Fiona brushed off Temple’s jacket the next morning outside the Willard as he prepared to join the military escort taking him to the B&O on horseback. She squinted into the sun and peered up at his face, and he pulled her hand up to his lips and kissed it.
“You’re always with me, Fi.”
“And you with me.”
Temple hugged Alexander and Augustus in turn, and Augustus leaned in toward Temple’s ear.
“I should have stayed at the asylum longer,” Augustus whispered.
“Had you done that, you wouldn’t have been able to meet me at Baker’s office.”
“If I had stayed back, they might not have gotten the diary.”
“They were Union troops. You saved my life. Had you not followed me, I’d be dead. If you vow to stay off your smoke, I’ll vow to stop my cards.”
The troops took Temple to the B&O, where, still in his Union blues, he boarded the train for New York. He transferred in Baltimore and arrived in Manhattan late that evening.
The following morning he bought a new pair of black trousers, a black jacket, and a white shirt for $10 at Moore & Sons, leaving his uniform neatly folded at the end of his bed when he left the St. Nicholas Hotel. A day later, he got a New York and Harlem train at Grand Street and then transferred onto the Erie in Piermont, heading north to Elmira.
• • •
AFTER RENTING A ROOM in the Brainard Hotel in Elmira, Temple spent the next three days downstairs at a table from sunrise until the doors were locked at night, eating, reading, and eyeing traffic in and out of the lobby until John Surratt finally arrived at the front desk to collect his keys.
Surratt was much taller than Temple had expected, and he was more emaciated than he appeared in the carte de visite that Fiona had taken from his mother’s cell, his face so gaunt that his cheekbones formed fine ridges on either side of his face. A long, thin moustache drooped down on either side of his lips, and his hair was wispy and thinning. He was deliberate and calm as he went about his business, and he didn’t bother to survey the lobby before going upstairs.
An hour later Surratt returned, and Temple followed him out the door, crossing the hurly-burly of wagons, horses, and people on Baldwin Street to the opposite corner so that he could observe Surratt as he walked down Water Street. Surratt lingered by the window at Schwenke & Grumme (LOUNGES AND LOUNGE BEDS MADE TO ORDER; HAIR, SPRING, STRAW AND HUSK MATTRESSES CONSTANTLY ON HAND; LOOKING GLASS AND PICTURE FRAMES READY FOR YOU) and then stopped at Preswick’s Book Store at 16 Water. He unlocked and entered a side door leading upstairs. A sign above the second-floor window announced the enterprise nominally operating below: “J. Harrison: Land Surveys, Daguerreotypes, Ambrotypes, Photographs, Etc., Etc.” A shade snapped down in the window a moment later.
When Surratt came back downstairs and headed toward the Brainard, Temple crossed the street, picked the lock at J. Harrison, and went upstairs. It was nearly empty in the office, save for a large drafting table in the middle of the room. On it were several maps and detailed sketches of the prison camp on the edge of town that, until recently, had been holding Confederate soldiers in conditions that the newspapers said were nearly as bleak and horrific as Andersonville. A number of reports, written in longhand and offering accounts of the conditions in the camp and in Elmira, were stacked neatly on the floor nearby. A knife bearing an elegant etching of a black locomotive across the length of its blade rested atop the papers, and in a lone box on a shelf was a stack of calling cards: “John Harrison, Surveys & Ambrotypes.”
Temple went back downstairs and gave two Indian heads to a boy peddling apples on the corner, asking him to run into the Brainard and say he had a message that he was to deliver personally to John Harrison.
The boy returned and told Temple that the hotel had said Harrison was a recent arrival and was confining himself to his quarters for the rest of the evening. The message could be delivered in the morning, but before nine, because Mr. Harrison was departing for a train then. Temple patted the boy on the head and gave him another Indian head.
THE NEXT MORNING, Temple waited in the Erie Railroad station and then followed Surratt onto the train to Canandaigua, sitting three benches behind him. Surratt was smoking a cigar and wearing a richly tailored maroon Oxford jacket and a round-top hat, clothing that was a considerable price above what he had worn the prior day. He began counting out Canadian currency in his lap, just as calm and fastidious as he had been in the Brainard, and the sight of the money put Temple into a disagreeable spin. Surratt was planning on heading to Canada, most likely to Montreal, where there still was an active movement of Secesh and where he could evade American authorities. He was not on his way to Manhattan, as Temple had hoped. He leaned back in his seat, cataloging his alternatives.
A conductor came down the aisle collecting tickets, followed by a newsboy selling papers and cigars. Surratt put the Canadian currency in his breast pocket, bought a paper, and laid it on the seat. He then walked to the end of the car, slid open the door that connected it to the adjacent cars, and passed through. Minutes later, another man—tall, thin, and mustachioed—entered the car wearing Surratt’s maroon jacket and hat. He sat down in Surratt’s seat, picked up the newspaper lying there, and began reading. None of his fellow passengers, save one, was any the wiser that he wasn’t the same man who had been seated there before.
Temple bolted up from his seat and hobbled down the aisle, passing into the next car and the car after that until he spotted Surratt curled up against a window sleeping. He was wearing a simple gray coat now, topped off by a floppy cotton cap with a wide brim. Temple sat down at the opposite end of the car and exhaled.
