He was gloating about the surprise he had planned for the prosecutor when the telephone rang. He was his own secretary. Picking up the telephone, he said, “Jonathan Moss.”
A man’s voice on the other end of the line: “You’re the Yank barrister, aren’t you?”
“That’s right,” Moss answered. “Who are you? What can I do for you?”
“If I was you, I wouldn’t start my motorcar no more,” the voice said. A click followed. The line went dead.
Moss looked out the window. There sat the Bucephalus, right where he’d left it. Had someone done something to it there on the street, brazen as could be? Or was somebody just trying to rattle his cage?
That wasn’t the biggest question, he realized. The biggest question was, did he feel like finding out the hard way?
He didn’t. He called the local garrison and reported what had just happened. The sergeant with whom he spoke knew who he was. The noncom thought the call highly amusing. “You’re worth more to the Canucks than a dozen of their own kind,” he said. “They ought to give you a medal, not blow you up.”
“Funny. Ha, ha,” Moss said. “Will you send your bomb squad out to go over my auto?”
“Yes,” the sergeant answered. “I’ll do that. The squad may take a while to get there, though. Yours is the fifth call we’ve had this morning.”
“A hoaxer, then,” Moss said. “He must want to make people run around in circles and waste time.”
“We thought so, too,” the sergeant told him. “The first two times we sent out the bomb squad, nothing. The third time, there was a bomb. They’re still playing with it. If you hear a bang and your windows rattle, you can bet the squad will be late to your place.” He laughed again.
Moss remembered such humor from his own days in the Army. It had seemed funny then. It didn’t now—not to him, anyhow. The sergeant enjoyed it. “You ought to be trying to find out who your practical joker is,” Moss said. “We could have another Arthur McGregor on our hands.”
“Don’t worry about it, Mr. Moss,” the sergeant said. “When we do catch this son of a bitch, whoever he turns out to be, you can get him off the hook. So long. The bomb squad will be along sooner or later.” He hung up.
That shows what my own people think of me, Moss thought unhappily. I’m not doing anything against the law—I’m working strictly within it. This is the thanks I get.
He wondered whether the bomb squad would show up at all, or whether he would get to find out if his car was wired by going out to it and turning the key. He heard no sudden and dreadful boom, though he worked with his ears peeled all day. Toward evening, a squad of men whose heavy armor made them look like a cross between modern soldiers and medieval knights showed up and went over his car. After twenty minutes or so, one of them waddled into the building.
By the time he got to Moss’ door, he was sweating despite the chilly weather. How much did that protective clothing weigh? If a bomb went off, how much good would it do? Even had Moss intended to ask those questions aloud, he didn’t get the chance. The man from the bomb squad asked if he was Jonathan Moss. When he nodded, the fellow said, “No bomb. Just that asshole running us from pillar to post.” Without waiting for an answer, he waddled away.
“Thanks,” Moss called after him. He raised a gauntleted hand and kept on walking.
Who would want to blow me up, or at least to scare me spitless? Moss wondered. The U.S. sergeant was right. He had done a lot of good for the Canucks. They shouldn’t have wanted to hurt him. They should have wanted to coat him in bulletproof glass.
Do they hate me just because I’m a Yank? He shook his head in slow wonder. Who could be that stupid?
M ary Pomeroy. Mary Pomeroy. Mary Pomeroy. No matter how often she wrote her new name, trying to get used to it, she still thought of herself as Mary McGregor. She’d been married only a couple of months. The change in her name sometimes seemed the smallest of the changes that had swept over her. She’d known they would be there when she said yes after Mort got down on one knee in front of her. She’d known they would be there, but she hadn’t had any idea how overwhelming they would prove.
How could living in Rosenfeld, for instance, be so very different from living on a farm not that far outside of town? So she’d asked herself before going from the farmhouse where she’d spent her whole life to rooms across the street from the diner where her new husband worked with his father. So she’d asked herself, and she’d found out.
