Return Engagement (44 page)

“Thanks,” Pinkard said. Maybe good reports could go back to the capital, too. Maybe. He wouldn’t have bet anything much above a dime on it.

He placed the call to Koenig’s office. Hisses and pops and clicks on the telephone line said it was going through. Every once in a while, Jeff could hear operators talking to each other. They sounded like faraway ghosts. And then, also from some considerable distance but not quite from the Other Side, the Attorney General said, “Koenig here.”

“Hello, sir. This is Pinkard. Wanted to let you know it’s all done.”

“Good. That’s good,” Koenig said. “You didn’t waste any time, did you?”

“Didn’t reckon I ought to,” Jeff answered. “Never can tell what’ll happen if you dick around on something like this.”

“Well, you’re right about that.” The Attorney General paused. “You’re sure about it?”

Jeff had expected that. He found himself nodding, even though Ferd Koenig was a thousand miles away. “Sir, I saw it with my own eyes. I made sure I did. Can’t take chances on something so important.”

“All right. I reckon you know why I have to make certain,” Koenig said. Pinkard nodded again. That meant the Attorney General would also check with Mercer Scott, and maybe with some other people at Camp Dependable, too, people about whom neither Pinkard nor Scott knew anything. Jeff didn’t know Koenig had people like that here, but he would have in the other man’s shoes. The Attorney General went on, “I’ll let the President know what a good job you did.”

“I thank you kindly.” Jeff meant that. “How do you want me to put it in the books, sir?, ‘Shot while attempting to escape’ or, ‘natural causes’?”

“, ‘Natural causes,’ “ Koenig answered after a bare moment’s hesitation. “His heart stopped, didn’t it?”

“Sure as hell did.”

“All right, then. Leave it at that. The less we stir up those waters, the better off everybody’ll be,” Ferdinand Koenig said.

Jeff found himself nodding one more time. “That’s how it’ll be, then.” There were still more than a few people who liked Willy Knight. They mostly kept their mouths shut if they wanted to stay healthy, but they were out there. No point getting them all hot and bothered, not if you could help it.
Natural causes
could mean anything.

“All right.” Koenig paused once more. “Sounds like it went off smooth as can be. I’ll let the President know about that, too.”

“Thanks. Thanks very much.” Pinkard beamed. Most of the time, nobody ever gave a jailer the respect he deserved.

After a few more polite noises—ones that didn’t matter nearly so much—Koenig hung up. Jeff let out a long sigh. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. But he’d handled it.

He nodded to himself. If it wasn’t one thing, it was another, all right. And he had a pretty good notion of what the next thing would be: a new population reduction. How many more of those could the guards take and still keep their marbles? He didn’t want them blowing out their own brains or finding other ingenious ways to kill themselves, the way Chick Blades had.

What could he do about it, though? He didn’t have the room or the food to keep all the blacks who flooded into Camp Dependable. If he tried, he’d touch off an explosion here. He couldn’t do that, not when the Confederate States were fighting for their lives. He had to make things here run as well as he could. He wasn’t supposed to cause trouble. He was supposed to stop it.

At least he didn’t have Willy Knight to worry about any more. No more bad dreams about Knight escaping, either. That was something, anyhow.

W
hen Cincinnatus Driver went to a drugstore to buy himself a bottle of aspirins, he had to wait till the druggist took care of every white customer in the place before he could give the man his money. Back before the Great War, he’d taken such humiliations for granted. After a quarter of a century of living as a citizen rather than a resident, though, they galled him. He couldn’t do anything about that, not unless he wanted to get his population reduced, but he was muttering to himself as he made his slow, halting way out the door.

He’d been lucky, after a fashion. Another white man came in just as he was going out: a tall, jowly fellow, still vigorous despite his white hair, with a mournful face and the light brown eyes of a hunting dog. He held the door open for Cincinnatus, saying, “Here you go, uncle.”

“Thank you kindly, suh,” Cincinnatus said. That
uncle
still grated, too. But it wasn’t the reason he leaned against the sooty brickwork of the drugstore’s front wall. Nobody bothered him there. Why would anyone? He was just a decrepit, broken-down nigger soaking up some sunshine. He could have been sprawled on the sidewalk with a bottle in his hand. Nobody would have bothered him then, either, unless a cop decided to beat on him or run him in for being drunk.

A pigeon strutted by, head bobbing. It could walk about as fast as Cincinnatus could. He opened the bottle of aspirins and dry-swallowed a couple of them. They wouldn’t get rid of all his aches and pains, but they would help some. And the sun did feel good on his battered bones.

