'Thank you. Thank you kindly,' Pinkard answered. He paused till the barmaid got him another beer, then chuckled and said, 'Wasn't what I came down here to do, but it hasn't worked out too bad.'
He spent most of the afternoon drinking with the other Party men and enjoying the chance to speak his own language. Then, despite a certain stagger, he made his way to the brothel and laid down enough silver for a quiet room and the company of a girl named Maria (not that half the women down here weren't named Maria), far and away the prettiest one in the place.
He'd drunk enough to have some trouble rising to the occasion. He'd paid enough to have her slide down the bed and start to help him with her mouth. He enjoyed it for perhaps half a minute. Then he remembered Emily's mouth on him after he'd found her with Bedford Cunningham, who had been his best friend. 'No, goddammit,' he growled, and pulled away.
'What?' Maria had no idea what the trouble was.
'No, I said.' He scrambled onto her. She'd got him hard enough so he could manage. He did, and then got back into his clothes and left in a hurry.
Maria shook her head. 'Loco,' she muttered, and tapped a finger against her temple.
C larence Potter said, 'My trouble is, I want to see the Freedom Party dead and buried, not just weak.' He sipped at his whiskey in the Charleston saloon. 'That makes me as much a fanatic as Jake Featherston, I suppose.'
The Freedom Party was weak nowadays, and weaker in South Carolina than it had been before the previous year's Congressional election. Even so, in most saloons a comment like that would have been good for starting a fight. Not in the Crow's Nest, though, not on a Tuesday night. The Whig Party faithful met at the Odd Fellows' hall across the street, and then a lot of them were in the habit of coming over and hashing things out with the help of the lubricants the saloon provided.
Braxton Donovan was a prominent Charleston lawyer. He was also, at the moment, slightly-but only slightly- drunk. He said, 'Only thing that'd put those know-nothing peckerheads into power is a calahamity-a calahamity, I tell you.'
'A calamity, you mean?' Potter asked.
'That's what I said, isn't it?' Several of the chins beneath Donovan's neat gray goatee wobbled.
'As a matter of fact, no,' Potter answered. Relentless precision had brought him into Confederate Army Intelligence, and later into investigative work.
'Well, it's what I meant-a calahamity is.' The lawyer held up his glass. The colored bartender hastened to refill it. Braxton Donovan nodded regally. 'Thank you kindly, Ptolemy.'
'You're welcome, suh,' Ptolemy said, professionally polite, professionally subservient.
'Tell me, Ptolemy,' Donovan asked in his rolling baritone, 'what is your view of the Freedom Party?' He might have been encouraging a friendly witness on the stand.
'Don't like 'em for hell, suh,' Ptolemy said at once. 'Somebody should ought to do somethin' about 'em, you wants to know what I thinks.' He polished the top of the bar with a spotless white towel.
'This country is in a bad way when some not so small fraction of the electorate can't see what's obvious to a nigger bartender,' Braxton Donovan said. He took a pull at his freshened drink. 'Still and all, better a not so small fraction than a large fraction, as was so a few years back.'
'Yes,' Potter agreed. 'And I believe Ptolemy here really does have no use for the Freedom Party-it's in his interest not to, after all, when you think about what Featherston has to say about blacks. But even so… Jeb Stuart III had a colored servant whose name, if I remember right, was also Ptolemy. Jake Featherston suspected the fellow was a Red-he was serving under Stuart in the First Richmond Howitzers. He told me about this servant not so long before the uprisings began.'
'And so?' Donovan asked. 'Your point is?'
'Jeb Stuart III pulled wires with his father to make sure that Ptolemy didn't have any trouble.' Clarence Potter finished his whiskey at a gulp. 'And he was a Red, dammit, as became abundantly clear when the pot boiled over. Young Stuart died in combat-let himself be killed, they say, so he wouldn't have to face the music. His father's revenge was to make sure Featherston never rose above the rank of sergeant. Petty, I suppose, but understandable.'
'Why are you telling me this?' the lawyer asked.
