Return Engagement (7 page)

“Why do you think I would want to get myself in trouble with them?” Mary asked.

Rokeby shrugged. “I don’t suppose you’d want to, exactly, but. . . .”

“But what?” Mary’s voice was sharp.

“But I recollect who your brother was, Mrs. Pomeroy, and who your father was, too.”

Hardly anyone in Rosenfeld mentioned Arthur McGregor, her father, to her. He’d been blown up by a bomb he meant for General George Custer, who’d passed through the town on his way into retirement. All that was left of Arthur McGregor these days was his Christian name, which was Alec’s middle name. And Mary couldn’t remember the last time anyone had spoken of Alexander McGregor. A lot of people in town were too young even to remember him. Twenty-five years was a long time.

But she didn’t quite like the way the postmaster had spoken of them. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I wouldn’t like to see the same sort of thing happen to you as happened to them,” Rokeby answered.

She stared at him. Except for Alec, they were the only two people in the post office, and Alec paid next to no attention to what grownups said to each other unless they started shouting or did something else interesting or exciting. “Why on earth would anything like that happen to me?” she asked, deliberately keeping her voice calm and her face straight.

“Well, I don’t know,” Wilf Rokeby said. “But I do recall a package you posted to a cousin of yours in Ontario not so long ago—a cousin named Laura Moss.”

“Do you?” Mary said tonelessly.

The postmaster nodded. “I do. And I recall reading in the paper a little later on about what happened to a woman named Laura Moss.”

What had happened to Laura Moss—who’d been born Laura Secord, descended from the Canadian patriot of the same name, and who’d been a Canadian patriot herself till she ended up in a Yank’s bed—was that a bomb had blown her and her little girl sky high. “What’s that got to do with me?” Mary asked, again with as little expression in her voice or on her face as she could put there. “Do you think I’m a bomber because my father was?” There. The challenge direct. What would Rokeby make of it?

He looked at her over the tops of the old-fashioned half glasses he wore. “Well, I don’t know anything about that for certain, Mrs. Pomeroy,” he said. “But I also believe I recollect a bomb that went off at Karamanlides’ general store after he went and bought it from Henry Gibbon. He’s from down in the USA, even if he’s been here a while now.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with that—or with this other thing, either,” Mary said. After the challenge direct, the lie direct.

Wilf Rokeby didn’t raise an eyebrow. He didn’t call her a liar. He showed not the slightest trace of anything but small-town interest. “Did I say you did, Mrs. Pomeroy?” he asked easily. “But I thought, with those new notices up there, you maybe ought to remember how nervous the Yanks and Frenchies are liable to be. You wouldn’t want to do anything, oh, careless while you’re near a train track, or anything like that.”

The only place where Mary had ever been careless was in letting Rokeby get a look at the name on the package she’d posted. She didn’t see how she could have avoided that, but she hadn’t imagined he would remember it. It only went to show you never could tell.

She studied the postmaster. If he’d wanted to, he could have told the Yanks instead of bringing this up with her. Searching her apartment wouldn’t have told them anything. Searching the basement of her apartment building would have. Her father’s bomb-making tools were hidden, but they could be found.

So what did he want? Money? She and Mort had some, but not a lot. The same probably applied to Wilfred Rokeby. Did he want something else from her, something more intimate? He was a lifelong bachelor. He’d never had any sort of reputation for skirt-chasing. She’d heard a couple of people over the years wonder if he was a fairy, but nobody had ever had any real reason to think so except that he didn’t have much to do with women.

“I always try to be careful,” she said, and waited to see what would happen next.

Rokeby nodded. “Good. That’s good. Your family’s seen too many bad things. Wouldn’t think you could stand a whole lot more of ’em.”

“Can I buy those stamps now?” Mary asked in a tight voice.

“You sure can,” the postmaster answered. “Just tell me what you need.” She did. He got out the stamps and said, “That’ll be a dollar and a half all told.” She paid him. He nodded as he would have to any other customer he’d been seeing for years. “Thank you kindly, Mrs. Pomeroy. Like I say, you want to be careful, especially now that there’s a war on.”

“I heard you,” Mary said. “Oh, yes. I heard you.”

