In Capitol Square, a Mitcheltown—what the damnyankees called a Blackfordburgh: a shantytown full of people who’d lost their jobs and lost their homes—had flourished for years. It was gone now, with no sign it had ever existed. Where were those people? Were they all working? Potter laughed under his breath. Not likely. But they were out of sight, which was what mattered to the present masters of the CSA.
Ford’s Hotel was a great white pile of a building, with Confederate flags flying everywhere on it. The cab wheezed to a stop in front of the entrance. Potter gave the driver half a dollar, which included a dime tip. He carried his bag up the low stairs leading into the hotel and past the doorman, an immensely tall, immensely fat Negro in a uniform gaudier than any the C.S. Army issued. Potter recalled the getup from his wartime visits to Richmond, though he didn’t think this was the same man wearing it.
He checked in, got his room key, and put his clothes on hangers and into drawers, as if he were an ordinary traveler. Then he went downstairs again and spent five cents for a copy of the Richmond Whig, which gave him a schedule of Olympic events.
President Featherston will watch the swimming competition tomorrow, one story said, to cheer on Richmond’s own Peter Dawson, who will be aiming for the gold medal in the 400 and 800 meters. Potter nodded slowly to himself. The swimming stadium would be a good place to try: much smaller than the great bowl where the athletes competed in track and field.
Every story in the paper seemed to glorify Featherston, the Freedom Party, the Olympics, Richmond, or all four at once. What made that particularly disgusting, as far as Potter was concerned, was that, up until the Freedom Party took power, the paper, as its name showed, had been strong for the Whigs. No more. Not many papers in the CSA persisted—or were still able to persist—in opposing the Freedom Party and the president.
“Which is why someone has to do something,” Potter murmured. And who better than me? I should have seen this coming before anybody else. Hell, I did see it coming, but I couldn’t take Featherston seriously. My only consolation is, nobody else did, either.
Without Jake Featherston, what would happen to the Freedom Party? Nothing good. Potter was sure of that. Featherston was the glue that held it together. Take him away, and the pieces would fly apart. They would have to . . . wouldn’t they?
Potter ate a big steak and a mess of fries in the hotel restaurant. Then he went up to his room and turned on the wireless. It was full of stories about—what else?—Jake Featherston, the Freedom Party, the Olympics, Richmond, or all four at once. The wireless stories were very smooth, smoother than those in the paper. Whoever had put them together knew what he was doing.
The next morning, Potter ordered a plate of ham and eggs. The condemned man ate a hearty meal. Well, why not?
He got another taxi and took it to the swimming stadium. Tickets were three dollars apiece—not the worst daily wage for a working man. Potter set three brown banknotes on the counter, took his ticket, and went inside.
For a tense moment, the smell of chlorine rising from the huge swimming pool put him in mind of Great War gas attacks. He had to fight down panic—had to and did. Then he worked his way toward the presidential box. He couldn’t get as close as he would have liked. Freedom Party guards in their almost-Army uniforms surrounded Jake Featherston. Potter sighed. He’d expected nothing different. He would have to wait for his chance, if it ever came.
He settled into his seat, right by an aisle that gave him at least the illusion of a chance to get away. He drummed his fingers on his thigh. How long would Featherston watch? Would he go do something else before Potter found a chance? You’ll find out, Potter told himself. Wait. See what happens.
While he waited, he watched the swimmers. He cheered “Richmond’s own Peter Dawson” as loudly as any of the men around him with their Freedom Party pins. He’d always thought of himself as a patriot. The difference was that, to him, Confederate patriotism didn’t start and stop with the Party.
Dawson didn’t win the gold in the 400 meters; a swimmer from Sweden did, by several lengths. But the hometown hero did win a silver medal. Better yet, he outkicked a man from the USA to do it. Cheers rang through the swimming stadium. After shaking the Swede’s hand, Dawson pulled himself from the pool and waved to the crowd.
“Frankfurters! Git your frankfurters! Twenty-five cents! Frankfurters!” The colored vendor roamed up and down the aisles, hawking the sausages. Clarence Potter handed the man—whose graying hair said they were about of an age—a quarter. He got back a frankfurter on a bun wrapped in waxed paper. As Potter unwrapped it and began to eat, the Negro hurried up the aisle once more. “Frankfurters! Git your frankfurters!”
