In at the Death (71 page)

“All right. I can understand that. It speaks well of you, as a matter of fact. But what are we supposed to do with him? Tell him not to be naughty again and turn him loose? I’d break every mirror in the house if we did.”

“Well, so would I, when you put it that way,” Moss said. “One of the reasons I don’t feel worse about defending him is that I knew he wouldn’t get off no matter what I did. Still, technically…”

The chief judge made a slashing motion with his right hand. “The law is about technicalities a lot of the time. Not here. We aren’t about to let quibbles keep us from making Pinkard and Koenig and the rest pay for what they can. I hear we were going to shoot Featherston without trial if we caught him, but that got taken care of.”

“Didn’t it just?” Moss said. “That colored kid’s got it made. He’ll be a hero the rest of his life. Too damn bad all the other blacks had to pay such a price.” He suspected one reason the United States were making so much of Cassius was to keep from noticing their own guilty conscience.

“What about you, Colonel?” the chief judge asked. “You’re going through the motions with the appeal, and we both know it. What are you really going to do once this case winds down?”

“Looks like private practice,” Moss answered without enthusiasm. “In wartime, the Army didn’t mind using pilots with gray hair. I even got to fly a turbo in combat, and that was something, no two ways about it. But they don’t want to keep me in that slot now, and I can’t even say I blame ’em. Fighter pilot is really a young man’s game.”

“I was impressed with the way you handled yourself here,” the judge said. “Are you interested in joining the Judge Advocate’s staff full time? This is one of those places where you can count on skill to beat reflexes. Look at me, for instance.” His hair was grayer than Moss’.

“Huh,” Moss said: an exclamation of thoughtful surprise. “Hadn’t even thought of that, sir. Don’t know why not. Probably because I got this assignment taking over from the poor guy in the motorcar crash. It always felt temporary to me.”

The chief judge nodded. “I take your point. And if you’ve had enough of living on an officer’s salary, I can see that, too. You’ll eat steak more often if you go civilian.”

Moss started to laugh. “I’ll tell you another reason you took me by surprise: I spent my whole career between the wars, trying to kick military justice in the teeth up in Canada.”

“I know. I checked up on you,” the chief judge said calmly. “If you wanted to, you could do the same thing here. Lord knows you’d have plenty of business.”

“That crossed my mind, sir,” Moss said. “Can’t say it thrills me, though. Far as I can see, the Canucks got a raw deal. I think I’d say the same thing if I didn’t fall in love with a Canadian girl. But the white Confederates? I was on the ground in Georgia for a couple of years, remember. Those people deserve everything they’re getting, and another dollar’s worth besides.”

“Think about switching sides, then,” the chief judge said. “Plenty more trials coming up. Not all of them will be as cut-and-dried as Jefferson Pinkard’s, either. We do need people who can conduct a good defense, and you’ve shown you can do that and then some. But we need prosecutors, too.”

He was bound to be right about the upcoming trials. How many people had helped shove Negroes into cattle cars? How many had run up barbed wire and put brick walls around colored districts in the CSA? How many had done, or might have done, all the things the Confederacy needed so it could turn massacre from a campaign promise to reality?

And what would they say now?
I was at the front
or
I was working in a factory
or
I never liked the Freedom Party anyway
. Some would be telling the truth. Some would be telling some of the truth. Some would be lying through their teeth. Sorting out who was who and giving the ones who deserved something what they deserved would take years. God only knew it would take plenty of lawyers, too.

“I don’t think I’d want to defend Vern Green, say, any time soon,” Moss said. The guard chief at the Texas camps Pinkard had run was on trial here, too, and it was a sure thing his neck would stretch along with his boss’. “One of these is about as much as I can stomach, at least from this side. Somebody where there really was some doubt about what he did…That might be a different story.”

“Nobody wants to do many of these,” the chief judge said. “I don’t think you
can
do many of these, not if you’re going to stay sane. We try not to drive our staff members loopy…on purpose. Think about it. You don’t have to make up your mind right away. In fact, if you want to think about it over a drink down in the officers’ club…God knows I need one, and I bet you do, too.”

“Sir, that is the best idea I’ve heard in a long time,” Moss said.

