“I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth,” the president of the Confederate States said into the microphone as soon as the engineer behind the glass wall gave him the high sign. “And the truth is, folks, that Kentucky is ours again and Texas is whole again and our country is a long way back towards being what it’s supposed to be again.
“The people spoke, and the Yankees had to listen. The people said they were sick and tired of being stuck in the USA. They came back where they belonged. The Stars and Bars are flying in Lubbock and San Antonio and Frankfort and Louisville. We took back what was ours, because that was how the people wanted it.”
He didn’t say anything about losing the plebiscite in Sequoyah. The papers and the wireless in the CSA hadn’t said much about it, either. People got the news he wanted them to have, slanted the way he wanted it to go. Oh, his coverage wasn’t perfect. By the nature of things, it couldn’t be. Too many people could also pick up wireless stations from across the U.S. border. But not a lot of them did. Confederates and Yankees had disliked and distrusted one another for a long time now.
“Here and there along the border, the Yankees are still holding on to what’s ours: in Sonora, in Arizona, in Arkansas, and right here in Virginia,” Jake continued. “Al Smith tried to make me promise I wouldn’t talk about those things if we had the elections last month, but I don’t call that an honest kind of promise. No, sir, folks, I don’t call it honest at all, not even a little bit. He was saying, ‘I’ll give you back some of what’s yours if you forget about the rest of what’s yours.’ Now you tell me, friends—is that fair? Is that right?”
Bang! He slammed his fist down on the table, a favorite trick of his. “I tell you it’s not fair! I tell you it’s not right! And I tell you that the Confederate States of America deserve to be whole again! The CSA will be whole again! This here that we’ve done now is only the beginning. We don’t want trouble with the United States. We don’t want trouble with anybody. But we want what’s ours, and we’re going to get it!”
He ended just as the light went red. This wasn’t one of his long speeches, only a little one to remind people that he’d got back two of the states the Whigs had lost. He stood up, stretched, and left the studio.
As always, Saul Goldman waited for him outside in the hallway. “Good speech, Mr. President,” the director of communications said. “I don’t think you can make a bad one.”
“Thanks, Saul,” Featherston answered. “We have a lot of things to take care of over the next few weeks. You’ve got the incident simmering?”
“Oh, yes.” The little Jew nodded. “We’ll have something worked up if they don’t take care of things for us. They’re liable to, you know.”
Jake nodded. “Hell, of course I know. But we’ll be able to get the story out the way we want it if it’s our incident to begin with.”
Bodyguards came up alongside of Saul Goldman. Goldman nodded to them in an absent-minded way. He didn’t take security as seriously as he should have. Of course, nobody was gunning for him, either. Featherston didn’t have the luxury of making that assumption. He nodded to the men in the butternut uniforms. They carried submachine guns at an identical angle. Their expressions were also identical: tough and watchful. Jake was watchful, too, though he tried not to let it show. Party stalwarts had tried to bump him off once. Could he really trust Party guards? If he couldn’t, could he trust anybody in the whole wide world?
The guards led him out into the street. They spread out before he got into his new armored limousine. With Virgil Joyner shot dead, his driver was new, too. He missed Virgil. He missed anybody who’d known him in the old days and stuck with him through thick and thin. Harold Stowe, the new man, was probably a better driver than Joyner had been. Jake didn’t care. The man was—and acted like—a servant, not a drinking buddy.
“Back to the Gray House, Harold,” Featherston said. Harold. He sighed to himself. Stowe didn’t even go by Hal or Hank or anything interesting.
“Right, Mr. President,” the driver said, and put the limousine in gear. Jake sighed again, a little louder this time. Virgil Joyner had called him Sarge. He’d had the right, too. Not many people did, not any more.
Climbing Shockoe Hill was hard work for the heavy limousine. There’d been an ice storm the night before. Despite rock salt on the road, the going was still slippery. They crawled to the top in first gear.
When he strode back into the presidential residence, his secretary met him just inside the door. “You know you’re scheduled to meet with Lieutenant General Forrest in ten minutes, don’t you, sir?” she said, as if sure he’d forgotten.
