In at the Death (60 page)

“Hey, I only want to get…started over.” Dover didn’t want to say
get back on my feet again
, not to a man who never would. “Doesn’t have to be here.”

“But this’d suit you best.” Willard Sloan didn’t make it a question.

“If you’ve done a halfway decent job since I left, the owners’ll keep you on,” Dover said. “I bet they’re paying you less than they paid me.” Would he work for less than he had before? Damn right he would. But he didn’t tell Sloan that.

“Yeah, they jewed me down pretty good,” the present manager agreed. “What can you do, though?”

“Not much,” Dover said. What could
he
do? He could let the owners know he was around. He’d likely taken care of that just by showing up here. If they wanted him back, they’d get word to him—and too bad for Willard Sloan. If they didn’t…he’d have to figure out something else, that was all.

T
hick wire mesh in the Houston jail’s visiting room separated Jefferson Pinkard from the new damnyankee officer the U.S. authorities had chosen to defend him. As he had with Isidore Goldstein, he growled, “Dammit, I didn’t do anything in your country. I didn’t do anything to anybody from your country. I didn’t do anything the people in my country didn’t want me to do, either.”

The damnyankee—he was called Moss, and he was about as exciting as his name—shook his head. “None of that counts. They’re charging you with crimes against humanity. That means you should have known better than to do that stuff even if they told you to.”

“My ass,” Jeff said angrily. “Goddamn coons always hated the Confederate States. They fucked us when they rose up in the last war.

Hell, first time I went into action, it wasn’t against you Yankees. It was against Red niggers in Georgia. You reckon they wouldn’t’ve done it again? Like hell they wouldn’t. Only we didn’t give ’em the chance this time around.”

Moss shook his head again. “Women? Children? Men who never did anybody any harm? You won’t get a court to buy it.”

“Well, shit, tell me something I don’t know,” Pinkard said. “You assholes are gonna hang me. Anything I say is just a fuckin’ joke, far as you’re concerned. Why’d they even bother giving me a new lawyer when Goldstein got hurt? Just to make it look pretty, I bet.”

“I wish I could tell you you’re wrong,” Moss replied, which took Jeff by surprise. “Chances are they
will
hang you. But I’ll fight them as hard as I can. That’s my job. That’s what lawyers do. I’m pretty good at it, too.”

Jeff eyed him through the grating. He still wasn’t much to look at: a middle-aged man who’d been through the mill. He did sound like somebody who meant what he said, though. Jeff knew professional pride when he heard it. He thought Moss
would
do the best job he could. He also thought it wouldn’t do him one goddamn bit of good.

“Can you give me anything to show there were Negroes you didn’t kill when you could have?” Moss asked. “That kind of thing might help some.”

“Nope.” Pinkard shook his head. “I did what I was supposed to do, dammit. I didn’t break any laws.”

“How many Negroes went through your camps?” Lieutenant Colonel Moss asked. “How many came out alive? How many had trials?”

“Trials, nothing,” Jeff said in disgust. “Trials are for citizens. Niggers aren’t citizens of the CSA. Never have been. Never will be now, by God.” He spoke with a certain doleful pride. He’d helped make sure of that.

“Even there, you’re wrong,” Moss said. “There were Negro citizens in the Confederate States—the men who fought for them in the Great War. They went into your camps just like the rest. U.S. authorities can prove that.”

“Well, so what? They were dangerous,” Jeff insisted. “You leave out the ones who learned how to fight, they’re the bastards who’ll give you grief down the line. When we take care of stuff, we do it up brown.”

The Yankee sighed. “You aren’t making it any easier for me—or for yourself.”

“What the hell difference does it make?” Pinkard demanded. “You said it yourself—they’re gonna hang me any which way. I’ll be damned if I give ’em excuses. I did what I was supposed to do, that’s all.”

“Are you sorry you did it?” Moss said. “You might be able to persuade them to go a little easier on you if you make them believe you are.”

“Easy enough to leave me alive?” Jeff asked.

“Well…” The military attorney hesitated. “You are the one who started using trucks to asphyxiate Negroes, right? And you are the one who started using cyanide in the phony bathhouses, too, aren’t you?”

“How’d you know about the trucks?” Jeff asked.

“There’s a Confederate official in Tennessee named…” The lawyer had to stop and check his notes. “Named Mercer Scott. He told us you were responsible for coming up with that. Is he lying? If he is, we have a better chance of keeping you breathing.”

