Return Engagement (49 page)

“He’s . . . got a whole new way of looking at the population-reduction problem,” Koenig said.

Jake almost laughed out loud at that. Even a tough customer like Ferd Koenig had trouble calling a spade a spade. Jake knew what he aimed to do. Koenig wanted to do the same thing. The only difference was, Ferd didn’t like talking about it. He—and a bunch of other people—were like a hen party full of maiden ladies tiptoeing around the facts of life.

The laugh came out as an indulgent smile. “Tell me about it,” Jake urged. Koenig did. Featherston listened intently. The longer the Attorney General talked, the harder Jake listened. He leaned forward till his chair creaked, as if to grab Koenig’s words as fast as they came out. When the other man finished, Jake whistled softly. “This could be big, Ferd. This could be really, really big.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Koenig said.

“A fleet of trucks like that, they’d be easy to build—cheap, too,” Featherston said. “How much you tell me it cost Pinkard to fix that one up?”

Koenig had to check some notes he pulled from a breast pocket. “He paid . . . let me see . . . $225 for the sheet-metal paneling, plus another ten bucks for the pipe. He did the work with that himself—didn’t want the mechanic figuring out what was going on.”

“He
is
a smart fellow,” Featherston said approvingly. “We get a fleet of those bastards made, we’re out of the retail business and we go into wholesale.” Now he did laugh—he was wondering what Saul Goldman would say to that. But he got back to business in a hurry. “Shooting people in the head all day—that’s hard work. A lot of men can’t take it.”

“That’s what Pinkard said. He said this guard named”—Koenig glanced at the notes again—“named Blades killed himself with car exhaust, and that’s what gave him the idea. He asked if Blades’ widow could get a bigger pension on account of this turned out to be so important.”

“Give it to her,” Jake said at once. “Pinkard’s right. Like I say, shooting people’s hard work. It wears on you. It’d be harder still if you were shootin’ gals and pickaninnies. But, hell, you load ’em in a truck, drive around for a while, and the job’s taken care of—
anybody
can do that, anybody at all. Get a ’dozer to dig a trench, dump the bodies in, and get on back for the next load.”

“You’ve got it all figured out.” Koenig laughed, but more than a little nervously.

“Bet your ass I do,” Featherston said. “This is part of what we’ve been looking for. We’ve always known what we were going to do, but we haven’t found the right way to go about it. This here may not be the final solution, but we’re sure as hell gettin’ closer. You get to work on it right away. Top priority, you hear me?”

“How many trucks you reckon we’ll need?” Koenig asked.

“Beats me,” Jake said. “Find some bright young fella with one o’ them slide rules to cipher it out for you. However many it is, you get ’em. I don’t give a damn what you got to do—you get ’em.”

“If it’s too many, the Army may grumble,” Koenig warned.

“Listen, Ferd, you leave the Army to me,” Featherston said, his voice suddenly hard. “I said top priority, and I meant it.
You get those trucks.
”

He hardly ever spoke to Ferd Koenig as superior to inferior. When he did, it hit hard. “Right, boss,” the Attorney General mumbled. Jake nodded to himself. When he gave an order, that was what people were supposed to say.

After some hasty good-byes, Koenig all but fled his office. Featherston wondered if he’d hit
too
hard. He didn’t want to turn the last of his old comrades into an enemy.
Have to pat him on the fanny, make sure his feelings aren’t hurt too bad,
he thought. He cared about only a handful of people enough for their feelings to matter to him. Ferd Koenig probably topped the list.

Lulu stepped in. “The Vice President is here to see you, sir.”

“Thank you, dear,” Featherston said. His secretary smiled and ducked back out. She was also one of the people whose feelings he cared about.

Don Partridge, on the other hand . . . The Vice President of the CSA was an amiable nonentity from Tennessee. He had a big, wide smile, boyishly handsome good looks, and not a hell of a lot upstairs. That suited Jake just fine. Willy Knight had been altogether too much like him, and he’d barely survived the assassination attempt Knight put together. Well, the son of a bitch was dead now, and he’d had a few years in hell before he died, too.
I pay everybody back,
Jake thought. The United States were finding out about that. So were the Negroes in the Confederate States, and they’d find out more soon.
Have to do something nice for that Pinkard fellow . . .

