The Lincoln Deception (17 page)

W
atching from less than a block away, Cook could scarcely believe how Fraser walked right into it. The man didn't have the sense God gave an ant. He could have crossed to the other side of the street. He could have run. He could have shouted bloody murder. He even might have walloped Stoneman. Fraser didn't seem to appreciate that he was a big man and could hurt someone if he put his back into it. And he should have known that Cook was close by, able to help out. But instead, he tried just to stroll past Stoneman? That wasn't ever going to work. Now Cook had to find a way out of this mess.

Riding a bicycle he borrowed from outside a house, Cook shadowed Stoneman's wagon to the pier in front of the shipping terminal. There the wagon's contents—doubtless including Fraser—were loaded onto the
Georgia.
With luck, they might only beat the tar out of Fraser and dump him on some lonesome shore or island of the Chesapeake Bay. But Cook feared worse. Stoneman had to be losing patience. He would want a permanent solution to the problem of Fraser and Cook.

He stripped off his shirt and joined the line of stevedores carrying bundles of cured tobacco leaf up the ship's gangplank. Cook kept his head down and put the load on his right shoulder, screening his face from the boss. The other men said nothing. Hauling heavy loads in the heat didn't make men sociable.

He used his first trip to canvas the situation. They stacked their loads near a hatch. Others took them down a ladder into the hold. Cook had to get on to that duty. On his fourth trip up the gangplank, Cook noticed that the pile of tobacco next to the hatch was mounting. “Boss,” he said to the foreman lounging against a railing, “how about I help clear some of this off?”

The man squinted through the smoke of his cigarette. “Why, you're just a coon Horatio Alger, ain't you?” Another stevedore dumped his load, then turned around.

Cook ducked his head. “Boss,” was all he said.

After a long drag on his smoke, the foreman flipped the stub overboard. “Go get 'em, Horatio.”

The descent into the hold was treacherous. Cook had to tilt his load at an awkward angle to clear the hatchway. At the bottom, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the murk. Three other stevedores were stacking the sheaves. Cook figured they were delaying their next trip up the steps as long as possible. One pointed where he should set his load down. Stretching his back, Cook took a good look around, then headed back up.

After three more trips, he had a plan. He found a spot at the front of the hold that had been left unfilled to allow a door to swing open. The door was locked, so Cook could hide there until the ship set sail. Then he would have to find a way into the rest of the ship.

By early afternoon, the cargo was loaded. Left alone in the hold for a moment, Cook stepped into the nook in the front. His muscles objected to crouching, but he held the position while the others finished the job, one grumbling that the old guy sure had made himself scarce. Cook winced when he heard the hatchway bolt slam shut from the top. He wasn't sure what he had gotten himself into.

The engines grumbled. Sensing the boat's motion, Cook ventured from his nest. The dark was near total. By memory and touch, he found the door handle and the lock underneath it. He pulled his picks out of his pocket—they were getting a lot of use—and went to work. He couldn't judge time in that black place, but it took a long while before he was slowly easing the door open. He entered a dimly lit passage that seemed to run next to the ship's boiler.

They probably stashed Fraser in an equipment room or a baggage room. If they put him in an empty passenger cabin, there was little hope. Cook couldn't wander the boat, shirtless, checking passenger cabins. So he stayed below and tried each door to an internal room. Luckily the locks were simple ones.

The third one was the charm. It housed pipes running from the engine room, coils of rope, and a few tools. It shimmered with heat from the engine. Fraser lay unconscious on the floor, off to the side, hands and feet bound. He didn't appear to be injured. Pulling his knife from a sheath strapped to his calf, Cook cut away Fraser's ropes. He couldn't revive him. Cook would never get him off the boat in that condition. More pressing, Stoneman was bound to check on his prisoner.

Cook pushed the inert man into a far corner, behind the pipes, then donned Fraser's jacket. It fit Cook well enough.

He assumed Fraser's former place on the floor. He placed his feet against a pipe to make it easier to rise quickly, then looped ropes around his wrists and ankles, and assumed a fetal position. He chose an angle that concealed his face and hands. His right hand gripped the knife. He waited in the roasting heat. His sweat made the knife handle slick. Baffles at the top and bottom of the door admitted a little light. It was better than the cargo hold.

Twice, steps passed by but didn't stop. Then two sets of feet paused and blocked the light at the lower baffles. The door opened and someone stepped in. A voice said, “Make sure he's still out.”

Cook lunged, driving the knife deep into the midsection of the first man, who grunted. Cook stabbed again and pushed the knife up. It stuck in his chest; he couldn't pull it out. Cook desperately heaved the body away. There stood Stoneman, grinning, holding a long, evil-looking blade. With his heel, Stoneman kicked the door shut and stayed in front of it. Shifting his weight, he came forward, forcing Cook into a corner.

