Edwin Stanton sent two cavalry officers to meet Temple in front of the Capitol on Wednesday morning, an hour before the Grand Review launched into its second day. The Union boys identified Temple by his cane and put him on a separate mount accompanying them. He was to be seated next to the war secretary as a guest in the reviewing stand.
Stanton, round as an egg and resolute as an ironclad, took Temple’s measure as soon as he reached the reviewing stand, scanning him up and down and nodding slightly as he did so. He didn’t extend his hand or ask Temple his name before they made their way to their seats, which would place the two men between Andrew Johnson and Ulysses Grant, both of whom had yet to arrive. Stanton moved deliberately, accustomed as he had become after long years of war and the burdens of his office to giving, rather than receiving, orders.
“There aren’t many who know me as Lord War,” Stanton said as he sat down. “Your diligence is impressive, Mr.…?”
“McFadden. You also are known as Mars?”
“You’ve gotten inside a Vigenère table as well. Also impressive. But you’re putting yourself in a very perilous and untenable place. Why?”
“I agreed to help uphold the law.”
“Come now.”
“It’s the truth,” Temple said, after considering—and deciding against—offering Stanton a more elaborate explanation. “I also deeply admired the president. It isn’t any more complicated than that.”
“Everything in the District right now is more complicated than it appears. Do you mean to do me damage?”
“I mean to find out why President Lincoln was killed.”
Stanton worried about the risks he had taken allowing a stranger to sit so close to him, Grant, and Johnson so soon after the president’s murder. He looked about for his guards, and mopped his brow with a handkerchief before turning back to Temple.
“I could detain you right now,” he said. “Right here and indefinitely, for no other reason than I wish it so. The state has given me those powers, and habeas corpus is just a cloak that we lift and drop as we intend. You would vanish.”
“You want what I have and you don’t have it yet,” Temple said. “If you wanted me arrested, you would have had it done when your men met me earlier at the Capitol. And you did not.”
Crowds were swelling again along Pennsylvania, and with both the Irish Brigade and Sherman’s troops set to march, the morning’s festivities had already turned distinctly rowdy and snapjacket. Scuffles broke out on corners where people jockeyed for better views; some police meant to patrol Pennsylvania Avenue were already drunk; cheers and peals of laughter coursed through windows and from the rooftops of shops and houses; flags and red, white, and blue bunting hung from windows; and, with legions of Union soldiers moving down the boulevard from the Capitol, the sun painted the entire enterprise as if, for a moment, to cleanse it and keep it whole before ancient hatreds threatened to divide it all again in the nights that were to come.
Temple leaned toward Stanton to continue their conversation, but the war secretary ignored him, rising from his chair to meet General Grant and President Johnson as they arrived. Johnson sat to one side of Stanton and, after the war secretary shooed Temple down a seat, Grant sat on the other, leaving Temple perched next to the man who, after Lincoln, was the most popular hero in the North.
As on the day before, a band preceded the military procession, but today the musicians were playing the anthem that had come to symbolize Sherman and his Army of the Tennessee, “Marching Through Georgia.” As the band’s refrains boomed louder, the throngs along Pennsylvania began to sing along with the music:
“Sherman’s dashing Yankee boys will never reach the coast!”
So the saucy rebels said and ’twas a handsome boast
Had they not forgot, alas! to reckon with the host
While we were marching through Georgia.
The song was a preamble for the appearance of Sherman himself, who sat tall on Lexington, his chestnut stallion, and rode in a new uniform before sixty-five thousand of his men, including some of the same bummers and free Negroes who had passed along with their ragtag gear and plunder in front of Augustus’s house. The mounted infantry of the Ninth Illinois rode ahead of Sherman and cleared a path for the general and his troops as crowds surged toward the war hero, offering him wreaths and gifts. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which Sherman’s army had played as they left a gutted, ravaged Atlanta the year before, replaced “Marching Through Georgia,” and Sherman bowed in his saddle toward the crowd. All of the onlookers roared in response, clapping and calling out his name.
When Sherman passed the reviewing stand, he saluted President Johnson with his sword, dismounted, and climbed the steps up to the platform. Sherman and Stanton harbored a well-known hatred of each other; Stanton suspected Sherman of having designs on the presidency and loathed his insubordination, while Sherman saw Stanton as overly sympathetic toward the Negro and in too much of a rush to reconstruct the South in the image of the North. When Stanton extended his hand to Sherman, the general ignored it and shook hands with his good friend Grant instead. Temple was asked to move down yet again so that Sherman could sit beside Grant.
