Dowling wanted to kiss her for reasons that had nothing to do with the way she looked. She was sharp as a tack, by God. Custer had done nothing but go straight at the enemy all through the Great War. First Army had suffered gruesomely, too, sending attack after attack straight into the teeth of the Rebs’ defensive positions. If not for barrels, Custer would probably still be banging heads with his Confederate opposite numbers down in Tennessee.
Now he said, “What was that, Miss Clemens? My ears aren’t quite what they used to be, I’m afraid.” Dowling had seen him use that selective deafness before. He wasn’t too hard of hearing, not considering how old he was. But he was, and always had been, ever so hard of listening.
Patiently, Ophelia Clemens repeated the question, changing not a single word. As she did so, the bells of St. Boniface’s Cathedral, over on the east side of the Red River, announced the noon hour.
Custer had no trouble hearing the bells, even if he managed to miss the question again. He said, “Perhaps you’ll take luncheon with my adjutant and me, Miss Ophelia. There’s a very fine chophouse not ten minutes away that I visit regularly: in fact, I have a motorcar laid on that should be pulling up in front of this building right about now.”
“I’d be delighted,” the reporter said, “provided we can keep working through it. That way, my editors won’t mind picking up the tab for me.”
“Oh, very well,” Custer said with poor grace. He’d no doubt wanted to use the luncheon as a breather from her astute questions. But Ophelia Clemens wasn’t half bad at getting her own way, either.
When they boarded the chauffeured Packard, Custer got his way, placing himself between Dowling and Miss Clemens. The seat was crowded for three: both he and his adjutant took up a good deal of space. Had Custer been so tightly squeezed against another officer, he would have had something rude to say about Dowling’s girth. As things were, he didn’t complain a bit.
“Hy’s, Gallwitz,” Dowling said, realizing the general was otherwise occupied.
“Yes, sir.” The chauffeur put the Packard in gear.
At the chophouse, Custer got himself a double whiskey and tried to press the same on Ophelia Clemens. She contented herself with a glass of red wine. Dowling ordered a Moosehead. Say whatever else you would about them, the Canucks brewed better beer than they did down in the States.
Custer ordered a mutton chop and then, his glass having somehow emptied itself, another double whiskey. Dowling chose the mutton, too; Hy’s did it splendidly. Miss Clemens ordered a small sirloin—likely, Dowling thought, to keep from having to match Custer in any way.
The second double vanished as fast as the first had done. Custer began talking a blue streak. He wasn’t always perfectly clear, but he wasn’t always perfectly clear sober, either. Even after the food arrived, Ophelia Clemens kept taking notes. “Tell me,” she said, “from the viewpoint of the commanding general, what is the hardest thing about occupying Canada?”
“There’s too much of it, and I haven’t got a quarter of the troops I need,” Custer answered. Drunk or sober, that was his constant complaint, and one with a good deal of truth to it, too. He cut a big bite off his chop and continued with his mouth full: “Not a chance in…blazes of getting the men I need, either, not with the…blasted Socialists holding the purse strings in their stingy fists.”
“You would favor a third term for TR, then?” Miss Clemens asked: a shrewd jab if she knew of the rivalry between Roosevelt and Custer, as she evidently did.
I’m a soldier, and shouldn’t discuss politics, would have been the discreet answer. But Custer had already started discussing politics, and was discreet only by accident. He’d just put another forkful of mutton into his mouth when he got the question, and bit down hard on it, the meat, and the fork, all at the same time.
He bit down hard literally as well as metaphorically. Too hard, in fact: Dowling heard a snapping noise. Custer exclaimed in dismay: “Oh, fow Jeshush Chwisht’sh shake! I’ve bwoken my uppuh pwate!” He raised his napkin to his mouth and removed the pieces.
“I’m terribly sorry, General,” Ophelia Clemens said. Her green eyes might have sparkled. They definitely didn’t twinkle. Dowling admired her self-control.
He went over to the bartender and got the name and address of a nearby dentist. “He’ll have you fixed up in jig time, sir,” Dowling said, and then, “I’m sorry, Miss Clemens, but it looks like we’re going to break up early today.”
“That’sh wight,” Custer said, nodding. “I’m showwy, too, Mish Ophewia, but I’ve got to get thish fikshed.”
