Breakthroughs (17 page)

“That’s what Lieutenant Straubing says, too,” Bliss agreed with a nod. “He says you work as hard as any man he ever saw. But he also says there’ve been a hell of a lot of fires and explosions in units his outfit has resupplied. You want to tell me about that?”

“Only thing I know is, a couple times last year the lieutenant said we should all keep an eye on each other on account of trouble like that,” Cincinnatus said. “Don’t know what ever came of it.”

He did know they hadn’t found the ingredients for the cigar-shaped firebombs he’d got from Tom Kennedy. As soon as Straubing made worried noises about such things, he’d made sure not to keep them in or near his house. Had the U.S. authorities discovered them, Luther Bliss wouldn’t be asking him questions now. He’d be taking him apart with a hacksaw and pliers and cutting torch.

Bliss kept tiptoeing around the edges of the truth: “Kennedy had a pal, storekeeper named Conroy. His place burned down last year, too—hell of a fire. Conroy hasn’t been seen much since. Folks saw you goin’ into that store.”

“Yes, suh, I did that, every now and then,” Cincinnatus said—no point denying something where the denial could be proved a lie. “It was on the way home from the riverside. But I didn’t do it a lot—he had high prices, an’ he didn’t fancy black folks much.”

“Black folks,” Bliss said musingly. “It’ll be different for niggers now that Kentucky’s back in the USA. Not so hard like it was before.”

“Hope so, suh,” Cincinnatus said. The law probably would be different. But, from what he’d seen, most whites in the USA had little more use for Negroes than did most whites in the CSA. And he didn’t see white Kentuckians changing their ways because a new flag flew over them.

Bliss clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Won’t be illegal for niggers to be Socialists, even, long as they’re peaceable about it.” He paused. “Of course, niggers likely won’t get to vote right away. It’s not like this was New England or somewhere like that.”

“No, suh,” Cincinnatus said with a sigh. Black Kentuckians wouldn’t get to vote till a majority of white Kentuckians decided they should. Cincinnatus didn’t plan on holding his breath.

He just hoped that oblique reference meant Luther Bliss was still tiptoeing around his connections with the Reds, too, and not seeing it plain. Bliss glared at him with those disconcerting eyes, as a coon dog might look at a raccoon it had treed in a crowded part of the woods, suddenly realizing the quarry might escape from tree to tree. The secret policeman looked intent. Cincinnatus didn’t like his expression. He’d come up with something nasty.

Before he could ask it, the door to the room in which he was questioning Cincinnatus opened. Bliss whirled angrily. “Dammit, I said I wasn’t to be disturbed in here,” he said.

“Sir,” said the man who’d bearded him in his den, “the president is outside, and he wants to talk with you.”

Bliss’ pale brown eyes widened. Before he could say anything, Theodore Roosevelt strode into the interrogation chamber. That made Cincinnatus’ eyes go wide, too. “I don’t have time for shilly-shallying and foolishness, Bliss,” Roosevelt snapped. “We need to purge this state of Rebs.”

“Get the trains, Mr. President,” Bliss answered. “Get the trains and ship about two people out of three somewhere else, because that’s the only way you’re going to purge Kentucky. If we’re lucky, we can keep most of the Rebs from raising too much Cain behind our lines till we’ve won the war. I think I can do that much. The other? Go talk to a preacher, because I’m not in the miracles game.”

Cincinnatus knew a certain reluctant respect for Luther Bliss. Telling Teddy Roosevelt he couldn’t have all he wanted seemed much the same as telling a tornado it couldn’t go where it wanted. The president of the United States glared at Bliss, who looked back imperturbably.

Roosevelt seemed to respect him, too. “It will have to do,” he said, “though I hate half measures.” He paid attention to Cincinnatus for the first time. “What’s this Negro here gone and done?”

