In at the Death (73 page)

A little boy with strep throat made him feel happier. Penicillin would take care of that, and would make sure the kid didn’t come down with rheumatic fever or endocarditis. O’Doull felt he’d earned his fee there and done some real good. All the same, he wasn’t used to taking it easy any more. He wondered if he ever would be.

A
corporal waited on the platform when Abner Dowling got off the train at the Broad Street station. Saluting, the noncom said, “I’ll take you to the War Department, sir.”

“Obliged,” Dowling said. The corporal grabbed his suitcase, too. It wasn’t heavy, but Dowling didn’t complain. Ten years earlier, he knew he would have. He still wasn’t as old as George Custer had been when the Great War broke out, but he needed only another six years.

Philadelphia looked better than it had the last time he was there. More craters were filled in. More ruined buildings were torn down. Of course, the superbomb hadn’t gone off right here.

“How are things on the other side of the river?” he asked.

“Sir, they’re still pretty, uh, fouled up.” The corporal would have said something strong talking with one of his buddies. As he braked for a red light, he added, “That’s such a big mess, God knows when they’ll set it to rights.”

“I suppose,” Dowling said.

“Believe it, sir. It’s the truth.” The corporal sounded missionary in his zeal to convince.

Dowling already believed. He’d spent too much time talking with Henderson V. FitzBelmont to do anything else. FitzBelmont wasn’t the most exciting man ever born—an understatement. But he’d put a superbomb together while the United States was doing their goddamnedest to blow Lexington off the map. Dowling didn’t like him, but did respect his professional competence. So did the U.S. physicists who’d interrogated him. They were impressed he’d done as much as he had under the conditions in which he had to work.

The War Department looked a lot better than it had when the Confederates tried their best to knock it flat. Now repairmen could do their job without fighting constant new damage. The concrete barriers around the massive structure remained in place. No C.S. diehards or Mormon fanatics or stubborn Canucks—rebellion still flared north of the border—could grab an easy chance to auto-bomb the place.

Dowling walked from the barricades up to the entrance. He wheezed climbing the stairs. His heart pounded. He was carrying a lot of weight around, and he’d just reminded himself how young he wasn’t.
I made it through the war, though. That’s all that
—
well, most of what
—
really counts
.

Despite the stars on his shoulder straps, he got frisked before he could go inside. The soldiers who patted him down didn’t take anything for granted. When Dowling asked about that, one of them said, “Sir, the way things are, we’ll be doing this forever. Too many assholes running around loose—uh, pardon my French.”

“I’ve met the word,” Dowling remarked. The enlisted men grinned.

A corporal in a uniform with creases sharp enough to shave with took Dowling down into the bowels of the earth to John Abell’s office. These days, the more deeply you were buried, the bigger the wheel you were. And Abell
was
a bigger wheel—he now sported two stars on his shoulder straps.

“Congratulations, Major General,” Dowling said, and stuck out his hand.

“Thanks.” The General Staff officer’s grip was stronger than his slender build and pallid face would have made you think. He’d been fair almost to the point of ghostliness even before he started impersonating a mole. But he had to be really good at what he did to rise as high as he had without a field command. Well, that was nothing Dowling hadn’t already known.

“What’s the latest?” Dowling asked.

“We finally have a handle on the rising in Saskatoon,” Abell answered. “They surrendered on a promise that we’d treat them as POWs—and that we wouldn’t superbomb the place.”

“Good God!” Dowling said. “Were we thinking of it?”

“No—but the Canucks don’t need to know that,” the younger man replied.

“Well, well. A use for superbombs I hadn’t thought of,” Dowling said. “Just knowing we’ve got ’em on inventory is worth something.”

“Indeed,” Abell said. “Speaking of which, how is Professor FitzBelmont?”

Before answering, Dowling asked, “Am I allowed to talk about that with you?”

Abell’s smile was cold, but his smiles usually were. “Oh, yes. That’s one of the reasons you were ordered back here.”