The medalists got up onto the victory stand. A pretty girl put the medals—gold, silver, bronze—around their necks. They all grinned and shook hands with one another. A band blared out what Potter presumed to be the Swedish national anthem, though he didn’t recognize it. Up went the Swedish flag, yellow cross on blue. The Stars and Bars and the Stars and Stripes rose on flagpoles to its right and left.
When the anthem ended, the three young men descended from the platform. They were still chattering excitedly. Peter Dawson and the swimmer from the USA might have been friends. Maybe they were. Potter wondered how often they’d raced against each other, how well they knew each other.
“Frankfurters! Twenty-five cents! Git your frankfurters!” Here came the vendor again, distracting Potter—and everyone around him—from the joy of the moment. Back in the Roman days, vendors at the Colosseum selling dormice in honey had probably made people miss the best moments of lions devouring Christians.
The Negro paused by Potter, taking another frankfurter from the enameled metal box he wore at his waist. A sweat-stained canvas strap that went around his neck supported the box, leaving his hands free. He handed the sausage to a woman across the aisle, got back a dollar banknote, and gave her three quarters in change.
“Frankfurters! Git your frankfurters here!” The vendor stopped again, two or three steps farther down. For a moment, that meant nothing to Clarence Potter. Then he realized no one there had called or waved for a frankfurter. The Negro reached into the box just the same. What he pulled out this time wasn’t a bun wrapped in waxed paper. It was a submachine gun with the stock sawed off short to make it easier to hide. With a wordless shout of fury and hate, he aimed it in Jake Featherston’s direction and started shooting.
Guards toppled, wounded or dead. People screamed. The president of the CSA went down, too. Did he dive for cover, or was he hit? Potter didn’t know. He did know the surviving guards were going to fill the Negro full of lead . . . and probably everyone around the fellow, including himself. With hardly any conscious thought, his own pistol sprang into his hand. He shot the Negro in the back of the head.
The colored man crumpled as if all his bones had turned to mush. He was surely dead before he hit the stairs. By sheer luck, the submachine gun didn’t spray any more bullets when it clattered off the concrete. You poor damned fool, Potter thought. If you’d only waited a little longer, I would have tried to do it for you. Now—sweet Jesus, maybe I’ve gone and saved Jake Featherston’s worthless life.
“Drop it!” Four Freedom Party guards screamed the words at the same time. They pointed Tredegars and submachine guns of their own at Potter. Very slowly and carefully, he laid down the pistol.
“Don’t shoot him!” somebody close by called. “He just killed that goddamn nigger—and where the hell were you?”
“That’s right!” someone else said, voice cracking with excitement. “He’s a hero! He just saved President Featherston!”
Those rifle barrels didn’t waver, but the guards held their fire. Maybe I didn’t save him, Potter thought hopefully. Maybe he got one right between the eyes. Maybe . . .
But no. Jake Featherston stuck his head up. He had a pistol in his hand. He wouldn’t have been easy meat for anyone. With a little luck, he won’t recognize me, Potter thought. He hasn�
��t seen me for years, after all.
Featherston’s eyes widened. He recognized Potter, all right. Then one of his guards—who didn’t—said, “This guy killed the nigger who was shootin’ at you, sir.” Other people called Potter a hero, too. Hero, here, was the last thing he wanted to be. But he was stuck with it—and so was Jake Featherston.
Back in the Gray House, Jake Featherston gulped down a whiskey and set the glass on the presidential desk. Across the desk from him, Clarence Potter, annoyingly calm, sipped from a drink of his own. Jake said, “So you were sitting right there close to me, and you just happened to have a pistol in a shoulder holster.”
“I didn’t just happen to have it.” Potter sounded annoyingly calm, too. “I’m an investigator. Some of the things I investigate are pretty unsavory. I always have a pistol where I can grab it in a hurry.”
“And you never once thought of plugging me?” Featherston said.
“Of course not,” Potter answered. His face said, If I did, do you think I’m dumb enough to admit it?
