In at the Death (62 page)

Flora’s district had suffered along with the rest of New York. Bombs had blown up apartment buildings and clothing factories and block after block of shops. Incendiaries had charred holes in the fabric of the city. Rebuilding wouldn’t be easy or quick or cheap.

One advantage incumbency gave Flora was her connections down in Philadelphia. If she asked for money to help put her district back together, she was more likely to get it than a Congressman new in his seat.

Her campaign posters got right down to business when they talked about that.
DO YOU WANT A NEW KID ON YOUR BLOCK
? they asked, and showed Morris Kramer in short pants pulling a wheeled wooden duck on a string. That wasn’t even remotely fair, but politics wasn’t about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side’s guy out. Once you’d done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren’t worth a dime.

“We want to make this district a better place than it was before the war,” Flora said to whoever would listen to her. “Not the same as it used to be, not just as good as it used to be. Better. If we can’t do that, we might as well leave the ruins alone, to remind us we shouldn’t be dumb enough to fight another war.”

Herman Bruck brought a blond kid in a captain’s uniform up to her one afternoon at the Socialist Party headquarters. “Flora, I’d like you to meet Alex Swartz,” he said.

“Hello, Captain Swartz,” Flora said. “What can I do for you?” She had no doubt that the earnest young officer with a roll of papers under one arm was on the up and up. Whether Herman Bruck had an ulterior motive in introducing him…Well, she’d find out about that.

“Very pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Alex Swartz said. He had broad, Slavic cheekbones and a narrow chin, giving his face a foxy cast. “I graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture two weeks before the war started. I’m on leave right now—in a week, I go back down to occupation duty in Mississippi. But I wanted to show you some of the sketches I’ve made for how things might look once we put them back together.”

“I’d like to see,” Flora said, not exaggerating too much. If the sketches turned out to be garbage, she could come out with polite nothings, let the captain down easy, and then get on with her reelection campaign and with taking care of the damage in the district.

But they weren’t garbage. As he unrolled them one by one and talked about what he had in mind, she saw she wasn’t the only one who’d been thinking along those lines. The sketches showed a more spacious, less jam-packed, less hurried place than the one her constituents lived in now.

“This is a lot like what I have in mind,” she said. “I particularly like the way you use green space, and the way you don’t forget about theaters and libraries. The next question is, how much does it all cost?” That was the one that separated amateurs from professionals. She wouldn’t have been surprised if Alex Swartz hadn’t worried about it at all.

He had, though. “Here—I’ve made some estimates,” he said, and pulled a couple of folded sheets of paper from his left breast pocket. “Not cheap, but I hope not too outrageous.”

“Let’s have a look.” Flora peered through the bottoms of her bifocals. She found herself nodding. Captain Swartz had it just about right—what he was proposing wasn’t cheap, but it wasn’t too expensive, either. If you wanted to do things right, you had to spend some money. “Not bad, Captain. Not bad at all.”

“Do you think…there’s any chance it will happen?” he asked.

“There’s some chance that some of it will,” she answered. “I can’t say any more than that. Nothing the government touches ever ends up looking just the way you thought it would before you started—you need to understand that right from the beginning, or else you start going crazy.”

Swartz nodded. “Got you.”

“Are you sure? You’d better, or you’ll end up very disappointed. Most things end up as compromises, as committee decisions that don’t make too many people too unhappy. Some good stuff goes down the drain. So does some crap. Which is which…depends on who’s talking a lot of the time.”

“Getting some of this built is better than leaving it all as pretty pictures,” Captain Swartz insisted. “Pretty pictures are too easy.”

“That sounds like the right attitude,” Flora said.

“One thing you find out pretty darn quick in the Army—you won’t get everything you want,” Swartz said.

“It’s no different in politics,” Flora said. “We don’t always have to shoot at people to make that clear, though, which is all to the good.”

Captain Swartz looked about sixteen when he grinned. “I bet.” Then the grin slipped. “Didn’t I hear your son got wounded? How’s he doing?”

