He had no trouble spotting Hadrian: his family's neighbor was the only Negro waiting on the platform. He didn't look to have slept much, either. 'C-come along with me,' he said. Cincinnatus didn't remember him stammering. He had a nervous tic under one eye, too.
No sooner had they got off the platform than four big, tough-looking white men in plain clothes surrounded them. 'You fuckin' bastard!' Cincinnatus exclaimed. He knew he'd been betrayed-he just didn't know to whom yet. Hadrian miserably hung his head. What had these people done or threatened to get him to write that letter?
They all piled into a big Oldsmobile. When it stopped in front of the city hall, Cincinnatus knew who had him. It didn't make him feel any better-worse, in fact. 'Come along, boy,' one of the whites snapped. He'd probably been a cop in the days when Covington belonged to the CSA.
However unwillingly, Cincinnatus went. The man waiting for him inside gave him a smile that might have come from a hunting hound. His luminous, yellow-brown eyes strengthened the resemblance. 'Howdy, Cincinnatus,' Luther Bliss said. 'Been a while, hasn't it?' The head of the Kentucky State Police-the Kentucky secret police-didn't wait for an answer. He turned to Cincinnatus' hard-faced escorts and spoke three words: 'Lock him up.'
E very once in a while, Nellie Jacobs would take her Order of Remembrance out of its velvet box and look at it. She didn't wear it much-where would a woman who ran a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., have occasion to wear the USA's highest civilian decoration? The last time she'd put it on was for Teddy Roosevelt's funeral. Roosevelt had presented the medal to her with his own hands. He'd given Nellie's daughter, Edna, a medal, too, but hers was only second class, not first.
She didn't know she was being a spy, Nellie thought. Lord, she wouldn't have cared if the Confederates held Washington forever. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way.
The eagle on the Order of Remembrance stared fiercely back at her. Of course, Roosevelt hadn't known the whole story, any more than Edna had. Roosevelt hadn't known she'd stuck a knife into Bill Reach, the U.S. spymaster in Washington. Nobody knew that, nobody but Nellie. Not even her husband knew, and Hal Jacobs had reported directly to Reach.
'He had it coming, the filthy son of a bitch,' Nellie muttered. It wasn't that Bill Reach had been a drunkard, though he had. But he'd also been a lecher and, in his younger days, a man who'd had-and paid for-assignations with Nellie. He'd thought he could keep on having them, too, if he just slapped down the cash.
Nellie's long oval face settled into the lines of disapproval it had worn so often since she'd escaped the demimonde. Shows how much he knew, she thought. She'd fought hard for respectability. She hadn't been about to throw it away for a drunken bastard and his red, throbbing prick. One of the things she liked about her husband was that he didn't trouble her in the bedroom very often. Old men have their advantages.
Her mouth twisted. You're no spring chicken yourself, she thought. She'd turned fifty earlier in the year. She felt every year of her age, too. It wasn't so much that she was going gray, though she was. That aside, she looked a good deal younger than her years. But keeping up with a four-year-old would have made anybody feel her years.
As if the thought of Clara were enough to make her get into mischief, she called, 'Ma! Help me tie my shoe!'
'I'm coming,' Nellie said. Her back twinged when she got off her bed. Clara couldn't tie her shoes yet. Sometimes she insisted on trying anyhow. Four-year-olds were nothing if not independent. That they drove their parents mad never once crossed their minds, of course. That was part of their… charm.
'I'm going to go out and play,' Clara declared when Nellie hurried into her bedroom.
'Not yet, you're not.' Nellie surveyed the damage. 'Oh, child, what have you gone and done?'
Actually, the damage itself left little room for doubt. Clara had put her shoes on the wrong feet and then tied as many knots as she could in the shoelaces. She couldn't manage a bow, but knots she had no trouble with. The shoes came up well over her ankles; they were almost boots, and fit snugly even before Clara created her knotty problem.
Nellie couldn't even get the shoes off her daughter till she untied some-several-of the knots. Clara didn't want to hold still for the process. Four-year-olds didn't hold still unless they were asleep or coming down with something. Nellie asked her twice not to squirm. That failing, she swatted Clara's bottom. Her daughter squalled, but then did hold still… for a little while.
