“There you go. Let me cut you some orders, then. I’ll send a wire to the outfit down there, tell ’em they’ve got their man. And we’ll give you a lift to the train station.” The sergeant sketched a salute. “Pleasure doing business with you, sir.”
“Back at you.” Pound returned the military courtesy.
Seeing the train gave him pause. It said—screamed, really—that the fighting wasn’t over yet. A freight car full of junk preceded the locomotive. If the track was mined, the car’s weight would set off the charge and spare the engine. There was a machine gun on the roof of every fourth car, and several more gun barrels stuck out from the caboose. You didn’t carry that kind of firepower unless you thought you’d need it.
He already knew what Georgia looked like. He’d helped create that devastation himself. He was moderately proud of it, or more than moderately. He changed trains in Atlanta. Walking through the station hurt, but he didn’t let on. Released Confederate POWs in their shabby uniforms, now stripped of emblems, also made their way through the place. They were tight-lipped and somber. Maybe the people in Tallahassee didn’t know the CSA had lost the war, but these guys did.
The new train also had a freight car in front and plenty of guns up top. Pound looked out on wrecked vehicles and burnt farmhouses and hasty graves—the detritus of war. He thought the devastation would have a sharp edge marking the U.S. stop line, but it didn’t. Bombers had made sure of that. Towns had got leveled. Bridges were out. He sat there for several hours waiting for the last touches to be put on repairs to one.
“Why don’t we go back or go around?” somebody in the car asked.
“Because that would make sense,” Pound said, and no one seemed to want to argue with him.
He got into Tallahassee in the late afternoon, then, and not the morning as he’d been scheduled to do. It wasn’t remotely his fault, but he didn’t think it would endear him to his new CO, whoever that turned out to be.
A sergeant standing just inside the doorway held a sign that said LIEUTENANT POUND. “That’s me,” Pound said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”
“It’s all right, sir. I know the railroads on the way down here are really screwed up,” the noncom said. “I’ve got an auto waiting for you. Can I grab your duffel? Colonel Einsiedel said you were coming off a wound.”
“Afraid I am.” Pound took the green-gray canvas sack off his shoulder and gave it to the sergeant. “Sorry to put you to the trouble, but if you’re kind enough to offer I’ll take you up on it.”
“Don’t worry about it, sir. All part of the service.” The sergeant was in his early twenties. He’d probably been a private when the war started, if he’d been in the Army at all. Michael Pound knew what his curious glance meant. You’re the oldest goddamn first looey I ever saw. But the man didn’t say anything except, “I’ve got it. Follow me.”
The motorcar was a commandeered Birmingham. The sergeant drove him past the bomb-damaged State Capitol and then north and east up to Clark Park, where the armored regiment was bivouacked. It wasn’t a long drive at all. “Tallahassee’s the capital of Florida, isn’t it?” Pound said. “I thought there’d be more of it.”
“It’s only about a good piss wide, sure as hell,” the sergeant agreed. “Christ, the Legislature only meets for a coupla months in odd-numbered years. We had to call ’em back into session so we could tell ’em what to do.”
“How did they like that?” Pound asked.
“Everybody hates us. We’re Yankees,” the sergeant said matter-of-factly. “But if anybody fucks with us, we grease him. It’s about that simple. All of our barrels have a .50-caliber machine gun mounted in front of the commander’s cupola, and we carry lots of canister, not so much HE and AP. We’re here to smash up mobs, and we damn well do it.”
“Sounds good to me.” Pound had wished for a machine gun of his own plenty of times in the field. Now he’d have one—and a .50-caliber machine gun could chew up anything this side of a barrel. And if God wanted a shotgun, He’d pick up a barrel’s cannon firing canister. Canister wouldn’t just smash up a mob—it would exterminate one.
Barbed wire surrounded Clark Park. So did signs with skulls and crossbones on them and a blunt warning message: HEADS UP! MINES! U.S. guards carrying captured C.S. automatic rifles talked to the sergeant before swinging back a stout, wire-protected gate and letting the Birmingham through.
