The Victorious Opposition
Page 34
“Damn you,” he said under his breath. That was aimed at Jake Featherston, but Potter knew better than to name names. Someone might be—someone almost certainly was—listening to him.
The trouble was, Featherston had known exactly what made Potter tick. I solve puzzles. I’m good at it. Point me at something and I will get to the bottom of it. Tell me it helps my country—no, let me see with my own eyes that it helps my country—and I’ll dig four times as hard to get to the bottom of it.
Above Potter’s head, the fans in the ventilation system went on whirring. The sound got to be part of him after a while. If it ever stopped, he’d probably exclaim, “What was that?” The vibration had made his fillings ache when he first came here. No more. Now it seemed as basic, as essential, as the endless swirl of blood through his veins.
A major walked past him. “After twelve,” the man said. “You going to work through lunch, Colonel?”
Potter looked at his watch in amazement. Where had the morning gone? He’d done more plugging than he thought. “Not me,” he said, and got to his feet. Intelligence had its own mess hall—the secret lunchroom, he thought with wry amusement—so men who dealt in hidden things could talk shop with no one else the wiser.
He got himself a pastrami sandwich—a taste he’d acquired in Connecticut, and not one widely shared in the CSA—and a glass of Dr. Hopper, then sat down at a table. He had it to himself. Even after a year and a half, he was still new here, still not really one of the gang. A lot of the officers in Intelligence, the elite in the C.S. Army, had served through the lean and hungry times after the Great War. They had their own cliques, and didn’t readily invite johnny-come-latelies to join. They were still deciding what to make of him, too. Some of them despised Jake Featherston. Others thought him the Second Coming. With one foot in both those camps, Potter didn’t fit either.
And so, instead of gabbing, he listened. You learn more that way, he told himself. A Yankee spy would have learned a lot, especially hearing the way names like Kentucky and Houston got thrown around. Potter had suspected that much even before he came back to Intelligence. As anyone would, he liked finding out he was right.
X
Snow swirled through the air. Colonel Abner Dowling stood at stiff attention, ignoring the raw weather. Even when a flake hit him in the eye, he didn’t—he wouldn’t—blink. I’ll be damned if I let Salt Lake City get the best of me now, he thought stubbornly. A military band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Beside Dowling, his adjutant drew himself up even straighter than he had been.
When the last notes of the National Anthem died away, Dowling moved: he marched forward half a dozen paces to face the newly elected governor of Utah, who stood waiting in a black suit an undertaker might have worn. A mechanism might have given Dowling’s salute. “Governor Young,” he said.
Heber Young returned a nod at least as precisely machined. “Colonel Dowling,” he replied, his tone as cool and formal as the officer’s.
Flashbulbs popped, recording the moment for posterity. Purple and green spots filled Dowling’s vision. He did his best not to blink on account of the flashbulbs, either. “Governor Young,” he said, “at the order of President Smith, Utah is now taking its place as a state like any other in the United States, its long military occupation coming to an end. I wish you and your fellow citizens good fortune in years to come, and hope with all my heart that the peace and tranquility established here may long continue.”
“Thank you very much, Colonel Dowling,” Governor Young replied, and more flashbulbs popped. “We of Utah have waited a long time for this moment. Now that our government is in our own hands once more, you may rest assured that we will be diligent and careful in serving the public good.”
He’s as big a liar as I am, Dowling thought. Utah wasn’t a land of peace and tranquility, and the new civilian government—the new Mormon government, since Latter-Day Saints held all the elected offices in the executive and solid majorities in both houses of the Legislature—would do whatever it damn well pleased.
Young went on, “For more than half a century now, the United States have persisted in believing that the people of Utah are different from others who call the USA home. At last, we will have the opportunity to show the country—to show the entire world—that that is not so. We are our own masters once more, and we will make the most of it.”
Dowling listened politely, which took effort. Young hadn’t mentioned a few things. Polygamy was one. Disloyalty was another. After an attempted secession during the Second Mexican War, an armed rebellion during the Great War, and an assassination in front of Dowling’s own eyes, were the people of Utah really no different from others who called the USA home? Dowling had his doubts.