Electricity, for instance. She’d never had it at the farm, so she’d never known what she was missing. Now she felt as if she’d spent her life in the Dark Ages. That was literally true; kerosene lamps didn’t come close to matching light bulbs for brilliance or convenience. But there was so much more. A refrigerator beat an icebox all hollow. A vacuum cleaner was ever so much easier to use and more effective than a carpet sweeper. An electric toaster knocked the stuffing out of the wire grid that went over the fire. An electric alarm clock didn’t stop running if she forgot to wind it.
An electric phonograph also didn’t run down, unlike the windup machine the McGregors had had on the farm. And a wireless set—a wedding present from Mort’s father—offered a window on the world Mary had never imagined. Music, dramas, comedies—all in the apartment, all at the twist of a dial? If that wasn’t a miracle, what was? She had to keep reminding herself the news that came from the machine on the hour was only what the Yanks wanted her to hear.
The apartment had a telephone, too. That didn’t impress Mary so much. None of the few people who might have wanted to call her had telephones of their own, so they couldn’t. Whenever it rang, it was for Mort. She suspected that would change as time went by. The Pomeroys were still a very new couple. Bit by bit, they would fit themselves into Rosenfeld’s jigsaw puzzle of class and sociability.
That thought had hardly crossed her mind before the other half of the Pomeroys came out of the bedroom pulling his overcoat tight around himself. “I’m off to the diner,” he said, and paused to give Mary a kiss.
“Oh, Mort,” she said. Her arms tightened around him. The kiss took longer and got hotter than he’d probably expected. He didn’t seem disappointed, though, when they finally broke apart.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said huskily.
Mary nodded. Some of the other things that went with marriage and a move to town were even more startling, even more exciting, than electricity. Although if it wasn’t electricity that set her pulse racing now, what was it? She knew what it was, all right. “Tonight,” she said.
Mort looked as if he had to remind himself he was supposed to go out the door, down the stairs, and across the street to the diner. Mary watched him from the window. He hurried across when no motorcars were coming in either direction. Snow flew up from his overshoes as he crossed the street. Rosenfeld would have a white Christmas in a couple of weeks. More snow started falling even as Mary watched.
Mort opened the front door to the diner, ducked inside, and closed it after him. With a regretful sigh, Mary turned away. What shall I do with the rest of my day? she wondered. Oh, she had work to do keeping the place clean and getting supper ready for tonight. But that was work for a few hours, not work that would devour a day. She had no livestock to look after but a cat, and Mouser, like any of his kind, looked after himself perfectly well.
Mary laughed. “I never thought I would miss shoveling manure,” she said. It wasn’t that she missed it, exactly, but she didn’t have certainty in her routine any more.
Once she was done with what she had to do, she could go out and explore Rosenfeld. She’d done that a lot after coming back from her honeymoon at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. She hadn’t wanted to set foot in New York, and Mort hadn’t argued with her. She didn’t go out into Rosenfeld so often as she had on first coming home. She hadn’t needed long to figure out there was only so much to see and do here. Compared to a farm, Rosenfeld was a metropolis. Compared to a real metropolis, Rosenfeld . . . might as well
have been a farm.
When she finished her chores today, she sat down and turned on the wireless. The tubes inside glowed to life. She waited for sound to start coming out of the machine. This is what it’s for, she realized. It fills up the spaces when you’re not working. She hadn’t had to worry about many spaces like that on the farm, for she was almost always working or eating or sleeping. But town life was different.
She could make herself a cup of tea, sit down in a rocking chair and read a book or a magazine, and listen to the wireless, and nobody would call her lazy or worthless. And she wasn’t, either; she’d done everything that needed doing except for making supper, and that could—should—wait till the afternoon.
The book she had was called I Sank Roger Kimball. She didn’t remember Kimball’s death; she’d been a lot younger then, and the Confederate States had seemed farther away than the mountains of the moon. Come to that, they still did. Her honeymoon train ride was the first time she’d ever left Manitoba, and even then she’d gone only one province away.
