CHAPTER

41

 

Journey sat back against the booth, closed his eyes, and nodded.

Tolman looked at him in disbelief. “You don’t seem surprised.”

“You know that Ulysses S. Grant was elected president, right? He was elected in 1868, three years after the war ended. He was an international hero, practically worshipped by much of the country. Even the South respected him because the terms he offered Lee at Appomattox were so generous. Grant was a rock star. Then he became president.”

“And this has what to do with Mark Twain?”

“Stay with me here, Meg,” Journey said. “Grant was one of the most honest men in America, but he surrounded himself with corrupt, unscrupulous, and often stupid people. He was a terrible president. Corruption, bribery … you name it and it happened during his two terms in office. By the time he left office in 1877, he’d squandered all his fame and popularity.”

“What did he do then?”

“He traveled, went into business, did a lot of different things. But remember, there was no presidential pension then, and he’d given up his military pension when he became president. Within a few years, he was completely destitute, and then he was diagnosed with throat cancer. After all the years of smoking, it was already in an advanced state, nothing that could be done for him.”

“But I still don’t get—”

“Sam Clemens, aka Mark Twain, had been an admirer of Grant’s for years. When Twain saw that Grant was dying, he told Grant to write his memoirs and that he—Twain—would publish them. Grant saw that it was the only way he could provide for his family after he was gone. He and his wife, Julia, moved to Mount McGregor, New York, and he started writing.”

“Did he finish? Did Twain actually publish the memoirs?”

“Oh, yes. Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant was a great success. Grant finished writing the book in the summer of 1885, and he died a few days after sending the manuscript to Twain. Twain had just started a publishing company with Charles Webster, who was his nephew by marriage, and it was the first book they published. It sold hundreds of thousands of copies, which was huge. And it did provide an income for Julia Grant until the day she died.” Journey stopped and leaned toward the computer. “And you found a connection between the Glory Warriors and Mark Twain?”

“Here,” Tolman said, manipulating the thumb bar. “One hit. It’s a document that’s been scanned as part of an archiving project at the University of California at Berkeley.”

“Berkeley,” Journey said. “Seems like I remember seeing a while back that a lot of Twain’s later letters and some scattered obscure papers had been donated to Berkeley. But you say this isn’t online? Then how can you get to it?”

“I use a program called RACER, which can go anywhere and find pretty much anything in the digital world. Part of its function searches out computer networks. If there’s a network, and if somewhere in it, the network is linked to the Internet, we can find it. This document isn’t posted online, but it’s scanned into a computer on a network that has an online connection. You see what I mean?”

“So you can read my e-mail. Or, say, the president’s e-mail.”

“It’s a research tool.”

“There’s really no such thing as privacy anymore, is there?”

“Look, that’s not for me to decide. Someone way above my pay grade makes those policies. For me, it’s a technology that lets me do my job. Do you want to have an academic debate about the government’s research methods or do you want to see what this document is?” She opened the file and angled the screen so both of them could see.

The scanned document seemed to be a letter from Mark Twain to someone named Leon, and was headed with the date April 8, 1910, and Redding, CT.

“I don’t know exactly when he died,” Journey said, “but I think this was very late in his life.”

The document was in a thick, heavy handwriting, with the look of a letter that had been written slowly. Tolman and Journey read through two pages of Samuel Clemens’s ramblings, talking about family, how he still terribly missed his two daughters who had died, even years after their deaths. He went on to describe the spring flowers in Connecticut, and the certainty that he would never see spring flowers again. Halley’s Comet would soon be visible to Earth, he wrote, and he expected his own death as it passed, just as he had been born in 1835, the last time the famed comet passed close to Earth.

Tolman and Journey kept reading. Journey drew in a hard breath on the third page.

And so, good man, one of the most rewarding—and I daresay the most confounding—experiences of this long and occasionally ill-lived life, was my association with General Grant.

The man saved our Union, and yet at life’s end found himself penniless. Once I persuaded him that his life’s story could be sold to the American people, that it was indeed a story worthy of recounting, thereby providing for his dear wife, Julia, and family, he threw himself fairly into the task. A fine writer he proved to be, one with more style and a sense of economy of words than yours truly!