After five or ten minutes, the man with the white hair and the hunting-hound eyes came out of the drugstore. He was carrying a small paper sack. He would have walked past Cincinnatus without a second glance, but the Negro spoke in a low voice: “Mornin’, Mistuh Bliss.”

The man stopped dead. Just for a moment, his eyes widened. Surprise? Fear? Cincinnatus would have bet on surprise. Luther Bliss was a first-class son of a bitch, but nobody’d ever said he scared easy. Cincinnatus wondered if he’d deny being who he was. He didn’t; he just said, “Who the hell are you? How do you know who I am? Speak up, or you’ll be sorry.”

Sorry
probably meant
dead.
His voice still held the snap of command. When Kentucky belonged to the USA, he’d headed up the Kentucky State Police—the Kentucky Secret Police, for all intents and purposes. He’d battled Negro Reds and Confederate diehards with fine impartiality, and he’d got out of the state one jump ahead of the incoming Confederates. If he was back now . . .

Cincinnatus said, “I holler for a cop, we see who’s the sorriest.” That brought Luther Bliss up short. Cincinnatus went on, “I spent time in your jail. Your boys worked me over pretty good.”

“You probably deserved it.” No, nobody’d ever said Bliss lacked nerve.

“Fuck you,” Cincinnatus said evenly.

That made Bliss jump; no Negro in his right mind would say such a thing to a white man here. But the former—or not so former—secret policeman was made of stern stuff, and shrewd as the devil, too. “You want to holler for a cop, go ahead. You’ll help the CSA and hurt the USA, but go ahead.”

“Fuck you,” Cincinnatus said again, nothing but bitterness in his voice this time. Luther Bliss had found the switch to shut him off, all right.

Seeing as much, Bliss managed a smile that did not reach his eyes. “This time, I reckon we’re on the same side. Any . . . colored fellow who isn’t on the USA’s side, he’s got to have something wrong with him.” He didn’t say
nigger,
but his hesitation showed he didn’t miss by much.

He wasn’t wrong, either. Cincinnatus wished he were. And sure as hell he wasn’t a coward. If the Confederates caught him here, they’d take him apart an inch at a time. “What the devil you doin’ in Kentucky again?” Cincinnatus asked him.

Bliss gave back that unamused smile once more. “Raising Cain,” he answered matter-of-factly. Those light brown eyes—an odd, odd color, one that almost glowed in the sunlight—measured Cincinnatus like a pair of calipers. “I remember you. That Darrow bastard sprung you. Old fool should have kept his nose out of what was none of his business.”

“I hoped to God I’d never see you again,” Cincinnatus said.

“Well, you’re about to get your wish,” Bliss replied. “Like I say, you want to yell for a cop, go right ahead.” He didn’t bother with a farewell nod or anything of the sort. He just walked away, turned the corner, and was gone, as if he were a bad dream and Cincinnatus suddenly awake.

Shaking his head, Cincinnatus walked to the corner himself. When he looked down the street, he didn’t see Luther Bliss. The ground might have swallowed up the secret policeman. Cincinnatus shook his head again. That was too much to hope for. “Do Jesus!” he muttered, shaken to the core. Ghosts kept coming back to life now that he was here in Kentucky again.

He made his slow return to the colored part of town. No drugstores operated there. A couple had been open while Kentucky belonged to the USA, run by young, ambitious Negroes who’d managed to get enough education to take on the work. The Confederates had made them shut down, though. The Freedom Party didn’t want capable colored people. As far as Cincinnatus could tell, the Freedom Party didn’t want colored people at all.

A policeman in a gray uniform strode up to Cincinnatus on an almost visible cloud of self-importance. “What’re you doing out of the quarter, boy?” he demanded.
Boy
was even worse than
uncle.

“Got me some aspirin, suh.” Cincinnatus displayed the bottle. “I’m crippled up pretty bad, an’ they help—some.”

“Let me see your passbook.”

“Yes, suh.” Cincinnatus handed him the all-important document. The cop studied it, nodded, and handed it back with a grudging nod. Like Luther Bliss, he walked away without a backward glance.

Cincinnatus stared after him, then slowly put the passbook in his pocket once more. He despised and feared Luther Bliss, but he was damned if he would tell a Confederate cop about him. One thing he’d learned and learned well was the vital difference between bad and worse. Bliss was bad, no doubt about it. Anything that had to do with the Freedom Party was bound to be worse.