But Sylvia Enos’ travels weren’t what leaped out of the sparsely written book at her. The American woman’s revenge was. She’d found out what had happened to her husband, and she’d paid back the man who did it. Her government had seemed powerless to do any such thing, but she’d pulled it off. Not only that, she’d got off scot free—and people all across the United States acclaimed her as a heroine.
Part of Mary applauded that. But it infuriated more of her. This Enos woman had struck back for her country, and politicians in the USA praised her to the sky. Mary’s own father had struck back at the USA for Canada, and he’d been hounded and hunted and ended up dying fighting the Americans. They’d murdered her brother, Alexander, who’d also been a patriot: murdered him under the disguise of law. Where was the justice in that?
And I haven’t done anything—not a single, solitary thing—to pay the Yanks back for what they did to Alexander and to my pa. Shame burned Mary’s cheeks. Her father’s bomb-making tools remained hidden in the barn back at the farm. How am I supposed to bring them here? One day I’ll have the chance, I suppose, but it hasn’t happened yet. How old will I have to be before I can do something? To twenty-three, even twenty-five looked far away.
She went through I Sank Roger Kimball at a feverish pace. She did it, she thought again and again. She did it, and she got away with it.
I haven’t done anything. When will I do something? Will I ever do anything? She went to the window and looked outside. As if on cue, a green-gray U.S. Army truck rolled slowly up the street. The Americans had been in Rosenfeld for going on twenty years now. The most she’d ever done to them was flatten a Model T’s tires with a nail, and she’d been a little girl then.
Most Canadians, these days, found it easier just to . . . get along with the Yanks. Even people who’d called themselves patriots during and after the war were in bed with the Americans these days, sometimes literally. She despised them even more than she despised the Yanks. Americans were wrong, but at least they served their own country. What could you say about a Canadian who did the bidding of the United States? Mary didn’t know any words vile enough for such people.
She’d had thoughts like that before, had them and done nothing about them. But I Sank Roger Kimball fired her all over again. Her father hadn’t feared to pay the price. Did she?
She shook her head. It wasn’t that. Life had got in the way. She’d never expected to fall in love, to get married, to leave the farm. She didn’t see how anyone could do that sort of thing and keep fighting the Americans.
That was all right—as long as she eventually got on with the war. As far as she was concerned, it hadn’t ended in 1917. It would never end till the Yanks left Canada and her country got its freedom back.
She salted and peppered a pork roast and put it in the oven with dried apples—the potatoes could wait till later. Buying meat at the butcher’s shop instead of doing the slaughtering herself was one more thing she’d had to get used to. It was much more convenient, even if she couldn’t always get the cuts exactly the way she wanted them.
Mort came home carrying a copy of the Rosenfeld Register. “Here’s something funny from Ontario,” he said, pointing to a story on an inside page. “Somebody threatened to bomb an American barrister’s auto in Berlin.”
“Just threatened?” Mary said. “Shame he didn’t do it.”
Mort Pomeroy nodded. He didn’t love the Yanks, either; Mary couldn’t have loved him if he had. But then he said, “He’s not an ordinary barrister, though. Have you heard of Jonathan Moss? He defends Canadians in trouble with the occupation government, and he gets a lot of them off.”
“No, I hadn’t heard of him,” Mary said. “Why does he do that, if he’s an American? He must have some kind of angle.”
“I don’t think so,” her husband said. “He is married to the woman whose maiden name was Laura Secord, but he was doing the same thing before he married her. And she wouldn’t have anything to do with the ordinary run of Yank, would she?”
Mary didn’t want to argue with Mort, even about something like this—which proved she was a newlywed, and very much in love. “I wouldn’t think so,” she said, and then, “Supper should be ready. Let me go make sure.”
“Smells good,” Mort said, and Mary smiled.
But she wasn’t smiling on the inside. She remembered Laura Secord’s name from the failed Canadian uprising of the mid-1920s. Wasn’t the woman supposed to have warned her American lover about it? And wasn’t it likely that that lover was this Moss fellow?
