Blood and Iron (74 page)

As she reached inside the handbag, he asked, “What are you doing?”

“I’ll show you.” She pulled out a banknote and held it up. “Do you see that?” After Kimball nodded, she drove the point home: “Take a good look at it. It’s a one-dollar banknote. You haven’t seen anything just like it since just after the war ended, not till this past fall you haven’t. And it’s still worth a real dollar, too.”

“That’s not all we need, dammit, not even close,” Kimball said furiously. “We’re naked to whatever the United States want to do to us.” He wished Anne were naked to whatever he wanted to do to her, but a different urgency filled him fuller. “We’ve got no submarines, we’ve got no battleships, we’ve got no barrels—Christ, they don’t even want us to have machine guns in case the niggers rise up again. You see the Whigs fixing any of that? I sure as hell don’t.”

Anne put the banknote back in her bag. “We will have all those things again,” she said. “It may take longer than I’d hoped, but we’ll have them. As long as the money stays good, we’ll have them. And”—she took a deep breath—“we’ll have them without murdering any more presidents to get them.”

“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” Kimball said. “I’ve broken plenty of eggs myself—and you’ve set up plenty to be broken.” That got home. Anne bit her lip and looked down at the floor. Kimball laughed. “You know what you remind me of? Somebody who likes bacon but won’t butcher a hog.”

“You
are
a bastard,” Anne said. “I’ve known it for a long time, but—”

Roger Kimball loosed another loud, jeering laugh. “Takes one to know one, I reckon. That’s likely the only reason we’ve put up with each other as long as we have—well, that and the screwing, anyway.”

He’d hoped to anger her, but found he’d failed. She also laughed, and seemed to gain strength from it. “Yes, that and the screwing,” she said. “I’ll miss you. I’ll be damned if I won’t. But I won’t miss the Freedom Party. Since you’re staying in, I have to cut you loose. Grady Calkins showed me once and for all there’s no controlling those people.”

“I got into it thinking Jake Featherston needed controlling, too,” Kimball said. “He doesn’t. But the Yankees want to control him, and that’s a fact.”

“Featherston’s clever,” Anne admitted. “But he can’t do everything himself. And if he can’t control his people, he can’t do anything at all.” By the way she talked, controlling was the be-all and end-all.

Kimball supposed it was natural she thought that way. She’d spent her whole life till the Red uprising controlling a plantation, controlling money, controlling everyone around her. Her ancestors had done the same thing for a hundred years before her time. She was, in fact, one of the aristocrats against whom Jake Featherston had campaigned.

With a shrug, Kimball said, “Well, yeah, a bigger egg than Jake wanted got busted, but you can’t blame the whole Freedom Party for Calkins.”

“Why can’t I? Everyone else does,” Anne said. “And there’s a lot of truth in it. With all the brawling, with the stalwarts with the clubs, with the riots during the campaign in ’21, where else was the Freedom Party going but towards shooting a president?”

Uneasily, Kimball remembered keeping a stalwart in white and butternut from taking a shot at Ainsworth Layne when the Radical Liberal candidate spoke in Hampton Park. Even so, he said, “You’re making—the whole country’s making—it out to be bigger than it is. Sure, we’ve lost some folks for now on account of what happened down in Birmingham, but they’ll be back.”

Anne Colleton shook her head. “I don’t think so. And that’s the other reason I’ve gotten out of the Freedom Party—I never back a loser. Never. I think the Party’s name will stink all across the CSA for years to come, and I don’t want any of that stink sticking to me.”

“You’re wrong,” Kimball told her. “You’re dead wrong.”

Now she shrugged. “I’ll take the chance.”

“Nothing fazes you, does it?” he said, and she shook her head again. He stepped toward her. “Last kiss before I go?”

He watched her consider it. Mischief filled her eyes. “Why not?” she said, and held out her arms.

When their lips met, he wondered if she’d bite him instead of kissing. But her malice was subtler than that. She put everything she had into the kiss, reminding him of what he wouldn’t be getting any more. She held him tight as if no clothes separated them, grinding her crotch into his.

