The Murder of Willie Lincoln Read online

  Poor Willie Lincoln

  There was one named Barabbas,

  who had committed murder

  in the insurrection.

  He read the note four or five times. Hay’s relationship with the Scriptures was incurious at best. But no one could live for long in any hamlet in the West without acquiring at least a passing acquaintance. Hay knew Barabbas as the bandit whom the crowd of Jews had chosen to free from crucifixion, in Jesus’ stead. Hay remembered nothing, however, about any insurrection, much less a …

  The noun caught in his throat. What could the note possibly mean about a … a … murder? Much less a murder in an…? Now, there was an insurrection; there was news of it night and day. What insurrection had Jesus known?

  Hay’s ignorance about such things was profound, but he knew who would know.

  * * *

  Thomas Stackpole sat slack-jawed by the president’s office door.

  “You still here, Mister Stackpole?” said Hay. Stupid question.

  Three hundred pounds of corpulence draped over the doorkeeper’s chair, but the heavy folds of his cheeks betrayed nary a quiver. His linen suit was laughably out of season; he reminded Hay of the white whale in that implausible yarn by the author of Typee and Omoo. Stackpole was usually sedentary, but he was agile when required. Now was not such a time.

  The door to Lincoln’s office was shut. Hay stepped toward it and raised his fist.

  “Not here,” Stackpole said in his sweet tenor.

  “Where, then?”

  Stackpole’s neck swiveled toward an indeterminate spot along the central hallway.

  Hay said, “Where?”

  “Where he passed.”

  It took Hay a moment to understand. Then he crossed through the double glass doors and down the hallway. A candle was lit at the far end. The silence seemed like midnight; his pocket watch said half past nine. The door to the Prince of Wales Room was open. Hay heard voices inside.

  A single lantern turned the purple wallpaper into the walls of a cavern. Mrs. Keckly stood by the foot of the bed. More than Mary Lincoln’s seamstress, the stately mulatto had become her aide-de-camp, even her friend. A blue-and-white bowl was in the crook of her arm, a soft cloth in her hand, tenderness on her face. She was bathing the elfin form outlined by the white linen sheet on the oversized bed. Hay remembered that Mrs. Keckly’s only child, George, had been killed just last August at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek, in Missouri.

  Lincoln was leaning over the bed, his back bowed at a painful angle. He lifted the covering and exposed his son’s face. The round cheeks were still wet; the lips looked lush. Lincoln’s gaze was earnest and long.

  “Oh, Madam Elizabeth,” Lincoln moaned. “My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so.” The president’s thin voice cracked. “It is hard, hard to have him die!”

  Lincoln buried his head in his hands, and his tall frame shook. Hay felt embarrassed at the nakedness, but Mrs. Keckly seemed serene.

  After the president regained his composure, Hay said quietly, “There is something I should show you, sir.”

  * * *

  Stackpole was gone from the president’s door. Lincoln lit a candle and took the low seat by the window. Hay unfolded the note, and the president gazed at it without a flicker of recognition, as if it were written in Mandarin. Hay took it back and read the message aloud.

  At the first three words—Poor Willie Lincoln—a shudder passed through the president, and with trepidation Hay recited the rest. He hardly needed the paper; he knew it by heart. There was one named Barabbas, who had committed murder in the insurrection. Lincoln stared through the window into the night.

  A minute passed, then a second, and Hay was wondering if he should leave when Lincoln, dry-eyed, said, “Mark fifteen-seven.”

  “Sorry, sir?”

  “The Gospel according to Mark, chapter fifteen, verse seven. The passage about Barabbas. Your father was remiss, I can see.”

  “In many ways, sir.”

  “‘And there was one named Barabbas, which lay bound with them that had made insurrection with him, who had committed murder in the insurrection.’”

  It always startled Hay how much of the Bible Lincoln had committed to memory. A benefit, he supposed, of a life devoid of burlesque.

  “What insurrection?” said Hay.

  “The rebellion of the Jews against the Romans. Barabbas was no common thief, nor an evil man. Not if you believe the Jews had a right to live free from Roman rule. Barabbas rebelled openly against Caesar—a brave man, he was—while Jesus preached his own path to the Almighty, peaceful but definitely traitorous. Subversives, both of them, and for their crimes they were sentenced to be crucified, side by side.”

