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

by Harry Turtledove

  FIGHT FOR YOUR COUNTRY! FIGHT FOR THE MOTHER COUNTRY! shouted the headline below the cartoon. The text under that was as vicious a denunciation of the USA as Mary had seen since the Yanks came into Rosenfeld in the first place.

  Automatically, she tucked the flyer into her handbag. She had no idea what she’d do with it, not right then. But it encouraged her even so. Somebody in town besides her couldn’t stand the Yanks. That was plenty to make her feel good all by itself. British agents, indeed!

  She got what she needed and brought it up to the counter. Karamanlides added it up. “Eight dollars and eighteen cents,” he said, his accent part Yank and part Greek. She gave him a ten and waited for her change. The storekeeper had come up from the USA and brought out Henry Gibbon, who’d run this place for years and years. No wonder the person with the flyer had stuck it here—this was one place where what had happened to Canada was obvious. It was the same reason Mary had planted a bomb here.

  Karamanlides wasn’t a bad fellow, not as an individual. He was honest enough. He carried a wide variety of goods, probably even more than Henry Gibbon had. He didn’t give anybody any trouble. But he was a Yank. If Canada were a free country, he never would have come up here. That made all the difference in the world.

  Mary carried the groceries and sundries back to her apartment building and up the stairs. Alec was still busy with the fortress of blocks and toy soldiers he’d been playing with when she went to the general store. He was getting bigger; she didn’t need to keep an eye on him every minute of every day.

  After she’d put things away, she pulled the delicious flyer out of her purse and reread it. It was just as wonderful the second time through. The Yanks and the Frenchies would have kittens if they saw it. She suspected it did come from Britain. A couple of turns of phrase weren’t quite Canadian. It was good to see that the British hadn’t forgotten their colony, even if it lay in enemy hands.

  And then, all at once, Mary started to laugh. “What’s so funny, Mommy?” Alec called from the front room. “Tell me the joke.”

  “It’s for grownups, sweetheart,” Mary answered. Alec made a disappointed noise. A minute later, though, he was blowing things up again. He had quite a war going on here. Mary decided to take advantage of that. She said, “I’m going over to the post office. Do you want to come along?”

  Had he said yes, she would have had to bring him. But he shook his head. She’d hoped he would, and thought so, too. He didn’t like it there; he always fidgeted. And he really was engrossed in the lead-soldier war.

  “I won’t be too long,” she said. He hardly heard her. She closed the door behind her and went out again.

  The post office was only a five-minute walk. Nothing in Rosenfeld was more than a five-minute walk from anything else. Mary nodded to several people on the street as she strolled along. No point to acting as if she were in a hurry.

  As usual, Wilf Rokeby had a fire going in the potbellied stove in one corner of the post office. It made the room too warm on a mild summer day. It also seemed to bring out the spicy smell of his hair oil.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Pomeroy,” he said, polite as usual. “Please excuse me for just one moment, if you’d be so kind.” He ducked into a back room, closing the door behind him. No one else was in the building.

  Better and better! Mary hurried behind the counter. She took the subversive flyer out of her purse and stuffed it into a drawer with the words POSTAGE FOR FOREIGN COUNTRIES neatly stenciled on the front. She was back on her side before the toilet flushed.

  Rokeby came out and nodded briskly. “Sorry to keep you waiting there. What can I do for you today?”

  “I need twenty stamps, please,” Mary said.

  “Coming right up.” Rokeby counted them off a roll. “That’ll be one dollar.”

  “A dollar!” Mary said. “Aren’t they still three cents apiece?”

  “New surcharge—I just got these in.” The postmaster tapped one of the stamps with a fingernail. Sure enough, it had 12 printed in black over President Mahan’s face. Rokeby went on, “It’s to help pay for the war, I expect.”

  Mary expected he was right. Now that she thought back on it, she remembered her father grumbling about such things during the Great War. She sighed as she reached into her purse. “They get you every which way, don’t they?”

  “Seems like it sometimes, that’s for sure.” Wilf Rokeby put the dollar bill in the cash box. “I thank you very much.”

