In at the Death (55 page)

“You bet,” Moss replied, and their grins got wider. What would they say if they found out he was heading west to see if he wanted to defend the Confederate officers who ran a murder factory? Nothing he wanted to hear—he was sure of that. And so he didn’t tell them.

When he passed from Louisiana to Texas, the Lone Star flag replaced the Stars and Bars. He wondered how long the United States would go on letting the Texans pretend they were independent. Recognizing their secession from the CSA had been a useful way to get them out of the war, but he didn’t think it was likely to last.

A Texas Ranger stood on the platform holding a small cardboard sign with his name on it. When Moss admitted who he was, the Texan—who was short and wiry, going dead against the image the men of his state liked to put across—said, “I’m here to take you to the city jail, sir.”

“Then let’s go,” Moss answered.

The Ranger didn’t have much to say. Houston seemed almost intact. Not many Confederate cities were farther from U.S. bomber bases. People on the street wore old, shabby clothes, but they didn’t look hungry.

“How do you feel about working with the United States?” Moss asked when the auto—a Confederate Birmingham—stopped in front of the red-brick fortress that housed prisoners.

“Sir, where we were at, it looked like the best thing to do.” With that less than ringing endorsement, the Texas Ranger killed the engine. He hopped out and held the door open for Moss.

U.S. officers meticulously checked Moss’ ID and then patted him down before admitting him to the building. He got checked and searched again when he went into the visitors’ room. A tight steel mesh separated his side from that of the man he might be representing.

In came Jefferson Pinkard. The fellow who’d run Camp Determination and Camp Humble was about Moss’ age. He had a big, burly frame: muscles with a lot of fat over them. He looked tough, but not vicious. Moss knew how little that proved, but found it interesting all the same.

Pinkard was giving him the once-over, too. “So the damnyankees found another bastard willing to speak up for me?” he asked in a Deep-South drawl.

“I don’t know that I am yet,” Moss answered. “Why did you want to kill off as many Negroes as you could?”

Had Pinkard denied it, Moss would have walked out. He didn’t, though. He said, “Because they were enemies of my country. They were shooting at us before we started fighting you Yankee bastards.”

“Men, women, and children?” Moss said.

“They’re black, they don’t like us,” Pinkard said. “’Sides, what business of yours is it, anyway? They were Confederate niggers. We can do what we damn well please in our own country. Far as I know, we didn’t do anything to coons from the USA.”

As far as Moss knew, that was true. He thought it was Pinkard’s strongest argument. A country was sovereign inside its own borders, wasn’t it? Nobody had gone after the Ottoman Sultan for what he did to the Armenians or the Tsar for pogroms against Jews…or the United States for what they did to their Indians. But…“Nobody ever made camps like yours.”

“Nobody ever thought to.” Jefferson Pinkard didn’t sound repentant—he sounded proud. “Fuck, you assholes are gonna hang me. You won, and I can’t do shit about it. But the only thing I was doing was, I was doing my job. I did it goddamn well, too.”

“I read that the mayor of Snyder killed himself after he got a look at the mass graves your camp had there,” Moss said.

“Some people are soft,” Pinkard said scornfully. “Yeah, we lost the war. But we’ll never have to worry about niggers down here, not the way we did before. Hell, you can even ask these chickenshit Texas traitors—they’ll tell you I’m all right in their book. I helped clean out Texas along with the rest of the CSA. You can defend me or not, however you please. I know what I did, and I’m damned if I’m sorry.”

You’re damned, all right
, Moss thought. Did guilty people really and truly need lawyers just like anybody else? Did he want to be one of them? There were all kinds of ways to go down in history. Was this the one he really had in mind?

If he didn’t do it, who would? Whoever it was, would the fellow do as good a job as Moss would himself? He had to doubt it, especially with the Army’s chief defense lawyer already down for the count. He didn’t believe anybody could get Pinkard off, but he’d always enjoyed giving military prosecutors a run for their money.

