Sion Crossing (30 page)

Willy paused to assimilate what he’d got. “He told you raht—‘
Mr O. St J. Latimer
’, it sez.”

“What sez?”

“It sez—little blue book—‘Mr
O. St J. Latimer
…
British Passport
…
United King-dom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland … N 676986
’, it sez, Joe.”

“Look inside the book, Willy. What’s it say there?”

“Sure …” Willie studied the passport. “It’s got a lot of writing—N 676986—Mr Oliver St John Latimer—that’s been writ in, the name—”

“Turn the next page.” The radio came up. “Yeah—we’re okay … Yeah, he’s safe … Jus’ you hold on … You got the next page, Willy?”

“Uh-huh … Got his picture—an’ that’s him sure ’nough … It sez … it sez
‘Occupation
—
Civil Servant
…
Place of Birth—East Grinstead … Date of birth—9.3.1934 … England … height—five-foot-eight-inches … eyes
—
blue
—” Pause “—an’ he’s sure as hell been around—”

“Okay—shuddup—” Once again the radio came up, as Joe repeated the contents of the passport into it.

Latimer was trying to think, but what he had so far been able to work out had not been reassuring. Because although Americans were all armed to the teeth he could not convince himself that Ingram machine-pistols were standard domestic equipment, even in darkest Georgia: there was surely no country in the world which permitted private possession of such weapons.

So that made Sion Crossing somewhere special. And it had to be somewhere specially
legal
… or highly
il
legal. And in either case he was now in very deep trouble indeed, that meant.

“Okay.” Joe had transmitted his message, and had received instructions in return. “He got anything else in his pockets—no? Okay, then … feel him up then … An’ put your gun down first, Willy, an’ watch yourself … Because he’s maybe a pro, the man sez—okay?”

Maybe a pro?

Latimer submitted to a search, from behind.

“Legs too, Willy.” Joe nodded. “All the way down to his ankles, that’s right.”

Maybe a pro?

“’Kay?” Joe still didn’t relax. “Ah’ll take it from here, then … You go back to your spot, Willy, an’ snug down there an’ keep your eyes skinned … An’ put the cash-money back—put it
all
back, jus’ where it come from.”

Maybe a pro
revolved inside Latimer’s head. That was certainly what he was, though not within Joe’s terms of professionalism. But then … what sort of pro was Joe himself?

It was the Ingram which most obviously set him apart from his comrade. But there was more to him than that deadly professional little weapon: the two of them spoke alike, genuinely in that distinctive Southern speech of theirs, which Kingston had falsely affected off and on, but which came from them as naturally and musically as the very different accent of Highland Scotsmen from Kyle of Lochalsh; and their inexplicable Confederate fancy-dress was identical, which by itself would have made it hard for him to take them seriously now.

Except … it was
not
just the Ingram: there was an attention-to-detail and a cat-on-hot-bricks wariness about Joe which reinforced the Ingram dreadfully, tagging him with the same label as that worn by the special breed of men who operated on both sides of the Ulster border, whom he had briefed a couple of years back.

“Mistah Latimer—” Joe caught him embarrassingly in the midst of his scrutiny, with a look of his own as cold as his voice “—you jus’ put your coat back on, nice an’ easy … an’ we’ll go see the man—okay?”

The man?

The heat of the day enclosed Latimer, as it had done all the time, though he had been too pre-occupied to feel it since Willy had come upon him from nowhere, in the ruins of Sion Crossing. But now there was also the heat of the private fires beneath Joe’s coldness, which frightened him.

The Man?

He could play the game of innocence now, but it would be useless: argument and bluster would at best only prolong the agony, and there was no point in that. And, at worst, neither the man Joe, nor that frightening weapon of his, were amenable to time-wasting games.

Besides which … all the games were over now, which he perceived too late he had been playing from the start: Senator Cookridge’s game, and Colonel Howard Morris’s game, which he had played back in England—had played because of cretinous miscalculation and professional greed; and now Lucy Cookridge’s game (and Kingston’s too?), which must be part of the same game.

He put on his coat and followed the direction of Joe’s nod meekly, without argument.

And, besides which, there was
The Man
—

It was extremely odd
, thought Latimer.