Whiskey probably didn’t do much for the thought process. It worked wonders on Moss’ attitude, though. And attitude mattered here at least as much as actual thought. Was this what he wanted to do with the rest of his working life?

Halfway down the second drink, he asked, “Will the Judge Advocate’s staff handle claims by Negroes against whites in the CSA?”

“I don’t know.” The chief judge looked startled. “There’ll sure be some, won’t there?”

“Only way there’d be more was if more Negroes lived,” Moss answered. “But if you’re involved in that, count me in. And if you’re not, you ought to be ashamed of yourselves. I can’t think of anything down here that needs doing more.”

“Now that you mention it, neither can I,” the chief judge said.

He’d sentenced Jefferson Pinkard to hang. That was his—and the USA’s—obligation to the dead. That the USA might also have an obligation to the living didn’t seem to have crossed his mind till now. Moss wondered how many other important people’s minds it also hadn’t crossed. Too many—he was sure of that. People in the USA kept doing their best not to think about Negroes or have anything to do with them, the same as they had ever since the CSA seceded.

Moss finished that second drink and waved for another one. He was also sure of something else. He was sure he’d found himself a new cause.

W
hat happened to your legs?” By the way the girl at Miss Lucy’s eyed Michael Pound, he might have come down with a horrible social disease.

He shrugged. “I got caught in a burning barrel.”

“Oh.” She was about twenty-five, cute enough even if she wasn’t gorgeous, and plainly not long on brains. “That must not have been much fun.”

“Sweetheart, you said a mouthful. And speaking of which…” Pound gestured. With a small sigh, the girl dropped to her knees.

He liked officers’ brothels a hell of a lot better than the ones enlisted men had to use. The girls were prettier. Nobody hurried you here, either. That was best of all. He could take his time and enjoy it. He could, and he did.

Afterwards, he left the girl—her name was Betty—a couple of dollars for herself. “You don’t need to say anything to Miss Lucy about ’em.”

“Well, I’ll try. But when it comes to cash, that old bitch has a Y-ranging set like you wouldn’t believe.” Betty spoke with more resignation than rancor.

Pound got back into his uniform. “See you again, maybe,” he said. She nodded. If she was enthusiastic, she hid it very well. She didn’t mind his money, but she sure wasn’t thrilled about him.

Well, he was old enough to be her father. And he was a damnyankee. And she was a whore and he was a trick. That left it fourth down and time to punt.

Miss Lucy’s had a bar, too—one more amenity enlisted men’s brothels didn’t enjoy. Maybe the assumption was that officers wouldn’t get plastered and smash whiskey bottles over each other’s heads. From everything Pound had seen, whoever made that assumption was an optimist.

Things seemed peaceable enough in there now. Pound stepped in and asked for a whiskey over ice. “Comin’ up,” said the woman behind the bar. She was one of the working girls; maybe she had her monthlies or something.

“Thanks,” he said when she gave it to him. “Did this place have a regular bartender back before the war?”

“Sure did. But Hadrian, he, uh, don’t work here no more.”

“Right.” Pound knocked back the drink. The booze wasn’t bad, but it tasted foul in his mouth. With a name like Hadrian, the ex-bartender had probably been colored. And the odds that he was dead now were pretty damn good. Pound set the glass on the bar. “Let me have another one.”

“Sure will.” The woman poured whiskey into a fresh glass and added a couple of ice cubes. “Boy, you drank that last one in a hurry.”

“Yeah,” Pound said. She didn’t know what was eating him. She didn’t have the faintest idea, as a matter of fact. That she didn’t was a measure of the CSA’s damnation.

Two good knocks of whiskey made Pound a little less graceful on his burned legs than he would have been without them. He walked back to BOQ through deepening twilight. There was a nip in the air. Tallahassee lay in the northern part of Florida; it got cool in the wintertime, unlike places farther south.

But the weather wasn’t the biggest thing on his mind. His head kept going back and forth. He wished he had an eye that would let him see to the rear. This was the time of day when U.S. soldiers got knocked over the head. By the time anyone found them, the bushwhackers were long gone. That didn’t keep hostages from being taken and shot, but killing innocent people also made the guerrillas have an easier time recruiting.