“Had trouble with auto bombs or people bombs?” Pound asked. “Do they shoot mortars at you in the middle of the night?”
“They tried that shit once or twice, sir,” his driver answered. “When we take hostages now, we’re up to killing a hundred for one. They know we’d just as soon see ’em dead, so they don’t mess with us like they did when we first got here. Now they’ve seen we really mean it.”
“That sounds good to me, too.” Pound was and always had been a firm believer in massive retaliation.
The sergeant drove him up to a tent flying a regimental flag—a pugnacious turtle on roller skates wearing a helmet and boxing gloves—that looked as if some Hollywood animation studio had designed it. Colonel Nick Einsiedel looked as if some Hollywood casting office had designed him. He was tall and blond and handsome, and he wore the ribbons for a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.
“Good to have you with us,” he told Pound. “I did some asking around—you’ve got a hell of a record. Shame you didn’t make officer’s rank till the middle of the war.”
“I liked being a sergeant, sir,” Pound said. “But this isn’t so bad.” As Einsiedel laughed, he went on, “How can I be most useful here, sir?”
“That’s the kind of question I like to hear,” the regimental CO replied. “We’re trying to be tough but fair—or fair but tough, if you’d sooner look at it that way.”
“Sir, if I’ve got plenty of canister for the big gun and a .50 up on my turret along with the other machine guns, you can call it whatever you want,” Pound said. “The people down here will damn well do what I tell ’em to, and that’s what counts.”
Colonel Einsiedel smiled. “You’ve got your head on straight, by God.”
“I’ve been through the mill. Maybe it amounts to the same thing.”
“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Einsiedel said. “One thing we don’t do unless we can’t help it, though—we don’t send a barrel out by itself. Too many blind spots, too good a chance for somebody to throw a Featherston Fizz at you.”
That didn’t sound so good. “I thought the locals were supposed to be too scared of us to try any crap,” Pound said.
“They are—supposed to be,” the regimental CO answered. “But in case they aren’t, we don’t want to lead them into temptation, either. Does that suit you?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I want to know what I’m getting into, that’s all,” Pound said.
Einsiedel gave him a crooked grin. “Whatever you get into down here, make sure you go to a pro station afterwards, ’cause chances are you’ll end up with a dose if you don’t.”
“Understand, sir,” Pound said, thinking back to his joke with the doctor before he got released. “Uh—is there an officers’ brothel in town?”
“Officially, no. Officially, all the brown-noses back up in the USA would pitch a fit if we did things like that. Unofficially, there are two. Maude’s is around the corner from the Capitol. Miss Lucy’s is a couple of blocks farther south. I like Maude’s better, but you can try ’em both.”
“I expect I will. All the comforts of home—or of a house, anyway,” Pound said. Colonel Einsiedel winced. Pound figured he’d got off on the right foot.
Like most Congressional veterans, Flora Blackford spent most of her time in Philadelphia. As summer swung towards autumn every other year, though, she went back to the Lower East Side in New York City to campaign for reelection. And this was a Presidential election year, too.
She thought Charlie La Follette ought to win in a walk. But the Democrats had nominated a native New Yorker, a hotshot prosecutor named Dewey, to
run against him. Dewey and his Vice Presidential candidate, a blunt-talking Senator from Missouri, were running an aggressive campaign, crisscrossing the country saying they could have handled the war better and would ride herd on the beaten Confederacy harder. President La Follette and his running mate, Jim Curley of Massachusetts, had to content themselves with saying that the Socialists damn well had won the war. Would that be enough? Unless people were uncommonly ungrateful, Flora thought it would.
Normally, she wouldn’t have wanted to see Congressman Curley on the ticket. He came straight from the Boston machine, an unsavory if effective apparatus. But Dewey’s would-be veep was a longtime Kansas City ward heeler, and the Kansas City machine was even more unsavory (and perhaps even more effective) than Boston’s.