  So, Barabbas was a rebel—a secesh, from the Roman empire. Hay said, “So why was Barabbas set free, and not Jesus?”

  “It was Passover, when the Jews celebrate their liberation as slaves in Egypt. As slaves! The custom was for one prisoner to be released. Pontius Pilate left it for the crowd to decide. Jesus was a man of peace, who posed no threat to Roman military might. But Barabbas was a Zealot, accused of murder, and thus beloved by the rebels in the crowd. So it was Barabbas they spared, the man of violence. The prince of peace they left to die on the cross.”

  “Who did he kill, Barabbas?”

  “Scripture says nothing. Not a Roman, or his fate would have been sealed. Another Jew, then. Probably a turncoat for Rome—a traitor to the Jews.”

  “Or a traitor’s son.”

  Lincoln winced. He pointed to the note in Hay’s hand and said, “Who sent this?”

  “No one.”

  Lincoln looked puzzled.

  “Nobody sent it. It was not sent. It was delivered—by hand.” Hay explained how he had found it shoved into his satchel. “No postage stamp. No postmark. Someone put it there.”

  A long pause. Then, in a voice soft yet firm, Lincoln said, “Find … out.”

  “Find out what?” said Hay, although he already knew.

  “Who put this”—Lincoln slapped at the foolscap—“into your satchel. And therefore who … might have…” His voice broke, and he turned his head away. “Tell me, John”—Hay was one of a handful of people whom Lincoln addressed by Christian name—“do you believe this is possible? That Willie was … was…?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  Lincoln’s prominent brow hid his eyes. “But it is possible, yes?”

  That Lincoln was seeking reassurance from him—Hay could not decide whether to feel flattered or frightened. Both. “Anything is,” Hay said.

  Then, in a lawyerly cadence, Lincoln asked him to keep the investigation secret from everyone but Nicolay or Allan Pinkerton. The Chicago detective had smuggled the president-elect into Washington City in the dead of night, past Baltimore’s murderous plug-uglies. “I know you dislike him,” Lincoln said—Hay did, though he could not recall saying so—“but he can help you. Pinkerton, Nicolay, others if you think it strictly necessary. Otherwise you would be wise to remember what people would think … in the South … yes, and in the North … if they thought that … that the president’s son had been…” Lincoln stopped, then continued in a raggedy voice. “The hatreds would grow even uglier, John. And where on this bloodstained earth would they ever end?”

  Silence again, and then Lincoln spoke in a different voice, flat in tone yet filled with suppressed emotion. “‘And so Pilate, willing to content the people, released Barabbas unto them, and delivered Jesus to be crucified.’ Mark, chapter fifteen, verse fifteen. Surely that one you know, John.”

  Hay recognized the jab as a jest and was relieved to hear it.

  “So, who is our Barabbas?” Lincoln said, more to himself than to Hay. “And who, pray tell, is our Jesus?”

  To that last question, Hay feared he knew the answer. He was staring up into his face.

  Chapter Two

  FRIDAY, FEBRUA
RY 21, 1862

  A tendril of nausea twisted through John Hay as he watched Nicolay slurp down a raw oyster. Hay had acquired a certain tolerance in Providence for unsightly seafood—but at breakfast? With steak and onions and pâté de fois gras? Too early in the season, thankfully, for robins on toast. The chefs at Willard’s Hotel ought to be ashamed. By all rights, Nicolay should be as fat as Winfield Scott, the old and gouty general who needed three strong soldiers to boost him onto his horse. But Nicolay remained thin almost to the point of emaciation—from his nervous disposition, no doubt. Even so, Hay knew whom to blame for Nicolay’s indulgence in Willard’s gustatory temptations: the Hell-cat. The rupture in their affection for Mary Lincoln—and hers for them—had driven the young aides from the table at the Executive Mansion. They took their meals at Willard’s instead, requiring a seven-minute stroll.

