Counting Up, Counting Down

by Harry Turtledove

  Morrie Harris pursed his lips. “Lucy says Pierre says Colquit can talk? That’s not much to go on. For all we know, it could be a trap.”

  “Yeah, it could be,” Michaels said. He and the other FBS man walked along in front of the St. Louis Cathedral, across the street from Jackson Square. They might have been businessmen, they might have been sightseers—though neither businessmen nor sightseers were particularly common in the states that had tried to throw off the Union’s yoke. Michaels went on, “I don’t think it’s a trap, though. Ducange’s first name is—was—Pierre, and we’ve found out he did go to the Original Absinthe House. He could have gotten to know Lucy there.”

  He could have done anything with Lucy there. The feel of her would not leave Michaels’ mind. He knew going back to the upstairs room would be dangerous, for him and for her, but the temptation lingered like a bit of food between the teeth that keeps tempting back the tongue.

  Harris said, “Maybe we ought to just haul her in and grill her till she cracks.”

  “We risk alerting the Rebs if we do that,” Michaels said.

  “Yeah, I know.” Harris slammed his fist into his palm. “I hate sitting around doing nothing, though. If they get everything they need before we find out where they’re squirreling it away, they start their damn uprising and the war effort goes straight out the window.” He scowled, a man in deep and knowing it. “And Colquit the hearse driver? You don’t know his last name? You don’t know which mortuary he works for? Naked little Lucy didn’t whisper those into your pink and shell-like ear?”

  “I told you what she told me.” Michaels stared down at the pavement in dull embarrassment. He could feel his dubiously shell-like ears turning red, not pink.

  “All right, all right.” Harris threw his hands in the air. Most FBS men made a point of not showing what they were thinking—Gary Cooper might have been the Bureau’s ideal. Not Morrie Harris. He wore his feelings on his sleeve. New York City, Michaels thought, with scorn he nearly didn’t notice himself. Harris went on, “We try and find him, that’s all. How many guys are there named Colquit, even in New Orleans? And yeah, you don’t have to tell me we got to be careful. If he knows anything, we don’t want him riding in a hearse instead of driving one.”

  A bit of investigation—if checking the phone book and getting somebody with the proper accent to call the Chamber of Commerce could be dignified as such—soon proved funerals were big business in New Orleans, bigger than most other places, maybe. There were mortuaries and cemeteries for Jews, for Negroes, for French-speakers, for Protestants, for this group, for that one, and for the other. Because New Orleans was mostly below sea level (Michaels heartily wished the town were underwater, too), burying people was more complicated than digging a hole and putting a coffin down in it. Some intrepid sightseers made special pilgrimages just to see the funeral vaults, which struck Michaels as downright macabre.

  Once they had a complete list of funeral establishments, Morrie Harris started calling them one by one. His New York accent was close enough to the local one for him to ask, “Is Colquit there?” without giving himself away as a damnyankee. Time after time, people denied ever hearing of Colquit. At one establishment, though, the receptionist asked whether he meant Colquit the embalmer or Colquit the bookkeeper. He hung up in a hurry.

  Repeated failure left Michaels frustrated. He was about to suggest knocking off for the day when Harris suddenly jerked in his chair as if he’d sat on a tack. He put his hand over the receiver and mouthed, “Said he just got back from a funeral. She’s going out to get him.” He handed the telephone to Michaels.

  After just over a minute, a man’s voice said, “Hello? Who’s this?”

  “Colquit?” Michaels asked.

  “Yeah,” the hearse driver said.

  Maybe it was Michaels’ imagination, but he thought he heard suspicion even in one slurred word. Sounding like someone from the Loyal States got you nowhere around here (of course, a Johnny Reb who managed to get permission to travel to Wisconsin also raised eyebrows up there, but Michaels wasn’t in Wisconsin now). He spoke quickly: “Lucy told me Pierre told her that I should tell you it was okay for you to talk with me.”

  He waited for Colquit to ask what the hell he was talking about, or else to hang up. It would figure if the only steer he’d got was a bum one. But the hearse driver, after a long pause, said, “Yeah?” again.

  Michaels waited for more, but there wasn’t any more. It was up to him, then. “You do know what I’m talking about?” he asked, rather desperately.