Now that he was back in his own part of town, Cincinnatus had to be extra careful where he set his cane and where he put his feet. Sidewalks here were bumpy and irregular and full of holes. In the white part of Covington, they got repaired. Here? Not likely. This part of town was lucky to have sidewalks at all. The USA hadn’t spent much more money here than the Confederate States had while they ran Kentucky.

One slow, painful step at a time, Cincinnatus trudged over to Lucullus Wood’s barbecue place. As usual, the smell made him drool blocks before he got there. Also as usual, Lucullus had customers both black and white. Freedom Party stalwarts might hate Negroes on general principles. That didn’t mean they didn’t know good barbecue when they sank their teeth into it.

The heat inside was terrific. Pig carcasses and great slabs of beef turned on spits over glowing hickory coals. Cincinnatus recognized one of the men turning the spits. “Can I see Lucullus?” he asked.

“Sure. Go on back,” the turner answered. “He ain’t got nobody with him now.”

“Come in,” Lucullus called when Cincinnatus knocked on the door. The barbecue cook had a hand in the top drawer of his desk. If Cincinnatus had been an unwelcome visitor, Lucullus probably could have given him a .45-caliber reception. But he smiled and relaxed and showed both hands. “Sit yourself down. What you got on your mind?”

Sitting down felt good—felt wonderful, in fact. Cincinnatus didn’t like being on his feet. Baldly, he said, “Luther Bliss is back in town.”

“My ass!” Lucullus exclaimed. “If he was, I reckon I’d known about it. How come you got the word ahead o’ anybody else? I don’t mean no disrespect, but you ain’t nobody special.”

“Never said I was,” Cincinnatus answered. “But he was goin’into Goldblatt’s drugstore when I was comin’ out. I ain’t nobody special, but I ain’t nobody’s fool, neither. I seen him, I recognized him—you better believe I recognized him—an’ I talked to him. He got white hair now, but he ain’t changed much otherwise. Luther Bliss, all right.”

Lucullus drummed his plump fingers on the desktop. “Confederates catch him, he take a looong time to die.”

“I know. I thought o’ that.” Cincinnatus nodded. “Man’s a bastard, but he’s a brave bastard. I always figured that.”

“What the hell he doin’ here?” Lucullus asked. Cincinnatus could only shrug. Lucullus waved away this motion. “I wasn’t askin’ you. Ain’t no reason for you to know. But
I
ought to have. I got me connections up in the USA. They shoulda told me he was comin’ back.”

“Back in the days when Kentucky belonged to the United States, Bliss cared more about chasin’ your daddy than about workin’ with him,” Cincinnatus said.

“Well, that’s so, but times is different now. You gonna tell me times ain’t different now?” Lucullus sent Cincinnatus a challenging stare.

Cincinnatus shook his head. “Not me. I oughta know. Still and all, though, Bliss, he works with white folks. He likely come down here for some special nasty trick or another, an’ he got his people all lined up an’ ready to go. I don’t reckon he wants nobody else to know he’s here.”

“You got to be right about that.” Lucullus eyed Cincinnatus again, this time speculatively. “You got to be lucky he don’t decide to dispose o’ you for knowin’ who he is.”

“He thought about it,” Cincinnatus said. The sun hadn’t been the only thing glowing in Luther Bliss’ eyes. “He thought hard about it, I reckon. He probably figured no nigger’s gonna give him away.”

“He a damn fool if he think like that. Plenty o’ niggers sell their mama for a dime.” Lucullus held up a hand, pale palm out. “I don’t mean you. I know better. You is what you is. But a lot o’ niggers is just plain scared to death—an’ the way things is goin’,
to death
is just about the size of it.”

“I ain’t gonna do nothin’ to help the Confederates an’ the Freedom Party,” Cincinnatus said. “Nothin’, you hear me?”

“I done said I don’t mean you. I said it, an’ I meant it. You got to listen when you ain’t talkin’,” Lucullus said. “Bliss was at Goldblatt’s, was he? He likely ain’t stayin’ real far from there, then.”

“Mebbe,” Cincinnatus said. “Never can tell with him, though. That there man taught the Mississippi to be twisty.”

“You ain’t wrong,” Lucullus said. “And I is much obliged to you fo’ passin’ on what you seen. I should know that sort o’ thing. Luther Bliss!” He whistled mournfully. “Who woulda thunk it?”

The cook heaved himself to his feet and led Cincinnatus out of the office. At his shouted order, one of the youngsters behind the counter gave Cincinnatus a barbecued-beef sandwich so thick, he could barely get his mouth around it. He walked back to his father’s house engulfing it like a snake engulfing a frog. But all the barbecue in the world couldn’t have taken the taste of Luther Bliss from his mouth.