The Crescent Spy (4 page)

“And you would take the oath of allegiance, truthfully and without guile?”

She lifted her right hand. “I will support the Constitution of the United States.”

“Good. I thought you would.”

Gray pulled the oars out of the water. They were only twenty yards from the grassy slope on the Virginia side of the river, but he let them drift downstream for another few minutes, the muddy current slowly twisting the boat around as they slid past guard posts and tent encampments. The meadows gave way to woods, and when they were beyond the last guard post, he eased them up to shore. He helped her out of the boat.

“I assume you have given up on your plan to deliver me to the Confederates,” she said.

“There was never a plan in the first place. If you failed to convince me, I was going to abandon you here and go back alone, leaving you with the threat of jail should you return.”

Josephine put her hands on her hips. “Seems a lot of fuss and bother if that was your intent all along. What now, will you row me across and tell Mr. Barnhart to hire me back at the paper?”

“I’m afraid you’re finished with the
Morning Clarion
, Miss Breaux.”

“You devil, I am not! You will march at once to my publisher and tell him I am innocent of this slander and demand that he reinstate me. I don’t care what that rag the
Washington Standard
says, I’m the best writer in the city.”

“My, you’re a feisty one,” Gray said, in a tone equal parts admiring and condescending. “But no, Mr. Pinkerton has other plans for you.”

“My imagination fails me, Mr. Gray.”

“Miss Breaux, if you declared the oath of allegiance in all good faith, then you have far more important business than penning stories about the war. You will have a hand in shaping it. And if you do well, I promise you all the personal glory in the world.”

She raised her eyebrows, and her eyes widened. She made no attempt to conceal her interest. “Oh?”

“First, we sneak back into the city. And when we arrive, there is someone Mr. Pinkerton wants you to meet.”

“Who?”

“President Abraham Lincoln.”

F
ranklin Gray led Josephine down the halls of the White House. As the sun went down, the staff was kicking out the various supplicants, curiosity seekers, and the gaggle of ne’er-do-wells who always seemed to be idling around the grounds and property of the presidential mansion. Gray found an inebriated man on the stairs, spitting tobacco toward a spittoon and missing, and the Pinkerton agent ordered him to vacate the premises at once.

They came into the president’s office on the south side of the second floor, but she was disappointed when she looked about expecting to see Abraham Lincoln. Instead, Allan Pinkerton stood by the window, a pipe at his lips. He turned when they entered and gestured that they take a seat at a heavy oak table where Josephine knew the president met with his cabinet. She sat on one side, and the two agents sat next to each other on the other.

Lincoln’s office was a massive room, some twenty-five or thirty feet wide and forty feet long, but there was nothing gaudy about the furniture or the furnishings. In addition to the table, a smaller mahogany desk was tucked to one side, with a pigeonhole cabinet stuffed with letters and telegrams. Various military maps decorated the walls, the largest of which was a huge map showing the entire South, this one marked with black dots. As it was growing dark, someone had lit the candelabras around the room, but there was no sign of the servant or any other person in the room.

“That was a clever game you played, Mr. Pinkerton,” Josephine said. “You had me convinced.”

“It was Mr. Gray’s idea.”

“Where is the president?”

Pinkerton waved his pipe. “Meeting with the secretary of war. He’ll come in when he finishes. Meanwhile, we have a few items of business to attend to.”

“Such as?”

He reached beneath the table and removed a carpetbag, which he set on the table next to Gray, who unfastened the clasp but didn’t open it. Josephine resisted the urge to stare or ask questions, knowing that it would be easy to lose whatever power over the situation she still possessed.

“Did you meet with Jeff Davis when you were in Richmond?” Pinkerton asked.

She raised her eyebrows. “Again? Aren’t we finished yet with the suspicion?”

“Please answer the question,” Gray said.

“Of course I did. You read the article—you saw what Davis said. I didn’t invent those quotes.” She fixed each of the men in turn. “But I’m no spy. If this is what you think, say it, I’ll depart at once.”

“In the first place, nobody thinks you’re a spy,” Pinkerton said. “In the second, there’s nowhere to go—you’re finished in Washington. We’ve made sure of that. Now you have a chance to prove your mettle, that you really mean the loyalty oath.” He glanced at his companion. “Did she take it?”

Gray nodded. “She did.”

