to himself that he hadn't. He'd thought Jake Featherston would disappear into obscurity once the war ended. Most men-almost all men-would have. The exceptions were the ones who had to be dealt with.
For the time being, it looked as if Featherston had been dealt with. Not so long before, his speech would have stood at the top of the front page, not below the fold. He was a falling star these days. With luck, he wouldn't rise again.
When Potter got to the harbor, he stiffened. A U.S. Navy gunboat was tied up at one of the quays. Seeing the Stars and Stripes here, where the Confederacy was born and the War of Secession began, raised his hackles. The flag stood out; the C.S. Navy used the Confederate battle flag as its ensign, not the Stars and Bars that so closely resembled the U.S. banner. And the U.S. Navy men's dark blue uniforms also contrasted with the dark gray their Confederate counterparts wore.
These days, Clarence Potter made his living as an investigator. He'd been looking into smuggling going through the harbor, and had headed there to report his findings to the harbormaster. But that warship flying the hated Northern flag drew him as a magnet drew iron.
He wasn't the only one, either. Men in both C.S. naval uniform and in civilian clothes converged on the U.S. gunboat. 'Yankees, go home!' somebody yelled. Scores of throats roared agreement, Potter's among them.
'Avast that shouting!' a U.S. officer on the deck of the gunboat bawled through a megaphone. 'We've got every right to be here under the armistice agreement, and you know it damned well. We're inspecting to make sure you Confederates aren't building submersibles in these parts. If you interfere with us while we're doing our duty, you'll be sorry, and so will your whole stinking country.'
They love us no better than we love them, Clarence Potter reminded himself. And that lieutenant commander had a point. If he and his men couldn't make their inspection, the CSA would pay, in humiliation and maybe in gold as well. The Yankees had learned their lessons well; as victors, they were even more intolerable than the Confederates had been.
'Yankees, go home!' the crowd on the quay shouted, over and over.
At a barked order, the sailors on the gunboat swung their forward cannon to bear on the crowd. The gun was only a three-incher-a popgun by naval standards-but it could work a fearful slaughter if turned on soft flesh rather than steel armor. Sudden silence descended.
'That's better,' the U.S. officer said. 'If you think we won't open fire, you'd goddamn well better think again.'
'You'll never get out of this harbor if you do,' somebody called.
The U.S. lieutenant commander had spunk. He shrugged. 'Maybe we will, maybe we won't. But if you want to start a brand new war against the United States of America, go right ahead. If you start it, we'll finish it.'
No one from the United States would have talked like that before the Great War. The Confederate States had been on top of the world then. No more. The Yankees had the whip hand nowadays. And people in Charleston knew it. The crowd in front of the U.S. gunboat dispersed sullenly, but it dispersed. Some of the men who walked away knuckled their eyes to hold back tears. The Confederates were a proud folk, and choking on that pride came hard.
Potter made his way to the harbormaster's office. That worthy, a plump man named Ambrose Spawforth, fumed about Yankee arrogance. 'Those sons of bitches don't own the world, no matter what they think,' he said.
'You know that, and I know that, but do the damnyankees know it?' Potter answered. 'I'll tell you something else I know: the way that bastard in a blue jacket acted, he just handed the Freedom Party a raft of new votes.'
Spawforth was normally a man with a good deal of common sense. When he said, 'Well, good,' a chill ran through Clarence Potter. The harbormaster went on, 'Isn't it about time we start standing up to the USA again?'
'That depends,' Potter said judiciously. 'Standing up to them isn't such a good idea if they go and knock us down again. Right now, they can do that, you know.'
'Don't I just!' Spawforth said. 'We're weaklings now. We need to get strong again. We can do it. We will do it, too.'
'Not behind Jake Featherston.' Potter spoke with absolute conviction.
But he didn't impress Spawforth, no matter how certain he sounded. The fat man said, 'He'll tell the Yankees off. He'll tell the niggers off. He'll tell the fools in Richmond off, too. That all needs doing, every bit of it.'
