XII
Cincinnatus Driver wasn’t happy about walking upstairs from his apartment. He knew he should have been happy. Knowing that only made him more unhappy yet. He sighed and muttered something under his breath. The more you looked at it, the more you lived it, the more complicated life got.
He knocked on the door of the apartment just above his. The wireless was on inside, pretty loud. He had to knock twice before anybody in there heard him. Suddenly, the wireless got softer. A few seconds later, the door opened.
“Evenin’, Mr. Chang,” Cincinnatus said. “How are you today?”
“Oh. Hello, Mr. Driver,” said the father of Cincinnatus’ daughter-in-law. Joey Chang was polite. He’d always stayed polite with Cincinnatus, even if he didn’t much care to have Achilles in his family. He hesitated, then brightened. “I just make new batch of beer. You want some?” If Cincinnatus had come up about homebrew, then maybe they wouldn’t have to talk about … other things.
And Cincinnatus smiled and nodded and said, “I’d love to have some, for true.” He meant every word of it. Iowa was a dry state, with liquor of any kind hard to come by. And Chang made damn good beer. But that wasn’t why Cincinnatus had come upstairs. “I got some news you need to know.”
“News?” Mr. Chang asked, and Cincinnatus nodded again. The Chinaman sighed, much as Cincinnatus had while climbing the stairs. He stepped aside. “You come in, you tell me news.”
“Thank you kindly,” Cincinnatus said. “Evenin’, Mrs. Chang,” he called to the woman sitting close by the wireless set. It was playing a comedy about a trolley driver and his friend who worked in a sewer. Cincinnatus wondered how much Mrs. Chang followed; her English wasn’t as good as her husband’s.
As if to underscore that, Joey Chang spoke to her in Chinese. She answered in the same language. Cincinnatus understood not a word, but she didn’t sound happy. Mr. Chang sighed again, on exactly the same note. He lit a cigarette, then offered Cincinnatus one. Once they were both smoking, he said, “What is this news?”
“Achilles and Grace, they gonna have themselves another baby toward the end of the year,” Cincinnatus answered.
“Baby?” Mrs. Chang said sharply. She might not have a whole lot of English, but she sure understood that.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s right,” Cincinnatus said.
“This is good news. Here, you wait.” Joey Chang went into the kitchen. He came back half a minute later with three small glasses. He gave one to his wife, one to Cincinnatus, and kept the third for himself. “A baby. Kampai!” he said, and knocked back his glass.
“Mud in your eye.” Cincinnatus followed suit. This wasn’t beer. It scorched his gullet all the way down, and exploded like a bomb when it hit his stomach. “Whew!” He eyed the empty glass with respect. “You make that yourself?”
“Not me.” Chang shook his head. “This place too small for proper still. Beer easy. Can make beer anywhere. But need more room for still, need place where neighbors no smell … smoke.” He scowled; that wasn’t the word he wanted. After a moment, he found the right one: “Fumes. Neighbors no smell fumes. For this, I trade plenty beer with fellow I know. You want more?”
“If you’ve got it to spare, I wouldn’t mind another one. Don’t want to put you to no trouble, though.”
“No trouble.” Mr. Chang took Cincinnatus’ glass and disappeared into the kitchen again. When he returned, he had a refill, too. This time, Cincinnatus sipped cautiously instead of sending the hooch down the hatch. It was some kind of brandy, not whiskey, and strong enough to grow hair on his chest—or on Joey Chang’s chest, which was a bigger challenge. “Another baby,” Chang murmured, his eyes for a few seconds soft and far away. “Grandfather again.”
“Yeah,” Cincinnatus said dreamily. Then he pointed at Mr. Chang. “You’d like it a lot better if you saw the new baby when it comes—and if you saw the grandbaby you already got once in a while.”
“I know. I know.” Chang stared down into the glass he held. “But Grace, she run off, she get married when we say no. She not do what her mother, her father say. She marry fellow who is not Chinese. Things hard on account of that.”
He was a little man, more than a head shorter than Cincinnatus. But he spoke with enormous pride. Reckon he’d say the same thing if I was white, too, Cincinnatus thought, bemused. He hadn’t imagined a Chinaman could also look down his nose at whites. The mere idea broadened his mental horizon.
