gilbert, Etcetera, I presume.”
From below came a cascade of laughter. From the window, thunder and a whiplash of rain across the glass. Keach advanced into the room. Somehow Oakes had time to see that the walls were covered with paintings of women, little feminine tables with cups and vases were everywhere. A side door cracked open and a maid’s face peeked in.
“Time to choose, Oakes. Your country or your girl. You always knew you’d have to.”
“Get out.”
“The Captain and I have an understanding,” Keach told Sarah. “You’re going to take me to that nice yellow gold you stole from Jeff Davis.”
And suddenly it had never been a choice at all.
“No,” Oakes said.
“Yes.” Keach pulled back his coat to reveal the butt of the Navy revolver he had brought all the way from the war to Paris. “You stole a lot of money, Miss Gilbert. You can take me to it, or I can take you to General Sharpe.”
“Quint—”
“General Sharpe is the man who would hang you for treason. He’s right downstairs.”
Oakes took a step toward him. Sarah moved backward toward the wall. Keach drew the revolver from his belt. Thunder clapped just overhead and a zigzag of lightning outside the window made the air in the room jump and the gas lamp go black.
In the darkness Oakes could hear the maid screaming. To his right came the noise of Sarah scrambling over something. Blindly he dove toward her and his shoulder hit Keach and he swung hard and cursed. Phantom hands, fingers struggling, then next to his ear a single loud snap.
The crack of a pistol sounds nothing at all like thunder. In a room, in a house it can sound tiny and angry and human. And yet, the instant after Keach fired the whole house seemed to have heard it and gone silent, even the rain and the wind. It must have been like that for Lincoln, Oakes madly thought, the whole great theater voiceless, mute while the pain shot like a fist through his skull. The maid screamed. Oakes swung again and felt blood on his knuckles. A second terrible crack, then the door to the hallway opened and in another tongue’s flicker of lightening he saw Sarah Slater, running away from him once again.
The gas lamp on the landing still worked. Oakes stumbled out, grabbed the banister, and felt a jolt of pain run down his wrist. There was just time enough for the thought to form—chasing a woman you don’t want to catch—then he was bouncing down the stairs three at a time. The double doors swung open from the grand salon on the right and shouting guests flooded into the entrance hallway. He glimpsed Maggie Lawton’s red hair before Keach’s fist hit the back of his neck like a a brick and sent him tumbling and rolling onto the wet tile of the entrance.
The front door of the house banged open; Sarah Slater disappeared into the black rain. Oakes felt himself buffeted sideways and backwards by the people still streaming out of the salon—so many by now that he had no chance at all of getting to the front door and out.
With a lurch he came to his feet and pushed the other way against the crowd, back into the salon. Here the gaslights were coming on. He could see the half-open window by the puppet stage. He threaded his way through overturned chairs—somebody shouted that he was bleeding—the puppet master jumped out of his way. At the window he braced one arm on the sill, registered in some part of his brain that now his whole arm was burning with pain, and vaulted over and into the shrubs that Haussmann had providentially left intact on Natalie’s side of the street.
“Quint!—”
Great-hearted Maggie Lawton, Maggie Lawton who would have shot Sherman dead if they’d sent her, who leapt through the Roman Coliseum like a deer—in the cold rain and colder wind Maggie Lawton had somehow gotten ahead of the hysterical crowd. Another flash of lightning showed her tottering at the edge of the excavation pit. On the other side of it, halfway up a slick muddy incline, Sarah had fallen in the mud. She was standing now, gripping a plank with both hands like a club.
Oakes could hardly see through the rain. He ran toward Keach with his arms windmilling to keep his balance. Something snagged his trousers and ripped them, a shoe sucked and filled with mud. Maggie Lawton jumped into the pit and started toward Keach.
“Get back, Maggie!”
Rain scoured his face. Sarah swung her plank and struck Keach a slicing blow on the head, but the revolver stayed in his hand. In the next lightning flash Maggie had caught up. The two women were no more than a yard apart, swaying patches of wet green silk, brown mud. Oakes saw his left hand grab Keach by the shoulder and fall away. As the wind lifted the next curtain of rain aside, he saw Sarah scrambling up a wobbling pyramid of construction stones. In another moment she would be at the top of the pit, on the open street, next to the river that ran to the faraway sea.
Then Keach clutched her trailing skirt, and Maggie came between them and pushed him away. Thunder broke open the sky. The streetlamps went out. In the staccato motion of a dream, their shadows flowed together and fell apart. The pistol barrel glinted, but thunder rolled over them again, jealous, obliterating every other sound, so that Oakes never heard it fire, he saw only an orange spurt of light, a green dress turn to red.
When he reached her Maggie was sprawled on her back and blood was pumping from her chest. Above them Sarah Slater paused and looked down. Her face hung in the darkness, far out of reach, and vanished.
“You stupid, stupid man,” Maggie whispered.
Oakes knelt and cradled her head. Someone knelt on the other side pressing a cloth against Maggie’s breast, but the dark blood pumped on, relentless, reddening the water on the ground.
She opened her eyes for a moment and Oakes bent so close he could feel her breath as it slipped away. “Sweet man,” she said, “you should have chosen me,” and her head flopped to one side in the mud.
Some people you just—but the thought never finished itself.
Keach was off to one side, yelling. Rough hands lifted Oakes to his feet and dragged him aside. Not speaking, not even glancing at Keach, Sharpe lunged to his knees beside Maggie.
Oakes staggered up. More hands guided him toward the sidewalk and automatically, mindlessly, like a wind-up automaton he walked a few stiff steps down it, toward the river. His arm felt on fire, his sleeve was bloody and sticky. He looked back once to see someone wrenching Keach’s arms behind his back as if to arrest him. There was no point in that, he thought. Keach would get away. Keach would say it was an accident. Nobody in France would care.
Three steps farther and the North Entrance of the Universal Exposition came into view at the bottom of the avenue. Its orange and white lanterns winked like fireflies through the leaves of the plaza. I was here. I am gone. Sarah would have melted into the crowd by now or got away into the carriages and cabs that swarmed along the avenue. In a matter of hours she would be far from Paris. He could go after her, but there was no point in that either. She was gone. She was as unreachable as Maggie.
The rain was still falling, but the storm had exhausted itself. The weary clouds were curling away to the east now, bruised and gray from their battle. He slowly turned in a circle. The ruins of Paris lay all about him. He looked like someone who had lost his way in a distant country.
THREE DAYS LATER, OAKES STOOD at a window looking out at the clear, clean, thoroughly scrubbed Parisian sky. Ambassador Dix had found temporary office space for them in the building that housed his own offices, but the room was on a lower floor and on a different side from the rue de Chaillot, so that the gray alley below them was undisturbed by pickaxes or shovels or the shouts of mud-smeared workmen. Silent as the grave, he thought.
“Are you interested in making yourself useful, Captain Oakes?”
Sharpe was seated on some kind of folding wooden chair, at an incongruously elegant Louis VI desk, studying his inevitable folders. His eyes were red-rimmed. His voice was flat and dull. His voice had been flat and dull since the night of Maggie Lawton’s…Oakes let his mind turn over various possible nouns—“accident,” “demise,” “murder”—but finally settled on the exquisitely uncommunicative word the French police and Sharpe had been using in their official report exculpating Keach, “décès”—decease.