He got back to BOQ without any trouble. Most people did, most of the time. Anything that could happen, though, could happen to you. Anybody who didn’t understand that never went to war. Being careless—being stupid—made living to a ripe old age less likely. Pound aspired to getting shot by an outraged husband at the age of 103.

When he went to breakfast the next morning, he realized something was up. He didn’t know what; Colonel Einsiedel wasn’t letting on. Something was cooking, though. A few people in the know were all excited about it, whatever it was. Pound and the others who noticed that tried to get it out of them. The rest of the officers shoveled in bacon and eggs, oblivious to the drama around them.

The double-chinned major sitting next to Pound was one of those. “Dammit, they should have had hash browns,” he complained. “I don’t like grits.” He might not have liked them, but he’d put away a good-sized helping.

Pound didn’t like them, either. He also hadn’t taken any. He’d doubled up on toast instead. To him, that was simple common sense. It seemed beyond the major.

Dear God! How did we win the war?
he thought. That answer seemed only too obvious. There were just as many thumb-fingered, blundering idiots on this side of the former border as on the other one. No matter where you went, you couldn’t escape the dullards. Life would have been easier and happier if you could.

That afternoon, the other shoe dropped. Harry Truman was coming to Tallahassee to talk to the troops and to any locals who wanted to listen to him. An officer who was with Pound when the news got out knew exactly what he thought of that: “They better frisk these bastards before they let ’em within rifle range of the guy.”

“Amen!” Pound said, and then, a beat later, “Dibs on the girls.” He held out his hands as if he were cupping breasts. The other officer laughed.

Truman arrived by airplane two days later. That was judged safer than traveling by train. Sabotaging railroad tracks was easy, but Confederate diehards didn’t have much in the way of antiaircraft guns. Pound’s barrel was one of the machines guarding the airport as the Vice President–elect’s airliner touched down on the runway.

Pound stood up in the cupola and peered at Truman through binoculars. The Senator from Missouri wasn’t young, but he walked with crisp stride and straight back: an almost military bearing. Fair enough—he’d been an artillery officer in the Great War. Not many healthy men in the USA had missed military service in one war or the other. Even fewer in what had been the CSA.

The Vice President–elect spoke in front of the state Capitol. They set up a podium and lectern for him by a palm tree on the lawn in front of the Italian Renaissance building. Sure enough, military policemen and female auxiliaries searched people in civilian clothes before letting them past rope lines half a mile from the podium. They also searched uniformed personnel. The war had shown that people had no trouble getting their hands on uniforms that didn’t belong to them and doing unpleasant things in the other side’s plumage.

What sort of Floridians would listen to the Vice President–elect of the USA? Michael Pound eyed them curiously. Some he recognized—collaborators. They figured they knew which side their bread was buttered on. There’d been some of that flexible breed north of the Ohio a couple of years earlier. They caught hell when they turned out to have guessed wrong. These plump fellows and their sleek women were less likely to be mistaken.

Others—more ordinary folks—seemed honestly curious. That gave Pound at least a little hope. If they could get used to the idea of being part of the USA…
It’d take a miracle, and when was the last one you saw?
the cynical part of his mind jeered. The rest of him had no good answer.

Colonel Einsiedel stepped up to the mike mounted on the lectern. “Ladies and gentlemen, it is my pleasure and my privilege to present the Honorable Harry S Truman of Missouri, Vice President–elect of the United States of America.”

Along with the other soldiers, Pound clapped till his palms stung. Applause from the local civilians seemed much more measured. Well, that was no surprise. Metal-framed eyeglasses gleaming in the sun, Truman looked out over the crowd. “If anybody would have told me ten years ago that I would come to Florida to speak to my country’s soldiers here, I would have said he was crazy.” To Pound’s ear, shaped in the northern Midwest, Truman’s Missouri twang had more than a little in common with the local drawl.

“Didn’t Jake Featherston say, ‘Give me five years, and you won’t recognize the Confederate States’?” the Vice President–elect went on. His jaunty grin invited soldiers and locals alike to see the bitter joke. “Well, the man was right, but not quite the way he expected to be.