The Center Cannot Hold

VI

During the Great War, Nellie Jacobs had heard more aeroplane motors above Washington, D.C., than she'd ever wanted to. Aeroplane motors, back in those days, had always meant trouble. Either observers were over the city taking photographs to guide bombers and artillery, or else the bombers themselves paid calls, raining destruction and death down on the Confederate occupiers. Later, Confederate bombers had tried to slaughter U.S. soldiers in Washington. Neither side cared much about civilians. Nellie had needed years after the war to stop wanting to duck whenever motors droned overhead.

Now, though, she and her husband stood in the street on the bright, crisp New Year's Day of 1926, staring into the blue sky, pointing, and exclaiming in excitement like a couple of children. "Look! There it is!" Hal Jacobs said, pointing again.

"I see it!" Nellie answered. "Looks like a big old fat cigar up there in the sky, doesn't it?"

"It certainly does," Hal said. "That is just what it looks like, I think."

Clara tugged at Nellie's skirt. "Ma, I have to go potty," she said.

"Well, go on in and go," Nellie said impatiently. "Your dad and me, we're going to stay right here and watch the zeppelin a while longer." Clara made the beginnings of a whimper. "Go on," Nellie told her. "Go on, or I'll warm your fanny for you. You're going to be six this year. You don't need me to hold your hand any more when you go tinkle."

Her daughter ducked into the coffeehouse. Nellie kept staring up at the Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm as it neared the mooring station that had been set up at the top of the newly refinished Washington Monument. "Can you believe it?" Hal said. "It flew all the way across the Atlantic. All the way across the ocean, without stopping once. What an age we live in!"

"Paper says the crown prince himself is in there." Nellie tried to point to the little passenger gondola hanging beneath the great cigar-shaped gas bag. "On a state visit to President Sinclair."

As Clara came back, Hal nodded. His voice was troubled. "We fought side by side with Kaiser Bill all through the Great War. Sad we should squabble with Germany now. I hope Friedrich Wilhelm can patch things up."

"That'd be good," Nellie agreed. "Don't want to worry about little Armstrong going off to war one of these days." She doted on her grandson, not least because her daughter Edna had to take care of him most of the time. Edna's half sister Clara, on the other hand, had been a not altogether welcome surprise and was an ungodly amount of work for a woman well into middle age. She would, thank God, be going back to kindergarten in a few more days.

Suddenly, the zeppelin's engines stopped buzzing. "They've got it," Hal said, as if he personally had been the one to moor the Kronprinz Friedrich Wilhelm to the white stone tower. He sounded delighted to repeat himself: "What an age we live in! When my father was born, there was no telegraph and hardly any railroads. And now we have these wireless sets and-this." He pointed toward the Washington Monument again.

"It's something, all right," Nellie agreed. But then, perhaps incautiously, she went on, "I don't know that it's all to the good."

"Not all to the good?" Her husband looked indignant. "What do you mean? What could be grander than-that?"

"Oh, it's-swell, the young people say now." Nellie brought out the slang self-consciously; like anyone of her generation, she was much more used to bully. "But when your pa was born, Hal, this here was all one country, too, you know. We've spilled an awful lot o' blood since on account of it ain't any more."

"Well, yes, of course," he said. The two of them, in conquered and reconquered Washington, had seen more spilled blood than most civilians. He sighed and breathed out a big, puffy cloud of steam. "I can't imagine how things could have been any different, though. You might as well talk about us losing the Revolution and still belonging to England."

"I suppose you're right." Nellie sighed. Hal was the sensible one in the family. He was, as far as she was concerned, sometimes sensible to a fault. Clara came back out. Nellie absentmindedly ruffled her hair. Then she decided to be sensible, too, and said, "Now we've seen it. Let's go inside. It's cold out here."

"Oh, Ma!" Nobody had ever accused Clara of being sensible.

But Hal said, "Your mother is right. If you stay out here too long, you could catch pneumonia, and then where would you be?"

"I'd be out here, having a good time," Clara answered. Pneumonia was just a word to her, not one of the many diseases that could so easily kill children.

"Come on in," Nellie said. She knew what pneumonia was, all right. "Edna and Uncle Merle and Cousin Armstrong are coming over in a little while."

That did get Clara back inside, at the price of continual questions-"When will they come? Why aren't they here yet?" — till her half sister, Edna's husband, and their son arrived half an hour later. Armstrong pulled Clara's hair. She squalled like a cat that had had its tail stepped on, then stamped on his foot hard enough to make him wail even louder.

He got little sympathy from his mother. "Serves you right," Edna said. "I saw what you did to Clara."

"Happy New Year," Merle Grimes said above the wails of the two irate children. Behind his gold-rimmed spectacles, irony glinted in his eyes.

"Well, I do hope the rest of it'll be happier than this godawful racket," Nellie said. "Maybe the crown prince will bury the hatchet once and for all."

"He'd like to bury it in our backs, I think," Grimes said. "One of these days, we really will have to worry about Germany. The Germans are worrying about us right this minute, and you can bet your bottom dollar on that."

Hal handed him a whiskey. After they clinked glasses and toasted 1926, Nellie's husband said, "We'll have a hard time worrying about Germany when we don't even worry about the CSA."

"I know," Grimes said. "Well, good old Kaiser Bill's got other worries besides us, too, and that's not bad."

Nellie raised her glass for a toast of her own. "Here's to no more war anywhere," she said once she'd caught everybody's eye. "Haven't we had enough?"

"Amen!" her husband said, and drank.

"I know I've had enough, enough and then some," her son-in-law said. He drank, too. "Wasn't for those… miserable Confederates"-he didn't swear around women, but he'd come close there-"I wouldn't limp for the rest of my days."

Edna also drank. "I hope they never, ever come anywhere near Washington again," she said. Nellie eyed her daughter. Edna looked back defiantly, but couldn't help turning red. She'd nearly married a Confederate officer. In fact, she would have married him if a U.S. shell hadn't killed him on his way to the altar. Almost ten years ago now, Nellie thought, amazed, wondering where the time had gone. As far as she knew, Merle Grimes had no idea Nicholas H. Kincaid had ever existed.

That was Edna's worry, not her own. She had secrets in her past, too, secrets she wanted to stay buried till they shoveled dirt over her. Her husband reminded her of those secrets by pouring everyone's glass full and proposing a toast of his own: "Here's to our missing friends, gone but not forgotten."

"Oh, God, yes!" Merle said, and gulped that drink down. His mouth tightened; harsh lines sprang out at its corners. "Too many good fellows dead for no reason: Ernie and Clancy and Bob and Otis and-" Behind his spectacles, tears glinted.

"And Bill Reach, too." Hal Jacobs sounded as maudlin as his step-daughter's husband. "He was worth a division, maybe more, in getting the Confederates out of Washington. I wish he'd lived to see this day, with an American empire stretching north to south, east to west…" He sighed. "He should have, too. Just bad luck."

Now Edna eyed Nellie. Now Nellie flushed and had trouble meeting her daughter's eye. She didn't reckon Bill Reach a missing friend. Reach had mortified her during the war, drunkenly taking her for the strumpet she'd been a long time before. She'd never been able to tell Edna anything since, not hoping to be taken seriously.

But not even Edna knew how Bill Reach had died. No one but Nellie knew that, which was just how she wanted things. She'd been foraging for supplies when he tried to rape her, counting on a broken bottle to intimidate her into cooperating. But she'd carried a butcher knife, and she'd been sober. Bill Reach's body was one of God knew how many hundreds or thousands from the time of the U.S. bombardment, the time before the Confederate Army finally and sullenly pulled out of the U.S. capital. So far as she knew, nobody'd ever found it.