“Yes, Lulu, I do know that,” he said. “Let me go to the office and look at a couple of things, and I’ll be ready for him.”
An officer named Nathan Bedford Forrest III should have raised Featherston’s hackles. He’d campaigned against all the Juniors and IIIs and even VIs who clung to power in the CSA by virtue of what their ancestors had done, and who hadn’t done anything much on their own. But, for one thing, the first Nathan Bedford Forrest had been as much of a self-made son of a bitch as Jake was, and he’d been proud of it, too. And, for another, his great-grandson wasn’t a Great War General Staff relic. He’d been too young even to fight in the trenches from 1914 to 1917. He was a hell of a soldier now, though, with notions of how to use barrels as radical as his illustrious ancestor’s ideas about horses. Featherston liked the way he thought.
At the moment, though, Forrest looked worried. “Sir, if the Yankees decide to jump us for moving troops into Kentucky and west Texas”—he wouldn’t call it Houston, refusing to recognize the validity of the name—“they’ll whip us. They can do it. If you don’t see that, you’ll land the country in a hell of a mess.”
“I never said they couldn’t,” Featherston answered. “But they won’t.”
Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked exasperated. The first officer to bear the name had been a rawboned man who looked a bit like Jake Featherston. His descendant had a rounder face, though he kept his great-grandfather’s dangerous eyes. They looked all the more dangerous when he glowered. “Why won’t they? You’ve promised to keep those states demilitarized, and you’re going back on your solemn word. What better excuse do they need?”
“If they attack me for moving my men into my states, they’ve got a war on their hands,” Jake said calmly. “I’m telling you, General, they don’t have the stomach for it.”
“And I’m telling you, Mr. President, you’ll take the country down in ruins if you’re wrong.” The first Nathan Bedford Forrest had had a reputation for speaking his mind. His great-grandson took after him.
“To hell with the country,” Featherston said. Nathan Bedford Forrest III gasped. Jake went on, “I’ve got twenty dollars of my own money against twenty dollars of yours, General. The damnyankees won’t move.”
Forrest frowned. “You sound mighty damn sure of yourself, Mr. President.”
“I am mighty damn sure of myself,” Jake Featherston answered. “That’s my job. Suppose you let me tend to it while you tend to yours.”
“I am tending to my job,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “If I didn’t point out to you that we’re liable to have a problem here, I wouldn’t be tending to it. The damnyankees outweigh us. They’re always going to outweigh us. Remember how much trouble the Germans had against the Tsar’s armies in the Great War? That wasn’t because one Russian was as good a soldier as one German. It was because there were a hell of a lot of Russians. There are a hell of a lot of soldiers in the USA, too.”
Jake Featherston nodded. “They’ll be able to outnumber us, like you said. That means we’ll just have to outquick ’em. You going to tell me we can’t do that?” His voice developed a hard and ugly rasp. If General Forrest was going to tell him something along those lines, he’d be sorry.
“No, sir.” Forrest didn’t try. “We’ve got the airplanes, and we’ve got the barrels, and we’ve got the trucks, too. We’ll run ’em ragged.” Like Jake, like most of the Confederates who were really involved with them, he called barrels by the name they had in the USA. Some of the men who’d done their service well away from the trenches still used the British name instead: tanks. Featherston found that a useless affectation. But the general wasn’t through, for he added, “If there is a war, sir, we’d better win it pretty damn fast. If we don’t, we’ve got troubles. They’re bigger than we are, like I say, and they can take more punishment. We don’t want to get into a slugging match with them. Do you hear what I’m saying?”
“I hear you,” Jake said coldly. “You make yourself very plain.”
“Good. That’s good. I want you to understand me,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “If I have a choice, I’d just as soon see us not have a war at all. Three years of the last one should have been enough to satisfy us for the rest of our days.”
Three years of war hadn’t been enough to satisfy Jake Featherston. He’d fought with undiminished hatred from beginning to end. Some of that hatred had been aimed at the Yankees, the rest at his own side. He’d had plenty to go around. He still did. “General, I don’t need to explain my policies to you. I just need you to carry them out,” he said. “Is that plain enough for you, or shall I draw you a picture?”
Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked back at him. “Oh, that’s plain enough,” he answered. “But if you’re being a damn fool, sir, don’t you think somebody has the duty to come out and tell you so?”
“People told me that before I got Kentucky and Houston back,” Jake said in a low, furious voice. “Was I right, or were they? People told me that when I brought dams and electricity into the Tennessee Valley. Was I right, or were they? People told me that when I made damn sure the farms in this country had the mechanical gear they needed, so we wouldn’t get stuck relying on niggers we can’t trust. Was I right, or were they?”
“Damned if I know about that last one,” Forrest said. “Now we’ve got those niggers robbing houses in town instead.” Featherston waited. The general nodded. “All right, sir. I get your point. But you’d better be able to take my twenty dollars. That’s all I’ve got to say.”
“Look here, General—I hope there won’t be a war, too,” Featherston said. “But one way or the other, the Confederate States are going to get what we want. We deserve it, it’s our right to have it, and we’re going to get it. Is that plain enough for you? Thanks to the Whigs, we’ve been waiting for almost twenty-five years. That’s too damn long. We can’t wait forever.”
“Yes, sir. Whatever you decide needs doing, we’ll try our best to give it to you,” Forrest said. “Doing that is our job. Figuring out what we need—that’s yours.” He got to his feet, saluted, and left.
Jake looked after him. As the door closed, he said, “I know what needs doing,” though Nathan Bedford Forrest III could not hear him. “And by God, I aim to do it.”
Mary Pomeroy paused with a forkful of scrambled eggs halfway to her mouth. “It’s not fair!” she said. “The Yanks let Kentucky and Houston vote on where they wanted to go, and now they’re back in the CSA. If they let us vote, the Americans would be gone from here so fast, it would make your head swim.”
Mort Pomeroy chewed up a mouthful of bacon—Canadian bacon, not the skinny strips that went by the name in the USA—before saying, “They let that Sequoyah place vote, too, and it voted to stay in the United States.”
Red curls flew as Mary tossed her head. “At least it had a choice. The Yanks don’t give us any.”
“I can’t do anything about that.” Mort ate another chunk of bacon. He might have been chewing on his words, too. After swallowing the bacon, he spat out the words: “And neither can you.”
She bridled. The Yanks had shot her brother for trying to do something about the occupation. Her father had fought a one-man war against the USA till his own bomb blew him up instead of General Custer, for whom it was intended. Mort braced himself, regretting what he’d said and getting ready for an argument. Before she could answer him, Alec spoke from his high chair: “More bacon?” He was wild for bacon and ham and sausage—anything salty, in fact.
“Sure, sweetheart,” Mary told him, and gave him some. While she cut it up for him, she wondered what to say to her husband. In the end, all that came out was, “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I can’t.”
Mort blinked, plainly thinking he’d got off easy. He waited for her to come out with something else. When she didn’t, he decided to count his blessings. He finished his bacon and eggs, his toast and jam, and his tea. Then he got into his overcoat, hat, and earmuffs for the trip across the street to the diner. It was warmer today than it had been lately; the high might get up into double digits. On the other hand, it might not, too.
Mary also finished her breakfast. Then she let Alec chase little pieces of bacon around his plate with his fork as long as he ate one every so often. When it stopped being breakfast and turned into playtime, she extracted him from the high chair and carried him over to the sink so she could wash his greasy face. He liked that no better than he ever did, and he was getting big enough to put up a pretty good fight. But she was still bigger, and so, whether he liked it or not, the grease came off.
She read to him for a while. He liked Queen Zixi of Ix, even if a Yank had written it. She didn’t suppose L. Frank Baum had particularly disliked Canada. The book gave no sign that he’d ever heard of it—or of the United States, either. Hard to go wrong with a world so thoroughly imaginary.
When Alec started to fidget in her lap, she let him down to play. She didn’t have to watch him quite every second these days; he was old enough not to stick everything into his mouth the instant he saw it. That let Mary go into the kitchen and play with something of her own.