At the edge of his vision, Cook saw a short section of water pipe on the floor. But Stoneman was too close. To reach the pipe, Cook would have to expose himself to Stoneman's knife. The first man's blood was on the floor.

Cook dove for Stoneman's leg, the one opposite his knife hand, driving through the knee with his shoulder. It was like slamming into a tree trunk. Cook bounced to the side and down on the floor. The impact caused Stoneman's slash to be high. Arching his back to avoid the blade when Stoneman pulled it back, Cook scrambled to the pipe. He grabbed it and rolled back into Stoneman's legs as the man swung again. Stoneman came down with a crash.

Gasping, Cook spun onto his knees and swung the pipe down, two-handed, with all his strength. Stoneman grunted. Cook swung again, harder. He was angry that he couldn't reach the man's head. He swung again. And again. Stoneman wasn't moving, but he had a knife. Cook swung three more times. He was hitting mostly rib cage, stoving it in.

Still on his knees, Cook straightened and sank back on his heels. His hand was sticky with the first man's blood. No, the blood was warm. He was cut on the upper arm. Cook reached for the wound with his other hand. The cut was high, near the shoulder. Not an easy place for a tourniquet.

He ripped part of the shirt from the man he had stabbed. Using his teeth to hold the fabric and his good arm to tear it, he came up with a strip. He tried to tie it around his arm, using his teeth again. Blood was everywhere.

The engine eased off; they must be nearing a port. Cook stumbled over to Fraser. He shook the man, then slapped his face. Fraser moaned and his eyelids fluttered. “Jamie,” Cook hissed. “Come on!” He shook him. “Come on!” Fraser stirred. “You got to get up,” Cook insisted. “Right now.” Fraser rolled onto his hands and knees.

Cook stood. He had to find a way out. He grabbed a coil of rope and slowly moved into the passageway. He could hear Fraser lurching behind him. Cook tried a facing door. It was an empty office. He ran to the porthole, which was on the river side of the ship, facing the far shore. He tied the rope to a pipe in the room and went back for Fraser, who was on his feet, but shaky. His eyes weren't clear yet.

They lowered themselves to the water down the rope. Cook's left arm was no good. He could barely feel it. Fraser went into the river with a splash, but then came up again. Two colored fisherman watched them from a nearby dinghy. A white man without a coat. A Negro wearing a jacket but no shirt. The fishermen slowly rowed near where both men were trying to swim. Those fishermen held their fate.

“Get on the far side of the boat,” said the man handling the oars. “Hang on there. We'll move down to where there's not so many people.” Cook and Fraser did it. “Keep your heads down,” the man said. They did that, too.

C
ook and Fraser drowsed in the narrow late-morning shade of the shed. The September sunshine unlocked sweet grass smells. The earth, soft with recent rain, yielded to their weight, which had grown over three days of rockfish, muskrat stew, and fresh corn. Women worked in the garden nearby. A breeze carried their voices, then dropped them. The men had left before sunrise to check crab traps and trail lines for rockfish or trout or bluefish. The children tried not to bother the two men staying in the shed.

Cook rested his bad arm on a wooden crate. Fraser had sewed the gash together with ordinary needle and thread. The wound was too deep to heal on its own. The stitching had to hurt, but Cook refused laudanum, insisting he couldn't afford to addle his wits any more. Fraser, whose own wits felt scrambled after being etherized, didn't insist.

They didn't provide much explanation to their saviors, Rafe Washington and his brother, Gabriel. Cook said they were on the run from some rough types, which Rafe and Gabriel surely knew already. They had only defended themselves, Cook added. Fortunately, the Washington brothers were disposed to help folks in trouble, especially colored folks.

Sleeping in the shed was fine, though closer to the outhouse than ideal. Fraser tried to give Rafe some money, but Rafe wouldn't take it, so Fraser started doctoring the family. He drained a cyst for Gabriel's wife and prescribed quinine for Rafe's fever, which had come and gone for years. He wasn't sure quinine would help, but it shouldn't hurt.

Mostly, Cook and Fraser had lazed around the small farm on Pine Chip Road, across the river from Chestertown. They slept heavily at night and napped in the day. They worried there would be an investigation of the killings on board the
Georgia.
In town, Rafe reported, the talk was that no one knew who killed those two white men. He couldn't ask about it, though. It wouldn't do to seem too curious. Fraser offered to help on the farm, but Rafe made a face and told them to stay out of sight.

When Fraser tried to talk about what happened on the ship, Cook acted like Fraser hadn't spoken. Fraser had a jumbled memory of struggling, of grunts and heavy breathing, a blood-slick floor, sprawled bodies. A knife protruded from a chest. A face stared vacantly. Fraser knew what they had to mean, but he couldn't string them together, link cause and effect, and then the next cause and the next effect.