I hope nobody ever does, either, she thought savagely. I hope he rots in the ground and burns in hell forever. It'd serve him right, by God.

Her husband had said something to her, but she had no idea what. "I'm sorry, Hal," she said. "I must've been woolgathering."

"It's all right, sweetheart," Hal said with a tender smile. He did love her. She knew that. She was absently fond of him, too, not least because, being a long way from young, he didn't try to make love to her very often. She'd had more than enough of that. Now he went on, "I said, I know you feel the same way about poor Bill as I do. He always praised the information you got to the skies. He did like the bottle a bit too much, but he was a fine man, a first-class patriot."

Nellie managed a nod and a glassy smile. They sufficed. Edna made a small noise that might have been the start of a snicker, but did stop at Nellie's glower. And then they all got distracted, for Clara came in shouting, "Ma! Ma! Armstrong went and put somethin' down the potty and then he flushed it, and now there's water all over everything! Come quick!"

"Oh, for God's sake!" Nellie sprang to her feet, as did the other grownups.

Getting out the pair of long johns and mopping up the water didn't take long. For Merle Grimes to wallop Armstrong's backside with a hairbrush didn't take long, either. Armstrong's howls needed some little while to subside. So did Nellie's temper. "He's only a little boy, sweetheart," Hal said.

"Boys!" Nellie snorted, in the tone she usually reserved for, Men! "You'd never see a little girl doing something like that."

"You tell 'em, Ma," Edna said. She and Nellie argued whenever they got a chance, but she would back her mother in a quarrel against the other half of the human race.

Except there was no quarrel. Hal Jacobs and Merle Grimes looked at each other, as if wondering who would bell the cat. At last, Hal said, "Well, Nellie, you may be right. If the world held nothing but women, we probably wouldn't have fought the Great War."

Merle chuckled. "Oh, I don't know if I'd go that far. They wouldn't have fought it over Serbia, though-I am sure of that. More likely over which was better, Macy's or Gimbel's."

He laughed. So did Hal. And so did Edna, betraying her sex after all. Nellie glared at her-yes, they would squabble over anything. Defensively, Edna said, "Oh, come on, Ma-it was funny."

"Well, maybe," Nellie said with the air of one making an enormous concession. She was so obvious about it, her husband and son-in-law started laughing again.

"Peace," Merle Grimes said when he could speak at last. "Peace. It's 1926, and we've already drunk to peace. Let's keep it for as long as we can." Not even Nellie could find anything to argue with there.

J onathan Moss got to his feet in the courtroom. "May it please your Honor," he said wearily, "but I must object to the prosecution's speaking of my client as 'the guilty party.' The purpose of a trial is to find out whether or not he is guilty."

His Honor was a U.S. Army colonel named Augustus Thorgood. Down came the gavel. "Overruled." He nodded to the prosecutor, a U.S. Army major named Sam Lopat. "You may proceed."

"Thank you, your Honor," Lopat replied. "As I was saying, Stubbs there is plainly guilty of insurrection against the military government of the United States in the former province of

Ontario, as defined in Occupation Administrative Code, section 521, subsection 17."

Horace Stubbs, Moss' client, leaned toward him and whispered, "Thanks for trying."

"We're not out of it yet," Moss whispered back. But he was whistling in the dark, and he knew it.

Major Lopat went on, "Before witnesses, the defendant said the United States deserved to be booted out of Canada on their backside. His very words, your Honor!" His voice trembled with indignation.

"Objection." Moss got to his feet again. "No witnesses have been produced before the court to show my client said any such thing."

"We have the testimony," Lopat said smugly.

"But no witnesses," Moss persisted. "Testimony can come from a man with a personal grudge, or from one out for a profit. How do we know unless we can cross-examine a witness?"

"This is not an ordinary criminal proceeding, Mr. Moss, as you know perfectly well," Colonel Thorgood said. "Testimony from certified informants may be admitted without their being liable to appear in open court, for fear of reprisal against them from the unreconciled."

"How can you possibly hope for justice under such conditions?" Moss asked.

"We aim to stamp out rebellion," the military judge said. "We will, too."

"Yes, your Honor. No doubt, your Honor." Moss turned Thorgood's title of respect into one of reproach. "But, sooner or later, ignoring the needs of justice and caring only for the needs of expedience will come back to haunt you. As Ben Franklin said, your Honor, 'They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.' "

He'd pulled that quotation out of his Bartlett's, hoping he wouldn't have to use it. If he did, his client would be in trouble. Well, Stubbs was in trouble, and Moss, like any lawyer worth his pay, used whatever weapons came to hand. And this one struck home. Colonel Thorgood turned red. Major Lopat jumped to his feet. "Now I object, your Honor! Incompetent, irrelevant, and immaterial."

"Sustained." Thorgood thumped the gavel. "The record will be stricken."

"Exception!" Moss said. "If you're going to railroad an innocent man, at least be honest about what you're doing."

Bang! The gavel came down again. "This inflammatory speech will also be stricken," Colonel Thorgood declared. He nodded to Lopat. "Carry on, Major."

Carry on Lopat did, with soldierly precision. The case against Horace Stubbs was strong-was, in fact, airtight-as long as one believed what informants said about him. Moss was convinced the informants were lying through their teeth. But he doubted whether Colonel Thorgood cared one way or the other. Thorgood's job was to keep Canada quiet. If he had to shoot every Canuck in sight to do that job, he would, and go to dinner with a hearty appetite five minutes later.

When Major Lopat finished, the military judge nodded to Moss. "Now, Counselor, you may have your say."

"Thank you, your Honor." Moss fought to keep sarcasm from his voice. He thought he still had some small chance, not of getting his client off-that was plainly hopeless-but of earning him a reduced sentence. Further affronting Colonel Thorgood wouldn't help there. He set forth the evidence as best he could, finishing, "May it please your Honor, the only people who claim Mr. Stubbs was in any way involved with recent unfortunate events in Ontario are those whose testimony is inherently unreliable and who have a vested interest in giving him the appearance of guilt regardless of whether that appearance is in any way justified." He sat down.

From the prosecution's table, Major Lopat muttered something about a "damn Canuck-lover." Moss sent him a hard look. The military prosecutor gave back a stare colder than any Canadian winter. Had he worked in the CSA rather than the USA, he would surely have muttered about a "damn nigger-lover" instead.

But, to Moss' surprise, Colonel Thorgood's gavel came down again. "That will be quite enough of that, Major," the judge said.

"I beg your pardon, your Honor," Lopat said politely. He didn't beg Moss' pardon, though.

"Very well, Major. Do keep your remarks to the business at hand. Having said as much to Mr. Moss, I can hardly fail to say the same to you." Thorgood looked down at the notes on his desk. He picked up a pen and scribbled something, then said, "Horace Stubbs, rise to hear the verdict of this court."

With a sigh, Stubbs got to his feet. He could see the writing on the wall as plainly as could Moss. He was a small, thin, middle-aged man. On looks alone, he made an unlikely insurrectionist.

"Horace Stubbs," Colonel Thorgood said, "I find you guilty of the crime of participating in rebellion against the U.S. occupying authorities in the former province of Ontario." Stubbs' shoulders slumped. The military judge scribbled something else. He continued, "Due to the unusual nature of this case, I sentence you to six months' imprisonment and to a fine of $250: failure to pay the latter will result in a further six months' imprisonment." Bang! went the gavel. "This court is adjourned."

