into her backside, shoving her up as he thrust down. She wrapped her legs around him and did her best to squeeze him breathless.
She squeezed him inside her, too. He groaned and gasped and spent himself at the same instant as she cried out, wordlessly this time. 'My God,' he said, like a man waking from the delirium of the Spanish influenza. And he had been in a delirium, though one far more pleasant than the influenza brought.
Laura Secord's face was still slack with pleasure; a pink flush mottled her breasts. She shook her head, as if she too were returning to herself. 'Which of us is going to the opium den?' she murmured. Before Moss could answer-if, indeed, he'd been able to find anything to say-she got out of bed and squatted over the chamber pot. A doctor friend of Moss' had once told him getting rid of the stuff like that did only a little good, because a woman couldn't get rid of all of it, but he supposed-he hoped-it was better than nothing.
Once that was done, she turned modest again, and dressed quickly and with her back to him. He got into his own clothes. 'I'd better head back down to Berlin,' he said.
'Empire, you mean,' Laura Secord told him.
Moss laughed. They disagreed on so many things… but when their bodies joined, it wasn't sparks flying, it was thunder and lightning. He'd never known nor imagined anything like it. 'I still say it's Berlin, and so does everybody else,' he answered, 'and if you don't like that, you can let me know about it, and maybe I'll come up here and argue about it.'
'Would you like to come up here and argue about it next Sunday?' she asked. 'You never can tell when the weather in these parts will change, but it should still be good then.'
'Next Sunday?' Moss said. 'I can do that.' His pulse quickened at the thought of it. 'As a matter of fact, I can hardly wait.'
As the clock in Jeremiah Harmon's drugstore chimed six, Reggie Bartlett put on his coat and hat. 'Where's the fire?' the druggist asked him. 'Are you going to leave before you get paid?'
'Not likely, boss,' Reggie answered. 'My wallet's been whimpering at me for the last couple of days. Thank heaven it's finally Friday.'
'Well, I've got the prescription a whimpering wallet needs,' Harmon said. 'Here you are, Reggie.' He counted out banknotes, then added a coin. 'One week's pay: seventeen dollars and fifty cents.'
'Thank you.' Bartlett put the notes in his wallet and the coin- he saw it was dated 1909-in his pocket. 'And do you know what, boss? I'm happier, I'm a hell of a lot happier, to get this than I was when you paid me millions and millions every week a couple of months ago '
'Of course you are-you're a sensible fellow,' Harmon said. 'When I paid you millions and millions, three days after you got them they'd be worth even less than they were when I gave them to you. Seventeen-fifty's not a whole lot of money, Lord knows, but it'll still be worth seventeen-fifty next Friday.'
'I hope it will, anyhow,' Reggie said. 'I don't think I'm ready to put any of it in the bank just yet, though. A lot of people who put money in the banks got wiped out after the war.'
'And isn't that the sad and sorry truth?' his boss said. 'I was lucky, as these things go: I got mine out while it was still worth something, anyhow, and I spent it on whatever I needed then, and ever since I've been living week to week and hand to mouth like everyone else.'
'I never had enough in the bank to worry too much about what I lost,' Reggie said. 'If I can keep my head above water for a little while now…' The new money had been in circulation for six weeks, and was still holding its value against the U.S. dollar and the German mark. Maybe it would go on doing that.
'What do you think of President Burton Mitchel these days?' Harmon asked slyly. 'Don't you wish you'd voted Whig in the election last fall?'
'Long as I didn't vote for Jake Featherston, who I did vote for doesn't matter a hell of a lot,' Bartlett answered. 'And Mitchel's had nothing but good luck since he got the job.'
'I wouldn't say the way he got it was good luck,' Harmon observed, his voice dry.
'Not for Wade Hampton V, that's for sure,' Reggie agreed. 'But good luck for the country? I reckon it is. Those wild men in the Freedom Party even got the damnyankees to feel sorry for us when they shot Hampton. Now that we aren't sending every dime in the country up to the USA, all the real money that's been hiding can come out again.' He reached into his pocket. He hadn't had a half dollar in there for years. 'And besides, Mitchel's got Congress eating out of the palm of his hand. Whatever he wants, they give him. Even the Freedom Party Congressmen have quit arguing with him.'