“He’s a more than capable physicist, and he had some good engineers working under him,” Dowling said. “That’s the opinion of people who ought to know. What with as much of this town as he blew up, I’d say they’re right.”

“What do we do with him?” Abell asked.

“He’s kind of like a bomb himself, isn’t he? All that stuff he knows…Damn good thing Featherston didn’t want to listen to him at first.
Damn
good thing. If the Japs or the Russians kidnapped him, I’d flabble,” Dowling said. “And he’d sing. He’d sing like a nightingale. He’d probably think it was…interesting.”

“Our German allies don’t want the Russians getting a superbomb,” Abell said. “
No
body wants the Japanese getting one.”

“Except them,” Dowling said.

“Yes. Except them.” John Abell jotted something in a notebook. Even upside down, his script looked clear and precise. “Probably about time for him to have an unfortunate accident, don’t you think? Then we won’t have to worry about what he’s up to and where he might go—or, as you say, might be taken.”

What had he just written down?
Kill Henderson FitzBelmont
, the way someone else might have written
eggs, salami,
½
pound butter
? Dowling didn’t know, but that was what he would have bet. And Abell wanted his opinion of the idea, too. What was he supposed to say? What came out of his mouth was, “Well, I think we’ve learned about as much from him as we’re going to.”

Abell nodded. “That was my next question.”

“If we’re going to do this, it really does have to look like an accident,” Dowling said. “We give the diehards a martyr if we screw up.”

“Don’t worry about it. The people we use are reliable,” Abell said. “Very sad, but if the professor tried to cross the street in front of a command car…”

“I see.” Dowling wondered if he saw anything but the tip of the iceberg. “How many Confederates have already had, uh, unfortunate accidents?”

“I can’t talk about that with you,” the General Staff officer answered. “Some people we can’t convict for crimes against humanity still don’t deserve to live, though. Or will you tell me I’m wrong?”

Dowling thought about that. He thought about everything that had happened in the CSA since Jake Featherston took over. Slowly, he shook his head. “Nope. I won’t say boo.”

“Good. I didn’t expect you would.” Abell gave another of his chilly smiles. “Tell me, General, have you given any thought to your retirement?”

The question might have been a knife in Abner Dowling’s guts.
So this is the other reason they called me to Philadelphia
, he thought dully. He didn’t know why he was surprised. Not many men his age were still serving. But he thought he’d done as well as a man could reasonably do. Of course, when you got old enough, that didn’t mean anything any more. They’d kick you out regardless. If it had happened to George Custer—and it had—it could happen to anybody.

With that in mind, Dowling answered, “Custer got over sixty years in the Army. I’ve had more than forty myself. That doesn’t match him, but it’s not a bad run. I’m not ready to go, but I will if the War Department thinks it’s time.”

“I’m afraid the War Department does,” Abell said. “This implies no disrespect: only the desire to move younger men forward. Your career has been distinguished in all respects, and no one would say otherwise.”

“If I’d held Ohio…” But Dowling shook his head. Even that probably wouldn’t have mattered much. The only way you could keep from getting old was by dying before you made it. The past three years, far too many people had done that.

“It’s
not
personal or political,” Abell said. “I understand that you feel General Custer’s retirement was both.”

“Oh, it was,” Dowling said. “I was there when the Socialists stuck it to him. There was blood on the floor by the time N. Matoon Thomas got done.”

“I shouldn’t wonder. Custer was a, ah, vivid figure.” Abell wasn’t lying. And the sun was warm, and the ocean was moist. The General Staff officer went on, “I repeat, though, none of those factors applies in your case.”

“Bully,” Dowling said—slang even more antiquated than he was. “I get put out to pasture any which way.”

“If you’d been asked to retire during the war, it might have shown dissatisfaction with your performance. We needed your experience then. Now we have the chance to train younger men,” Abell said.