A couple of husky U.S. noncoms strode forward to take Horace Stubbs off to jail. "Just a minute," he told them. "Just one damn minute." He grabbed Jonathan Moss' hand, hard enough to hurt. "Thank you, sir," he said. "Everything they told me about you, it was all true, and then some. God bless you."

"You're welcome," Moss said in slightly dazed tones as the noncoms took charge of his client and led him away. He'd hoped Colonel Thorgood would go easy on Stubbs. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined Thorgood would go this easy. Six months and $250? From a military court? That was hardly even a slap on the wrist.

Major Lopat must have felt the same way. As he put papers back into his military-issue briefcase, he sent Moss a sour stare. "Well, Clarence Darrow, you pulled a rabbit out of the hat this time," he said.

"Oh, come on," Moss said-he was damned if he'd admit surprise to the other side. "You didn't have a case, and you know it."

Lopat didn't even bother arguing with him. All the military prosecutor said was, "Yeah? So what? Look where we are."

"Canadians deserve justice, too," Moss said.

"Oh, yeah? Since when? Says who?" Having fired three cliches like an artillery barrage, Major Lopat added, "And a whole fat lot you'd care, too, if you weren't sleeping with a Canuck gal."

That might even have been true. Even so, to Moss it had only one possible answer, and he used it: "Screw you, Sam." He packed his own papers in his briefcase and left the courtroom, grabbing his overcoat as he went. The calendar said spring had started three days earlier, but Berlin, Ontario, paid little attention to the calendar. Snow whitened streets and sidewalks, with more falling even as Moss walked along the street.

He paused thoughtfully in front of a sign that said, EMPIRE GROCERIES. Below the words, a large, American-looking eagle was painted. Maybe the storekeeper meant the American empire, the one that stretched from the Arctic Ocean to the Gulf of California, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But maybe, too, it was meant to call to mind the name Berlin had briefly borne during the Great War, when its citizens decided living in a town named for an enemy capital was unpatriotic.

Moss chuckled. Laura Secord still refused to call the town anything but Empire. As far as she was concerned, the occupying authorities had no right to change back the name. There were no Canadian patriots more fiery than Laura.

And yet she'd warned him the uprising was imminent. He still didn't fully understand that, and she refused to talk about it now. His best guess was that she hadn't thought the revolt had any chance to succeed, and so she wasn't committing treason by talking about it. But that was only a guess, and he knew it.

He stopped at a diner a few doors down from Empire Groceries. A waiter brought him a menu. The man walked with a limp; he'd taken a bullet in the leg trying to hold back the U.S. Army. He knew Moss had flown aeroplanes for the USA, but didn't hold it against him-much. "Case over?" he asked as Moss sat down at an empty table.

"That's right," Moss answered. "Let me have the corned beef on wheat, and coffee to go with it."

As the waiter scribbled on a pad, he asked another question: "They going to let Horace live?"

"Six months in jail and $250," Moss said exultantly.

The waiter dropped his pencil. "Be damned," he said, grunting in pain as he bent to pick it up. He called back to the cook, who was also the owner. "Hey, Eddie! This fast-talking Yank got Horace off easy!"

"What's 'easy'?" Eddie called back. "Twenty years? Ten?"

"Six months," the waiter answered, sounding as excited as Moss. "And $250."

"Be damned," Eddie said, as the waiter had. That impressed him enough to make him come out front. He had on a cloth cap in lieu of the toque a cook at a fancier place might have worn. He tipped it to Moss. "Lunch on the house, pal."

"Thanks," Moss told him.

"You did it," Eddie said. "Seems like our own barristers haven't had much luck in Yankee courts. Maybe it takes one to know one."

That wasn't exactly praise, though the cook no doubt meant it as such. It also wasn't so, or not necessarily. With a sigh, Moss said, "That fellow they said was a bomber, they threw the book at him no matter what I did."

"Enoch Dupree, you mean?" the waiter said.

Moss nodded. "That's right."

The waiter and Eddie looked at each other. After a long pause, Eddie said, "Hate to tell you, but Enoch, he was a bomber. I happen to know it for a fact, on account of his brother-in-law's married to my cousin. I-"

"I don't want to hear about it." Moss held up a hand to show he really meant it. "My job is to give people the best defense they can get, regardless of whether they're guilty or not."

"Don't know I much fancy that," the waiter said. "Shouldn't be guilty people running around loose just 'cause they've got smart lawyers."

"Well, your other choice is to send innocent people to jail," Moss answered. "How do you like that?"

"I don't, much," the Canadian answered. "But I thought it was what you Yanks call justice. Sure has looked like that since you came."

"You shouldn't blame him," Eddie said. "He's done everything he could for us, ever since he hung out his shingle here."

"That's so," the waiter admitted, and Moss felt good till the fellow added, "Sure as hell wish he could do a lot more, though."

Lucien Galtier sighed as he and Marie and Georges and Jeanne-the last two children left at home-got into his Chevrolet for the Sunday trip to Riviere-du-Loup. "I'd sooner go to Mass in St.-Antonin or St.-Modeste," he said, "but sometimes there's no help for it."

"Doing this is wise," his wife said. "As long as we come to church every so often and let Bishop Pascal see us, everything should be fine."

"We don't want to give him any reason to complain about us to the Americans, no," Lucien agreed.

"But the Republic of Quebec is free and independent," Georges said. "And if you don't believe me, just ask the first American soldier you see."

Georges always liked to sound as if he were joking. Sometimes he was. Sometimes… Lucien had learned an English expression: kidding on the square. That summed things up better than anything in Quebecois French.

"You're getting pretty good at this driving business," Georges went on as they rolled up the paved road past the hospital and toward the town on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. "Anyone would think you'd been doing it all your life." He chuckled. "They'd hardly even invented horses when you were a boy, eh, Papa, let alone motorcars?"

"They hadn't invented such smart alecks, I'll tell you that," Lucien said. His younger son preened, as if at praise.

The Eglise Saint-Patrice in Riviere-du-Loup was called a cathedral these days, though it was the same building it had always been. Quite a few motorcars parked nearby. Times were… Lucien wouldn't say they were good, but he thought it now and again.

As people filed into the church (being the stubborn Quebecois farmer he was, Galtier refused to think of it as a cathedral, no matter what Bishop Pascal declared), some of them talked about the stocks they'd bought, and about how much money they'd made from them. Lucien felt Marie's eyes on him. Ever so slightly, he shook his head. He'd stayed away from the bourse, and intended to go right on staying away from it. It struck him as being much more like gambling than any legitimate way to make money. Gambling, now, gambling was all very well-so long as you knew you could lose as easily as you could win.

He was almost to the door when he heard the word scandal for the first time. Now he and his wife looked at each other. He shrugged. Marie did the same. A moment later, he heard the word again. Something juicy had happened. And I've been on the farm minding my own business, and so I haven't the faintest idea what it is, he thought regretfully.

"Tabernac," he muttered. The look Marie sent him this time was definitely reproachful. He pretended not to notice. It wasn't-quite-as if he'd cursed on holy ground. The other side of the door, it would have been a different business.

No sooner had he gone inside than someone else-a woman-said scandal, and immediately started giggling. "What's going on, mon pere?" Georges asked. Scandal-especially scandal that might be funny-drew him the way maple syrup drew ants.