  “Yeah,” Colquit repeated: a man of few words.

  “You can’t talk where you are?”

  “Nope,” Colquit said—variety.

  “Will you meet me for supper outside Galatoire’s tonight at seven, then?” Michaels said. With a good meal and some booze in him, Colquit was more likely to spill his guts.

  “Make it tomorrow,” Colquit said.

  “All right, tomorrow,” Michaels said unhappily. More delay was the last thing he wanted. No, not quite: he didn’t want to spook Colquit, either. He started to say something more, but the hearse driver did hang up on him then.

  “What does he know?” Morrie Harris demanded after Michaels hung up, too.

  “I’ll find out tomorrow,” Michaels answered. “The way things have gone since I got down here, that’s progress.” Harris nodded solemnly.

  The wail of police sirens woke Neil Michaels from a sound sleep. The portable alarm clock he’d brought with him was ticking away on the table by his bed. Its radium dial announced the hour: five past three. He groaned and sat up.

  Along with the sirens came the clanging bells and roaring motors of fire engines. Michaels bounced out of bed, ice running down his back. Had the Rebs started their revolt? In that kind of chaos, the pistol he’d brought down from the North felt very small and useless.

  He cocked his head. He didn’t hear any gunfire. If the Southern men were using whatever the Nazis had shipped them, that would be the biggest part of the racket outside. Okay, it wasn’t the big revolt. That meant walking to the window and looking out was likely to be safe. What the devil was going on?

  Michaels pushed aside the thick curtain shielding the inside of his room from the neon glare that was New Orleans by night. Even as he watched, a couple of fire engines tore down Canal Street toward the Vieux Carré. Their flashing red lights warned the few cars and many pedestrians to get the hell out of the way.

  Raising his head, Michaels spotted the fire. Whatever was burning was burning to beat the band. Flames leaped into the night sky, seeming to dance as they flung themselves high above the building that fueled them. A column of thick black smoke marked that building’s funeral pyre.

  “Might as well find out what it is,” Michaels said out loud. He turned on the lamp by the bed and then the radio. The little light behind the dial came on. He waited impatiently for the tubes to get warm enough to bring in a signal.

  The first station he got was playing one of Benny Goodman’s records. Michaels wondered if playing a damnyankee’s music was enough to get you in trouble with some of the fire-eating Johnny Rebs. But he didn’t want to hear jazz, not now. He spun the dial.

  “—terrible fire on Bourbon Street,” an announcer was saying. That had to be the blaze Michaels had seen. The fellow went on, “One of New Orleans’ long-standing landmarks, the Original Absinthe House, is going up in flames even as I speak. The Absinthe House presents shows all through the night, and many are feared dead inside. The building was erected well over a hundred years ago, and has seen—”

  Michaels turned off the radio, almost hard enough to break the knob. He didn’t believe in coincidence, not even a little bit. Somewhere in the wreckage of the Original Absinthe House would lie whatever mortal fragments remained of Lucy the dancer, and that was just how someone wanted it to be.

  He shivered like a man with the grippe. He’d thought about asking Colquit to meet him there instead of at Galatoire’s, so
Lucy could help persuade the hearse driver to tell whatever he knew—and so he could get another look at her. But going to a place twice running was a mistake. That let the opposition get a line on you. Training had saved his life and, he hoped, Colquit’s. It hadn’t done poor Lucy one damn bit of good.

  He called down to room service and asked for a bottle of whiskey. If the man to whom he gave the order found anything unusual about such a request at twenty past three, he didn’t show it. The booze arrived in short order. After three or four good belts, Michaels was able to get back to sleep.

  Colquit didn’t show up for dinner at Galatoire’s that night.

  When Morrie Harris phoned the mortuary the next day, the receptionist said Colquit had called in sick. “That’s a relief,” Michaels said when Harris reported the news. “I was afraid he’d call in dead.”

  “Yeah.” Harris ran a hand through his curly hair. “I didn’t want to try and get a phone number and address out of the gal. I didn’t even like making the phone call. The less attention we draw to the guy, the better.”