A minister on the platform, observing Sherman slighting Stanton, rose and shouted: “Edwin M. Stanton, savior of our country under God, rise and receive the greetings of your friends!” When Stanton refused to stand, the minister repeated himself: “Edwin M. Stanton, savior of our country under God, rise and receive the greetings of your friends!” As waves of applause rolled out from the same onlookers who had cheered Sherman earlier, Stanton stood up and received the ovation. Sherman, refusing to acknowledge the moment, leaned in toward Grant and whispered in his ear.
The generals took no notice of or interest in Temple, and for the rest of the day he would occasionally lean out from his seat and look down the aisle to scrutinize Stanton, taking stock of his comportment, his demeanor, and his reactions to the surges of emotion that accompanied the crowd’s response to each new military regiment as it passed by for review and with each thundering volley of rifle fire that sounded up and down Pennsylvania. When Temple’s friend Michael Gleason, a captain in the Irish Brigade of Illinois, rode by with his sword raised, Temple cheered him, and he noticed Stanton cheering heartily as well. But such outpourings were rare from the war secretary, who was almost regal in his self-possession and who took in the last hours of the Grand Review as a man entranced by the human spectacle and made somber and weary by the sacrifices that gave rise to it.
When the parade ended at three-thirty, the reviewing stand emptied quickly as the dignitaries tried to escape the crush on Pennsylvania. Crowds encircled Sherman, who lost his temper as he and his wife were besieged; he screamed, “Damn you, get out of the way! Get out of the way!” Temple noticed that Sherman’s protests drew a faint smile from Stanton, but the war secretary knew better than to let himself be caught gloating. His lips re-formed into a thin line and he turned toward Temple, finally ready after several hours to converse. The two of them, and Stanton’s contingent of four bodyguards, were the only ones left on the platform.
“An entire army, the mightiest and deadliest ever assembled, marches through Washington in two days and then disappears forever into the citizenry,” Stanton said. “A million men of war turned into men of peace in only forty-eight hours.”
“Four years and forty-eight hours,” Temple said. “With the Union preserved.”
“The South is subdued, not conquered. There is still mighty work to be done to bring our Southern brethren into the fold, and it will be all the more daunting with President Lincoln away from us.”
“Pardon my impatience, Mr. Secretary, but why have you kept me here for so prolonged a time? Isn’t our business straightforward?”
“In good time, Mr. McFadden, all will become apparent. I want you to consider what stands between the end of this war and a reconstructed South of a fit with the nation that surrounds it. What stands in the way, sir?”
“The Southerners themselves, I would imagine.”
“To a point. They will stand in the way of the Negro and the rights of the freedmen. They will resist rule from the North. They are bitter and will be so well into the future. There is all of that. But there is also our new class of industrialists in the North made robust and wealthy by the engines of this war and the inventiveness of our citizenry. They have designs on the western territories, and they would be content to force our politicians to bargain for fewer concessions from a defeated South—if the Secesh are willing to cede the expansion of the West to the railroad interests, and to permit a new railroad to be built through the South and Texas.”
“I am at a loss as to how this involves my letter to you,” Temple said. “I have abided this delay today in the hope that I would gain more than a tutorial.”
Stanton shook his head. He was a man whom the war had made rough as bark and who had come to understand things he had never wanted to consider. He reached into the pocket on his vest, made tight by the pressure of his girth, and withdrew the note Temple had left for him at the Willard. He unfolded it, then waved away his bodyguards as he read from it in a whisper that only he and Temple could hear: “ ‘Dear Mars: The Booth diary speaks of you, in conjunction with Patriot, Avenger, Tyrant, Goliath, Wise Man, and Drinker. Mrs. Lincoln’s diary speaks of misery, of course, and of the railroads. I would like an interview with you. Please send your men to fetch me tomorrow morning in front of the Capitol building. I am identified by my cane, my wayward hobble, and my height. If your men do not arrive for me I will register you as uninterested and go on my way.’ ”
Stanton folded the note again and slipped it back into his vest pocket.
“You have a strong, confident script. It speaks well of you.”
“Who are these people, Patriot and the rest?” Temple asked.
“Mr. McFadden, I have chosen not to answer your questions today. My men here are going to take you into custody.”
“I don’t have the diaries with me.”
“I’ve kept you here these long hours today so you wouldn’t cause any interferences in Swampdoodle, which is where, I believe, the diaries are, yes? In safekeeping with Jack Flaherty—‘Nail’ to his friends and to you, but a boodler and a thug to the rest of us. You are a worthy man, but you’re interfering and in an arena beyond your scope and abilities.”