A young priest named Father Guillaume stood by the altar in Bishop Pascal's place. As Lucien took his seat in the pews, he asked the fellow next to him, a townsman, "Where's the bishop?"

"Why, with the children, of course," the man answered, and started to laugh. Lucien fumed. He didn't want to admit he didn't know what was going on. That would make him look like a farmer who came to town only to sell things and to hear Mass. Of course, he was a farmer who came to town only to sell things and to hear Mass, but he didn't want to remind the world of it.

His eldest daughter, Nicole; her husband, the American doctor named Leonard O'Doull; and their son, Lucien, sat down behind his family. He started to lean back and ask them what was so delicious, but Father Guillaume began speaking in Latin just then, so he had to compose himself in patience.

He dared hope the priest's sermon would enlighten him, but it only left him more tantalized and titillated than ever. Father Guillaume talked about those without sin casting the first stone. He praised Pascal, and wished him good fortune in whatever he chose to do with the rest of his life.

Lucien wiggled like a man with a dreadful and embarrassing itch. What ever the scandal was, it must have got Bishop Pascal! He'd never cared for Pascal; the man was too pink, too clever, too… too expedient, to suit him. But Pascal had always come up smelling like a rose-till now. And I don't even know what he did! Galtier thought in an agony of frustration.

He went up and took communion from Father Guillaume. He swallowed the wafer as fast as he could; he didn't want to speak of scandal with the Body of Christ still on his tongue. But then he made a beeline for his son-in-law.

"What? You don't know? Oh, for heaven's sake?" Dr. O'Doull exclaimed. He'd come to Quebec during the war, speaking tolerably good Parisian French. After ten years here, his accent remained noticeable, but only a little. He sounded more as if he'd been born in la belle province-la belle republique, now-every day.

"No, I don't know," Galtier ground out. "Since you are such a font of knowledge, suppose you enlighten me."

"Mais certainement, mon beau-pere," O'Doull said, grinning. "Bishop Pascal's lady friend just had twins."

"Twins!" Lucien said. "Le bon Dieu!"

"God was indeed good to Bishop Pascal, wouldn't you agree?" his son-in-law said, and laughed out loud. "I should say, to former Bishop Pascal, for he has resigned his see in light of this… interesting development. Father Guillaume will serve the spiritual needs of Riviere-du-Loup until the see has a new bishop."

"Twins," Galtier repeated, as if he'd never heard the word before. "Yes, I can see how he would have to resign after that."

No one was surprised when priests had lady friends. They were men of the cloth, yes, but they were also men. A lot of women, down through the years, had sighed over Father, later Bishop, Pascal. Lucien didn't understand it, but he'd never been a woman, either. And few people were astonished if the lady friends of priests sometimes presented them with offspring. That, too, was just one of those things. Life went on, people looked the other way, and the little bastards were often very well brought up.

"But twins!" Lucien said. "You can't look the other way at twins. By the nature of things, a bishop's twins are a scandal."

"Exactly so, mon beau-pere," Leonard O'Doull said. "And that is why Bishop Pascal is Bishop Pascal no more, but plain old Pascal Talon."

"Pascal Talon!" Galtier exclaimed. "That's right-that is his family. I hadn't thought of his family name in years, though. No one has, I'm sure."

"Of course not, not when he belonged to the Church for all those years," Dr. O'Doull said. "That's what belonging to the Church means. That's what it does. It takes you away from your family and puts you in God's family." He laughed again. "But, now that he's gone and made God's family bigger…"

Galtier laughed, too. He asked, "Since you are in town and hear all these things the moment they happen-and since you don't bother telling your poor country cousins about them-could you tell me what M. Pascal Talon plans to do now that he is Bishop Pascal no more?" Whatever it was, he had the nasty feeling the man would make a great success of it.

And, sure enough, his son-in-law said, "I understand he's decided Riviere-du-Loup is too small a place for a man of his many talents. He will be moving to Quebec City, they say, where he can be appreciated for everything he is."

A snake, a sneak, a worm, a collaborator, a philanderer-yes, in the capital of the Republic he should do well for himself, Galtier thought. He found some more questions: "And what of the twins? Are they boys or girls, by the way? And what of their mother? Is Pascal now a married man?"

"They're a boy and a girl. Very pretty babies-I've seen them," O'Doull replied. Being a doctor, he'd seen a lot of babies. If he said they were pretty, Lucien was prepared to believe him. He went on, "I am given to understand that Suzette is now Mme. Talon, yes, but I don't think she'll be going to Quebec City with her new husband."

Marie heard that and let out a loud sniff. "He made himself a member of God's family. If he cheated on his vows to the Lord, how can anyone think he won't cheat on his vows to a woman? Poor Suzette."

"Yes, very likely Pascal will cheat on her, but she must have known he cheated when she first started her games with him," Lucien said.

"Why do you always blame the woman?" his wife demanded.

"Why do you always blame the man?" he returned, also heatedly.

"Excuse me." Dr. O'Doull made as if to duck. "I'm going somewhere safer-the trenches during the war were probably safer."

"It will be all right," Galtier said. "We've been married this long. We can probably last a little longer."

Marie didn't argue, but her expression was mutinously eloquent. And, as a matter of fact, Galtier wondered why he did take the former Bishop Pascal's side. It wasn't as if he liked the man. He never had. He'd never trusted him, either. Pascal had always been too smooth, too rosy, to be reliable. That was what Lucien had thought, at any rate. Plainly, a lot of people had had a different opinion.

But was Suzette, the new Mme. Talon, such a bargain? Galtier also had his doubts about that. After all, if she'd let Pascal into her bed, what did that say about her taste? Nothing good, certainly.

"Let's go home," he said.

"All right," Marie answered. Her voice had no, We'll come back to this later, in it, so he supposed this wouldn't be a fight that clouded things between them for days at a time. They'd had a few of those, but only a few: one reason they still got on so well after thirty years and a bit more besides.

"Why do you dislike Bishop Pascal so much?" Jeanne asked on the way back to the farm.

"Well, just for starters, because he tried to get us to collaborate with the Americans during the war. And when we wouldn't do it, he got them to take away our land and build the hospital on it," Galtier replied. "You were just a little girl then, so you wouldn't remember very well, but he alienated our patrimony."

"But…" His youngest daughter seemed to have trouble putting her thoughts into words. At last, she said, "But my sister married an American. We're paid rent, and a good one, for the land the hospital sits on."

Georges laughed. "How do you answer that one, Papa?"

That was a good question. Galtier did the best he could, saying, "At the time, what Father Pascal did seemed wrong. It worked out for the best. I can't quarrel with that. But just because it worked out for the best doesn't mean Pascal did what he did for good reasons. He did what he did to grab with both hands."

"Suppose the Americans had lost the war," Marie added. "What would have happened to Pascal then?"

"He would have come out ahead of the game, and convinced everyone everything was somebody else's fault," Georges replied at once.

He was probably right, even if that wasn't the answer his mother had been looking for. Lucien sighed. The farmhouse wasn't far now. "Quebec City had better watch out," he said, and drove on.

S ylvia Enos stood in the kitchen of her flat, glaring at her only son. She had to look up to glare at him. When had George, Jr., become taller than she? Some time when she wasn't watching, surely. He looked unhappy now, twisting his cloth cap in his hands. "But, Ma," he said, "it's the best chance I'll ever have!"