Jake worried about no coups from Don Partridge. Not having to worry about him was why he was Vice President. “Well, Don, what’s on your mind?” he asked.
Not a hell of a lot,
he guessed.

“Got a joke for you,” Partridge said. He went ahead and told it. Like a lot of his jokes, it revolved around a dumb farm girl. This time, she wanted to make a little record to send to her boyfriend at the front, but she didn’t have the money to pay the man at the studio in town. “. . . and he said,, ‘Get down on your knees and take it out of my pants.” So she did., ‘Take hold of it,’ he said, and she did. And then he said,, ‘Well, go ahead.” And she said,, ‘Hello, Freddie . . .” “

Partridge threw back his head and guffawed. Jake laughed, too. Unlike a lot of the jokes Don Partridge told, that one was actually funny. “Pretty good,” Jake said. “What else is going on?”

“That’s what I wanted to ask you, Mr. President,” Partridge said. He knew better than to get too familiar with Jake. “You’ve got me out making speeches about how well everything’s going, and sometimes folks ask when the war’s going to be over. I’d like to know what to tell ’em.”

He was earnest. He didn’t want to do the wrong thing. He also had to know Featherston would come down on him like a thousand-pound bomb if he did. Jake didn’t mind being feared, not even a little bit. He said, “You tell ’em it’s Al Smith’s fault we’re still fighting. I offered a reasonable peace. I offered a just peace. He wouldn’t have it. So we’ll just have to keep knocking him over the head till he sees sense.”

“Yes, sir. I understand that.” Don Partridge nodded eagerly. “Knocking the damnyankees over the head is important. I know it is.” He stuck out his chin and tried to look resolute. With his big, cowlike eyes, it didn’t come off too well. “But the trouble is, sometimes the Yankees hit back, and people don’t much like that.”

“I don’t like it, either,” Jake said, which was a good-sized understatement even for him. “We’re doing everything we can. As long as we hang in there, we’ll lick ’em in the end. That’s what you’ve got to let the people know.”

The Vice President nodded. “I’ll do it, sir! You can count on me.”

“I do, Don.”
I count on you to stay out of my hair and not cause me any trouble. There are plenty of things you’re not too good at, but you can manage that.

“I’m so glad, sir.” Partridge gave Jake one of his famous smiles. From what some of the Freedom Party guards said, those smiles got him lady friends—or more than friends—from one end of the CSA to the other. This one, aimed at a man older than he was, had a smaller impact.

“Anything else I can do for you?” Featherston didn’t quite tell Partridge to get the hell out of there, but he didn’t miss by much. The Vice President took the hint and left, which he wouldn’t have if Jake had made it more subtle.

He’s a damn fool,
Featherston thought,
but even damn fools have their uses. That’s something I didn’t understand when I was younger.
One thing he understood now was that he couldn’t afford to let the damnyankees kill him before he’d won the war. He tried to imagine Don Partridge as President of the Confederate States. When he did, he imagined victory flying out the window. Damn fools had their uses, but running things wasn’t one of them.

Featherston looked at a clock on the wall, then at a map across from it. He’d got Partridge out early; his next appointment wasn’t for another twenty minutes. It was with Nathan Bedford Forrest III. The general was no fool. Railing against the Whigs, Jake had cussed them for being the party of Juniors and IIIs and IVs, people who thought they ought to have a place on account of what their last name was. Say what you would about Forrest, but he wasn’t like that.

He came bounding into the President’s office. He didn’t waste time with hellos. Instead, he pointed to the map. “Sir, we’re going to have a problem, and we’re going to have it pretty damn quick.”

“The one we’ve seen coming for a while now?” Jake asked.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III nodded. “Yes, sir.” His face was wider and fleshier than that of his famous ancestor, but you could spot the resemblance in his eyes and eyebrows . . . and the first Nathan Bedford Forrest had had some of the deadliest eyes anybody’d ever seen. His great-grandson (the name had skipped a generation) continued, “The damnyankees have seen what we did in Ohio. Looks like they’re getting ready to try the same thing here. After all, it’s not nearly as far from the border to Richmond as it is from the Ohio River up to Lake Erie.”

“Like you say, we’ve been looking for it,” Featherston replied. “We’ve been getting ready for it, too. How much blood do they want to spend to get where they aim to go? We’ll give ’em a Great War fight, only more so. And by God, even if they do take Richmond, they haven’t hurt us half as bad as what we did to them farther west.”

