Back Bay (6 page)

“Exquisite,” whispered Pratt.

“That’s it?” Sally Korbel was amazed. “No shit?”

“None whatsoever.”

She grabbed the sampler. “You’d better come up with fifteen hundred if you want it, mister. If you can pay a thousand for this, you can pay two.”

Pratt had been expecting that. He haggled with her and eventually paid another thousand dollars for the sampler. He didn’t tell her that he would have paid fifty if she’d held out for it.

“I hope your wife likes it, Mr. Weatherman.”

“Nothing could make her happier.”

Mr. Soames was waiting when Pratt returned to the suite.

“Book the next flight, Bennett.”

“You were successful?”

Pratt flipped the sampler to Soames, who read the lines and smiled.

Sally Korbel felt great. In three hours, she had made nearly two thousand dollars and spread her legs just once. She poured a vodka on the rocks and studied her appointment book. She had three
more tricks, regulars, before eleven. Wednesday was her busy day. She wanted to cancel them and spend the rest of the night with her girlfriend Maria. But good call girls never turn down the regulars who tip well. She showered and went back to work.

That night, she cleared three hundred dollars. At eleven o’clock, she returned to her apartment with a bottle of champagne under her arm and an ounce of cocaine in her purse. She hoped that Maria would be awake when she called. She let herself into the apartment and fumbled for the light switch. She never found it.

The door slammed behind her and something slammed her against the wall. She dropped the champagne, but the bottle didn’t break. She smelled perfume and wondered what kind of freak wore Shalimar when he robbed a working girl. Then a silk stocking closed around her neck, and she knew it was one of her own. She sprinkled them with perfume every week.

She tried to scream, but the sound was caught. She reached for the letter opener. Too far. She elbowed the body in the ribs. She tried to kick free. The silk was drawn tight around her throat. She heard something pop. The champagne blew its cork across the room.

Thirty thousand feet over Nevada, Philip Pratt sipped Scotch and read
Business Week
as American Flight 5 streaked to Boston.

It was closing time in the Sixpence, a basement bar with low ceilings, cramped tables, and countless violations of the fire code. The Sixpence was a favorite spot with Harvard people, and Fallon had been drinking there since his freshman year.

He sat at the end of the bar while Hank Miller, owner and bartender, served the last call. He opened DL’s letter and placed it in front of him. He had been thinking about it all night. It was puzzling, cryptic, completely unlike Pratt’s usual correspondence. He wanted to investigate the letter, and he wanted to learn something more about the contemporary Pratts, who seemed so secretive. After a few sips of beer, he told himself that he had no right to invade other people’s privacy and the letter probably meant nothing. Its references—DL, the Eagle, Gravelly Point—might even be
explained in his high-school text. Moreover, he imagined that Pratt would have been more careful about burning the letter, had it contained anything incriminating.

Fallon folded the letter, put it in his pocket, and finished his beer. For a while, he stared into the bottom of the glass and tried not to think. Then he took out the letter and opened it again.

“You been lookin’ at that thing all night, Peter. What the hell is it?” asked Miller.

“A puzzle.”

“You want another beer?”

Fallon nodded and began to study the letter. It was a distraction he didn’t need. He was trying to finish his dissertation by the end of September. Then, armed with a Harvard B.A. and a Ph.D. in history, he would hit the streets. He had applied for teaching positions at sixty-five university history departments. There were twelve openings, and he had received two offers: one from an agricultural school in Minnesota, the other from a Fundamentalist college that boasted of its basketball team and banned alcohol, dancing, and unmarried sex for anyone connected with the institution. And no one had offered him tenure. After three years in history, he was telling himself that he should have gone to law school.

He decided he needed a bender, a full-scale drunk to clear his head and keep him writing until the dissertation was done. He folded the note and put it in his pocket. He resolved that he would not look at it again.

“Hey, Hank, bring me a Jameson’s first, then the beer.”

“You sure?” asked the bartender.

Fallon nodded.

“I guess it must be early June, then.” Miller poured the Irish whiskey. “You know how I can tell?”

“How?” Fallon downed the shot.

“You order a boilermaker the first week of every other month. I can set my watch to it. These things’ll kill you.”

“Occasionally I need some lubrication.” Fallon gulped the beer and left. After six beers and a shot, he was beginning to feel numb. He would know he’d had enough when he stopped thinking about the Pratts, “the Eagle,” and “DL.”