Josephine crossed her arms. “I told you, I’m not a spy. Not for the Confederates, and not for you, either. I’ll listen to what you have to say, but if that’s what you’re asking, you can toss those hopes out the window. I won’t spy.”

Pinkerton smiled. “Not even to return to New Orleans?”

She blinked. This was not what she was expecting, and she didn’t know how to answer the question. She wasn’t sure she wanted to go back. In the first year she had missed the river and the delta with an aching all the way to her bones. Last spring, a traveling exhibition named
Panorama of the Mighty Mississippi
had come to Washington. The panorama was a three-hundred-foot-long, ten-foot-high canvas that scrolled past with painted scenes of the Mississippi: deer and buffalo at the water’s edge, Indians in canoes, the ruins of the failed Mormon city at Nauvoo, Illinois. As the canvas moved, a narrator explained to the enraptured audience what they were viewing. All were scenes she had witnessed, and while the painting quality was as poor as one could expect from such a vast, workmanlike scene, it was still close enough to her childhood that she had to get up and leave the theater because she was so overwhelmed with memories, both happy and painful.

“I’m not exactly from New Orleans,” she said.

“That is part of the reason we’re interested in you,” Pinkerton said. “You know the city, but you don’t have all of the relationships that might trip you up. And you know the river, which is our specific concern.”

“What makes you say that?” she said warily.

“Didn’t you grow up on a Mississippi riverboat?”

Josephine thrust out her chin. “And what of it?”

Pinkerton nodded at Gray, and the younger agent opened the carpetbag. He removed a few papers with handwritten notes, and a stack of telegrams on American Telegraph Company cards. Then he removed a black-lacquered box with a sc
ene of a landscape chiseled into the red-and-green-painted lid. The scene was a grand harbor, lined with jagged mountains and filled with Chinese junks.

She sprang to her feet and reached across the table. “Give me that!”

Gray snatched it up and held it out of reach. “Calm down, Miss
Breaux.”

“You stole that from my rooms!”

“We didn’t steal it,” Pinkerton said. “To maintain the fiction, we told your landlady you’d been expelled from the city. We simply collected your belongings so Mrs. Mills wouldn’t sell them.”

“That’s pure fimble-famble. That box was hidden behind the wainscot, which means you tore my rooms apart. Did you steal everything? Where’s my money?”

“Everything is here,” Gray said, “and you will get it back in due time.”

“That time is now.”

Nevertheless, she sat, fuming that her possessions had been violated, but she was still under their power, disgraced and evicted.

Gray opened the chest. He removed a stack of banknotes and set them on the table, plus a dozen twenty-dollar gold double eagles. He stacked the coins on top of each other, then ran his thumb across the banknotes.

Gray whistled, as if seeing it for the first time, although she had little doubt that these men had counted every last dollar. “That’s quite a tidy sum.”

While his fellow agent pawed over Josephine’s money, Pinkerton packed more tobacco into his pipe and relit it. “How old are you, Miss Breaux?”

“Twenty-four.”

“That is a lot of money for a young woman to possess, especially one with such an interesting background. Three thousand eight hundred dollars. Mr. Gray’s salary is six dollars a day, plus expenses. How long would one have to work and save to accumulate so much money? You have been in Washington for how long? Three years?”

“What are you driving at?”

Pinkerton puffed and cast a glance at Gray. These two men were working her over in an interrogation that was growing increasingly invasive, clearly designed to break down her protective barriers.

“We have reason to believe you are younger than you claim,” Gray said.

“I am not. Anyway, what does that matter?”

“It is suspicious enough for a woman who arrived in Washington at the age of twenty-one to be in possession of three thousand eight hundred dollars in ready money. It is another thing for a girl of eighteen to arrive with those resources.”

“And you have deduced all of this since this afternoon?” she asked. “That I am three years younger than I claim and that I arrived in Washington with this money instead of earning it here? Pretty clever work if you only just came into possession of that box. Or had you already broken into my rooms and rifled through my possessions?”

“We won’t insult your intelligence with lies,” Pinkerton said. “Of course we have been watching you for some time. Ever since
Joseph
Breaux interviewed Jeff Davis three weeks ago.”

“That story didn’t earn me as much attention as I had hoped,” she admitted. “People thought I was embellishing all those things Davis told me.”

“We didn’t,” Pinkerton said. “Certain details rang all too true. Once we had our eye on you, it didn’t take much digging to turn up the truth.”