“I aim to try to keep that from happening,” Forrest said. “I think I can. I hope I can. And you’re right about the other. What we’ve done to them will make it harder for them to do things to us. But we’re going to have a hell of a fight on our hands, Mr. President. You need to know that. Life doesn’t come with a guarantee.”

“I haven’t backed down from a fight yet,” Jake said. “I don’t aim to start now.”

XIII

O
n the shelf. Abner Dowling hated it. Oh, they hadn’t thrown him out of the Army altogether, as he’d feared they might. But he was back in the War Department in Philadelphia, doing what should have been about a lieutenant colonel’s job. That was what he got for letting Ohio fall.

He’d been George Armstrong Custer’s adjutant for what seemed like forever (of course, any time with Custer seemed like forever). He’d been a reasonably successful military governor in Utah and Kentucky. These days, Utah was in revolt and Kentucky belonged to the CSA, but none of that was his fault.

Then they’d finally given him a combat command—but not enough barrels or airplanes to go with it. He hadn’t done a bang-up job with what he had. Looking back, he could see he’d made mistakes. But he was damned if he could see how anyone but an all-knowing superman could have avoided some of those mistakes. They’d seemed like good ideas at the time. Hindsight said they hadn’t been, but who got hindsight ahead of time?

Dowling swore under his breath and tried to unsnarl a logistics problem. Right this minute, the war effort was nothing but logistics problems. That was the Confederacy’s fault. Getting from east to west—or, more urgently at the moment, from west to east—was fouled up beyond all recognition. Everybody thought he deserved to go first, and nobody figured he ought to wait in line.

“I ought to give ’em a swat and make ’em go stand in the corner,” Dowling muttered. If Army officers were going to act like a bunch of six-year-olds, they deserved to be treated the same way. Too bad his authority didn’t reach so far.

Someone knocked on the frame to the open door of his office. A measure of how he’d fallen was that he didn’t have a young lieutenant out there running interference for him. “General Dowling? May I have a few minutes of your time?”

“General MacArthur!” Dowling jumped to his feet and saluted. “Yes, sir, of course. Come right in. Have a seat.”

“I thank you very much,” Major General Daniel MacArthur said grandly. But then, Daniel MacArthur was made for the grand gesture. He was tall and lean and craggy. He wore a severely, almost monastically, plain uniform, and smoked cigarettes from a long, fancy holder. He was in his mid-fifties now. During the Great War, he’d been a boy wonder, the youngest man to command a division. He’d commanded it in Custer’s First Army, too, which had made for some interesting times. Custer had never wanted anybody but himself to get publicity, while MacArthur was also an avid self-promoter.

“What can I do for you, sir?” Dowling asked.

“You may have heard I’m to head up the attack into Virginia.” MacArthur thrust out his long, granitic chin. Like Custer, he was always ready—always eager—to strike a pose.

“No, sir, I hadn’t heard,” Dowling admitted. He wasn’t hooked into the grapevine here. Quite simply, not many people wanted to talk to an officer down on his luck. He put the best face on it he could: “I imagine security is pretty tight.”

“I suppose so.” But Daniel MacArthur couldn’t help looking and sounding disappointed. He was a man who lived to be observed. If people weren’t watching him, if he wasn’t at the center of the stage, he began to wonder if he existed.

“What can I do for you?” Dowling asked again.

MacArthur brightened, no doubt thinking of all the attention he would get once he became the hero of the hour. “You have more recent experience in fighting the Confederates than anyone else,” he said.

“I guess I do—much of it painful,” Dowling said.

“I hope to avoid
that.
” By his tone, MacArthur was confident he would. Custer had had that arrogance, too. A good commander needed some of it. Too much, though, and you started thinking you were always right. Your soldiers commonly paid for that—in blood. MacArthur went on, “In any case, I was wondering if you would be kind enough to tell me some of the things I might do well to look out for.”

Abner Dowling blinked. That was actually a reasonable request. He wondered if something was wrong with MacArthur. After some thought, he answered, “Well, sir, one thing they do very well is coordinate their infantry, armor, artillery, and aircraft, especially the damned barrels. They’d studied Colonel Morrell’s tactics from the last war and improved them for the extra speed barrels have these days.”