"Nonsense," Sylvia told him. "The best chance you'll ever have is to stay in school and get as much learning as you can."

His face-achingly like his dead father's, though he couldn't raise a mustache and they were falling out of style anyhow-went closed and hard, suddenly a man's face, and a stubborn man's at that, not a boy's. "I don't care anything about school. I hate it. And I'm no.. good in it anyhow." He wouldn't say damn, not in front of his mother. Sylvia had done her best to raise him right.

"You don't want to go to sea at sixteen," Sylvia said.

"Oh, yes, I do," he said. "There's nothing I want more."

Till you meet a girl. Then you'll find something you want more. But Sylvia didn't say that. It wouldn't have helped. What she did say was, "If you go to sea at sixteen, you'll be doing it the rest of your life."

"What's wrong with that?" he asked. "What else am I going to be doing the rest of my life?"

"That's why you go to school," Sylvia said. "To find out what else you could be doing."

"But I don't want to do anything else," George, Jr., said, exactly as his father might have. "I just want to go down to T Wharf and out to sea, the way Pop did."

All the reasons he wanted to go to sea were all the reasons Sylvia wanted him to stay home. "Look what going to sea got your father in the end," she said, fighting to hold back tears.

"That was the Navy, Ma." Now George, Jr., just sounded impatient. "I'm not going into the Navy. I just want to catch fish."

"Do you think nothing can go wrong when you're out there in a fishing boat? If you do, you'd better think again, son. Plenty of boats go out from T Wharf and then don't come home again. Storms, fog, who knows why? But they don't. Even if they do come home, they don't always bring back everybody who set out. If you're tending a line or hauling in a net and a big wave comes by… Do you really want the crabs and the lobsters and the flatfish fighting over who gets a taste of you?"

Most fishermen had a horror of a watery death, and of the creatures they caught catching them. But her son only shrugged and answered, "If I'm dead, what difference does it make?" He was sixteen. He didn't really think he could die. So many sailors had, but he wouldn't. Just listening to him, Sylvia could tell he was sure of it.

With a sigh, she asked, "Well, what is this big chance you're talking about, son?"

"I ran into Fred Butcher the other day, Ma," George, Jr., said.

"He's got fat the last few years, hasn't he?" Sylvia said.

George Jr., grinned. "He sure has. But he's got rich the last few years, too. He doesn't put to sea any more, you know. He hires the men who do."

"I know that." Sylvia nodded. "He's one of the lucky ones. There aren't very many, you know." Butcher wasn't just lucky. He'd always driven himself like a dray horse, and he had a head for figures. Sylvia wished she could have said the same about her son. But, as he'd said himself, he didn't like school, and he'd never been an outstanding scholar.

"I don't care. I want to go to sea," he said now. "And Mr. Butcher, he said he'd take me on for the Cuttlefish. She's one of the new ones, Ma, one of the good ones. Diesel engine, electricity on board, a wireless set. A fishing run on a boat like that, it's almost like staying ashore, it's so comfy."

Sylvia laughed in his face. He looked very offended. She didn't care. "You tell me that after you've put to sea, and I'll take you seriously. Till then…" She shook her head and laughed some more.

But she'd yielded ground, and her son took advantage of it. "Let me find out, then. I'll tell you everything once I get back. Mr. Butcher, he says he'll pay me like a regular sailor, not a first-timer, on account of he was friends with Pop."

That was generous. Sylvia couldn't deny it. She wished she could have, for she would. Tears came to her eyes again. She was losing her little boy, and saw no way to escape it. There before her stood someone who wanted to be a man, and who was ever so close to getting what he wanted. She sighed. "All right, George. If that's what you care to do, I don't suppose I can stop you."

His jaw dropped. Enough boy lingered in him to make him take his mother's word very seriously. "Thank you! Oh, thank you!" he exclaimed, and gave Sylvia a hug that made her feel tiny and short. "I'll work as hard as Pop did, I promise, and save my money, and… everything." He ran out of promises and imagination at the same time.

"I hope it works out, George. I pray it works out." When a tear slid down Sylvia's face, her son looked alarmed. She waved him away. "You're not going to get me not to worry, so don't even try. I worried about your father every day he was at sea, and I'll worry about you, too."

"Everything will be fine, Ma." George, Jr., spoke with the certainty inherent in sixteen. Sylvia remembered how she'd been when she was that age. And it was worse with boys. They thought they were stallions, and had to paw the ground with their hooves and neigh and rear and show the world how tough they were.

The world didn't care. Most of them needed years to figure that out. Some never did figure it out. The world rolled over them either way: it ground them down and made them fit into their slots. If they wouldn't grind down and wouldn't fit, it broke them. Sylvia didn't think it intended to. But what it intended and what happened were two different beasts.

It had rammed her into a slot, all right. Here she was, coming up on middle age, living from day to day, wondering how she'd get by, worrying because her only son was quitting school and taking up a dangerous trade. If there weren't ten thousand others just like her in Boston, she'd have been astonished.

But then savage anger and pride shot through her. I killed the son of a bitch who sank the Ericsson. I shot him dead, and I'm walking around free. How many others can say the like? Not a one.

She'd take that to the grave with her. Most of the time, it wouldn't do her one damn bit of good, not when it came to things like catching a streetcar or dealing with the Coal Board or going to the dentist. But it was hers. Nobody could rob her of it. For one brief moment in her life, she'd stepped out of the ordinary.

George, Jr., brought her back into it, saying, "I'll go right on giving you one dollar out of every three I make, too, Ma. I promise. It'll be the same with this as it's always been with the odd jobs I've been doing. I'll pay my way, honest."

"All right, George," she said. He was a good boy. (She didn't think of him as a man. She wondered if she ever would, down deep where it counted. She had her doubts.)

He asked, "What do you think Pop would say about what I'm doing?"

That was a good question. After some thought, Sylvia answered, "Well, he always did like going to sea." God only knew, that was the truth. Whenever the Ripple went out, she'd felt as if she were giving him up to the arms of another woman-the Atlantic had that kind of hold on him. She went on, "I think he'd have wanted you to stay in school, too. But if you got this kind of chance, I don't think he'd have stood in your way."

His face lit up. "Thanks!" Almost as fast as it had appeared, that light faded. "I wish I would have known him better. I wish I could have known him longer."

"I know, sweetheart. I wish you could have, too. And I wish I could have." On the whole, Sylvia meant that. She'd never quite forgiven her husband for having been about to go to a Tennessee brothel with a colored whore, even if he hadn't slept with the woman and even if being about to had saved his life. If he hadn't been on his way to the whorehouse, if he'd gone back aboard his river monitor instead, he would have been on it when Confederate artillery blew it out of the water. But if he'd come home from the war, if he'd been around every day-or half the time, as fishermen usually were-and if he'd kept his nose clean, she supposed she would have.

George, Jr., started for the door. "I'd better go find Mr. Butcher and tell him. I don't know how long he'll hold the job for me."

"Go on, then, dear," Sylvia said, half of her hoping Fred Butcher wouldn't hold the job. The door opened. It closed. Her son's footsteps receded in the hallway. Then they were gone.

Sylvia sighed. She muttered something she never would have let anyone else hear. That helped, but not enough. She pulled a whiskey bottle out of a kitchen cabinet. A fair number of states had made alcohol illegal, but Massachusetts wasn't one of them. She poured some whiskey into a glass, then added water and took a drink. Whiskey had always tasted like medicine to her. She didn't care, not now. She was using it for medicine.

