Return Engagement (11 page)

“If they don’t run away as soon as they get there,” Rodriguez whispered to Carlos Ruiz. His friend nodded. Neither of them had much faith in the men who followed Francisco José II, the new Emperor of Mexico.

Quinn went on, “But that is not the only news I have for you tonight,
mis amigos.
I am delighted to be able to tell you that I have a copy of President Featherston’s important new book,
Over Open Sights,
for each and every one of you.” He picked up a crate and set it on the table behind which he sat. “You can get it in Spanish or English, whichever you would rather.”

An excited murmur ran through the Freedom Party men. Rodriguez’s voice was part of it. People had been talking about
Over Open Sights
for years. People had been talking about it for so long, in fact, that they’d begun to joke about whether Featherston’s dangerous visions would ever appear. But here was the book at last.

Only a few men asked for
Over Open Sights
in English. Rodriguez wasn’t one of them. He spoke it fairly well, and understood more than he spoke. But he still felt more comfortable reading Spanish. Had his sons been at the meeting, he suspected they would have chosen the English version. They’d had more schooling than he had, and more of it had been in English.

“Pay me later, as you have the money,” Quinn said. “Some of the price from each copy will go to helping wounded soldiers and the families of those who die serving their country.
Señor
Featherston,
el presidente,
was a soldier himself. Of course you know that. But he has not forgotten what being a soldier means.”

Hipolito Rodriguez wasn’t the only one who nodded approvingly. Now that Jake Featherston was rich and famous, he could easily have forgotten the three dark years of the Great War. But Quinn was right; he hadn’t.

The local Freedom Party leader went on, “At the end of the last war, our own government tried to pretend it didn’t owe our soldiers anything. They’d fought and suffered and died—
por Dios,
my friends,
you’d
fought and suffered and died—but the government wanted to pretend the war had never happened. It had made the mistakes, and it blamed the men for them. That’s one of the reasons I’m so glad we finally came to power. What the Whigs did then, the Freedom Party will never do. Never!”

More nods. Some people clapped their hands. But the applause wasn’t as strong as it might have been. Rodriguez could see why. Instead of giving
Señor
Quinn all their attention, men kept opening their copies of
Over Open Sights
here and there and seeing just what Jake Featherston had to say. The President would never come to Baroyeca, especially not now, not with a war on. But here, in his book, Featherston was setting out all his thoughts, all his ideas, for his country to read and to judge.

Rodriguez held temptation at bay only long enough to be polite. Then he, too, opened
Over Open Sights.
What
did
Jake Featherston have to say? The book began,
I’m waiting, not far behind our line. We have niggers in the trenches in front of us. As soon as the damnyankees start shelling them, they’ll run. They don’t want anything to do with U.S. soldiers—they’d sooner shoot at us. I’d like to see the damnyankees dead. But I’d rather see those niggers dead. They aim to ruin this country of ours. And most of all, I want to pay back the stupid fat cats who put rifles in those niggers’ hands. I want to, and by Jesus one of these days I will.

And he had. And he was paying back the
mallates,
and he was paying back the damnyankees, too. Rodriguez had always thought Jake Featherston was a man of his word. Here once again he saw it proved.

Quinn laughed. He said, “I am going to ask for a motion to adjourn. You are paying more attention to the President than you are to me. That’s all right. That’s why Jake Featherston
is
the President. He makes people pay attention to him. He can do it even in a book. Do I hear that motion?” He did. It passed with no objections. He went on, “
Hasta la vista, señores.
Next week, if it pleases you, we will talk about some of what he has to say.”

The Freedom Party men went out into the night. Some of them headed for home, others for
La Culebra Verde.
After a brief hesitation, Rodriguez walked to the cantina. He didn’t think people would wait for next week’s meeting to start talking about what was in
Over Open Sights.
He didn’t want to wait that long himself. He could read and drink and talk—and then, he thought with a smile, drink a little more.