“Ah, yes. Colonel Morrell.” MacArthur looked as if Dowling had broken wind in public. He didn’t much like Morrell. The barrel officer had gained breakthroughs last time around where he hadn’t. Morrell was
not
a publicity hound, which only made him more suspicious to MacArthur.

“Sir, he’s still the best barrel commander we’ve got, far and away,” Dowling said. “If you can get him for whatever you’re going to do in Virginia, you should.”

“Colonel Morrell is occupied with affairs farther west. I am perfectly satisfied with the officers I have serving under me.”

“Is it true that the Confederates have recalled General Patton to Virginia?” Dowling asked.

“I have heard that that may be so.” Daniel MacArthur shrugged. “I’m not afraid of him.”

Dowling believed him. MacArthur had never lacked for courage. Neither had Custer, for that matter. He was as brave a man as Dowling had ever seen. When it came to common sense, on the other hand . . . When it came to common sense, both MacArthur and Custer had been standing in line for an extra helping of courage.

“Flank attack!” Dowling said. “The Confederates kept nipping at our flanks with their armor. You’ll have to guard against that on defense and use it when you have the initiative.”

“I intend to have the initiative at all times,” MacArthur declared. The cigarette holder he clenched between his teeth jumped to accent the words.

“Um, sir . . .” Dowling cast about for a diplomatic way to say what damn well needed saying. “Sir, no matter what you intend, you’ve got to remember the Confederates have intentions, too. I hope you’ll mostly be able to go by yours. Sometimes, though, they’ll have the ball.”

“And when they do, I’ll stuff it down their throat,” MacArthur said. “They cannot hope to stand against the blow I will strike them.”

He sounded very sure of himself. So had Custer, just before the start of one of his big offensives. More often than not, the ocean of blood he spent outweighed the gains he made. Dowling feared the same thing would happen with Daniel MacArthur.

But what can I do?
Dowling wondered helplessly. Nobody would pay attention to a fat failed fighting man who’d been put out to pasture. Lord knew MacArthur wouldn’t. Everything already seemed perfect in his mind. To him, everything
was
perfect. What the real world did to his plans would come as a complete and rude shock, as it always had to Custer.

“If you already have all the answers, sir, why did you bother to ask me questions?” Dowling inquired.

Some officers would have got angry at that. Invincibly armored in self-approval, MacArthur didn’t. “Just checking on things,” he replied, and got to his feet. Dowling also rose. It didn’t help much, for MacArthur towered over him. Smiling a confident and superior smile, MacArthur said, “Expect to read my dispatches from Richmond, General.”

“I look forward to it,” Dowling said tonelessly. Major General MacArthur’s smile never wavered. He believed Dowling, or at least took him literally. With a wave, he left Dowling’s office and, a procession of one, hurried down the corridor.

With a sigh, Abner Dowling sat back down and returned to the work MacArthur had interrupted. It wasn’t a grand assault on Richmond—assuming the grand assault got that far—but it wasn’t meaningless, either. He could tell himself it wasn’t, anyhow.

He jumped when the telephone on his desk rang. He wondered if it was a wrong number; not many people had wanted to talk to him lately. He picked it up. “Dowling here.”

“Yes, sir. This is John Abell. How are you today?”

“Oh, I’m fair, Colonel, I guess. And yourself?” Dowling couldn’t imagine what the General Staff officer might want.

“I’ll do, sir,” Abell answered with what sounded like frosty amusement—the only kind with which he seemed familiar. “Did you just have a visit from the Great Stone Face?”

“The Great—?” Dowling snorted. He couldn’t help himself. “Yes, Colonel, as a matter of fact I did.”

“And?” Colonel Abell prompted.

“He’s . . . very sure of himself,” Dowling said carefully. “I hope he had reason to be. I haven’t seen his plans, so I can’t tell you about that. You’d know more about it than I would, I’m sure.”

“Plans go only so far,” John Abell said. “During the last war, we saw any number of splendid-sounding plans blown to hell and gone. Meaning no offense to you, our plans in the West at the start of this war didn’t work as well as we wish they would have.”

“It does help if the plans take into account all the enemy can throw at us,” Dowling replied, acid in his voice.

“Yes, it does,” Abell said, which startled him. “I told you I meant no offense.”

“People tell me all kinds of things,” Dowling said. “Some of them are true. Some of them help make flowers grow. I’m sure no one ever tells you anything but the truth, eh, Colonel?”