A silent aide set a piece of paper on Featherston’s desk. His gaze flicked down it. When he was done, he eyed Potter again. “You’ve been a busy boy down in Charleston, haven’t you? It’s a wonder you’re still running around loose.”
“You come right out and admit that?” Potter said.
“Admit what?” Jake’s smile was all teeth and no mirth. “You say I said it—you say I said it and you get anybody to print what you say—and I’ll call you a liar to your face. How are you going to prove anything different?”
Potter took another sip from his drink. “A point.” He wasn’t just a cool customer. He was a cold fish.
“So what the hell am I going to do with you?” Jake wondered aloud. “You hate my guts, but you shot that nigger before any of my guards could.”
He’d had bullets whistle past his ear before. The frankfurter seller who’d tried to do him in couldn’t shoot worth a damn. The first couple of rounds had been near misses, but then the submachine gun had pulled up and to the right, as such weapons did all too often. Ten or twelve people were hurt, some of them badly, but not Jake. And, by failing, the Negro had handed the Freedom Party a whole new club with which to beat his race.
That could wait—for a little while, anyhow. “What am I going to do with you?” Featherston repeated.
With a shrug, Clarence Potter said, “Give me a medal and send me home.”
Featherston shook his head. “Nope. You’d be back. And who knows? You might not miss. If I send you home, you’d have to have an accident pretty damn quick.”
“You don’t care what you say, do you?” Potter remarked. “You never did.”
“I already told you, you’re not going to make a liar out of me,” Jake said. “Tell you what I’ll do, though, since I owe you for this, and since you were damn near the only officer I knew during the war who had any sense at all.” He leaned forward. “How’d you like to go back in the Army . . . Colonel Potter?”
In spite of Potter’s calm façade, his eyes widened. “You mean that,” he said slowly.
“Damn right I do. I can get some use out of you, and so can the country. About time we had some intelligence in Intelligence, goddammit. And I can keep an eye on you that way, too. What do you say?”
“If I tell you no, I wind up dead,” Potter answered. “What do you think I’m going to say?”
You can end up just as dead in a butternut uniform as you can in slacks and a jacket, Jake thought. But he wasn’t sorry Potter had said yes. The other man was a prim son of a bitch, but he had brains and he had nerve. He’d proved that during the war, in the swimming stadium, and—Jake’s eyes again traveled down the list of some of the things Potter had done in Charleston—in between times, too, even if he’d been on the wrong side then. He could do the CSA a lot of good if he wanted to.
“All right, Colonel,” Featherston said. “We’ll go from there, then.” He stuck out his hand. Potter didn’t hesitate more than a heartbeat before shaking it.
Watching Potter walk out the door with a flunky reminded Jake of something else, a piece of business he wondered why he’d left unfinished. He picked up the telephone and spoke into the mouthpiece. He’d taken too many orders in his time. He liked giving them a lot better.
He had to wait a while before this order was carried out. Normally, he didn’t like waiting. Here, though, he composed himself in patience and went through some of the endless paperwork on his desk. If I’d known how much paperwork went with the job, I might’ve let Willy Knight be president of the Confederate States. But he shook his head. That might be funny, but it wasn’t true. The paperwork didn’t just go with the job; in large measure, the paperwork was the job.
His secretary poked her head into the office. “General Stuart is here to see you, Mr. President.”
“Thanks, Lulu.” Jake’s smile was large and predatory. “You send him right on in.”
In marched Jeb Stuart Jr., his back as stiff as an old man could make it. He was a year or two past seventy, his chin beard and hair white, his uniform hanging slightly loose on a frame that had begun to shrink. He looked at Featherston with gray-blue eyes full of hate. His salute might have come from a rickety machine. “Mr. President,” he said tonelessly.
“Hello, General,” Featherston said, that fierce grin still on his face. “We meet again.” He waved to a chair. “Sit down.”
“I prefer to stand.”
“Sit down, I said,” Jake snapped, and Stuart, startled, sank into the chair. Featherston nodded. “Remember the last time you paid a call on me, General? You were gloating, on account of I was down. You reckoned I was down for good. You weren’t quite as smart as you reckoned, were you?”