Alec wandered in to watch. “Whatcha doing?” he asked.
“Fixing something,” Mary answered.
“Is it busted?” he asked. “It don’t look busted.”
“Doesn’t,” Mary said. “It doesn’t look busted.”
“If it doesn’t look busted, how come you’re fixing it?”
Conversations with children could be surreal. By now, Mary had got used to that, or as used to the unpredictable as you could get. She said, “I’m not fixing it like that. I’m fixing it up.”
“Are you making it fancy-like?”
She shook her head. “No, I’m just taking care of what needs taking care of.” That didn’t mean much to Alec. It didn’t mean much to her, either. She didn’t care. It kept him from asking too many more questions, which was what she’d had in mind. She worked on it for a while, then put it away. Before too long, it would be done.
“Can we go out and play?” Alec asked.
“No. It’s too cold.”
“Can we throw snowballs? I’ll bop you in the nose with one.”
“No. It’s even too cold to throw snowballs.”
“How can it be too cold to throw snowballs?” Alec was disbelieving. “It’s not too cold to snow.”
“It’s too cold for people to go out there unless they have to.”
“Daddy went out there.”
“He just went across the street to the diner. And he didn’t stop to throw snowballs at anybody.” Mary still wondered how Mort had come to be daddy to Alec. Her own father had always been pa to her. She hadn’t looked for anything like that to change. But change it had.
“Sometimes Daddy throws snowballs,” Alec said.
Mary couldn’t very well deny that. They’d had a memorable snowball fight only a few weeks before. But she said, “He doesn’t do it on days like this. On days like this, he stays inside where it’s warm as much as he can.”
Alec went to a window and looked out. “There’s people out there.”
“I know there are people out there. Sometimes you have to go to the general store or to the dentist. Sometimes you have to deliver letters and things, the way the postman does.” The Yanks called him the mailman. Mary refused to. She’d been calling him the postman since she learned to talk, and she wasn’t about to change now. She still called the last letter of the alphabet zed, too. She wondered if Alec would after he started going to school. Yanks said zee, which struck her as insufferably … American.
“Do you have to go to the general store, Mommy?” Alec asked hopefully.
“No. I’ve got everything I need right here,” Mary answered. She wasn’t ma, either. She wondered why not. How had the language changed while she wasn’t looking? She couldn’t have said, but it had.
Cleaning and dusting here took only a fraction of the time they would have back on the farm. She didn’t have any livestock to worry about, either. How many times had she gone out to the barn no matter what the weather was like, to feed the animals and collect eggs and muck out? She didn’t have a number, but she knew it would have been a large one. Animals needed tending, rain or shine or blizzard. Back on the farm, if she had a moment to relax, it probably meant she’d forgotten something that needed doing. Here, she could sit down and smoke a cigarette and read a book or listen to the wireless without feeling guilty about leaving work undone.
Except for electric lights, the wireless was the best thing about electricity she’d found. And there were replacements of sorts for electric lights: gas lamps, or even the kerosene lanterns her mother still used out on the farm. What could replace the wireless, for immediacy or for entertainment? Nothing she could imagine.
No sooner had that thought crossed her mind, though, than she remembered a story the Rosenfeld Register had run not so long before. People were starting to figure out how to send moving pictures the same way they sent wireless signals. Apparently they’d broadcast pictures of a football game in New York City. But the sets cost more than a thousand dollars. Mary didn’t suppose they’d ever come down to where an ordinary person could afford them.
During the middle of the afternoon, she started boiling a beef tongue in a big iron pot. Tongue was one of her favorite foods. Alec liked it, too. So did Mort, but he preferred it with cloves stuck in it. Back on the farm, they’d always done it simply with carrots and onions and potatoes and whatever other vegetables they happened to have. Today she made it the way her husband liked.
He sniffed when he got back from the diner. “I know what that is!” he exclaimed.
“That’s nice,” Mary said with a smile.