In the end, that—and being at loose ends as a pilot with the war over—decided him. “Do you want me to defend you? I’ll give it my best shot.”

“D’you reckon you can get me loose?” Pinkard asked. “Or was I right the first time?”

“Long odds against you, mighty long. Anybody who tells you different is lying, too, just so you know.”

The camp commandant grunted. “Fuck. It looked that way to me, too, and to that Goldstein guy, but I was hoping maybe you saw it different. But, shit, even if you don’t, Colonel Moss, I’m mighty glad to have you. Do whatever the hell you can, and see if you can embarrass ’em before they put a noose around my neck.”

He didn’t have unreasonable expectations, anyhow, which was the start of being a good client. “I think we’ve got ourselves a deal,” Jonathan Moss said. Because of the wire screen, they couldn’t even shake on it.

A
lot of the Confederate officers at Camp Liberty! sank into despair when they finally believed their country had surrendered. Most of the ones who took the surrender hardest had been in there longest. They hadn’t seen the disasters of the past year and a half with their own eyes. Jerry Dover had. He knew damn well that the Confederate States were licked.

“Yeah, we lost,” he’d say whenever somebody asked him about it—or sometimes even when nobody did.

“Why don’t you soft-pedal the doom and gloom, Dover?” Colonel Kirby Smith Telford asked him. The senior C.S. officer was convinced Dover wasn’t a Yankee plant, which didn’t mean he was happy with him. “People already feel bad enough without you rubbing it in.”

“Christ on a crutch, it’s over. We’re licked,” Dover said. “How can it be doom and gloom after we’re doomed?”

“Keeping our chins up means we can respect ourselves,” Telford answered. “It makes U.S. forces respect us more, too.”

That last might even have been true. It left Dover no happier. “What difference does it make?” he demanded. “We don’t even have a country any more. The United States are occupying the whole CSA. Far as I can see, that turns us into damnyankees.”

“My ass,” Telford said. “I’ll see them in hell before I bow down and worship the goddamn Stars and Stripes.”

“Yes, sir. I feel the same way,” Dover said. “Only problem is, as long as we feel that way, why should the Yankees let us out of this place?”

“Why? Because the war’s over, dammit, that’s why.” But not even Kirby Smith Telford could make himself sound as if he thought that was reason enough.

The U.S. authorities showed no signs of letting their commissioned POWs go free. After a few days, Colonel Telford asked them why not. The answer he got left him scowling.

“They say they’re investigating to see if they need to charge any of us with this ‘crimes against humanity’ crap,” he reported.

Jerry Dover didn’t like the sound of that. It struck him as being vague enough to let the United States do whatever they pleased. “What exactly do they mean by that?” he asked.

“Well, what they were mostly talking about with me was finding out whether we ever gave niggers up to the people who shipped ’em off to the camps,” Telford answered.

“Oh.” Dover relaxed. About the most hideous thing he’d done as a quartermaster officer was send gas shells up to the front. Since the damnyankees had used gas themselves, they couldn’t very well get their bowels in an uproar about it…unless they felt like getting their bowels in an uproar. If they did, who was going to stop them?

Nobody this side of the Kaiser, that was who.

Someone said, “They can’t treat us this way,” so maybe he thought he
was
the Kaiser, or else somebody even more important.

Kirby Smith Telford looked bleak and sounded bleaker. “Not much we can do about it. Not anything we can do about it, far as I know. If they decide to line us up and shoot us, who’s going to complain to them?”

“It ain’t right,” the other Confederate officer said. Telford only shrugged.

Who’d complained when the Confederacy got rid of its Negroes? Dover knew he hadn’t. He also knew his fellow officers wouldn’t appreciate his pointing that out. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was just keep your big mouth shut. Dover, a man who liked to yell at people, had been a long time learning that. He had the lesson now, though.