“He’s getting better,” Flora answered. “It was a hand wound—nothing life-threatening, thank God.” And it kept him out of action while the war finally ran down. Maybe it kept him from stopping something worse. She could hope so, anyway. Hoping so made her feel not quite so bad when she thought about what
did
happen to Joshua.

“Glad to hear it,” the architect said. “I admire you for not keeping him out of the Army or getting him a job counting paper clips in Nevada or something. You would’ve had the clout to do it—I know that.”

“Captain, I’ll tell you what isn’t even close to a secret. I’m his mother, after all. If he’d let me do something like that, I would have done it in a heartbeat,” Flora answered. “But he didn’t, and so I didn’t. If, God forbid, anything worse would have happened, I don’t know how I would have looked at myself in a mirror afterwards.”

“Well, I can see that,” Alex Swartz said. “But I can see how he feels about it, too. You don’t want to think your mother’s apron strings kept you out of danger everybody else had to face.”

“No, and you don’t want to get killed, either.” Flora sighed. “He came through it, and he didn’t get hurt too bad. That means I don’t hate myself…too much.” She tapped an unrolled drawing with the nail of her right index finger. “I really think you’re on to something here with these sketches. I hope we can make some of them more than sketches, if you know what I mean. The district will be better off if we can.”

His eyes glowed. “Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” she said. “Remember, I grew up here, in a coldwater flat. We’re too crowded. I like the open space that’s part of your plan. We need more of it here. We’d be better off if the whole district had more, not just the parts the Confederates bombed.”

“Using war as an engine for urban improvement—” Captain Swartz began.

“Is wasteful,” Flora finished for him. She didn’t know if that was what he was going to say, but it was the truth. She went on, “But if it’s the only engine we’ve got,
not
using it would be a crime. And the way things are on the Lower East Side, I’m afraid it is.”

“If I got out of the Army before Election Day, I was going to vote for you anyway,” he said. “Now I want to vote for you two or three times.”

From behind Flora, Herman Bruck said, “That can probably be arranged.”

“Hush, Herman,” Flora said, though she knew he might not be kidding. She turned back to Captain Swartz. “Instead of doing that, take your plans to Morris Kramer. If he wins, he can do his best to push them through, too. And they’re important. They ought to go forward regardless of politics.” Did she really say that? Did she really mean it? She nodded to herself. She did. When it came down to the district, you could…every once in a while.

F
rom Virginia all the way down to Florida—except the area around Lexington, Virginia, which was the most special of special cases—Irving Morrell’s word was law.
Military governor
was a bland title, but it was the one he had. In the Roman Empire, he would have been a proconsul. That held more flavor, at least to him. A Roman, to whom Latin came naturally, might have disagreed.

Morrell had always had a bitch of a time with Latin. He set up shop in Atlanta. It was centrally located for his current command, and it also hadn’t taken the pounding Richmond had. One of these days, the states under his jurisdiction might rejoin the USA. That was the long-term outlook in Philadelphia. Morrell would believe it when he saw it. Right now, his main job was making sure smoldering resentment didn’t burst into flaming revolt.

Thick tangles of barbed wire strengthened by iron and concrete pillars made sure autos couldn’t come within a couple of hundred yards of his headquarters. No auto bomb was going to take out the whole building. Everyone who approached on foot, male or female, was methodically searched.

Security was just as tight at other U.S. headquarters throughout the fallen Confederacy. Neither that nor brutal retaliation for attacks had kept a couple of colonels and a brigadier general from joining their ancestors.

“And these people are supposed to become citizens?” Morrell said to his second-in-command. “How long do they expect us to wait?”

“The French and Germans don’t love each other, either,” Harlan Parsons replied.

“But they both know they’re foreigners,” Morrell said. “The Confederates speak English. These states used to belong to the USA. And because of that, the bigwigs in Philadelphia think it can happen again, easy as pie. And I’ve got one thing to say to that: bullshit!”

“You get to try to make it work,” Brigadier General Parsons said. “Aren’t you lucky…sir?”

“Yeah. I’m lucky like snow is black,” Morrell answered.

His number two sent him a quizzical look. “You’re the first officer I ever heard who used that line and wasn’t Jewish.”