One of Potter's eyebrows rose. 'Splendid,' he said. 'And what happens after he tells the Yankees off?'
'Huh?' Plainly, that hadn't occurred to Spawforth.
'The likeliest thing is, they take some more of our land or they make us start paying them reparations again,' Potter said. 'We aren't strong enough to stop them, you know. Do you want another round of inflation to wipe out the currency?'
He was-he always had been-a coldly logical man. That made it easy for him to resist, even to laugh at, Jake Featherston's fervent speechmaking. It also made him have trouble understanding why so many people took Featherston seriously. Ambrose Spawforth was one of those people. 'Well, what we need to do is get strong enough so the USA can't kick us around any more,' he said. 'The Freedom Party's for that, too.'
'Splendid,' Potter said again, even more sardonically than before. 'We tell the United States we aim to kick them in the teeth as soon as we get the chance. I'm sure they'll just go right ahead and let us.'
'You've got the wrong attitude, you know that?' the harbormaster said. 'You don't understand the way things work.'
What Potter understood was that you couldn't have whatever you wanted just because you wanted it. Even if you held your breath till you turned blue, that didn't mean you were entitled to it. As far as he could see, the Freedom Party hadn't figured that out and didn't want to.
He also understood getting deeper into an argument with Spawforth would do him no good at all. The man didn't have to hire him to snoop around the harbor. Yes, he'd been in intelligence during the war. But plenty of beady-eyed, needle-nosed men were at liberty in Charleston these days. A lot of them could do his job, and do it about as well as he did.
And so, however much he wanted to prove to the world at large-and to Ambrose Spawforth in particular-that Spawforth was an ass, an imbecile, an idiot, he restrained himself. Instead of laying into the man, he said only, 'Well, I didn't come here to fight about politics with you, Mr. Spawforth. I came to tell you about the fellows who're sneaking dirty moving pictures into the CSA and taking tobacco out.'
'Tobacco? So that's what they're getting for that filthy stuff, is it?' Spawforth said, and Potter nodded. The harbormaster looked shrewd. 'If it's tobacco, they're likely Yankees. I would've reckoned 'em some other kind of foreigners-goddamn Germans, maybe-from the girls on the films, but they don't talk or nothin', so I couldn't prove it.'
'Yes, the films are coming in from the USA. I'm sure of that.' Potter looked at Ambrose Spawforth over the tops of his spectacles. 'So you've seen some of these moving pictures, have you?'
The harbormaster turned red. 'It was in the line of duty, damn it. Have to know what's going on, don't I? I'd look like a right chucklehead if I didn't know what all was coming through Charleston harbor.'
He had enough of a point to keep Potter from pressing him. And the veteran, in the course of his own duties, had seen some of the films himself. He didn't think the girls looked German. They were certainly limber, though. He took some papers from his briefcase. 'Here's my report-and my bill.'
J onathan Moss hadn't taken up the law to help Canadians gain justice from the U.S. occupying authorities. Such thoughts, in fact, had been as distant from his mind as the far side of the moon before the Great War started. He'd spent the whole war as an American pilot in Ontario, beginning in observation aircraft and ending in fighting scouts. He'd come through without a scratch and as an ace. Not many of the men who'd started the war with him were still there at the end. He knew exactly how lucky he was to be here these days, and not to need a cane or a hook or a patch over one eye.
U.S. forces had planned to take Toronto within a few weeks of the war's beginning. But the Canadians and the English had had plans of their own. The U.S. Army had taken three years to get there. Almost every inch of ground around Lake Erie from Niagara Falls to Toronto had seen shells land on it. The city itself…
Having spent a lot of time shooting it up from the air, Moss knew what sort of shape Toronto had been in when the fighting finally stopped. It was far from the only Canadian place in such condition, either. Towns came