D
r. Leonard O’Doull was not a happy man. He found that all the more strange, all the more disheartening, because he’d been so happy for so long. He’d come up to Quebec during the Great War to work at the hospital the U.S. Army had built on a farmer’s land near the town of Rivière-du-Loup. He’d ended up marrying the farmer’s daughter, and he and Nicole Galtier had come as close to living happily ever after as is commonly given to two mortals to do. Their son, Lucien, named for his grandfather, was a good boy, and was now on the edge of turning into a good young man.

Oh, they’d had their troubles. O’Doull had lost his father, a physician like himself, and Nicole had lost both her mother and her father in the space of a few years. But those were the sorts of things that happened to people simply because they were human beings. As a doctor, Leonard O’Doull understood that better than most.

He’d made a good life, a comfortable life, for himself in the Republic of Quebec. He’d spoken some French before he ever got up here. These days, he used it almost all the time, and spoke it with a Quebecois accent, not the Parisian one he had of course learned in school. There had been times when he could almost forget he was born and raised in Massachusetts.

Almost.

He’d been reminded his American past still stayed a part of him when war clouds darkened the border between the United States and the Confederate States. To most people in Rivière-du-Loup—even to his relatives by marriage—the growing strife between the USA and the CSA was like a quarrel between strangers who lived down the street: interesting, but nothing to get very excited about.

Now that war had broken out, the locals still felt the same way. The Republic of Quebec was helping the USA with occupation duty in English-speaking Canada, but the Republic remained neutral, at peace with everyone even when most of the world split into warring camps.

As Leonard O’Doull walked from his home to his office a few blocks away, he did not feel at peace with the rest of the world. Far from it. He was a tall, lean man, pale as his Irish name suggested, with a long, lantern-jawed face, green eyes that usually laughed but not today, and close-cropped sandy hair now grayer than it had been. He didn’t feel fifty, but he was.

People nodded to him as he walked by. Rivière-du-Loup wasn’t such a big town that most folks didn’t know most others. And O’Doull stood out on account of his inches and also on account of his looks. He didn’t look French, and just about everybody else in town did. Most people were short and dark and Gallic, the way their ancestors who’d settled here in the seventeenth century had been.

Oh, there were exceptions. Nicole’s brother, Georges Galtier, was as tall as O’Doull, and twice as broad through the shoulders. But Georges looked like a Frenchman, too; he just looked like an oversized Frenchman.

Here was the office. O’Doull used one key to open the lock, another to open the dead bolt. His was one of the few doors in Rivière-du-Loup to have a dead bolt. But he was a careful and reputable man. He kept morphine and other drugs in here, and felt an obligation to make them as hard to steal as he could.

He got a pot of coffee going on a hot plate and waited for his receptionist to come in. Stephanie was solidly reliable once she got here, but she did like to sleep in every so often. While he waited for the coffee to perk and for her to show up, O’Doull started skimming medical journals. With vitamins and new drugs and new tests appearing seemingly by the day, this was an exciting time to be a doctor. He had a chance of curing diseases that would have killed only a few years before. Every journal trumpeted some new advance.

The outer door opened. “That you, Stephanie?” O’Doull called.

“No, I’m afraid not.” It was a man’s voice, not a woman’s, and used a clear Parisian French whose like Leonard O’Doull hadn’t heard for years. Then the man switched to another language with which O’Doull was out of touch: English. He said, “How are you today, Doctor?”

“Pas pire, merci,”
O’Doull replied in Quebecois French. He had no trouble understanding English, and thanks to his journals read it all the time, but he didn’t speak it automatically the way he once had. He needed a conscious effort to shift to it to ask, “Who are you?”

“Jedediah Quigley, at your service,” the stranger said. He paused in the doorway to the private office till O’Doull nodded for him to come in. He was trim and lean, still erect and probably still strong though he had to be past seventy, and he had the look of a man who’d spent a long time in the military. Sure enough, he went on, “Colonel, U.S. Army, retired. I’ve done a fair amount of liaison work between the U.S. and Quebecois governments in my time. I confess to taking it easier these days, though.”

“Jedediah Quigley.” O’Doull said the name in musing tones. He’d heard it before, and needed to remember where. He snapped his fingers. “You’re the fellow who took my father-in-law’s land for the military hospital, and then ended up buying it from him after the war.”