  Waiting six days after that was one of the harder things Mary had done. If Rokeby happened to reach into that drawer in the meantime . . . But how many people in sleepy little Rosenfeld needed postage for foreign countries—especially these days, when a censor was bound to take a long, hard look at any letters bound for distant lands?

  At the end of the wait, Mary went to Rosenfeld’s only telephone booth, which stood beside one of the town’s three gas stations (all run by Americans). She folded the glass door shut behind her and put a nickel in the coin slot. When the operator came on the line, she said, “Occupation headquarters, please.” She made her voice squeakier than usual so Maggie McHenry, who ate at the diner about three times a week, wouldn’t recognize it.

  “Yes, ma’am,” was all the woman at the switchboard said.

  “Allo? Who is this?” a Frenchy said in accented English when he picked up the call.

  Again, Mary did her best not to sound like herself. She also did her best to sound as if she was very excited. And so she was, but not in the way she was pretending. “Horrible treason!” she gasped. “Wilf Rokeby! At the post office! Filthy pictures! Hid it when I came in, but— Oh, my God! Horrible!”

  “Who is this?” the Quebecois demanded. “What do you say?”

  “Treason!” Mary repeated, and then, “I’ve got to go. They’re looking.” She was proud of that. It could have meant anything at all. She hung up and left the phone booth in a hurry.

  She strolled home as calmly as if she had nothing in the world on her mind. The Frenchies probably wouldn’t have the brains to question Maggie. Even if they did, she hadn’t sounded as if she knew Mary’s voice. And now whatever happened with Wilf Rokeby would happen. Mary nodded and kept walking.

  “Hear the news?” Mort asked at supper that night.

  Mary shook her head. “I’ve been here almost all day. Just stepped out once for a second. Didn’t talk to anybody.” That should forestall Alec, who might have given her the lie if she said she hadn’t been out at all. She looked interested, which wasn’t hard—not a bit. “What’s up?”

  “Frenchies hauled Wilf Rokeby off to jail,” Mort said solemnly. “Story is, they found subversive literature at the post office, if you can believe it. Wilf Rokeby! My God! Who would’ve figured him for that kind of thing? What was he going to do when he retired—start shooting at Frenchies and Yanks for the fun of it?”

  “That’s terrible. Terrible!” Mary knew she had to sound dismayed. Once she’d done it, she took another bite of meat loaf.

  Hipolito Rodriguez was as happy as a man with a son in the Army could be during time of war. Everything else in his life was going well, and nothing had happened to Pedro. This war, from what the wireless said and from the way the front moved, was a different sort from the one he’d known. You weren’t stuck in trenches all the time, waiting for enemy machine-gun bursts to knock over anyone careless enough to show even a bit of himself. A war of movement, people called it.

  Did it mean it was a war in which ordinary soldiers were less likely to get killed? So far, it seemed to. Rodriguez sometimes lit candles in the hope that would go on. At Freedom Party meetings, Robert Quinn kept telling everybody how well things were going. The wireless said the same thing, over and over again. Every day, it seemed, the men who read the news announced some new triumph.

  Most people who heard the news believed every word of it. Why not? Nothing else in the Confederate States challenged the reporting. One evening after a Freedom Party meeting, though, Rodriguez went to La Cul
ebra Verde for a few drinks. If Magdalena yelled at him when he got home, then she yelled at him, that was all. He didn’t feel like standing at the bar; he spent too much time on his feet in the fields. He and Carlos Ruiz took a table against the wall. When the barmaid came up and asked what they wanted, they both ordered beers.

  Away she went, hips swinging in her flounced skirt. Rodriguez’s eyes followed her—in a purely theoretical way, he told himself. Magdalena, no doubt, would have had another word for it. He shrugged. He was a dutiful enough husband. He hadn’t done more than look at another woman since coming home from the war. If he’d gone upstairs with a few putas while he wore butternut . . . well, he’d usually been drunk first, and he’d been a lot younger, and he’d been a long way from home, with no assurance he’d ever see his wife again. What she didn’t know and couldn’t find out about wouldn’t hurt her.

  He noticed Ruiz wasn’t watching the barmaid. “Are you all right?” he asked his old friend. “She’s pretty.”

