In at the Death (61 page)

“Sure it is. You won. I already told you that, too.”

“Not what I meant, dammit.” Tyler went red again. “We dropped ours out of airplanes, the way you would with any other bomb. We didn’t sneak them over the border under false pretenses.”

“Over, under, around, through—so what?” Potter said. “Shall I apologize because we didn’t have a bomber that would carry one of the goddamn things? I’m sorry, Major—I’m sorry we didn’t have more, and I’m sorry we didn’t have them sooner. If we did, I’d be interrogating you.”

Ezra Tyler changed the subject, which was also the victor’s privilege: “Speaking of crimes against humanity, General, what did you know about your government’s extermination policy against your Negroes, and when did you know it?”

Fear trickled through Potter. If the Yankees wanted C.S. officials dead, they could always throw that one at them.

“All I knew was that I was involved in sniffing out the Negro uprising in 1915—which really did happen, Major, and which really did go a long way toward losing us that war. And I know there was a black guerrilla movement—again, a real one—before the start of this war. Those people were not our friends.”

“Do you think your government’s policy had anything to do with that?”

Of course I do. You’d have to be an idiot not to. I’m not that kind of idiot, anyway
. Aloud, Potter said, “I’m a soldier. Soldiers don’t make policy.”

“Yes, you are a soldier. You returned to the C.S. Army after the 1936 Richmond Olympics, where you shot a Negro who was attempting to assassinate Jake Featherston.”

“That’s right.”

“Before that time, you opposed Featherston politically.”

“Yes, I was a Whig.”

“You traveled to Richmond for the Games. You had a gun. You were close to a President you opposed. Did you go there intending to shoot him yourself?”

“It’s not illegal to carry a gun in the CSA, any more than it is here. The language in our Constitution comes straight from yours.” For the past eight years, Potter had been automatically saying no to that question whenever it came up. Saying yes would have got him killed—an inch at a time, no doubt. He needed a deliberate effort of will to tell the truth now: “Scratch that, Major. Yes, I went up there with that in mind. Maybe things would have gone better if I did it, or if I let the coon do it. They couldn’t have gone much worse, could they? But it’s a little late to worry about it now.”

Major Tyler grunted. “Well, maybe. After all, of course you’d make that claim now. Amazing how many Confederates always hated Jake Featherston and everything he stood for—if you ask them, anyhow…What’s so funny?”

Potter’s laughter was bitter as wormwood. He’d lied convincingly enough to make a connoisseur of liars like Jake Featherston believe him. All the other Confederate big shots had, too. Now he was telling the truth—and this damnyankee wouldn’t take him seriously. If he didn’t laugh, he would cry.

“You can believe whatever you want—you will anyhow,” he said. “I believe plenty of people who yelled, ‘Freedom!’ when that looked like the smart thing to do will tell you now that they never had anything to do with anything. They know who’s on top and who’s on the bottom. Life is like that.”

The major wrote something in his notebook. “You’re so cynical, you could go any way at all without even worrying about it. Down deep, you don’t believe in anything, do you?”

“Fuck you, Tyler,” Potter said. The Yankee blinked. Potter hadn’t lost his temper before. “Fuck you in the heart,” he repeated. “The one woman I ever really loved, I broke up with on account of she was for Featherston and I was against him.”

“Will she testify to that?” the interrogator asked.

“No. She’s dead,” Potter answered. “She was in Charleston when your Navy bombers hit it back in the early days of the war.” He barked two more harsh notes of laughter. “And if she were there at the end, she would have gone up in smoke with the rest of the city because of your superbomb.”

Major Tyler gave him a dead-fish look. “You’re in a poor position to complain about that, wouldn’t you say?”

“Mm, you may be right,” Potter admitted. That made the Yankee blink again; he didn’t know Potter well enough to know his respect for the truth.
Who does know me that well nowadays?
Potter wondered. He couldn’t think of a soul. That bespoke either a lifetime wasted or a lifetime in Intelligence, assuming the two weren’t one and the same.

“If we were to release you, would you swear a loyalty oath to the United States?” the interrogator asked.