“I understand.” Ophelia Clemens kept on taking notes and asking questions. Dowling wondered if Custer’s embarrassment would become news from coast to coast. If so, too bad, Dowling thought. Custer had always courted publicity. That usually paid handsome dividends. Every once in a while, it took a bite out of him.
When they got out to the automobile, Dowling told Gallwitz where to take Custer. Ophelia Clemens got in, too. No matter how mushy Custer sounded, she wanted to finish the interview. “Yes, sir,” the chauffeur said, stolid as always. He started the engine; the Packard rolled smoothly down Kennedy Street.
He’d just turned right onto Broadway, where the dentist had his office, when the world blew up behind the motorcar. The roar sounded like the end of the world, that was for sure. Windows shattered on both sides of the street, showering passersby with glass. The Packard’s windshield shattered, too. Most of the glass it held, luckily, blew away from the chauffeur. Gallwitz shouted anyway, in surprise and maybe fright as well. Dowling could hardly blame him.
And Custer shouted, “Shtop the automobiwe! Tu’n awound! Go back! We’ve got to shee what happened and what we can do to he’p!” He should have sounded ridiculous—an old man with no teeth, real or false, in his upper jaw, bellowing like a maniac. Somehow, he didn’t.
“Yes, sir,” Gallwitz said, and spun the motorcar through a U-turn that would have earned him a ticket from any traffic cop in the world.
“My God,” Dowling said when he saw the devastation on Kennedy. “My God,” he repeated when he saw where the devastation centered. “That’s Hy’s. I mean, that was Hy’s.” Only rubble remained of the chophouse, rubble from which smoke and flames were beginning to rise.
“A bomb,” Ophelia Clemens said crisply. “A bomb undoubtedly meant for you, General Custer. What do you make of that?” She poised pencil above notebook to record his answer.
“Cowa’d’sh way to fight,” he said, as if he’d almost forgotten she was there—most unusual for Custer with a journalist, especially a good-looking female journalist, in range. “Canucksh have awwaysh been cowa’d’sh.” Even now, Custer got in a dig at the country from which the men who’d killed his brother had come. He pounded Gallwitz on the shoulder. “Shtop!” Gallwitz did, as close as he could get to the shattered Hy’s. Custer sprang out of the Packard. “Come on, Dowwing! Let’sh shee if we can weshcue anybody!”
Dowling came. Men and women were spilling out of the shops and houses and offices around Hy’s, some bleeding and screaming, others looking around for someone to lead them into action. Custer did just that, and people hastened to obey his orders even if his voice did sound mushy or maybe drunk. With a plain problem set right in front of his face, he was a world-beater.
“Buwwy!” he cried when Dowling and a fellow in a barber’s white shirt and apron dragged a groaning, smoke-blackened man from the ruins of Hy’s. “Now—have we got a docto’? We need a bucket bwigade to keep the fwamesh down unti’ a fiwe engine getsh heah. You, you, and you! Find wunning watuh! We’ve got to do what we can!”
“He’s in his element, isn’t he?” Ophelia Clemens said to Dowling.
“Yes, ma’am,” Custer’s adjutant answered. Loyally, he went on, “You see what a fine commander he is.”
“Oh, poppycock,” she said. “These are the talents of a captain or a major, not the talents of a four-star general. The evidence that he has the talents of a four-star general
is moderately thin on the ground, wouldn’t you say?”
“No, ma’am,” Dowling replied, loyal still, though he thought Miss Clemens had hit the nail right on the head. With someone pointing his battalion at an enemy strongpoint and saying Take it, Custer would go right at it, ahead of all his men, and take the position or die trying. During the Great War, an awful lot of his men had died trying, because smashing through was all he’d ever known.
Here, for one brief shining moment, fate—and the luck of a broken dental plate—had put him back in his element. Was he enjoying himself? Looking at him, listening to his insistent commands, Dowling could not doubt he was.
A woman stuck a box of arrowroot cough lozenges into her handbag. “Thank you kindly,” she told Reggie Bartlett. “Freedom!”
Reggie grimaced, as he did whenever he heard that salutation. “Those people are crazy, and there’s more of them every day,” he said to his boss.