'Maybe it's the sign of a guilty conscience, though I wouldn't have bet they were possessed of any such equipment,' Harmon said. 'I don't know how long the honeymoon will last, but Mitchel's making the most of it.'
'Anything that makes the Freedom Party shut up is good in my book.' Reggie touched a finger to the brim of his hat. With September heading into October, he'd traded in his flat-crowned straw for a fedora. 'I'll see you tomorrow morning for my half-day.'
'Good night, Reggie,' Harmon told him.
Bartlett left the drugstore. Light was draining out of the sky. At this season of the year, nightfall came earlier, perceptibly earlier, every day. Street lamps threw little puddles of light down at the feet of the poles they surmounted. With dusk, people hurried wherever they were going, wanting to get there before full darkness if they could.
A man Reggie recognized passed him under one of those street lamps. The fellow came into Harmon's drugstore every so often, and was an outspoken Freedom Party backer. Reggie didn't know whether he was a Freedom Party goon, but he looked as if he might have been.
To stay on the safe side, Reggie stuck his hand in the pocket in which he still carried a pistol. The Freedom Party man knew he didn't have any use for Jake Featherston. If the fellow also knew he'd been the one who helped aim Tom Brearley at Roger Kimball, all sorts of fireworks might go off.
Whatever the Freedom Party man knew, he kept walking. His head was down, his face somber and, Reggie thought, a little confiised. Was he looking for the certainty he'd known before Grady Calkins shot the president of the Confederate States, the certainty that Jake Featherston was on the way up and he himself would rise with his leader from whatever miserable job he held now? If he was, he wouldn't find it on the dark, dirty sidewalks of Richmond.
Posters on a board fence shouted HANG FEATHERSTON HIGHER THAN HAMAN! in big letters. Underneath, in much smaller type, they added, Radical Liberal Party of the Confederate States. They'd gone up less than a week after Wade Hampton V got shot, and no one, not even the men of the Freedom Party, had had the nerve to deface them or tear them down. Even the goons in white and butternut might have known some shame at being goons.
Back at his flat, Reggie took a chunk of leftover fried chicken out of the icebox and ate it cold with a couple of slices of bread and a bottle of beer to wash everything down. It was, he knew, a lazy man's supper, but he figured he had the right to be lazy once in a while if he felt like it.
After washing the dishes, he took out the new banknotes he'd got and looked at them. The one-dollar notes bore the image of Jefferson Davis, the five-dollar notes that of Stonewall Jackson: no doubt to remind people of the Stonewall, the five-dollar gold-piece hardly seen since the end of the war. Maybe, now that specie wasn't flowing out of the CSA as reparations, the government would start minting Stonewalls again.
Reggie walked into the bedroom and got out a banknote he'd kept from the last days before the currency reform: a $1,000,000,000 banknote. It might have been the equivalent of twenty-five or thirty cents of real money. It showed Jeb Stuart licking the Yankees during the Second Mexican War, and was every bit as well printed as the new banknotes, even if all the zeros necessarily made the design look crowded.
'A billion dollars,' Reggie said softly. If only it had been worth more than a supper at a greasy spoon or a couple of shots of whiskey at a saloon with sawdust on the floor. But it hadn't; it was nothing more than a symbol of a whole country busy going down the drain. Reggie set it on the table by the sofa. 'If I ever have kids,' he said, 'I'll show this to them. Maybe it will help them understand how hard times were after the war.'
He shook his head. They wouldn't understand no matter what, any more than they would understand what life in the trenches was like. Experience brought understanding. Nothing else came close.
When he got to work the next morning, he glanced affectionately at the cash register. All of a sudden, its keys corresponded to prices once more. He didn't mentally have to multiply by thousands or millions or billions any more.
A customer came in and bought some aspirins. 'That'll be fifteen cents,' Bartlett said. The man pulled from