“That’s very nice,” Mort said. “We don’t serve tongue at the diner. We can’t get enough of it, and not enough people would order it if we did.”
“Well, here it is,” Mary told him. “Sit down, make yourself at home, and it’ll be ready in a minute.” The way things turned out, making himself at home kept him from sitting down for a while, because Alec tried to tackle him. Any football referee would have thrown a penalty flag. Mort only laughed.
“And Mommy fixed something up in the kitchen,” Alec said, trying to tell Mort about the day.
“I know she did, sport,” his father answered. “And now we’re going to have it for supper.”
“No, something else. Something this morning,” Alec insisted. Mary wondered if Mort would ask more questions. He didn’t. Instead, he got Alec in a half nelson and tickled him with his free hand. Alec squealed and wiggled and kicked. Mary hoped he wouldn’t have an accident. That sort of treatment was asking for trouble.
But Alec didn’t. He was growing up. He’d start school pretty soon. Part of Mary reacted to that with surprise and horror, and not just because school would teach what the Yanks wanted taught. Where had the time gone? But part of her looked forward to getting him out of the apartment during the day. He really was starting to notice too much of what went on around him.
“Yum,” Mort said when he dug into dinner. Mary liked it, too, although she would have preferred the tender meat without cloves. To her, they distracted from the flavor; they didn’t improve it. And Alec made supper exciting when he bit into one and yelled that it was burning his tongue off. A swig of milk helped put out the fire.
The next morning, the sun shone brilliantly. The mercury shot all the way up into the twenties. Mary wrapped the box she’d been working on in brown paper and binder twine. “Come on,” she told Alec. “Let’s get you dressed up nice and warm. We have to take this to the post office.”
“What is it?”
“Something for your cousins, over in Ontario.”
Getting to the post office took a while, even if it was only three blocks away. Alec threw snowballs and made snow angels and generally had more fun than should have been legal. He had snow all over his front when they went in. It promptly started to melt, because Wilf Rokeby always kept his potbellied stove well fed with coal. The smell of his hair oil was part of the smell of the post office. He wore his hair parted right down the middle, the way he had when Mary was a little girl. It had been dark then. It was white now.
“What have we got here?” he asked when Mary set the box on the counter.
“Present for my cousins,” she answered, as she had with Alec.
Like any small-town postmaster, Rokeby knew a lot about what went on in his customers’ lives. “You don’t have a lot to do with ’em,” he remarked, “nor the rest of your family, either. Been years since I sent anything from you folks to Ontario.”
“I got a wire from them,” Mary said. “Laura had a baby.”
His face softened. “A baby. That’s nice.” He put the package on the scale, then looked at a chart. “Well, you owe me sixty-one cents for this.” She gave him three quarters, got her change, and took Alec back out into the snow.
Jonathan Moss got up from the table. He put on his overcoat and hat. “I’m going to head for the office,” he said.
Laura nodded. “I thought you would.” She gave him a quick, perfunctory kiss. “Do you really have to go in on a Saturday morning, though?”
“I’ve got to be in court Monday morning, and I’m not ready,” Moss answered. “If I don’t want to get slaughtered, I’d better know what I’m doing. Say good morning to Dorothy for me when she finally gets up.”
“I will.” A faint smile crossed Laura’s face. “I wonder where she gets it.” Their daughter loved to sleep late, a habit neither of them had.
“Don’t know. Wherever it comes from, I wish I could catch it. Well, I’m off.” Out the door Moss went. As soon as he closed it behind him, he dropped his right hand into the coat pocket where he carried his pistol. He didn’t do that where Laura could see him. It made her nervous. But not doing it once he was out in the hallway made him nervous.
No one lay in wait there. No one troubled Jonathan on the stairs. No one bothered him on the way to his Ford, which he didn’t park right in front of the apartment building. He examined the auto before getting in. It looked all right. Nothing blew up when he started the engine.
Maybe this is all so much moonshine, he thought as he drove to the office. But he couldn’t afford to take the chance. What had happened to occupation headquarters in Berlin proved that. He might have laughed off threatening letters. Nobody but an idiot laughed off a bomb.