He knew that he was very frightened, but that didn’t surprise him: he had been frightened before,
physically
frightened, and more than once … frightened at school, when he had been forced to climb dangerous cliffs, and to do other unnatural things like that, which other boys had enjoyed doing … and frightened more recently, in that near-accident on the motorway … So he knew himself for a coward, where flesh and blood was concerned—
his
flesh and blood, anyway—just as he was
not
a coward in any other respect, when decisions had to be taken.

But this was different: this was genuine physical fear, because he was being threatened now, as he had never been threatened before—which the man Joe had seen in his face.

But this was not the same fear as those other old fears, so well-remembered: it was real enough—it was not a minor part of what he felt … but it had to share his consciousness with a mixture of anger and curiosity.

The woods were still all around him—

Anger
… because this was all his own fault—he had been deceived, but he had let himself be deceived: he had known it, too—so that wasn’t so surprising.

But
curiosity
—what was odd was that curiosity was still so strong, in relation to
fear
and
anger
!

He wanted to see
The Man
—he wanted to do that almost as much as he was frightened for himself, and angry with himself, for being here—on the end of Joe’s gun.

There was something through the trees ahead—something white—?

His curiosity instantly receded, and he felt his spirit begin to weaken: there was something unhealthy about that curiosity, on second thoughts—a man didn’t need to plunge his hand into the flames to discover the properties of fire—

Joe growled something unintelligible from behind him, but the meaning of the sound was all too plain: whether he wanted to meet
The Man
or not was not a choice programmed into Joe’s orders: willing or not, curious or not, frightened and angry or not, he was going to meet
The Man
, that sound meant.

The trees fell away, on either side, and the white blur resolved itself into a house—a house set in well-cut lawns, unnaturally green, with banks of bright-flowering unEnglish trees setting off the green-and-white.

For an instant the scene almost took Latimer’s breath away, not so much because it was surprising, as because it
wasn’t
altogether a surprise: it was something he had never expected consciously, but it was quite unbelievably like another house which had never existed.

He was looking at the great house of Sion Crossing, as he had imagined it!

His feet walked, remembering Joe, while his mind tried to accommodate what he saw.

It was a wonderfully elegant house—it wasn’t really like any house he had actually imagined, at second glance, because it was not like any house he had ever seen; so it was neither Tara nor Fair Oaks, never mind Sion Crossing.

It was a house built for hot southern weather—for this very heat—long before air-conditioning: it was a house built inside a square of Corinthian columns holding up its wide overhanging roof, with cool shadowed verandahs all around it at two levels, raised ground floor and first floor.

That was how Sion Crossing ought to have been … but—what had made it momentarily more unbelievable, until recent memory reasserted itself—it was also Sion Crossing true-and-false, with Confederate soldiery in attendance.

But recent memory was almost instantaneously stronger, enough to destroy the illusion: reality was behind him, and there was only more fancy-dress ahead of him, with 1984 playing 1864 for some childish reason of its own, in a game in which he had no part.

The fancy-dress men reacted to his approach—two, three … and now a fourth appearing from behind a bright red-flowered bush—taking up their weapons, but then relaxing as they saw Joe behind him.

“What the hell?” Joe’s voice was sharp with sudden anger. “For chrissake!”

The man from behind the bush ceased studying Latimer. “Huh?”

“For chrissake!”

“Joe—” The man passed out of Latimer’s line of vision “—who you got there?”

They were well out on the lawn now, and with Joe’s anger behind him Latimer felt himself hurrying towards the house in spite of the appalling heat.

“Joe—”

“Shuddup! Shuddup an’ listen—” Joe drew a breath “—Willy’s back there, by the ol’ place, but ah want someone down by the creek with a sight of the bridge—” another breath “—so you get the hell down there, an’ you doan take your goddam’ eyes off’n that goddam’ bridge … an’ anythin’ crosses it—an’ ah mean
anythin’
—you call in Control right away—
you got that
?”

There was a pause. “We … we got trouble, Joe?”

A matched pause. “We got trouble? You jus’ think … anythin’ gets ’cross that bridge—anythin’ on wheels, anythin’ on legs, anythin’ that goddam’ crawls—an
you
got trouble—that’s for sure, if’n you doan call in. An’ that’ll be all the trouble you’ll need—okay?”