'A couple of reasons,' Potter answered. 'For one, we can trace the rise of the Freedom Party to such small things. And, for another, a white man's a fool if he takes a Negro's word at face value. Look what happened to Jeb Stuart III.' He swung around on the stool so that he faced the bartender. 'Ptolemy!'
'Yes, suh? 'Nother drink, suh?' the black man asked.
'In a minute,' Potter said. 'First, tell me something-what were you doing when the rebellion came in 1915?'
'Me, suh?' For all they showed, Ptolemy's eyes might have been cut from stone. 'Nothin', suh. Stayin' home mindin' my business.'
'Uh- huh.' Potter knew what that meant. It meant the bartender was lying through his teeth. Every Negro in the CSA claimed to have stayed at home minding his own business during the Red rebellion. If all the blacks who said they had actually had stayed at home, there would have been no rebellion in the first place.
Ptolemy said, 'Suh, it was a long time ago nowadays, an' it's all over an' done with. Ain't no way to change what happened. Onliest thing we can do is pick up the pieces an' go on.'
'He's right,' Braxton Donovan said. Potter found himself nodding. The Confederate States, and everybody in them, did have to do that. Saying it, though, was easier than doing it. Donovan took a half dollar out of his pocket and slid it across the bar to Ptolemy. 'Here you are. Buy yourself a drink.' A few hundred years before, kings had tossed out largess to peasants with that same sort of offhanded generosity.
'Thank you, suh.' Ptolemy made the coin disappear. He did fix a drink for himself. By its pale amber color, it held a lot more water than whiskey. And the bartender nursed it, raising it to his lips every now and then but not doing much in the way of real drinking. Potter had known very few men who worked behind a bar and did much in the way of pouring down what they served. Too easy, he supposed, for a man who worked around whiskey all the time to come to like it too well.
Having been generous to one beneath him-or so he plainly felt-Braxton Donovan swung his attention back to Potter. 'I have a question for you, sir,' he said, 'speaking of the Freedom Party.'
'Ask it, then,' Potter answered.
'I've heard you knew Roger Kimball while he was still alive,' the lawyer said.
Clarence Potter nodded. 'And so I did. That's the best time to get to know a man-while he's still alive, I mean.'
'Indeed. And in fact.' Donovan nodded grandly. 'Now, sir, the question: while he was still alive, did Kimball ever hint to you that he'd torpedoed the USS Ericsson after we'd yielded to the damnyankees?'
'Never once, never in the slightest way,' Potter replied at once. 'We were acquaintances, you understand, not friends-he liked Jake Featherston as much as I loathe the man. But I would say he didn't tell his friends, either. He was, in my opinion, a first-class son of a bitch, but he knew how to keep a secret-by keeping it, at all times and everywhere. If his exec hadn't spilled the beans, I don't think anyone would ever have known.'
'Poetic justice, what he got,' Donovan said.
'Yes, I think so, too,' Potter agreed. 'If he hadn't come to a sudden demise, he would have been a sore spot between us and the USA, and we can't afford to give them excuses to kick us around. They're too liable to do it even without excuses, though Sinclair has taken a milder line than Teddy Roosevelt did.'
'I quite agree,' Donovan said. 'I despise the Socialists and all they stand for-they set a bad example for our people, at the very least-but their foreign policy is… well, as you said, gentler than Roosevelt's.'
'Now I have a question for you,' Potter said. Braxton Donovan looked cautious, but could hardly do anything but nod. Potter asked, 'Why are you so interested in the late, unlamented Roger Kimball?'
'Idle curiosity,' Donovan answered.
'Shit,' Potter said crisply. All of a sudden, his metal-framed spectacles didn't make him seem mild and ineffectual any more. When he went on, 'I deserve a straight answer,' the implication was that he'd do something unpleasant if he didn't get one.
Braxton Donovan could have bought and sold him. Donovan owned enough property that the disastrous postwar inflation hadn't wiped him out. They both knew it. Most of the time, in the class-conscious Confederate
