“You might do worse than think about publishing your memoirs in timely fashion,” Abell said. “A lot of high-ranking officers will be doing that. If you get yours out there before most of the others, it can only work to your advantage.”
If I do that, Dowling thought, I will have to talk about lying to the War Department. A good many people would read a memoir of his precisely because he’d worked with Custer for so long. But work with Custer wasn’t all he’d done—not even close. Didn’t the world deserve to know as much?
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“All right.” Abell nodded briskly. He’d solved a problem. Dowling wouldn’t be difficult, not the way Custer had. The General Staff officer went on, “Do you want to head over to the press office to help them draft a release about your retirement?”
“Do I want to?” Dowling shrugged. “Not especially. I will, though.” What did Proverbs say? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth forever. He hadn’t passed away yet, but he was passing. The United States, like the earth, would abide, and he’d helped make that so.
XIX
Hi, hon,” Sally Dover said when Jerry came back to the house. “You got a telephone call maybe half an hour ago.”
“Oh, yeah?” Dover gave his wife the kind of absentminded kiss people who’ve been married a long time often share. “Good thing we didn’t take it out yet, then.” That was coming soon, he feared. You could pretend to stay middle-class for a while when you were out of work, but only for a while. After that, you started saving every cent you could, every way you could. The Dovers weren’t eating meat very often these days, and most of the meat they did eat was sowbelly.
“Here’s the number.” She gave him a scrap of paper.
He’d hoped it would be the Huntsman’s Lodge. It wasn’t. He knew that number by heart, of course. He knew the numbers for just about all the restaurants in Augusta by heart. This wasn’t any of them. If it was anything that had to do with work, whether in a restaurant or not, he would leap at it now.
He dialed the operator and gave her the number. She put the call through. It rang twice before someone on the other end picked it up. “This is Mr. Broxton’s residence.” The voice was unfamiliar. The accent wasn’t—if the man hadn’t been born in Mexico, Jerry Dover was an Eskimo.
Hope was also unfamiliar. Charlemagne Broxton—and wasn’t that a name to remember?—was the principal owner of the Huntsman’s Lodge. Heart thuttering, Dover gave his name. “I’m returning Mr. Broxton’s call,” he said.
“Oh, yes, sir. One moment, please,” the—butler?—said. Back before the war, Charlemagne Broxton had had colored servants. Who among the wealthy in Augusta hadn’t? Where were they now? Nobody who’d lived through the war wanted to think about things like that. Nobody on the Confederate side, anyway—the damnyankees were much too fond of asking such inconvenient and embarrassing questions.
“Broxton here.” This voice was deep and gruff and familiar. “That you, Dover?”
No. My name’s Reilly, and I sell lampshades. The mad, idiot quip flickered through Dover’s mind and, fortunately, went out. “Yeah, it’s me, Mr. Broxton. What can I do for you, sir?”
“Well, I hear you’re looking for work,” Broxton said. “How would you like your old job back?”
“I’d like that fine, Mr. Broxton. But what happened to Willard Sloan?” Jerry Dover asked.
Shut up! Are you out of your mind? Sally mouthed at him. He ignored her. No matter how tight things were, he didn’t want to put a cripple on the street. That could have happened to him if a bullet or a shell fragment changed course by a few inches.
“Well, we had to let him go,” Broxton answered.
“How come?” Dover persisted. “Not for my sake, I hope. He could do the job.” Sally looked daggers at him. He went right on pretending not to see.
“Didn’t have anything to do with that,” Broxton said. Jerry Dover waited. The restaurant owner coughed. “Can you keep this quiet? I don’t want to hurt his chances somewhere else.”
“C’mon, Mr. Broxton. How many years have you known me? Do I blab?” Dover said.
“Well, no.” Charlemagne Broxton coughed again. “We caught him taking rakeoffs from suppliers. Big rakeoffs. And so…”
If some food disappeared from the restaurant, well, that was part of the overhead. The manager and the cooks and the waiters and the busboys all stole a little. Skimming cash was something else again. If you got caught, you got canned. The one might not cost more than the other, but it went over the line. Dover wondered why Sloan needed to do it. Was he a gambler? Was he paying somebody else off? (Dover knew too much about that.) Or did he just get greedy? If he did, he was pretty dumb. And so? People were dumb, all the goddamn time.