One by one, the officers in his barracks hall got summoned to their interrogations. A few left Camp Liberty! not much later. The rest stayed where they were, fuming and cursing their damnyankee captors. Dover wondered how smart the victors were. If these POWs hadn’t been embittered Yankee-haters who would do anything they could to hurt the USA once they finally got free, they were more likely to turn into men with views like that the longer they sat and stewed.

Of course, maybe the U.S. authorities didn’t intend to let them go at all. Dover imagined stooped, white-haired POWs dying of old age as the twentieth century passed into the twenty-first. He shivered. Not even the Yankees could stay vengeful for upwards of half a century…could they?

They seemed to be questioning prisoners in roughly the order the Confederates had been captured. That meant Jerry Dover had quite a while to wait. He was perfectly willing to be patient.

Kirby Smith Telford came back from his grilling hot enough to cook over. “I’m a special case, the sons of bitches say,” he rasped.

“How come?” Dover asked. “You were just a combat soldier, right? Why are they flabbling about you, then?”

“On account of I’m from Texas, that’s why,” Telford answered. “From the goddamn traitor Republic of Texas, now. If I’m gonna get outa here, I have to swear to be loyal to a country”—he made as if to spit at the very idea—“that betrayed the country I grew up in.”

“You could just ask them to ship you back to some other part of the CSA,” Dover said.

“I tried that. It only made things worse,” Telford said bleakly. “They reckoned I said that because I wanted to raise trouble for them. I didn’t mean it that way—not then I didn’t. But Jesus God! If I get out of here now…” He didn’t say what he would do then. What he didn’t say, nobody could report to the authorities. Dover didn’t have much trouble figuring it out, though.

“Probably should have done whatever they told you to do, and then gone on about your business afterwards,” he said.

“Yeah. I figured that out, too, only not quick enough to do me any goddamn good.” Kirby Smith Telford sounded almost as disgusted at himself as he did at his Yankee interrogators.

Dover’s turn came about a week later, on a summer day as hot and sticky as any in Savannah. The officer who questioned him was a major about half his age, a fellow named Hendrickson. He had a manila folder with Dover’s name on it. It was fat with papers. Dover wondered whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

“You were in the Quartermaster Corps,” Major Hendrickson said. He had a prissy little hairline mustache that didn’t go with the shape of his face.

“I sure was,” Dover said.

“You were taken outside of Huntsville.”

“That’s right.”

“You fought in the Great War, but you’re not career military.”

“Right again.” This ground seemed safe enough.

Hendrickson lit a cigarette—a nasty U.S. brand. He didn’t offer one to Dover. Instead, he went through some of the papers in the folder. “Tell me what you did between the wars.”

“I managed a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia,” Dover replied. Hendrickson asked him for the name of the place. “The Huntsman’s Lodge,” Dover said, wondering why that could possibly matter.

It seemed to; Major Hendrickson grunted and checked something off. Dover tried to see what it was, but he couldn’t read upside down well enough to tell. The interrogator went on, “Did you employ Negroes in this restaurant?”

“Yeah,” Dover said. “Cooks and waiters and cleanup crew. Couldn’t hardly get along without ’em.”

“We don’t seem to have any trouble,” Hendrickson said primly. Dover only shrugged; he didn’t care how damnyankees ran their eateries. The interrogator riffled through his papers some more. “Was one of these Negroes a man named, uh, Xerxes?”

He botched the name, so Dover almost didn’t recognize it. “Xerxes?” He said it the right way, as if the first X was a Z. “Yeah, he worked for me for years. Hell of a smart guy. Probably would’ve been a lawyer or a Congressman if he was white. But how the devil did you know that?”

Annoyingly, Hendrickson answered a question with another question: “Do you remember his son’s name?”

“Have to think about that—I only met him a couple of times. He was…Cassius. How come?” Before the Yankee major answered, Dover’s jaw dropped. “Sweet suffering Jesus! Not
that
Cassius?” The U.S. wireless wouldn’t shut up about the Negro who’d shot Jake Featherston.

Major Hendrickson nodded. “The very same. And it just so happened your name came up a couple-three times when we questioned him.”