When they reached Albany, Temple got off the train and watched the man in Surratt’s maroon jacket make a show of going to a ticket window to inquire about the best form of passage to Montreal. Surratt waited aboard the Canandaigua train another fifteen minutes, then stepped off and crossed the platform only minutes before the departure of the train that would carry him south to Piermont and then on to Manhattan. Temple followed him on board the train to Manhattan, settled in behind him yet again, and then used the rest of their journey together to contemplate the endgame.
AFTER BOOKING A ROOM at the Fifth Avenue Hotel for that evening, Surratt waited in Madison Square Park until a large black brougham carrying a driver and two other men pulled up at the northeastern corner of the square. Temple stepped back into the trees and shadows behind the Worth obelisk, watching them. Surratt didn’t move until two men stepped from the brougham, canvassed the immediate block, and then nodded to him. He scampered off his park bench and into the carriage. Temple waited until the driver had spurred his pair of horses before he stepped out of the trees, and then he watched the brougham depart. A carriage Temple had retained was waiting a block away and he stepped to the street to summon it. He wouldn’t need to follow Surratt too closely, because he knew exactly where he was headed.
FOUR DIFFERENT ARCHITECTS and three different contractors had been retained to build the mansion at 212 Madison Avenue, and it was said to be even more elaborate inside than out. In addition to rumors that the interior and its nine bedrooms were lined with gold leaf and marble, there was persistent chatter that the owner had spent nearly $50,000 on a glass and iron dome for the mansion, which in the end he decided to reject because it didn’t conform architecturally with the rest of the estate. The entire home was outfitted for gas illumination—the first of its kind in New York—and the owner was said to have built a private railway depot adjacent to his basement.
Not in dispute was the fact that the owner had never been seen outside the mansion and had never extended an invitation to anyone in the neighborhood to visit him. Whispered in the most discreet fashion in what was agreed to be the most prestigious and expensive neighborhood in Manhattan was that the mansion’s owner was most likely quite mad.
Had he cared to inform his neighbors or anyone else in Manhattan about his true preferences and tastes, the owner himself would have told all of them that he never would live in a home with marble walls and marble floors and that, instead, his estate featured mahogany, oak, and cherry so polished one could almost use the walls as looking glasses.
He also would have shown them, had they ever been welcomed inside, that in addition to modern gas tubing strung throughout the estate, he also had his own telegraph line; his own Otis elevators traveling between the mansion’s basement and three upper floors on a singular system of pulleys, counterweights, and hydraulics; his own elaborate gardens; his own stable of horses; his own library of nearly forty thousand titles; two wine cellars, three Raphaels, and a Caravaggio; six carved fountains that he had imported from Europe, South America, and Russia; and a collection of gemstones kept in a room of their own alongside glass cabinets stocked with Ming vases.
He could catalog these holdings with the same ease that he could count the fingers on his hand. But he would never bother enlightening his neighbors about any of it because he had as little interest in their friendship as he did in their well-being.
“We are dedicated to serving only ourselves, are we not?” he said to his apprentice.
“That and nothing else, Maestro,” replied Surratt, who was seated beside a medieval fireplace brought over, stone by stone, from Warsaw. It was large enough for seven men to stand inside it, but because of the summer heat it was unlit and yawned like a deep black cavern across most of an entire wall.
The owner sat in a high-backed dark walnut chair with rosettes carved on its frame. He had, in fact, installed over his office a glass and iron dome similar to the one he’d rejected, albeit smaller, never having intended to cap the mansion as a whole with such a thing, and during the day shafts of sunlight danced in bars around his desk. On nights with a full, lush moon such as this, a purple glow bathed the top of his head.
“I have arranged transport for you this evening on a steamship to Liverpool, and from there you are going to go to the Vatican and serve as a papal Zouave. The Vatican is a state unto itself, and our authorities have no power to pluck you from there.”
“Thank you for arranging this, Maestro.”
“Thank you for your service in Richmond, Washington, Elmira, and Montreal. We plan to pay you well for all that you have done.”
Surratt stood up from his chair, measuring his words and his nerve as he listened to the sound of water trickling in the courtyard fountain outside. The low whir and rumbling of the mansion’s elevators rose and fell as the cars moved inside the walls.
“I want railroad stock,” Surratt blurted, rushing to get the words out before his legs grew rubbery again. “Judah Benjamin asked for the same when I met with him in Richmond in March. And he wired me in early April when I returned to Elmira to say that he had burned all records of the rail negotiations, as you wished. He said it was only right that he also receive a stock grant.”
The owner cleared his throat, assessing Surratt as if seeing him for the first time. He appreciated men who could reduce discussions to money. If they were entitled to a claim, it made everything more rational. If they weren’t, well, then they weren’t and that, too, offered clarity.
“Of course you want stock,” the owner said, holding out his hand to Surratt, who stepped forward tentatively to take it.
In a corner of the room beneath a gaslight that cast an amber shroud around him, a slender, graceful man uncurled like a cat from a high-backed, tufted leather chair and began to stand up. He paused, frustrated, because his left leg, broken when he’d leapt to the stage after killing Lincoln, still couldn’t bear all of his weight.
He forced himself upright and reached back down to a tray by the chair to pull a cigar up to his mouth, chuckling and leaning against a wall to continue observing Surratt’s negotiation. He had pale skin that gleamed in the room’s half-light, large, sensual eyes, and a moustache and wavy hair the color of India ink. He waited until the throbbing in his leg subsided, then gestured with his cigar toward the middle of the room.
“I suppose, then, that I should request stock as well, Maestro,” John Wilkes Booth said. “I’d like something that gives me a deeper taste, a true financial partnership that reflects all that we’ve accomplished together.”