“No,” Potter said at once. “You can conquer my country. Hell, you did conquer my country. But I don’t feel like a good Socialist citizen of the USA. I’d say I was sorry I don’t, only I’m not. Besides, why play games? You aren’t going to turn me loose. You’re just looking for the best excuse to hang me.”

“We don’t need excuses—you said so yourself, and you were right,” Tyler replied. “Let me ask you a slightly different question: would you swear not to take up arms against the USA and not to aid any rebellion or uprising against this country? You don’t have to like us for that one, only to respect our strength. And if you violate that oath, the penalty, just so you understand, would be a blindfold and a cigarette—a U.S. cigarette, I’m afraid.”

“Talk about adding insult to injury,” Potter said with a sour smile. “Yes, I might swear that oath. There’s no denying we’re knocked flat. And there’s also no denying that pretty soon I’ll get too old to be dangerous to you with the worst will in the world. Things will go the way they go, and they can go that way without me.”

“By your track record, General, you could be dangerous to us as long as you’re breathing, and I think we’d be smart to make sure you don’t sneak a telegraph clicker into your coffin,” Ezra Tyler said.

“You flatter me,” Potter told him.

“I doubt it,” the U.S. officer replied. “If we were to release you, where would you go? What would you do?”

“Beats me. I spent a lot of years as a professional soldier. And when I wasn’t, in between the wars, I lived in Charleston myself. Not much point going there, not unless I want to glow in the dark.” Potter took off his glasses and polished them with a handkerchief. It bought him a moment to think. “Why are you going on and on about turning me loose, anyway? Are you trying to get my hopes up? I’ve been on the other end of these jobs, you know. You won’t break me like that.”

If they started getting rough…He had no movie-style illusions about his own toughness. If they started cutting things or burning things or breaking things or running a few volts—you didn’t need many—through sensitive places, he would sing like a mockingbird to make them stop. Anybody would. The general rule was, the only people who thought they could resist torture were the ones who’d never seen it. Oh, there were occasional exceptions, but the accent was on
occasional
.

Major Tyler shrugged. “Our legal staff has some doubts about conviction, though we may go ahead anyway. If you were captured in our uniform…But you weren’t.”

“Don’t sound so disappointed,” Potter said.

“What did you think when that colored kid shot President Featherston?” the Yankee asked out of a blue sky.

“I didn’t know who did it, not at first,” Potter answered. “I saw him fall, and I…I knew the war was over. He kept it going, just by staying alive. If he’d made it to Louisiana, say, I don’t think we could have beaten you, but we’d still be fighting. And I’d known him almost thirty years, since he was an artillery sergeant with a lousy temper. He made you pay attention to him—to who he was and to what he was. And when he got killed, it was like there was a hole in the world. We won’t see anyone like him any time soon, and that’s the Lord’s truth.”

“I say, thank the Lord it is,” Tyler replied.

“He damn near beat you. All by himself, he damn near did.”

“I know. We all know,” Tyler said. “And everybody who followed him is worse off because he tried. He should have left us alone.”

“He couldn’t. He thought he owed you one,” Potter said. “He was never somebody who could leave anybody alone. He aimed to pay back the Negroes for screwing him out of a promotion to second lieutenant—that’s how he looked at it. He wanted to, and he did. And he wanted to pay back the USA, too, and you’ll never forget him even if he couldn’t quite do it. I hated the son of a bitch, and I still miss him now that he’s gone.” He shook his head. Major Tyler could make whatever he wanted out of that, but every word of it was true.

XVI

T
he doctor eyed Michael Pound with a curious lack of comprehension. “You can stay longer if you like, Lieutenant,” he said. “You’re not fully healed. You don’t have to return to active duty.”

“I understand that, sir,” Pound answered. “I want to.”

He and the doctor wore the same uniform, but they didn’t speak the same language. “Why, for God’s sake?” the medical man asked. “You’ve got it soft here. No snipers. No mines. No auto bombs or people bombs.”