“Jesus!” he said, his voice hoarse, when he had to take his mouth away from Anne’s to breathe. She laughed, delighted with the effect she’d created. His hand cupped her breast. “Last lay before I go, too?”

“No,” Anne said deliberately, and knocked the hand away. “Good-bye, Roger.”

Rage ripped through him. “Why, you goddamn little tease,” he rasped, and shoved her against the bed. She let out a startled squeak as she landed on her back. “I’ll give you something to remember me by—see if I don’t.” He sprang on her.

Years before, he’d realized trying to take her by force wasn’t a good idea. Since then, he never had tried. He’d never needed or wanted to try. Now…If she thought he’d just walk away after that kiss, she could damn well think again. Whatever he’d realized years before was dead as the
Ericsson
, dead as Tom Brearley.

It shouldn’t have been, for his fury overpowered not only good sense but also caution. Anne might have been startled when he pushed her onto the bed, but she didn’t stay that way longer than a heartbeat. With exquisite timing, her knee came up between his legs and caught him exactly where it did her the most good.

He howled and doubled up and clutched at himself, as any wounded animal might have done. Anne twisted away from him. He couldn’t possibly have stopped her, not for the first few seconds there. “Now I think you’d better go,” she said coolly.

He didn’t want to take her any more. He wanted to kill her. But when he looked up, he discovered she’d had more in her handbag than a one-dollar banknote. She aimed a revolver straight at his head. He hadn’t the least doubt she would pull the trigger if he moved in any way that did not suit her.

“Get off the bed,” she said. He had to obey, though he still walked doubled over. The pistol tracked him. She’d killed before, helping to put down the Negro rebellion. No, she wouldn’t hesitate now. Iron in her voice, she went on, “Go to the door, get out, and never come back.”

At the door, he paused. “Can I wait till I can straighten up?” he asked, not wanting to publish his humiliation to the world.

He thought she’d send him out in anguish, but she nodded and let him have a couple of minutes. Then she gave a peremptory gesture with the pistol. Out he went. He still wasn’t moving well—he felt like bloody hell—but, if he walked like an old man, he didn’t walk like a wounded old man.

He made his slow, painful way back to his flat without meeting anyone he knew, for which he thanked God. “That would be just what I need,” he muttered as he walked spraddle-legged up the stairs, “to run into Potter and Delamotte again.” He grunted. Anne had hurt him worse than they had when he brawled with them—not in so many places, but worse.

He poured himself a tall whiskey, and then ran the bath half full of cold water. He shivered when he sat down in it, but the steam radiator made the apartment tolerably warm and the whiskey made him tolerably warm, so he didn’t think he’d come down with pneumonia or the Spanish influenza. And the cold water helped numb his poor, abused balls—or maybe that was the whiskey, too.

At last, he let the water run down the drain. After cautiously drying, he put on the loosest drawers and baggiest trousers he owned. Then he went back to the kitchen and poured out some more whiskey. He didn’t want food. The knee Anne had given him still left him faintly nauseated.

He drank from the second glass of whiskey. “Stupid bitch,” he said, as if someone in the room might disagree. “Miserable stupid bitch.” He took another big sip from the glass. He wished he’d wrung her neck, back there at the hotel. But he hadn’t got the chance. Say what you would about her, Anne Colleton took a back seat to nobody when it came to nerve.

The glass was empty again. He refilled it.
Might as well get drunk,
he thought.
What else have I got to do?
Even if he never saw Anne again, he’d have no trouble getting laid. He knew that. He’d never had any trouble getting laid. Why, then, did he feel like a man whose tongue kept exploring the empty spot where a wisdom tooth had been before the dentist got his forceps on it?

“Dammit, we were two of a kind,” he muttered. “We
are
two of a kind. She’s just being stupid about the Party, that’s all. She’ll come around.” He nodded. “She gives me half a chance—hell, she gives me even a quarter of a chance—I’ll horn her into coming around.” With better than two glasses of whiskey in him, it not only sounded simple, it sounded inevitable.

Someone knocked on the door. Kimball hurried to open it. “There she is already, by God!” he said happily. Of course she wouldn’t stay away.

But the woman who stood in the hallway was darker and plainer and tireder than Anne Colleton. “You are Mr. Roger Kimball, the naval officer?” she asked.

