'Sorry to hear it, ma'am,' Robert E. Kent said politely. 'He fixed my boots once or twice. He was right good at it.'
He gave Hal the sort of impersonal praise he might have given a whore who'd pleased him. Maybe thinking of that particular comparison was what made Nellie ask, 'Do you know what else he was good at?'
'No, ma'am,' Kent said. Confederates were polite, sometimes even when Nellie wished they weren't.
She said, 'He was good at finding out what you people were up to, that's what. He was a big part of the U.S. spy ring in Washington during the war-and so was I.'
That proud announcement spawned a considerable silence from the Confederates. At last, Kent said, 'Well, ma'am, you helped your country, same as we helped ours.'
He was, to Nellie's way of thinking, too polite by half. She'd hoped to get a bigger rise out of him and his countrymen. What good was gloating if the people you were gloating over refused to acknowledge you were gloating? To cover her feelings, she poured herself a cup of coffee.
One of the other Confederates said, 'Ma'am, your country won the last war, no doubt about it. That's one for you, and we can't deny it.' His compatriots nodded. He went on, 'You've got to remember, though, when Jake Featherston gets to be president of the CSA in a couple of weeks… well, tomorrow belongs to us.'
Almost all of the Confederates, Robert E. Kent among them, nodded again. One man looked sour as vinegar. Nellie would have bet he hadn't voted for Featherston. The others, though… The others looked as if they were talking not about ordinary earthly politics, but about the Second Coming. Kent said, 'He'll put us back on our feet, by heaven.'
'And he'll put the niggers in their place,' another man said. 'If there's anything worse than an uppity nigger, I don't know what it is.'
Still more nods. Nellie had the feeling she ought to listen carefully, then take what she heard across the street to Hal, just as she had during the Great War. But Hal wasn't there, never would be there any more. The Italian fellow who had the place now would think she was crazy if she burst in and started babbling about what the Confederates were saying in her coffeehouse. He might be right, too.
'You Yankees waited a long time before you finally whipped us,' Robert E. Kent said. 'You needed to build yourselves up, and you went and did it. Now we're the ones who have to do that.'
'Why?' Nellie asked, as if she were still a spy trying to ease important information out of people and not simply a proprietor trying to get her customers to hang around and order more coffee and sandwiches. 'What difference does it make? If we're going to stay at peace, who cares whether one side's built up and the other one isn't?'
Kent said, 'Ma'am, I think there's two different kinds of peace. One's where this fellow's strong and that fellow's weak, and when this fellow says, 'This is how we'll do things,' they do 'em that way, on account of that fellow's got no choice. That there is what we've got nowadays. The other kind is where both fellows are strong, and neither one pushes the other one around because he knows he'll get pushed back. That there is what Jake Featherston is after, and I reckon he can get it.'
They all nodded again. Even the one who plainly hated Featherston and the Freedom Party nodded. Nellie wondered what that meant. Probably that he might not have much use for the president-elect of the CSA, but that he despised the United States still more. Nellie had never known any Confederates who had much use for the USA, not even when they came up here to do business.
'Let me have another cup of coffee, ma'am, if you'd be so kind,' Robert E. Kent said, 'and if you could get me a ham and cheese sandwich to go with it, that'd be good.' Three or four of the others ordered more food and drink, too. They had plenty of money-U. S. coins and greenbacks, not the scrip and brown Confederate banknotes they'd used during the war. Nellie was glad to take it from them, and they tipped generously. All in all, it was the best business day she'd had in weeks.
Even so, she wasn't sorry when they finally left. She wanted Confederates to know their country was weaker than the United States. She wanted them afraid of the USA. When she found them cocky instead, she worried. She'd seen the CSA bombard Washington in the Second Mexican War as a child and in the Great War when she was in the prime of life. She didn't want it to happen again when she was an old woman.
Edna came by at closing time, as she often did now that Hal was dead. 'How are you, Ma?' she said. 'How was your day?'
'Fair. No, better than fair,' Nellie answered, and told her about the Confederates.
Her daughter sighed, probably thinking of Confederate Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid and what might have been. Another world, Nellie thought, and laughed a little. If she was going to think of other worlds, why not one where the United States won the War of Secession and there never was any such thing as the Confederate States of America? With Virginia still in the USA, Washington wouldn't have been shelled. It would still be the capital in more than name, too. And who would ever have heard of Jake Featherston? Nobody at all, odds were.
'What are you smiling about?' Edna asked. When Nellie told her, she said, 'Wouldn't that be something? You ought to write a book, Ma, like that gal from Boston did-you know, the one who shot the Confederate submersible skipper. You could get rich.'
'Maybe I could get rich-if I could write a book. And if pigs could fly, we'd all carry umbrellas,' Nellie said.
'You wouldn't have to do it all by your lonesome,' Edna said. 'That other gal had somebody else, a real writer, do most of the work. You could split the money and still have plenty.'
'I haven't got enough ideas for a book,' Nellie said firmly. 'The only other thing I'm sure of is that we wouldn't have had this stinking collapse if we were one big country, and anybody can see that. It's not worth writing about.'
'I suppose.' Her daughter didn't want to give up the idea. 'I know what you could do, then. Write about your life story. That's exciting enough for anybody, what with the spy stuff during the war and the.. the other stuff back before the turn of the century.'
By the other stuff, of course, she meant Nellie's time in the demimonde. 'I don't want to write about that!' Nellie exclaimed. 'I wish to heaven none of that ever happened. I spent all these years getting to be halfway respectable, and now you want me to write about
… that? Forget it, Edna.'
'Too bad,' Edna said. 'It'd be exciting. People'd pay money to read about it.'
'It wasn't exciting. It was just nasty.' Nellie couldn't imagine how anybody who'd actually been in the demimonde could think it was exciting. She hadn't come close to warming up to a man more than a couple of times in all the years since she'd left. And how much would people want to read about that?
She expected Edna to go on harping about it. Her daughter refused to believe how foul it had been, how foul it had made Nellie feel after a man put gold on the dresser, got undressed, and then did what he wanted-and had her do what he wanted. But Edna didn't nag, or not exactly. Instead, she said, 'You remember that Bill Reach, the fellow who Hal said ran the whole spy show?'
The fellow who made me out to be a whore in front of a coffeehouse full of Confederates, Nellie thought grimly. 'I remember him,' she said, and not another word.
'I wonder what ever happened to him,' Edna said. 'If you know that, you could stick it in the book, too.'
I know what happened to him. I killed the drunken son of a bitch when he tried to rape me. She almost told that to Edna, just to shut her daughter up. How much could it matter now that Hal, who'd idolized Bill Reach for no good reason Nellie could ever see, was dead? But she swallowed the words. She'd promised herself she would take that secret to her own grave, and she aimed to do it.
'If I had to guess,' she said after an all but imperceptible pause, 'he got killed when the United States bombarded Washington before they took it back. An awful lot of people did.'
'No story in that, though,' Edna said.
'I don't care,' Nellie said. 'That's what I'm telling you. There was no story.'
'Ma, you're a stick.'
'Well, maybe I am. I don't care. I worked too hard for too long to tell a bunch of fancy lies now that I'm on the edge of turning into an old lady. What would Hal say if I did?'
'Tell the truth, then,' Edna said.
'I have been telling the truth,' Nellie lied.
Her daughter threw her hands in the air. 'What am I supposed to do with you, Ma?' she said, half affectionate, half exasperated.
