you. I'm not going to tell you yes or no. I'm going to pass you on to the Sarge. He'll make up his mind, and we'll go on from there. How does that sound?'
'I came to Richmond to see him,' Anne answered.
Ferdinand Koenig shook his head. 'No, you came up here to see me, remember? Now you've passed the first test, so you get to see him. See the difference?'
'Yes,' Anne said, though she'd always assumed she would pass it.
'Well, come on, then.' Koenig heaved his bulk out of the chair. He led her down the hall, up a flight of stairs, along the corresponding hall on the next floor up, and into an office. The secretary there wasn't decorative; she was, in fact, severely plain. That probably meant she was very good at what she did. Koenig nodded to her. 'Morning, Lulu. Here's Miss Colleton, to see the boss.'
Lulu gave Anne the once-over. She sniffed, as if to say, What can you do? Anne bristled. The secretary took no notice of that at all. With a small sigh, she said, 'Go right in, Miss Collins. He'll be expecting you.' She wasn't the sort who'd get names wrong by accident. That meant she'd done it on purpose. Anne bristled all over again, and again got nothing resembling a rise from Lulu.
When she walked into Jake Featherston's office, the leader of the Freedom Party rose and leaned across the desk to shake her hand. He wasn't handsome. Still, those strong, bony features and the energy that sparked from him made mere handsomeness seem insipid. Anne had had that thought before. 'Sit down,' he said, waving her to a chair. 'Sit down and tell me why I should pay any attention to you after you went and left us when we needed you bad.'
He hadn't forgotten. Anne doubted he ever forgot anything that went against him. They weren't so far apart there. She answered, 'Two reasons: my money and my brains.'
He frowned. 'If you had any brains, you never would've walked out on us in the first place.'
'No.' Anne shook her head. 'I back winners. If you think you looked like a winner after Calkins killed President Hampton, you're not as smart as you think you are. But times are hard again, and in hard times the Freedom Party shines. So… here I am.'
How many people gave him such straight talk? Not many, Anne suspected. What would he do when he heard it? Get angry? Yes, by the slow flush that mounted to his cheeks and by the way his eyes flashed. But he held it in, saying, 'You're a cool one, aren't you? You're telling me straight out you'd walk away again if you saw us in trouble.'
'No,' Anne replied. 'What I'm telling you is, this time I expect you to win.'
'And you want to come along for the ride,' Featherston said.
'Of course I do,' Anne answered. 'Sooner or later, we're going to have some things to say to the United States. If you don't think I want to be part of that, you don't know me at all. And I can help. At your rallies, you're still using tricks I figured out for you ten years ago, and you know it.'
'You spent the last few years trying to teach the Whigs new tricks,' he said.
'Yes, and they're old dogs-they couldn't learn them,' Anne answered. 'They've been in power too long. They can't learn anything any more. That's why they've got to go.'
'They're dogs, all right, the sons of-' Featherston caught himself. 'Well, I have plans for them, too. You'd best believe that. Way they've stomped on the people of the Confederate States… You're dead right they've got to go, Miss Colleton. And I aim to get rid of 'em.'
Anne wondered how he meant that. Literally? She knew he was ruthless. Was he that ruthless? Maybe. She wouldn't have been astonished, but even the most ruthless man faced a formidable barrier of law. Anne nodded to herself. Here, that kind of barrier might not be bad at all.
'You come back in, you'll follow the Party line?' Jake Featherston asked.
You'll do as I say? was what he meant. Anne had never been one to do as anybody said. But if she said no, she'd have no place in the Freedom Party, not now, not ever. That was ever so clear. This is why you came to Richmond, she reminded herself. Do you want to go home empty-handed? Part of her said she did. She ignored it. Nodding to Featherston, she said, 'Yes, I'll do that.'
He didn't warn her-no, You'd better, or anything like that. 'Good,' he said. 'We've got a deal.' He didn't ask for her soul, either. But why would he? She'd just handed it to him.
XIII
The alarm clock jangled, bouncing Jefferson Pinkard out of bed at what he reckoned an ungodly early hour. His shift at the Birmingham jail started an hour and a half earlier than he'd gone to the Sloss Works. He yawned, lurched into the bathroom of his downtown flat-one more thing he was getting used to after so long in company housing-brushed his teeth, lathered his face and slid a straight razor over his cheeks, and then went into the kitchen and made coffee and the inevitable bacon and eggs on the fancy, newfangled gas-burning stove in there.
Thus fortified, he got out of his nightshirt and into the gray jailer's uniform he'd worn since Caleb Briggs found out the Sloss Works had given him the boot. He planted his wide-brimmed hat on his head at a jaunty angle and looked at himself in the mirror. His reflection happily nodded approval at him. 'I'm hot stuff, no two ways about it,' he said, and that reflection did not presume to disagree.
He put his nightstick on his belt and headed out the door. He'd toted longer, heavier bludgeons while breaking up Whig rallies with his Freedom Party pals, but he supposed he understood why jailers didn't usually carry guns. If something went wrong, that would give prisoners deadly weapons, which was the last thing anybody wanted.
People got out of his way when he walked down the street in that uniform. He liked that. He'd never had it happen before, except when he was in the company of a lot of his pals, all of them in white shirts and butternut pants, all of them ready-even eager-for trouble. Now he strode along by himself, but men and women still made way for him. He lit a cigarette and blew out a cheerful cloud of smoke.
Birmingham City Jail was a squat red-brick building that looked like a fortress. As far as Jeff was concerned, it looked just the way it was supposed to. He tipped his hat to a policeman in an almost identical uniform coming out. 'Mornin', Howard,' he said. 'Freedom!'
'Mornin', Jeff. Same to you,' the cop answered. A lot of policemen in Birmingham belonged to the Freedom Party. Pinkard had seen some of them at meetings. Since becoming a jailer, he'd found out that a good many who didn't go to meetings or knock heads were members just the same. Some policemen felt they shouldn't flaunt their politics. But that didn't mean they had none.
Inside the city jail, Jeff stuck his card in a time clock just like the one at the Sloss Works except for being painted gray rather than black. He stuck his head into the cramped little office where he had a battered desk. 'Mornin', Billy,' he said to his night-shift counterpart, who was writing a report at an equally beat-up desk. 'What's new for me?'
'Not a whole hell of a lot,' Billy Fraser answered. He was about Jeff's age, and like him a veteran-precious few white men of their generation in the CSA hadn't gone to the front. 'A couple of niggers in for drunk and disorderly, and one burglar who was the easiest collar you'd ever want-dumb asshole fell out a second-story window making his getaway and broke his ankle. Yell he let out woke up the whole goddamn block. They were beating on him pretty good. He was probably glad when the cops pulled the citizens off him and hauled him away.'
'Don't reckon we have to worry about him bustin' out for a while,' Pinkard said with a chuckle.
'Hell, no,' Fraser said. 'Like I told you, a quiet night.'
Jeff nodded. 'Anything else I need to know?'
'Don't reckon so,' the other man answered. He threw the report in his Out basket and got to his feet. 'Gonna head on home and catch me some shuteye. See you tomorrow. Freedom!'
'Freedom!' Pinkard echoed. 'Get some rest. I don't expect the bastards we've got locked up are going anywhere much.'
'They better not,' Billy Fraser said. 'That'd leave us some pretty tall explaining to do.' He grabbed his hat-the twin of Jeff's-from the rack, stuck it on his head, and went out whistling 'The Pennsylvania Rag,' a tune that had been popular during the early days of the Great War, back when the CSA had held a large part of Pennsylvania.
The first thing Jefferson Pinkard did then was look at the report Fraser had written. It was meant for the