He was putting the best face he could on it. He wasn’t a hundred percent convincing, but he didn’t miss by much. Even so…“How long before they put
you
out to pasture?” Dowling asked brutally.

“I may have a few more years. Or they may ask me to step down tomorrow,” Abell answered with every appearance of sangfroid. “I hope I’ll know when it’s time to say good-bye. I don’t know that I will, but I hope so.”

“Time to say good-bye,” Dowling echoed. “When I started, no one was sure what the machine gun was worth. Now FitzBelmont talks about blowing up Rhode Island with one bomb.”

“Best thing that could happen to it,” Abell observed.

“Heh,” Dowling said. “Maybe it is time for me to go.”

“Believe me, the Army appreciates everything you did,” Abell said. “Your success in west Texas changed the whole moral character of the war.”

Dowling knew what that meant. Not even U.S. citizens who didn’t like Negroes could stomach killing them in carload lots. That was why Jefferson Pinkard would swing. Dowling’s Eleventh Army had shown that the massacres weren’t just propaganda. The Confederates really were doing those things—and a lot of them were proud of it.

“Well…thank you,” Dowling said. It wasn’t exactly what he’d hoped to be remembered for when he graduated from West Point, but it was better than not being remembered at all. As Custer’s longtime adjutant, he’d been only a footnote. The one time he’d been important was when he lied to the War Department about what Custer and Morrell planned to do with barrels. That, he hoped,
wouldn’t
go down in history. In this war, he’d carved out a niche for himself. It wasn’t a Custer-sized niche. If anybody had that one this time around, it was Irving Morrell. But a niche it was.

“You might do worse than think about publishing your memoirs in timely fashion,” Abell said. “A lot of high-ranking officers will be doing that. If you get yours out there before most of the others, it can only work to your advantage.”

If I do that
, Dowling thought,
I
will
have to talk about lying to the War Department
. A good many people would read a memoir of his precisely because he’d worked with Custer for so long. But work with Custer wasn’t all he’d done—not even close. Didn’t the world deserve to know as much?

“I’ll think about it,” he said.

“All right.” Abell nodded briskly. He’d solved a problem. Dowling wouldn’t be difficult, not the way Custer had. The General Staff officer went on, “Do you want to head over to the press office to help them draft a release about your retirement?”

“Do I
want
to?” Dowling shrugged. “Not especially. I will, though.” What did Proverbs say?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever
. He hadn’t passed away yet, but he was passing. The United States, like the earth, would abide, and he’d helped make that so.

XIX

H
i, hon,” Sally Dover said when Jerry came back to the house. “You got a telephone call maybe half an hour ago.”

“Oh, yeah?” Dover gave his wife the kind of absentminded kiss people who’ve been married a long time often share. “Good thing we didn’t take it out yet, then.” That was coming soon, he feared. You could pretend to stay middle-class for a while when you were out of work, but only for a while. After that, you started saving every cent you could, every way you could. The Dovers weren’t eating meat very often these days, and most of the meat they did eat was sowbelly.

“Here’s the number.” She gave him a scrap of paper.

He’d hoped it would be the Huntsman’s Lodge. It wasn’t. He knew that number by heart, of course. He knew the numbers for just about all the restaurants in Augusta by heart. This wasn’t any of them. If it was anything that had to do with work, whether in a restaurant or not, he would leap at it now.

He dialed the operator and gave her the number. She put the call through. It rang twice before someone on the other end picked it up. “This is Mr. Broxton’s residence.” The voice was unfamiliar. The accent wasn’t—if the man hadn’t been born in Mexico, Jerry Dover was an Eskimo.

Hope was also unfamiliar. Charlemagne Broxton—and wasn’t that a name to remember?—was the principal owner of the Huntsman’s Lodge. Heart thuttering, Dover gave his name. “I’m returning Mr. Broxton’s call,” he said.