  Ruiz started. His laugh sounded embarrassed. “I wasn’t even thinking about her. I was thinking about the war.” He had two sons in the Army.

  “Oh.” Rodriguez couldn’t tease him about that. He said, “Gracias a Dios, everything goes well.”

  His friend made the sign of the cross. “I hope so. By all the saints, I hope so. They tell us about victory after victory—heaven knows that’s true.”

  “That proves the war is going well, sí?” Rodriguez said. The barmaid came back and set two foam-topped mugs on the table. He smiled at her. “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  Her answering smile was a professional grimace that showed white teeth. “You’re welcome.” She hurried away, her backfield in motion.

  Rodriguez raised his mug. “Salud.” He and Carlos Ruiz both drank. Rodriguez sucked foam off his upper lip. “Why aren’t you happy about the war, then?”

  Ruiz eyed his beer. “If it’s going as well as they say it is, why haven’t los Estados Unidos given up?”

  “They’re the enemy,” Rodriguez said reasonably.

  “Well, yes.” Ruiz finished his beer and waved to the barmaid for a refill. Rodriguez hadn’t intended to pour his down, but he didn’t want to fall behind, either. He gulped till the mug was empty. Ruiz, meanwhile, went on, “But in 1917 they beat us over and over. They beat us like a drum.” He’d fought in Kentucky and Tennessee, where the worst beatings had happened. “And when they’d beaten us hard enough and long enough, we had to give in. Now everyone says we’re beating them like that. So why aren’t they quitting, the way we had to?”

  Rodriguez shrugged. “We’d been fighting for three years then. We couldn’t fight any more. This war is hardly even three months old yet.”

  “And if it goes on for three years, we will probably lose again,” Carlos Ruiz said gloomily. “If a little man fights a big man, sometimes he can hit him with a chair right at the start and win like that. But if the big man gets up off the floor and keeps fighting, the little man is in trouble.”

  “Countries aren’t men,” Rodriguez said.

  Ruiz shrugged again. “I hope not. Because we’ve knocked the United States down, but we haven’t knocked them out.”

  The barmaid set fresh beers on the table and took away the empty mugs. Her smile might have been a little warmer—or maybe Rodriguez’s imagination was a little warmer. He was pretty sure she did put more into her walk this time. She’s just trying to get a bigger tip out of you, he told himself. He enjoyed watching her even so. Thinking about the war took a real effort. “We’ve cut the United States in half,” he said.

  “Sí, es verdad,” Ruiz said. “But even if it is true, so what? Why did we cut los Estados Unidos in half? To make them quit fighting, yes? If they don’t quit fighting, what good does it do us?” He started emptying his second mug of beer as methodically as he’d finished the first.

  “Well . . .” Rodriguez thought for a little while. “If they’re cut in half, they can’t send men and supplies from one part to the other. That’s what Señor Quinn says, and the wireless, too. How can they fight a war if they can’t do that? They’ll run out of men and food and guns.”

  “They still have men on both sides. They still have food on both sides, and factories, too.” Carlos Ruiz seemed determined to be glum. “We’ve made it harder for them, sí, sin duda. But also without a doubt, we haven’t beaten them unless they decide they’re beaten. It isn’t like it was with us at the end of the last war, when we couldn’t stand up any more. They can go on for a long time if they decide they want to, and it looks like they do.” He tilted back his mug. His throat worked. He set the mug down empty and waved to the barmaid again.

  Rodriguez had to gulp to get his mug dry, too, by the time she walked over. He said, “At the rate we’re going, you’re not going to be able to stand up any more, and neither am I.” But he nodded when his friend ordered refills for both of them.

  Ruiz said, “I’ll be able to get home. I’m not worried about that. But if I get drunk tonight—so what? I don’t do it very often any more. If I have a headache tomorrow, I’ll have a headache, that’s all. That’s tomorrow. Tonight, I’ll be drunk.”

  Magdalena would have something besides so what? to say to getting drunk. Rodriguez suspected Carlos’ wife would, too. That didn’t make the idea any less tempting. Rodriguez didn’t get drunk very often any more, either. Did that mean he couldn’t do it every once in a while if he felt like it? He didn’t think so. The two beers he’d already drunk argued loudly that they ought to have some company.

