Breakthroughs (79 page)

Bliss was undoubtedly right—nobody harassing Cincinnatus was stupid. Cincinnatus didn’t say anything about that. The less he said, the better the chance the Kentucky State Police chief would give up—give up for the time being, anyhow—and go away. But Bliss, with his odd eyes the color of a hunting dog’s, stuck with him like a hunting dog on a scent. Side by side, they approached the shed where Lieutenant Straubing’s drivers gathered.

Straubing was waiting outside. “Good morning, Cincinnatus,” he said. “You’ll have to tell your friend good-bye here.”

“Good-bye, friend,” Cincinnatus said at once, smiling in Luther Bliss’ direction.

Now Bliss laughed at him. “You don’t get rid of me that easy. I have some more questions that need answering.”

“Ask them some other time,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “Nothing interferes with my men when they’re supposed to be working. Nothing. Have you got that?”

“Listen, Junior, I’m Luther Bliss, and I’m looking into a killing,” Bliss said. Maybe the Army didn’t faze him after all. Maybe nothing fazed him. That wouldn’t have surprised Cincinnatus one bit. “Far as I’m concerned, that’s a hell of a lot more important than if one nigger hops in a truck on time. Have you got that?”

Straubing wasn’t any older than Cincinnatus. He was skinny and on the pale side. And, as far as Cincinnatus could tell, he never backed down from anybody or anything. “Sounds like you’re trying to sell me the Brooklyn Bridge,” he answered. “Cincinnatus didn’t kill anybody. If he had killed somebody, you wouldn’t be grilling him here. He’d be in prison. If it’s about somebody else doing some killing, I think it can keep—doesn’t sound like fresh news, anyhow. Now just who’s supposed to be dead, and why do you think Cincinnatus knows the first thing about it?” That was Lieutenant Straubing to the core: methodical, precise, unyielding.

“Why do I reckon he knows something about it?” Bliss asked with a chuckle. “Because the fellow who’s dead got his head blown off right on your little darling’s front stoop, that’s why. Bastard was a Rebel diehard name of Tom Kennedy.”

“Oh. Him.” Straubing waved a hand in a careless gesture of dismissal. “You may as well leave Cincinnatus alone, if that’s what you’re exercised over. He doesn’t know anything about it.”

“And you do?” Luther Bliss asked. Calm as ever, Straubing nodded. Bliss spoke in an exasperated growl: “And how come you know so goddamn much, Lieutenant,
if
you don’t mind my asking, of course?”

“It’s not very hard, Chief,” Straubing answered, still calm. “I shot that Kennedy bastard myself.”

“
You
shot Tom Kennedy?” For once in their lives, Cincinnatus and Luther Bliss said the same thing at the same time with the same intonation: one of astonished disbelief.

But Lieutenant Straubing only nodded. “I certainly did. He needed shooting. Cincinnatus is one of my better men, and Kennedy was distracting him from his work. He might even have managed to get Cincinnatus involved in something subversive if he’d kept pestering him long enough.”

Kennedy had got Cincinnatus into several subversive things, but Straubing didn’t know that. Neither did Luther Bliss, who proved it by saying, “We’ve never pinned anything on Cincinnatus here. But
you
shot Kennedy, Lieutenant? Why in hell didn’t you say something about it to somebody?”

“I don’t know.” Straubing shrugged. “It never seemed that important. I was only doing my job and making sure one of my men could do his. It’s not like Kennedy was anything but a Rebel diehard. I didn’t think anything more about it than I would have thought about stepping on a cockroach.”

Cincinnatus believed that; he’d had a long time to watch Straubing’s mind work. After some small pause for thought, Luther Bliss evidently decided he believed it, too. “Lieutenant, you’d have made a lot of people’s lives simpler if you didn’t play your cards so goddamn close to your chest,” he said at last. His eyes flicked to Cincinnatus. “Reckon this fellow’d tell you the same thing.”

“That’s a fact,” Cincinnatus said. “Everybody reckoned I had somethin’ to do with it. Folks kept tryin’to cipher out who I done it for. Made my life livelier than I really cared for, believe you me it did.”