Visiting Socialist Party headquarters felt like coming home again. The only difference from when she worked there thirty years earlier was that the butcher’s shop underneath the place was owned by the son of the man who’d run it then. Like his father, Sheldon Fleischmann was a Democrat. And, like his father, he often sent cold cuts up anyhow.
The district had changed. Far fewer people here were fresh off the boat than had been true in 1914. Native-born Americans tended to be more conservative than their immigrant parents. All the same, Flora worried more about the national ticket than her own seat. The fellow the Democrats had nominated, a theatrical booking agent named Morris Kramer, had to spend most of his time explaining why he hadn’t been in uniform during the war.
“He’s got a hernia,” Herman Bruck said. He’d been a Socialist activist as long as Flora had. “So all right—they didn’t conscript him. But do you think anybody wants a Congressman who wears a truss?”
“If he didn’t wear it, his brains would fall out,” somebody else said. That got a laugh from everyone in the long, smoky room. Half the typewriters stopped clattering for a moment. The other half wouldn’t have stopped for anything this side of the Messiah.
“I won’t give him a hard time for not going into the service,” Flora said. “The voters know the story.” If they didn’t know it, she would make damn sure they found out before Election Day. “I want to show them what having somebody who’s been in Congress for a while means to them.”
“Well, you’ve got a chance to do that,” Bruck said.
“I know,” Flora answered unhappily. During the Great War, C.S. bombers hardly ever got as far north as New York City. They did little damage on their handful of raids. It wasn’t like that this time around, worse luck.
Most of the Confederates’ bombs had fallen on the port—most, but far from all. Some rained down on the city at random. In a place so full of people, the bombardiers must have assumed they would do damage wherever their explosions came down—and who was to say they were wrong?
Flora’s district had suffered along with the rest of New York. Bombs had blown up apartment buildings and clothing factories and block after block of shops. Incendiaries had charred holes in the fabric of the city. Rebuilding wouldn’t be easy or quick or cheap.
One advantage incumbency gave Flora was her connections down in Philadelphia. If she asked for money to help put her district back together, she was more likely to get it than a Congressman new in his seat.
Her campaign posters got right down to business when they talked about that. DO YOU WANT A NEW KID ON YOUR BLOCK? they asked, and showed Morris Kramer in short pants pulling a wheeled wooden duck on a string. That wasn’t even remotely fair, but politics wasn’t about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side’s guy out. Once you’d done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren’t worth a dime.
“We want to make this district a better place than it was before the war,” Flora said to whoever would listen to her. “Not the same as it used to be, not just as good as it used to be. Better. If we can’t do that, we might as well leave the ruins alone, to remind us we shouldn’t be dumb enough to fight another war.”
Herman Bruck brought a blond kid in a captain’s uniform up to her one afternoon at the Socialist Party headquarters. “Flora, I’d like you to meet Alex Swartz,” he said.
“Hello, Captain Swartz,” Flora said. “What can I do for you?” She had no doubt that the earnest young officer with a roll of papers under one arm was on the up and up. Whether Herman Bruck had an ulterior motive in introducing him…Well, she’d find out about that.
“Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Alex Swartz said. He had broad, Slavic cheekbones and a narrow chin, giving his face a foxy cast. “I graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture two weeks before the war started. I’m on leave right now—in a week, I go back down to occupation duty in Mississippi. But I wanted to show you some of the sketches I’ve made for how things might look once we put them back together.”
“I’d like to see,” Flora said, not exaggerating too much. If the sketches turned out to be garbage, she could come out with polite nothings, let the captain down easy, and then get on with her reelection campaign and with taking care of the damage in the district.
But they weren’t garbage. As he unrolled them one by one and talked about what he had in mind, she saw she wasn’t the only one who’d been thinking along those lines. The sketches showed a more spacious, less jam-packed, less hurried place than the one her constituents lived in now.