It was, Nellie decided, long enough. It was, at any rate, long enough for her to get the shoes on their proper feet and tie a couple of bows. 'Play on the sidewalk in front of the shop here,' Nellie warned. 'Don't you go out in the street. I'm going to come downstairs and keep an eye on you. If you even go near the street, you'll get a spanking like you'll never forget. No, you'll get two-one from me, and one from your pa.'
'I promise, Ma.' Clara solemnly crossed her heart. 'Hope to die.'
No, it's so you don't die, Nellie thought, but Clara wouldn't have had the faintest idea what she was talking about. 'Let's go downstairs,' Nellie said. Clara took her favorite toy, a rag doll named Louise, and went down to the ground floor at what Nellie would have reckoned a suicidal pace. Nellie followed more sedately.
Nellie turned away for a moment to get a whisk broom and a dust pan. The coffee shop was closed on Sundays, of course; Washington's blue laws were as strict as any in the USA. But the more cleaning she did now, the less she would have to worry about come Monday morning, when she'd also be busy brewing coffee, frying eggs and ham and bacon and potatoes, toasting bread, and serving her customers. Her door might be shut, but she didn't reckon Sunday a day of rest.
Before Nellie had taken more than three steps, brakes screeched out in the street. Metal crumpled. Glass tinkled musically. It reminded her of artillery bombardments during the war, but wasn't so dramatic.
Or it wouldn't have been… 'Oh, God in heaven!' Nellie said, and dashed outside. 'Clara!' she shouted. 'Where are you, Clara?'
No answer. Fear rising in her like the tide, Nellie stared at the accident. A Ford and a Packard had locked horns. The Ford, predictably, was the loser. Steam gushed from its ruptured radiator. Its driver descended to the street holding a handkerchief to his head, which he'd bloodied when he greeted his windshield face first.
'Clara!' Nellie called again. 'Dear God, please…' The last time she'd prayed had been during the U.S. artillery barrage that nearly leveled Washington before the Confederates finally, sullenly, drew back into Virginia. God must have heard that prayer-she'd come through alive. But everything back then seemed small and unimportant when set against her daughter's safety. 'Clara!'
The gray-haired man who'd been driving the Packard had to kick at his door before it would open. He didn't seem badly hurt, and started shouting at the other man: 'You idiot! You moron! You thumb-fingered baboon!'
'Fuck you, Grandpa,' the man with the bloodied face replied. 'You drove right into me.'
'Liar!'
'Liar yourself!'
Neither one of them said anything about a little girl, and neither one of them paid any attention to Nellie. 'Clara!' she called once more. She didn't want to look closely at the accident, for fear she would see little legs sticking out from under a wheel. 'Clara!'
'Boo!'
Nellie sprang a foot in the air. There stood her daughter, coming out from behind the stout iron base of a street lamp. 'Thank you, Jesus,' Nellie whispered. She ran to her little girl and held her tight.
'Fooled you, Mama!' Clara said happily. 'I got down there and- Ow! ' Nellie applied her hand to the part on which her daughter was in the habit of sitting, much harder than she had before they went outside. Clara started to howl. 'What's that for, Mama? I didn't do nothing!'
'Oh, yes, you did,' Nellie said, and spanked her again. 'You scared me out of a year's growth, that's what you did. I was afraid one of those cars ran over you, do you know that?'
Clara, at the moment, knew nothing except that her fanny hurt. She tried to get away, and had no luck whatsoever. Nellie dragged her back into the coffee shop. 'Louise!' Clara wailed.
Although Nellie was tempted to leave the doll out on the sidewalk, that would have cost more tears and hysterics than it was worth. She snarled, 'You stay here. Don't move a muscle!' at Clara, and then went back to retrieve Louise. She all but threw the rag doll at her daughter. 'Here!'
'Thank you, Mama,' Clara said in an unwontedly small voice. She hadn't moved a muscle, and evidently had figured out this was no time to say or do anything that might land her in more trouble.
When Nellie's husband came back from a friend's later that morning, Nellie told him the whole story. Clara looked at him in silent appeal; he was often softer than her mother. But not this time. Hal Jacobs sighed, wuffling