“How unfortunate.” Lieutenant Straubing looked as distressed as he ever did, which wasn’t very. “I just thought of him as rubbish who wouldn’t be missed. But if that ends Chief Bliss’ business with you…”

“Ends this business, anyway.” Bliss touched a finger to the brim of his straw hat. “Obliged to you, Lieutenant. Would have been more obliged if you’d spoken up sooner, but obliged all the same.” Off he went, brisk and competent himself.
Ends
this
business
, Cincinnatus thought. That would have to do, though it was far less than he wanted.

Once inside the shed, Lieutenant Straubing wasted no time and no words: “Let’s get moving, men. We’ve got food and munitions heading down to First Army. One more thing you need to know: with the armistice holding, we’ll be laying off our civilian drivers after this run. We’re hauling less now, and we’ll be doing it with Army personnel only from now on. You civilians have done a good job, and the United States are grateful to you.”

“What are we supposed to do now?” one of those drivers, a white man, demanded before Cincinnatus could get the words out of his mouth.

“Find other work, of course,” Straubing answered. “I wish you the best of luck, but I’m not your nursemaid.”

“Some of us got killed haulin’ for you,” Cincinnatus said. “Is that all you got to say, Lieutenant—‘I ain’t your nursemaid’?”

“Their families are taken care of,” Straubing said. “If you’d been killed, your family would have been taken care of, too. Since you weren’t, you can’t expect the government to hold your hand for you now that your labor is no longer required.”

He cared about the job. When the job was done, he didn’t care any more. When the job was done, nobody cared any more. Cincinnatus wondered where he’d find work now. He whistled softly under his breath. “God damn,” he said. “Welcome to the United States.”

Secretary of State Robert Lansing had come before the Transportation Committee to discuss the integration of the railroads in lands conquered from Canada and the Confederate States into the rail network of the USA. Chairman Taft plainly feared some members’ questions might go further afield, but fearing that and being able to do much about it were two different things. “I recognize the distinguished Representative from New York,” he said with a strange sort of polite reluctance.

“Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” Flora Hamburger said. She knew she had to follow her course with care, lest she be ruled out of order. “Now, Mr. Secretary, will these railroads be brought into our network to make trade easier with the CSA and whatever is left of Canada after peace is finally established?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Lansing paused to draw on a cigarette and to run a hand through his fine head of gray hair. “That is one of the principal purposes of the integration. The other, of course, is to provide for the defense of the United States, railroads being so important to the transport of men and matériel.” He spoke with the precision of the longtime lawyer he had been.

“I see.” Flora nodded. “And against which parts of Canada does the administration see a need for future defense?”

“Those parts not annexed to the United States or to our ally, the Republic of Quebec,” Lansing answered.

“I understand as much, yes,” Flora said. “Which parts will those be?”

“We anticipate that the Republic of Quebec will have borders substantially similar to those of the former province of Quebec,” the secretary of state said.

When he said no more, Flora asked, “And the rest of Canada?”

“Areas under military occupation, we anticipate annexing,” Lansing said. “Areas not presently occupied are being negotiated with British and Canadian representatives. Whatever we do not annex will naturally fall within our economic sphere of influence, as Holland and Belgium will fall within Germany’s and Serbia and Albania within Austria-Hungary’s.”

He made fewer bones about exploitation than Flora had thought he would. She asked, “And what of the Confederate States?”

“Again, we shall annex such land as we now hold, pending adjustments to create frontiers appropriate to our needs and acceptable to the Confederate States, which may be required to exchange territory for any we yield back to them,” Lansing said. “I remind you that this land is different from that of Canada, as it was formerly part of the territory of the United States.”

“Did we not abandon our claim of sovereignty over it when we recognized the CSA?” Flora asked sharply.

“So the Confederates now say,” Lansing returned—he might look dry and dusty, but he was dangerous, tarring her with the brush of the beaten enemy. “The view of the president is that recognition of the CSA was granted under duress and maintained by coercion on the part of the Confederates and their allies.”

“The peace, then, will be as harsh as you can make it,” Flora said.

Congressman Taft looked unhappy, but the question followed logically from others Lansing had answered without hesitation. He answered this one without hesitation, too: “Yes, ma’am. The stronger the peace from our point of view, the better off we shall be and the longer our foes will need to recover from it and menace us again.”

“Wouldn’t we be better off making them our friends?” Flora asked.