“No, sir.” Jeb Stuart Jr.’s voice remained stubbornly wooden.
“Do you recollect Clarence Potter, General Stuart?” Featherston asked. Doing his best to remain impassive, Stuart nodded. Featherston went on, “I just brought him back into the Army—rank of colonel.”
“That is your privilege, Mr. President.” Stuart did his best not to make things easy.
His best wasn’t going to be good enough. Jake had the whip hand now. “Yeah,” he said. “It is. You screwed his career over just as hard as you screwed mine. And for what? I’ll tell you for what, God damn you. On account of we were right, that’s what.”
Jeb Stuart Jr. didn’t answer. During the war, Jake had served in a battery commanded by Jeb Stuart III, his son. He’d suspected Pompey, the younger Stuart’s colored servant, of being a Red. He’d said as much to Potter. Jeb Stuart III had used his family influence, and his father’s, to get Pompey off the hook. The only trouble was, Pompey had been a Red. When that proved unmistakably clear, Jeb Stuart III had thrown his life away in combat rather than face the music. And Jeb Stuart Jr. had made sure neither Featherston nor Potter saw another promotion through the rest of the war.
“Did you reckon I’d forget, General Stuart?” Jake asked softly. “I never forget that kind of thing. Never, you hear me?”
“I hear you, Mr. President,” Stuart said. “The high respect I hold for your office precludes my saying more.”
“For my office, eh? Not for me?” Featherston waited. Again, Jeb Stuart Jr. didn’t answer. Jake shrugged. He knew the older man blamed him for Jeb Stuart III’s death. Too damn bad, he thought. In spite of his campaign promises, he’d walked softly around the Army up till now. He hadn’t been quite ready to clean house. All of a sudden, he was—and surviving an assassination attempt would do wonders for his popularity, cushion whatever anger there might have been. “I accept your resignation, General.”
That struck home. Stuart glared. He’d spent fifty-five years in the Confederate Army; he’d been a boy hero in the Second Mexican War, and had never known or wanted any other life. “You don’t have it, you . . . you damned upstart!” he burst out.
Upstart? Jake knew he was one. The difference between him and Stuart—between him and all the swarms of Juniors a
nd IIIs and IVs and Vs in the CSA—was that he was proud of it. “No resignation?” he said. Jeb Stuart Jr. shook his head. Featherston shrugged. “All right with me. In that case, you’re fired. Don’t bother cleaning out your desk. Don’t bother about your pension, either. You’re finished, as of now.”
“I demand a court-martial,” Stuart said furiously. “What are the charges against me, damn you? I’ve been in the Army and risking my life for my country since before you were a gleam in your white-trash father’s eye. And not even the president of the Confederate States of America has the power to drum me out without my day in court.”
“White trash, is it?” Featherston whispered. Jeb Stuart Jr. nodded defiantly. “All right, Mr. Blueblood. All right,” Jake said. “You want charges, you stinking son of a bitch? I’ll give you charges, by Christ!” His voice rose and went harsh and rough as a rasp: “Yeah, I’ll give you charges. Charges are aiding and abetting your inbred idiot son, Captain Jeb fucking Stuart III, in hiding that his prissy little nigger called Pompey was really a goddamn Red. I’ll take you down, cocksucker, and I’ll take your stinking brat down with you. There won’t be a place in the CSA you can hide in by the time I’m done with you two, you’ll stink so bad. And so will he.”
The color drained from Jeb Stuart Jr.’s face. It wasn’t just that no one had talked to him like that in all his life. But no one had ever gone for the jugular against him with such fiendish gusto. He was white as typing paper when he found his voice, choking out, “You—You wouldn’t. Not even you would stoop so low.”
Jake smiled savagely. “Try me. You want a court, that’s what you’ll get.”
“G-Give me a pen, God damn you,” Stuart said. Featherston did, and paper to go with it. The officer’s hand shook as he wrote. He shoved the paper back across the desk. I resign from the Army of the Confederate States, effective immediately, he’d written, and a scrawled signature below the words. “Does that satisfy you?”
The Victorious Opposition Page 22
