Return Engagement (48 page)

“Oh. I see. You need not worry yourself about that, Mrs. Pomeroy,” the Frenchy said. “We searched those things before paying a call upon you. Had we found anything of interest there, we would have paid a different sort of call. On that, you may rely.” He spoke to his men in their own language. They tramped away.

“Look what they did, Mommy!” Alec said. “Are they going to come back and do it some more?”

“I hope not,” Mary answered. “Will you help me try to put things back together?”

He did try. She gave him credit for that. But he was much more interested in making messes than in repairing them. He got bored in a hurry. Mary hadn’t realized how much she and Mort had till she saw it all spilled on the floor. The soldiers in blue-gray had enjoyed mess-making as much as Alec did. They’d even pawed through her underwear, though explosives were unlikely to be lurking there.

She’d got things about half repaired by the time Mort came home from across the street. “What happened here?” he asked. “Our own private earthquake?”

“You’re close,” Mary answered. “The Frenchies searched the place.”

Her husband blinked. “Why would they do that?”

“Because my father . . . did what he did. Because my brother . . . was who he was,” she said.
Because Wilf Rokeby is trying to save his own skin,
she added, but only to herself. She wasn’t supposed to know anything more than the usual gossip about how and why the longtime postmaster had ended up in trouble with the occupying authorities.

Mort gave her a hug. “Those dirty bastards,” he said, which was about as rough as he ever talked around her. “They’ve got no business doing that. None, you hear me?”

“They’ve got the guns,” Mary said bleakly. “They can do whatever they want.”

She hated that kind of argument when Mort used it on her. By his sour expression, he didn’t like it coming back at him, either. He said, “It’s not right. They can’t tear your place to shreds for no reason at all.” It wasn’t for no reason at all, but he didn’t know that. Mary didn’t intend to let him find out, either.

B
ig, snorting trucks brought the latest shipment of Negroes to Camp Dependable. The trucks were painted butternut and had butternut canvas covers over the back. From the outside, they looked just like the vehicles that hauled Confederate soldiers here and there. And, in fact, the differences were minor. The biggest one was that these trucks were fitted with manacles and leg irons to make sure their passengers didn’t depart before they got where they were going.

Jefferson Pinkard came out to watch the unloading, the way he always did. His men had it down to a science. He watched anyway. The Negroes coming into his camp had nothing to lose, and they probably knew it. If some of them could beat the restraints before they got here, they might grab a guard who was releasing them and turn his gun on the others. Even science could go wrong, especially if you got careless.

Nobody here got careless. That was another reason Jeff came to the unloadings. When men worked under the boss’s eye, they worked by the book. They didn’t get smart. They didn’t get cute. They just did what they were supposed to do. Nothing went wrong, which was exactly what Jeff wanted.

“Good job,” he told Mercer Scott when the last Negro had been processed through into the camp.

“Yeah.” The guard chief nodded. He paused to light a cigarette, then held out the pack. Jeff took one, too. Scott went on, “All the same, though, I wonder why the hell we bother.”

“How do you mean?” Jeff asked.

Scott’s gesture left a small trail of smoke in its wake. “Well, shit, we could get rid of these niggers as soon as they come in the gates, blow their goddamn brains out while they’re still in the trucks, and save ourselves the bother of leadin’ ’em out to the swamp later on.”

“Population reductions,” Pinkard said distastefully. They still offended his sense of order. He was a
jailer,
dammit, not a . . . a. . . . He didn’t have the word for what his superiors were turning him into, didn’t have it and didn’t want to go looking for it very hard. After a moment, he shook his head. “Wouldn’t work so good. They’d have to shoot ’em, and then they’d have to get rid of their bodies, ’stead o’ just letting ’em fall into the trenches like they do now. We’d have more people eating their guns and going out like Chick Blades.”

“Shit,” Scott said again, but he didn’t try to tell Jeff he was wrong. Instead, he suggested, “We could let the niggers who’re still alive dispose of the others.”

That sounded halfhearted. There were good reasons why it should, too. Pinkard pointed that out: “This place is antsy enough as is. We start doin’ our population reductions right here and let the niggers know for sure we’re doin’ ’em, it’s gonna blow up right in our faces. You want to tell me any different?”

“No.” Mercer Scott scowled, but he could see the obvious when you rubbed his nose in it. “No, goddammit.”

