Settling Accounts Return Engagement: Book One of the Settling Accounts Trilogy

by Harry Turtledove

  “That gentleman” came in. He was in his fifties: somewhere not too far from Potter’s age. He was tall and skinny, and carried himself like a man who’d fought in the Great War. Potter was rarely wrong about that; he knew the signs too well. The gentleman wore a travel-wrinkled black suit, a white shirt, a dark fedora, and a somber blue tie. “Pleased to meet you, General Potter,” he said, and held out his hand.

  Potter took it. The newcomer’s grip was callused and firm. “Pleased to meet you, too, ah. . . .” Potter’s voice trailed away.

  “Orson will do,” the other man said. “It was enough of a name to get me across the border. It will be enough of a name to get me back. And if I need another one, I can be someone else—several someones, in fact. I have the papers to prove it, too.”

  “Good,” Potter said, thinking it was good if the Yankees didn’t search Orson too thoroughly, anyhow. “You didn’t have any trouble crossing into Texas?”

  Orson smiled. “Oh, no. None at all. For one thing, the war’s hardly going on in those parts. And, for another, you Easterners don’t understand how many square miles and how few people there are in that part of the continent. There aren’t enough border guards to keep an eye on everything—not even close.”

  “I see that. You’re here, after all,” Potter said.

  “Yes. I’m here. Shall we find out how we can best use each other?” Orson, plainly, had had fine lessons in cynicism somewhere. He went on, “You people have no more use for us than the United States do. But the enemy of one’s enemy is, or can be, a friend. And so . . .”

  “Indeed. And so,” Clarence Potter said. “If Utah—excuse me, if Deseret—does gain its independence from the United States, you can rest assured that the Confederate States will never trouble it.”

  The Mormon smiled thinly. “A promise worth its weight in gold, I have no doubt. But, as it happens, I believe you, because no matter how the war goes the Confederate States and Deseret are unlikely to share a border.”

  Not only a cynic but a realist. Potter’s smile showed genuine good nature. “I do believe I’m going to enjoy doing business with you, Mr. . . . uh, Orson.”

  “That’s nice,” Orson said. “Now, what kind of business can we do? How much help can you give a rising?”

  “Not a lot, not directly. You have to know that. You can read a map—and you’ve traveled over the ground, too. But when it comes to railroads and highways—well, we may be able to do more than you think.”

  “Maybe’s a word that makes a lot of people sorry later,” Orson observed.

  “Well, sir, if you’d rather, I’ll promise you the moon,” Potter said. “I won’t be able to deliver, but I’ll promise if you want.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks,” Orson said. “Maybe isn’t much, but it’s better than a lie.”

  “We’re going in the same direction—or rather, we both want to push the USA in the same direction,” Potter said. “It’s in the Confederacy’s interest to give you a hand—and it’s in your interest to work with us, too, because where else are you going to find yourselves any friends?”

  “General, we’ve been over that. We aren’t going to find any friends anywhere, and that includes you,” Orson answered calmly. “Do you think I don’t know that the Confederacy persecutes us, too? We’ve also been over that. But it’s all right. We’re not particularly looking for friends. All we want is to be left alone.”

  “Well, Jeff Davis said the same thing when the Confederate States seceded,” Potter answered. “We have a few things in common, I’d say. And you haven’t got any more use for niggers than we do, have you?”

  “Depends on what you mean,” Orson said. “We don’t really want to have anything to do with them. But I don’t think we’d ever do some of the things you people are doing, either. I don’t know how much of what I hear is true, but. . . .”

  Clarence Potter had a pretty good idea of how much of rumor was true. Here, he didn’t altogether disapprove of what the Freedom Party was up to. He hadn’t trusted the Negroes in the CSA since 1915. He said, “You can afford to take that line, sir, because you can count the niggers in Utah on your thumbs, near enough. Here in the CSA, they’re about one in three. We have to think about them more than you do.”

  “I don’t believe, if our positions were reversed, that we would do what you are doing, or what I hear you’re doing,” Orson replied.

