The First Assassin (14 page)

The bluecoat apparently was a talker. “And they’re all in the White House?” asked Mazorca.

“They’ve turned the place into a bivouac. I’ve never seen such a rabble. But the truth is we need every man we can get these days. We’re short of soldiers all over the city, and those fellows look ready to fight.”

“At least the president is safe.”

“I suppose. With the soldiers on duty here, plus Lane’s men, I think we could hold off a small group of attackers. I’m sure you’ve heard all the rumors of kidnapping plots and that sort of thing.”

“It seems as though people move in and out of the building with ease.”

“Mr. Lincoln has insisted on keeping the house open at all times. He talked to us the other day about it and said that when he was a congressman during the Polk years, the house was shut to the public. He said it created an appearance of aloofness, and he wanted no part of that.”

“Interesting.”

“I definitely see his point. But sometimes I wonder how safe he really is in there. He calls it ‘the people’s house,’ but it’s his house as well. I sure don’t want any harm to come to him.”

“I’m sure you don’t.”

“What’s your business here?”

“Just looking.”

“Have you come for a job?”

Mazorca narrowed his eyes. “You could say that,” he replied.

The soldier thought nothing of it. “That’s what most of the people who come here are doing,” he continued. “They’re asking Mr. Lincoln to give them jobs in the government.”

“I see,” said Mazorca. “Well, right now I’m just looking.”

“Good to meet you, mister,” said the soldier. He walked into the house.

Mazorca watched him go. “I’ve already got a job,” he said, to no one but himself.

When Violet Grenier heard the Irish girl marching up the stairs, she rose from her chair and smoothed her dress. The door opened, revealing a plain-looking girl in a plain-looking dress. Polly was perhaps seventeen years old, and she possessed precisely what Violet wanted in a servant: an appearance so thoroughly ordinary that none of Violet’s male visitors would notice her. If there was one thing Violet Grenier was good at, it was securing the attention of men.

“Mrs. Grenier, you have visitors,” said Polly, in a meek brogue.

Violet already knew. She had been writing a note at her desk when she glanced out the window of her second-floor study, looked across Sixteenth Street to St. John’s Church on the other side, and saw two men walking straight for her front door. She had not recognized either of them.

“They called themselves Jeff and Alex,” continued Polly. She seemed unsure of herself, which was normal except that now she seemed hesitant even by her own standards. “They didn’t give last names, and they said it didn’t matter because you wouldn’t know them by their names but by a phrase. They made me memorize it: ‘Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction.’” The girl’s face, usually expressionless, showed a flash of distaste.

Violet recognized the words immediately. It surprised her to hear them. She asked Polly to repeat the line. The girl closed her eyes and spoke it again.

“Tell our guests that I will join them presently,” said Violet.

Polly nodded and left. Violet stayed behind and paused before a mirror. She was one of those women who was not beautiful at first glance but became so as a man studied her. She was tall and slim, with olive skin that flushed into color on her face, thick eyebrows crowning brown eyes that somehow sparkled, and just a touch of gray in her black hair, which was parted straight down the middle and drawn back tightly despite a current fashion calling for rings and curls. Her beauty was the kind that comes with maturity, a confident pose of female experience that younger women could only hope to achieve one day. She also had a good figure—one that few women could duplicate even in their youth. At the age of thirty-nine, Violet had never felt better about herself.

There was a time when she would have thought feeling good about herself was impossible. Just six years earlier, she had become a childless widow when her husband died on a business trip to California. The news came to her in a telegram. She had read it in this very room. For months she was despondent. Her husband had left her with enough money to remain comfortable, but also more grief than she thought she could bear.

Slowly but surely, however, Violet overcame her sadness. It had been like recovering from a long convalescence. Yet when it was gone, it was gone for good—and Violet once again threw herself into the Washington political scene as a high-powered hostess whose guests came from the ranks of cabinet members, military officers, and foreign diplomats. When her friend James Buchanan was elected president in 1856, she achieved even greater levels of prominence. An invitation to dine at her home had become a prized mark of social success.

Although Violet had no shortage of suitors, a widowed woman in possession of a good fortune does not necessarily want a husband. Violet enjoyed her newfound prestige and decided that she would rather entertain senators than marry one. She met most of them in drawing rooms and across dinner tables, but these were by no means her only places of congress. They were not even the most important ones.

Violet had discovered a talent for bewitching men. At first she deployed it for her own amusement. Before long, however, she realized that her paramours were willing to share their intimate knowledge of Washington politics—she heard what was said behind the closed doors of committee rooms, which public men were to be trusted under no circumstances, and who aspired to high office but would never get there because of a drinking problem. Sometimes men confided in Violet because they wanted to impress her. Other times they did it because they just wanted to talk and she was willing to listen. Their motives hardly mattered to Violet, who realized that she occupied a unique and privileged position. And she saw it as an opportunity to exploit.

Personal ambition was only a part of her motive, and it was not even the biggest part. Instead, Grenier had become radicalized by the times. Between North and South, there was no question about her own loyalties.

She had grown up in Maryland, about two dozen miles from where she now lived, on a small plantation that grew tobacco and wheat. The entire operation depended on slave labor. As Violet grew up, it had not occurred to her that slavery might be unjust. Quite the contrary, she viewed it as the natural order of things and felt that slaves often were not sufficiently appreciative of the lives they were allowed to live.

This particular sentiment owed much to a family tragedy. When Violet was a girl, her father spent a dreary afternoon at a local tavern. In the evening, it started to rain hard. Violet’s father passed the hours by continuing to drink. Shortly after midnight, the rain stopped and he decided to leave. He was intoxicated and barely able to mount his horse. His manservant, a slave called Jacob who often traveled with him, helped Violet’s father onto his steed. They departed together.