“All right, then,” Jeff said. “We’ll keep on doin’ it the same old way till we come up with somethin’ better.
Better,
you hear me?”

“I hear you.” Scott threw his butt on the ground and crushed it out under his boot heel. He probably would have sooner crushed Jeff under it, but even a guard chief didn’t always get his druthers.

For that matter, a camp commandant didn’t, either. Jeff went back to his office muttering to himself. He hated the way Camp Dependable worked now, but he hadn’t been able to come up with anything better, either. Trucks came in. Shackled prisoners shambled into the swamp. They didn’t come out. And, every so often, a Chick Blades would run a hose from his auto’s exhaust pipe into the passenger compartment, turn on the motor, and. . . .

The obvious. And maybe, maybe, the not so obvious. Instead of sitting down at his desk, Pinkard started pacing around it. After half a dozen revolutions, he paused, an unaccustomed look of wonder spreading across his fleshy face. “Well, fuck me!” he exclaimed. “Maybe I
am
a genius.”

If he was, he needed something to prove his genius on. He hurried out of the office again. To his relief, not all the trucks had left. He kept one of them and sent the driver back with a pal. When the man squawked, Pinkard said, “You tell your boss to give me a call. I’ll square it with him—you bet I will.” The driver grumbled some more, but Jeff had the bulge to get away with it.

“What’s going on?” Mercer Scott asked, attracted by the argument.

“Need me a truck,” Jeff answered.

Scott scratched his head. “How come?”

“You’ll see,” was all Pinkard said. If this worked, it was his baby. If it didn’t work, he’d have to fix it up with the fellow from whose bailiwick he’d lifted the truck. He figured he could. One truck and one miffed driver were small change in the bureaucratic skirmishes that ate so much of his life these days. He clapped Scott on the back. “I’m going into town for a little while. Try not to let the niggers steal this place or burn it down while I’m gone, all right?”

Scott staring after him, he drove the truck into Alexandria. He was glad traffic was light. He’d never tried handling anything so big, and he wasn’t used to a gearshift with five forward speeds instead of the usual three. But he didn’t hit anything, and he wasn’t grinding the gears when he shifted nearly so much by the time he got where he was going: a garage named Halliday’s, on the outskirts of town.

Stuart Halliday was a compact man with battered, clever hands. “What can I do for you, buddy?” he asked when Jeff descended from the truck.

Jeff told him what he wanted, finishing, “Can you handle it?”

The mechanic rubbed his chin. “Sheet metal all the way around there . . . Gasketing on the doors . . .”

“Gotta be sturdy sheet metal,” Pinkard said.

“Yeah, I heard you.” Halliday thought for a little while, then nodded. “Yeah, I can do it. Set you back two hundred and fifty bucks.”

“I’ll give you one seventy-five,” Jeff said. They haggled good-naturedly for a little while before settling on two and a quarter. Jeff asked, “How soon can you let me have it?”

“Be about a week.” Halliday sent Pinkard a curious look. “What the hell you want it like that for?”

“Camp business,” Jeff answered. If the snoopy garage man couldn’t work it out for himself, that was all to the good. Then Pinkard coughed. In all of this, he hadn’t figured in one thing. “Uh—you give me a lift back to camp?”

Halliday carefully didn’t smile. “Why, sure.”

When Jeff came back without the truck, Mercer Scott sent him a stare full of hard suspicion. He didn’t care. He knew what he was doing, or thought he did. Over the week, while Halliday was overhauling the truck, he made a few preparations of his own. Till he saw how this would go, he intended to play his cards close to his chest.

He paid Halliday when the mechanic delivered the revised and edited machine. He used camp money. If the thing didn’t work, he’d pay it back out of his own pocket. Halliday stuffed brown banknotes into his coveralls. “I left that one hole, like you said,” he told Jeff. “I don’t understand it, not when the rest is pretty much airtight, but I did it.”

“You got paid for doin’ the work,” Jeff answered. “You didn’t get paid for understanding.”

One of Halliday’s kids drove him away from Camp Dependable. Unlike Jeff, he’d thought ahead. After he was gone, Jeff did some of his own work on the truck. He drew a small crowd of guards. Most of them hung around for a while, then went off shrugging and shaking their heads.

Mercer Scott watched like a hawk. Suddenly, he exclaimed, “You son of a bitch! You
son
of a bitch! You reckon it’ll work?”