Fraser plucked a long stem of alfalfa with feathery white blooms at the top. He chewed one end. “Not sure I've ever seen so much trouble grow out of something that started out honest and true,” he said. “We're trying to figure out a killing, not get people killed.”

“Some people,” Cook said, “need killing.”

“You think God will hold those against us?”

Cook sighed and pulled his legs up at the knees. “You thinking I'm going to hell for that?”

“Not you, us. It was killing. It's on our heads.”

“Not on mine. I
saved
a life—yours.” He looked over at Fraser. “What d'you think hell is like? Big vat of boiling oil? Devils with tails and pitchforks poking you in the behind?”

“Yeah, when I was a boy. What else?”

“Well, we ain't kids now.” When Fraser said nothing, Cook added, “So if there's some men need killing, who're going to kill a friend of mine, I ain't going to lose sleep over how those little demons with pitchforks'll think about it.”

“I said thank you, more than once.”

With his good hand, Cook clapped Fraser on the thigh and squeezed it. “You did. So we need to get out of here, let these people get on with their lives without desperadoes like us around their necks.” Cook let a smile play on his face. “It's possible Stoneman had so many enemies they can't know who actually killed him.”

“These people know it was us.” The women were gathering up their tools, the tomatoes and squash they'd picked.

“They're country Negroes. Nobody thinks they know anything. If they say they don't know nothing, white folks believe it. It's the good part of having people think you're stupid. I've played stupid a time or two.”

“Couldn't have been very convincing.”

“Doesn't have to be. White folks just know I'm naturally stupid.”

“Whoever was paying Stoneman's going to send someone else after us.”

Cook shrugged, his gaze locked on the tall weeds that bent before the wind. “If coming after us involves getting killed, they may find it's getting harder to get good help.” He turned his head to Fraser. “So, we going through with this whole business? I'm not feeling the fire coming off you, not like it used to. Getting too rough?”

“I took up this quest—” he smiled and shook his head. “Maybe that's too dramatic. No, okay, I took up this quest because it seemed so important, and what I was doing had stopped seeming that way. This mattered. But now, it's turning out to be more than I bargained on, and I'm thinking about Eliza, too. She's changed how I think about things. We set out to solve a puzzle, not refight the Civil War, end up running from men trying to kill us.”

“A man's got to choose what matters to him,” Cook said. “I made my choice. This matters.” He pointed with his thumb over his shoulder, behind him, toward the Washingtons' two-room house. “I went inside that house, here on this tired-out land. These folks've got nothing, or next to nothing, but you know the one framed picture on the wall? Abraham Lincoln, Father Abraham himself. He mattered. The people who took him away, they cheated a whole nation. That's what they meant to do, and they did it. But they especially cheated me, and Rafe Washington and his people, and all our people. That matters to my babies back in Steubenville, to the world they'll live in. And I aim to even that score.” Cook stabbed the air with the index finger of his good hand, his voice low and intense. “So, Dr. Fraser, you need to choose. You in or you out?”

The silence stretched out. Fraser knew he should be weighing the pluses and minuses of his decision, gauging the risks against the likely benefits. Yet his mind felt empty. He felt the warm air on his face. He looked over at Cook, who had leaned his head back against the bleached wood of the shed. Fraser's eye followed a hawk gliding on the wind, turning circles in the high white sky.

“We know,” Fraser said,” that Barstow bankrolled John Surratt.”

“Yeah? How we know that?”

Fraser described what Anna Surratt Tonry had told him. It meant, Fraser said, that Barstow paid for Booth, too. Cook objected. He was jumping past the evidence, that woman wasn't ever going to testify to anything, and they had missed their chance to talk to John Surratt.

This time Fraser objected. “He was never going to talk to us.”

“Okay,” Cook answered, “but what about Sam Arnold? Shouldn't we try him?”

Fraser didn't answer right away. “I guess so,” he finally said. “We should.”

But what Fraser wanted to talk about was Barstow's game. He'd been thinking about their dinner at Delmonico's. The old fox expressed real regret that George McClellan didn't become president, that the Union and Confederate armies hadn't conquered the rest of North America. Had that been the purpose of the Booth conspiracy, to reverse the results of the 1864 election, install McClellan as president and embark on continental conquest?

Cook wouldn't buy it. First, he pointed out, the last thing the United States needed right then was more territory. The Civil War started because of the argument over spreading slavery into new lands. More territory would have meant more arguments.

Fraser was ready for him. Canada would be non-slave, and Mexico would have slaves. It would be like all those compromises from before the war, with slavery south of some line and no slavery above it.

Cook grew exasperated. After three years of war, he insisted, the North wasn't going to give up on slavery, just let it keep on. Union troops already occupied Louisiana, much of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Slaves had been freed wherever the Union troops went. Lots of them made themselves free, just walked away. The Emancipation Proclamation took effect. No crazy foreign invasion was going to undo all that, certainly not one that involved killing Abraham Lincoln.