  Easy enough for you to say. But the words didn’t cross Potter’s lips. That wasn’t for fear of insulting Orson. He could afford to insult him if he wanted to. The Mormon was a beggar, and couldn’t be a chooser. On reflection, though, Potter decided he believed Orson. His people had always shown a peculiar, stiff-necked pride.

  Instead, the Confederate Intelligence officer said, “And how are the Indians who used to live in Utah? Will you invite them to join your brave new land?”

  Orson turned red. Potter wasn’t surprised. The Mormons had got on with the local Indians no better than anyone else in the United States did. The USA might have a better record dealing with Negroes. The CSA did when it came to Indians.

  “What do you want from us?” Potter asked again, letting the Mormon down easy. “Whatever it is, if we’ve got it, you’ll have it.”

  “Grenades, machine guns—and artillery, if you can find a way to get it to us,” Orson answered. “But the first two especially. Rifles we’ve got. We’ve had rifles for a long time.”

  “We can get the weapons over the border for you. If you got in, we can get them out,” Potter promised. “It’s just a matter of setting up exactly where and when. How you get them to where you use them after that is your business.”

  “I understand.” Orson snapped his fingers. “Oh—one other thing. Land mines. Heavy land mines. They’re going to throw barrels at us. They didn’t have those the last time around. We’ll need something to make them say uncle.”

  “Heavy land mines.” Potter scribbled a note to himself. “Yes, that makes sense. How are you fixed for gas masks?”

  “Pretty well, but we could probably use more,” Orson answered. “We didn’t have to worry much about gas the last time around, either.”

  “All right.” Potter nodded. “One more question, then. This one isn’t about weapons. What will Governor Young do when Utah rises? What will you do about him if he tries to clamp down on the rising?” That was two questions, actually, but they went together like two adjoining pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.

  Orson said, “There are some people who still think we can get along with the USA. We’ll take care of them when the time comes. We have a list.” He spoke without anger but with grim certainty. He didn’t name Heber Young—one of Brigham’s numerous grandsons. On the other hand, he didn’t say the governor wasn’t on the list, either.

  “That’s good,” Clarence Potter said. “I was hoping you might.”

  The Mormon—nationalist? patriot? zealot? what was the right word?—eyed him with no great liking. “Occurs to me, General, that it’s just as well we won’t share a border no matter how things turn out. You’d be just as much trouble as the United States are.”

  “You may be right,” Potter said, thinking Orson certainly was. “But what does that have to do with the price of beer?”

  Beer. Orson’s lips silently shaped the word. Potter wondered how badly he’d just blundered. The man in the somber suit undoubtedly didn’t drink. But Orson could be practical. After a small pause, he nodded. “Point taken, sir. Right now, it doesn’t have anything to do with anything.”

  “We agree on that. If we don’t agree on other things—well, so what?” Potter said. “I’m going to take you to my colleagues in Logistics. They’ll arrange to get you what you need when you need it.” He got to his feet.

  So did Orson. He held out his hand. “Thank you for your help. I realize you have your own selfish reasons for giving it, but thank you. Regardless of what you’re doing here in the CSA, you really are helping freedom in Deseret.”

  I love you, too,
Potter thought. Whatever his opinion of Orson’s candor, it didn’t show on his face. But as they walked to the door, he couldn’t help asking, “Would the, um, gentiles in your state agree with you?”

  Orson stopped. His face didn’t show much, either. But his pale eyes blazed. “If they’d cared what happened to us for the past sixty years, maybe I would worry more about what happens to them. As things are, General . . . As things are, what do they have to do with the price of beer right now?”

  “Touché,” Potter murmured. He took the Mormon down the hall to Logistics. People gave the obvious civilian curious looks. He didn’t seem to belong there. But he was keeping company with a brigadier general, so no one said anything. And, even if he didn’t belong in the War Department, he had the look of a man of war.

  Logistics didn’t receive Orson with glad cries. Potter hadn’t expected them to. They parted with ordnance as if they made it themselves right there in the War Department offices. But they’d known the Mormon was coming. And they knew one other thing: they knew Jake Featherston wanted them to do what they could for Orson. In the Confederate States these days, nothing counted for more than that.