She'd medicated herself quite thoroughly when the front door to the flat opened. She hoped it would be George, Jr., coming back all crestfallen to tell her Fred Butcher had given someone else the berth. But it wasn't her son; it was Mary Jane, back from helping her teacher grade younger students' papers. Sylvia's daughter even got paid a little for doing it. She made a better scholar than her brother. That would have been funny if it hadn't been sad. A boy could do so many more things with an education than a girl could, but Mary Jane seemed to want to learn, while George, Jr., couldn't have cared less.

"Hello, Ma," Mary Jane said now, and then, as she got a better look at Sylvia's face, "Ma, what's wrong?"

"Your brother's going to sea, that's what." Without the whiskey in her, Sylvia might not have been so blunt, but that was the long and short of it.

Mary Jane's eyes got wide. "But that's good news, not bad. It's what he's always wanted to do."

"If he'd always wanted to jump off a cliff, would it be good news that he'd finally gone and done it?" Sylvia asked.

"But it's not like that, Ma," Mary Jane protested. She didn't understand, any more than George, Jr., did. "He needs a job, and that's a good one."

"A good job is a shore job, a job where you don't have to worry about getting drowned," Sylvia said. "If he'd gotten one of those, I'd stand up and cheer. This-" She shook her head. The kitchen spun slightly when she did. Yes, she was medicated, all right.

"He'll be fine." Mary Jane was fourteen. She also thought she was immortal, and everybody else, too. She hardly remembered her own father, and certainly didn't care to remember he'd died at sea. She went on, "Things are a lot safer than they used to be. The boats are better, the engines are better, and they just about all have wireless nowadays in case they run into trouble."

Every word of that was true. None of it did anything to reassure Sylvia, who'd seen too many misfortunes down by T Wharf. She said, "I want him to have a job where he doesn't need to worry about running into trouble."

"Where's he going to find one?" Mary Jane asked. "If he goes into building, somebody could drop a brick on his head. If he drives a truck, somebody could run into him. You want him to be a clerk in an insurance office, or something like that. But he'd be lousy at clerking, and he'd hate it, too."

Every word of that was true, too. Sylvia wished it weren't. Mary Jane was right. She did want George, Jr., in a white-collar job. But Mary Jane was also right that he wouldn't be good at one, and wouldn't like it. That didn't stop Sylvia from wishing he had one. She knew the sea too well ever to trust it.

W hen Jefferson Pinkard went down to the Empire of Mexico, he never dreamt he'd stay so long. He never dreamt the civil war would drag on so long. That, he realized now that he understood things here a little better, had been naive on his part. The Mexican civil war had started up not long after the Great War ended. The USA fed the rebels money and guns. The CSA sent money and guns and-unofficially, of course-combat veterans to prop up the imperialists.

Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Jeff took a sip of strong, black coffee. The coffee had been improved- corrected, they said hereabouts-with a shot of strong rum. Alabama was officially dry. The Mexicans laughed at the very idea of prohibition. Some ways, they were pretty damn smart.

He finished the coffee as the artillery barrage went on. The front line ran quite a ways west of San Luis Potosi these days. Mexican-built barrels had driven back the rebels, and the damnyankees didn't seem to be helping their pet Mexicans build armored vehicles. Maybe they would one of these days, or maybe they'd just import some from the USA. If they did, a lot more greasers would end up dead, the front line would stabilize or start going back, and the civil war might last forever.

A Mexican soldier in the yellowish shade of butternut they wore down here politely knocked on Pinkard's open door. "Yeah?" Pinkard said, and then, " Si, Mateo?"

"Todo esta listo," Mateo said, and then, in English as rudimentary as Pinkard's Spanish, "Everyt'ing ready, Sergeant Jeff."

"All right, then." Pinkard heaved himself to his feet. He towered over Mateo, as he towered over almost everybody down here. Lieutenant Guitierrez-no, he was Captain Guitierrez these days-was an exception, but Jeff could have broken him over his knee like a stick.

He left the little wooden shack that served him as an office and strode out into sunlight bright and fierce enough to make what he'd got in Birmingham seem as nothing by comparison. Summer down here was really a son of a bitch. It was bad enough to make him understand just how the spirit of manana had been born.

Standing out there in the broiling sun were several hundred rebel prisoners, drawn up in neat rows and columns. They all stiffened to attention when Pinkard came into sight. He nodded, and they relaxed-a little. Some of them wore uniforms of a darker shade than those of Maximilian III's soldiers. More, though, looked like peasants who'd chanced to end up in a place where they didn't want to be-which was exactly what they were.

Pinkard inspected them as if they were men he would have to send into battle, not enemies of whom he was in charge. While they stood out in the open, he strode through their barracks, making sure everything was shipshape and nobody was trying to tunnel out of the camp.

He wished he had a proper fence, not just barbed wire strung on poles, but he made the best of what there was. Guards on rickety towers at each corner of the square manned machine guns. Jeff waved to each of them in turn. "Everything good?" he asked, and then, in what passed for Spanish, "Todo bueno?"

He got answering grins and waves and nods. As far as the guards were concerned, everything was fine. They had easy duty, duty unlikely to get them shot, and they got paid for it-as often as anybody except Confederate mercenaries got paid. The Mexicans didn't stiff the men from the CSA the way they did their own people.

For a while, Jeff had wondered why the devil any Mexican would fight for Maximilian III. Then, from interrogating prisoners, he'd found out the rebels cheated their soldiers every bit as badly as the imperialists cheated theirs. Nobody down here had clean hands. Nobody even came close.

He went back up in front of the prisoners. "Dismissed!" he shouted. Mateo told them the same thing in Spanish. They all saluted. He thought they meant it, too. As long as they did what he told them to, he treated them fairly. Nobody'd ever treated a lot of them fairly before, and they responded to it even from the fellow in charge of a prison camp. If they got out of line, they were liable to earn a kick in the nuts. As far as Pinkard was concerned, that was fair, too.

As the prisoners went back to the barracks to get out of the ferocious sun, Mateo asked, "Sergeant Jeff, how you know so much about-this?" His-orderly, Pinkard supposed the word was-waved around at the camp. "In Confederate States, you policia — policeman?"

Jeff laughed like hell. "Me? A cop? Jesus God, no. I was a steelworker, a damn good steelworker, before I came down here."

Getting across what a steelworker was took a little while. When Mateo finally did figure it out, he gave Pinkard a peculiar look. "You do work like that, mucho dinero, eh? Why you leave?"

"On account of I couldn't stand it any more," Jeff answered. That plainly made no sense to the Mexican. Pinkard tried again: "On account of woman troubles." That wasn't the whole story, but it sure was a big part. If Emily hadn't decided she wasn't going to wait for him to come back from the war… Well, he didn't know how things would have been, but he sure knew they would have been different.

"Ah." Mateo got that one right away. What man wouldn't have? "Si. Mujeres." He rattled off something in Spanish, then made a stab at translating it: "No can live with, no can live without, neither."

"By God, buddy, you got that one right!" Pinkard burst out. Even now, when he thought about Emily… He did his best not to think about Emily, but sometimes his best wasn't good enough.

"You no policia, how you know what to do with-?" Mateo waved again as he came back to what he really wanted to know.

Pinkard answered him with a shrug. "Just another job, God damn it. Somebody had to do it. Remember when we took all those prisoners after the barrels came up from Tampico?" He'd lost his orderly, and backtracked in clumsy, halting Spanish to let the other man catch up. When Mateo nodded, Jeff went on, "Like I say, somebody had to do it. Otherwise they probably all would've died. So I took charge of the poor sorry bastards-and I've been in charge of prisoners ever since."