  Which suited Hay, unless the weather was rotten. Willard’s was the center of the known universe—the political universe, at least. Crossing the lush and pillared lobby, you might run into (or try to avoid) senators and visiting mayors and magnates and gamblers and wire-pullers for the railroads. Or even that pacifist, Julia Ward Howe, whose overwrought poem, “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” published in the latest Atlantic Monthly, had been scrawled in a room upstairs. The business of government, honest and otherwise, was transacted upon the rotunda’s mosaic floor. And military business as well, judging by the clumps of generals and fancifully attired men of the cavalry hobnobbing with the army’s suppliers and would-be suppliers over whiskey at the opulent bar; the fact that liquor was short in the capital (the best was distilled in the South) was forgotten until the tab came due. A crossroads of the capital and of the Union, Willard’s was jammed at most hours of the day or night.

  But not, blessedly, at a quarter past seven in the morning. The kitchen in the gentlemen’s dining room would not open until eight o’clock—except for Hay and Nicolay. They were expected. It was their custom to eat early, a Westerner’s advantage over the capital’s denizens who slept through the dawn. Ephraim had yawned, two buttons of his tunic still undone, and ushered them to the farthest corner of the cavernous room. Looking out across Fourteenth street at the ramshackle façades of Newspaper Row, they could converse without being overheard.

  “You should have fun with this, Johnny—it ought to appeal to all of your worst instincts,” Nicolay said. “But instead of going for the jugular, my suggestion is to start at the edges and work your way in. An old journalistic tactic.”

  Nicolay had begun as a printer’s devil at Pike County Free Press in western Illinois and wound up as the editor and owner, taking printing jobs for a perennial candidate named Lincoln.

  “Meaning?”

  “First, ask Old Edward if anyone unusual came in.”

  “Isn’t there always? The cabinet, are they not un…? Oh, I thought you said ‘unspeakable.’”

  Nicolay ignored the sophomoric humor. “Between the hours of five o’clock—you were in your office, yes, when Willie died? It was not in your satchel before five—you are certain?”

  “I never saw it there. Not that I looked. I have to assume so.”

  A look of triumph played across Nicolay’s face. “Johnny, how many times have I told you the first rule of…”

  “Of journalism is,” Hay joined in, and together they finished, “never assume.”

  “I cannot say for an absolute certainty,” Hay said, “but I”—to the extent that he could in a chair, he bowed—“think it is the case that the envelope was not in my satchel before five o’clock. Clear enough?”

  Ephraim brought a pot of coffee—the real stuff, nothing like the chicory or the swill of acorns or okra seeds the rebels drank, owing to the Union blockade.

  “And you noticed it when?” said Nicolay, once Ephraim was gone.

  “Around nine, I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  “Around nine.” Hay hated to feel stupid or, worse, imprecise in Nicolay’s presence. No doubt, Nicolay took note of Hay’s inaccuracies and mistakes. He kept track of everything; his mind was a machine. That was his value to Lincoln, beyond his judgment, unclouded by sentiment. Even so, Hay knew that Nicolay never judged him by the score. So Hay felt free to say whatever he liked, assured that any idiocy would be forgiven, if not forgotten. “From five o’clock ’til nine—four hours. Anyone could have entered the mansion and ventured up the stairs.”

  “Then ask Stackpole if he saw anyone enter your office from five until nine. To leave that note. Stackpole would be sitting right across from your door.”

  “Assuming … he was at his post,” Hay said. “And aware of his surroundings.”

  Hay nibbled at a hotcake.

  “And beyond the question of who,” Nicolay said, “is the question of why. Related, obviously. But still, why would anyone want to kill an eleven-year-old boy?”

  Hay was surprised he knew the answer, but he did. “He was a military target. The son of the commander in chief. If you harm the commander in chief, you harm the Union.”

  They waited until Ephraim removed their plates. Hay was relieved to see the oysters whisked away.

  “Or,” Nicolay said, “maybe it was not someone unusual. Maybe it was someone usual.”

  “Yes, maybe. Who was already inside. Who could enter my office without being noticed. Maybe because he entered it all the time, or from time to time. So that no one would think anything of it.”

  “Can we make a list of everyone who was in the mansion last night from five o’clock until nine?”

  “Can we?” said Hay.

  “Can you?”