  Here came the barmaid. She had company for those beers in her hands. “Here you are, señores,” she said, bending low to set the fresh mugs on the table. Rodriguez tried to look down her ruffled white blouse. By the way Carlos Ruiz craned his neck now, so did he. By the way the barmaid giggled, she knew exactly what they were doing, and knew they wouldn’t—quite—have any luck.

  They drank. The barmaid brought over a plate of jalapeños. Those were free, but they made the two men thirstier. They drank some more to put out the fire. They weren’t the only ones doing some serious drinking tonight, either. Somebody at the bar started to sing. It was a song Rodriguez knew. Joining in seemed the only right thing, the only possible thing, to do. He’d never sounded better, at least in his own ears. And the rest of the audience wasn’t inclined to be critical, either.

  It was two in the morning when he and Carlos staggered out of La Culebra Verde. “Home,” Rodriguez said, and started to laugh. Everything was funny now. It might not be when Magdalena saw the state he was in, but he wasn’t going to worry about that. He wasn’t going to worry about anything, not right this minute. He embraced his friend one last time. They went their separate ways.

  The long line of power poles pointed the way home. They went straight across the countryside. Hipolito Rodriguez didn’t, but he did go generally in the same direction. And he found the power poles convenient in another way, too. He paused in front of one of them, undid his trousers, and got rid of a good deal of the beer he’d drunk. A couple of miles farther out of Baroyeca, he did the same thing again.

  The night was cool and dry. Days here in late summer kept their bake-oven heat, but the nights—growing longer now—were much more tolerable. Crickets chirped. Moths fluttered here and there, ghostly in the moonlight. Bigger flying shapes were bats and nightjars hunting them.

  A coyote trotted past, mouth open in an arrogant, almost-doggy grin. Have to look out for my lambs, Rodriguez thought, wondering if he’d remember when he got home. Farmers around here shot coyotes on sight, but the beasts kept coming down out of the mountains and stealing stock.

  There was the house, a light on in the front window. He approached with drunken caution; if the light was on, Magdalena might be waiting up for him. And if Magdalena was waiting up, she wouldn’t be very happy.

  He tiptoed up the steps. Somehow, he wasn’t so quiet as he wished he would have been. He managed to slam the front door behind him. Even that didn’t bri
ng out his wife. Maybe she’d stayed up till an hour or so ago, and was deep asleep now. That would save him for the time being, but she’d be twice as angry in the morning, and he’d be hung over then. He didn’t look forward to that.

  He didn’t want to be very hung over in the morning. He knew it was too late to block all the aftereffects of what he’d drunk tonight. Maybe he could ease the pain to come, though, at least a little. He went into the kitchen and flipped on the light in there. He didn’t have to fumble around lighting a lamp. A flick of the switch was all it took. A good thing, too; he might have burned down the house fooling around with kerosene and matches.

  In the refrigerator were several bottles of beer. Rodriguez let out a silent sigh of relief; Magdalena might have thrown them all away. He reached for one. It might take the edge off the headache he’d have in the morning. He was still drunk, and proved it by knocking over a pitcher of ice water next to the beer on the top shelf.

  A desperate, drunken, miraculous grab kept the pitcher from crashing to the floor and bringing Magdalena out with every reason to be furious. It didn’t keep the whole pitcher’s worth of water from splashing down onto the floor and all over everywhere. He jumped and cursed. The cold water froze his toes. He’d hardly felt them for quite a while, but they announced their presence now.

  Still swearing under his breath, he fumbled for rags. He did a halfhearted—a very halfhearted—job of cleaning up the mess, or at least that part of it right in front of the refrigerator. Puddles still glittered on the floor in the light of the electric lamp. He started to go after some of them, then shook his head. It was only water. It would dry up. And getting down on his hands and knees was making his head hurt. He didn’t just want that beer. He needed it.

  He opened it. He drank it. It wasn’t just delicious, though it was that. It was medicinal. His headache retreated. He started to smile. Maybe he would get away with this after all. He set the bottle on the counter. Then he smiled a sly smile and put it in the trash instead. Magdalena wouldn’t have to know. He wasn’t as sly as he thought, though, and he was drunker than he thought.