  George Enos, Jr., found himself facing the same dilemma as his father had a generation earlier. He didn’t want to join the U.S. Navy. He would much rather have stayed a fisherman. If he tried, though, his chances of being conscripted into the Army ranged from excellent to as near certain as made no difference. He relished the infantry even less than the Navy.

  “I’d better do it,” he told his wife on a morning when the war news was particularly bad—not that it had ever been good, not since the very start of things.

  Connie began to cry. “You’re liable to get killed!” she said.

  “I know,” he replied. “But what’s liable to happen to me if they stick a rifle in my hands and send me off to Ohio? Where are my chances better? And it’s not safe just putting to sea these days.” He remembered too well the gruesome strafing the British fighter had given the Sweet Sue.

  “Why don’t you just get a job in a war plant here in Boston and come home to me every night?” Connie demanded.

  They’d been over that one before—over it and over it and over it again. George gave the best answer he could: “Because I’d start going nuts, that’s why. The ocean’s in me, same as it is with your old man.”

  She winced. Her father had been a fisherman forever. As long as he could keep going out, he would. She and George both knew it. She said, “That’s not fair. It’s not fair to me, it’s not fair to the boys. . . .” But she didn’t say it wasn’t true. She couldn’t, and she knew it.

  “I’m sorry, hon. I wish I was different,” George said. “But I’m not. And so . . .”

  And so the first thing he did the next morning was visit the Navy recruiting station not far from T Wharf. It was in one of the toughest parts of Boston, surrounded by cheap saloons, pawnshops, and houses where the girls stripped at second-story windows and leaned out hollering invitations to the men passing by below and abuse when they got ignored. George wouldn’t have minded stripping himself; the day was breathlessly hot and muggy. Even walking made sweat stream off him.

  A fat, gray-haired petty officer sat behind a sheet-steel desk filling out forms. He finished what he was doing before deigning to look at—look through—George. “Why shouldn’t I just be shipping your ass on over to the Army where you belong?” he asked in a musical brogue cold enough to counteract the weather.

  “I’ve been going to sea for more than ten years,” George answered, “and my father was killed aboard the USS Ericsson at—after—the end of the last war.”

  The petty officer’s bushy, tangled eyebrows leaped toward his hairline. He pointed a nicotine-stained forefinger at George. “We can check that, you know,” he rumbled. “And if you’re after lying to me for sympathy’s sake, you’ll go to the Army, all right, and you’ll go with a full set of lumps.”

  “Check all you please,” George said. “Half the people in Boston know my story.” He gave his name, adding, “My mother’s the one who shot Roger Kimball.”

  “Son of a bitch,” the petty officer said. “They should have pinned a medal on her. All right, Enos. That’s the best one I’ve heard since the goddamn war started, so help me Hannah.” He pulled open a desk drawer. It squeaked; it needed oiling, or maybe grinding down to bright metal. “I’ve got about five thousand pounds of forms for you to be filling out, but you’ll get what you want if you pass the physical.” One of those eyebrows rose again. “Maybe even if you don’t, by Jesus. If you come from that family, the whole country owes you one.”

  “I can do the job,” George said. “That’s the only thing that ought to matter. I never would have said a word about the other stuff if you hadn’t asked me the way you did.”

  “You’ve got pull,” the petty officer said. “You’d be a damn fool if you didn’t use it.” He pointed again, this time towards a rickety table against the far wall. “Go on over there and fill these out. To hell with me if we won’t have the doctors look you over this afternoon. You can say your good-byes tonight and head off for training first thing tomorrow mornin’.”

  He sent three men away while George worked on the forms. Two went quietly. The third presumed to object. “I’ll go to another station—you see if I don’t,” he spluttered. “I was born to be a sailor.”

  “You were born to go to jail,” the petty officer retorted. “Think I don’t know an ex-con when I see one?” The man turned white—that shot struck home like a fourteen-inch shell from a battleship. The petty officer went on, “Go on, be off with you. Maybe you can fool some damn dumb Army recruiting sergeant, but the Navy’s got men with eyes in their heads. You’d be just right for the Army—looks like all you’re good for is running away.”