“Oh, yes, sir. One moment, please,” the—butler?—said. Back before the war, Charlemagne Broxton had had colored servants. Who among the wealthy in Augusta hadn’t? Where were they now? Nobody who’d lived through the war wanted to think about things like that. Nobody on the Confederate side, anyway—the damnyankees were much too fond of asking such inconvenient and embarrassing questions.

“Broxton here.” This voice was deep and gruff and familiar. “That you, Dover?”

No. My name’s Reilly, and I sell lampshades.
The mad, idiot quip flickered through Dover’s mind and, fortunately, went out. “Yeah, it’s me, Mr. Broxton. What can I do for you, sir?”

“Well, I hear you’re looking for work,” Broxton said. “How would you like your old job back?”

“I’d like that fine, Mr. Broxton. But what happened to Willard Sloan?” Jerry Dover asked.

Shut up! Are you out of your mind?
Sally mouthed at him. He ignored her. No matter how tight things were, he didn’t want to put a cripple on the street. That could have happened to him if a bullet or a shell fragment changed course by a few inches.

“Well, we had to let him go,” Broxton answered.

“How come?” Dover persisted. “Not for my sake, I hope. He could do the job.” Sally looked daggers at him. He went right on pretending not to see.

“Didn’t have anything to do with that,” Broxton said. Jerry Dover waited. The restaurant owner coughed. “Can you keep this quiet? I don’t want to hurt his chances somewhere else.”

“C’mon, Mr. Broxton. How many years have you known me? Do I blab?” Dover said.

“Well, no.” Charlemagne Broxton coughed again. “We caught him taking rakeoffs from suppliers. Big rakeoffs. And so…”

If some food disappeared from the restaurant, well, that was part of the overhead. The manager and the cooks and the waiters and the busboys all stole a little. Skimming cash was something else again. If you got caught, you got canned. The one might not cost more than the other, but it went over the line. Dover wondered why Sloan needed to do it. Was he a gambler? Was he paying somebody else off? (Dover knew too much about that.) Or did he just get greedy? If he did, he was pretty dumb. And so? People
were
dumb, all the goddamn time.

“If you need me back, you know I’ll be there,” Dover said.

“Good. I hoped you’d say that.” Charlemagne Broxton coughed one more time. “Ah…There is the question of your pay.” He named a figure just over half of what Dover had been making before he went into uniform.

“You can do better than that, Mr. Broxton,” Dover said. “I happen to know you were paying Willard Sloan more than that.” Sally gave him a Freedom Party salute. He scowled at her; that was dangerous even in private. And if you did it in private you might slip and do it in public. His wife stuck out her tongue at him.

Broxton sighed. “Business isn’t what it used to be. But all right. I’ll give you what I was giving Sloan.” He named another figure, which did indeed just about match what Jerry Dover had heard. Then he said, “Don’t try fooling around to bump it up, the way Sloan did.”

“If you think I will, you better not hire me,” Dover replied.

“If I thought you would, I wouldn’t have called,” Broxton said. “But I didn’t think Sloan would, either, dammit.”

“When do you want me to start?” Dover asked.

“Fast as you can get over to the restaurant,” the owner answered. “I’ve got Luis tending to it now, and I want him to go back to boss cook fast as he can. A greaser in that spot’d steal me blind faster’n Sloan did.”

From what Jerry Dover had seen, honesty and its flip side had little to do with color. He didn’t argue with Charlemagne Broxton, though. “Be there in half an hour,” he promised, and hung up.

Sally flew into his arms and kissed him. “They want you back!” she said. He nodded. Her smile was bright as the sun. She’d worked in a munitions plant during the war, but times had been lean since. Money coming in was a good thing.

After Dover detached himself from her, he put on a tie and a jacket and hustled off to the Huntsman’s Lodge. He didn’t want to be late, even by a minute. As he hurried along Augusta’s battered streets, he contemplated ways and means. He didn’t want the head cook pissed off at him. That was trouble with a capital T. He’d have to find a way to keep Luis sweet, or else get him out of the restaurant.