“That’s right.” Quigley gave back a crisp nod. “He skinned me for every sou he could, too, and he enjoyed doing it. I was sad to hear he’d joined the majority.”

“So was I,” O’Doull said. “He was quite a man. . . . But you didn’t come here to talk about him, did you?”

“No.” The retired officer shook his head. “I came here to talk about you.”

“Me? Why do you want to talk about me?” O’Doull pulled open a couple of desk drawers to see if he could find a spare cup. He thought he remembered one, and he was right. He stuck it on his desk, filled it with coffee, and shoved it across to Quigley. Then he poured the usual mugful for himself. After a sip, he went on, “I’m just a doctor, doing my job as best I can.”

“That’s why.” Quigley sipped his own coffee. He chuckled as he set down the cup. “Some eye-opener, by God. Why you, Dr. O’Doull? Because you’re not just a doctor. You’re an American doctor. What I came to find out is, how much does that mean to you?”

“Isn’t that interesting?” O’Doull murmured. “I’ve been wondering the same thing myself, as a matter of fact. What have you got in mind?” Even as he asked the question, a possible answer occurred to him.

When Jedediah Quigley said, “Your country needs doctors, especially doctors who’ve seen war wounds before,” he knew he’d got it right. Quigley added, “Things aren’t going as well as we wish they were. Casualties are high. If you still think of yourself as an American . . .”

“Good question,” Dr. O’Doull said. “Till this mess blew up, I really didn’t. I was as much a Quebecois as anybody whose umpty-great-grandfather fought alongside Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham. But there’s nothing like seeing the country where you were born in trouble to make you wonder what you really are.”

“If you think we’re in trouble now, wait till you see what happens if those Confederate bastards make it all the way up to Lake Erie,” Quigley said.

“You think that’s what they’re up to?” O’Doull asked.

“I do.” Quigley spoke with a good officer’s decisiveness. “If they can do that, they cut the country in half. All the rail lines that connect the raw materials in the West with the factories in the East run through Indiana and Ohio. If those go . . . Well, if those go, we have a serious problem on our hands.”

Leonard O’Doull hadn’t thought of it in those terms. He’d never been a soldier. At most, he’d been a doctor in uniform. But a picture of the USA formed in his mind—a picture of the factories in eastern Ohio and Pennsylvania and New York and New England cut off from Michigan iron and from Great Plains wheat and from oil out of Sequoyah and California. He didn’t like that picture—didn’t like it one bit.

“What do we do about it?” he asked.

“We do our damnedest to stop them, that’s what,” Quigley answered. “If you cut me in half at the belly button, I won’t do too well afterwards. The same applies to the United States. I can tell you one thing stopping the Confederates means, too: it means casualties, probably by the carload lot.”

“Well, I do understand why you’re talking to me,” O’Doull said.

The retired colonel nodded. “I would be surprised if you didn’t, Doctor. You’re good at what you do. I don’t think anybody in town would say anything different. And you’ve got plenty of experience with military medicine, too, as I said before.”

“More than I ever wanted,” O’Doull said.

Jedediah Quigley waved that aside. “
And
you’re an American.” He cocked his head to one side and waited expectantly. “Aren’t you?”

No matter how much O’Doull wanted to deny it, he couldn’t, not when he’d been thinking the same thing on his way to the office. “Well, what if I am?” he asked, his voice rough with annoyance—at himself more than at Quigley.

“What if you are?” Quigley echoed, sensing he had a fish on the hook. “If you are, and if you know you are, I’m going to offer you the chance of a lifetime.” He sounded like a fast-talking used-motorcar salesman, or perhaps more like a sideshow barker at a carnival. Before going on, he made a small production of lighting up a stogie. The match hissed when struck, sending up a small gray cloud of sulfurous smoke. What came from the cheroot wasn’t a whole lot more appetizing. Quigley didn’t seem to care. After blowing a smoke ring, he said, “If you’re an American, I’m going to offer you the chance to get close enough to the front to come under artillery fire, and probably machine-gun fire, too. You’ll do emergency work, and you’ll swear and cuss and fume on account of it isn’t better. But you’ll save lives just the same, and we need them saved. What do you say?”