Mrs. Chang spoke, a sharp, singsong rattle of Chinese. Her husband answered in the same language, then returned to English for Cincinnatus’ benefit: “She say, we not angry because your boy colored fellow. We angry because Grace disobey us. For Chinese, this is very bad. Hard to forgive.”
“Don’t know nothin’ about that,” said Cincinnatus, who suspected Chang was lying some for politeness’ sake, but wasn’t quite sure. He went on, “I do know you ain’t just missin’ out on Grace, though. You missin’ out on your grandbaby. You gonna be missin’ out on two grandbabies. Your pride worth all that?”
Now Mr. Chang spoke in Chinese—translating the question, Cincinnatus figured. Mrs. Chang answered right away. Again, her tone said everything Cincinnatus needed to know. You bet your life pride is worth it. That was what she’d told him, all right. Cincinnatus wondered whether Mr. Chang would show any backbone. From everything the Negro had seen, Mrs. Chang was the one who said, Jump, frog! Her husband asked, How high? on the way up.
But he said something more, and then something more, and then something more again. After his last sally, Mrs. Chang burst into tears. Embarrassed, Cincinnatus turned away. “I better go,” he mumbled.
“All right, you go,” Mr. Chang said. “But you see Achilles and Grace, you say they can come by here. We be glad to see them. This go on too long.” Mrs. Chang protested again. Her husband, for a wonder, overrode her. They were still arguing when Cincinnatus slipped out the door and went downstairs.
“Well?” Elizabeth asked when he walked into their apartment.
“Mr. Chang say they can come visit,” Cincinnatus answered, and his wife’s face lit up. He raised a warning hand. “Mrs. Chang ain’t very happy about it. Pretty fair chance she make him change his mind.”
Elizabeth sighed. “They’s powerful proud folks,” she said. Cincinnatus walked over and gave her a kiss. She eyed him with as much suspicion as pleasure. “What’s that for?”
“On account of that’s the very same word the Changs used when they was talkin’ about themselves,” he said, “and only a clever lady like you would figure it out all on her lonesome.”
“That a fact?” Elizabeth said. Cincinnatus solemnly nodded. She wagged a finger at him. “I tell you a fact: you only talk so sweet to me when you want something—an’ I generally know what it is you want.”
If she hadn’t been smiling, the words would have flayed. As things were, Cincinnatus laughed. “Sure enough, you got what I want,” he said. Elizabeth snorted. Cincinnatus laughed again. But, though he might have been trying to butter her up, he hadn’t been lying. He hoped she felt the same way. She’d never given him any signs she didn’t.
When he came home two or three days later, Elizabeth pointed to an envelope on the kitchen table. “You got a letter from Covington,” she said. She hadn’t opened it. She’d acquired her letters only after they came to Iowa, and still didn’t read fluently. They also had a family rule that mail belonged to the person whose name was on the envelope, and to nobody else.
Cincinnatus eyed the envelope with a mixture of pleasure and apprehension. His father and mother still lived in Kentucky, and they did write to him every so often—or rather, they had a literate neighbor do it, for they couldn’t read or write. He was always glad to hear from them, and always suspicious when he did. Back in the 1920s, the Kentucky State Police had used a false message from them to lure him to Covington, and flung him into jail for sedition as soon as he got off the train.
He opened the envelope and took out the sheet of paper inside. He was frowning when he put it down. “What’s it say?” Elizabeth asked.
“He says Ma’s startin’ to forget things, act like she was a little child again.” Cincinnatus scowled at the letter. Up till now, Livia had always been the rock at which the family anchored. Seneca’s health had been shaky now and again, but hardly ever hers. Tears stung Cincinnatus’ eyes. This wasn’t anything a doctor could fix, either; he knew that too well.
“That’s hard to bear, sweetheart. That’s right hard to bear,” Elizabeth said. Both her parents, though, were long dead, so her sympathy went only so far. Sudden anxiety sharpened her voice as she asked, “He don’t want you to go down there? He better not, after all you went through.”