Confession, at this late date, is advantageous to the soul, or so I am led to believe. I confess great perplexity on the whole business of the Glory Warriors, of which the General wrote, then entreated me to reconsider the publication of said pages. I was obliged to hastily correspond with Webster and have him remove the pages from the book. What Webster did with the pages, I do not know. The General passed from this life within days, and of course Webster himself met his own end not long thereafter.

A perplexing business, indeed, and quite unlike the General. At first I had thought the General to be spinning a yarn, amusing himself at the end of the manuscript, perhaps distracting himself away from the horrors of his disease. But General Grant never joked about matters of war, so I can only surmise this unexpected coda to the memoir is a matter that confounded the General himself. As the conditions he described never came to pass, the notion must have faded from consciousness. General Lee was deceased many years by then, and Grant elected not to include the business in his memoir. It all seems to have been left with the dead, and as my own passage is imminent, so it shall stay.

A computer-printed note was appended to the bottom of the file, declaring that Samuel L. Clemens died on April 21, 1910, thirteen days after composing this letter. The letter was never sent, and the Leon to whom it was addressed remained unknown. The letter was found by the author’s surviving daughter, Clara, among his other papers after his death, and finally came to the archive at Berkeley in 1962, on Clara’s death.

Journey sat back, his heart pounding. Suddenly feeling closed in, he said, “I have to get out. I have to move around.” Tolman tossed money onto the table, and they left the restaurant. Journey walked around the edge of the parking lot and onto a grassy area between the truck stop and the highway service road. He paced up and down the grass, in and out of the lights that ringed the parking lot, limping on his left foot.

“What are you thinking?” Tolman finally asked him.

A truck went by on the service road, and Journey waited for the sound of the diesel engine to pass. After another pace, he stopped, turned to Tolman, and slapped the knuckles of his left hand into the palm of his right. “Grant wrote about the Glory Warriors. He did. Up until now, all we’ve had are these documents in a third person’s writing, presumably Samuel Williams. But Mark Twain, practically on his deathbed, says that Grant himself wrote about it.”

Tolman walked beside him for a few steps. “But then Grant changed his mind and told Twain he didn’t want it published in his memoir.”

“So Twain wrote to his nephew Charles Webster, who actually ran the publishing company, and had him remove those pages.”

“And you say the Grant memoir is well known?” Tolman said.

Journey glared at her.

Tolman raised both hands. “I didn’t study history, Nick. You have to remember that not everyone is as into this stuff as you are.”

“Yes, yes, Grant’s book is considered a classic military memoir.”

“And you’ve read it?”

“Of course I’ve read it.”

“Never saw anything in it that remotely sounded like the Glory Warriors? Nothing that would point to it?”

“No, nothing.”

“What about Lee’s writing?”

Journey shook his head. “Lee wasn’t a writer. He never did a memoir, and really only left behind a few letters. After the war he was president of Washington College. But no, he never mentioned anything remotely resembling this, in the few writings that did survive and have been accessible to historians.”

“Okay, so Grant’s publisher—who just happens to be one of the most famous authors in the world—writes on his own deathbed, years and years after Grant’s death, that Grant mentioned this, then pulled it from the book. Twain also says that the nephew … What was his name?”

“Charles Webster.”

“Right, that Webster died not long after that, and Twain didn’t know what Webster did with the pages.”

“Right.”

“Is the publishing company still in business? Even as a subsidiary? I’m thinking of Samuel Williams’s bank, still doing business after all this time, even though under a different name.”

Journey sighed. “No. I can tell you that much. The company published a few more books, including Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, but none of them were as successful as Grant’s. It folded a few years later.”

Tolman stopped in a circle of light and leaned against a pole, transferring her laptop bag from one shoulder to the other. “Those pages have to exist somewhere. Come on, you can’t seriously tell me that what amounts to outtakes from a bestseller didn’t find their way into someone’s hands. A collector, a treasure hunter … Hell, Nick—” Tolman waved an all-encompassing hand. “—they could be sitting in a museum somewhere for all this time, with no one knowing what they had.”

