If I’d learned nothing else during my time with him, I knew better than to expect explanations once I’d accepted an assignment. He’d only give me one of those toothless tight-lipped cat’s smiles and say no intelligence was as useful as the kind I found out on my own; Washington jargon for what I didn’t know couldn’t hurt me. Which was a bald-faced lie, as I’d found out on my own more times than I could count.
So I went over his head, literally: straight to the attic.
Blackthorne had lost patience while the local, territorial, and federal authorities were arguing the details of constructing a courthouse, and had set up shop in the headquarters of the Herald building, arranging recesses to coincide with when the presses in the basement began their daily rumble. He’d had the attic cleared of stacks of old numbers of the newspaper to make room for records and evidence, turning it into a combination file room and Black Museum. Trial transcripts rolled and bound with cord stuck out like ancient scrolls from floor-to-ceiling pigeonholes, clamshell boxes stood cheek-by-jowl on freestanding shelves open on both sides, and wooden cases contained case files in leather folders amidst a thicket of edged and percussion weapons hung up like heraldic arms. The collection bore nightmare tales of beheadings, back-shootings, and duels fought at such close range the combatants’ shirts caught fire; these, too, dangled from pegs, singed and stiff with old blood, reeking of stale smoke and charred flesh. It all added up to some ten thousand years at hard labor and a potters’ field of necks broken on the scaffold.
The curator and headmistress of all this sat at a student desk, her erect back supported by whalebone wrapped in black bombazine and a rimless monocle behind which swam a brown eye swollen all out of proportion, like a fish in a bowl. Just where Electra Highbinder spent the hours of darkness added color to the conversation in Chicago Joe’s. Depending on which story you bought, she slept on a cot among the stained broadaxes and jars of poisoned livers or sipped green tea from a translucent cup in a room above the Gans and Klein Clothing Store at Main and Broadway furnished in the Federal style, all carved mahogany eagles and rich leather bindings inside blown-glass presses; this on the authority of the man who’d delivered her four-poster bed from Montgomery Ward.
I followed protocol: Took off my hat, called her Mrs. Highbinder, and stated my request. I had no evidence that she actually refused access to those who got it out of sequence, but the ghost of a husband last seen at the bottom of a shaft in Last Chance Gulch hung about her like tuberose and there was nothing to be gained by stirring him.
“Childress?” She off-loaded one of her plat-book-size ledgers from the stack on the floor by her knee onto the desk, splayed it open, and ran the fletch of her old-fashioned quill down the crowded columns, stopping near the bottom of the page. The quill rose from the sheet, pointing across the room. “CH-17.”
I found it among the clamshell boxes on a shelf and started to leave with it tucked under my arm. A rapid clicking noise brought me back around to where she sat tapping the nib of her pen against tea-stained teeth. Again she reversed the quill, lining it up with a writing table standing in a pool of milky sunlight leaking through a fan-shaped window across from her station. The meaning was clear: I could leave, but the box stayed.
The split-bottom chair found every saddlesore I’d accumulated since I’d left Helena the last time, but I opened the box and spilled its contents onto the table. They were in a bundle, tied with more cord. I tugged loose the knot, set aside a ragged stack of newspaper clippings, and began reading a neat clerkly hand on foolscap sheets, identified at the top as a transcription from the decoded report wired by the Pinkerton who’d vanished in Mexico.
His name was DeBeauclair, but he’d walked the length of the Sierra Madre posing as a Portuguese sailor who called himself Salazar, and who’d had his fill of the sea and had pledged to hike through all the uncivilized places of the earth until some vision told him what direction his life should take.
The story was just lunatic enough to satisfy the most suspicious observer. In reality, DeBeauclair/Salazar was working for U.S. banking interests, tracking bandits who’d been raiding the border for months, looking for names and evidence for warrants to extradite. Along the way, he’d picked up on the rumors of Oscar Childress’ activities in the interior.
The agent had been sufficiently intrigued to take time out from his original assignment and report what he’d heard through the Western Union office in the anonymous fishing village in Cabo Falso, but according to a letter accompanying the notes, all attempts to reach him afterward had failed. That letter, written on heavy rag bond and addressed to U.S. Attorney General Augustus Garland, bore the disturbing all-seeing eye and “We Never Sleep” pledge of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, and the signature of Robert A. Pinkerton himself, son of its legendary founder, and every bit the miserable son of a bitch his father had been. He demanded federal intervention. An addendum scribbled in a different hand suggested that the matter “be taken under advisement.”
Which explained the letter’s presence in Judge Blackthorne’s files.