August 1814

D
exter Lovell found the First Lady in the northeast bedroom. Although the door was open, he knocked softly.

“Come in, Dexter.” Dolley Madison stood by an open window and studied the horizon through a spyglass.

“The dinner is ready, ma’am, and I’ve set out iced ale and Madeira, should you want a dram to ward off the heat.” He was a rangy figure with high cheekbones and gray hair that he tied, in the Revolutionary style, at the collar. Although he wore a white livery and knee breeches, he looked more like a seaman than a servant, and he spoke with a Cockney accent.

“I’ll await the President, Dexter. We may be stifling, but it’s a good deal hotter wherever he is at the moment.”

The sound of artillery fire rolled across Washington like distant thunder. Mrs. Madison shuddered and turned again to the window. In four days, thought Lovell, she had grown old. A large woman in her mid-forties, she wore a shapeless cotton dress that emphasized her bulk, and the lines in her face had deepened with worry.

“We’re losing, aren’t we, ma’am?”

She handed him the glass. “See for yourself.”

Six miles away, in a hamlet called Bladensburg, two thousand British regulars were routing an American force three times their size. From the windows of the President’s Mansion, Lovell saw the smoke and dust that hung above the battle like heat haze, and he heard the faint sounds of rifle fire carried on the breeze.

On the other side of Washington, across the mud and swamps and impassable thickets that separated the President’s Mansion from the rest of the city, he saw the American Militia straggling back from Bladensburg. Their return had incited a panic. The citizens of Washington had packed what they could carry onto wagons and carts, and they were pouring by the hundreds up
Pennsylvania Avenue, past the Mansion, and off into the safety of the Virginia countryside.

“They look like the Jews fleeing Egypt,” said Lovell.

“The Jews wanted to leave.”

A rider galloped up the drive. It was Jim Smith, President Madison’s freedman, waving wildly and hollering to Mrs. Madison.

“Men bringing good news don’t ride like that, ma’am,” said Lovell.

“We’ve lost! The President says clear out! Clear out!” Smith bellowed.

“I’ll have that Madeira now, Dexter, then I think we should start packing.” Dolley Madison left Lovell by the window and went downstairs.

Lovell stared at the caravan streaming past and at the turbulent sky above Bladensburg. His moment had arrived.

He took an envelope from Mrs. Madison’s desk. It carried the words “By Presidential Courier” on the front and Madison’s signature on the flap. The President had signed several envelopes and left them with his wife, so that she might communicate efficiently while he was with the troops.

Lovell addressed the letter to Horace Taylor Pratt, his old friend in Boston.

He signed his initials in flowing script and folded the letter, sealing it with a drop of hot wax and the President’s stamp.

Downstairs, Dolley Madison was directing the evacuation. Her sister and brother-in-law loaded a wagon with china, silverware, and books. Mrs. Madison and Charles Carrol, a family friend, stripped the Oval Room of its red velvet draperies. Jacob Barker and Robert de Peyster, businessmen from New York, loaded the President’s
papers. In the dining room, Jean Sioussa, the President’s doorkeeper, and household gardener Tom Magraw struggled to remove the Gilbert Stuart portrait of Washington, which was screwed to the wall and would not come loose.

Descending the staircase, Lovell spied John Peel, one of the President’s couriers, leaving in the confusion. Lovell followed him into the sunshine. “Mrs. Madison told me to give this to you. See that it gets to Baltimore as quick as possible.”

Peel noted the President’s signature on the envelope and stuffed it into his pouch. By coast, the trip to Boston took eleven days. Through the network of military couriers set up during the war, a letter might reach Boston in four. John mounted and galloped off through the traffic pouring up Pennsylvania Avenue. From Baltimore, another courier would take the dispatch to a military outpost in Wilmington, Delaware, then on to Philadelphia and up the chain to Boston.

Lovell returned to the foyer and saw Jean Sioussa rushing toward the dining room with an ax. Known as French John, Sioussa was a stocky man with a cheerful disposition and a bald head that made him look like a monk. He was in charge of the President’s household staff, and he stopped when he noticed Lovell.

“Have you loaded the plate?” he asked in a thick French accent.

“Not yet.”

“Then hurry up. Mrs. Madison will not leave until everything we can carry is on the road, and I want her out of here in twenty minutes.”