“No, no.” Cincinnatus shook his head. “He say my pa’s managin’ for now.” But then he shook his head in a different, more thoughtful way. “Reckon maybe I could, though. Ain’t no more Kentucky State Police to fling me in jail.”
“Sure ain’t.” But that wasn’t agreement from his wife. It was sarcasm. “And there ain’t on account o’ the Freedom Party’s runnin’ things in Kentucky nowadays. Freedom Party fellers, they love to have another nigger come down to their state an’ commence to raisin’ trouble.”
“I wouldn’t raise no trouble,” Cincinnatus said. “All I’d be doin’ was seein’ my own mother while she’s still on this earth.”
Elizabeth shook her finger at him as if he were a naughty little boy. “You stay right here where you belong.”
“Ain’t goin’ nowhere. Already told you that. But things ain’t as bad as you think in Kentucky, and that’s the truth. Yeah, they got them Freedom Party fellers runnin’ things now, but they can’t do like they done down in the Confederate States—can’t beat up all the folks who don’t like ’em and keep them folks from votin’. They lose the next election, they’s gone.”
“You goes down there, you’s gone,” Elizabeth said. “ ‘Sides, you goes down there, what’s Amanda an’ me supposed to do for money? It don’t grow on trees—or if it do, I ain’t found the nursery what sells it.”
“Even if I was to go, I wouldn’t be gone long,” Cincinnatus said. “It’d be to see my ma, say good-bye to her while she still know who I am. That kind of forgettin’, it just gits worse an’ worse. Somebody live long enough, he don’t even know who he is, let alone anybody else.”
Elizabeth softened slightly. “That’s so,” she admitted, and hugged Cincinnatus. “All right. We take it like it comes, see how she do. If you got to go, then you got to go, and that’s all there is to it.”
She started to let go of Cincinnatus, but now he squeezed her. “I love you,” he said. “You’re the best thing ever happen to me.”
“I better be,” Elizabeth said, “on account of you don’t know how to stay out of trouble on your own.” Cincinnatus wanted to resent that or get angry about it. He wanted to, but found he couldn’t.
“No,” Alexander Arthur Pomeroy declared, like a tycoon declining a merger offer. Mary had just asked him if he wanted a nap. At two and a half, he was liable to mean that no, too, and to be fussy and cranky at night because he hadn’t had it. One of these days before too long, he’d stop taking naps for good, and then Mary wouldn’t get any rest from dawn till dusk, either. She looked forward to that day with something less than delight. Most of Alec’s milestones had delighted her: first tooth, first step, first word. Last nap, though, last nap was different.
Of course, Alec might also have been saying no just for the sake of saying no. He did that a lot. From what other mothers said, every two-year-old went through the same maddening phase. Maddening though it was, it could also be funny. Slyly pitching her voice the same way as she had when asking him if he wanted a nap, Mary said, “Alec, do you want a cookie?”
“No,” he said again, a pint-sized captain of industry. Then he realized he’d made a dreadful mistake. The horror on his face matched anything in the moving pictures. “Yes!” he exclaimed. “Cookie! Want cookie!” He started to cry.
Mary gave him a vanilla wafer. He calmed down. The way he’d wailed, though, said he needed a nap whether he wanted one or not. She didn’t ask again, but scooped him up, sat down in the rocking chair, and started reading a story. She kept her tone deliberately bland. After about ten minutes, Alec’s eyes sagged shut. She rocked a little longer, then carried him to his crib.
She put him down with care; sometimes his head would bob up if she wasn’t gentle. But not today. Mary let out a sigh of relief. Now she had anywhere from half an hour to an hour and a half to herself. Time had been a luxury more precious than ermine, more precious than rubies, ever since Alec was born.
“Coffee!” Mary said, and headed for the kitchen. She’d always liked tea better. Come to that, she still did like tea better. But coffee had one unquestionable advantage: it was stronger. With a baby—now a toddler—in the house, strength counted. She’d long since given up trying to figure out how far behind on sleep she was.