Cook gestured with his good arm. “Why would you believe anything Barstow said? When you and him were at that fancy restaurant, he had to know who you really were, what you were really about. He stuck you on top of that bridge just two days later. Why would he tell you the truth about anything?”

Fraser had no answer.

After sundown that night, Rafe joined them out behind the shed. Cook and Fraser explained that they would leave separately. They figured that some men would still be looking for a white man and a Negro, both large, traveling together. Rafe suggested that Fraser leave on one of the ferries that crossed the bay. With his beard growing out, he could put on some country clothes and pass for a laboring man, so long as he kept those soft hands in his pockets. Fraser should leave the Washingtons' place before dawn; Rafe would row him to the other side of the river and he could walk to the wharf.

They agreed that Cook should wait a couple more days to heal up. Cook didn't stand out so much on the farm. He could cross the bay on a boat with some of the Negro watermen, who would set him down in a quiet inlet. Rafe shook hands and went to join his family.

Fraser and Cook went back over their plans. Fraser would go to Sam Arnold's place in little Friendship, Maryland. That was where Townsend, the writer, said he lived.

“Now that man, Townsend, that's something we got to talk about,” Cook said. “I've been thinking on him. There's a string of coincidences we're piling up.” Cook had a serious tone. “Okay, so we go see him at that strange castle, whatever you want to call it, and you head off to Indiana, just like he says, right?”

Fraser nodded.

“And there's two rough customers there who beat you bad, right?”

“I was probably pretty conspicuous there,” Fraser objected, “and I was going to see Weichmann every day.”

“But why on earth was anyone looking for you there in that nowhere town? You think these people just watch whomever Weichmann talks to, every day of the year?” Cook didn't wait for an answer. “No, they were looking for
you.
Okay, then you get back home and decide to head back out, this time I'm along for the ride. What do you do first? Check in with Townsend about where that Creston Clarke is. And what's waiting at Lake Erie? That nigger-lover letter. We go on to New York, which Mr. Townsend knows, and we have us a high old time there, almost die in interesting ways. When we decide to leave, first we ask old Townsend how to find people in Maryland. Shoot, we weren't learning, were we? We met that fellow on the train, remember the one at the depot in Elizabeth, the one you thought I was mean to?

“So now, we're getting careful, even crafty. We get on those mules and ride through the country, dodging shadows, but we go straight to where Townsend knew we were going, to Mrs. Anna Surratt Tonry. And where does Stoneman find you? Two blocks from her house.”

Fraser's mouth felt dry. “So,” Fraser said, “you think he's been tipping them off, that he's in with Barstow and his Sons of Liberty? That would mean he was bought long before we ever turned up.”

When Cook didn't answer, Fraser reminded him how Townsend's books and articles were completely devoted to the lone-madman theory. “If you're right, that means that those men who killed Lincoln not only remade history, but then they paid him to write them out of it. And they aim to
stay
out of it.” Fraser shook his head. “We might as well have worn bells around our necks.”

Cook nodded. “If we stop telling Townsend what we're up to, this business might get easier. Worth a try.”

That night, as they settled on the straw in the shed, Fraser pulled out the banknotes in his money belt. He had dried them since dropping out of the
Georgia
into the Chester River. By lantern light, he counted out forty dollars to leave for Rafe. Cook said he'd leave it where Rafe's wife would find it. She'd have more sense and less pride about keeping it.

Fraser split the rest of the banknotes between them. Over the last two weeks, they'd made a pretty heavy dent in his funds. Fraser didn't regret that the money was going. That's what he meant to do with it.

Cook said he wouldn't linger in Chestertown any longer than he had to. He told Fraser to watch his step. “That Arnold may know you're coming, may know all about you. He, what, grew up with Booth?”

“Went to school with him.”

Fraser planned to take a room at the National Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. That was a sentimental choice. John Wilkes Booth slept there on the night before he killed Lincoln. Cook said he'd find someplace less conspicuous.

In Washington, Fraser continued, they could talk to that Hale woman.

Cook smiled. “The one whose daddy was a senator, was supposed to be engaged with Booth?”

“Yes, she traveled with him in New England the week before the killing, then had breakfast with him on the morning of the assassination. He had her picture in his wallet.”

“Didn't he have pictures of four other women, too?”

Fraser shrugged. “She was the only one he was supposed to marry. Also—” he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the leather frog book. He showed how the cover opened to the drawing of the frog, the outlines of which had blurred, but the other pages were wadded up, permanently stuck to each other. “When you wore my jacket into the river, this went in with you. It's dry now, but we're never going to get to read it again. Tried slicing the pages apart with a knife, but they just tear up.”