Quincannon said nothing. He knew what was coming.
“I would go to Silver City myself if I could, but I’m needed here. And Greenspan hasn’t enough experience. You’re the only man I can send; next to me, you’re the best operative in this part of the country.” There was no false modesty in Boggs; he knew his talents and was not chary about expressing them to others. “Or you were once,” he went on pointedly. “If this were twelve months ago I would have no qualms. None at all. But now…”
“Do you expect me to burrow up in Silver City with a keg of whiskey?” Quincannon asked.
“Of course not. But a steady consumption of liquor distorts a man’s judgment, slows his reflexes, makes him prone to mistakes.”
“I won’t make any mistakes.”
“You might if you continue to drink as you have this past year.”
“What is it you want, Mr. Boggs? My promise not to use whiskey while I’m in Silver City?”
“Yes.”
“Then you have it.”
Boggs looked surprised. “On your word of honor as a gentleman and an employee of the Service?”
“On my word of honor.”
This seemed to relieve Boggs and thus put a quick end to what might otherwise have been a lengthy lecture. They spent the next few minutes settling on Quincannon’s assumed name and occupation — Andrew Lyons, patent medicine drummer, an alias and a cover he had used before — and on other matters relative to his mission. Then Quincannon left to return to his rooms, pack a bag, wait for a messenger to deliver a sample case of patent medicine, and then to proceed by ferry to the Oakland railroad depot.
But he made one stop on his way home, at a Market Street saloon not far from the Mint, where he took two whiskeys. He would have another drink in his rooms, and one on the ferry, and one at the depot, and several on the train, and more in Boise and Nampa — and as much as he needed in Silver City. He could not stop drinking there, any more than he could stop here; he had no desire to quit, because sobriety meant confronting the shrieking ghost of Katherine Bennett and that in turn meant madness. He had willfully lied to Boggs and he felt no remorse for having done so. “On my word of honor,” he had said. But there was no honor left to him; he had lost it forever. So what did it matter if he added “liar” to what he already was?
And what he was, plain and simple, was a murderer. The murderer of Katherine Bennett, a twenty-year-old woman innocent of any crime and eight months pregnant, who had died screaming with his bullet in her stomach.
Chapter 3
Idaho had changed considerably since the last time Qnin-cannon had been there, nine years ago on a case involving broken-bank bills — notes drawn on a bank that had suspended operation. Back then, in 1884, Boise had been a quiet little town just beginning to grow. Rail service had just been extended all the way across southern Idaho, ending the area’s isolation: prior to that year, more than two hundred miles in any direction separated Boise from the nearest railhead or steamboat. The railroads had opened up the area to settlement, with the result that the rich soil of the Snake River Valley now burgeoned with farms and Boise itself had grown into a city of more than four thousand.
Rail tracks had recently been laid into the town proper, and it was at a brand new depot that the Central Pacific train from Portland delivered Quincannon on Sunday afternoon, two days after his departure from San Francisco. He made arrangements there for passage to Nampa on the Idaho Central, found he had a wait of two hours before the next train, and used that time to find a saloon and slake his thirst with two large whiskeys and a glass of beer. He also bought a bottle of whiskey to take with him; the two he had brought from California were empty, and his pocket flask was nearly so.
It was dusk when he arrived in Nampa, a hamlet still in its infancy that had sprung up along the Oregon Short Line railroad connecting Wyoming with Bear River and the Snake River Valley. The weather was some warmer here than in Boise — a welcome change from the dreary early-fall rains that drenched northern California. He sought out the stage depot, but it was closed for the day. A schedule in its front window told him that the coach to Silver City departed at nine in the morning.
There was a hotel in Nampa, if it could be dignified by that term; but Quincannon cared nothing for comfort any more. He took a room for the night, drew the shade, had his customary nightcap, and took himself to bed.
But sleep eluded him, as it sometimes did when he was traveling. After a time, restless, he lighted the lamp and tried to read the volume of poems by Emily Dickinson from his warbag. He had three-score volumes of poetry in his rooms in San Francisco, given to him by his mother, and he habitually took one with him on his trips. He had seldom opened any during the past year, but still he packed one. Old habits, good habits, died hard.
I took my power in my hand
And went against the world;
”Twas not so much as David had,
But I was twice as bold.
I aimed my pebble, but myself
Was all the one that fell.
Was it Goliath was too large,
Or only I too small?
He put the book aside, reached for the bottle to pour himself another drink. Poetry. Once he had loved it, just as his mother had; now there was too much meaning in most of it, too many reminders of what he had done and what he was.
He was glad his mother had not lived to hear about Katherine Bennett. She had died much too young, of a disease that had left her withered and riddled with pain. Not that pain had been a stranger to her. A gentlewoman, Margaret Cullen Quincannon, a product of the Virginia aristocracy who had fought on the wrong side during the Civil War and had never been able to reconcile their losses. Life had been good to her before the hostilities; she had married a handsome Scot from Washington, moved to the capital, had a son, sipped cordials and broken bread with heads of state. But then the war had come, and while her loyalties were with the South, her staunchly pro-Union husband had forced her to stay in Washington, in the midst of the Northern effort to crush the Confederacy. One of her brothers had been killed at Bull Run; her father had died of apoplexy shortly before Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. The laughter and joy of her youth turned to sorrow and melancholy, to the pain that had stayed with her, growing, for the rest of her days.
She had died bewildered, had Margaret Cullen Quincannon. With nothing left to her but faded memories of a time of gentility that had become a time of blood — and her pride in her only son’s success as a detective, first with his father’s Washington agency, where he had begun work as a runner and office boy at the age of seventeen, and then with the Secret Service. If she had known about Katherine Bennett, it would have shaken that pride and caused her even more pain.
Thomas L. Quincannon would not have understood either, if he were still alive; if an assassin’s bullet had not cut him down on the Baltimore docks eleven months after the death of his wife. A stone-hard man, his father; stubborn, unyielding. A man of principle. The rival of Pinkerton, the better of Pinkerton to hear him tell it. And a damned old fool who had believed himself invincible, who should not have been on the Baltimore docks the night he was shot, who should have been home in bed like other stout and gout-ridden men his age.
“You shot a pregnant woman by accident,” he would have said to his son, “in the performance of your sworn duty to the government of your country. It was unavoidable. Unfortunate, of course, but nonetheless an accident. Put it behind you, John. Forget it. There is no purpose in remorse. What is done is done and cannot be undone.” No, Thomas Quincannon would not have understood at all.
Quincannon had taken his father’s profession, had worked with his father, had inherited his father’s ability for detective work. But inside, at the core of him, he was his mother’s son.
He awoke at dawn with a throbbing head and a queasy stomach: it had taken two more drinks to bring him the temporary oblivion of sleep. He took another now, to still the inner trembling, and then doused his head with water from the bureau pitcher, dressed, packed his warbag. Downstairs in the dining room, he forced himself to eat