Cincinnatus spoke for himself: “I haven’t done anything, sir.” Where he’d wanted to impress Bliss as being ignorant and shiftless, he wanted Roosevelt to see him as a bright, intelligent innocent wronged.

The only trouble with that stratagem was Bliss’ noticing his shifting style. The secret policeman’s hunting-dog eyes widened, just for a moment. To Roosevelt, he said, “Hard to say, your Excellency. Fugitive Confederate underground man named Kennedy got his head blown off on this boy’s front porch. Cincinnatus here drove for Kennedy before the war. Been a fair number of suspicious fires clustered around him, too.”

Thinking fast, Cincinnatus said, “Mr. President, sir, one of these suspicious fires he’s talking about was to Conroy’s general store. Mr. Bliss told me Conroy was one of Mr. Kennedy’s friends. If I was workin’ for Mr. Kennedy, why would I burn out one of his friends?”

“That strikes me as a fair question,” Roosevelt said. “How about it, Bliss?”

Bliss had not an ounce of retreat in him. “Mr. President, we’re also looking at his connections with the Reds.”

“Have you found any?” Roosevelt demanded.

“Not yet,” the secret policeman said stolidly.

“And I’m not a bit surprised, either,” Roosevelt said. “How in the blue blazes do you expect a man to be simultaneously aiding the Confederate resistance and the Marxist resistance, when the Marxists came as close to overthrowing the CSA as we’ve managed ourselves?”

“Sir, this is Kentucky,” Bliss said. “Everything’s topsy-turvy here.”

“Poppycock!” Roosevelt snorted. “Drivel! Things either make logical sense or they don’t, and that’s as true in Kentucky as it is in New Hampshire. If you’re trying to make out that this Negro is a Reb and a Red at the same time, and if you haven’t got any solid evidence he’s either one, I suggest—no, I don’t suggest, I order—that you let him go on about his lawful occasions.”

It wasn’t poppycock. It wasn’t drivel. Cincinnatus knew it wasn’t poppycock or drivel. So did Luther Bliss, who, being a Kentuckian, understood his home state better than Theodore Roosevelt could ever hope to do. But the president of the United States had just given Bliss a direct order. With a sigh, he said, “All right, Cincinnatus, you are free to go. You keep your nose clean and you won’t have any more trouble from me.”

“Thank you kindly, suh.” Cincinnatus didn’t think Bliss meant that, but he had said it and could be reminded of it at need. “Suh, could you give me a letter to Lieutenant Straubing, to let him know I’m in the clear so as I can go back to makin’ an honest livin’?”

Bliss plainly didn’t want to, but had no choice. “I’ll see to it,” he said.

“Back pay!” Roosevelt exploded, so vehemently, Cincinnatus jumped. “Pay for all the days this man has not been able to work. What’s your daily rate, Cincinnatus?”

“Two and a half dollars, sir,” Cincinnatus answered.

“If that’s all you make, and you’ve missed considerable work because of this folderol, you must be feeling the pinch,” Roosevelt said. “Bliss, pay this man one hundred dollars, and pay it out of your own pocket, for harassing someone who’s done nothing wrong.”

Cincinnatus expected the chief of the Kentucky State Police to do some exploding of his own at that, but Bliss, after another moment of surprise, nodded. He said, “I’ll have that and the letter ready for him when he goes. Now if we can send him out so we can talk about a couple of things without him listening—”

To Cincinnatus’ disappointment, Roosevelt didn’t object to that. A couple of hard-faced guards led Cincinnatus away and put him in what had probably been a small meeting room before the war but now served as a holding cell. They didn’t do anything but sit him down. He knew how easily that might have been otherwise.

He waited for what had to be a couple of hours. He wondered what Roosevelt and Luther Bliss were talking about. He wondered if Bliss would wait till Roosevelt was gone and then go back to sweating him. Finally, a guard said, “Come along, you,” and led him out to the city-hall steps.