“That’s right,” he answered. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he realize she had a Yankee accent—she sounded a little like Clarence Potter.

“Oh, good,” she said. “I’m so glad I found you.” As Anne had before, she reached into her purse. And, as Anne had before, she pulled out a pistol. Two bullets had slammed into Roger Kimball’s chest before she said, “My husband was on the
Ericsson
.” She kept firing till the revolver was empty, but Kimball never heard the last few shots.

Sylvia Enos sat in a Charleston, South Carolina, jail cell, wondering what would happen to her next. Looking back on it, she decided she shouldn’t have shot Roger Kimball. Now she would have to pay for what she’d done. Try as she would, though, she couldn’t make herself sorry she’d done it.

She shared the small women’s wing of the Charleston city jail with a couple of drunks and a couple of streetwalkers. They all kept sending her awestruck looks because she was locked up on a murder charge. She hadn’t imagined anything like that. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way.

A matron with a face like a clenched fist came down the hall and stopped in front of Sylvia’s cell. “Your lawyer is here,” she said, and unlocked the door. Then she quickly stepped back, as if afraid Sylvia might overpower her and escape. Sylvia found that pretty funny, too.

Her lawyer was a chubby, white-mustached, very pink man named Bishop Polk Magrath. He insisted that she call him Bish. She’d never called anyone Bish in her life, but didn’t argue. He sat on one side of a table in a tiny visiting room, she on the other. The matron stood close by to make sure they didn’t pass anything back and forth.

“I still don’t understand why you’re helping me,” she said. She’d said that before, and hadn’t got any kind of answer that made sense to her.

Now she did, after a fashion. Magrath’s blue, blue eyes sparkled. “You don’t seem to have realized what a
cause célèbre
your case has become, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll draw more notice for defending you than I would in ten years of ordinary cases.”

“I don’t see how you’ll draw notice for defending me and losing,” Sylvia said. “I did it.” She hadn’t tried to run after shooting Kimball. She’d given her revolver to the first man who stuck his head out the door of another apartment and waited for the police to come arrest her.

“Let’s just put it like this, Mrs. Enos,” the lawyer said: “There are a good many people in this town who think Mr. Kimball deserved what you gave him, a good many people who aren’t the least bit sorry he’s dead. If we can get enough of them on a jury, you might just see Rhode Island again.”

“Massachusetts,” Sylvia said automatically. She scratched her head. “I don’t follow you at all. Isn’t—wasn’t—Roger Kimball a hero down here for sinking the
Ericsson
?”

“Oh, he is, ma’am. To some people, he is,” Magrath said. By the expression on the matron’s face, she might well have been one of those people. The lawyer went on, “But he’s not a hero to everybody in the Confederate States, not after what happened last June he’s not.”

“Oh,” Sylvia said softly. At last, a light went on in her head. “Because he was a Freedom Party bigshot, you mean.”

“What a clever lady you are, Mrs. Enos.” Magrath beamed at her. “That’s right. That’s just exactly right. There are people in this country—there are people in this town—who would be happy if the same thing that happened to Roger Kimball would happen to the whole Freedom Party.”

One of those people, whoever they might be, was without a doubt paying Bishop Polk Magrath’s fees. Sylvia certainly wasn’t. She’d spent more than she could afford getting a passport and a one-way ticket down to Charleston. She hadn’t expected she’d be going back to Boston. Maybe she’d been wrong.

“Time’s up for this visit,” the tough-looking matron said. Sylvia obediently got to her feet. The lawyer started to reach across the table to shake hands with her. A glance from the matron stopped him. He contented himself with tipping his derby instead. “Come along,” the matron told Sylvia, and Sylvia came.

Halfway back to her cell, she asked, “Will supper be more of that cornmeal mush?” It didn’t taste like much of anything, but it filled her stomach.

As if she hadn’t spoken, the matron said, “You damnyankees killed my husband and my son, and my brother’s got a hook where his hand used to be.”

“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said. “I haven’t got a brother, and my son’s too young to be a soldier. But the man I shot snuck up on my husband and more than a hundred other sailors after the war was over, and he didn’t just kill them—he murdered them like he’d shot them in the back.”