As usual, he chose a route to the office different from the one he’d used the day before. He didn’t park right in front of the building where he worked, either: he used the guarded lot nearby. All the same, the ends of his daily trips to and from work made him nervous. If anyone was gunning for him, those were the places where danger was worst, because he always had to be there. So far, he’d had no trouble. Maybe all his precautions were snapping his fingers to keep the elephants away. Then again, maybe they weren’t. The only way to find out was to stop taking them, and even that might not prove anything. He preferred not to run the risk.
Up the steps and into the building. No assassin lurking in the lobby. Up the stairs to his office, wary every time he turned. No crazed Canuck stalking the stairway. He opened the door, flipped on the light switch, and peered inside. Everything was exactly as he’d left it.
He closed and locked the door. Then he took care of the morning housekeeping: he made a pot of coffee and put it on the hot plate. Even though he’d had a cup with breakfast, waiting for it to get ready was a lonely vigil.
Meanwhile, the case ahead. Somebody—under occupation regulations, the military prosecutor didn’t have to say who—claimed his client had played an active role in the Canadian uprising in the mid-1920s. Why whoever this was hadn’t come forward years earlier was a question Moss intended to raise as loudly as the judge would let him. He’d been trying to find out who had a grudge against Allen Peterhoff. Somebody who stood to gain from Peterhoff’s troubles was the likeliest to cause those troubles.
So far, Moss had had no luck finding anyone like that. As far as he could tell, Peterhoff was a pillar of the community. As for what he’d been doing in 1925 and 1926, nobody seemed to have a lot of hard evidence one way or the other. Of course, in cases like this, hard evidence didn’t always matter. Hearsay counted for just as much, and often for more.
“Got to be some bastard after his money,” Moss muttered to himself. He hadn’t seen a case as blatant as this for a long time. It really belonged to the harsh years right after the revolt, not to 1941. But here it was, and the occupying authorities were taking it very seriously indeed. That worried Moss. Why were they flabbling about Peterhoff if they didn’t have a case?
Moss had just poured himself his second cup of coffee from the pot when the telephone rang. His hand jerked, but not enough to make him spill the coffee. He set down the cup and picked up the telephone. “Jonathan Moss speaking.”
“Hello, Mr. Moss.” That cigarette-roughened baritone could only belong to Lou Jamieson. Moss’ one-time client was not a pillar of the community, except perhaps for certain disreputable parts of it. He went on, “I think maybe I found what you were looking for.”
“Did you, by God?” That perked Moss up better than coffee. “Tell me about it, Mr. Jamieson, if you’d be so kind.”
Tell him about it Jamieson did. If the man with dubious connections was telling the truth—always an interesting proposition where he was concerned—then a couple of Peterhoff’s business associates stood to make a bundle if he vanished from the scene for ten or twenty years. It wasn’t anything showy or obvious, but it was there.
“By God!” Moss said again. His pen raced across a yellow legal pad as he jotted down notes. The more he heard, the happier he got. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart!” he exclaimed when Jamieson finally finished. “You’ve just saved an innocent man a hell of a lot of trouble. Even a military court will have to sit up and take notice when I use this.”
“That’s nice, Mr. Moss,” Jamieson said affably. “You done me a good turn a while ago with the goddamn Yanks. Figured this was the least I could do for you.” He couldn’t have cared less whether Allen Peterhoff was guilty or innocent. What mattered was that he owed Moss a favor. If he hadn’t, Peterhoff would have been welcome to rot in jail, as far as he was concerned.
His sometime client’s amoral cynicism would have bothered Moss much more if Jamieson hadn’t proved so valuable. As things were, Moss threw the notes in his briefcase, thanked Jamieson again, and got ready to go home early. Dorothy will be glad to see me, he thought, and I hope Laura will, too.
He made sure he turned off the hot plate. He didn’t want to burn down the building by accident. Then he went out to his auto. His hand stayed in the overcoat pocket with the pistol, but he wasn’t very worried. Nobody could reasonably expect him to leave at this hour. He might even be back before the mailman got to the apartment building where he lived.