But President Smith evidently didn’t, and Smith’s opinion carried a lot more weight than Dowling’s (even if Dowling himself carried a lot more weight than Smith). Removing the U.S. garrison from Utah would save millions of dollars that might be better spent elsewhere—provided the state didn’t go up in flames and cost more money, not less. We’ll find out, Dowling thought.
“I will work closely with the government of the United States to make sure peace prevails,” Heber Young said. “Utah has been born again. With God’s help, our liberty will long endure.”
He nodded once more to Dowling. What did that mean? Get out, you son of a bitch, and don’t come back? Probably, though Young, a thorough gentleman, would never have said such a thing.
Dowling gave him another salute, to show that civilian authority in the United States was superior to military. Then the commandant—now the former commandant—of Salt Lake City did a smart about-face and marched back to his men. The ceremony was over. Civilian rule had returned to Utah for the first time in more than fifty years.
Trucks waited to take the soldiers to the train station. Dowling and Captain Toricelli went in a green-gray automobile instead. Toricelli said, “Five minutes after we leave the state, the Mormon Temple will start going up again.”
“What makes you think they’ll wait that long?” Dowling asked, and his adjutant laughed, though he hadn’t been joking. He went on, “How much do you want to bet that gilded statue of the angel Moroni will go on top of the new Temple, too?”
“Sorry, sir, but I won’t touch that one,” Captain Toricelli answered. The gilded copper statue that had surmounted the old Mormon Temple had disappeared before U.S. artillery and aerial bombs brought the building down in 1916. The occupying authorities had put up a huge reward for information leading to its discovery. In more than twenty years, no one had ever claimed that reward, and the statue remained undiscovered.
“I wonder what the Mormons will do now that they’re legal again,” Dowling said in musing tones.
“Young had to promise they wouldn’t bring back polygamy,” Toricelli said. “The president did squeeze that much out of him.”
“Bully,” Dowling replied, at which his adjutant, a much younger man, looked at him as if amazed anyone could say such a thing. Dowling’s ears heated. His taste in slang had crystallized before the Great War. If he sounded old-fashioned . . . then he did, that was all.
No one shot at the auto or the trucks on the way to the station. Dowling had wondered if his men would have to fight their way out of Salt Lake City, but the withdrawal hadn’t had any trouble. Maybe the Mormons didn’t want to do anything to give Al Smith an excuse for changing his mind. Dowling wouldn’t have, either, not in their shoes, but you never could tell with fanatics.
The Mormons did find ways to make their feelings known. Pictures and banners with beehives—their symbol of industry and the emblem of the Republic of Deseret they’d tried to set up—were everywhere. And Dowling saw the word FREEDOM! painted on more than a few walls and fences. Maybe that just meant the locals were glad to be getting out from under U.S. military occupation. But maybe it meant some of them really were as cozy with Jake Featherston’s party and the Confederate States as Winthrop W. Webb had feared.
At the station, most of the soldiers filed into ordinary second-class passenger cars. They would sleep—if they slept—in seats that didn’t recline. Dowling and Toricelli shared a Pullman car. Dowling remembered train rides with General Custer. He didn’t think he was as big a nuisance as Custer had been.
No matter what he thought, he’d never broached the subject to Captain Toricelli. Custer was a great hero to the USA, but not to Abner Dowling. As Dowling knew too well, no man was a hero to his adjutant, any more than he was to his valet. Toricelli stayed polite. That sufficed.
With a squeal of the whistle and a series of jerks, the train began to move. Toricelli said, “I won’t be sorry to get out of Utah, sir, and that’s the Lord’s truth.”
“Neither will I,” Dowling allowed. “I wonder what the big brains in Philadelphia will do with me now.”