  “You said it.” Michaels took off his glasses, blew a speck from the left lens, set them back on his nose. “Now we know where he works. We can find out where he lives. Just a matter of digging through the papers.”

  “A lot of papers to dig through,” Harris said with a grimace, “but yeah, that ought to do the job. Shall we head on over to the Hall of Records?”

  Machine-gun nests surrounded the big marble building on Thalia Street. If the Johnny Rebs ever got their revolt off the ground, it would be one of the first places to burn. The Federal army and bureaucrats who controlled the conquered provinces of the old Confederacy ruled not only by force but also by keeping tabs on their resentful, rebellious subjects. Every white man who worked had to fill out a card each year listing his place of employment. Every firm had to list its employees. Most of the clerks who checked one set of forms against the other were Negroes. They had a vested interest in making sure nobody put one over on the government.

  Tough, unsmiling guards meticulously examined Harris’ and Michaels’ identification papers, comparing photographs to faces and making them give samples of their signatures, before admitting them to the hall. They feared sabotage as well as out-and-out assault. The records stored here helped hold down all of Louisiana.

  Hannibal Dupuy was a large, round black man with some of the thickest glasses Michaels had ever seen. “Mortuary establishments,” he said, holding up one finger as he thought. “Yes, those would be in the Wade Room, in the cases against the east wall.” Michaels got the feeling that, had they asked him about anything from taverns to taxidermists, he would have known exactly where the files were hidden. Such men were indispensable in navigating the sea of papers before them.

  Going through the papers stored in the cases against the east wall of the Wade Room took a couple of hours. Michaels finally found the requisite record. “Colquit D. Reynolds, hearse driver—yeah, he works for LeBlanc and Peters,” he said. “Okay, here’s an address and phone number and a notation that they’ve been verified as correct. People are on the ball here, no two ways about it.”

  “People have to be on the ball here,” Morrie Harris answered. “How’d you like to be a Negro in the South if the whites you’ve been sitting on for years grab hold of the reins? Especially if they grab hold of the reins with help from the Nazis? The first thing they’d do after they threw us damnyankees out is to start hanging Negroes from lampposts.”

  “You’re right. Let’s go track down Mr. Reynolds, so we don’t have to find out just how right you are.”

  Colquit Reynolds’ documents said he lived on Carondelet, out past St. Joseph: west and south of the French Quarter. Harris had a car, a wheezy Blasingame that delivered him and Michaels to the requisite address. Michaels knocked on the door of the house, which, like the rest of the neighborhood, was only a small step up from the shotgun shack level.

  No one answered. Michaels glanced over at Morrie Harris. FBS men didn’t need a warrant, not to search a house in Johnny Reb country. That wasn’t the issue. Both of them, though, feared they’d find nothing but a corpse when they got inside.

  Just as Michaels was about to break down the front door, an old woman stuck her head out a side window of the house next door and said, “If you lookin’ for Colquit, gents, you ain’t gonna find him in there.”

  Morrie Harris swept off his hat and gave a nod that was almost a bow. “Where’s he at, then, ma’m?” he asked, doing his best to sound like a local and speaking to the old woman as if she were the military governor’s wife.

  She cackled like a laying hen; she must have liked that. “Same place you always find him when he wants to drink ’stead of workin’: the Old Days Saloon round the co’ner.” She jerked a gnarled thumb to show which way.

  The Old Days Saloon was painted in gaudy stripes of red, white, and blue. Those were the national colors, and so unexceptionable, but, when taken with the name of the place, were probably meant to suggest the days of the Great Rebellion and the traitors who had used them on a different flag. Michaels would have bet a good deal that the owner of the place had a thick FBS dossier.

  He and Harris walked in. The place was dim and quiet. Ceiling fans created the illusion of coolness. The bruiser behind the bar gave the newcomers the dubious stare he obviously hauled out for any stranger: certainly the four or five men in the place had the look of longtime regulars. Asking which one was Colquit was liable to be asking for trouble.

  One of the regulars, though, looked somehow familiar. After a moment, Michaels realized why: that old man soaking up a beer off in a corner had driven the horse-drawn hearse that had slowed him up on his way back to the hotel a few days before. He nudged Morrie Harris, nodded toward the old fellow. Together, they went over to him. “How you doin’ today, Colquit?” Harris asked in friendly tones. The bartender relaxed.

