Love and War

'You know your father can't help you any longer.' The nib rasped; another star appeared. 'I saw you skulking at the cemetery yesterday — come, don't deny it. The lapse is forgivable.'

Rasp; scrape. Done with stars, the lawyer inked a blocky B. Then he shot a look at his caller. 'This one is not.'

Bent turned red, frightened and furious at the same time. How could this man daunt him so? Jasper Dills was no less than seventy and no more than five feet one. He had a child's hands and feet. Yet neither size nor age diminished the force he could put into his voice or the intimidating way he could eye a man, as he eyed Bent now.

'I beg —' swallow — 'I beg to differ, sir. I'm desperate.' In a few jumbled sentences, he described the reason. Throughout, Dills kept drawing: more B's, then a series of finely detailed epaulettes, each smaller than the last. In the hazy yellow light falling through the dirty windowpanes, the attorney looked jaundiced.

At the end of Bent's recital, Dills kept him dangling in silence for ten seconds. 'But I still can't understand why you came to see me, Colonel. I have no power to help you and no reason. My sole obligation as your father's executor is to follow his verbal instruction and see that you continue to receive your generous annual stipend.'

'The money doesn't mean a goddamn thing if I'm shipped off to die in Kentucky!'

'But what can I do about it?'

'Get my orders changed. You've done it before — you or my father. Or was it those men who employed him?' That scored, all right; Dills stiffened noticeably. Here was the crucial bluff. 'Oh, yes, I know something about them. I heard a few names. I saw my father twice, remember. For several hours each time. I heard names,' he repeated.

'Colonel, you're lying.'

'Am I? Then test me. Refuse to help. I shall very quickly talk to certain people who will be interested in the names of my father's employers. Or my parentage.'

Silence. Bent breathed noisily. He'd won. He felt confident of it.

Dills sighed. 'Colonel Bent, you have made a mistake. Two, in fact. As I've already indicated, the first was your decision to come here. The second is your ultimatum.' He laid his pen on the scrawled stars. 'Let me not resort to melodrama, only make this point as clearly as I can. The moment word reaches me that you have attempted to regularize or publicize your connection with my late client — or the moment I hear anything else detrimental to his reputation, including certain names I really doubt that you know — you will be dead within twenty-four hours.' Dills smiled. 'Good day, sir.'

He rose and walked to his bookshelves. Bent burst from the chair, started around the desk. 'Damn you, how dare you say such a thing to Starkwether's own —'

Dills pivoted, closing a book with a gunshot sound. 'I said good day.'

As Bent blundered down the long flight to the street, an inner voice screamed: He meant it. The man meant it. What shall I do now?

In the office, Dills replaced the book and returned to his desk. Seated, he noticed his speckled hands. Shaking. The reaction angered and shamed him. Furthermore, it was unnecessary.

Certainly his former client's employers would want their names guarded. But Dills was confident Bent didn't know their identities. Further, Bent was patently a coward, hence could be bluffed. Of course, through certain of Starkwether's connections, Dills could easily have arranged for Bent to take a fatal musket ball. In Kentucky, it could even be made to appear that his killer was a reb. Such a scheme would only work to the lawyer's financial disadvantage, but Bent didn't know that.

That two parents with such positive character traits could have produced a son as weak and warped as Elkanah Bent confounded Dills's sense of order. Born in the meanest poverty in the Western woodlands, Starkwether had been gifted with guile and ambition. Bent's mother had possessed breeding and a background of wealth and eminence. And look at the sorry result. Perhaps force majeure was more than a legal conceit. Perhaps some illicit relationships and their fruit were condemned in heaven from the moment the seed fell.

Unable to compose himself or banish the memory of his visitor, Dills took a small brass key from his waistcoat. He unlocked a lower desk drawer, reached in for a ring of nine larger keys, and used one to enter the office closet. In the dusty dark, another key opened an iron strongbox. He drew out its contents. One thin file.

He examined the old letter which he had first read fourteen years ago. Starkwether, ailing, had given it to him permanently last December. The letter filled both sides of the sheet. His eyes dropped to the signature. The effect of reading that instantly recognizable name was always the same. Dills was stunned, astonished, impressed. The letter said in part:

You used me, Heyward. Then you left me. But I admit I shared a certain pleasure and cannot bring myself to abandon altogether the result of my mistake. Knowing the sort of man you are and what matters most to you, I am prepared to begin paying you a substantial yearly stipend, provided you accept parental responsibility for the child — care for him (although not necessarily in a lavish manner), help him in whatever way you deem reasonable — but most important, diligently monitor his whereabouts in order to prevent any circumstance or action on his part or the part of others which might lead to discovery of his parentage. Need I add that he must never learn my identity from you? Should that happen, whatever the reason, payment of the stipend will cease.

Dills wet his lips with his tongue. How he wished he had met the woman, even for an hour. A bastard would have smirched her name and spoiled her possibilities, and she had been clever and worldly enough to know that at eighteen. She had married splendidly. Again he turned the sheet over to gaze at the signature. Poor vengeful Bent would more than likely crack apart if he saw that last name.

The paragraph above it was the one of most direct interest to him:

Finally, in the event of your death, the same, stipend will be paid to any representative you designate, so long as the boy lives and the above conditions are met.

At his desk, Dills inked his pen again, pondering. Alive, Starkwether's son was worth a good deal of money to him; dead, he was worth nothing. Without interfering too directly, perhaps he should see that Bent was spared hazardous duty out West.

Yes, definitely a good idea. Tomorrow he would speak to a contact in the War Department. He jotted a reminder on the foolscap, tore it off, and poked it well down into his waistcoat pocket. So much for Bent. Other duties pressed.

Starkwether's employers had become his, and they were interested in the possibility of New York City seceding from the Union. It was a breathtaking concept: a separate city-state, trading freely with both sides in a war whose length the gentlemen could to some extent control. Powerful politicians, including Mayor Fernando Wood, had already endorsed secession publicly. Dills was researching precedents and preparing a report on potential consequences. He returned the letter to the strongbox and after three turns of three keys in three locks resumed work.

14

'What the hell did we do wrong?' George said, flinging away the stub of his cigar. It landed in front of the small, plain office building in the heart of the huge Hazard Iron complex.

'I honestly don't know, George,' Christopher Wotherspoon replied with a glum look.

George's expression conveyed his fury to the hundreds of men streaming along the dirt street in both directions; the early shift was leaving, the next arriving. George didn't care if they saw his anger. Most would have heard the detonation when the prototype columbiad exploded on the test ground chopped out of the mountainside