A gently steaming cup beside her, she sat down in the rocking chair again, this time by herself. She unfolded the Rosenfeld Register and prepared to make the most of her free time. The Register was just a weekly, and so didn’t bother with much news from abroad, but it did have one foreign story on the front page: CONFEDERATE STATES RESUME CONSCRIPTION! President Featherston of the CSA said he was doing it because of the continuing national emergency in the country, and blamed rebellious blacks. President Smith of the USA hadn’t said anything by the time the Register went to press.
Mary glanced over to the wireless set. She couldn’t remember anything Smith had said since the Register went to press, either. She thought about turning on the set and listening to some news, but she didn’t have the energy to get up. Whatever the president of the USA said, she’d find out sooner or later.
Regardless of what President Smith said, Mary knew what she thought. If the Confederates weren’t getting ready to spit in their northern neighbor’s eye, she would have been surprised. She hoped they spat good and hard.
During the war, Canada and the Confederates had been on the same side. She’d wondered about that then; the Confederate States hadn’t hung out a lamp of liberty for all the world to see. They still didn’t, by all appearances. But, whether they did or not, one ancient rule had still applied: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
These days, Mary would gladly have allied with the Devil against the United States. Only trouble was, Old Scratch appeared uninterested in the deal—or maybe he’d taken up residence in Philadelphia. As for her country, it remained subjugated. She saw no grand uprising on the horizon. The Canadians had tried that once: tried, failed, and seemed to decide not to repeat the experiment.
That left Mary furious. She wanted to be part of something bigger than herself, something more than a rebellion of one. Other people made bombs, too, and made more of them; she read and heard about the bangs every so often, and had the feeling the papers and wireless didn’t talk about all of them. The others attacked real soldiers and administrators, too, the way her father had. They didn’t limit themselves to a Greek who’d come up to Canada to run a general store.
Mary looked up toward the heavens and asked God, or perhaps her father, Well, what else could I do? Other parts of life had got in the way of her thirst for revenge. One of those other parts was working in the diner across the street. Another was sleeping in the crib. She knew next to nothing about the people who planted other bombs, but she would have bet they didn’t have babies to worry about.
Local stories filled most of the Register’s pages: local stories and local advertising. The wedding announcements and obituaries were as stylized as the serials that ran ahead of main features on the cinema screen. If you’d seen one, you’d seen them all; only names and dates changed.
As for the ads, many of those were even more formulaic than the announcements. Peter Karamanlides bought space to plug his store every week. So did Dr. Shipley, the painless dentist. Mary often wondered why, when they had the only general store and dentist’s office for miles around. The same applied to the laundry and the haberdasher and to the newspaper itself. If you didn’t use their services, whose would you use?
Advertisements from farmers often followed formulas, too. Those for stud services did: offspring to stand and walk was the stock phrase. If the offspring did, fine; if not, the stud fee had to be refunded. But some of those ads were different. There was no standard format, for instance, for selling a piano.
There was no formula for the little stories speckled through the inner pages of the Rosenfeld Register, either. The editor, no doubt, would have called them “human interest” pieces. Mary sometimes wondered about the sanity of any human being who was interested in stories about a two-headed calf nursed by two different cows or a man who pulled a boxcar with his teeth—and false teeth, at that.
But she looked at the filler pieces herself. A story about a mother cat nursing an orphaned puppy could make her smile. So could one about two former sweethearts who’d both moved away from the small town where they grew up, then didn’t see each other for twenty-five years till they were standing in line at the same Toronto cinema. One had never married; the other was a widower. They’d fallen in love all over again.
Some of those “human interest” stories made Mary grit her teeth, because propaganda poisoned them. The one about the Yank flier who’d requalified as a fighter pilot after twenty years away from aeroplanes was particularly sappy; she had to resist the impulse to crumple up the Register and throw it across the living room. The last paragraph said, Our bold hero, now also a successful barrister specializing in occupation affairs, is married to the former Laura Secord, a descendant of the “Paul Revere of Canada,” who had the same name. They have one daughter. Thus we see that the two lands are becoming ever more closely intertwined.
Mary saw nothing of the sort. What she saw was a traitor living high on the hog because she’d married a Yank. And hadn’t Laura Secord been one of the people who’d betrayed the uprising in the 1920s? Mary nodded to herself. She was sure she remembered that. She wouldn’t forget the name, not when she’d learned it in school before the Yanks started changing what was taught. Had the woman been intertwined with this Yank flier even then? The lewd image was enough to make Mary’s cheeks heat.