“If you need me back, you know I’ll be there,” Dover said.
“Good. I hoped you’d say that.” Charlemagne Broxton coughed one more time. “Ah…There is the question of your pay.” He named a figure just over half of what Dover had been making before he went into uniform.
“You can do better than that, Mr. Broxton,” Dover said. “I happen to know you were paying Willard Sloan more than that.” Sally gave him a Freedom Party salute. He scowled at her; that was dangerous even in private. And if you did it in private you might slip and do it in public. His wife stuck out her tongue at him.
Broxton sighed. “Business isn’t what it used to be. But all right. I’ll give you what I was giving Sloan.” He named another figure, which did indeed just about match what Jerry Dover had heard. Then he said, “Don’t try fooling around to bump it up, the way Sloan did.”
“If you think I will, you better not hire me,” Dover replied.
“If I thought you would, I wouldn’t have called,” Broxton said. “But I didn’t think Sloan would, either, dammit.”
“When do you want me to start?” Dover asked.
“Fast as you can get over to the restaurant,” the owner answered. “I’ve got Luis tending to it now, and I want him to go back to boss cook fast as he can. A greaser in that spot’d steal me blind faster’n Sloan did.”
From what Jerry Dover had seen, honesty and its flip side had little to do with color. He didn’t argue with Charlemagne Broxton, though. “Be there in half an hour,” he promised, and hung up.
Sally flew into his arms and kissed him. “They want you back!” she said. He nodded. Her smile was bright as the sun. She’d worked in a munitions plant during the war, but times had been lean since. Money coming in was a good thing.
After Dover detached himself from her, he put on a tie and a jacket and hustled off to the Huntsman’s Lodge. He didn’t want to be late, even by a minute. As he hurried along Augusta’s battered streets, he contemplated ways and means. He didn’t want the head cook pissed off at him. That was trouble with a capital T. He’d have to find a way to keep Luis sweet, or else get him out of the restaurant.
To his relief, the Mexican didn’t seem angry. “I’d rather cook,” he said. “The suppliers, all they do is try to screw you. You want to take it, Señor Dover, you welcome to it.”
Dover’s grin was pure predator. “I don’t take it, man. I give it.” Luis blinked. Then he grinned, too.
Before Dover could give it, he had to find out what was there. He checked the refrigerators and the produce bins. The menu had changed a little since he went into the Army. Part of that was because some things were unavailable. Part of it was because the damnyankees who made up such a big part of the clientele these days had different tastes from the regulars who’d filled the place before the war.
A glance at the list of telephone numbers in the manager’s office said a good many suppliers had changed, too. Some of the old bunch were probably dead. Some were more likely out of business. And some of the new ones had been giving Sloan kickbacks.
“Damned if you don’t sound like Jerry Dover,” said a butcher Jerry’d known for a long time.
“Yeah, it’s me all
right, Phil,” Dover agreed. “So your days of fucking the Huntsman’s Lodge are over, through, finished. Got it?”
“I wouldn’t do that!” Phil the butcher sounded painfully pure of heart.
He gave Dover a pain, all right. “Yeah, and then you wake up,” he said sweetly.
He also enjoyed introducing himself to the new suppliers. If they gave him what they said they would and gave him decent prices, he didn’t expect to have any trouble with them. If they tried to palm crap off on him…He chuckled in anticipation. They’d find out. Boy, would they ever!
For tonight, the place would run on what Luis had laid in. From what Dover had seen, the boss cook hadn’t done badly. If he didn’t want the job—well, that made things easier all the way around.
Most of the time, Jerry stayed behind the scenes. He would only come out and show himself to the customers if somebody wasn’t happy and the waiters couldn’t set things right by themselves. Tonight, though, he felt not just an urge but an obligation to look around and make sure things ran smoothly. He didn’t want Charlemagne Broxton to regret hiring him back.