“This is a lot like what I have in mind,” she said. “I particularly like the way you use green space, and the way you don’t forget about theaters and libraries. The next question is, how much does it all cost?” That was the one that separated amateurs from professionals. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Alex Swartz hadn’t worried about it at all.
He had, though. “Here—I’ve made some estimates,” he said, and pulled a couple of folded sheets of paper from his left breast pocket. “Not cheap, but I hope not too outrageous.”
“Let’s have a look.” Flora peered through the bottoms of her bifocals. She found herself nodding. Captain Swartz had it just about right—what he was proposing wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t too expensive, either. If you wanted to do things right, you had to spend some money. “Not bad, Captain. Not bad at all.”
“Do you think…there’s any chance it will happen?” he asked.
“There’s some chance that some of it will,” she answered. “I can’t say any more than that. Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started—you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy.”
Swartz nodded. “Got you.”
“Are you sure? You’d better, or you’ll end up very disappointed. Most things end up as compromises, as committee decisions that don’t make too many people too unhappy. Some good stuff goes down the drain. So does some crap. Which is which…depends on who’s talking a lot of the time.”
“Getting some of this built is better than leaving it all as pretty pictures,” Captain Swartz insisted. “Pretty pictures are too easy.”
“That sounds like the right attitude,” Flora said.
“One thing you find out pretty darn quick in the Army—you won’t get everything you want,” Swartz said.
“It’s no different in politics,” Flora said. “We don’t always have to shoot at people to make that clear, though, which is all to the good.”
Captain Swartz looked about sixteen when he grinned. “I bet.” Then the grin slipped. “Didn’t I hear your son got wounded? How’s he doing?”
“He’s getting better,” Flora answered. “It was a hand wound—nothing life-threatening, thank God.” And it kept him out of action while the war finally ran down. Maybe it kept him from stopping something worse. She could hope so, anyway. Hoping so made her feel not quite so bad when she thought about what did happen to Joshua.
“Glad to hear it,” the architect said. “I admire you for not keeping
him out of the Army or getting him a job counting paper clips in Nevada or something. You would’ve had the clout to do it—I know that.”
“Captain, I’ll tell you what isn’t even close to a secret. I’m his mother, after all. If he’d let me do something like that, I would have done it in a heartbeat,” Flora answered. “But he didn’t, and so I didn’t. If, God forbid, anything worse would have happened, I don’t know how I would have looked at myself in a mirror afterwards.”
“Well, I can see that,” Alex Swartz said. “But I can see how he feels about it, too. You don’t want to think your mother’s apron strings kept you out of danger everybody else had to face.”
“No, and you don’t want to get killed, either.” Flora sighed. “He came through it, and he didn’t get hurt too bad. That means I don’t hate myself…too much.” She tapped an unrolled drawing with the nail of her right index finger. “I really think you’re on to something here with these sketches. I hope we can make some of them more than sketches, if you know what I mean. The district will be better off if we can.”
His eyes glowed. “Thank you!”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “Remember, I grew up here, in a coldwater flat. We’re too crowded. I like the open space that’s part of your plan. We need more of it here. We’d be better off if the whole district had more, not just the parts the Confederates bombed.”
“Using war as an engine for urban improvement—” Captain Swartz began.
“Is wasteful,” Flora finished for him. She didn’t know if that was what he was going to say, but it was the truth. She went on, “But if it’s the only engine we’ve got, not using it would be a crime. And the way things are on the Lower East Side, I’m afraid it is.”
“If I got out of the Army before Election Day, I was going to vote for you anyway,” he said. “Now I want to vote for you two or three times.”
From behind Flora, Herman Bruck said, “That can probably be arranged.”
“Hush, Herman,” Flora said, though she knew he might not be kidding. She turned back to Captain Swartz. “Instead of doing that, take your plans to Morris Kramer. If he wins, he can do his best to push them through, too. And they’re important. They ought to go forward regardless of politics.” Did she really say that? Did she really mean it? She nodded to herself. She did. When it came down to the district, you could…every once in a while.
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