There stood Luther Bliss. “Here’s your letter,” he said. Cincinnatus checked it. It was what it was supposed to be. “And here’s your money.” Bliss took his wallet from his hip pocket and peeled off five twenty-dollar bills. Only after Cincinnatus had the money in his own pocket did he wonder who was watching and why they thought he was getting it. And only after that did he realize how clever and dangerous Luther Bliss really was.

Flora Hamburger wished she were somewhere, anywhere, else than at Theodore Roosevelt’s second inauguration. She wished, most particularly, that she were at the inauguration of President Eugene V. Debs. But Socialist Senator Eugene V. Debs of Indiana felt no qualms about attending the inauguration of the man who had defeated him, so Flora supposed she could get through it, too.

The ceremony was held in an enormous briefing room in one of the many War Department buildings that sprawled through downtown Philadelphia. In a normal year, it would have been outdoors. (In a normal year, of course, it would have been in Washington, D.C., but that was another story.) To keep Confederate bombers from disrupting it now, it was not only indoors but also secret; Flora had found out where to come only the day before.

Someone tapped her on the shoulder. She turned. Sitting behind her was Hosea Blackford of Dakota. “Tell me what kind of bargain we can make to get your vote on that immigration bill,” he said.

She shook her head. “Ask me something else. Half the people in my district have relatives in Europe, and that bill would strand them there forever. If I vote for it, they’ll throw me out, and I’ll deserve it.”

He frowned. “The party leadership backs it, you know.”

“The party leadership backed the war, too, right from the start,” Flora answered. “Were they right then?” Before Blackford could say anything, she waved him to silence. “Here come the president and the chief justice.” She smiled down at the floor. Here she was, glad to see Theodore Roosevelt after all.

He wore cutaway, white tie, top hat, and gloves: all the trappings of capitalist power. With him strode Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, his big fierce white mustache a fitting ornament for his proud hawk face. Holmes was only a few days away from his seventy-fifth birthday, but moved like a much younger man. He was, without a doubt, a class enemy; reckoning him an honest man, Flora granted him grudging admiration for that.

He and Roosevelt took their places behind a podium more often used to let officers know the upcoming plan of attack. After Vice President Kennan took the oath for his second term, Roosevelt did the same in a loud, firm voice.

Once the applause had died down, Justice Holmes stepped away from the podium. President Roosevelt stared out over it at the senators and representatives and other assembled dignitaries. The electric lights flashed off the lenses of his spectacles, giving his face a curiously mechanical appearance, as if a device had taken almost human form and were running the United States.

“Without the fighting edge,” he said, “no man and no nation can be really great, for in the really great man, as in the really great nation, there must be both the heart of gold and the temper of steel.” His gestures were stiff, adding to the industrial impression those blank, shining disks that seemed to replace his eyes created.

“In 1862 England and France said it was the duty of those two nations to mediate between the United States and the Confederate States, and they asserted that any Americans who in such event refused to accept their mediation and to stop the war would thereby show themselves the enemies of peace.

“Even Abraham Lincoln regarded this as an unfriendly act to the United States, but he had not the strength to withstand it. And in so regarding it, as in few other things, Lincoln was right. Looking back from a distance of more than fifty years, we can clearly see as much. Such mediation
was
a hostile act, not only to the United States but to humanity. The nations that forced that unrighteous peace upon us more than fifty years ago were the enemies of mankind.

“Very many of the men and women who are at times misled into demanding peace, as if it were itself an end instead of being a means of righteousness, are folk of good will and sound intelligence who need only seriously to consider the facts, and who can then be trusted to think aright and act aright. Well-meaning folk who always clamor for peace without regard as to whether peace brings justice or injustice should ponder such facts, and then should still their clamor.”

Ponder the facts, and then think my way,
Flora thought scornfully. President Roosevelt pounded on: “England and France and the cuckoo’s egg they planted in the American nest of freedom humiliated our great nation again a generation later, and have sought to encircle us on our own continent ever since, just as they and the Russian tyrants have sought to encircle our partner, friend, and ally, the German Empire, on the European continent.

