“I’ll bring word tomorrow at the cabin.” I laid my coins on the table and left, knowing there would be no response. We were both professionals. Even more than asking the right questions and sharing the right information, our safety and success depended on knowing when to keep our mouths shut.
While Bellamy and Pinkerton could not be seen together, Hattie and I could stroll in the park without attracting much notice, and so we did. We interspersed our empty chatter with occasional words of import, and as I walked with her back to her hotel, her husband joined us for a short while. That was when I conveyed the information to him. The secessionist militia. Their location and danger. The barber, who needed to be watched. Bellamy’s need to learn more. While we knew the plot was unlikely to involve an entire formal group of soldiers, we knew these men were passionate secessionists and couldn’t let the opportunity to hear their talk pass. Individual men were not nearly as dangerous as an organized force, and certainly, the most dangerous of them all was an armed one.
Pinkerton agreed with me: Bellamy had to go to Perrymansville, and there was no time like the present.
We met at the abandoned cabin on the outskirts of town the next day. I walked and lurked near the edge of the cabin. Bellamy approached on horseback, and I was surprised at what I saw.
He didn’t have access to his costume closet, but he had still managed to transform himself. He wore homespun pants, a shirt that had seen much wear, and a cap pulled low over his eyes. More importantly, he had changed the way he carried himself. He had never seemed a calm man, but now there was something tightly coiled about him, as if his entire body were a spring. He looked like an angry, ready man. He looked like a rebel.
He rode near enough for me to see and hear him, though my shape was obscured by the outer cabin wall, and no one riding by on the nearby road would know that I was there.
“Am I to go?” he asked the air.
“Yes.”
“I’ll leave word here when I can,” he said and began moving away without waiting for an answer.
No one was there to see him go but me. Perhaps because of this, he saluted. Then he wheeled his horse and headed off down the road at a slow, unhurried trot.
Seeing him go, I felt a twinge in the pit of my stomach. Could he possibly convince these men, these potential evildoers, that he was one of them? He was headed straight into the hornet’s nest.
I hated the feeling that every time I parted company with someone I knew, it might be the last time we saw each other alive. Bellamy wasn’t a friend, but I’d known him a long time, and I respected him deeply. The thought that he might be riding to his death made me ill.
I knew he was the best we had. I just wasn’t sure he would be good enough.
Chapter Nineteen
Plots and Plans
I wanted to introduce Pinkerton to the barber, but I couldn’t do so quickly without inviting suspicion, having already introduced him to Tim Bellamy just two days before. Instead, I placed them in each other’s path, suggesting Pinkerton appear, with Hattie, at a restaurant called Guy’s near the Barnum Hotel. It was very popular with the barber and his ilk. I knew a head-turning young lady like Hattie would draw the barber’s attention quickly. Hattie knew how to flirt just enough. A target would bask in the warm sun of her attention without believing her a fickle mistress ready to turn her back on her husband for anyone at all. It was a talent.
Within three days, Pinkerton had made friends with the barber and learned much. The next time I saw him, he was excited and angry in equal measure.
“He is brazen beyond belief!” Pinkerton said without preamble. I had carefully snuck into their room at the Chesapeake Hotel, my room at the Barnum being far too accessible to the Secesh sympathizers.
“How so?”
“Boasts outright about killing Lincoln. For the sake of the country, he says. Man is a tyrant, he says. Says he’s willing to die for a cause, as many proud Italians have done before him.”
“And the police can’t arrest him for that?”
“That’s the worst of it. The chief of police is part of the cabal.”
“No.”
He nodded gravely. “He’s ready to step aside when the day comes. He’ll send a small force, but only the minimum, to the Calvert Street Station for Lincoln’s arrival. There will be some sort of diversion, some noise, that causes them to be drawn off. And then the violence will be done.”
“He talks of this in the open? Even though he doesn’t know you?”
“In the company of complete strangers. I shouldn’t have worried that he would censor himself on my account. I almost believe he would say these vile things in front of the president-elect himself.”
I shook my head. “Terrible. But at least we know for sure. No pussyfooting around. There is a plot and no two ways about it.”
“Yes. The threat is real. We need to tell Lincoln.”
“We do.”
“You do, I should say.”
“Me?”
“He’ll listen to you, Warne,” said Pinkerton.
“Will he?”
“He asks after you every time we speak. He was very impressed by what you did in Springfield, says you’re the best agent I have. I have to hope he’ll listen to you. If he doesn’t listen to someone, we’ll lose him.”
“You’ve already tried?”
“I have. I sent telegram after telegram.”
“But in person, surely—”
“Tried that too. He was polite about it, but he sent me on my way. Said he owed it to the people to keep his path and wouldn’t be swayed from it.”
“I’ll talk to him,” I said. Whether or not I succeeded, I’d be a fool and a coward not to try. “What’s my cover?”
? ? ?
Ten hours later, I arrived at the Astor Place Hotel in New York. I was sick to death of hotels, truth be told. But our business had to be done where it had to be done. And, I reminded myself, there was no greater business than this.