Legends

Lincoln turned back to focus on Dr. Treffler. “I wasn’t in the army.”

“If you weren’t in the army, what were you doing at Fredericksburg?”

“Fact is, I’d been working for Alan Pinkerton in Chicago. You ever heared of Pinkerton’s detective agency?” When Dr. Treffler nodded, he said, “Thought you might have. Alan was employed by his friend Colonel McClellan to eliminate banditry from the railroads out west. When old Abe appointed the colonel to head the Army of the Potomac, McClellan brought along his friend Alan Pinkerton, who was using the pseudonym E.J. Allen at the time, if I remember right. And Alan brought along some of his operatives, me among them, to organize an intelligence service. Then came what the Federals called the battle of Antietam, after the stream, and the Confederates called the battle of Sharpsville, after the village. With the help of General Joe Hooker—who tore himself away from his camp followers, what we jokingly called Hooker’s girls or just plain hookers, long enough to lead the attack on the right—McClellan won the day and Bobby Lee was obliged to pull his force, what was left of it, back into Virginia. Antietam was the first time I saw the elephant—”

“Saw the elephant?”

“That’s how we described experiencing combat—you say you saw the elephant. After the battle, Alan sent several of us riding south to discern the Confederate order of battle, but that old snake in the grass Lee bamboozled us—he must have figured we could estimate his troop strength by counting the rations he issued, ‘cause he doubled the rations and we doubled the size of his army and McClellan got cold feet and stayed put, which is when old Abe decided McClellan had got the slows and sent him packing back to Chicago. Alan Pinkerton went along with him but I stayed on to work for Lafayette Baker, who was setting up a Federal intelligence service in Washington. Which brings me to McClellan’s successor, Ambrose Burnside, and Fredericksburg.” Leaning forward, Lincoln picked up the small microphone and spoke into it. “A woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat ’em, the better they be. Hey, doc, what about you and me having dinner together when we’re finished here?”

Bernice Treffler kept her face a blank and her voice neutral. “You’ll understand that this is simply not possible. A psychiatrist cannot have a relationship with a client outside of working hours and still hope to maintain the distance she needs to evaluate the client.”

“Where is it written there has to be a distance between you and the client? Some psychiatrists sleep with their patients in order to bridge this distance.”

“That’s not the way I function, Lincoln.” She tried to make a joke out of it. “Maybe you need another psychiatrist—”

“You’ll do fine.”

“Why don’t you go on with your story.”

“My story! You think it’s a story!” He set the microphone back on the table. “You still don’t see that what I’m telling you really happened. To me. At Fredericksburg.”

“Lincoln Dittmann taught history at a junior college,” Dr. Treffler said patiently. “He turned his college thesis on the battle of Fredericksburg into a book and printed it himself, under the title Cannon Fodder, when he couldn’t find an editor willing to publish the manuscript.”

“There are things that happened at Fredericksburg you can’t find in any history book, or Cannon Fodder, for that matter.”

“Such as?”