He called to the ambulance driver,” Are you taking them to General Hospital Number Twelve?”
“No, sir, I got to go on to Chimborazo,” the driver said. “Number Twelve’s full up.” He clucked to his horses, flicked the reins. The ambulance sped up. So did the cries from inside it. Lee’s heart went out to those poor hurt souls. Chimborazo Military Hospital, out on the eastern edge of town, was twice as far from Capitol Square as Military Hospital Number Twelve, which meant they would have twice the jolting journey to endure.
It also meant the butcher’s bill in the square was small only by comparison to a stand-up fight during the Second American Revolution. General Hospital Number Twelve could take in more than a hundred people. If it was already filled…He wondered just how many wounded had had to go to Chimborazo. He promised himself the Rivington men would pay for every one.
He started to go up to the covered platform on which he’d taken his oath of office, but stopped when he saw the dead and injured had been taken away. Only the bloody rills that ran down the timbers of the front and sides told of the chaos that had reigned here a few hours before.
He wondered where they had taken Mary. He wanted to see her, to say how sorry he was for inviting her up onto the stand, to say good-bye. No time now. He hoped she would know without his telling her. She was often sharp-tempered; with her endless bodily afflictions, who could blame her? But after thirty-seven years, she knew him—had known him, he corrected himself, still not truly believing it in his heart—about as well as one person can know another.
The bodies of the five men who had accompanied Konrad de Buys still lay where they had fallen. They were not a pretty sight. All but one had been shot in the head; the sole exception, who looked absurdly peaceful by comparison to his comrades, had bled to death from a thigh wound.
Rips in coats and shirts told of other rounds that had struck without doing damage. Lee’s lips thinned—they’d all been armored like de Buys. No wonder they’d been so hard to bring down. With that armor, maybe they’d thought they could escape once they’d done their murderous work. If so, they’d proved mistaken, there as elsewhere.
None of the assassins still gripped his UZI. Lee hoped that meant the guns had been taken to someone responsible—with luck, to Josiah Gorgas, who would no doubt be delighted to have such fascinating new toys to play with. And if not, well, if not, a thief would be able to use the UZIs only until they ran out of ammunition.
“Where now, sir?” one of the bandsmen asked when Lee shifted his direction again.
“To the offices of America Will Break,” he said in a voice like stone.
The corner of Franklin and Ninth was another scene whose like Lee had not known since the war. As in Capitol Square, physicians and ambulances swarmed liked bees. Bullet holes scarred and pitted the face of Mechanic’s Hall. A Confederate soldier shot through the head hung half in, half out of one window. Across the street was an identically dead, identically placed Rivington man.
The headquarters of America Will Break had taken far worse damage than Mechanic’s Hall; the twelve-pounder shot had blown several gaping holes in its brick and marble front. Only blind luck the building didn’t go up inflames, Lee thought. Fire spread so easily and was so hard to fight. He remembered the charred Richmond of the Picture History of the Civil War, and had to shiver. That disaster could have happened here.
He pointed to the roof, above which the red, white, and black AWB flag still flew. “Someone cut that down at once.”
A couple of soldiers hurried off to do his bidding. One of them said, “We ought to save it with our captured Yankee battle flags.” That had not occurred to Lee; he’d simply wanted the hateful banner cast on the rubbish heap. But the soldier had a point. The Confederacy had won a battle here, but the cost, the cost…
Lee followed the men into the building, looked around curiously. Part of the curiosity sprang from his never having been here before; the Rivington men had come to him rather than he to them. But some of his curiosity was also professionaclass="underline" here he had the chance to learn what hard combat inside a building did to it. He shook his head, not liking what he saw.
The trail of blood and crumpled bodies led him to the suite of offices America Will Break had used. Corpses in Confederate gray far outnumbered those in mottled green; the Rivington men had fought like devils—or perhaps they had simply preferred dying in action to the gallows. Brass cartridge cases clinked, an incongruously cheerful sound, as Lee kicked them out of his path.
A door had painted upon it AMERICA WILL BREAK and the organization’s three-pronged insignia. Lee stepped over two bodies in gray and one in green, walked inside. The fellow whose head and torso he had seen from the street had fought from a window here. Bullets had chewed up the wall opposite that window; the picture that hung there was no longer recognizable.
One of the bandsmen who guarded Lee looked around and said, “Take away the dead men and it ain’t so very peculiar, is it?”
He was right; shorn of carnage, the offices of America Will Break might have housed any fair-sized business or trading establishment. Lee did not know quite what he’d expected. Perhaps, knowing what he knew about the Rivington men, he’d looked for the future to have impinged more visibly on their operation. But the desks, the chairs, the cabinets full of papers here seemed at first glance no different from those in the War Department across the street. Those papers would have to be examined, of course, but their home appeared utterly ordinary.
“You’d reckon anybody nasty enough to do what these bastards done ought to have a place that looks worse’n this,” the guard went on.
“That’s so,” Lee said thoughtfully. The bandsman, whose every word declared his lack of education, had nonetheless touched an important truth. Evil, to Lee’s way of looking at things, ought to declare itself openly, to appear as foul as it was in fact. But the headquarters of America Will Break, a group that stopped at nothing, not even indiscriminate murder, to achieve its ends, had for the eye, at least, no taint. Somehow the semblance of normality made even worse the evil it contained.
Lee strode from room to room within the suite. All the furnishings were like those of the chamber through which he’d entered, which is to say, unmemorable. But unmemorable men could not have plotted such hideously memorable deeds.
At last Lee came to a door before which several soldiers stood. “It’s locked, sir,” one said. “We put a shoulder to it, but it don’t want to move.”
Excitement flowered within Lee—was this the Rivington men’s sanctum sanctorum? “Send for a locksmith, then, if you have not already done so,” he said. The soldier hurried away. Lee examined the doorknob. Here at last was something unfamiliar: its shape was like none he had ever seen. He wondered what luck the locksmith would have with it. The door was painted with a smooth coat of gray enamel. He rapped it. It was metallically cold, metallically hard, and gave not at all.
Jingling with tools, the locksmith arrived around half past six, and set to work at once. Five days later, despite his efforts, those of the best burglar in Richmond (released from jail to test his expertise), and a team of men armed with a stout ram, the door remained closed.
Once more, Lee found himself awash in telegrams. He would willingly have forgone the flood of sympathy, and indeed, were it possible, would have’ forgone the telegrams that had announced his election and set in train that bloody March 4.
From the flood, though, came a few messages he cherished. One, from Springfield, Illinois, in the U.S.A., said simply,