  “What’s he got that I haven’t?” The man pointed at George.

  “A clean record, for one, like I say,” the petty officer answered. “And a mother with more balls than you and your old man put together, for another.” He jerked a thumb toward the door. “Get out, or I’ll pitch you through the window.”

  The man left. Maybe he would have made a good Navy sailor and maybe he wouldn’t. George wouldn’t have wanted to put to sea with him in a fishing boat. A quarrelsome man in cramped quarters was nothing but a nuisance. And if this, that, and the other thing started walking with Jesus . . . George shook his head. No, that was no kind of shipmate to have.

  He finished the paperwork and thumped the forms down on the petty officer’s desk. The man didn’t even look at them. He picked up his telephone, spoke into it, and hung up after a minute or two. “Go on over to Doc Freedman’s. He’ll give you the physical. Here’s the address.” He wrote it on a scrap of paper. “You bring his report back to me. Unless you’ve got a glass eye and a peg leg you haven’t told me about, we’ll go on from there.”

  “Yes, sir. Thank you, sir,” George said.

  The petty officer laughed. “You’ve still got some learning to do, and that’s the God’s truth. You don’t call me sir. You call me Chief. Save sir for officers.”

  “Yes—” George caught himself. “Uh, right, Chief.”

  “That’s the way you do it.” The older man nodded. “Go on. Get the hell out of here.”

  George left. The doctor’s office wasn’t far. The receptionist, a sour old biddy, sent the new arrival a disapproving look. “You are unscheduled, Mr. Enos,” she said, as if he had a social disease. But she sent him on in to see the sawbones.

  Dr. Freedman was a short, swarthy Jew with a pinkie ring. He looked as if he made his money doing abortions for whores, and maybe selling drugs on the side. His hands were as cold and almost as moist as a cod just out of the Atlantic. But he seemed to know what he was doing. He checked George’s ears, looked in his mouth and ears and nose, listened to his chest, took his blood pressure, and stuck a needle in his arm for a blood sample. Then he put on a rubber glove and said, “Bend over.” Apprehensively, George obeyed.
That was even less fun than he thought it would be. So was getting grabbed in intimate places—much less gently than Connie would have done—and being told to cough.

  After half an hour’s work, the doctor scrawled notes on an official Navy form. “Well?” George asked as he got back into his clothes. “How am I?”

  “Except for being a damn fool for wanting to do this in the first place, you’re healthy as a horse,” Freedman answered. “But if they disqualified every damn fool in the Navy, they’d have twenty-seven men left, and how would they win the war then?”

  George blinked. He didn’t think he’d ever run into such breathtaking cynicism before. He asked, “You think going into the Army is better?”

  The doctor laughed, a singularly unpleasant sound. “Not me. Do I look that stupid? I’d get a job where they weren’t going to conscript me and sit this one out. Wasn’t the last one bad enough?”

  Connie had said much the same thing. George hadn’t wanted to hear it from her. He really didn’t want to hear it from a big-nosed Hebe with all the charm of a hagfish. “Don’t you care about your country?” he asked.

  “Just as much as it cares for me,” Freedman said. “It takes my money and throws it down ratholes. It tells me all the things I can’t do, and none of the things I can. So why should I get all hot and bothered?”

  “Because the Confederates are worse?” George suggested.

  Freedman only shrugged. “What if they are? This is Boston, for God’s sake. We could lose the next three wars to those bastards, and you’d still never see one within a hundred miles of here.”

  “What if everybody felt the way you do?” George said in something approaching real horror.

  “Then nobody would fight with anybody, and we’d all be better off,” Freedman replied. “But don’t worry about that, because it isn’t going to happen. Most people are just as patriotic”—by the way he said it, he plainly meant just as stupid—“as you are.” He scratched his name at the bottom of the form. “Take this back to the recruiting station. It’ll get you what you want. As for me, I just made three dollars and fifty cents—before taxes.”