To his relief, the Mexican didn’t seem angry. “I’d rather cook,” he said. “The suppliers, all they do is try to screw you. You want to take it,
Señor
Dover, you welcome to it.”

Dover’s grin was pure predator. “I don’t take it, man. I give it.” Luis blinked. Then he grinned, too.

Before Dover could give it, he had to find out what was there. He checked the refrigerators and the produce bins. The menu had changed a little since he went into the Army. Part of that was because some things were unavailable. Part of it was because the damnyankees who made up such a big part of the clientele these days had different tastes from the regulars who’d filled the place before the war.

A glance at the list of telephone numbers in the manager’s office said a good many suppliers had changed, too. Some of the old bunch were probably dead. Some were more likely out of business. And some of the new ones had been giving Sloan kickbacks.

“Damned if you don’t sound like Jerry Dover,” said a butcher Jerry’d known for a long time.

“Yeah, it’s me all right, Phil,” Dover agreed. “So your days of fucking the Huntsman’s Lodge are over, through, finished. Got it?”

“I wouldn’t do that!” Phil the butcher sounded painfully pure of heart.

He gave Dover a pain, all right. “Yeah, and then you wake up,” he said sweetly.

He also enjoyed introducing himself to the new suppliers. If they gave him what they said they would and gave him decent prices, he didn’t expect to have any trouble with them. If they tried to palm crap off on him…He chuckled in anticipation. They’d find out. Boy, would they ever!

For tonight, the place would run on what Luis had laid in. From what Dover had seen, the boss cook hadn’t done badly. If he didn’t want the job—well, that made things easier all the way around.

Most of the time, Jerry stayed behind the scenes. He would only come out and show himself to the customers if somebody wasn’t happy and the waiters couldn’t set things right by themselves. Tonight, though, he felt not just an urge but an obligation to look around and make sure things ran smoothly. He didn’t want Charlemagne Broxton to regret hiring him back.

Everything seemed all right. The Mexican waiters and busboys sounded different from the Negroes who’d been here before, but they knew what to do. He’d started hiring Mexicans during the war. He’d already seen that they weren’t allergic to work.

The customers seemed happy. Some of them were locals. One or two even recognized him, which left him surprised and pleased. More were U.S. officers. They didn’t know him from a hole in the wall, which suited him fine. If the local women with them did know him, they didn’t let on.

Then, around ten o’clock, a woman waved to him. She wasn’t local, which didn’t mean he didn’t know her. He wished he’d stayed in his office. Melanie Leigh waved again, imperiously this time. He didn’t want to go over to the table she shared with a U.S. colonel, but he feared he had no choice.

“Hello, Jerry,” she said, as brightly as if she hadn’t been his blackmailing mistress and a likely Yankee spy. “Don, this is Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover. We’ve been friends a long time. Jerry, this is Don Gutteridge.”

“I’m very retired, Colonel Gutteridge,” Dover said, hesitantly offering his hand.

Gutteridge shook it. He was about fifty, in good hard shape for his age. “You were in the Quartermaster Corps, isn’t that right?” he said.

Dover nodded. “Uh-huh. How did you know?” He looked at Melanie. Her blue eyes might have been innocence itself…or they might not have. Knowing her, they probably weren’t.

“Let me buy you a drink, Dover, and I’ll tell you about it,” Gutteridge said. “War’s over. We can talk about some things now that we couldn’t before.”

At his wave, a waiter appeared. He ordered whiskey all around, asking Dover with his eyebrows if that was all right. Dover nodded. The waiter went away. Before the drinks came back, Dover asked, “Were you Melanie’s…handler? Isn’t that what the spies call it?”

“Yeah, I was, and yeah, that’s what we call it,” Gutteridge answered easily. “You almost got her caught, you know.”