  The sun slanted across the patched roofs of Newspaper Row and in through Willard’s high windows. Hay noticed a few straggles of gray in Nicolay’s sullen brown hair. Twenty-nine was awfully young for that, Hay thought. And there was his delicate health, and Therena’s absence, and the unrelenting work.

  “By piecing it together,” Hay said, “I suppose we could.”

  “Start with Old Edward. He knows everything. Sitting on the secrets of six presidents, he is.”

  “If Buchanan had any.”

  * * *

  They emerged from Willard’s onto Pennsylvania avenue just as the city was coming to life. The chilly sun struggled through the clouds for the first time in days. Hay squinted to his left. Fourteen blocks southeast, along the broad Avenue, the blurry outline of the decapitated Capitol shimmered in the winter’s air, hovering above the lines of leafless elms. Its old, piddling dome was gone, and war had caught the new, grander one when only a rim of it was built.

  The City of Magnificent Distances, it was called. Its clusters of grand public buildings were scattered along grand—usually muddy, often impassable—boulevards. The city, barely sixty years old, had never grown into itself, and Hay wondered if it ever would. Here and there a public building aspired to grandeur, surrounded by shanties and swamp and vacant land. Hay was mindful of another magnificent distance, between the city’s reality and its self-regard. He preferred Dickens’s witticism, during the English novelist’s American tour, about the City of Magnificent Intentions. There was something pathetic in the city’s allusions (and illusions) to the glory of ancient Rome, to the point of naming its Capitol and its Senate and, more ridiculously, the Tiber Creek, which had trickled from the Capitol westward along the national Mall, before it was made into a canal and open sewer. Indeed, the capital’s talent for not seeing the squalor on every side probably counted, Hay figured, as a national strength.

  Granted, Springfield was uncivilized, with its unpainted buildings and rustic ways, but it never (well, rarely) claimed to be more than it was. Here, pretense reigned. Not only the work masquerading as play, demeaning both. Aesthetics must be considered: The city was ugly as sin. Washington imagined itself a city, Hay had concluded, only because it was wicked. Well-endowed in the usual vices, especially while Congress was in town, plus the evils peculiar to a capital—political backstabbing, depravities of power, military
contracts and kickbacks. But it was less a city than a miserable, sprawling village—in truth, villages, each a huddle of row houses and slums, stinking alleys and backyard privies whose pleasures were carted nightly to a depository ten blockś north of the Executive Mansion.

  On the Avenue, an hour and a half past daybreak, an air of disorder had already taken hold. It was too early for the organ-grinders—the monkeys must still be asleep. But the vendors were brewing their coffee, roasting their chestnuts, spreading their selections of socks and scarves. Men in flashy silks—contractors, speculators, office seekers, peddlers of goods and persuasion—scooted into Willard’s to start their day of conversation and commerce. Top hats and bowlers vied for position with fedoras of beaver fur felt. On the wide sidewalk, a soldier nearly knocked over an amputee in a ragged blue coat hobbling past on a crutch. In every direction, soldiers ambled along in blue overcoats and trousers, aware that the military patrols never checked anyone’s papers early in the day. You could hardly fling a stone across the Avenue—this was the president’s quip—without striking a brigadier general or two.

  “You see the Ancient to-day?” said Hay.

  Nicolay nodded. Hay felt a pang of envy.

  “He is in fine whack, I suppose,” Hay said.

  “Actually, he seems to be. That man is an enigma. Melancholic when he ought to be joyful. Hopeful when he has every good reason to give up the ghost.”

  “Hopeful?” Hay exclaimed.

  Crossing Fifteenth street, a two-wheeled sulky and an ambulance nearly collided, splattering mud on Hay’s pantaloons. Damn! He would need to change clothes before to-night. At the opposite curb, the side of the Treasury building lined with gargantuan Ionic columns blocked their way. A lady unashamed of her gaiter boots picked through the slush, scattering two geese and a hog.

  A half block to the right, by the State Department’s dingy brick building, a left turn brought them back onto Pennsylvania avenue. Here, the sidewalks were broad, but business or pleasure was scarce. Black mud a foot high fouled the gutters. Hay’s long, loose overcoat swung open as he barreled along, his felt hat at a jaunty angle, his hands thrust into his pockets.