“Sure, Joe—”

Sure, Joe:
the man from behind the bush had got the message. But there was also information in it for Latimer, and he knew he was badly in need of information, any scrap of it, with the house only twenty yards ahead now, cool and elegant and tree-shaded, and very frightening.

These were not fancy-dress men, for all their grey uniforms and brass buttons and silly little képis. They were guards—and they were
armed
guards … and they were on the alert for trouble.

But what sort of trouble?
And why
—
?

The little knot of Confederates by the steps up to the ground floor verandah had evidently picked up the vibrations of Joe’s anger, if not his actual words: they had unrelaxed themselves into readiness again, although they looked as though they weren’t quite sure what they were ready for, any more than Latimer himself did. All that was apparent was that they shared his fear of the man with the Ingram machine-pistol.

“For chrissake!” The original anger had decayed into contempt during the passage of the lawn. “Y’all got rocks for brains?”

Latimer stopped at the foot of the steps. Somehow, although no one had worn those uniforms as real soldiers for over a century, they had the look of real squaddies wilting under their sergeant-major’s scorn, as their great-great-grandfathers might have done outside another house at Sion Crossing. But perhaps that fancy originated in the cold suspicion that there were real bullets in their rifles.

“
Jee
-sus—Jee-
sus
!” Joe swept a glance across his hoplites and selected a target. “Ronnie—for chrissake—you should’a bin watchin’ the gate by now, not takin’ part in a goddam’ convention! The Man pays you—an’ you’re tryin’ to prove somethin’? You tell me?”

The youngest of the juvenile trio stiffened under the blasphemy, but the eldest shuffled half a step nearer to Ronnie, as though defensively. “Shit, Joe! We gotta be in town, for the parade—” he looked at his wrist-watch, an anachronism below the pale blue cuff of his grey uniform coat “—like, we gotta be there
now
.” He looked up again, and caught Latimer’s eye accidentally for an instant, and then transferred the look back to Joe. “How we gotta be
there
now an’
here
too, the same time—huh?”

Latimer felt his soul contract. In that instant of contact, he had not even been a blue-coated Iowan prisoner from Sherman’s army from long ago, let alone a prisoner-of-war protected by any more modern convention. He had simply not been anything requiring human recognition, neither to be feared nor pitied.

“Huh?” Joe reacted predictably. “You tryin’ to blow smoke up my ass, boy? We got intruders an’ you wanna play soldiers in town, an’ take time off to feel up Di-
anne
when you through flag-wavin’—that it?”

Ronnie’s defender opened his mouth to deny the allegation, but he was a breath too late to pre-empt Joe’s follow-through.

“You get the hell over by the smoke-house, where you oughta be now—an’ you doan let
no one
in there, less’n ah tell you—not if it was the goddam’ Governor of the State … not if Di-
anne
was to’come showin’ that cute little fanny of hers … Do ah make mahself plain?”

Very plain, thought Latimer. And there was more useful information there too, in the plainness. Joe was a professional burdened with low-grade local help … or maybe it had been carefully chosen for the lack of curiosity which went with low intelligence. But that was beside the point—

“Then for chrissake move it!”
Joe broke the moment of acquiescent silence, galvanizing Ronnie and his comrade in opposite directions and leaving the last member of the trio petrified in front of him.

The point was that these mock-Confederates had been
expecting
trouble of some sort.

“As for you …” Joe shook his head speechlessly, in the manner of sergeants down the ages in the presence of insuperable stupidity.

The youth blinked nervously. “Ah’m t’set … an’ ring the house bell if’n ah see anythun—you said.”

Joe studied the youth for a moment. “You rung the bell then, sonny?” He nodded up the verandah steps towards the big white door.

The youth stared at Joe for a second, his hands clenching and unclenching on the rifle in them. Then he gave the door a quick glance, as though he was seeing it for the first time. “But … but …”

“You see anythin’?” asked Joe, not unkindly. “Comin’ ’cross the lawn jus’s now—anythin’—” he nodded at Latimer “—like him, mebbe?”