Violet’s father never made it home. Somewhere along the way, he suffered a fatal head injury. Jacob insisted that he had fallen from his horse and struck a rock. The slave thought that perhaps the horse had slipped in the mud, causing its rider to lose his balance. A doctor who arrived on the scene confirmed that the wound came from a blow to the head but speculated that perhaps it had been delivered after the fall—in other words, that the slave had finished off his master. There was a trial, a verdict, and a hanging. Violet was too young to remember the details, such as the fact that Jacob was judged by an all-white jury and could not call character witnesses. Yet she grew up thinking that her father had been murdered by a slave and believing that the sons and daughters of Africa deserved bondage and should be more grateful for it.

As a widow in Washington, she knew any number of figures who supported freeing the slaves. She even liked a few of them. But that was on a personal level, and she despised their opinions. For a time, she kept these views to herself. Debating political or moral issues was not considered proper behavior for a society lady. Yet it became increasingly difficult to keep opinions bottled up, even in settings that were supposed to be filled with conviviality. Abolitionists from the North started refusing to break bread with slaveholders from the South, and vice versa. When the two sides did meet, often the best a hostess could hope to achieve was a frostiness that kept everyone’s manners in check. The dinner party had been an essential feature of life in the capital because it allowed politicians from different parties, regions, and branches of the government to meet outside the halls of formal power, and hostesses like Violet provided an essential service. When the Republican Party nominated Abraham Lincoln for president and the Democrats splintered into hostile factions, however, it broke down completely.

Over the years, Grenier had made a habit of sharing the information she had obtained by her various methods with favored politicians. Most were from the South, but a few, such as Buchanan, were Northerners who were amenable to the South. Sometimes she merely repeated what she had heard verbatim, but she was not above planting false rumors when she thought these would serve a purpose, such as harming the chances of a certain congressman’s winning a prized committee seat. Buchanan once called her “the Lady Macbeth of Washington.” He meant it as a joke; Violet considered it a compliment.

In 1860, as it became apparent that Lincoln would win the election, Violet began telling acquaintances that no matter what happened, she would remain in Washington. She told her most trusted friends that she would be willing to serve as the eyes and ears of those who could not be there with her, either because they felt they had to leave or because they already lived elsewhere. Furthermore, she let them know that she would be glad to participate in plans to undermine the Lincoln administration, whether it meant merely making observations about cabinet deliberations or collecting data on local troop strength—or perhaps even something more extreme. The milk of human kindness was not her way. Lady Macbeth would have understood.

Violet and her far-flung network did not believe that they could communicate in the open, so they developed a system of codes and techniques that would allow them to make contact under watchful eyes. She kept a few ciphers in her desk drawer, as well as other materials that helped her send and receive messages to contacts in Richmond, Montgomery, and elsewhere. One of her correspondents was Langston Bennett of South Carolina, whom she had met through her husband some years earlier. Yet it was not to him that her mind turned when Polly delivered the message from her visitors. She thought of someone else entirely.

Several months ago, on a day when her anger at Lincoln’s victory was particularly intense, Violet had discussed an extravagant plot with a New York merchant whose livelihood depended on his ability to transport slave-produced goods from Southern ports to European cities. When their conversation was done and the man gone, Violet reflected upon it—and concluded it was complete nonsense. There was no way the man could accomplish what he had proposed. It was simply too bold. But she also remembered how he had picked up a Bible on her shelf and flipped to the book of Matthew. “You will know my agents by the thirteenth verse of chapter seven,” he said. Violet followed his finger down to the black letters: “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction.”

She decided that she had spent enough time looking in the mirror. She was not sure that associating with these men was wise, but now they were here and they spoke the words from the book. It meant that no matter how much Violet might have wanted it otherwise, they already were associated. She decided at least to meet with them for a few minutes.

Violet walked down the steps and moved to the front of her home, where a pair of small red parlors stood side by side. A crimson silk curtain separated the rooms, hanging from a wide doorway. Gold candle sconces and small portraits of prominent statesmen decorated the walls. Several were familiar to anybody who kept abreast of federal politics: Senator Stephen Douglas, Secretary of State William Seward, and the late Southern political giant John Calhoun. A large tête-à-tête sat in the parlor by the front door, and a rosewood piano with pearl keys dominated the parlor in back.

Grenier moved silently beside the piano and watched her two guests, who had their backs turned to her as they stood and looked at the decorations in the front parlor. She could not see their faces, but their clothes were well-worn and lacking in the finery that most of her visitors displayed. One of the men was a good deal larger than the other.

“Good afternoon,” said Grenier as she passed into the front parlor. She spoke in a voice that was meant to convey a cool formality rather than a warm hospitality.

Both men spun around. At first, they said nothing. Their eyes ran up and down Grenier—a habit of many men, and one that Grenier occasionally even enjoyed, especially when she was making an effort to impress. Yet these two men were coarse. Grenier wished they would simply announce their business.

“How may I help you?” she asked, hoping that one of them would speak.

The larger of the two gave her a mischievous grin. “Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction,” he said.

“So I have heard.”

“Our employer suggested that we meet with you,” he said.

“My name is Davis, and this here is Stephens, except that those aren’t our real names.”

“Then why do you bother giving them to me?”

“Our real names aren’t important. These are the ones that we’re using as we pursue our current project.” Davis raised his eyebrows, seeking some kind of acknowledgment from Grenier. She did not give him any. “You do know about our current project, don’t you? Wide is the gate and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction?”

“You have already said that,” replied Grenier. “I’ve met with your employer, and I think I know what you are planning. It is certainly ambitious.”

Davis and Stephens began to smile, but their smiles vanished as Grenier continued.