'What ever happened to that no-account cousin of yours or whatever the hell he was?' Jeff asked. 'You know the one I mean-the guy they threw in jail. What the hell was his name?'
'You mean Leonidas?' Vespasian said, and Jeff nodded. The black man went on, 'They let him out after the las' war was over-decided he weren't no danger to the country or nobody else. He kept his nose clean afterwards. Got married, had a couple chillun. Died o' TB a little befo' the new war start.'
'How about that?' Jeff said. 'I plumb lost touch with Birmingham lately.' He hesitated, then waved the guards away. 'I'll be all right, dammit,' he told them. 'I got a gun, and he ain't dumb enough to give me no trouble.' They didn't like it, but the man who made the rules could break them, too. When the guards were out of earshot, Jeff asked Vespasian, 'Ever hear what happened to that gal I used to be married to?'
'Yes, suh.' Vespasian nodded. 'She went downhill pretty bad. Got to drinkin' an' carryin' on with men. Ain't heard nothin' 'bout her in a while, though. Dunno if she's alive or dead.'
'Huh.' Jeff 's grunt was more self-satisfied than anything else. Run around on him, would Emily? Whatever she got after he cut her loose served her right, as far as he was concerned. 'Bitch,' he muttered under his breath. 'Probably had a goddamn taxi meter between her legs.'
Vespasian either didn't catch that or had the sense to pretend he didn't. He lifted the pail to his mouth again. Pinkard tensed. If he threw it…But he set it down and wiped his mouth on his filthy sleeve. 'Ask you somethin' now, suh?'
'Go ahead,' Jeff told him.
'What you do with me, now that I'm here?'
'You give people trouble?'
'Now, Mistuh Pinkard, you know I ain't like that,' Vespasian said reproachfully.
'I sure do.' Jeff nodded. 'I told McIlhenny the same thing when he said you were asking for me. So you just stay in the barracks and do like the guards tell you, and everything'll be fine.'
'Sure weren't fine comin' here.' Vespasian didn't sound as if he believed a word of it. He was nobody's fool, evidently. Jeff knew what kind of lies he was telling. He didn't have anything against Vespasian as a man, but he didn't have the kind of affection for him that would have made him want to keep his former coworker around in defiance of the rules. The rules said the Confederacy needed to get rid of blacks. They caused the country more trouble than they were worth. From everything Jefferson Pinkard had seen, that was the gospel truth. And it was just Vespasian's hard luck that he'd finally wound up at Camp Humble.
So Jeff shrugged and spread his hands and went right on lying. 'I am sorry about that, honest to God. Wish it could've been better. But there's a war on.' That was the handy-dandy excuse for anything these days.
'Ain't no reason to leave a man in his own filth. Ain't no reason to have people die on the way to this here place,' Vespasian said. 'What's gonna happen to us all now that we's here?' Fear and apprehension roughened his voice.
'You got to remember, this is nothin' but a transit camp,' Jeff said-one more lie piled on all the others. 'You'll get some food, you'll get cleaned up, and we'll send you on the way again.' And so they would, on a journey from which Vespasian wouldn't come back. 'Then you'll sit out the war somewhere else. Once we're done licking the damnyankees, I reckon you'll go on back to Birmingham. We'll sort all that shit out then.'
'I got to wait till we lick the USA, reckon I'll be at that other camp forever,' Vespasian said.
The gibe held much more truth than Jeff wished it did. It also played on his own fears. He tried not to show that, but he did call the guards back. 'Take him off to the barracks that's scheduled for the bathhouse next,' he told them. 'Once he gets cleaned up, we'll go from there.'
'Yes, sir,' the guards chorused. One of them nudged Vespasian. 'Come on. You heard the boss. Get moving.'
Away Vespasian went. Did he know Jeff had just ordered him liquidated? Pretty soon, he'd go up the crematorium stack, one more smudge of soot in a system that didn't work as well as advertised. Jeff might have found a lesson there had he been looking for one. Since he wasn't, he didn't worry about it. He had a job to do, and he aimed to keep at it till it was done.