He wasn't altogether sorry-far from it. The distant mutter of artillery reminded him why he wasn't sorry. If he weren't doing this, he'd have been up there at the front, and then some of those shells might have landed on him. He'd seen enough combat in the Great War to be glad he was part of an army, but not part in any immediate danger.

Mateo said, "You do good. Nobody never hear of nothing like how you do with prisoners. Everybody now try do like you. Even rebels now, they try do like you."

There was praise, if you liked. When the enemy imitated you, you had to be doing something right.

A couple of days later, Pinkard decided to do something right for himself. He grabbed a ride on a supply truck and went north to the village of Ahualulco, where Maximilian III's army had a supply dump that kept the prisoners eating. Ahualulco wasn't anything much. It wouldn't have been anything at all if two roads-well, two dirt tracks-hadn't crossed there.

Red-white-and-green flags fluttered everywhere. Both sides in the civil war flew those colors, which got as confusing as the Stars and Bars and the Stars and Stripes had during the Great War. For Maximilian's side, they were also the colors of Austria-Hungary, from which his ancestors had come. Pinkard was damned if he knew why the rebels also flew those colors, but he'd never been curious enough to find out.

The fighting was the biggest thing that had happened to Ahualulco since… maybe since forever. A couple of new cantinas had opened, and a whorehouse, and a field hospital. Jeff went into one of the cantinas-which had a picture of the Mexican emperor, cut from some magazine, tacked to the front door-and ordered a beer. Mexican beer was surprisingly good, even if they didn't believe in keeping it cold. He lit a cigarette, found a table, and settled down to enjoy himself.

He'd just started his second beer when the door flew open. In came a couple of big men talking English. One of them looked his way, waved, and called, "Freedom!"

"Freedom!" Jeff echoed. "Who the hell are you boys? Where y'all from?"

One of them, a blond, was named Pete Frazee. The other, who sported a fiery red mustache, called himself Charlie MacCaffrey. They sat down by him. Frazee got a beer. MacCaffrey ordered tequila. "How do you drink that stuff?" Pinkard asked him. "Tastes like cigar butts, you ask me."

"Yeah, but it'll get me drunk faster'n that horse piss you and Pete got," MacCaffrey answered. He knocked it back and waved for more.

He was from Jackson, Mississippi; Frazee from the country not far outside of Louisville. The Kentuckian said, "They told me I could've gone back after the war, but I was damned if I wanted to live in the United States. I spent three years tryin' to kill those damnyankees. Screw me if I wanted to be one myself."

"Oh, hell, yes," Pinkard said. "How'd you find out about the Party?"

"Heard one of their people talkin' on a street corner in Chattanooga, where I was at," Frazee answered with a reminiscent smile. "Soon as I did, I decided that was for me. Haven't looked back since." He nudged the fellow who'd come in with him. "How about you, Charlie?"

"I like bustin' heads," MacCaffrey said frankly. "Plenty of heads need bustin' in Mississippi, too. We got as many niggers as white folks, and some o' them bastards even got the vote after they went into the Army. I don't cotton to that-no way, nohow. Whigs and Rad Libs let 'em do it. Soon as I found me a party that didn't like it, I reckoned that was for me."

"How'd you come down here?" Jeff asked.

MacCaffrey made a face. "Ever since that stupid bastard plugged Wade Hampton V, we pulled in our horns like a goddamn snail. Wasn't hardly any fun any more. I still got more ass-kickin' in me than that. How about you?"

Jeff shrugged. "Didn't like what I was doin'. Didn't have nothin' holdin' me in Birmingham. I thought, Why the hell not? — and here I am."

"You're the fellow with the prisoners of war, ain't you?" Pete Frazee said suddenly. Pinkard nodded. So did Frazee, in a thoughtful way. He went on, "Heard about you. From what everybody says, you're doing a hell of a job."

"Thank you. Thank you kindly," Pinkard answered. He paused till the barmaid got him another beer, then chuckled and said, "Wasn't what I came down here to do, but it hasn't worked out too bad."

He spent most of the afternoon drinking with the other Party men and enjoying the chance to speak his own language. Then, despite a certain stagger, he made his way to the brothel and laid down enough silver for a quiet room and the company of a girl named Maria (not that half the women down here weren't named Maria), far and away the prettiest one in the place.

He'd drunk enough to have some trouble rising to the occasion. He'd paid enough to have her slide down the bed and start to help him with her mouth. He enjoyed it for perhaps half a minute. Then he remembered Emily's mouth on him after he'd found her with Bedford Cunningham, who had been his best friend. "No, goddammit," he growled, and pulled away.

"What?" Maria had no idea what the trouble was.

"No, I said." He scrambled onto her. She'd got him hard enough so he could manage. He did, and then got back into his clothes and left in a hurry.

Maria shook her head. "Loco," she muttered, and tapped a finger against her temple.

C larence Potter said, "My trouble is, I want to see the Freedom Party dead and buried, not just weak." He sipped at his whiskey in the Charleston saloon. "That makes me as much a fanatic as Jake Featherston, I suppose."

The Freedom Party was weak nowadays, and weaker in South Carolina than it had been before the previous year's Congressional election. Even so, in most saloons a comment like that would have been good for starting a fight. Not in the Crow's Nest, though, not on a Tuesday night. The Whig Party faithful met at the Odd Fellows' hall across the street, and then a lot of them were in the habit of coming over and hashing things out with the help of the lubricants the saloon provided.

Braxton Donovan was a prominent Charleston lawyer. He was also, at the moment, slightly-but only slightly-drunk. He said, "Only thing that'd put those know-nothing peckerheads into power is a calahamity-a calahamity, I tell you."

"A calamity, you mean?" Potter asked.

"That's what I said, isn't it?" Several of the chins beneath Donovan's neat gray goatee wobbled.

"As a matter of fact, no," Potter answered. Relentless precision had brought him into Confederate Army Intelligence, and later into investigative work.

"Well, it's what I meant-a calahamity is." The lawyer held up his glass. The colored bartender hastened to refill it. Braxton Donovan nodded regally. "Thank you kindly, Ptolemy."

"You're welcome, suh," Ptolemy said, professionally polite, professionally subservient.

"Tell me, Ptolemy," Donovan asked in his rolling baritone, "what is your view of the Freedom Party?" He might have been encouraging a friendly witness on the stand.

"Don't like 'em for hell, suh," Ptolemy said at once. "Somebody should ought to do somethin' about 'em, you wants to know what I thinks." He polished the top of the bar with a spotless white towel.

"This country is in a bad way when some not so small fraction of the electorate can't see what's obvious to a nigger bartender," Braxton Donovan said. He took a pull at his freshened drink. "Still and all, better a not so small fraction than a large fraction, as was so a few years back."

"Yes," Potter agreed. "And I believe Ptolemy here really does have no use for the Freedom Party-it's in his interest not to, after all, when you think about what Featherston has to say about blacks. But even so… Jeb Stuart III had a colored servant whose name, if I remember right, was also Ptolemy. Jake Featherston suspected the fellow was a Red-he was serving under Stuart in the First Richmond Howitzers. He told me about this servant not so long before the uprisings began."

"And so?" Donovan asked. "Your point is?"