“You’re wrong about the diaries.”
“About one of them, you mean? Of course. Only one is in Swampdoodle. The other is with your wife and Mrs. Lincoln on her private rail cars to Chicago.”
Temple stumbled back a step, dizzied, trying to calculate how long it would take him to get back to Swampdoodle. And where, between Chicago and here, Fiona might be. His breathing started to come in rushes and he tightened his grip on his cane, looking away from Stanton and trying to decide where on Pennsylvania Avenue he could secure a horse.
“I can see your thoughts revolving, but there isn’t any time left for you on this. Robert Lincoln will intercept his mother’s diary, and no one is going to take the widow at her word about her scribblings in a journal. Everyone considers her quite mad. I imagine Robert will have to have his mother institutionalized on some coming date,” Stanton said, shaking his head. “And, as I’m also sure you know, Lafayette Baker has a long list of resentments and injuries cataloged against you and Mr. Flaherty, and he has shared them with me. You’ve seriously injured a number of his men and embarrassed him in the fields around Augustus Spriggs’s handsome new home, and Mr. Flaherty even shot one of Mr. Baker’s marksmen from the trees. These men were and are agents of our government, and you have intruded upon their work. Mr. Baker has ventured into Swampdoodle today and I am sure shots have been exchanged, but with all of the rifle fire accompanying our parade, I doubt anyone heard them. I am sorry this has taken such an ugly and unfortunate shape. I truly am.”
Temple saw regret trace its way across Stanton’s face, but he had no time to consider the matter further. He pivoted on his cane, his mind spinning as he skittered down the aisle, away from Stanton. The war secretary nodded to his guards, who closed in on Temple from either side. Temple cracked his cane across the knees of the first soldier and then clubbed him in the jaw as he dropped. The soldier behind him had his bayonet drawn, but Stanton ordered him to take Temple alive; the soldier hesitated, and Temple turned on him and sliced his cane into the side of the man’s head and then butted him in the stomach with it as he collapsed. But Temple never saw the two guards vaulting over the bleachers toward him from several rows above, and when they reached him, one of them threw his arms around him in a bear hug. The other slammed his gun into Temple’s head, snapping his neck sideways and causing his vision to blur.
Comrades mine, and I in the midst, and their memory
ever I keep for the dead I loved so well;
For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands …
and this for his dear sake;
Lilac and star and bird, twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines, and the cedars dusk and dim.
Temple slumped back unconscious, a fine tendril of blood spiraling down from his scalp.
“Take him to the Old Capitol Prison,” Stanton said.
A FEW HOURS earlier, Nail was napping in his warehouse, fresh ink stains on his hands and forearms and fresh sheets of cogniacs drying and gently flapping on the wall above him, when a series of rifle shots awoke him. It must be the Grand Review, he thought before rolling back on his side. But a scattered round of subsequent shots were not at all like the measured rounds of a military volley, which would have charged off in sequence: pause, fire, pause, fire. No, not like that at all. This was a gunfight. A battle.
The noise he heard next was new and strange. It sounded like a series of metal hammers pounding away at a wall and creating little explosions each time they landed. He heard screams of the sort he had never heard in Swampdoodle before. He heard fear.
Nail pulled one of his shotguns from beneath his cot and grabbed a pistol lying on a nearby table. They were both always loaded, but he checked again to make sure. Before he got to the front door of the warehouse, it was flung open in front of him. One of his men, bloodied across the front of his shirt, was staring at him wild-eyed. He was stuttering, unable to speak, and pointing with a forefinger back over his shoulder.
“What is it?” Nail shouted.
But the man couldn’t get a word out. Nail slapped him hard across the cheek, and the man corralled himself.
“There’s a good one hundred of them, and they came right over the bridges with guns. They killed the women and the dogs at the entrance to Swampdoodle, and they rolled over any of the children who got in their way. And then they just mowed the men down, Nail, with a horrible thing. Three of them. Horrible and large.”
“Three men?”
“No, three guns. They spin and they spit bullets and they’re a terror.”
By the time Nail emerged from the warehouse, a wide semicircle of his men, forty to fifty strong, had formed in front of the warehouse, armed with clubs, guns, and knives. The noon sun was high over their heads when the first of the three wagons appeared—huge wooden arks, each pulled by two horses and arriving in single file. Drivers sat atop the wagons, and behind each of the drivers knelt three sharpshooters. They began picking off Nail’s men, one by one, to protect the drivers until all three wagons had passed across the rickety, splintered bridges and into the expanse before the warehouse.