Unlike Daniel MacArthur, Colonel Abell had a working sarcasm detector. “You mean there are other things besides truth, sir?” he said in well-simulated amazement.

“Heh,” Dowling said, which was about as much as he’d laughed at anything the past couple of months. Then he asked, “Is the General Staff concerned about Major General MacArthur’s likely performance?”

Perhaps fifteen seconds of silence followed. Then Colonel Abell said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, General.”

He said no more. Dowling realized that was all the answer he’d get. He also realized it was more responsive than it seemed at first. He said, “If you’re that thrilled with him, why isn’t somebody else in command there?”

After another thoughtful silence, Abell answered, “Military factors aren’t the only ones that go into a war, sir. General MacArthur came . . . highly recommended by the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War.”

“Did he?” Dowling kept his tone as neutral as he could make it.

“As a matter of fact, he did. His service in Houston before the plebiscite particularly drew the committee’s notice, I believe.” Abell sounded scrupulously dispassionate, too. “It was decided that, by giving a little here, we might gain advantages elsewhere.”

It was decided.
Dowling liked that. No one had actually had to decide anything, it said. The decision just sort of fell out of the sky. No one would be to blame for it, not the General Staff and certainly not the Joint Committee. If MacArthur got the command, the committee would leave the War Department alone about some other things. Dowling didn’t know what those would be, but he could guess. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. “I hope it turns out all right,” he said.

“Yes. So do I,” Colonel Abell answered, and hung up.

T
he knock on Seneca Driver’s door came in the middle of the night, long after evening curfew in the colored district in Covington. Cincinnatus’ father and mother went on snoring. Neither of them heard very well these days, and a knock wouldn’t have meant much to her anyhow. Nothing much meant anything to her any more.

But a knock like that meant something to Cincinnatus. It meant trouble. It didn’t sound like the big, booming open-right-now-or-we’ll-kick-it-in knock the police would have used. That didn’t mean it wasn’t trouble, though. Oh, no. Trouble came in all shapes and sizes and flavors. Cincinnatus knew that only too well.

When the knocking didn’t stop, he got out of bed, found his cane, and went to the door. He had to step carefully. Darkness was absolute. Police enforced the blackout in this part of town by shooting into lighted windows. If they saw people, they shot to kill. They were very persuasive.

Of course, Luther Bliss didn’t run the Kentucky State Police any more. He might come sneaking around to shut Cincinnatus up. That occurred to Cincinnatus just as he put his hand on the knob. He shrugged. He couldn’t move fast enough to run away, so what difference did it make?

He opened the door. That wasn’t Luther Bliss out there. It was another Negro. Cincinnatus could see that much—that much and no more. “What you want?” he asked softly. “You crazy, comin’ round here this time o’ night?”

“Lucullus got to see you right away,” the stranger answered.

“During curfew? He nuts? You nuts? You reckon I’m nuts?”

“He reckon you come,” the other man said calmly. “You want I should go back there, tell him he wrong?”

Cincinnatus considered. That was exactly what he wanted. Saying so, though, could have all sorts of unpleasant consequences. He muttered something vile under his breath before replying, “You wait there. Let me get out of my nightshirt.”

“I ain’t goin’nowhere,” the other man said.

I wish I could tell you the same.
Cincinnatus put on shoes and dungarees and the shirt he’d worn the day before. When he went to the door, he asked, “What do we do if the
po
lice see us?”

“Run,” his escort said. Since Cincinnatus couldn’t, that did him no good whatever.

They picked their way along the colored quarter’s crumbling sidewalks. Cincinnatus used his cane to feel ahead of him like a blind man. In the blackout, he almost was a blind man. Starlight might have been beautiful, but it was no damn good for getting around.

His nose proved a better guide. Even in the darkness of the wee small hours, he had no trouble telling when he was getting close to Lucullus Wood’s barbecue place. The man with him laughed softly. “Damn, but that there barbecue smell good,” he said. “Make me hungry jus’ to git a whiff.” Cincinnatus couldn’t argue, not when his own stomach was growling like an angry hound.

The other man opened the door. Cincinnatus pushed through the blackout curtains behind it. He blinked at the explosion of light inside. He wasn’t much surprised to find the place busy regardless of the hour. Several white policemen in gray uniforms were drinking coffee and devouring enormous sandwiches. Cincinnatus would have bet they hadn’t paid for them. When did cops ever pay for anything?