The matron said nothing more till they got back to Sylvia’s cell. As she locked Sylvia inside once more, she remarked, “Grits for supper again, yes,” and went on her way.

“What’s your lawyer got to say?” one of the streetwalkers called to Sylvia. “A lawyer—God almighty.” She sounded as if she never expected to enjoy a lawyer’s professional services, though a lawyer might enjoy hers.

Two days later, the hard-faced matron marched up to Sylvia’s cell and announced, “You’ve got another visitor.” Disapproval congealed on her like fat in a pan cooling on the stove.

“Is it—Bish?” Sylvia still had to work to say that. The matron shook her head. Sylvia frowned in confusion. Now that Kimball was dead, her lawyer was the only person she knew or even knew of in Charleston. “Who is it, then?”

Through tight lips, the matron said, “Just come on.” Sylvia came. Sitting in an iron cage staled very quickly.

Waiting for her in the visitors’room was a blond woman about her own age whose sleek good looks, coiffure, and clothes all shouted
Money!
“Mrs. Enos, my name is Anne Colleton.”

That meant nothing to Sylvia—and then, to her dismay, it did. She’d seen the name in a couple of the newspaper stories that talked about Kimball. “You’re one of the people who helped the Freedom Party,” she said. Maybe Bishop Polk Magrath had been talking through that derby of his.

Anne nodded. “I was one of those people, yes, Mrs. Enos. And I was a friend of Roger Kimball’s, too—I was, up till his last day on earth.”

Sylvia heard, or thought—hoped—she heard, a slight stress on the past tense. “Were you?” she asked, with her own slight stress.

Maybe that was approval in Anne Colleton’s eyes. “You listen, don’t you?” the woman from the Confederate States said. “In fact, I’m not telling you any great secret when I say that Roger Kimball and I were more than friends, up till his last day on earth.”

Whatever hope Sylvia had went up in smoke. It hadn’t been approval after all. It must have been well-bred, well-contained fury. “Have you come here to gloat at me in jail, then?” she asked with gloomy near-certainty.

“What?” Anne Colleton stared, then started to laugh. “You don’t understand, then, do you, my dear?” Sylvia shook her head. She only understood that she didn’t understand. Anne’s voice went cold and harsh. “I’ll spell it out for you, in that case. Not too long before you shot him, Roger Kimball tried to take me by force when I told him I didn’t care to be more than his friend any more. He did not succeed, I might add.” She spoke proudly. “I might also add that I came very close to shooting him myself before you got the chance.”

“Oh,” Sylvia whispered. Something more seemed to be called for. She went on, “I’m glad you didn’t. It would have meant I’d spent all that money on my passport and train fare for nothing.”

“We wouldn’t want that, would we?” Anne Colleton said, and sounded as if she meant it. “With any luck at all, Mrs. Enos, the Confederate government or the government of South Carolina will pay your train fare north. Bish Magrath and I will do everything we can to see that that’s what happens.”

“Oh,” Sylvia repeated in a different tone of voice. She’d put her children on the train, too, to distant cousins in Connecticut—distant, but closer than any other relatives she had close by. George, Jr., and Mary Jane had thought it would be a short get-acquainted visit. So had her cousins. Maybe, just maybe, if God and Anne Colleton turned out kind, they’d be right.

“Time’s up,” the matron announced, and even Anne Colleton, who seemed able to outstare the lightning, did not argue with her. Sylvia got to her feet and headed back toward her cell. When she was about halfway there, the matron said, “Some rich folks reckon they can buy their way out of anything.”

I hope this one’s right,
Sylvia thought. Saying that out loud didn’t seem to be the best idea she’d ever had.

Anne Colleton did not visit her again. Bishop Polk Magrath did, a couple of times. He didn’t ask many questions; he seemed to come more to cheer her up than for any other reason. She didn’t know how cheerful she should be. She’d gathered Anne Colleton was a power in the land, but how big a power? Sylvia couldn’t find out till she went to court.

