was this McGregor down on his farm when Hy's was bombed? He was not. You know he was not.'
'I know where he was, too: visiting kin in Ontario,' Dowling said. 'He didn't make a secret of where he was going. His farm was checked after the bombing, and then again a little before Christmas, in the hope he might have gotten careless. I don't think he could have gotten careless, sir, because I don't think he had anything to get careless about.'
'Ought to haul him in,' Custer said. 'Ought to haul him in, give him a blindfold and a cigarette, and stand him up against a wall and give him the same his son got.'
'Sir!' Dowling exclaimed in real alarm. 'Sir, the country's been pretty quiet lately. Do you want to give the Canucks a martyr? If you execute a man when you can't prove he's done anything, you're asking for trouble. Don't you think it's better to let sleeping dogs lie?'
'That dog of a McGregor lies, all right, but he's not asleep,' Custer retorted. 'He's wide awake and laughing at us, that's what he's doing. And as for asking for trouble…' He looked sly, always a dangerous sign. 'With the damned Socialists coming into power in another five weeks, I'd love to see the Canucks turn fractious. It might remind the Reds in Philadelphia why we have soldiers up here.'
That was devious. Dowling wondered how a soldier who'd gained his reputation by charging straight at the foe-regardless of whether the situation called for it-had acquired such a byzantine sense of politics. It might even be a clever move… if you didn't stop and think about what it meant to this Arthur McGregor and what was left of his family.
Dowling said, 'Sir, this fellow's already lost his son. If you shoot him, you leave a widow and a couple of orphaned daughters. That's pretty hard, sir. If he were the bomber, he would have conspired with somebody, wouldn't he? There's nothing to show he's done that. I mean nothing at all, sir. No claims, no circumstantial evidence-zero. He hasn't done it, period.'
'Lone wolf,' Custer said, but he didn't sound so cocksure as he had a moment before. Lone-wolf mad bombers weren't that easy to believe in, even for Custer.
Pressing his advantage, Dowling went on, 'So you see, sir, it really isn't that bad a report. I know it would be more satisfying if they could tie up the bomber with a pretty pink ribbon, but there are millions of Canucks and millions of square miles in this miserable icebox of a country. Catching the stinking bastard isn't easy.'
'Bah,' Custer said-a sign of weakening. Then, as if it proved something, he added, 'He almost blew you up, too.'
'Believe me, sir, I know that,' Dowling said fervently. Nobody cared enough about him personally to want to do him in. But if Custer went, he was liable to go, too. He'd make one line in the fourth paragraph of the newspaper stories. The commanding general's adjutant also perished in the blast-all the obituary he'd ever get.
He sighed. His name and photograph wouldn't make it into the encyclopedias or the history books. If he ever wrote his memoirs, the only reason they might find a publisher would be that people had an endless appetite for stories about Custer. Dowling coughed. He could tell stories about Custer, all right, stories that would curl the hair of anybody with an ounce of sense.
He did not think he was boastful in reckoning himself smarter than the senior soldier in the U.S. Army. Custer had graduated dead last in his West Point class-hardly a shining example, save perhaps of what not to do. Whenever Custer had been right, all through his enormously long military career, he'd been right for the wrong reasons. The shouting match he'd got into with Teddy Roosevelt about how and why they'd used their Gatling guns in Montana Territory the way they had proved how far back that went.
And yet, for all his failings, Custer was, and deserved to be, famous. He might have been right for the wrong reasons, but he'd been right at the right times. That counted for more. And Custer, whatever else you said about him, never did anything by halves. That counted for a lot, too.
Flaws and all-and Dowling, from long exposure to them, knew how massive they were-Custer would live in the country's memory for generations to come. And, when authors got around to writing historical novels about him, they would have to invent a character to play his adjutant, because no one would remember that perfectly competent but uninspired lieutenant colonel, Abner Dowling, whose only measurable defect was measurable indeed, in his uncommon and ever-increasing girth. It hardly seemed fair.
No doubt it wasn't fair. But then, life wasn't fair. Some people were smarter than others. Some were handsomer than others. Some-Custer sprang to mind-were pushier than others. You did what you could with what you had. And, even if no one would recall the contributions of an obscure officer named Dowling, Custer had done more than he might have otherwise because he'd had that obscure officer at his side and guarding his back.
Testily, Custer said, 'Oh, very well, Dowling-have it your way. If you think this McGregor is pure as the driven snow'-a comparison that hardly required a poetic spirit in Winnipeg in January-'we'll leave him alone. On your head be it. And if he sets off another bomb, on your head it will be.'
'You already pointed that out, sir.' Dowling sounded on the testy side himself. 'I would point out to you in return that this is not merely my opinion. It is the opinion of the expert on the spot. If we pay no attention to the opinion of the expert on the spot, where are we?'
He'd meant it for a rhetorical question. Custer answered as if it were literal: 'In the General Staff offices in Philadelphia.' That jerked a startled snort of laughter out of Dowling. Custer went on, 'But if we fall down and worship the expert on the spot, where are we then? With the Israelites who fell down and worshiped the Golden Calf, that's where.'
Dowling thought the second comparison far-fetched. What Custer meant was that he wanted the liberty to do as he damn well pleased. That was all Custer had ever wanted. Since he was eighty-one years old and still hadn't learned the difference between liberty and license, he wasn't likely to gain that knowledge in however much time he had left.
'I do think you're doing the right thing by letting this McGregor alone,' Dowling said. 'The whole country has been noticeably calmer lately than it was when you first took over.'
'I put the fear of God in the Canucks, that's why, and I had my own good reasons for doing it,' Custer said. There might even have been some truth in his words, though Dowling thought the Canadians' despair over a cause obviously lost had more to do with it. 'We will make a desert if we have to, and we shall call it peace.'
'Yes, sir,' his adjutant said resignedly. No use expecting Custer to become a decent Latin scholar at his age, either (more hope that he might become a scholar of indecent Latin). When Tacitus had said the Romans made a desert and called it peace, he was condemning them. Custer took it for praise.
'I don't care if they hate us,' Custer added, 'as long as they're afraid of us.' That was another Latin tag. Custer probably knew as much; having thought of the one, coming up with the other would have been easier for him. But did he remember the phrase came from Caligula's lips? Not likely, Dowling judged. He glanced over at Custer. Would Caligula have been like this if he'd lasted to eighty-one? Dowling's shiver had nothing to do with the subzero cold outside. He couldn't recall the last time he'd had such a frightening thought.
He said, 'Now that they are quiet, sir, I really do think it's best not to stir them up.'
'So you've said-over and over and over,' Custer said. 'So everyone says. Well, I have something to say to you, too: you and everyone else had better be right, or the United States are going to end up with egg on their face. And what do you think of that?'
'I think you're right, sir.' Dowling didn't see what good pointing out Custer's unfailing gift for the obvious would do.
XIII
Jefferson Pinkard's alarm clock went off with a sound like doom. The steelworker thrashed and writhed and finally managed to turn the bloody thing off. He wished he could thump himself in the head and get rid of his headache the same way. Alabama was a dry state, but that didn't mean he and his Freedom Party buddies couldn't lay their hands on some whiskey after meetings when they set their minds to it.
'Ought to know better than to go into work hungover,' he said. He did know better. He'd learned better the hard way. He hadn't headed for the Sloss Works hurting in years-not till he threw Emily out of the house after catching her whoring with Bedford Cunningham a second time. Since then… since then, he knew he'd been drinking more than he should, but knowing and stopping were two different critters.