She’d promised herself vengeance on the people who’d made the uprising fail. She’d promised, and then she hadn’t delivered. Her father would have been ashamed of her. Up there in heaven, Arthur McGregor probably was ashamed of her.
“I’ll take care of it,” she whispered. “I’ll take care of it if it’s the last thing I ever do.”
Then she had to take care of something else, because Alec woke up with a yell: “Pooping potty!” That was his signal that he needed to use the toilet—or, sometimes, that he’d just gone. Mary rushed in to lift him out of the crib and see which it was this time.
“You’re dry!” she exclaimed in glad surprise after a hasty check—he did have accidents in his sleep.
“Dry as a fly,” he answered, echoing one of the things she said to him.
“What a good boy!” Mary took him out of the crib, gave him a kiss, and stood him on a stool in front of the toilet. He did his business, and almost all of it went where it was supposed to go. Mary cleaned up the rest with toilet paper. “What a good boy!” she said again. Another woman in the block of flats insisted babies didn’t turn into people till they were toilet-trained. Mary thought that went too far … most of the time.
His clothes set to rights, Alec went off to play. Mary went off to keep at least one eye on him while he was playing, to make sure he didn’t knock over a table or pull a lamp down on his head or try to swallow a big mouthful of dust or stick his finger in an electric socket or do any of the other interesting and creative things small children did in their unending effort not to live to grow up.
This afternoon, he made a beeline for the ashtray. “Oh, no, you don’t!” Mary said, and got there first. He’d tried that before. Once, he’d managed to swallow one of Mort’s cigarette butts, as he’d proved by puking it up. Keeping an eye on her son, Mary understood how her mother had come to have gray hair.
Every so often, she cast a longing glance across the street at the diner. When Mort got back, she’d have another pair of eyes in the flat to keep watch on Alec. One toddler left two parents only slightly outnumbered. Dealing with Alec by herself, Mary often felt not just outnumbered but overwhelmed.
But when Mort did come home, he sank down into the rocking chair with a bottle of Moosehead and complained about how busy he’d been all day at the diner. “Lord, it’s good to get off my feet,” he said.
“I have the same feeling when Alec takes a nap,” Mary said pointedly.
Her husband didn’t take the point. “It was a madhouse over there today,” he said. “We made good money, but they kept us hopping.”
“Alec always keeps me hopping,” Mary said.
“This little fellow? This little fellow here?” Mort grabbed Alec and stuck him on his lap. Alec squealed with glee and cuddled up. If I tried that, he’d pitch a fit. Either that or he’d just jump off ten seconds later, Mary thought. Mort ruffled the toddler’s fine sandy hair. “You’re not so tough, are you?”
“Tough!” Alec yelled gleefully. “Tough!”
“You’re not so tough,” Mort said again, and turned him upside down. Alec squealed in delight. Mary hid a sigh by turning away. Mort could do things with their son that she couldn’t. She’d seen that very early on. He could get Alec to pay attention and do what he was told when she couldn’t. Maybe it was just that he had a deep, rumbling man’s voice. Maybe it was that he was gone more and Alec wanted to please him while he was around. Whatever it was, it was unquestionably real.
So was Laura Secord’s treason. Alec has his father, Mary thought. I made a promise to mine a long time ago. I haven’t kept it yet, but that doesn’t mean I won’t. Oh, no. It doesn’t mean that at all. She nodded to herself. Then she smiled. She wasn’t annoyed at Mort any more, not even a little bit.
Conscripts were filling out the ranks of the Confederate Army. It got stronger week by week. Confederate aeroplanes carried guns and bombs. The fastest Confederate fighters could go up against anything the USA built. And the United States, while they’d grumbled, hadn’t done anything but grumble. As far as Clarence Potter was concerned, that would do for a miracle till a bigger one came along.
Jake Featherston had thought it would work like this. If it hadn’t, whether Featherston got—extorted—the right to run for a second term wouldn’t have mattered a hill of beans’ worth. The country would have thrown him out on his ear if the USA didn’t take care of the job.