“They have tried. And they have failed.” Roosevelt could not go on then; thunderous applause interrupted him. He basked in it before raising his hands to ask for quiet. “I promise you this: my second term will show us the victory we have longed for since those now old were young. The debt we owe is old, too, and has accumulated much interest through the years. We shall repay it in full, and more besides.” More applause echoed from the ceiling of the briefing room.

“We must stand absolutely for the righteousness of revenge,” Roosevelt finished, “and we must remember that to do so would have been utterly without avail if we had not possessed the strength and tenacity of spirit which back righteousness with deeds and not mere words. Until we complete our vengeance, we must keep ourselves ready, high of heart and undaunted of soul, to back our rights with our strength.”

He stepped back from the podium. The torrent of applause that rose up made everything that had gone before seem like a whisper in a distant room. Flora Hamburger joined in the applause, though tepidly and for politeness’ sake. She looked around and saw that most of her fellow Socialists and the handful of Republicans still in Congress were doing the same. It mattered little. The Democratic majority made plenty of noise on their own.

Roosevelt took his time leaving the hall. He paused in the aisles to chat with soldiers and politicians and functionaries who came crowding up to him, eager to be recognized. Flora’s lip curled at their fawning sycophancy…till she saw Senator Debs talking amiably with the president. The cooperation she’d already seen between Socialists and Democrats in Congress had surprised her. This shook her. It was as if a long-familiar picture, turned upside down, yielded another image altogether.

Then Roosevelt caught sight of her. She was easy to spot. The audience held only a handful of women, and she was the youngest by at least fifteen years. The president smiled in her direction. “Miss Hamburger!” he called, and beckoned her to him.

She could either go or, staying in her place, seem rude. What ran through her mind as she approached Theodore Roosevelt was,
My parents will never believe I’m talking with the president of the United States.
She might not share his politics, but the USA had never yet had a Socialist chief executive. “I’m honored to meet you, Mr. President,” she said,
honored
being true because of his office where
pleased
would have stretched a point.

“And I am honored to meet you, Miss Hamburger—Congresswoman Hamburger, I should say,” Roosevelt answered, and surprised her by sounding as if he meant it. “You showed great pluck in the campaign that won you your seat; I followed it with interest and no little admiration. And, by all accounts, you seem to be shaping well in the House.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” she said. “You surprise me, since I am not of your party and”—she couldn’t resist the jab—“I don’t see much point to this war, even if I know a good many of the facts about it.”

He surprised her again by not getting angry. “The point is that winning it will at last let our country take its rightful place in the sun, a place wrongly denied us since the War of Secession.”

“My question is, what price do we pay for our place in the sun?” Flora replied. “How many young men will never see that place in the sun, some because they are blind, most because they are dead? How many young working men will die so the capitalists who own the steel mills and the coal mines and the weapons plants can buy new mansions, new motorcars, new yachts with the profits they make selling munitions to the government?”

Now Roosevelt frowned, but still did not explode. “If the capitalists can afford new toys after the war tax we’ve slapped on ’em, they’ve got better bookkeepers and lawyers than I think they do. You have a fine stump speech there, Congresswoman, and I think you are sincere in it, but it doesn’t altogether match the way the world works. A pleasure to meet you, as I said. If you’ll excuse me—” He shook someone else’s hand.

Flora found herself more impressed with him than she’d thought she would be. Part of that was the office he held. Part of it was realizing that what she had taken for political bombast were in fact his true beliefs. And part was the force with which he expressed those beliefs, a force mocked in her own party but, she discovered, not one to be taken lightly.

Hosea Blackford came up to her in Roosevelt’s wake. His expression was somewhere between amused and curious. “Well, what do you think of the earthquake that walks like a man now that you’ve met him in the flesh?” the congressman from Dakota asked.