Alec in tow, she left the post office and started back to their apartment. They hadn’t gone far before her son asked, “Mommy, what was that man talking about?”

It was a good question. Did Wilf Rokeby really sympathize with her? He hadn’t told the Yanks and he hadn’t asked for anything from her. He’d just warned her. So maybe he did. Could she trust everything to the strength of a maybe? She had to think about that. She had to think hard. She also had to tell Alec something. “Nothing important, sweetie,” she said. “Grownup stuff, that’s all.” He accepted that with a nod. His question was easily answered. Her own? No.

W
hen the last war broke out, Chester Martin had been a corporal taking a squad of U.S. soldiers from West Virginia into Virginia. He’d been through the mill, sure as hell, and he’d been lucky, too, as luck ran in wartime: three years of hard fighting, and only one wound. Back in 1914, he’d been a Democrat. He’d lived in Toledo.

A lot of things had changed since. He wasn’t a kid any more. He was closer to fifty than forty. His light brown hair had gone gray. His features had been sharp, almost foxy. Now he had jowls and a belly that stuck out farther than his chest, though not much. He had a wife and a young son. He was a Socialist, a construction workers’ organizer in Los Angeles.

He was a Socialist these days, yes. But he’d voted for Robert Taft in the 1940 presidential election, not Al Smith. He’d been through the mill. He didn’t want to see the Confederate States strong. As his wife set a plate of ham and eggs in front of him, he said, “Things don’t look so good back East.”

“No, they don’t,” Rita agreed. Chester was her second husband. Her first had gone to war a generation earlier, but he hadn’t come back. That was as much luck of the draw as Chester’s survival. If you happened to end up in the wrong place at the wrong instant, you could be the best soldier in the world and it wouldn’t matter one goddamn bit. Your next of kin would get a wire from the War Department, and that would be that.

“I wish . . .” Chester began, and then let it trail away.

He might as well not have bothered. Rita knew what he hadn’t said. “It wouldn’t have made any difference if Taft beat Al Smith,” she said. “We’d still have a war right now, and we wouldn’t be any readier than we are.”

She was a Socialist, too. She’d never been anything else. Her folks were Socialists, where Chester’s were rock-ribbed Democrats. And she sometimes had a hard time forgiving him when he backslid—that was how she looked at it, anyhow.

Here, she was probably right. Al Smith had agreed to the plebiscites in Houston and Sequoyah and Kentucky before the election. Even if Taft had won, they were scheduled for early January, before he would have been inaugurated. And once Kentucky and Houston went Confederate in the vote, could he have thrown out the elections? That would have touched off a war all by itself.

Of course, it would have touched off a war with Kentucky and what was once more west Texas in U.S. hands, which might have made things better. Chester almost said so—almost, but not quite. He and Rita had been married a while now. He’d learned a wise man didn’t antagonize his wife over something inherently unprovable, especially when she’d just given him breakfast. He finished the ham and eggs and some toast, gulped his coffee, put on a cap, and headed out the door. Rita gave him a kiss as he left, too, one more reason to make him glad he hadn’t got her angry.

“Chillicothe falls!” a newsboy shouted. “Read all about it!”

He forked over a nickel for a copy of the
Los Angeles Times.
He hated giving the
Times
his money. It thought labor unions were nothing but a bunch of Reds; reactionary didn’t begin to go far enough to describe it. But it was the only morning paper he could buy on the way to the trolley stop. Sometimes convenience counted for more than ideology.

Another nickel went into the trolley’s fare box, and four pennies for two transfers. He was going all the way down to Torrance, in the South Bay; he’d have to change trolleys twice. He plopped his fanny into a seat and opened up the
Times.
He had some time to kill.

Long shadows of early morning stretched out toward the west. The day was still cool, but wouldn’t stay that way for long. It would be better in Torrance, which got the sea breeze, than here in Boyle Heights on the east side of town; the breeze didn’t usually come in this far. It got hotter here than it ever did in Toledo. Chester didn’t mind. Hot weather in Toledo was steam-bath central. He’d known worse in Virginia during the war, but Toledo was plenty bad. Next to that kind of heat, what L.A. got was nothing. Your clothes didn’t stick to you. You didn’t feel you’d fall over dead—or at least start panting like a hound dog—if you walked more than a hundred yards. And he didn’t miss snow in the wintertime one bit.