“Sir, no offense, but it’s boring here,” Pound said. “I want to go where things are happening. I want to make things happen myself. I needed to be here—I needed to get patched up. Now I can walk on my hind legs again. They can put me back in a barrel, and I’m ready to go. I want to see what the Confederate States look like now that they’ve surrendered.”

“They look the way hell would if we’d bombed it back to the Stone Age,” the doctor said. “And everybody who’s left alive hates our guts.”

“Good,” Pound said. The doctor gaped. Pound condescended to explain: “In that case, it’s mutual.” He held out his hospital-discharge papers. “You sign three times, sir.”

“I know the regulations.” The medical man signed with a fancy fountain pen. “If you want a psychological discharge, I daresay you’d qualify for that, too.”

“Sir, if I want a discharge, I’ll find a floozy,” Pound said. As the doctor snorted, Pound went on, “But you’ve even got things to really cure VD now, don’t you?”

“As a matter of fact, we do. Curing stupidity is another story, worse luck.” The doctor kept one copy for the file and handed back the rest. “Good luck to you.”

“Thanks.” Pound took the papers and limped across the street to the depot there for reassignment.

“Glutton for punishment, sir?” asked the top sergeant who ran the Chattanooga repple-depple. He was not far from Pound’s age, and had an impressive spread of ribbons on his chest—including one for the Purple Heart with two tiny oak-leaf clusters on it.

“Look who’s talking,” Pound told him. The noncom chuckled and gave back a crooked grin. Pound asked, “What have you got for me?”

“Armor, eh?” the sergeant said, and gave Pound a measuring stare. “How long did you wear stripes on your sleeve instead of shoulder straps?”

“Oh, a little while. They finally promoted me when I wasn’t looking,” Pound said.

“Thought that was how things might work.” The sergeant didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out. A first lieutenant with graying, thinning hair and lines on his face hadn’t come out of either West Point or the training programs that produced throngs of ninety-day wonders to lead platoons. Every so often, the school of hard knocks booted out an officer, too. The sergeant shuffled through papers. “What’s the biggest outfit you were ever in charge of?”

“A platoon.”

“Think you can swing a company?”

Pound always thought he could do anything. He was right more often than he was wrong, which didn’t stop him from occasionally bumping up against a hard dose of reality. But, since he would never again be able to get back to the pure and simple pleasures of a gunner’s job, he expected he could handle a larger command than any he’d had yet. “Sure. Where is it?”

“Down in Tallahassee, Florida,” the personnel sergeant said. “Kinda tricky down there. They didn’t see any U.S. soldiers during the war, so a lot of them don’t feel like they really lost.”

“No, huh?” Pound said. “Well, if they need lessons, I can give ’em some.”

“There you go. Let me cut you some orders, then. I’ll send a wire to the outfit down there, tell ’em they’ve got their man. And we’ll give you a lift to the train station.” The sergeant sketched a salute. “Pleasure doing business with you, sir.”

“Back at you.” Pound returned the military courtesy.

Seeing the train gave him pause. It said—screamed, really—that the fighting wasn’t over yet. A freight car full of junk preceded the locomotive. If the track was mined, the car’s weight would set off the charge and spare the engine. There was a machine gun on the roof of every fourth car, and several more gun barrels stuck out from the caboose. You didn’t carry that kind of firepower unless you thought you’d need it.

He already knew what Georgia looked like. He’d helped create that devastation himself. He was moderately proud of it, or more than moderately. He changed trains in Atlanta. Walking through the station hurt, but he didn’t let on. Released Confederate POWs in their shabby uniforms, now stripped of emblems, also made their way through the place. They were tight-lipped and somber. Maybe the people in Tallahassee didn’t know the CSA had lost the war, but these guys did.

The new train also had a freight car in front and plenty of guns up top. Pound looked out on wrecked vehicles and burnt farmhouses and hasty graves—the detritus of war. He thought the devastation would have a sharp edge marking the U.S. stop line, but it didn’t. Bombers had made sure of that. Towns had got leveled. Bridges were out. He sat there for several hours waiting for the last touches to be put on repairs to one.

“Why don’t we go back or go around?” somebody in the car asked.

