States, it would have mattered a great deal. Now, somehow, it didn't. The lawyer flinched, muttered something under his breath, and gulped his drink. 'Fill it up,' he told the bartender.
'Yes, suh.' Ptolemy did. Ice clinked as he built Donovan a fresh one.
The lawyer sipped from the new whiskey. Clarence Potter waited, patient and implacable as a father waiting up for a son out too late. At last, Donovan said, 'You know Anne Colleton?'
'Personally? No,' Potter said. 'But I know of her. Who doesn't, in this state? What's she got to do with anything?'
'She and Kimball were… friends during the war, and for a while afterwards,' Braxton Donovan answered, suggesting by the pause that they'd been more than friends. 'Any dirt I can get on him will stick to her.'
'Wait a minute.' Potter held up a hand. 'Wait just a minute. Didn't she help get the Yankee woman who punched Kimball's ticker for him out of jail and back to the USA?'
'Oh, yes.' Donovan's silver pompadour was so securely in place, it didn't stir a hair as he nodded. 'They broke up unpleasantly. I think it was over politics-he stayed in the Freedom Party, and she was one of the rats who left the sinking ship.' His lip curled.
'Why tar her, then?' Potter asked. 'If she's back to being a Whig, don't you want her to keep on being one? If you drive her into Featherston's arms again, aren't you just asking for trouble? She's a high-powered woman, no two ways about it.'
'That's the point,' Donovan said. 'She's talking like a Whig again, yes, but she's trying to pull us to the right till you can't tell us from the yahoos in white shirts and butternut pants who run around yelling, 'Freedom!' She wants to have another go at the United States-wants it so bad, she can taste it.'
Potter pondered that. 'We'd have to be damn lucky to win it. They beat us and they hurt us. And even if we do lick them, that just sets up another war ten, twenty, thirty years further down the line. I wish I could say something else-I fought those bastards from the very first day to the very last, and I'd've kept on fighting if we hadn't folded up. But come on, Donovan. A good big man won't always lick a good little one, but sure as hell that's the way to bet. And I don't think we can afford to lose again.'
'I don't want to fight them again, either,' Donovan said. 'I fought plenty in the last war, too, and I am plumb satisfied. And I don't want her voice in the Whig Party.'
'There may be something to that,' Potter allowed. 'On the other hand, there may not. You want to think twice about going after her. Maybe you want to think three times.'
'I know what I'm doing.' Braxton Donovan certainly sounded confident. Potter wondered if that was the whiskey talking. He also wondered how Donovan not only didn't fall over but kept on sounding coherent. The man had to have a sponge in place of a liver. Donovan went on, 'She's not quite the force she used to be, anyhow, on account of she's ten years older than she used to be, same as the rest of us. But it hurts women more.' He finished the latest drink. 'One more of the same, Ptolemy.'
'Comin' right up, suh,' the Negro said. As he made the next whiskey, Potter studied him and, covertly, Donovan. He wondered if the lawyer really knew as much as he thought he did. Not too many people came away happy after they bumped up against Anne Colleton.
Which meant… Potter finished his own drink. He didn't ask for a fresh one, not right away. Instead, he did some quiet thinking. He came closer to agreeing with Donovan than with Anne Colleton. Nothing was stupider, though, than backing a loser, which he judged Donovan likely to be. How much of a deal can I cut? he wondered. And should I?
VII
As far as Cincinnatus Driver was concerned, the worst part of prison was getting used to it. After a while, Luther Bliss stopped interrogating him, which meant he didn't get beat up very much any more. Hardly anything happened to him any more, in fact. He sat in his cell with nothing to do, except for the one hour a week when he was led out to exercise, as a beast might have been.
Outside the gray stone walls of the prison, time was passing. What did Elizabeth think, back in Des Moines? What did Achilles think? How big was the boy these days? Cincinnatus struggled to remember his face. Did Amanda remember him at all? He was starting to doubt it.
Only the weather told him the season of the year. He never saw a newspaper, or anything else with print on it. He began to wonder if he still remembered how to read and write. That thought provoked him to bitter laughter. Read and write? Hell, I'm startin' to wonder if I still recollect how to talk. Days at a time would go by when he never said a word to anyone.
The guards did not encourage conversation, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along. When they gave orders, it was always, 'Come here, nigger,' 'Go there, boy,' or 'Stand aside, nigger.' They didn't want to hear Cincinnatus say, 'Yes, suh.' They just wanted him to do as he was told. He did it. He'd tried not doing it a couple of times. The results of that had proved more painful than they were worth.
He'd also tried protesting that he was a citizen of the United States, and nobody, not even Luther Bliss and the Kentucky State Police, had any business holding him like this. The results of that had proved even more painful than those of the other.
If I wasn't colored, they wouldn't be able to get away with it, no matter what they think I done. That had run through his mind more times than he could count. He did his best not to dwell on it. Its truth was all too obvious. He'd thought things would be better in the USA than they had been when Kentucky was part of the CSA. Maybe not.
But, in spite of all this, maybe. In the Confederate States, Negroes who made trouble often just stopped living. However much Luther Bliss wanted Cincinnatus on ice, he hadn't dug a hole and put his body in it. Sometimes Cincinnatus wondered why not.
On a hot, muggy afternoon in what he reckoned was the middle of summer, three guards came to his cell door. Two of them drew pistols and pointed them at him, while the third turned a key in the lock and opened the cell. Then that fellow jumped back and yanked his pistol from its holster, too. 'Come along with us,' one of the guards said.
'Where?' Cincinnatus' voice creaked with disuse, and with fear. This wasn't exercise time or mealtime. Maybe that hole in the ground waited for him after all.
'Don't give us no back talk, boy, or you'll be sorry for it,' the guard snapped. 'Get moving.'
Cincinnatus did, thinking, They can kill me here as easy as anywhere else, and then take my body wherever they need to. He wanted to run. His legs had that light-as-a-feather feel panic could bring. He was sure he could outrun these three big-bellied white men. But he was also sure it would do him no good. Nobody outran a bullet.
They took him not to the room where they'd questioned him before but to an office in one of the prison's corner towers. He supposed it was the warden's office, but the man behind the desk was, inevitably, Luther Bliss. Bliss had light brown eyes, like a hound dog's. At the moment, those eyes were as sad as a hound dog's, too.
When Cincinnatus came in, the chief of the Kentucky State Police turned to the other man in the room, an older fellow who sat in a chair off to one side. 'See, Mr. Darrow? Here he is, sound as a dollar.'
'Whose dollars are you talking about, Bliss?' the old man-Darrow? — demanded. 'The Confederates', after the war?'
Oh, sweet Jesus, Cincinnatus thought. Bliss is going to lock him up and throw away the key. But Bliss didn't do anything except drum his fingers on the desktop. If he was angry, he didn't show it past that-which made Cincinnatus take another long look at the man named Darrow.
He had to be close to seventy. His skin was grandfather-pink. His jowls sagged. He combed thinning iron-gray hair over the top of his head to make it cover as much ground as it could. But his gray-blue eyes were some of the sharpest-and some of the nastiest-Cincinnatus had ever seen.
After coughing a couple of times, he pulled his wallet from a vest pocket. He looked down at a photograph in it, then over to Cincinnatus. 'You are Cincinnatus Driver,' he said, sounding surprised. 'I wouldn't've put it past this sneaky son of a bitch'-he pointed to Luther Bliss-'to try to sneak a ringer by me, but I guess he figured I'd spot it.'