“I knew I stole it from somebody. I forgot who,” Morrell said.

The telephone on his desk rang. Parsons picked it up. “General Morrell’s office.” Maybe he could protect his superior from the slings and arrows of outrageous—or outraged—idiots. Here, though, he listened for a little while and then said, “I’ll pass you through. Hold on.” Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, he told Morrell, “It’s Colonel Einsiedel, down in Tallahassee.”

“Thanks.” Morrell took the telephone. “Hello, Colonel. What’s gone wrong now?” He assumed something had. People didn’t call him to talk about the weather.

Sure enough, the local commander said, “We’re facing a boycott here. All the locals are pretending we don’t exist. And they aren’t going into any of the stores that sell to us. Some of the merchants are starting to feel the pinch.”

“That’s a new one,” Morrell said. “Any violence?”

“Not aimed at us,” Colonel Einsiedel answered. “They may have used some strong-arm tactics to get their own people to go along. What are we supposed to do about it?”

“Ignore them. Wait it out,” Morrell said. “What else is there?”

“Some of the storekeepers don’t want to sell to us any more,” the colonel said. “They’re trying to get out of the deals they made. It’s hard to blame them. If they keep doing business with us, they starve.”

“You can’t let ’em get away with that. If you do, this time tomorrow there won’t be a shop in the old Confederacy where we can buy anything. We aren’t niggers, and our money’s good.”

“Yes, sir. We’ll try,” Einsiedel said. “One of my lieutenants said we ought to shoot any storekeeper who won’t sell to us.”

Morrell laughed. “Damned if that doesn’t sound like Michael Pound.”

“How the devil did you know, sir?” The colonel in Florida sounded flabbergasted.

“You mean it is?” Morrell laughed again. “Well, I can’t say I’m surprised. I’ve known Pound for twenty-five years now. He has a straightforward bloodthirstiness that would scare the crap out of any General Staff officer ever born. He’s not always right, but he’s always sure of himself.”

“Boy, you can say that again,” Einsiedel said. “All right, sir. We’ll see what we can do to nip this stuff in the bud.”

“Don’t be too gentle,” Morrell said. “We won the war. If they think they’re going to win the peace, they can damn well think again.”

“I sure hope so,” Colonel Einsiedel said, which wasn’t exactly the encouraging note on which Morrell would have wanted the conversation to end. But the colonel hung up after that, so Morrell couldn’t pump him any more without calling him back. Deciding that would make more trouble than it saved, Morrell put the handset back into its cradle instead.

“Boycott, huh?” Brigadier General Parsons said. “That’s…different.”

“Yeah. It lets them annoy us without giving us a good excuse to shoot them,” Morrell said. “Some of them are still fighting the war, even if they don’t carry guns any more. Every time they make us blink, they figure they’ve won a battle.”

“So we don’t blink, then,” Parsons said.

“That’s about the size of it.” Morrell hoped he could get his own officers to go along. Not all of them would see that this was a problem.

Michael Pound did, by God! Morrell smiled and shook his head. Pound saw problems and solutions with an almost vicious clarity. As far as he was concerned, everything was simple. And damned if watching him in action didn’t make you wonder whether he had it right and everybody else looked at the world through a kaleidoscope that made everything seem much more complicated than it should have.

The telephone rang again. “General Morrell’s office,” Harlan Parsons said. This time, he didn’t hesitate in answering on his own hook: “That’s right. As of the surrender, Negroes have the same rights on ex-Confederate territory as whites do. Anyone who tries to go against that goes up against the U.S. government…. Yes, that includes intermarriage, as long as the people involved want to go through with it.”

After he hung up, Morrell asked, “Where?”

“Rocky Mount, North Carolina,” his second-in-command answered. “Nice to know there are still some Negroes there.”

“Still
some
Negroes all through the CSA,” Morrell said. “Just not many.” He’d heard so many stories of survival by luck and by stealth and by guerrilla war that they started to blur. He’d heard some of survival by the kindness of whites, but fewer than he wished he had.

“Featherston turned a whole country upside down and inside out,” Parsons said. “It’ll never be the same down here. Never. How many dead?”