He had to wait and see. He’d spent ten years as Custer’s adjutant (and if that wasn’t cruel and unusual punishment, he didn’t know what would be) and all the time since in Utah. What next? He’d proved he could put up with cranky old men and religious fanatics. What else did that suit him for? He himself couldn’t have said. Maybe the General Staff back in the de facto capital would have some idea.
Military engineers kept the train tracks in Utah free of mines. Dowling hoped they were on the job as the Army garrison left the state. He also hoped trains wouldn’t start blowing up once the engineers stopped patrolling the tracks.
When the train passed from Utah to Colorado, Dowling let out a silent sigh of relief. Or maybe it wasn’t so silent, for Captain Toricelli said, “By God, it really is good to get out, isn’t it?”
“I spent fourteen years in the middle of Mormon country,” Dowling answered. “After that, Captain, wouldn’t you be glad to get away?”
His adjutant thought it over, but only for a moment. “Hell, yes!” he said. “I’ve been there too damn long myself.”
The farther east the train got, the more Dowling wondered what sort of orders would wait for him in Philadelphia. All he knew was that he was ordered to the War Department. That could mean anything or nothing. He wondered if he still had any sort of career ahead of him, or if they would assign him to the shore defense of Nebraska or something of the sort. The farther east the train got, the more he worried, too. He was an outspoken Democrat, who’d been adjutant to one of the most outspoken Democrats of all time, and he was coming home in the middle of a Socialist administration. He’d met omens he liked better.
Captain Toricelli seemed immune to such worries. But Toricelli was only a captain. Dowling was a colonel. He’d been a colonel a long time. If he didn’t get stars on his shoulders pretty soon, he never would. And a superannuated colonel was as pathetic as any other unloved old maid.
On the way to Philadelphia, the train went through Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, not through Kentucky. Going through Kentucky was less dangerous than going through Houston, but only a little. Freedom Party men, whether homegrown or imported from the CSA, made life there a pretty fair approximation of hell. Long military occupation and memories of a lost uprising had helped cow the Mormons. Nothing seemed to cow the militants in the states taken from the Confederacy.
“Think of it this way, sir,” Captain Toricelli said when Dowling remarked on that. “When we put them down, our men are getting real combat training.”
Dowling was tempted to go, Bully! again, but feared his adjutant wouldn’t understand. Instead, he said, “Well, so we are, but the Confederates get it, too.”
“Yes, sir. That’s true.” Toricelli might have bitten into a lemon at the prospect. Then he brightened. “They don’t if we kill all of them.”
“Right,” Dowling said. There was bloodthirstiness the irascible George Armstrong Custer himself would have approved of.
Even a luxurious Pullman car palled after a few days. Dowling began to wish he’d taken an airliner from Salt Lake City. More and more people were flying these days. Still, he doubted the government would have held still for the added expense.
The train was going through Pittsburgh when he saw flags flying at half staff. Alarm shot through him. “What’s gone wrong?” he asked Captain Toricelli, but his adjutant, of course, had no better way of knowing than he did. No one else on the train seemed to have any idea, either. All he could do was sit there and fret till it pulled into the station in downtown Philadelphia.
He hurried off, intending to ask the first man he saw what had happened. But a General Staff lieutenant colonel was waiting on the platform, and greeted him with, “Welcome to Philadelphia, Brigadier General Dowling. I’m John Abell.” He saluted, then stuck out his hand.
In a crimson daze of delight, Dowling shook it. He heard Captain Toricelli’s congratulations with half an ear. Lieutenant Colonel Abell led him to a waiting motorcar. They think I’ve done something worthwhile with my time after all, he thought. He’d wondered, as any man might.
Not for hours afterwards did he think about the flags again. It hadn’t been a disaster after all, he learned: only a sign of mourning for the passing of former President Hosea Blackford.
Flora Blackford felt empty inside, empty and stunned. The rational part of her mind insisted that she shouldn’t have. Hosea had been getting frail for years, failing for months, dying for weeks. He’d lived a long, full life, fuller than he could ever have imagined it before he chanced to meet Abraham Lincoln on a train ride through Dakota Territory. He’d risen from nothing to president of the United States, and he’d died peacefully, without much pain.
