Episode VI
In which Lincoln is "assassinated" and Max finds someone with his abilities.
23.
This is what I saw, mostly with my mouth hanging open:
Up in the presidential box, President Lincoln slumping over, banging his head on the railing. Smoke curled up from the derringer in John Wilkes Booth’s hand. Mary Todd Lincoln screamed and covered the back of her head with both hands as if to protect it from a bullet. Major Henry Rathbone leaped to his feet and jumped at Booth. Rathbone’s fiancé, Clara Harris, also started screaming.
Booth dropped his single-shot derringer and pulled out a large hunting knife. As Major Rathbone reached for him, Booth slashed twice with his knife, slicing open Rathbone’s arm and neck. A bloody line appeared on the side of Rathbone’s neck. With one hand clamped on his neck to stop the bleeding, he continued to lunge at Booth. Booth slashed his arm again.
On the stage below a play was in progress, with actors moving about the set delivering their lines, oblivious to what was going on in the presidential box above and off to the right of the stage. Loud crowd laughter was still echoing from the line I heard right before the gunshot. Something about snickerdoodles.
Booth dodged Major Rathbone and suddenly leaped up onto the railing of the balcony and jumped. His boot spur snagged on the flag-like cloth that decorated the front of the presidential box, causing him to twist slightly during the ten-foot drop to the stage. When he landed in the middle of the play that was going on, his right leg buckled awkwardly. He stood up, limping on his right leg a couple steps before holding up his knife and shouting: “E pluribus unum! The South is avenged!”
The actors on stage just stared in bewilderment. The audience was silent. A few laughed, obviously thinking this was part of the play. Then someone shouted: “The president’s been shot!” Someone else: “Stop that man!”
Booth turned and limped across the stage, past the actors, and disappeared behind the side curtains.
The whole scene, from gunshot to escape, took less than a minute.
An insistent tapping on my shoulder made me jump as if I’d been shot.
When I turned, a thin bald man with a goatee wearing a fancy black tuxedo frowned disapprovingly at me. “Weren’t you told?” he said. “There’s a dress code for an assassination.”
24.
It took a few seconds for his words to sink in. Finally, my sluggish lizard brain thawed from its deep freeze and I stuttered, “W-w-what? A dress code?”
He shook his goateed head and snorted. “There’s no time for that now. You’re late.” He thrust a clipboard into my hands. A small pen dangled from a string attached to the clipboard. He handed a matching clipboard to Mink. Then he turned to the other twenty or so well-dressed people gathered at the back of the room with us and said. “You have ten minutes. Starting…” He clicked an old-fashioned stopwatch. “…now!”
The others rushed onto the stage, pushing and shoving each other out of the way, furiously scribbling on their clipboards.
I turned to Mink. We stared at each other like we’d just both met up in each other’s dream. She looked at the men in tuxedos and women in silky evening dresses hurrying around with their clipboards.
“This is definitely a Final Cut moment,” Mink said.
We looked around the room. It was huge, as big as the auditorium back at my high school in D.C. But there were no seats. In fact, there was no audience. The sounds of audience laughter from earlier had come from the giant speakers positioned around the room.
In the middle of the room was a stage, with actors dressed up in nineteenth century clothes. The actors stayed frozen in place, ignoring the men and women that were poking at them as if they were statues in a wax museum instead of real people.
Lincoln’s presidential box, which had hovered ten feet in the air on top of a huge hydraulic scissor crane, was slowly lowered to the ground. The instant it touched the stage, the other well-dressed bunch ran over and started examining Lincoln’s slumped body, Mary Todd Lincoln’s hair, Clara Harris’s dress, and Major Henry Rathbone’s wounds (which I could see now were just stage make-up). One woman in a dark red dress picked up the derringer Booth had fired and began sniffing it.
And limping slowly back across the stage was John Wilkes Booth himself. Or at least the actor playing him. Everyone stopped to give him a round of enthusiastic applause. He bowed slightly to acknowledge their appreciation, but then just stood still in the middle of the stage where he had last made his brief speech to the audience. Six or seven of the guests hurried over to examine him and the large hunting knife he still gripped. They also poked at his clothes, even reached into his pockets to pull out the contents.