It was dated five months ago, which was standard procedure regarding stories of conspiracy against the Union. They were as cyclical as the tides, and few of them attracted more notice than it took to file them away; but whenever one managed to creep so far north from its origin, the president had to be consulted, and Grover Cleveland was not a man to dismiss such things lightly only four years after the Garfield assassination.
DeBeauclair’s report, if it had been disencrypted faithfully, was practical, offering no assumptions beyond what he’d overheard in cantinas and peso-a-week flophouses in coastal villages and witnessed firsthand. The rumors passed without comment; some of them were fantastic on their face, stories of cannibalism and human sacrifice. But he’d read flyers offering top wages for experienced soldiers, preferably without family, seen wagonloads of grim-faced men bound for the Sierras wearing bandoleers of ammunition, rifles and carbines slung from their shoulders, and while passing through a filthy storeroom on his way to an outhouse, staggering convincingly, had lifted the canvas cover off a stack of crates stenciled CUIDADO, and leant down far enough to catch a whiff of sulphur and potassium, the principal ingredients of dynamite. As there was no mining or railroad-building taking place within a hundred miles of the ginhouse, he’d seen fit to include the discovery in his report. Under all these eavesdroppings and observations had run a theme, whispered in disease-ridden brothels, sung in urine-soaked alleys, and spoken in opium trances: “El General Childress.”
It had taken him almost a quarter-century to overcome his demotion from Union colonel to captain of the Confederacy and promote himself to general.
I turned from the report to the yellowed cuttings, sliced from crumbling copies of The Charleston Mercury and The New York Times, the leading journalistic voices of the War Between the States. The Mercury, a rebel sheet, trumpeted the victories of Childress’ volunteers at First and Second Manassas, Chickamauga, and Cold Harbor, while the Times made scant reference to an obscure band of southern mercenaries until its commander leapt into its lead column in April 1863:
ATROCITY IN SPRINGFIELD.
Rebel Guerrillas Stop Civilian Train.
Open Fire on Defenseless Passengers.
Eighteen, Including Women and Children, Blasted into Eternity in as Many Seconds.
Accompanying it was a woodcut illustration of a uniformed firing squad with rifles raised, spitting smoke and lead at a reeling line of men in bowlers, women in ankle-length dresses, and children in hair bows and knickers withering before the blast.
Ten minutes later I found a corresponding report in the Charleston rag, headed SKIRMISH IN SPRINGFIELD. This was a brief account of a battle involving Childress’ volunteers and passengers aboard a federal troop train, who had opened fire on the Confederates from onboard. The editors had not elected to provide an illustration.
I’d fought in that war, and had learned, when newspapers were available (usually wrapped around a slab of greasy catfish), that what I’d experienced and what I read about later might have been separate engagements. Throw the Times’s massacre and the Mercury’s armed encounter into a bushel basket, shake it, draw out your own interpretation, and you might have something approaching the truth. Personally I had trouble singling out a specific act of malice from the general hell of war: The worse it got, the better, if anyone who might wind up in charge had learned anything from it. I was more interested in Cold Harbor, and whether one of the faces I’d looked into across the crossroads that long day, black with powder and striped from sweat, had belonged to Oscar Childress. By that fourth year of fighting, officers’ insignia were practically nonexistent among the gray and butternut; their uniforms had gone the way of all shoddy, replaced by Union castoff and motley snatched off clotheslines. I remembered a burly party in a dirty lace camisole and a raddled straw hat with holes cut for an ass’s ears, turning back a flank attack with a saber stained crimson to the hilt. He might have been a general.
Cold Harbor, Virginia: Fifteen thousand dead or wounded on the side of the Army of the Potomac, as opposed to two thousand on the other. Of all the forgotten battlefields I had no intention of revisiting, that intersection of twin ruts leading nowhere in particular came in dead last.
The Mercury ceased publication when Charleston fell in February 1865, and no mention of Childress had been preserved from the Times after Crook’s cavalry set fire to a barn his men had deserted during the retreat from Winchester; two hogs and a goat lost their lives in that action, and their affiliation remained undetermined. The last item, therefore, belonged to a publication with a different typeface whose name wasn’t included with the clipping. It was two inches only, and read:
Readers of this journal will be relieved to learn that Captain O. Childress, author of the infamous slaughter at Springfield, Missouri, has decamped to Mexico with the remains of his command, and is believed to have thrown in with Emperor Maximilian in defense against revolutionists loyal to former President Benito Juarez. May God in His mercy protect the women and children of New Spain.
Unless the reporter got things backward, Childress had started out hoping to change his luck by siding with established authority, then turned coat and fought once again with the rebels, this time with better results. If so, his mental prowess lived up to its reputation; but it hadn’t outlived the nickname he’d acquired during those eighteen seconds in Missouri.