“Because that would make sense,” Pound said, and no one seemed to want to argue with him.

He got into Tallahassee in the late afternoon, then, and not the morning as he’d been scheduled to do. It wasn’t remotely his fault, but he didn’t think it would endear him to his new CO, whoever that turned out to be.

A sergeant standing just inside the doorway held a sign that said
LIEUTENANT POUND
. “That’s me,” Pound said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“It’s all right, sir. I know the railroads on the way down here are really screwed up,” the noncom said. “I’ve got an auto waiting for you. Can I grab your duffel? Colonel Einsiedel said you were coming off a wound.”

“Afraid I am.” Pound took the green-gray canvas sack off his shoulder and gave it to the sergeant. “Sorry to put you to the trouble, but if you’re kind enough to offer I’ll take you up on it.”

“Don’t worry about it, sir. All part of the service.” The sergeant was in his early twenties. He’d probably been a private when the war started, if he’d been in the Army at all. Michael Pound knew what his curious glance meant.
You’re the oldest goddamn first looey I ever saw
. But the man didn’t say anything except, “I’ve got it. Follow me.”

The motorcar was a commandeered Birmingham. The sergeant drove him past the bomb-damaged State Capitol and then north and east up to Clark Park, where the armored regiment was bivouacked. It wasn’t a long drive at all. “Tallahassee’s the capital of Florida, isn’t it?” Pound said. “I thought there’d be more of it.”

“It’s only about a good piss wide, sure as hell,” the sergeant agreed. “Christ, the Legislature only meets for a coupla months in odd-numbered years. We had to call ’em back into session so we could tell ’em what to do.”

“How did they like that?” Pound asked.

“Everybody hates us. We’re Yankees,” the sergeant said matter-of-factly. “But if anybody fucks with us, we grease him. It’s about that simple. All of our barrels have a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in front of the commander’s cupola, and we carry lots of canister, not so much HE and AP. We’re here to smash up mobs, and we damn well do it.”

“Sounds good to me.” Pound had wished for a machine gun of his own plenty of times in the field. Now he’d have one—and a .50-caliber machine gun could chew up anything this side of a barrel. And if God wanted a shotgun, He’d pick up a barrel’s cannon firing canister. Canister wouldn’t just smash up a mob—it would exterminate one.

Barbed wire surrounded Clark Park. So did signs with skulls and crossbones on them and a blunt warning message:
HEADS UP! MINES!
U.S. guards carrying captured C.S. automatic rifles talked to the sergeant before swinging back a stout, wire-protected gate and letting the Birmingham through.

“Had trouble with auto bombs or people bombs?” Pound asked. “Do they shoot mortars at you in the middle of the night?”

“They tried that shit once or twice, sir,” his driver answered. “When we take hostages now, we’re up to killing a hundred for one. They know we’d just as soon see ’em dead, so they don’t mess with us like they did when we first got here. Now they’ve seen we really mean it.”

“That sounds good to me, too.” Pound was and always had been a firm believer in massive retaliation.

The sergeant drove him up to a tent flying a regimental flag—a pugnacious turtle on roller skates wearing a helmet and boxing gloves—that looked as if some Hollywood animation studio had designed it. Colonel Nick Einsiedel looked as if some Hollywood casting office had designed him. He was tall and blond and handsome, and he wore the ribbons for a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.

“Good to have you with us,” he told Pound. “I did some asking around—you’ve got a hell of a record. Shame you didn’t make officer’s rank till the middle of the war.”

“I liked being a sergeant, sir,” Pound said. “But this isn’t
so
bad.” As Einsiedel laughed, he went on, “How can I be most useful here, sir?”

“That’s the kind of question I like to hear,” the regimental CO replied. “We’re trying to be tough but fair—or fair but tough, if you’d sooner look at it that way.”

“Sir, if I’ve got plenty of canister for the big gun and a .50 up on my turret along with the other machine guns, you can call it whatever you want,” Pound said. “The people down here will damn well do what I tell ’em to, and that’s what counts.”

Colonel Einsiedel smiled. “You’ve got your head on straight, by God.”