His smile when he thought of not getting snowed on slipped as he read the lead story. Chillicothe wasn’t the only Ohio town that had fallen to the Confederates. They looked to be pushing north through Ohio and Indiana with everything they had: men and airplanes and barrels and poison gas.

“God damn Jake Featherston,” Chester muttered under his breath. Neither side had moved like this during the Great War. Machine guns had made attacks almost suicidally expensive. Railroads behind the lines had stayed intact. That meant defenders could move men forward faster than attackers could push through devastated terrain. That was what it had meant in the last war, anyhow. This time, trucks and barrels seemed to mean the rules had changed.

Other news wasn’t good, either. Confederate bombers had hit Washington and Philadelphia again, and even New York City. The Empire of Japan had recalled its ambassador to the USA. That probably meant a new war in the Pacific, and sooner, not later. And the war in the Atlantic already looked insane, with ships from the USA, Germany, the CSA, Britain, and France all hammering at one another.

From what Chester remembered, the naval war in the Atlantic had been crazy the last time around, too. He didn’t remember much of that, though. He’d been too busy trying not to get shot to pay it a whole lot of attention.

And Governor Heber Young of Utah said his state would react with “disfavor and dismay” if the USA tried to declare martial law there. Chester didn’t have much trouble translating that into the kind of English somebody who wasn’t the governor of a state might speak. If the United States tried to put their foot down in Utah, the state would explode like a grenade. Of course, if the United States didn’t put their foot down in Utah, the state was liable to explode like a grenade anyhow. Mormons thought the USA had been oppressing them since before the Second Mexican War sixty years ago, if not longer than that. If they had a chance to break away and get their own back, wouldn’t they grab it with both hands?

The French were claiming victories in Alsace-Lorraine. The Germans were loudly denying everything. They were also loudly denying that the Ukraine’s army had mutinied when the Tsar’s forces crossed the border from Russia. Maybe they were telling the truth and maybe they weren’t. Time would show, one way or the other.

Suddenly sick of everything that had to do with the war, Chester turned to the sports section, which was mostly full of news of football games canceled. The Los Angeles Dons, his favorite summer league team, had been up in Portland to play the Wolves. Now a quarter of the squad had got conscription notices, and the rest were arranging transportation back to Los Angeles. He sighed. He hadn’t really thought about what the war would do to ordinary life. He hadn’t been part of ordinary life the last time around.

He got so engrossed in the paper, he had to jump off the trolley at the last moment to make one of his transfers. He was still reading when he got off in Torrance. He walked three blocks to the construction site the union was picketing. The builders had done everything under the sun to drive away the pickets. They’d even sicced Pinkerton goons on them. That hadn’t worked; the union men had beaten the crap out of the down-and-outers the detective agency hired.

Chester expected more trouble here. What he didn’t expect was a man of about his own age in a double-breasted gray pinstripe suit and a straw hat with a bright plaid hatband who came up to him, stuck out his hand, and said, “You must be Martin.”

“Yeah.” Chester automatically took the proffered hand. The other fellow didn’t have a worker’s calluses, but his grip was strong. Martin said, “Afraid I don’t know you.”

“I’m Harry T. Casson,” the other man said.

Son of a bitch,
Chester thought. Harry T. Casson might not have been the biggest builder in Los Angeles, but he was sure as hell one of the top three. He was also, not coincidentally at all, the man trying to run up the houses here. “Well, what do you want with me?” Chester asked, hard suspicion in his voice.

“Cooperation,” Casson said. “Things are different with a war on, don’t you think?”

“If you’re going to try to use the war for an excuse to exploit the people who work for you, you can go straight to hell, far as I’m concerned,” Chester said.

He almost hoped that would make Casson spit in his eye. It didn’t. Calmly, the builder said, “That’s not what I meant. I know I have to give some to get some.”

Give some to get some? Chester had never heard anything like that before from the men who hired construction workers here. He wondered why he was hearing it now. Smelling a rat, he said, “You know what we want. Recognize the union, dicker with us in good faith over wages and working conditions, and you won’t have any trouble with us. No matter what the
L.A.
goddamn
Times
says, that’s all we’ve ever wanted.”