Jerry Dover shrugged, as impassively as he could. “I gave it my best shot. I could afford the money—and I got value received for it, too,” he said. Melanie turned red; she was fair enough to make that obvious, even in the low light inside the Huntsman’s Lodge. Dover went on, “I could afford that, yeah, but I didn’t want to pass on any secrets. And so I talked to some of our own Intelligence boys, and….”

“I didn’t even wait for the answer to the letter I sent you,” Melanie said. “Something didn’t feel right, so I took a powder.”

The drinks arrived. Dover needed his. “How’d you land on me, anyway?” he said.

“In the trade, it’s called a honey trap,” Gutteridge answered for his former lover. “We ran ’em all over the CSA, with people we might be able to squeeze if push ever came to shove again. It wasn’t like your people didn’t run ’em in the USA, either.”

“A honey trap. Oh, boy,” Jerry Dover said in a hollow voice. He looked at Melanie. “I thought you meant it.”

“With you…I came a lot closer than I did with some others,” Melanie said.

“Great. Terrific.” He finished the drink in a gulp. What did they say?
A fool and his money are soon parted
. He’d parted with money, and he’d been a fool. He’d needed a while to realize how big a fool he’d been, but here it was in all its glory. He got to his feet. “’Scuse me. I have to go back to work.” Well, he wouldn’t be that kind of fool again—he hoped. He hurried away from the table.

Y
ou know what Mobile is?” Sam Carsten said.

“Tell me,” Lon Menefee urged him.

“Mobile is what New Orleans would’ve been if it was settled by people without a sense of humor,” Sam said. New Orleans was supposed to be a town where you could go out and have yourself some fun. People in Mobile looked as if they didn’t enjoy anything.

“Boy, you’ve got something there,” the exec said, laughing. “Even the good-time girls don’t act like they’re having a good time.”

“Yeah, I know.” Sam had seen that for himself. He didn’t like it. “Pretty crazy—that’s all I’ve got to tell you. This was a Navy town, too. If a bunch of horny, drunk sailors won’t liven you up, what will?”

“Beats me,” Menefee said.

Sam pointed. “Crap, that’s their Naval Academy, right over there.” It and the whole town lay under the
Josephus Daniels
’ guns. Several C.S. Navy ships and submersibles lay at the docks. U.S. caretaker crews were aboard them. Sam didn’t know what would happen to them. People were still arguing about it. Some wanted to take the captured vessels into the U.S. Navy. Others figured the spares problem would be impossible, and wanted to scrap them instead.

“Academy’s out of business,” Menefee said. Sam nodded. All the cadets had been sent home. They weren’t happy about it. Some wanted to join the U.S. Navy instead. Some wanted to shoot every damnyankee ever born. They weren’t quite old enough to have had their chance at that. The exec waved toward the Confederate warships. “What do you think we ought to do with those, sir?”

“Razor blades,” Sam said solemnly. “Millions and millions of goddamn razor blades.”

Menefee grinned. Anything large, metallic, and useless was only good for razor blades—if you listened to sailors, anyhow.

Here on the Gulf coast, winter was soft. Sam had wintered in the Sandwich Islands, so he’d known softer, but this wasn’t bad. Things stayed pretty green. It hadn’t snowed at all—not yet, anyhow. “A couple of more days and it’s 1945,” he said. “Another year down.”

“A big one,” Lon Menefee said. “Never been a bigger one.”

He wasn’t old enough to remember much about 1917. Maybe that had seemed bigger in the USA. Nobody then had known how awful a war could be. A lot of people were inoculated against that ignorance now. And 1917 had shown the USA
could
beat the Confederate States and their allies. Up till then, the United States never had. Now…Maybe now the USA wouldn’t have to go and do this all over again. Sam could hope so, anyhow.

He didn’t feel like arguing with the younger man, nor was he sure he should. “What with the superbomb and everything, I’d have a devil of a time saying you’re wrong.”

“We’ve got it,” the exec said. “Germany’s got it. The Confederates had it, but they’re out. The limeys had it, but—”