“I’ve been through the mill. Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Einsiedel said. “One thing we don’t do unless we can’t help it, though—we don’t send a barrel out by itself. Too many blind spots, too good a chance for somebody to throw a Featherston Fizz at you.”

That didn’t sound so good. “I thought the locals were supposed to be too scared of us to try any crap,” Pound said.

“They are—supposed to be,” the regimental CO answered. “But in case they aren’t, we don’t want to lead them into temptation, either. Does that suit you?”

“Oh, yes, sir. I want to know what I’m getting into, that’s all,” Pound said.

Einsiedel gave him a crooked grin. “Whatever you get into down here, make sure you go to a pro station afterwards, ’cause chances are you’ll end up with a dose if you don’t.”

“Understand, sir,” Pound said, thinking back to his joke with the doctor before he got released. “Uh—is there an officers’ brothel in town?”

“Officially, no. Officially, all the brown-noses back up in the USA would pitch a fit if we did things like that. Unofficially, there are two. Maude’s is around the corner from the Capitol. Miss Lucy’s is a couple of blocks farther south. I like Maude’s better, but you can try ’em both.”

“I expect I will. All the comforts of home—or of a house, anyway,” Pound said. Colonel Einsiedel winced. Pound figured he’d got off on the right foot.

L
ike most Congressional veterans, Flora Blackford spent most of her time in Philadelphia. As summer swung towards autumn every other year, though, she went back to the Lower East Side in New York City to campaign for reelection. And this was a Presidential election year, too.

She thought Charlie La Follette ought to win in a walk. But the Democrats had nominated a native New Yorker, a hotshot prosecutor named Dewey, to run against him. Dewey and his Vice Presidential candidate, a blunt-talking Senator from Missouri, were running an aggressive campaign, crisscrossing the country saying they could have handled the war better and would ride herd on the beaten Confederacy harder. President La Follette and his running mate, Jim Curley of Massachusetts, had to content themselves with saying that the Socialists damn well
had
won the war. Would that be enough? Unless people were uncommonly ungrateful, Flora thought it would.

Normally, she wouldn’t have wanted to see Congressman Curley on the ticket. He came straight from the Boston machine, an unsavory if effective apparatus. But Dewey’s would-be veep was a longtime Kansas City ward heeler, and the Kansas City machine was even more unsavory (and perhaps even more effective) than Boston’s.

Visiting Socialist Party headquarters felt like coming home again. The only difference from when she worked there thirty years earlier was that the butcher’s shop underneath the place was owned by the son of the man who’d run it then. Like his father, Sheldon Fleischmann was a Democrat. And, like his father, he often sent cold cuts up anyhow.

The district had changed. Far fewer people here were fresh off the boat than had been true in 1914. Native-born Americans tended to be more conservative than their immigrant parents. All the same, Flora worried more about the national ticket than her own seat. The fellow the Democrats had nominated, a theatrical booking agent named Morris Kramer, had to spend most of his time explaining why he hadn’t been in uniform during the war.

“He’s got a hernia,” Herman Bruck said. He’d been a Socialist activist as long as Flora had. “So all right—they didn’t conscript him. But do you think anybody wants a Congressman who wears a truss?”

“If he didn’t wear it, his brains would fall out,” somebody else said. That got a laugh from everyone in the long, smoky room. Half the typewriters stopped clattering for a moment. The other half wouldn’t have stopped for anything this side of the Messiah.

“I won’t give him a hard time for not going into the service,” Flora said. “The voters know the story.” If they didn’t know it, she
would
make damn sure they found out before Election Day. “I want to show them what having somebody who’s been in Congress for a while means to them.”

“Well, you’ve got a chance to do that,” Bruck said.

“I know,” Flora answered unhappily. During the Great War, C.S. bombers hardly ever got as far north as New York City. They did little damage on their handful of raids. It wasn’t like that this time around, worse luck.

Most of the Confederates’ bombs had fallen on the port—most, but far from all. Some rained down on the city at random. In a place so full of people, the bombardiers must have assumed they would do damage wherever their explosions came down—and who was to say they were wrong?