The Confederate States were ever so much stronger than they had been. Potter knew just how strong they were—and how strong the United States were. A fight would have been no contest. But no fight came. Featherston had been sure none would. And he’d been right.
“By God, he’s earned a second term for that,” Potter muttered at his desk down below the War Department building.
He shook his head in something halfway between bemusement and horror. Did I say that? Did I say that? he wondered. By God, I did. I meant it, too. He’d spent more than fifteen years as one of Jake Featherston’s sincerest enemies—sincerest, because he’d known Featherston longer and better than any of the other people who couldn’t stand him. And now he had to admit Jake had known what he was doing after all.
Potter wouldn’t have dreamt the USA would sit quiet and let the CSA rearm. He would have thought—hell, he had thought—you’d have to be crazy to take a chance like that. Featherston had taken the chance, and he’d got away with it.
So what did that make him? A crazy man saw things nobody else could see. But what about someone who saw things nobody else could see—but that turned out to be there after all? There was a word for people like that, too. The word was genius. Potter didn’t like using that word about Jake Featherston. He still remembered the weight of the revolver he’d carried up to the Olympic swimming stadium, intending to get rid of Jake once for all.
But he hadn’t. He’d got rid of the colored would-be assassin instead, and the whole world was different on account of it. He looked down at his butternut uniform. He wouldn’t have put that on again, not in a million years.
Here he sat, analyzing reports from Confederates in the USA who talked as if they’d grown up there. The reports, of course, weren’t addressed WAR DEPARTMENT, RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, CSA. Somehow, that might have made even the sleepy United States open eyes wide and perhaps raise an eyebrow. Instead, the letters and telegrams had come to a variety of businesses scattered all over the Confederate States. They were all coded, too, so they didn’t talk directly about barrels or aeroplanes. Not all the codes were particularly subtle, but they’d defeat casual snoopers.
Potter wished the reports could come straight to him. As things were, he got them anywhere from several hours to several days after they reached the CSA. As long as the United States and Confederate States stayed at peace, the delay didn’t matter too much. If they ever went to war …
He laughed at himself. If the USA and the CSA went to war again, the only way letters and telegrams crossed the border would be through the International Red Cross. He suspected—no, he knew—they would be a lot slower than they were now.
He drummed his fingers on the desk, took off his spectacles and carefully polished them, replaced them on his nose, and then did some more drumming. However much he despised the USA, he hoped another war wouldn’t come. The Confederacy would be fighting out of its weight, and all the more so because the United States had no second front against Canada this time.
Did Jake Featherston see that? It seemed pretty plain to Potter. As far as he could tell from cautious conversations, it seemed pretty plain to most of the officers in the War Department. The trouble was, of course, that Featherston wasn’t an officer, and never had been one. He was a jumped-up sergeant, remarkably shrewd, but not trained to look at the big picture. How much would that matter? If it really came to another fight, the president would surely be shrewd enough to let trained commanders take charge of things.
Potter’s musings were interrupted when a uniformed officer—not a soldier, he realized after a moment, but a Freedom Party guard—strode up to his desk, saluted, and barked out, “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Potter echoed in more crisply military tones. “And what can I do for you, ah, Chief Assault Leader?” The other officer wore a captain’s three bars on either side of his collar, but Party guards had their own titles of rank. Potter didn’t know if they thought the Army’s weren’t good enough for them, or if they thought those were too good. It wasn’t the sort of question he could ask, not if he wanted to keep wearing his uniform and not one with a big P stenciled on the back.
“Sir, I am ordered to bring you to the president at once,” the chief assault leader answered.
“Ordered, are you? Well, then, you’d better do it, eh?” Potter said, pushing back his chair and stowing papers in a drawer that locked. The Freedom Party guard nodded seriously. Clarence Potter didn’t smile. He’d been pretty sure a man who became a Party guard wouldn’t recognize irony if it piddled on his shiny black boots. He asked, “Do you know what this is about?”
“No, sir,” the officer said. “I have my orders. A motorcar is waiting outside.” He turned and marched, machinelike, toward the stairs. Potter followed at a more human amble.
