Now… Now, lazy in the afterglow, he sprawled on the bed in Ford's Hotel. 'You see?' he said. 'You just wanted me to tell you I was wrong.'
'Well, of course,' Anne answered, and poked him in the ribs. 'What else does a woman want to hear from a man?'
'How about, 'I love you'? How about, 'You're beautiful'?' Potter suggested.
'Those are nice, too,' she agreed with a smile. 'As far as I'm concerned, though, nothing's better than, 'You were right.' '
He believed her. He didn't tell her so. She was too likely to take it the wrong way, to think he meant she was tough and bossy. And, as a matter of fact, he did think she was tough and bossy. To his way of thinking, though, that was a compliment. He had as little use for a woman who couldn't take care of herself as for a man who couldn't take care of himself.
'You are beautiful, you know,' he said.
The smile didn't just fade. It blew out like a candle flame. 'I used to be,' she said bleakly. 'You don't need to butter me up, Clarence. I know what's there when I look in the mirror.'
'You're not young any more. So what?' Potter shrugged. The motion made the mattress shake beneath him. 'I'm no spring chicken these days, either. And have you looked at all of you in a mirror lately?' He ran a hand along the length of her. 'You've got nothing to worry about.'
'Like hell I don't,' Anne said. 'My tits sag, I'm thick in the middle, and I'm spread in the butt.'
'You're not young any more. So what?' he said again. 'You still look damn good. I might lie, but do you think he would? He's either sincere or he doesn't work at all, especially at my age.'
Anne laughed. A moment later, though, she rolled over onto her stomach and started sobbing into her pillow. Startled, Potter put a hand on her shoulder. She shook it off.
'What's the matter?' he asked, honestly bewildered.
'You son of a bitch,' she said, her voice muffled. 'I don't remember the last time a man made me cry. I didn't think anybody could any more. And then you went and did it.'
'I didn't mean to,' he said.
'I know.' She sat up, a wry smile on her tear-streaked face. 'If you'd been trying, you couldn't have done it in a million years. You caught me off-guard-and look what happened.'
'No, no, no.' Potter shook his head. 'That's what the United States are supposed to say to us one of these days.'
Anne laughed, but she nodded, too. 'Oh, yes.' She leaned forward. He'd caught her interest in a different way-which was probably just as well, since he wasn't good for more than one round a day himself any more. She asked, 'How likely is it? How soon?'
He shrugged again. 'All I know is what I read in the newspapers, like that comic from Sequoyah says.'
Anne Colleton laughed again, this time at him. 'Tell me another one, Colonel Potter. If you can't tell me, who can?'
'The president, most likely,' Potter answered. 'But believe me, he doesn't confide in colonels.' That wasn't altogether true. From things Potter had heard, and from others that had crossed his desk, he could make what he thought were some pretty good guesses about how things might go. He didn't tell her what they were. With another woman, he would have been joking about the president. But Anne knew Jake Featherston. Could Jake put her up to finding out whether one Clarence Potter, colonel in Intelligence, ran off at the mouth? Potter didn't think so, but he wasn't a hundred percent sure.
She pointed an accusing, red-tipped fingernail at him. 'So you won't talk, eh?'
'Not me. Not a word. Nothing but name, rank, and pay number.' He rattled them off. 'Wild horses couldn't pull more out of me.'
'Who said anything about wild horses?' Anne's voice went soft and breathy. A mischievous glint sparked in her eyes. 'Wild horses went out with the covered wagons. What we do these days is…' She started doing it.
After a while, Potter discovered there were still days when he was good for more than one round-with sufficient encouragement, that is. Panting, his heart pounding, he said, 'My goodness. Torture's certainly come up in the world since the last time I ran into it.'
'I should hope so. This is a high-class outfit here.' As if to prove as much, Anne pulled up the sheet and daintily dabbed at her chin. Then she assumed what she fondly imagined to be a U.S. accent and said, 'So tell me the score, Colonel.'
'If it's all the same to you, I think I'd rather hold out for more torture,' he said.
She poked him in the ribs again, hard enough to come closer to torture than he'd looked for. 'Monster!' she said. He made as if to salute. She made as if to poke him one more time. Instead, she aimed that forefinger at him once more, this time as if it were the barrel of a Tredegar. 'All right, you… you impossible person. Be that way. Don't tell me what you know. Tell me what you think. You can't get in trouble for thinking.'
As seriously as he could, Potter answered, 'I think that, if I tell you what I think, I'll get in trouble for telling you what I think.' She started to get angry. So did he. He went on, 'Dammit, Anne, what do you think my job is? Finding out secrets and keeping them, that's what. How long do you think I could do it if I ran my mouth like a heavy freight tearing downhill with the brakes gone?'
Every once in a while, when she heard the plain truth, it would disarm her completely. Clarence remembered that from the days of their unhappy affair in South Carolina. It was one of the things he'd liked most about her then. Now he saw it again. 'I hadn't looked at it like that,' she admitted in a small voice. 'Never mind.'
He sat up in bed, put on his glasses, and swung his feet down to the carpet, still wondering whether he'd passed his own test, hers, or Jake Featherston's. Through the gauzy curtains on the window, he could see people bustling along the paths in Capitol Square and others lying on the grass in the shade of the trees, doing their best to fight the oppressive weather.
On the sidewalk down below the window, a Negro said, 'Spare some change for a hungry man?… Spare some change for a hungry man?… Spare some change for-? Oh, God bless you, ma'am!'
'I wouldn't give a nigger a dime,' Anne said coldly. 'I wouldn't give a nigger a penny, by God. If they can't find work, to hell with them. Let 'em starve.'
Clarence judiciously pursed his lips. 'A lot more of them looking for work these days, you know, with tractors and farm machinery driving sharecroppers off the land.'
'Yes, I've seen that. So what?' she said. 'If they can't figure out some way or another to make themselves useful, who needs them? The whole country would be better off without them.'
'Would it? I wonder. Who'd do the nigger work without niggers?'
'Machines could do a lot of it, the way they do on a farm,' Anne answered.
'Some of it, anyway,' Clarence admitted. 'But where are you going to get a machine that waits on tables or cuts somebody's hair? If we didn't have niggers, whites would need to do things like that.' He started getting dressed.
'It could happen,' Anne said stubbornly. 'I do all sorts of things for myself I used to have servants do back before the war.'
'I suppose so,' Potter said. 'Nigger work must get done in the USA, too, and they don't have that many niggers to do it. But things are different here. An awful lots of whites here say, 'I may be poor and stupid, but by God I'm white, and I'm better off than those niggers, and I don't have to do the things they do.' ' Slyly, he added, 'An awful lot of them vote Freedom, too.'
Anne Colleton didn't rise to the bait. She just nodded. 'I know they do. But if they didn't have any choice, they'd do what needs doing. If we had another war, we could even make them feel patriotic about doing what needs doing.'
At first, Potter thought that was one of the most monstrously cynical things he'd ever heard, and he'd heard some doozies. Then he realized that, no matter how cynical it was, it probably wasn't wrong. He leaned over and kissed her. 'Do you want to write that down and pass it on to the president, or do you want me to do it?' he asked.
'Whichever you please,' she answered. 'But what do you want to bet he's already thought of it himself?'
Clarence thought it over. He didn't need to think very long. 'I won't touch that one,' he said. 'You're bound to be right.' Featherston was plenty cynical enough to use patriotism to get people to do what he wanted-and plenty good enough at leading to get them to follow.