“They’re not in a museum,” Journey said. “Someone in the history community would have uncovered something by now if they were. If the pages are that explosive and outlined the fact that the two most beloved generals in America had at one point put their names on something like this, well, that would have come to light by now, even if the other puzzle pieces, the ones we uncovered, weren’t in place. No, they had to have stayed hidden.”

“Okay, they’re not in a museum,” Tolman said. “I wish you didn’t know so goddamn much about all this stuff. Half the time, I feel like I should be getting course credit when I’m talking to you.”

“Occupational hazard. I’m always a teacher, even when I’m not teaching.”

“My, that’s profound. So the pages have stayed underground somewhere.” They both turned back toward the parking lot, to the old Toyota. “God, I really need a piano. And I really need to get to a secure phone so I can call Rusty and tell him what’s happening.” She slapped her hand against the car door. “And we need those fucking pages and those fucking signatures.”

Journey stood beside her, taking his weight off his bad foot.

Tolman glanced sideways at him. “They’re going to try to kill the president,” she said in a low, resigned voice.

Journey nodded. “Yes.”

“What’s their timetable? I mean, let’s say they kill the president. Now there’s this huge power vacuum that activates the Glory Warriors. They have to have weapons, wherever they are around the country. They think they have a right to do this, because of what Lee and Grant signed. But Jesus, Nick, these people think they have a legal right to suspend the Constitution and basically overthrow our government! I mean, our government’s not very efficient, I realize. Hell, I work for it and I know that. But we don’t have coups in this country. Russia, Bulgaria, Pakistan, Chile, maybe, but not here.”

Journey shook his head. “Why do governments anywhere get overthrown? There’s instability, people are restless. Look at us now. Yes, we have the best government on the planet, and things are still a mess. When a fanatic or group of fanatics steps into a mess and promises to make things orderly, it will get the attention of some people.”

“And that’s when you get a Hitler or a Lenin or the Taliban.”

“Or a Glory Warrior invoking the names of two American heroes.” He thumped the car door. “But I still don’t understand why Grant and Lee would agree to it in 1865. It doesn’t seem in character for them.”

Tolman scuffed a foot on the pavement. “Okay, I’m not the historian here, but as you’ve told me, it was a different time. Can anyone alive now really, truly understand what the Civil War was like? You couldn’t tell if someone was a spy, because he might look just like your brother. He might be your brother. There’s no way we can understand. As logical and practical and strategic as people like Robert E. Lee and U. S. Grant were as soldiers, they were also people, and they were just as susceptible to emotions as anyone else. They may have felt, as least for a time, that they had no choice but to join together at the end of the war to create this contingency plan. They weren’t thinking about the fact that it would stand the entire Constitution on its head. Maybe they were thinking a lot of people had died, and by then, they were sick of people dying, and just wanted to find a way to deal with all the blood. And this thing, however it came about, gave them an out, gave them a way to prepare.”

Journey was staring at her. The look was intense, the lines on his forehead deepening into slash marks. Then they slowly softened.

“Sorry,” Tolman said. “Now I’m the one who’s lecturing.”

“But you’re right,” Journey said. “Especially in that time, men didn’t write their deepest fears and feelings into memoirs. It just wasn’t done. Grant’s book is a great recounting of his life up through the end of the war, and of his thinking as a military man. But it’s hard to tell how he—or anyone—felt.”

“We need to see those pages that Grant asked Twain to take out of the book.”

“Yes. But in the meantime, we know they’re going to go after the president, and we still can’t prove any of this. What if we get the evidence, but it’s too late?”

“I’ll be able to talk to my boss when we get where we’re going,” Tolman said.

“And that would be where?”

Tolman shook her head. “Later. We may have to go at this a different way, as far as the threat against the president.”

“What do you mean?”

“I happen to have a contact in the Secret Service.”

“Someone you trust?”

Tolman thought of her father, crying in the ER after the car crash fifteen years ago, and of him a few days ago, sitting at the wedding reception in Chevy Chase, applauding her performance while everyone else ignored her. “With my life,” she said.