as if it weren't bootleg. And then, as they had a good many times before, they went upstairs to her bedroom.
Everything was dark in there, but Lucien knew where the bed was. He sat down on one side of it and got out of his clothes. When he was naked, he reached out. His hand found Йloise's bare, warm flesh.
They kissed and caressed each other. Lucien's heart pounded with excitement. Heart still pounding, he rolled onto his back. Йloise straddled him. She liked riding him, and he found it easier than the other way round.
'Oh, Lucien,' she whispered.
He didn't answer. As his delight mounted, so did the thudding in his chest. He could hardly breathe. He'd never felt anything like this, not in all his years, not with Marie, not with Йloise, not with anyone. Pleasure shot through him. So did pain, pain in his chest, pain stabbing up his arm. Pain… He groaned and clutched at Йloise. In an instant, the darkness in the bedroom became darkness absolute.
'Lucien?' Йloise exclaimed. He never heard her scream, or anything else, ever again.
Scipio might have known it would happen one of these days. Hell, he had known it might happen one of these days. The Huntsman's Lodge was the best restaurant in Augusta. No other place even compared. If Anne Colleton ever came to town, this was where she'd have dinner.
And there she sat, at a table against the far wall, talking animatedly with several local big shots. Scipio hadn't seen her for twenty years or so, but he had not the slightest doubt. She'd aged very well, even if he wouldn't have called her beautiful any more. And she still sounded as terrifyingly self-assured as she ever had, maybe even more so.
As befit its status as a fancy place to eat, the Huntsman's Lodge was dimly lit. Scipio didn't think she recognized him. He was just another colored waiter, not one serving her table. He thanked heaven he hadn't let Jerry Dover talk him into taking the headwaiter's post. Then he would have had to escort her party to the table, and she would have been bound to notice him.
Even now, he wasn't sure she hadn't. She always held her cards close to her chest. He didn't want to go anywhere near that table. He didn't want to speak, for fear she would know his voice. He spent as much time as he could in the kitchens. The cooks gave him quizzical looks; he didn't get paid for roasting prime rib or doing exotic things with lobster tails.
His boss knew it, too. 'What the hell you doing hiding in there, Xerxes?' Jerry Dover demanded indignantly. 'Get your ass out and wait tables.'
'I's sorry, suh,' Scipio answered. 'But I gots to tell you, I's feelin' right poorly tonight.'
Dover didn't say anything for a little while. His eyes raked Scipio. 'You know,' he remarked at last, 'there's niggers I'd fire on the spot, they tried to use that kind of line on me.'
'Yes, suh,' Scipio said stolidly. Firing was the least of his worries right now.
'You ain't one of 'em, though. You never tried shirking on me before,' the restaurant manager said. He astonished Scipio by reaching out to put a palm on his forehead. 'You don't have a fever. At least it isn't the grippe. You need to go home? Go on, then, if you've a mind to.'
'I thanks you kindly, suh.' As he had years before with John Oglethorpe, Scipio needed to remind himself that white men could be decent. He found it especially remarkable now, with the Freedom Party in the saddle for the past seven years. Things were set up to give whites every excuse to be bastards, and a lot of them didn't need much excuse. 'Somehow or other, I finds a way to pay you back.' He felt like the mouse talking to the lion in the fable. But the mouse actually had found a way to do it. How could he?
Dover only shrugged. He wasn't worrying about it. 'Get the hell out of here,' he said. 'You got your reasons, whatever they are. I've known you for a while now. You don't fuck around with me. So get.'
Scipio got. He wasn't used to being out on the street so early. He made a beeline for the Terry. The sooner he got into his own part of town, the safer he'd feel.
Then he heard a gunshot down an unlit alleyway, a scream, and the sound of running feet. Maybe he wasn't so safe in the Terry after all. Whites preyed on blacks, but blacks also preyed on one another. He wondered why. His own people had so little. Why not try to rob whites, who enjoyed so much more? Unfortunately, an answer occurred to him almost at once. If a Negro robbed a white, the police moved heaven and earth to catch him. If he robbed another Negro, they yawned and went about their business.