She came before a judge two weeks after Anne Colleton visited her. Bish Magrath kept beaming like a grandfather with plenty of candy canes in his pockets for his grandchildren to find. The lawyer at the other table in front of the judge—the district attorney, Sylvia supposed he was—seemed anything but happy. But was that because of the case or because he’d had a fight with his wife before coming here? Sylvia couldn’t tell.

“I understand you have a request before we proceed, Mr. Chesterfield?” the judge asked the district attorney.

“Yes, your Honor, I do,” the lawyer—Chesterfield—said. When he glanced over to Sylvia, he looked as if he’d bitten down hard on a lemon. “May it please the court, your Honor, the state must recognize the extraordinary circumstances that prompted the defendant to act as she has admitted acting. In light of the fact that the decedent did cause the death of the defendant’s husband not during wartime but after he knew combat had ended, the state is willing”—he looked none too willing himself—“to further the cause of international understanding and amity by not pressing charges in this case, provided that the defendant leave the Confederate States on the first available transportation north and solemnly swear never to return to our nation again, on pain of rearrest and the charges’ being reinstituted.”

“How say you, Mr. Magrath?” the judge inquired.

“I am in complete accord with my learned colleague, your Honor,” Magrath said placidly. “I should also like to note for the record that the government of the United States has formally requested clemency for my client from both the government of the Confederate States and the government of the sovereign state of South Carolina. It now rests in your hands, your Honor.”

Things were happening too fast for Sylvia. They weren’t just arranged—they were nailed down tight. “How say you, Mrs. Enos?” the judge asked her. “If set at liberty, will you quit the Confederate States of America, never to return?”

Bish Magrath had to nod before she could stammer, “Y-Yes, sir.”

Bang!
Down came the gavel. “So ordered,” the judge declared. “Mrs. Enos, you will be on a northbound train before the sun sets this evening.” Numbly, Sylvia nodded. She had her life back. Now she would have to figure out what to do with it.

Lieutenant Lije Jenkins sorted through the mail that had come into the barrel unit at Fort Leavenworth. He held out an envelope to Irving Morrell. “Letter from Philadelphia for you, Colonel.”

“War Department?” Morrell asked, not that he had much doubt. Jenkins nodded. Morrell took the envelope. “Well, let’s see what kind of birthday present they have for me today.” His birthday still lay a month away, but he thought about it more than he had before he got married, because Agnes’ came only a week afterwards.
Have to get into Leavenworth and do some shopping for her,
he thought, and laughed under his breath. Amazing, the small domestic things in which he took pleasure these days because he was doing them for the woman he loved.

He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter it held. As his eyes went back and forth across the typewritten page, he stiffened.
Colonel Morrell,
the letter read,
Having completed work on the test vehicle for a new-model barrel and having also completed evaluation of optimum strategic utilization of barrels irregardless of model, you are ordered to terminate the program you now head at Fort Leavenworth and to report to the War Department Personnel Office here in Philadelphia no later than 1 March 1923 for reassignment. Each day earlier than the aforesaid date for the closure of the project will be greatly appreciated due to reduced expenditures as a result thereof.

Only after he’d gone through the letter twice did he notice who had signed it: Lieutenant Colonel John Abell, the adjutant to General Hunter Liggett, who’d replaced Leonard Wood as U.S. Army Chief of Staff a few months into President Sinclair’s administration.

“Well, well,” Morrell said softly. A pigeon had come home to roost. He’d spent some time as a General Staff officer during the Great War, and had not got on well with John Abell. Abell was a brilliant man, everything a military administrator should be and then some. Morrell had always made it plain he would sooner have been out in the field fighting. When he’d got out in the field, he’d smashed the enemy. And now he was going to pay for it.

“Something wrong, sir?” Lieutenant Jenkins asked.

“No good deed goes unpunished,” Morrell answered.

“Sir?” Jenkins said. Morrell handed him the letter. He read it, then stared at his superior. “Close down the Barrel Works? They can’t do that!”

“They can. They are. Whether they ought to or not is a different question, but not one that’s mine to answer,” Morrell said. “You see why they’re doing it—they need to save money.” He saw no point to saying anything about John Abell. If personal animosity had dictated where the savings would come from…If that had happened, it wouldn’t be the first time.