“And even less work to put that weasel from the
Washington Standard
on the story. Which one of you did that?” She turned to Gray. “Was that you? I hope you appreciate the humiliation I suffered.”

“That was an unfortunate turn of events,” Pinkerton said. “But once it happened, we knew we had to move quickly.”

She held out her hand. “Can I have my chest back now? It’s from Shanghai and a hundred years old, and I don’t want you breaking it.”

Gray didn’t obey, but reached his hand into Josephine’s Oriental chest, and she winced, wondering what he would bring up next. She’d received that box at the age of thirteen and had stored all manner of keepsakes and mementos inside. Some had been valuable, others were merely sentimental, and several were embarrassing.

He took out two photographs and set them on the table. Josephine remembered posing for them each, remaining still for what had seemed an eternity, while the sun sent sweat trickling down her face. Then the photographer retreated to his wagon to work in darkness, emerging later, smelling of chemicals, with the picture lacquered onto tin and protected with glass cemented on top with a transparent balsam resin. That she had not one, but two photographic recollections of her childhood was unusual. That they had survived the upheavals of her life was nearly miraculous. Yet on more than one occasion she had considered smashing the glass and destroying them.

“The girl in each of these photos is you?” Gray asked.

“I was an awkward child.”

“I don’t see that. But I do see a girl of nine or ten here, and perhaps thirteen in this picture.”

“And?”

“Is this woman your mother?”

Josephine looked at the picture. She’d stared at it hundreds of times, could picture it in her mind with little trouble. But she saw it now as if for the first time. A young, gawky girl of eight, standing on the deck of a riverboat steamer next to a woman in a sequined dress, who showed too much leg and wore too much face paint. The girl, jutting her chin forward, a defiant gleam in her eyes. The mother, still beautiful and glamorous and only in her midtwenties, a coquettish look on her face.

“I’m not answering the question.”

“The question doesn’t need an answer,” Pinkerton said. “The eyes are the same, as is the nose. This woman is evidently your mother. She must have been young when she had you—sixteen or seventeen.”

“She was a professional riverboat dancer. Not what you’re implying.”

“Nobody is implying anything.”

Josephine fixed her gaze on Pinkerton. “What did you say about insulting my intelligence with lies?”

The older of the two men didn’t look ashamed, merely puffed again at his pipe and nodded for his fellow agent to continue.

“And is this one your father?” Gray asked. He showed the second photo.

In this one, Josephine was older, in that awkward stage between childhood and womanhood, when she’d felt all arms and legs, like a bony scarecrow. In spite of how she looked, and what came shortly after, that had been a time that she now regretted passing. Her mind had been older, sharper, and she could understand the world, but she had not yet filled out and started drawing unwanted attention.

“Is he?” Gray pressed. “It is harder to tell if there’s a resemblance—
the man’s face is blurry.”

“He’s blurry because he didn’t want to stand still. Anyway, I don’t know the answer to your question. We called him the Colonel.”

This admission hung in the air a long moment without comment. What did it say that Josephine didn’t know the answer to such a simple question? Was he, or was he not her father?

“You were traveling on a boat by the name of
Cairo Red
,” Gray said. “There’s plenty of evidence for it in your box—passenger tickets, a letter from your mother that mentions it—”

Josephine’s face flushed. “You read that? Have you no honor, Mr. Gray?”

For once, the man looked ashamed, and avoided meeting her gaze, but glanced instead to Pinkerton for guidance.

“Go on,” Pinkerton told the younger man.

Gray nodded and turned back to Josephine. “But the boat in the photo isn’t
Cairo Red.
This is a boat named
Crescent Queen.
We know this because
Crescent Queen
is currently in Memphis, being outfitted with guns to serve in the Confederate navy, and we were able to identify it.”

Josephine forced the emotion from her voice. “I lived on
Crescent Queen
for most of my childhood. There was trouble. The last few years I spent on
Cairo Red
.”

“What kind of trouble?” Pinkerton asked.

“Never mind,” she said abruptly, as more memories came to the surface, like a Mississippi eddy swirling up a dead body from the muddy depths. “My mother had an opportunity on
Cairo Red
, so we took it.”

“I’ve sent out inquiries about
Cairo Red
,” Pinkerton said. “We’re collecting information about all shipping on the river. But as of yet I have no information on the boat. Perhaps you could tell us more.”

“I’d rather not. You’ll get your answer soon enough. Suffice it to say that she is no longer sailing the Mississippi.”