If that was so, the fellow who’d threatened to bomb the motorcar really should have done it, but with Moss’ wife in the machine. Mary remembered her scorn—no, her hatred—for collaborating Canadians when the rebellion fizzled. She’d vowed revenge on them then. She’d vowed, and then she’d ignored her vow.
She took the pork roast out of the oven. Savory steam filled the kitchen. Mort exclaimed again. Mary hardly heard him. As she plunged her carving knife deep into the roast, she knew what she had to do.
“And I will,” she murmured.
“Will what?” Mort asked.
“Get some butter for the potatoes,” Mary answered smoothly. She took the butter out of the refrigerator. She’d bought it. She hadn’t had to churn it: one more change from farm to town. But that wasn’t what she’d meant. No, that wasn’t what she’d meant at all.
When the door to your flat opens at three in the morning and you wake up at the noise and you smile and murmur, “Oh, thank God,” odds are you are a fisherman’s relative. Raising her voice slightly from that relieved murmur, Sylvia Enos called, “Is that you, George?”
“It’s me, Ma,” he answered, also in a soft voice: Mary Jane lay sleeping in the bedroom she now shared with her mother. “I’m sorry I woke you up.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’m glad you’re here,” Sylvia said. Mary Jane muttered, rolled over, and started to snore again. Sylvia went on, “Four days after New Year’s and I’ve got my Christmas present. What time did your boat get in?”
“Last night, about five,” George, Jr., said.
“What?” Sylvia couldn’t believe her ears. She jumped out of bed and angrily hurried to her son. She wanted to shake him, but he was too big to shake. “And what were you doing between then and now? Drinking away your pay with a pack of worthless sailormen, I’ll bet—that or worse.” She sniffed, but she didn’t smell beer or whiskey on her son’s breath. She didn’t smell cheap perfume, either, so maybe he hadn’t been doing worse.
“Ma, I’m not drunk,” George, Jr., said, and Sylvia had to nod, for she could tell that was true. He went on, “I didn’t do . . . anything else, either. Not like that. Not what you meant.”
Reluctantly, Sylvia nodded again. She didn’t think he would lie to her straight out. “What did you do, then?” she asked. “Why didn’t you come home?”
George, Jr., took a deep breath. “Ma, I didn’t come home because I paid a call
on Constance McGillicuddy and her folks. I asked her to marry me, Ma, and she said yes.”
“Oh.” The word took all the breath out of Sylvia. She stared up at her tall, broad-shouldered son in the gloom inside the flat. To her, he would always be a little boy. “Oh,” Sylvia said again. Yes, she’d had to inhale first. Little boys didn’t give her news like that.
“I love Connie, Ma,” her son said. “She loves me, too. We’ll be happy together. And she’s got a waitressing job that looks like it’s good and steady. We’ll be able to make it, with a little luck.”
In times like these, how much luck was out there? Sylvia didn’t know. Times were hard when you had to worry about what your wife-to-be could bring in. She did know that. But George, Jr., was sensible enough to make the calculation instead of ignoring it. I did something right, Sylvia told herself.
Aloud, she said, “I haven’t even met this girl, or her family. What do they do?”
She could barely make out her son’s smile in the darkness. “Her father’s a fisherman—what else? He knew Pa a little. I don’t think they ever sailed together, though. He was in a destroyer during the war, too. He even got torpedoed, but he made it to a boat and got picked up.”
“He didn’t get torpedoed after the damn war was over.” Sylvia’s voice stayed soft, but she could hear the savagery in it. Even after more than sixteen years, what Roger Kimball had done still felt filthy to her. She remembered the weight of the pistol in her hand, remembered the way it had bucked when she pulled the trigger, remembered the deafening report, remembered Kimball falling with a look of absurd surprise on his face and blood spreading over the front of his shirt. If I had it to do over again, would I? she wondered.
She didn’t wonder long. Hell, yes! I’d do it in a red-hot minute!
Coming back to here and now took a distinct effort of will. “McGillicuddy,” she said. “She’ll be Irish, then. Catholic.”
American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold Page 73