“Perhaps we might be, if they showed any interest in friendship,” Lansing said. “The next such interest they do show, however, will be the first.”

Democrats up and down the committee table laughed. Some of them even snickered. The chairman rapped loudly for order. Flora felt her face flush. The question, while heartfelt, had sounded naive. “If we do annex Canada, I expect a large influx of Socialist voters,” she remarked.

“No one, as yet, is speaking of making U.S. states from Canadian provinces, so the question of voter affiliation in them is moot,” Lansing replied. “Again, this differs from our approach to territory formerly under Confederate administration.”

“Of course it does,” Flora said. “Ex-Confederates are likely to make good Democrats, since they’re reactionary to the core.”

Taft’s gavel came down again. “That is out of order, Miss Hamburger.”

“Is it out of order to suggest that the administration will make whatever peace is to its advantage, and will worry about its advantage before it worries about the people’s advantage?” Flora asked. “Perhaps the administration is out of order, and I am not.”

Bang! Bang! Bang!
Taft plied the gavel with such vigor, his beefy face turned red. “We shall have no more such outbursts,” he declared.

Flora inclined her head to the committee chairman. “Never ask any questions that might be difficult or inconvenient, is what you mean, isn’t it, Mr. Chairman?” she said. “Never ask any questions where the American people really need to know the answers. Never mind the First Amendment. Is that what you mean? If it is, Teddy Roosevelt is a lot more like Kaiser Bill than he thinks, or than he wants us to think.”

A couple of other Socialist congressmen on the Transportation Committee loudly clapped their hands, and the lone Republican with them. William Howard Taft, however, turned redder still: almost the color of a ripe beet. “It is intolerable that you should impugn the administration and the president in this way,” he boomed.

“Is it tolerable that the administration and the president should impugn the truth?” Flora returned.

She got no answer. What she got was an early adjournment of the committee. Robert Lansing stuffed papers into his briefcase and scurried away, looking back over his shoulder as if he expected dogs to come after him with teeth bared. His alarmed expression gave Flora some satisfaction, but not enough.

She went back to her office and stared in dismay at the mountain of paperwork awaiting her there. She’d wanted to go visit David at the Pennsylvania Hospital, but she wouldn’t have the chance, not today, not if she was going to do the job she’d been elected to do. Duty ran strong in her.

If she couldn’t take the time to visit, she could telephone. When the hospital operator answered, she said, “This is Congresswoman Hamburger. I’d like to speak to one of the doctors seeing my brother.” In this matter, she did not hesitate to use her influence. She could learn from the doctor, but she couldn’t make him do anything he wouldn’t have otherwise except talk to her.

“Please wait, ma’am,” the operator said, as Flora had known she would. Flora impatiently drummed her fingers on the broad oak surface of the desk.

“This is Dr. Hanrahan, Congresswoman,” a man’s voice said at last. Flora brightened; of all David’s doctors, Hanrahan seemed the most open. “We tried fitting a prosthesis on your brother this morning. The stump isn’t ready yet, I’m afraid, but he tolerated the padded end of the artificial leg better than he has. Things
are
healing in there, no doubt about it. And it was very good to see David upright, if only for a little while.”

Tears stung her eyes. “I wish I could have been there to see that,” she said. “How soon will he be walking? How well will he walk?”

“No way to tell how soon,” Hanrahan said. “I wish we had some better way to fight infection than we do, but his body will have to win that battle. How well…He’s always going to have a rolling motion to his stride, ma’am; that’s the way the knee joint on the prosthesis works. But I hope he’ll be able to get by without even a cane.”

“Alevai,”
Flora said, which surely meant nothing to an Irishman. She returned to English: “I hope you’re right. That would help a lot.” She wondered if it would help enough for her brother ever to find a wife.

Maybe Hanrahan was thinking along with her, for he said, “A lot of good men got wounded in this war, Miss Hamburger. People won’t hold injuries against them, not nearly so much as they did before the fighting started. You don’t mind my saying so, there ought to be a law against people who do dumb things like that, anyhow.”

“I am going to write that down, Dr. Hanrahan,” Flora said, and she did. The Democrats, no doubt, would scream that such laws were not the federal government’s job. The only federal laws they liked readied the country for war. Maybe she could make them think about the aftermath of war, too.