“He’s—formidable,” Flora answered. “He’s easy to caricature, but I have the idea that taking the caricature for the man would be a mistake.”

“A dangerous mistake,” Blackford agreed. “Roosevelt has made a lot of people pay for doing that. When he goes charging straight at something, he seems to have no more brains than a bull moose, but anyone who thinks they aren’t hiding behind that smirk ends up regretting it.”

Flora sighed. “He does argue better than I thought he would.”

“He met Lincoln during the Second Mexican War, I gather, the same as I did,” Blackford answered. “They quarreled, so he was less impressed than I was.”

“There’s only one kind of person Roosevelt doesn’t quarrel with, as far as I can see,” Flora said. The congressman from Dakota raised a questioning eyebrow. She explained: “Someone who already agrees with every word he says.”

Hosea Blackford laughed. “You
are
dangerous, aren’t you? Did you get your invitation to the inaugural ball at the Powel House?”

She nodded. “Yes, I did. I hate to admit it, but I thought the president was generous to invite the whole Congress to his residence, Socialists and Republicans along with the Democrats.”

“Stinginess isn’t one of Teddy’s besetting sins,” Blackford said. “He has enough besides that. Are you going?”

“I was thinking of it, yes,” Flora said. Only weeks out of the Lower East Side, she knew her fascination with the glamour she was encountering was un-Socialist, but she couldn’t help it. “Are you?”

“Oh, no, and I wish you wouldn’t, either,” he said. Alarm stabbed through her: was she committing some dreadful
faux pas
? Stone-faced as a judge, he went on, “The Socialists should boycott it. That way, if the Confederate bombers get through and level the place, we’ll be ready and waiting to take over the government.”

She stared at him, then laughed so loud, Roosevelt looked back over his shoulder to see what was funny. “Let me ask you again,” she said, her voice dangerous: “Are you going to the inaugural ball?” A little sheepishly, Blackford nodded. So did Flora, with the air of having won a victory. “Good. As I said, so am I. I’ll see you there.”

Sergeant Jake Featherston sat on an upended barrel of flour atop Round Hill, Virginia. He’d bought a Gray Eagle scratchpad in the Round Hill general store, and his pencil scraped over the paper. He knew he wasn’t the best writer ever born, or anything close to it. He didn’t care. So many things he hadn’t been able to say to anybody—so many things he had said that nobody would hear. If he got them down, he would, at least, be able to prove he’d been right all along.

“Got any makings, Sarge?” Michael Scott called as he walked up to Featherston. “My pouch is empty as Teddy Roosevelt’s head.”

“Yeah, I got some,” Jake answered. Before he pulled his own leather tobacco pouch out of a pocket, he slammed the notebook shut and put a hand over the cover. What was in there was
his
, no one else’s. Only after he’d made sure it was safe did he toss Scott the pouch.

“Thanks,” the loader said, and rolled himself a cigarette. He gave the tobacco back to Featherston. “You been writin’ up a storm there, past couple days.” He lit a match. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke.

“Somethin’to pass the time,” Featherston said uncomfortably. It was much more than that to him, but he wouldn’t admit as much, not to Scott, not to anybody else, barely to himself. He wondered how he’d managed to get through so much of the war without trying it before. If he’d gone much longer without setting down what he thought, what he felt, he was sure he’d have gone crazy.

Scott didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, which eased Jake’s mind. “Yeah, we’ve had some time to pass lately,” Scott said, taking another drag on the handmade cigarette. “Yankees got down here into Virginia, and they haven’t done a whole hell of a lot since.”

“I know it.” That didn’t make Featherston any happier, though. Nothing made Featherston very happy these days. Every silver lining had its cloud. “Last time they were quiet like this, back in Pennsylvania, they were building for the push that threw us back to where we’re at now. If they hit us another lick like that one there, where the hell will we end up?”