Jeremiah Harmon shrugged. “Their money spends as good as anybody else’s,” he said, and then gave a thumbs-down. “Which is to say, not very.” He laughed. So did Reggie. He’d charged the woman a quarter of a million dollars for her lozenges, and wasn’t sure whether the drugstore had made or lost money on the transaction.
A tall, rather pale man about his own age came up to the counter and set down a jar of shaving soap. He looked vaguely familiar, though Bartlett couldn’t recall where he’d seen him before. “Good to hear somebody who can’t stand the Freedom Party lunatics and isn’t afraid to come out and say so,” he remarked.
When he spoke, Reggie knew him. “You’re Tom, uh, Brearley. You married Maggie Simpkins after she showed me the door.”
“So I did, and happy I did it, too,” Brearley answered. He looked at Reggie out of the corner of his eye, as if wondering whether the druggist’s assistant were about to grab a stove lifter and try to brain him with it.
Reggie harbored no such intentions. He wanted to talk about the Freedom Party, was what he wanted to do. Instead of a stove lifter, he brandished a newspaper at Brearley. “Ten thousand people for a rally down in Charleston the other day, if you can believe it. Ten thousand people!” He opened up the paper and went hunting for the quotation he wanted: “‘Party district manager Roger Kimball told the cheering crowd, “This is only the beginning.” ’”
“Jesus Christ!” Brearley started violently, then checked himself. “Doesn’t surprise me one damn bit that he ended up in the Freedom Party,” he said. “He would, as a matter of fact. As bloodthirsty a son of a bitch as ever hatched out of his egg.”
“You know him?” Reggie asked, as he was surely supposed to.
“I was his executive officer aboard the Bonefish for most of the last two years of the war—till the very end.” Brearley looked as if he’d started to add something to that, but ended up holding his peace.
“That’s a real kick in the head.” Bartlett shuffled through the newspaper again. “Other thing it says here is that a gal named Anne Colleton’s been pumping money into the Party down in South Carolina. ‘We have to put our country back on its feet again,’ she says.”
He’d surprised Brearley again. “You know Anne Colleton?” the former Navy man asked.
“If I knew a rich lady, would I be working here?” Bartlett asked. From the back of the drugstore, his boss snorted. Brearley chuckled. Reggie went on, “On the Roanoke front, though, I had a CO name of Colleton, Tom Colleton. He was from South Carolina, too. Her husband, I bet, or maybe her brother.”
“Brother.” Brearley’s voice held certainty. “She’s not married. Roger knows her, any way you want to take the word. Every time he’d come back to the boat after a leave, he’d brag like a fifteen-year-old who just laid his first nigger whore.”
“Small world,” Reggie said. “You know him, I know her brother, they know each other.” He blinked; he hadn’t intended to burst into rhyme.
“I wonder how well they know each other,” Brearley said in musing tones. He caught the gleam in Reggie’s eye and shook his head. “No, not like that. But Roger’s done some things that don’t bear bragging about. You’d best believe he has.”
“Oh, yeah?” Reggie set his elbows on the countertop and leaned across it. “What kind of things?”
But Brearley shook his head in a different way. “The less I say, the better off I’ll be, and the better off you’re liable to be, too. But if I could tell my story to Anne Colleton, that might drive a wedge between ’em, and that couldn’t help hurting the Party.”
“Anything that hurts the Freedom Party sounds good to me.” Reggie leaned forward even more. “How about this? Suppose I write a letter to Tom Colleton? I’ll tell him you want to talk to his sister because you know something important.”
“He’s liable to be in the Freedom Party up to his eyebrows, too,” Brearley said.
“If he is, I’m only out a stamp,” Bartlett answered. “What’s ten grand? Not worth worrying about. But his name isn’t in the paper, so maybe he’s not.”
“All right, go ahead and do it,” Brearley said. “But be mysterious about it, you hear? Don’t mention my name. Just say you know somebody. This really could be my neck if these people decide to come after me, and they might.”
“I’ll be careful,” Bartlett promised. He wondered if Brearley was in as much danger as he thought he was, or if he was letting his imagination run away with him. Had Reggie cared more about losing Maggie Simpkins, he might have thought about avenging himself on the ex–Navy man. As a matter of fact, he did think about it, but only idly.
