Free The Art of the Devil by John Altman

to rubberneck at the Eisenhower farm, little realizing they had no chance of glimpsing the commander-in-chief.
    Entering a residential neighborhood, she noticed a second-hand Oldsmobile parked on a front lawn, battered FOR SALE sign propped behind the windshield. Coming to a stop, she ruffled her brow. After a moment’s deliberation, she moved up the front walk.
    The young man who answered her knock would later tell investigators that he had initially been taken aback by this attractive young lady asking to purchase the Olds Rocket. The car was irrefutably a beast, appealing mostly to soldiers back from the war who had grown accustomed overseas to operating powerful military equipment. But as the young lady told her story, he began to understand the situation. She was buying the car at the instruction of her employer, a widowed German Jew named Josephine Booth who had fled the Nazis in the late 1930s, financed by the portable wealth of diamonds, and established herself in America. Having survived the Third Reich, Mrs Booth wanted an escape plan in place should history repeat itself. Seen through this lens, the young lady’s interest in the second-hand Rocket – which with its 303-cubic-inch V8 engine and Hydra-Matic transmission certainly qualified as a fine escape vehicle – made perfect sense. And the diamonds she proposed to barter for the Olds were of the highest quality. When she agreed to leave one as a sample he might show a jeweler, his last doubts vanished. She suggested meeting again one week from that day, and if he found the diamonds acceptable, to go ahead then with the trade – conditions to which he readily consented.
    Elisabeth proceeded toward the center of Gettysburg. The plaza in which she paused to orient herself – Lincoln Square, named after the author of the famous address given there ninety-some years earlier – divided the main street into two tributaries, York on the east and Chambersburg on the west. In the years since Lincoln’s speech, the square had actually developed to become a circle surrounding a pavilion. Drugstores, movie theaters, bars, shops, and hotels crowded cheek-to-jowl around the perimeter. Occupying a position of honor in the center, beside an American flag and a large clock mounted on a wrought-iron post, stood an inhuman-looking bronze statue of Honest Abe himself, with beard and stovepipe hat. Strange, thought Elisabeth, that they chose to honor this man who had done so much to spoil the purity of their bloodlines. Americans had everything backwards.
    After identifying the bench in front of the Plaza Restaurant where she would meet her contact, she went shopping. To justify her day to anyone paying close enough attention, she bought a few personal items – a four-dollar skirt, an inexpensive box of chocolates, some toiletries and sundries, and a commemorative copy of Lincoln’s speech. (‘We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground; the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.’) Then she ventured farther afield, seeking pawn shops and five-and-dimes. From neighborhoods designed to appeal to tourists, she reached districts catering to students and factory workers; since the early nineteenth century, Gettysburg College and the Lutheran Seminary had operated in town, as had carriage manufacturers, shoemakers, and tanneries.
    GOLD AND SILVER PAWN offered three used guitars for sale. For ten dollars and seventy-five cents, Elisabeth made a steel-string Gibson with a battered tweed carrying case her own. Inside a neighboring five-and-dime, she browsed shelves stocked with cosmetics, selecting items – make-up, false eyelashes, stockings, dark wig, spirit gum, rubbing alcohol, and a small jar of greasepaint – which she brought to the register. Ringing her up, the girl behind the counter whistled absently: ‘How Much Is That