Everything seemed all right. The Mexican waiters and busboys sounded different from the Negroes who’d been here before, but they knew what to do. He’d started hiring Mexicans during the war. He’d already seen that they weren’t allergic to work.
The customers seemed happy. Some of them were locals. One or two even recognized him, which left him surprised and pleased. More were U.S. officers. They didn’t know him from a hole in the wall, which suited him fine. If the local women with them did know him, they didn’t let on.
Then, around ten o’clock, a woman waved to him. She wasn’t local, which didn’t mean he didn’t know her. He wished he’d stayed in his office. Melanie Leigh waved again, imperiously this time. He didn’t want to go over to the table she shared with a U.S. colonel, but he feared he had no choice.
“Hello, Jerry,” she said, as brightly as if she hadn’t been his blackmailing mistress and a likely Yankee spy. “Don, this is Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover. We’ve been friends a long time. Jerry, this is Don Gutteridge.”
“I’m very retired, Colonel Gutteridge,” Dover said, hesitantly offering his hand.
Gutteridge shook it. He was about fifty, in good hard shape for his age. “You were in the Quartermaster Corps, isn’t that right?” he said.
Dover nodded. “Uh-huh. How did you know?” He looked at Melanie. Her blue eyes might have been innocence itself…or they might not have. Knowing her, they probably weren’t.
“Let me buy you a drink, Dover, and I’ll tell you about it,” Gutteridge said. “War’s over. We can talk about some things now that we couldn’t before.”
At his wave, a waiter appeared. He ordered whiskey all around, asking Dover with his eyebrows if that was all right. Dover nodded. The waiter went away. Before the drinks came back, Dover asked, “Were you Melanie’s…handler? Isn’t that what the spies call it?”
“Yeah, I was, and yeah, that’s what we call it,” Gutteridge answered easily. “You almost got her caught, you know.”
Jerry Dover shrugged, as impassively as he could. “I gave it my best shot. I could afford the money—and I got value received for it, too,” he said. Melanie turned red; she was fair enough to make that obvious, even in the low light inside the Huntsman’s Lodge. Dover went on, “I could afford that, yeah, but I didn’t want to pass on any secrets. And so I talked to some of our own Intelligence boys, and….”
“I didn’t even wait for the answer to the letter I sent you,” Melanie said. “Something didn’t feel right, so I took a powder.”
The drinks arrived. Dover needed his. “How’d you land on me, anyway?” he said.
“In the trade, it’s called a honey trap,” Gutteridge answered for his former lover. “We ran ’em all over the CSA, with people we might be able to squeeze if push ever came to shove again. It wasn’t like your people didn’t run ’em in the USA, either.”
“A honey trap. Oh, boy,” Jerry Dover said in a hollow voice. He looked at Melanie. “I thought you meant it.”
“With you…I came a lot closer than I did with some others,” Melanie said.
“Great. Terrific.” He finished the drink in a gulp. What did they say? A fool and his money are soon parted. He’d parted with money, and he’d been a fool. He’d needed a while to realize how big a fool he’d been, but here it was in all its glory. He got to his feet. “’Scuse me. I have to go back to work.” Well, he wouldn’t be that kind of fool again—he hoped. He hurried away from the table.
You know what Mobile is?” Sam Carsten said.
“Tell me,” Lon Menefee urged him.
“Mobile is what New Orleans would’ve been if it was settled by people without a sense of humor,” Sam said. New Orleans was supposed to be a town where you could go out and have yourself some fun. People in Mobile looked as if they didn’t enjoy anything.
“Boy, you’ve got something there,” the exec said, laughing. “Even the good-time girls don’t act like they’re having a good time.”
“Yeah, I know.” Sam had seen that for himself. He didn’t like it. “Pretty crazy—that’s all I’ve got to tell you. This was a Navy town, too. If a bunch of horny, drunk sailors won’t liven you up, what will?”
“Beats me,” Menefee said.