Jeff considered. So Mercer was singing, was he? Well, he was trying to save his neck, too. Chances were he wouldn’t be able to do it, not when he ran Camp Dependable after Jeff moved on to Camp Determination. The trucks first showed up at Camp Dependable. They made life a lot easier for guards than taking Negroes out into the swamps and shooting them. Was the mechanic who’d made the first one still alive? Jeff didn’t know. It probably didn’t matter. Other guards back at the camp by Alexandria would be able to back Mercer up. As for the cyanide, he had plenty of correspondence with the pest-control company that made it. If he tried to deny things there, he was screwed, blued, and tattooed.

And so, with a heavy sigh, he shook his head. “No, I did that stuff, all right. I did it in the line of duty, and I don’t need to be ashamed of it.”

“You were trying to kill people as efficiently as you could,” Moss said.

“I was trying to dispose of niggers as efficiently as I could, yeah,” Pinkard said. “They were a danger to the Confederate States, so we had to get rid of ’em.”

“Jake Featherston could have settled on redheads or Jews just as easily,” the lawyer said.

“Nah.” Jeff shook his head. “That’s just stupid. Redheads never did anything to anybody. And Jews—hell, I don’t have a lot of use for Jews, but they pulled for us, not against us. Look at Saul Goldman.”

“He’s under arrest, too,” Moss said. “They’ll hang him for all the lies he told and all the hatred he stirred up.”

Jefferson Pinkard laughed. “You dumbass Yankees reckon we need to get talked to to hate niggers? We can take care of that on our own, thank you kindly. And so can you-all. Otherwise, you would’ve opened up the border and let ’em all in back before the war. Sure as hell didn’t see that happening.”

Moss wrote himself a note. “I’ll bring it up at the trial. Some of the Negroes’ blood is on our hands.”

“Think it’ll help?” Jeff asked.

“No,” Moss said. “It’ll just make the judges mad, because they’ll aim to lay all the blame on you. But I’ll get it on the record, anyhow.”

“Hot shit,” Jeff said.

The lawyer shrugged. “I can’t promise to get you off the hook, not when I don’t have a chance in church of delivering. They’re going to do what they’re going to do. I can slow them down a little and piss them off a little, and that’s about it.”

“It ain’t fair,” Jeff said. “You can’t blame me for doing what my country wanted me to do. It’s not like I broke any of my laws. You’re changing the rules after the game is over.”

“You’re probably right, but so what?” Moss answered. “Millions of people are dead. Millions of people got killed for no better reason than that they were colored. The government of the USA has decided that that’s a crime regardless of whether it broke Confederate law or not. I can’t appeal against that decision—they won’t let me. I have to play by the rules they give me now.”

“Well, I had to play by the rules they gave me then. What’s the goddamn difference?” Jeff said.

Moss reached into his briefcase and pulled out some photographs. He held them up so Pinkard could see them. They showed the crematorium at Camp Humble and some of the mass graves back at Camp Determination. “This is the difference,” Moss said. “Doesn’t it mean anything to you?”

“It means they’re gonna fuck me,” Jeff said. “That lousy crematorium never did work the way it was supposed to.”

“I know. I’ve seen your letters to the company that built it,” Moss said. “The people in charge of that company are also charged with crimes against humanity. The whole Confederacy went around the bend, didn’t it?”

“Nope.” If Jeff admitted that, he admitted he’d done something wrong. No matter what the damnyankees thought, he was damned if he believed it. “We were just taking care of what we had to do, that’s all.”

The U.S. officer sighed. “You don’t give me much to work with, but I’ll do what I can.”

He sounded as if he meant it, anyhow. “Thanks,” Jeff said grudgingly.

“Right.” Moss put papers back into the briefcase, closed it, pushed back his chair, and got up. “We’ve done about as much as we can today, looks like.”

He left. He
could
leave. Guards took Jeff back to his cell. He wasn’t going anywhere, not until the damnyankees decided it was time to try him and hang him. The unfairness of it gnawed at him. When you won the war, you could do whatever you goddamn well pleased.