'Hey, nigger!' A woman's voice, all rum and honey, called from the darkness. 'You in your fancy clothes, I show you a good time like you ain't never seen.' Scipio didn't even turn to look. He just kept walking. 'Cocksuckin' faggot!' the woman yelled after him, all the sweetness gone.
Bathsheba stared when Scipio came into the apartment so early. 'What you doin' here?' she demanded. 'I jus' put the chillun to bed.'
He'd been trying to figure out what to tell her ever since he left the Huntsman's Lodge. 'Once upon a time, you asked me how I came to be able to speak like this,' he answered in soft, precise, educated white man's English. Bathsheba's eyes went wide. The only time he'd ever spoken like that in her hearing was to save their lives in the rioting not long after the Freedom Party took over. Now he had to tell the truth, or some of it. In that same dialect, he went on, 'A long time ago, I was in the upper ranks of one of the Socialist Republics we tried to set up. Someone came into the restaurant tonight who knew me in those days. I'm not certain whether she recognized me, but she might have. She's… very sharp.' Seeing Anne Colleton forcibly reminded him how sharp she was.
'You learn to talk like dat on account of you was a Red?' Bathsheba asked.
Scipio shook his head. 'No. I was useful to the Reds because I could already talk like this. I… I was a butler, a rich person's butler in South Carolina.' There. Now she knew-knew enough, anyhow.
He waited for her to shout at him for not telling his secret years before. But she didn't. 'If you was a big Red, no wonder you don't say nothin',' she told him. 'What we do now?'
'Dunno.' He fell back into the slurred speech of the Congaree Negro. Talking in that other voice took him off to a world that had died in fire and blood and hate-but also a world where he'd grown to manhood. The contrasts terrified him. 'Mebbe nuttin'. Mebbe run fas' as we kin.'
'How?' Bathsheba asked, and he didn't have a good answer for her. Passbooks were checked these days as they'd never been before the war. Any black without a good reason for being where he was-and without the papers to back up that reason-was in trouble. People talked about camps. No one knew much about them, though; they were easy to get into, much harder to leave.
Even so, he said, 'Better we takes de chance. They catches me…' He didn't go on. If they caught him and realized who he was, he wouldn't last ten minutes. No trial. No procedure. They'd just shoot him.
Bathsheba was still staring at him. His wife clucked sadly, a sound of reproach: self-reproach, he realized when she said, 'I shoulda pussected what you was.' He needed a heartbeat or two to figure out that she meant suspected. She went on, 'If you was a Red, you had to hide out. And you was smart, gettin' out o' the state where you was at.'
'I weren't no Red, not down deep, not for real an' for true,' Scipio said. 'But dey suck me in. I don't go 'long wid dey, dey shoots me jus' like de buckra shoots me.' That was the truth. Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds on the Marshlands plantation had been in deadly earnest. Confidence in their doctrine had sustained them-till rifles and what little else they got from the USA ran up against the whole panoply of modern war, and till they discovered their oppressors wouldn't vanish simply because they were called reactionaries.
Bathsheba's mind went in a different direction. Suddenly, she said, 'I bet Xerxes ain't even your right name.'
'Is now. Has been fo' years.'
'What your mama call you?'
'Scipio,' he said, and wondered how long it had been since he'd spoken his own name. More than twenty years; he was sure of that.
'Scipio.' Bathsheba tasted it, then slowly shook her head. 'Reckon I like Xerxes better. I's used to it.' She sent him an anxious look. 'You ain't mad?'
'Do Jesus, no!' he exclaimed. 'You go an' forget you ever hear de other one. Dat name get around, de buckra after we fo' sure. Dey still remembers me in South Carolina.' Was that pride in his voice? After all these years, after all that terror, after being sure at the time that he was walking into a disaster (and after proving righter than even he'd imagined), was that pride? God help him, it was.
His wife gave him a kiss. 'Good.' She was proud of him, too, proud of him for what had to be the stupidest thing he'd ever done in his life. Madness. It had to be madness. There was no sensible explanation for it. But no