Brearley took out his wallet. “What do I owe you for this?” he asked, pointing to the almost forgotten shaving soap.
“Four and a quarter,” Reggie said. “Good thing you got it now. If you came in here next week, you can bet it’d cost more.”
“Yeah, that’s not as bad as I thought.” Brearley handed Reggie a crisp, new $500,000 banknote. Reggie gave him a $50,000 banknote, two $10,000 notes, and one valued at a minuscule $5,000. As he made change, he laughed, remembering when—not so very long before—the idea of a $5,000 banknote, let alone one worth half a million dollars, would have been too absurd for words.
“I will write that letter,” Reggie said. “I saw this Jake Featherston on a stump not long after the war ended—so long ago, you could still buy things for a dollar. I thought he was crazy then, and I haven’t seen anything since to make me want to change my mind.”
“Roger Kimball’s not crazy, but he can be as mean as a badger with a tin can tied to its tail,” Brearley said. “Not the sort of fellow you’d want for an enemy, and not the sort of fellow who’s got a lot of savory friends.”
“Maybe we’ll be able to bring both of ’em down, or help, anyway,” Reggie said. “Here’s hoping.” He paused. “If you care to, give my best to Maggie. If you don’t care to, I’ll understand, believe me.”
“Maybe I will and maybe I won’t.” Brearley picked up the shaving soap and walked out of the drugstore. Bartlett nodded at his back. He hadn’t expected anything much different. Then he nodded again. Anything he could do to sidetrack the Freedom Party struck him as worthwhile.
Jeremiah Harmon came up and set a bottle full of murky brown liquid on the shelf below the counter. “Here’s Mr. Madison’s purgative,” the druggist said. “If this one doesn’t shift him, by God, nothing ever will. I reckon he’ll be by after he gets off at the bank.”
“All right, boss,” Bartlett said. “I’ll remember it’s there.”
“That’s fine.” Harmon hesitated, then went on, “You want to be careful what you get yourself into, Reggie. I heard some of what you and that fellow were talking about. All I’ve got to say is, when a little man gets in the prize ring with a big tough man, they’re going to carry him out kicking no matter how game he is. You understand what I’m telling you?”
“I sure do.” Reggie took a deep breath. “Other side of the coin is this, though: if nobody gets in the ring with a big tough man, he’ll go and pick figh
ts on his own.” That didn’t come out exactly the way he’d wanted it to; he hoped Harmon followed what he’d meant.
Evidently, the druggist did. “All right, son,” he said. “It’s a free country—more or less, anyway. You can do as you please. I wanted to make sure you didn’t do anything before you thought it through.”
“Oh, I’ve done that,” Reggie assured him. “My own government sent me out into the trenches. The damnyankees shot me twice and caught me twice. What can the Freedom Party do to me that’s any worse?”
“Nothing, maybe, if you put it like that,” Harmon allowed. “All right, then, go ahead—not that you need my permission. And good luck to you. I’ve got the feeling you’re liable to need it.” He went back to his station at the rear of the store and began compounding another mixture.
In due course, Mr. Madison did appear. Reggie’s opinion was that his bowels would perform better if he lost weight and got some exercise. Like most people, Madison cared nothing for Reggie’s opinion. Studying the bottle, he said, “You’re sure this one is going to work?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Reggie said. “Mr. Harmon says it’s a regular what-do-you-call-it—a depth charge, that’s it. Whatever’s troubling you, it won’t be.”
“Christ, I hope not.” As Mrs. Dinwiddie had done before, as people had a habit of doing, the bank clerk proceeded to tell Bartlett much more about the state of his intestinal tract than Reggie had ever wanted to know. After far too long, Madison laid down his money, picked up the precious purgative, and departed.
Reggie paid less attention to his work the rest of that day than he should have. He knew as much, but couldn’t help it. His boss overlooked lapses that would have earned a dressing-down most of the time. Harmon had no great love for the Freedom Party, even if he declined to get very excited about it.
At last, Reggie got to go home. The bare little flat where he lived wasn’t anything much. Tonight, it didn’t need to be. He found a clean sheet of paper and wrote the letter. Then—another triumph—he found an envelope. He frowned. How to address it?
Blood and Iron Page 36