Behind the wagons marched five-score men, all wearing the long black frock coats common to Lafayette Baker’s men. As the group moved in, the drivers wheeled the wagons around so that their blank backsides faced the warehouse and the horses now faced Baker’s own men, an oddity that caused some of Nail’s people to look back at him, puzzled. He shrugged, unable to provide an answer.
As the wagons settled, Baker shouted out to Nail from behind one of the wagons. “Give us what we came for and this needn’t be bloodier than it already has been.”
“If it had been a rainy day, you never would have gotten those wagons across our swampland,” Nail shouted back from the steps of the warehouse.
“It’s not a rainy day,” Baker replied.
Nail lifted his pistol and shot one of the wagon drivers through the back of his head. Before he could lower his arm, a sniper’s bullet tore through his shoulder and his gun fell from his hand. The sniper took the reins of the wagon from the dead driver as Baker shouted out again.
“Last chance, fingerlickers. Drop your arms and give us what we came for.”
“Answer him, men!” Nail shouted.
A round of fire erupted from the semicircle, and splinters of wood blasted from the sides of the wagons. Two of the marksmen fell from the wagons, and some of Baker’s men behind the wagons dropped. Nail’s men roared, raised their clubs, and began to charge across the thirty yards separating them from Baker’s private army.
Tall, thick doors swung open on springs in the back of the wagons, and from each of them three long, chubby, gleaming steel guns emerged. Each bore six barrels that rotated around a central shaft, spun by a man turning a large wood and metal crank while another fed rounds into a hopper above the contraption. Each of the three guns began firing six hundred rounds a minute—sounding just like a series of metal hammers pounding explosively at a wall, Nail thought—and they shredded his men like paper dolls in front of his eyes. Bone fragments and chunks of flesh showered the field, shrouded in eruptions of blood and laces of red mist. Those who weren’t killed were left writhing and screaming on the ground, pieces of jaw and cheek missing, limbs chewed into strands, fist-sized crevices where eyes had been, parts of heads sheared off. When the guns stopped, Nail stood alone on the steps, everyone else around him dead.
Baker stepped out between two of the wagons. The bandage covering the wrist that Temple had broken was as white as snow in the sunlight. In his good hand he was dragging two of Swampdoodle’s boys by the scruff of their necks.
“My guns are a wonder, aren’t they?” he shouted to Nail. “Developed for our army by Richard Gatling and ready to go into service sometime next year. A killing machine, as you can see.”
Nail hopped down the steps, choking back dust and bile, and raced toward the wagons, hoisting his shotgun with the only good arm he had left.
“Take him down,” Baker commanded.
Three shots rang out from the marksmen; one separated Nail’s left hand from his shotgun while the others spun into each of his legs and forced him to crumple. He flopped forward onto his chest and face.
When Baker reached Nail, he kicked him in the side and rolled him over on his back, then turned Nail’s head toward him with his boot. Baker let go of both boys—neither was more than five years old—and the pair stood there shivering with fear. He pulled his LeMat from his belt and pounded the butt against the head of one of the boys, toppling the child across Nail’s torso.
“I’ll kill both of these tots unless you tell me where the diary is.”
Nail spat onto Baker’s boot, and Baker shot him through the shoulder.
“Tell me. I have plenty of men here and they’ll search the place once you’re dead. Tell me.”
Nail began laughing.
“It wasn’t here more than a night, and we’ve moved it. You’ll never find it, and whatever you do to me won’t matter, you silly, buggering arsehole, because my friend Temple is smarter than all of you.”
“Your friend Temple isn’t likely to last the day, either.”
Nail spat at him again. Baker put his Colt to Nail’s head and blew his brains out the back of his skull in a moist pile of bone splinters and flesh that turned the ground crimson.
Baker brushed droplets of blood off the front of his coat and stuffed the LeMat back into his belt. He dragged the first boy off Nail’s body and stood him next to the other; the pair looked away from him, quivering.
Baker reached down and patted one of them on the cheek.
“I’m not the kind who would kill either of you boys. You’re both going to grow up in a country that has a little more order to it. Run along.”
He watched the pair stumble away from Nail’s body and then break into a slow, winding trot as they headed back into the shacks of Swampdoodle.
“Move out across this shithole now,” he shouted to his men.
“We’re hunting for a diary.”