  Colquit looked up at them with eyes that didn’t quite focus. “Don’t think I know you folks,” he said, “but I could be wrong.”

  “Sure you do,” Harris said, expansive still. “We’re friends of Pierre and Lucy.”

  “Oh, Lord help me.” Colquit started to get up. Michaels didn’t want a scene. Anything at all could make New Orleans go off—hauling a man out of a bar very much included. But Colquit Reynolds slumped back onto his chair, as if his legs didn’t want to hold him. “Wish I never told Pierre about none o’ that stuff,” he muttered, and finished his beer with a convulsive gulp.

  Michaels raised a forefinger and called out to the bartender: “Three more High Lifes here.” He tried to slur his words into a Southern pattern. Maybe he succeeded, or maybe the dollar bill he tossed down on the table was enough to take the edge off suspicions. The Rebs had revered George Washington even during the Great Rebellion, misguided though they were in other ways.

  Colquit Reynolds took a long pull at the new beer. Michaels and Harris drank more moderately. If they were going to get anything out of the hearse driver, they needed to be able to remember it once they had it. Besides, Michaels didn’t much like beer. Quietly, so the bartender and the other locals wouldn’t hear, he asked, “What do you wish you hadn’t told Pierre, Mr. Reynolds?”

  Reynolds looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer were written there. Michaels wondered if he was able to remember; he’d been drinking for a while. Finally, he said, “Wish I hadn’t told him ’bout this here coffin I took for layin’ to rest.”

  “Oh? Why’s that?” Michaels asked casually. He lit a Camel, offered the pack to Colquit Reynolds. When Reynolds took one, he used his Zippo to give the hearse driver a light.

  Reynolds sucked in smoke. He held it longer than Michaels thought humanly possible, then exhaled a foggy cloud. After he knocked the coal into an ashtray, he drained his Miller High Life and looked expectantly at the FBS men. Michaels ordered him another one. Only after he’d drunk part of that did he answer, “On account of they needed a block and tackle to get it onto my hearse an’
another one to get it off again. Ain’t no six men in the world could have lifted that there coffin, not if they was Samson an’ five o’ his brothers. An’ it clanked, too.”

  “Weapons,” Morrie Harris whispered, “or maybe ammunition.” He looked joyous, transfigured, likely even more so than he would have if a naked dancing girl had plopped herself down in his lap. Poor Lucy, Michaels thought.

  He said, “Even in a coffin, even greased, I wouldn’t want to bury anything in this ground—not for long, that’s for damn sure. Water’s liable to seep in and ruin things.”

  Colquit Reynolds sent him a withering, scornful look. “Damnyankees,” he muttered under his breath—and he was helping Michaels. “Lot of the times here, you don’t bury your dead, you put ’em in a tomb up above ground, just so as coffins don’t get flooded out o’ the ground come the big rains.”

  “Jesus,” Morrie Harris said hoarsely, wiping his forehead with a sleeve, and then again: “Jesus.” Now he was the one to drain his beer and signal for another. Once the bartender had come and gone, he went on, “All the above-ground tombs New Orleans has, you could hide enough guns and ammo to fight a big war. Goddamn sneaky Rebs.” He made himself stop. “What cemetery was this at, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “Old Girod, out on South Liberty Street,” Colquit Reynolds replied. “Don’t know how much is there, but one coffinload, anyways.”

  “Thank God some Southern men don’t want to see the Great Rebellion start up again,” Michaels said.

  “Yeah.” Harris drank from his second High Life. “But a hell of a lot of ’em do.”

  Girod Cemetery was hidden away in the railroad yards. A plaque on the stone fence surrounding it proclaimed it to be the oldest Protestant cemetery in New Orleans. Neil Michaels was willing to believe that. The place didn’t seem to have received much in the way of legitimate business in recent years, and had a haunted look to it. It was overgrown with vines and shrubs. Gray-barked fig trees pushed up through the sides of some of the old tombs. Moss was everywhere, on trees and tombs alike. Maidenhair ferns sprouted from the sides of the above-ground vaults; as Michaels had seen, anything would grow anywhere around here.