And Flora had loved him, and being without him felt like being without part of herself. That made the emptiness. No matter what the rational part of her mind told her, she felt as if she’d just walked in front of a train.
Joshua took it harder yet. Her son wasn’t quite fourteen. He didn’t have even the defenses and rationalizations Flora could throw up against what had happened. She knew Joshua was a child born late in the autumn of Hosea’s life, that her husband had been lucky to see their son grow up as far as he had. All Joshua knew was that he’d just lost his father. To a boy heading toward manhood, losing a parent was more a betrayal than anything else. Your mother and father were supposed to be there for you, and be there for you forever.
In their New York apartment, Flora said, “Think of Cousin Yossel. He never got to see his father at all, because his father got killed before Yossel was born. You knew your father your whole life up till now, and you’ll remember him and be proud of him as long as you live.”
“That’s why I miss him so much!” Joshua said, his voice cracking between the treble it had been and the baritone it would be. Tears ran down his face. He fought each spasm of sobs, fought and lost. A few years younger, and crying would still have seemed natural to him; he would have done it without self-consciousness. Now, though, he was near enough a man to take tears hard.
Flora held him. “I know, dear. I know,” she said. “So do I.” Joshua let himself be soothed for a little while, then broke free of her with a man’s sudden heedless strength and bolted for his bedroom. He slammed the door behind him, but it couldn’t muffle the pain-filled sound of fresh sobs. Flora started to go after him, but checked herself. What good would it do? He was entitled to his grief.
The telephone rang. Flora stared at it with something close to hatred. Hosea was only one day dead, and she’d already lost track of how many reporters and wireless interviewers she’d hung up on. She’d put out a statement summing up her husband’s accomplishments and her own sorrow, but did that satisfy them? Not even close. The more she had to deal with them, the more convinced she grew that they were all a pack of ghouls.
Staring at the telephone didn’t make it shut up. Muttering under her breath, she went over to it and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Flora, dear, this is
Al Smith.” That rough New York voice couldn’t have belonged to anybody else. “I just wanted to call and let you know how sorry I am.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. President.” Flora mentally apologized to the telephone. “Thank you very much. I appreciate that, believe me.”
“He was a good man. He did everything he could. The collapse wasn’t his fault, and fixing it isn’t easy.” The president sighed. “Hoover found that out, and I’m doing the same damn thing. Not fair he should be stuck with the memory of it.”
“I know,” Flora answered. “I’ve been saying the same thing since 1929. The next person who pays attention will be the first.”
“I’m paying attention,” Smith said. “The services will be out West?”
“That’s right. He wanted to be buried in Dakota. That was home for him. I’ll do what he would have wanted.”
“Good. That’s good.” Across the miles, Flora could all but see the president nod. “You have any trouble dealing with a goyishe preacher?”
In spite of everything, she laughed. The USA was a special country, all right, and New York a special state—where else would a Catholic leader come out with a perfectly fitting bit of Yiddish? “Everything seems all right so far,” she answered.
“Fine,” Smith said. “He gives you any tsuris, though, you tell him to talk to me. I’ll fix him—you see if I don’t.”
“Thank you,” Flora said. That made quite a picture, too: a Catholic president offering to browbeat a Methodist minister. She went on, “Joshua and I are going to fly back to Dakota this afternoon. We’ll finish making arrangements on the spot, and we’ll be ready when . . . when Hosea gets there.” Her husband’s body was coming by special train.
“Charlie will come out to the funeral,” Smith said.
Now Flora found herself nodding. When Hosea was vice president, one of his duties had been going to important people’s funerals, too. La Follette would only follow a long tradition there. And Al Smith himself didn’t want to seem too closely associated with Hosea Blackford even in death: people still blamed Blackford for the business collapse, and Smith didn’t want that to rub off on him no matter how unfair it was. Flora said, “President Sinclair has already left for Dakota.”