The motorcar was a Birmingham painted butternut. It flew a Freedom Party flag, though, not the Confederate battle flag an Army vehicle would have sported. Potter and the stone-faced chief assault leader got in. The driver, also a Freedom Party guard, whisked them away from the War Department and up Shockoe Hill to the presidential residence.
A bodyguard there relieved Potter of his pistol. That was routine these days. If the guard knew Potter had once carried a pistol intending to use it on the president, he gave no sign.
“Reporting as ordered, sir,” Potter said when the captain—no, the chief assault leader—took him into Featherston’s office. Formality helped. If he spoke to the president of the CSA, he wouldn’t have to think—so much—about the fiery, foul-mouthed artillery sergeant he’d known during the war, wouldn’t have to think that the sergeant and the president were one and the same.
“Good to see you, Colonel. Sit down,” Jake Featherston replied, returning the salute. Maybe he was using formality to suppress memory, too. As soon as Potter was in the chair, Featherston waved to the Party officer. “That’ll be all, Randy. You just run along. Close the door on your way out.” Randy looked unhappy, but he did what everybody seemed to do around Featherston: he obeyed. The president turned back to Clarence Potter and got straight to business: “I need more from your people in Kentucky.”
“Sir?” Potter needed a moment to shift gears.
Featherston’s scowl made him look like an angry, hungry wolf. “Kentucky,” he repeated impatiently. “Things are heating up there, and I’m going to want to know more about what’s going on. I’m going to want to be able to make things happen there, too.”
“I haven’t got but a handful of men in Kentucky, Mr. President,” Potter said. “My specialty is people who talk like Yankees, and that’s not what we mostly use there, because the accent is closer to our own. Men from Tennessee don’t stand out in Kentucky the way they would in Pennsylvania or Kansas.”
“I know what you’ve got in Kentucky.” Featherston reeled off the names and positions of almost all of Potter’s men in the state. He wasn’t looking at a list. He knew them, knew them by heart. Those names and supporting details had surely gone to him in one report or another, but that he’d remembered them… . Clarence Potter was more nearly flabbergasted than impressed at that grasp of detail. I didn’t know he had it in him, he thought. The president went on, “The point is, three or four of your people are in slots with the state government or a city government where they can be useful to us because everybody reckons they’re Yankees.”
“They can do some of that,” Potter said cautiously, “but not too much. If they don’t act like what they’re supposed to be, they’ll make the real Yankees wonder why they don’t. That wouldn’t be good. The last thing we want is to make the United States suspicious.”
This time, Featherston’s scowl was of a different sort. Potter had no trouble identifying it, though: it was the scowl of a man who wasn’t used to people telling him anything he didn’t want to hear. Well, too damn bad, the intelligence officer thought. You’re the one who brought me back into the Army. Now you have to take the consequences. I’m not one of your Party hacks, and you’d better remember it.
“You telling me you can’t do what I need?” The president’s voice was harsh and dangerous.
Potter shook his head. “No, sir. That’s not what I said at all. But I am asking you to make sure in your own mind that what you get now is worth the risk of losing a lot later on. If the damnyankees start looking hard for Confederate spies, they’re bound to find some. And if they find some, they’ll look for more, and… .”
“All right.” Featherston held up a hand. “I see what you’re saying. But what’s the point of having all these goddamn spies in place if we can’t get any use out of ’em?”
“We do get use out of them,” Potter said; for all his grasp of detail, Jake Featherston was missing the big picture here. “We get information. Without it, we’re blind. That’s really what they’re there for, as far as we’re concerned. If they step out of their roles, they may give themselves away.”
Featherston grunted. His eyes showed his own hard suspicion. Regardless of whether his guards did, he remembered the pistol in Clarence Potter’s pocket, and he had to know why Potter had had it there. “If we can’t use our people to nudge things along there, how the hell do we do it?” he snapped.
“We can use our people. The ones I run just aren’t the right set of tools for the job,” Potter answered. “Demonstrations, riots, stories in the papers, wireless shows … We can do all that. About the most my men can do is pretend they haven’t seen telegrams, things like that. If they try to do much more, the fellows they work for will start giving them fishy stares. Do you see what I’m saying?”