Sam pointed. “Crap, that’s their Naval Academy, right over there.” It and the whole town lay under the Josephus Daniels’ guns. Several C.S. Navy ships and submersibles lay at the docks. U.S. caretaker crews were aboard them. Sam didn’t know what would happen to them. People were still arguing about it. Some wanted to take the captured vessels into the U.S. Navy. Others figured the spares problem would be impossible, and wanted to scrap them instead.
“Academy’s out of business,” Menefee said. Sam nodded. All the cadets had been sent home. They weren’t happy about it. Some wanted to join the U.S. Navy instead. Some wanted to shoot every damnyankee ever born. They weren’t quite old enough to have had their chance at that. The exec waved toward the Confederate warships. “What do you think we ought to do with those, sir?”
“Razor blades,” Sam said solemnly. “Millions and millions of goddamn razor blades.”
Menefee grinned. Anything large, metallic, and useless was only good for razor blades—if you listened to sailors, anyhow.
Here on the Gulf coast, winter was soft. Sam had wintered in the Sandwich Islands, so he’d known softer, but this wasn’t bad. Things stayed pretty green. It hadn’t snowed at all—not yet, anyhow. “A couple of more days and it’s 1945,” he said. “Another year down.”
“A big one,” Lon Menefee said. “Never been a bigger one.”
He wasn’t old enough to remember much about 1917. Maybe that had seemed bigger in the USA. Nobody then had known how awful a war could be. A lot of people were inoculated against that ignorance now. And 1917 had shown the USA could beat the Confederate States and their allies. Up till then, the United States never had. Now…Maybe now the USA wouldn’t have to go and do this all over again. Sam could hope so, anyhow.
He didn’t feel like arguing with the younger man, nor was he sure he should. “What with the superbomb and everything, I’d have a devil of a time saying you’re wrong.”
“We’ve got it,” the exec said. “Germany’s got it. The Confederates had it, but they’re out. The limeys had it, but—”
“Maybe they’re out,” Sam put in. “You never can tell about England.”
“Yeah,” Menefee said. “Japan and Russia and France all have the hots for it.”
“I would, too, if somebody else had it and I didn’t,” Sam said. “I remember how rotten I felt when Featherston got Philly. If he’d had a dozen more ready to roll, he might have whipped us in spite of everything.”
“Good thing he didn’t,” the exec said. “But how are you supposed to fight a war if everybody’s got bombs that can blow up a city or a flotilla all at once?”
“Nobody knows,” Sam answer
ed. “I mean nobody. The board that talked to me when we came in for refit right after the war ended asked if I had any bright ideas. Me!” He snorted at how strange that was. “I mean, if they’re looking for help from a mustang with hairy ears, they’re really up the creek.”
“Maybe the Kaiser will be able to keep England from building any more and France from getting started. Japan and Russia, though? Good luck stopping ’em!” Menefee said.
“Uh-huh. That occurred to me, too. I don’t like it any better than you do,” Carsten said.
“It’s going to be trouble, any which way,” Menefee predicted.
“No kidding,” Sam said. “Of course, you can say that any day of the year and be right about nine times out of ten. But just the same…Hell, if Germany and the USA were the only countries that could make superbombs, how could we stay friends? It’d be like we mopped the floor with everybody else, and we had to see who’d end up last man standing.”
“Hard to get a superbomb across the ocean,” Menefee said. “We don’t have a bomber that can lift one off an airplane carrier, and the Kaiser doesn’t have any carriers at all.”
“We don’t have a bomber that can do it now. Five years from now? It’ll be different,” Sam said. “They’ll shrink the bombs and build better airplanes. Turbos, I guess. That’s how those things always work. I remember the wood and wire and fabric two-decker we flew off the Dakota in 1914. We thought we were so modern!” He laughed at his younger self.
Lon Menefee nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right, skipper. But the Germans still don’t have carriers.”
“Maybe they’ll build ’em. Maybe they’ll decide they don’t need ’em. Maybe they’ll make extra-long-range bombers instead. If I were fighting the Russians, I’d sure want some of those. Or maybe they’ll make rockets, the way the damn Confederates did. I bet we try that, too. How’s anybody going to stop a rocket with a superbomb in its nose?”
In at the Death Page 68