“We need that ax, French John!” Dolley Madison shouted from the dining room, and Sioussa hurried off to her aid.

Lovell grabbed Thomas Jefferson Grew, a Jamaican freedman who worked on the grounds. He gave Grew the keys to the cabinet in the small dining room and instructed him to begin packing the silver and gold plate.

“You leavin’ dis job all to me?” asked Grew, aware of the responsibility the white man was giving him.

“I’ll be along to ’elp you in a minute.”

Grew smiled. “Ain’t no white man gonna give Jeff Grew the keys
to the gold and say ‘Do it yourself.’ No, sir. Well, Dexter Lovell, you be along in a minute. I be here.”

Lovell wanted to crack the nigger across the face. Grew was the most arrogant freedman he had ever met, but there was no time now to teach him his place. “Get your arse to work, or we’ll leave you ’ere for the British.”

Grew continued to smile. “I like the British, Dexter Lovell. Talk too much about ’em, I be wantin’ to stay.”

Lovell turned and headed for the dining room, where French John was swinging the ax at the frame around Washington’s portrait. Mrs. Madison quivered with every blow.

“Hurry up, John,” said Magraw, who could smell the British a few miles away.

“Take as much time as you need,” said Dolley Madison. “I’m too old to be raped, and the British are too civilized to set a woman on fire.”

“I’m not too sure about that, Madame,” said Sioussa.

Lovell tried to approach the group very quietly. The Golden Eagle Tea Set was displayed on a cart beneath Washington’s portrait, and it had been rolled aside to give Sioussa room to work. Lovell hoped to remove it without attracting attention.

“Dexter,” cried Dolley Madison before he was halfway across the room. “We mustn’t forget Paul Revere in our haste to save Gilbert Stuart.” She grabbed the cart and pushed it toward him. “Take good care of this.”

“Mrs. Madison!” screamed French John, “We’ve done it!”

Dolley Madison turned again to the painting. “Treat it like a child.”

Still in its wooden stretcher, the canvas slid free from the frame as Lovell wheeled the tea set out of the room. He put it on the dumbwaiter in the hallway and sent it downstairs. The kitchen was deserted. A pot of stew bubbled on the stove and coffee was brewing for the President’s return, but all the servants were loading wagons or fleeing to Virginia. Lovell rolled the cart into a broom closet and locked it with the master key.

Then, he pulled two heavy strongboxes from the storage room. Inside one box, two thicknesses of oak and another of copper protected the velvet compartments which would hold the tea set.
The other box had no lining, but was of similar size and shape. Lovell filled the unlined box with pewter utensils and the few silver pieces he found in the kitchen. He locked the box and dragged it toward the dumbwaiter.

“Dexter.” Thomas Jefferson Grew’s deep voice startled Lovell, and he nearly dropped the box. “Gimme dat thing, Dexter. You be too old. Be lettin’ dat damn thing fall on your foot.” Grew was six feet tall and solid muscle. Lovell was fifty-six and glad for the help.

“Dis be dat fancy tea set?”

“Aye.”

Grew noticed the second box lying by the broom closet. “What’s in dat box?”

“Nothing,” snapped Lovell. “We won’t be needin’ it.”

Grew could feel Lovell bristling. “You mean you carry dat heavy damn thing in here for nothin’? Not too smart, Dexter Lovell. Not too smart.”

“I said we won’t be needin’ it. Now move.”

The black studied Lovell for a moment, smiled cannily, and threw the strongbox onto the dumbwaiter.

Lovell made certain that Mrs. Madison saw the strongbox loaded onto a wagon. He hoped that later, she might think the Golden Eagle had left the mansion with her caravan and been lost en route, or that the wrong box was accidentally loaded and the tea set left behind for the British. If the ruse cast suspicion away from him for a few hours, Lovell would be satisfied. After that, he would never be seen in Washington again.

In the hour between Jim Smith’s arrival and Mrs. Madison’s departure, a dozen soldiers stopped at the mansion to offer their help before joining the flight. And each one brought news of the battle. The British were entering the city. They were still an hour from Washington. The President had ridden off without escort and galloped straight into the arms of the enemy. He and his entourage were hastening home and could be expected at any moment. Dolley Madison wanted to wait for her husband, but reports of the battle were so unreliable that she had little choice but to believe the worst. At four in
the afternoon, she left with her carriage and two wagons full of belongings.