Pinkard looked up from fitting a length of pipe to the hole that had puzzled Stuart Halliday. “I don’t know,” he said, “but I aim to find out.”

“Chick Blades ought to get a promotion for giving you the idea,” Scott said. “Goddamn shame he’s too dead to appreciate it.”

“Yeah.” Jeff examined his handiwork. Slowly, he nodded to himself. “That ought to do it. Now I’ll just announce a transfer to another camp. . . .”

Getting Negroes to volunteer to hop into the truck was so easy, it almost embarrassed him. The hardest part was picking and choosing among them. They knew that when they got shackled together and marched out into the swamp, they weren’t coming back. But a transfer to another camp had to be an improvement. Maybe there wouldn’t be population reductions somewhere else.

Pinkard drove the truck himself that first time. It was his baby. He wanted to see how it went. He closed the gasketed doors behind the Negroes who’d got in. The lock and bar to keep those doors closed were good and solid. Halliday hadn’t skimped. Jeff would have skinned the mechanic alive if he had.

He started up the engine and drove out of camp. It wasn’t long before the Negroes realized exhaust fumes were filling their compartment. They started shouting—screaming—and pounding on the metal walls. Jeff drove and drove. After a while, the screams subsided and the pounding stopped. He drove a little longer after that, just to be on the safe side.

When he was satisfied things had worked out the way he’d hoped, he took a road that the prisoners had built into the swamp. Mercer Scott and half a dozen guards waited at the end of it. Jeff got out of the cab and walked around to the back of the truck. “Well, let’s see what we’ve got,” he said, and opened the rear doors.

“By God, you did it,” Scott said.

The Negroes inside were dead, asphyxiated. All the guards had to do was take them out and throw them in a hole in the ground. Well, almost all. One of the men held his nose and said, “Have to hose it down in there before you use it again.”

“Reckon you’re right,” Jeff said. But he was just about happy enough to dance a jig. No fuss, no muss—well, not too much—no bother. Guards wouldn’t have to pull the trigger again and again and again. They wouldn’t have to see what they were doing at all. They’d just have to . . . drive.

And, best of all, the Negroes inside Camp Dependable wouldn’t know what was happening. Their pals who got in the truck were going to another camp, weren’t they? Sure they were. Nobody expected them to come back.

Mercer Scott came up and set a hand on Pinkard’s shoulder. “You know how jealous I am of you? You got any idea? Christ, I’d’ve given my left nut to come up with something so fine.”

“It really did work, didn’t it?” Jeff said. “You know what? I reckon maybe I will try and bump poor Chick up a grade or two. It’d make his missus’ pension a little bigger.”

Scott gave him a sly look. “She’d be right grateful for that. Not a bad-lookin’ woman, not a bit. Maybe I oughta be jealous of you twice.”

Jeff hadn’t thought of it like that. Now that he did, he found himself nodding. She’d been haggard and in shock at the funeral, but still. . . . Business first, though. “Other thing I’m gonna do,” he said, “is I’m gonna call Richmond, let ’em know about this. They been tellin’ me stuff all along. By God, it’s my turn now.”

F
erdinand Koenig strode into Jake Featherston’s office in the Gray House. The Attorney General was a big, bald, burly man with a surprisingly light, high voice. “Good to see you, Ferd. Always good to see you,” Jake said, and stuck out his hand. Koenig squeezed it. They went back to the very beginnings of the Freedom Party. Koenig had backed Jake at the crucial meeting that turned it into
his
party. He came as close to being a friend as any man breathing; Jake had meant every word of his greeting. Now he asked, “What’s on your mind?”

“Head of one of the camps out in Louisiana, fellow named Pinkard, had himself a hell of a good idea,” Koenig said.

“I know about Pinkard—reliable man,” Jake said. “Joined the Party early, stayed in when we were in trouble. Wife ran around on him, poor bastard. Went down to fight in Mexico, and not many who weren’t in the hard core did that.”

Koenig chuckled. “I could’ve named a lot of people in slots like that—slots lower down, too—and you’d know about them the same way.”

“Damn right I would. I make it my business to know stuff like that,” Featherston said. The more you knew about somebody, the better you could guess what he’d do next—and the easier you could get your hooks into him, if you ever had to do that. “So what’s Pinkard’s idea?”