He imagined the Confederate States victorious. He imagined Jake Featherston setting up tribunals and hanging Yankees from Denver to Bangor for all the nasty things they’d done to the CSA after the Great War. There’d be Yankee bastards dangling from every lamppost in every town. Well, he could imagine whatever he pleased. Things had worked out the other way, and the sons of bitches from the USA were getting a brand new chance to work out on the Confederacy.

Where was the justice in that? Nowhere, not as far as he could see.

Of course, he couldn’t see very far, not where he was. He could see lots and lots of iron bars, a forest of them. They weren’t even damnyankee iron bars. They came to his eyes courtesy of the city of Houston. What mattered, though, was his own cell. It boasted a lumpy cot, a toilet without a seat (God only knew what kind of murderous weapon he could have come up with if they’d given him a toilet seat), and a coldwater sink. He knew why he didn’t get hot water—that would have cost money, heaven forbid.

And he was an important prisoner, too. He had the cell to himself. Most cells held two men. He wouldn’t have minded the company, but worrying about what he wanted wasn’t high on anybody’s list. Well, his own, but nobody gave a rat’s ass about that any more. He’d been a big wheel for a long time. He’d got used to shoving Army officers around and arguing with the Attorney General. Now he might as well have been a coon himself, up on a drunk-and-disorderly rap.

Except they wouldn’t hang a coon for that. They were going to hang him higher than Haman.

An attendant brought him a tray of food. He’d gone to jail in Birmingham a few times in his younger days. The chow then had been lousy. It still was.

“Sorry, buddy,” the attendant said. “If it was up to me, I’d give you a fuckin’ medal for what you did with the nigs.”

“A medal doesn’t do me a hell of a lot of good,” Jeff said. “Can you get me out of here instead?”

The attendant shook his head. “Nope. No chance. Too many Yankees around. They’d hang me right alongside of you, and I got five kids.”

Jeff could see the fear in his eyes. He would have said no if he were a fairy with no kids and no hope of any. The attendants were locals. Even though Texas was calling itself the Republic of Texas these days, they loved blacks no more than any other white Confederate did. But they loved their necks just fine. Nobody would help an important prisoner, nobody at all.

M
y name is Clarence Potter,” Potter told the U.S. interrogator in Philadelphia. “My rank is brigadier general.” He rattled off his pay number. “Under the Geneva Convention, that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”

“Screw the Geneva Convention,” the interrogator answered. He was a major named Ezra Tyler, a real Yankee from New England. “And screw you, too. You blew up half of Philadelphia. And you did it wearing a U.S. uniform. You get caught after that, the Geneva Convention won’t save your sorry ass.”

“You won. You can do whatever you want—who’s going to stop you?” Potter said. “But you know you used U.S. soldiers in C.S. uniforms in front of Chattanooga—other places, too. And you dropped two superbombs on my country, not just one. So who do you think you’re trying to kid, anyway?”

Major Tyler turned red. “You’re not cooperating.”

“Damn straight I’m not,” Potter agreed cheerfully. “I told you—I don’t have to. Not legally, anyway.”

“Do you want to live?”

“Sure. Who doesn’t? Are you people going to let me? Doesn’t seem likely, whether I cooperate or not.”

“Professor FitzBelmont doesn’t have that attitude.”

“Professor FitzBelmont isn’t a soldier. Professor FitzBelmont knows things you can really use. And Professor FitzBelmont is kind of a twit.” Potter sighed. “None of which applies to me, I’m afraid.”

“A twit?” One of Tyler’s eyebrows rose. “Without him, you wouldn’t have had a superbomb.”

“You’re right—no doubt about it,” Potter said. “Put a slide rule in his hands and he’s a world beater. But when he has to cope with the ordinary world and with ordinary people…he’s kind of a twit. You didn’t have much trouble getting him to open up, did you?”

“That’s none of your business,” the interrogator said primly.

Henderson V. FitzBelmont, in his tweedy innocence, wouldn’t have known what Tyler meant, but Potter did. “Ha! Told you so.”

“He…appreciates the delicacy of his position. You don’t seem to,” Tyler said.

“My position isn’t delicate. In international law, I’m fine. Whether you care about international law may be a different story.”

“We’re treating you as a POW for the time being. You weren’t
captured
in our uniform. You’ll have a trial,” Major Tyler said. “But if we charge you with crimes against humanity—”

“Will you charge the Kaiser? What about Charlie La Follette? Like I said, you used two superbombs on us. We only had one to use on you.”

“That’s different.”