C ongresswoman Flora Blackford was sick to death of war. She didn't know of anyone in the USA who wasn't. But she also didn't know of anyone except a few fools and lunatics who wanted to make peace with the Confederate States and Jake Featherston. There'd been more doubt and disagreement during the Great War. Had the European powers patched up a peace then, odds were the USA and CSA would have done the same. Now…The one thing Featherston had done was unify the United States-against him. No arguments about workers' solidarity now, not even from the hardcore wing of the Socialist Party. Getting rid of the enemy came first.
Her secretary stuck her head into Flora's inner office. 'The Assistant Secretary of War is on the line, Congresswoman,' she said.
'Thank you, Bertha. Put him through,' Flora said.
She picked up the telephone on her desk even before the first ring finished. 'Hello, Flora,' Franklin Roosevelt boomed. 'How are you this lovely morning?'
Flora looked out the masking-taped window. It was pouring rain, and the weatherman said there was a chance of sleet tonight. Winter hadn't got to Philadelphia, but you could see it coming. Roosevelt's office down in the bowels of the War Department was only a few blocks from hers. 'Have you been down there so long you've forgotten it's not July any more?' she asked.
He chuckled merrily. 'Well, you can see when you come over.'
Telephone lines coming out of the War Department and the Congressional office building were supposed to be the most secure in the USA. Saying too much over them wasn't a good idea anyhow. Roosevelt had something interesting, though. Flora was sure of that. 'On my way,' she told him, and hung up.
Had the weather been halfway decent, she would have walked. As things were, she flagged a cab. Even the short ride showed her a couple of hits from the new Confederate rockets. They were aiming at the center of government, but weren't especially accurate; they fell all over Philadelphia. No warning was possible. The only thing you could do to stay safe was to be somewhere else when they came down.
'Ain't they terrible? Ain't they wicked?' said the cab driver, a middle-aged woman. 'How come we don't got nothin' like that?'
'I expect we're working on them.' Flora wasn't exactly giving away military secrets by admitting that.
'We shoulda done it first,' the cabby said. 'Blow them Confederate bastards to kingdom come without our boys gettin' hurt.'
'That would be good.' Flora thought of her own son. Joshua was in basic training now. Pretty soon, if the war didn't end first, they'd give him a rifle and turn him loose on the enemy. The enemy, unfortunately, had rifles-among other things-too.
Flora paid the driver, opened the cab's door, opened her umbrella, and splashed up the broad stairs to the entrance to the War Department. She didn't get very wet, but she didn't exactly stay dry, either. At the entrance, soldiers examined her ID with remorseless care before letting her in. She didn't get very far in even then, not at first. A hard-faced woman frisked her in a sandbagged revetment that could blunt the force of a people bomb. Only then did a private with peach fuzz escort her down, down, down to Franklin Roosevelt's office.
'You look like something the cat dragged in,' the Assistant Secretary of War exclaimed. 'Can I fix you a drink? Purely medicinal, of course.'
'Of course,' Flora said, deadpan. 'Thanks. I'd love one.'
The medicinal alcohol turned out to be some fine scotch. 'Confiscated from a British freighter,' Roosevelt explained. 'I arranged for a friend of mine in the Navy Department to get some good Tennessee sipping whiskey, and this is how he scratched my back.'
'Nice to have friends,' Flora said. 'I like scotch better, too.'
'I still owe him a little something, or maybe not such a little something,' Roosevelt said. 'The Navy's been nice to us lately.'
'Has it?' Flora said. When Roosevelt nodded, she went on, 'Does that have something to do with why you called me over?'
He beamed at her. 'I knew you were smart. It sure does. A few days ago, one of our destroyer escorts met the U-517 somewhere in the North Atlantic. The Navy and the Germans worked out just where. It doesn't matter anyhow, except that they did meet. The skipper of the submersible passed a package to the skipper of the Josephus Daniels-that's the destroyer escort. Our ship brought the package in to Boston, and now we've got it.'