As usual, he parked around the corner from the building. Even though he didn’t expect trouble, it was one of those days where he would almost have welcomed it. He felt as if he were trouble’s master. He remembered that for a very long time. The thought filled his mind as he turned the corner. That was when the explosion knocked him off his feet.
“Holy Jesus!” he said. Bright shards of glass glittered in the snow, blown out of nearby windows. He picked himself up and ran toward the sound of the blast. If anyone needed help, he’d do what he could.
He hadn’t gone more than a few steps before he realized his building was the one that had suffered. The hole in the front wall gaped from his floor. And …
“No,” Moss whispered. But that was his apartment. Or rather, that had been his apartment. Not much seemed left of it. Not a whole lot seemed left of the ones to either side, either. Smoke started pouring out of the hole as broken gas lines or wires set things ablaze.
“Call the police!” someone shouted. “Call the fire department!” somebody else yelled. Jonathan Moss heard them as if from very far away. He ran toward the front steps of the building where he’d lived for so long. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t go up them, because all the people who’d lived in the apartment building were flooding out. Some of them were bloodied and limping. Others just had panic on their faces.
“Laura!” Moss shouted. “Dorothy!”
He didn’t see them anywhere. He hadn’t really thought he would. But hope died hard. Hope, sometimes, died harder than people. People, as he knew too well, could be awfully easy to kill.
A man who lived on the same floor as he did pushed him away. “You don’t want to try to go in, Mr. Moss,” he said. “The whole goddamn building’s liable to fall down.”
“My wife! My little girl!”
“Wasn’t that your place where it happened?” his neighbor asked. Helplessly, he nodded. The other man said, “Then there’s nothing you can do for ’em now, and that’s the Lord’s truth. If they come out, they come out. If they don’t …” He spread his hands.
More people pushed out of the building. More bricks fell off it. Some landed in the snow. One hit a man in the shoulder. He howled like a wolf. Moss tried again to go into the building. Again, he failed. People took hold of him and dragged him back by main force.
Sirens screamed in the distance, rapidly drawing closer. Screams bubbled in Moss’ throat. Why they didn’t burst out, he had no idea. Everything he cared about had been in that flat. Now the flat was gone, and twenty-five years of his dreams and hopes with it.
He tried to think, though his stunned wits made it next to impossible. He’d been getting threats for a long time. He hadn’t taken them too seriously till the bomb went off in the occupation center. After that, he realized disaster really could happen to him. And now it had.
“Who?” he muttered. Who would have wanted to blow up a woman and a child? For if this was a bomb, as seemed horribly likely, whoever had sent it must have addressed it to Laura or Dorothy. Had it had his name on it, they would have left it alone. He would have opened it. And it would have blown up in his face.
Fire engines howled to a stop. The police came right behind them. And soldiers in green-gray helped clear people away from the building. “Move it!” they shouted. “The whole thing may collapse!”
“Get out of the way!” the firemen shouted. They began playing streams of water on the spreading flames. A lot of the water splashed down onto the people who had lived in the building. That moved them away faster than the soldiers could have.
A major called, “Whose place was it that went up?”
“Mine,” Moss said dully.
“You weren’t inside there.” The officer stated the obvious. “You’d be hamburger if you were.”
“Hamburger.” My wife is hamburger. My little girl is hamburger. Moss managed to shake his head. “No. I was doing some work at the office. I had just got out of my auto when … when it happened. Laura … Dorothy …” He began to weep.
“Christ! You’re Jonathan Moss.” Recognizing him, the major suddenly put two and two together. “This wasn’t a gas leak, or anything like that. This was a bomb, or it probably was a bomb, anyway.”
Now Moss’ head moved up and down as mechanically as it had gone back and forth. “Yes. I think you’re right. Somebody killed them.” He could say it. It didn’t sound as if it meant anything. He was still deep in shock. But part of him knew it would mean something before long. The major seemed to sense it was too soon for questions. He led Moss down the street. Docile as a child, Moss went with him. Behind them, the building fell in on itself.