John Miller - The First Assassin

Rook kept looking across the street. He and the other watchers would have seen anybody who stood beside one of the windows or passed by it. The only exception was Mazorca’s room, where the curtains were shut. They were open everywhere else.

Why were his closed? The day before, when Rook was in the room, they had been left slightly open. The only time Rook had ever closed a curtain in the middle of the day was to sleep. If Mazorca was dozing, he might be secured without a fight.

Rook mulled it over and decided to act on what his gut was telling him to do. “We’re done waiting,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

Polly brightened when the soldier waved to her on Pennsylvania Avenue, outside Willard’s Hotel. She might have worked for Violet Grenier, who could say all kinds of terrible things about federal men, but Polly rather liked how they looked in their blue uniforms. The idea that one of them had actually noticed her made her heart beat a little faster.

“Hello, ma’am,” said the soldier, a private who was about Polly’s age.

Polly smiled coyly. “Hello,” she replied.

“May I show you something?” He held out a card.

It was a peculiar approach, but she had no intention of complaining. She took the card and realized that it was not a card at all but rather a photograph. Polly owned several about the same size. They were mostly pictures of handsome actors who toured the country and occasionally came to Washington.

The image was not sharp. Polly could tell it had not been taken in a studio. It certainly did not appear posed. A man was in the center of it, viewed in profile. His ear was disfigured. It did not make him ugly, but he sure was not as fine looking as the men Polly had admired from the balcony at Ford’s Theatre.

“Have you seen this man?” asked the private.

Disappointment washed over her. The soldier was not interested in her but in what she might know. This was not a casual rendezvous. That was all right, she realized, because he was not as handsome as her favorite actors either.

She looked down at the picture again. “No, I’m afraid not.” She tried to hand it back to him.

“Keep it,” he said. “I’ve got a whole stack, and I’m supposed to get rid of them all.” Polly saw that he held about a hundred of them in his other hand. “Take it back home. Anybody who has seen this man should report to the Winder Building as quickly as possible. He may be dangerous.”

“Okay,” said Polly. She tucked away the photo. “You be careful,” she said as she walked away.

“Yes, ma’am. I will,” said the private. He winked at her and smiled.

Polly decided that he was not bad looking after all. She would have to find an excuse to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue again soon.

In the middle of a weekday afternoon, H Street did not exactly hum with activity-and Rook waited until it was positively deserted before he crossed it from the apothecary’s shop. Six uniformed soldiers followed him, and they made directly for Tabard’s boardinghouse. Anybody watching them would have understood that it was not a social visit.

The door to Tabard’s was unlocked. Rook pushed it open, removing a pistol from his holster at the same time. The soldiers gripped their own guns. Even though H Street was empty, they had not wanted to draw their weapons until they were actually entering the building. To their backs, above the apothecary’s shop, a pair of soldiers leaned out of a third-story window and aimed their Sharps rifles. Several other soldiers were positioned at the intersections of Sixth and Seventh streets, and a few more guarded the alley in the rear. The boardinghouse was surrounded by armed men.

The door swung open. The foyer was vacant except for a rug on the floor and a few small pieces of furniture pushed against a wall. Rook stepped inside and made straight for the staircase, without even a glance at the other rooms on the ground floor. This time, he did not bother with the key in the kitchen. There was nothing surreptitious about what he planned to do. Behind him, three soldiers spread out on the first floor. The other three went up the steps with him.

On the second floor, Rook positioned himself outside of Mazorca’s room. He pressed his ear to the door and listened. No sounds came from within. All was silence except for the rustlings of the soldiers below as they moved around the first floor’s dining room, kitchen, and Tabard’s personal quarters. They were trying to keep quiet, but Rook could hear their muffled footfalls. They had orders to conduct a thorough search, opening closet doors, checking pantries, and looking beneath and behind curtains and anything else that might hide a person who did not want to be found.

When Rook heard one of them coming up the steps, he finally pulled away from Mazorca’s door. The soldier looked at Rook and shook his head to indicate that they had found nobody. A moment later, a soldier who had gone upstairs came back down with the same report: the common areas were free of people.

With his pistol still in hand, Rook reached for the knob on Mazorca’s door and gently tried to turn it. The thing refused to budge. The colonel took a step back, squared himself to the door, raised a leg, and kicked. The sole of his black boot crashed into the door, ripping its latch and flinging it open. His gun entered the room before he did, ready to fire upon anybody who wanted to put up a fight.

The light inside was dim. What illumination there was came from the edges of the closed curtains. He scanned the room rapidly, his head jerking around like a bird as it tried to spot predators. On the bed, a blanket covered a lump the size of a body. Rook had hoped to catch Mazorca napping. Yet he knew that nobody could have slept through the sound of the door smashing in.

The soldiers swarmed in after Rook. One of them opened the curtains. As light fell on the bed, Rook saw the dark stain. He leaned in for a closer look. It was red and fresh. One whiff and Rook knew it was blood. The body was a corpse.

The blanket was not tucked in. Instead, it had been tossed on top of the body in haste. Beneath it was Tabard. She lay on her right side, but her head was twisted unnaturally to the left. Her chin rested on her shoulder, and her face looked up at the ceiling. Her eyes were wide open. If it had not been for the huge gash in her neck, Rook might have thought that she was still alive. He could tell that she had not been dead for long. The blood glistened in the sunlight. It had soaked into everything-the blanket, the mattress, her clothes. Rook had seen men die in battle before. It always amazed him to see how many buckets of blood could fill a human body.

He pulled back. “Mazorca did this,” he said to nobody in particular. “And we don’t know where he is.”

He told the soldiers to clear the entire building-to open all of the doors that were closed, to investigate the guest rooms, and even to check the roof. Rook’s own attention turned to the trunk. He opened it and reached in. To his mild surprise, the rifle was still there, exactly as it had been before. Rook wondered why an assassin would leave behind his weapon.

Rook descended the steps onto the ground floor. From above, he heard knocking on doors, and then the bangs and cracks of forced openings. Yet he was not really listening. He walked into the dining room, passed through the kitchen, and entered Tabard’s bedroom.

It was small and neat-the private chamber of a woman whose life had revolved around her guests. Rook imagined Tabard coming in here at the end of each day, worn out from hours of cooking, cleaning, and conversing, and collapsing into the cool sheets of her bed.

Across the room, a closet stood wide open. It appeared as though someone had ransacked its contents. A few dresses hung from a rack, but several others lay in a heap on the floor. Rook called for the soldier who had entered it just a few moments earlier. When he appeared, Rook pointed to the closet.