"Jeb Stuart III pulled wires with his father to make sure that Ptolemy didn't have any trouble." Clarence Potter finished his whiskey at a gulp. "And he was a Red, dammit, as became abundantly clear when the pot boiled over. Young Stuart died in combat-let himself be killed, they say, so he wouldn't have to face the music. His father's revenge was to make sure Featherston never rose above the rank of sergeant. Petty, I suppose, but understandable."

"Why are you telling me this?" the lawyer asked.

"A couple of reasons," Potter answered. "For one, we can trace the rise of the Freedom Party to such small things. And, for another, a white man's a fool if he takes a Negro's word at face value. Look what happened to Jeb Stuart III." He swung around on the stool so that he faced the bartender. "Ptolemy!"

"Yes, suh? 'Nother drink, suh?" the black man asked.

"In a minute," Potter said. "First, tell me something-what were you doing when the rebellion came in 1915?"

"Me, suh?" For all they showed, Ptolemy's eyes might have been cut from stone. "Nothin', suh. Stayin' home mindin' my business."

"Uh- huh." Potter knew what that meant. It meant the bartender was lying through his teeth. Every Negro in the CSA claimed to have stayed at home minding his own business during the Red rebellion. If all the blacks who said they had actually had stayed at home, there would have been no rebellion in the first place.

Ptolemy said, "Suh, it was a long time ago nowadays, an' it's all over an' done with. Ain't no way to change what happened. Onliest thing we can do is pick up the pieces an' go on."

"He's right," Braxton Donovan said. Potter found himself nodding. The Confederate States, and everybody in them, did have to do that. Saying it, though, was easier than doing it. Donovan took a half dollar out of his pocket and slid it across the bar to Ptolemy. "Here you are. Buy yourself a drink." A few hundred years before, kings had tossed out largess to peasants with that same sort of offhanded generosity.

"Thank you, suh." Ptolemy made the coin disappear. He did fix a drink for himself. By its pale amber color, it held a lot more water than whiskey. And the bartender nursed it, raising it to his lips every now and then but not doing much in the way of real drinking. Potter had known very few men who worked behind a bar and did much in the way of pouring down what they served. Too easy, he supposed, for a man who worked around whiskey all the time to come to like it too well.

Having been generous to one beneath him-or so he plainly felt-Braxton Donovan swung his attention back to Potter. "I have a question for you, sir," he said, "speaking of the Freedom Party."

"Ask it, then," Potter answered.

"I've heard you knew Roger Kimball while he was still alive," the lawyer said.

Clarence Potter nodded. "And so I did. That's the best time to get to know a man-while he's still alive, I mean."

"Indeed. And in fact." Donovan nodded grandly. "Now, sir, the question: while he was still alive, did Kimball ever hint to you that he'd torpedoed the USS Ericsson after we'd yielded to the damnyankees?"

"Never once, never in the slightest way," Potter replied at once. "We were acquaintances, you understand, not friends-he liked Jake Featherston as much as I loathe the man. But I would say he didn't tell his friends, either. He was, in my opinion, a first-class son of a bitch, but he knew how to keep a secret-by keeping it, at all times and everywhere. If his exec hadn't spilled the beans, I don't think anyone would ever have known."

"Poetic justice, what he got," Donovan said.

"Yes, I think so, too," Potter agreed. "If he hadn't come to a sudden demise, he would have been a sore spot between us and the USA, and we can't afford to give them excuses to kick us around. They're too liable to do it even without excuses, though Sinclair has taken a milder line than Teddy Roosevelt did."

"I quite agree," Donovan said. "I despise the Socialists and all they stand for-they set a bad example for our people, at the very least-but their foreign policy is… well, as you said, gentler than Roosevelt's."

"Now I have a question for you," Potter said. Braxton Donovan looked cautious, but could hardly do anything but nod. Potter asked, "Why are you so interested in the late, unlamented Roger Kimball?"

"Idle curiosity," Donovan answered.

"Shit," Potter said crisply. All of a sudden, his metal-framed spectacles didn't make him seem mild and ineffectual any more. When he went on, "I deserve a straight answer," the implication was that he'd do something unpleasant if he didn't get one.

Braxton Donovan could have bought and sold him. Donovan owned enough property that the disastrous postwar inflation hadn't wiped him out. They both knew it. Most of the time, in the class-conscious Confederate States, it would have mattered a great deal. Now, somehow, it didn't. The lawyer flinched, muttered something under his breath, and gulped his drink. "Fill it up," he told the bartender.

"Yes, suh." Ptolemy did. Ice clinked as he built Donovan a fresh one.

The lawyer sipped from the new whiskey. Clarence Potter waited, patient and implacable as a father waiting up for a son out too late. At last, Donovan said, "You know Anne Colleton?"

"Personally? No," Potter said. "But I know of her. Who doesn't, in this state? What's she got to do with anything?"

"She and Kimball were… friends during the war, and for a while afterwards," Braxton Donovan answered, suggesting by the pause that they'd been more than friends. "Any dirt I can get on him will stick to her."

"Wait a minute." Potter held up a hand. "Wait just a minute. Didn't she help get the Yankee woman who punched Kimball's ticker for him out of jail and back to the USA?"

"Oh, yes." Donovan's silver pompadour was so securely in place, it didn't stir a hair as he nodded. "They broke up unpleasantly. I think it was over politics-he stayed in the Freedom Party, and she was one of the rats who left the sinking ship." His lip curled.

"Why tar her, then?" Potter asked. "If she's back to being a Whig, don't you want her to keep on being one? If you drive her into Featherston's arms again, aren't you just asking for trouble? She's a high-powered woman, no two ways about it."

"That's the point," Donovan said. "She's talking like a Whig again, yes, but she's trying to pull us to the right till you can't tell us from the yahoos in white shirts and butternut pants who run around yelling, 'Freedom!' She wants to have another go at the United States-wants it so bad, she can taste it."

Potter pondered that. "We'd have to be damn lucky to win it. They beat us and they hurt us. And even if we do lick them, that just sets up another war ten, twenty, thirty years further down the line. I wish I could say something else-I fought those bastards from the very first day to the very last, and I'd've kept on fighting if we hadn't folded up. But come on, Donovan. A good big man won't always lick a good little one, but sure as hell that's the way to bet. And I don't think we can afford to lose again."

"I don't want to fight them again, either," Donovan said. "I fought plenty in the last war, too, and I am plumb satisfied. And I don't want her voice in the Whig Party."

"There may be something to that," Potter allowed. "On the other hand, there may not. You want to think twice about going after her. Maybe you want to think three times."

"I know what I'm doing." Braxton Donovan certainly sounded confident. Potter wondered if that was the whiskey talking. He also wondered how Donovan not only didn't fall over but kept on sounding coherent. The man had to have a sponge in place of a liver. Donovan went on, "She's not quite the force she used to be, anyhow, on account of she's ten years older than she used to be, same as the rest of us. But it hurts women more." He finished the latest drink. "One more of the same, Ptolemy."

"Comin' right up, suh," the Negro said. As he made the next whiskey, Potter studied him and, covertly, Donovan. He wondered if the lawyer really knew as much as he thought he did. Not too many people came away happy after they bumped up against Anne Colleton.

Which meant… Potter finished his own drink. He didn't ask for a fresh one, not right away. Instead, he did some quiet thinking. He came closer to agreeing with Donovan than with Anne Colleton. Nothing was stupider, though, than backing a loser, which he judged Donovan likely to be. How much of a deal can I cut? he wondered. And should I?