The Victorious Opposition (42 page)

He didn’t know whether the United States were arming the guerrillas. He knew he would have if he were in charge in Philadelphia. But coming up with U.S.-made weapons and putting them in the hands of dead Negroes so photographers could snap pictures of them was the easiest thing in the world.

“President Smith says the United States want peace. They act like they want trouble. We would rather have peace, too. But if they think we can’t handle trouble, they had better think again.”

That was a bluff, nothing else but. If the United States pushed hard against the Confederate States, he hadn’t a prayer of resisting. But the USA had seemed ever more reluctant to hang on to their conquests. If they couldn’t even manage that, they weren’t very likely to do anything more.

In the control room, the engineer held up a hand, fingers spread: five minutes. Jake nodded to show he’d seen the signal. He’d had a good notion of what the time was, but he wanted to make sure everything ran smoothly. “North America is a big place,” he said. “We’re not all crowded together, the way they are in Europe. There’s room on this continent for two great countries—maybe even for three, if the United States ever bother to recollect what they’ve done up in the north.” A smile that was half snarl flitted across his face. He enjoyed nothing more than sticking a needle in the USA. “If the United States think the Confederate States can’t be great again, if they think we
shouldn’t
be great again, then they had better think again about that, too.

“All we really want is for them to take their noses out of our affairs, to take them out and to keep them out. That’s what good neighbors do. Bad neighbors get doors slammed in their faces, and they deserve it, too. But I don’t really expect we’ll have any trouble. If they’re just reasonable, we’ll get on fine.”

To Featherston,
if they’re just reasonable
meant
if they do what I want
. That the phrase could mean anything else never occurred to him. He’d just said the last word when the engineer drew a finger across his throat and the red light went out. Jake got to his feet and stretched. As usual, Saul Goldman waited for him right outside the studio door. Goldman’s title—director of communications—didn’t sound like much, any more than the little Jew looked like much. But it meant that Goldman was in charge of the way the Freedom Party and the Confederate States presented themselves to the world.

“Good job, Mr. President,” he said now.

“Thank you kindly, Saul,” Jake answered. He spent more politeness on Goldman than on most people, a recognition of how valuable he thought the other man was. The Party and the CSA could get by without a lot of fellows who brought only fanaticism. Losing somebody with brains would have hurt much more. Brains were harder to come by.

Goldman said, “You do remember you’ve got the rally tonight? That’s going to be the speech about agriculture and about the dams and electricity.”

“I remember,” Jake said indulgently. “Got to talk about what’s going on inside the country. That’s what most folks worry about first. Wouldn’t want anything to go wrong with my reelection.” He laughed. Nothing would go wrong. But saying the word felt good. Up till now, no elected Confederate president had, or could have, been reelected. Now that the amendment had repealed those seven nasty words, though, Jake could go on about his business without worrying about leaving office after only six years. He clapped Goldman on the back. “You did real good with the campaign for the amendment, too.”

“Thank you, Mr. President,” Goldman said. “You’re the one who will have to make it worthwhile.”

“And I intend to,” Featherston said.

He was feeling pretty cocky as he strode out of the studio and got into his armored limousine. “Back to the Gray House?” the driver asked.

“That’s right, Virgil,” Jake answered. Virgil Joyner had been driving him for years—ever since the Party struggled for survival after Grady Calkins assassinated President Hampton. Featherston trusted him as far as he trusted anybody.

Outriders on motorcycles pulled away from the curb before the limousine got going. Featherston didn’t believe in taking chances he didn’t have to. He wanted to make sure he got to enjoy his second term.

The limousine glided past Capitol Square. Everything there was clean and tidy and orderly. No more shantytown right at the heart of the CSA. All the hungry squatters had been cleared away well before the Olympics, and they hadn’t come back. Freedom Party stalwarts made damn sure they didn’t come back.

But instead of turning left to go up Shockoe Hill to the presidential residence, the driver hit the brakes. “What the hell?” Jake said.

“There’s a wreck up ahead,” Joyner answered. “We’ll have to go around.”

Sure enough, not just two but three autos had tangled at the corner of Twelfth and Capitol. Steam jetted from smashed radiators. Drivers and passengers stood by the wreckage arguing about who’d done what to whom.

Joyner blew his horn, which did no good at all. Featherston’s outriders descended from the motorcycles to push the wreckage out of the way, which was a lot more practical.

Another big motorcar raced down Twelfth Street. It screeched to a stop on the far side of the accident. Three men in the white shirts and butternut trousers of Freedom Party stalwarts got out. Jake didn’t think anything about that till they raised submachine guns and started shooting.

“Get the hell out of here!” he shouted as his guards started falling. The men who were dressed like stalwarts—or, worse, really
were
stalwarts—ran forward, shooting as they ran. One of them fell, which meant they hadn’t picked off all the outriders, but the others came on.

Virgil Joyner put the limousine in reverse, but it could only limp—the assassins had shot out the two front tires. Their bullets starred the windscreen. Pretty soon, they’d punch through; even bulletproof glass could take only so much. Rifle rounds would have smashed through the glass right away.

Featherston and his driver both had .45s—not the best weapons to use against submachine guns, but a hell of a lot better than nothing. A heartbeat before the windscreen finally blew in and sprayed fragments of glass all over the passenger compartment, Jake threw himself flat in the back seat. Bullets thudded into the upholstery just above his head.

And then the stream of bullets punishing the limousine stopped. That meant at least one of the bastards out there had gone through a whole magazine’s worth of ammunition and needed to reload. Featherston popped up and fired out through the hole the assassins had shot in the windscreen. With a pistol, you had to aim. You couldn’t just spray bullets around and hope some of them would hit something. One of the gunmen started to grab for his face. He never finished the motion. Instead, he crumpled to the ground, the back of his head blown to red ruin as the round that killed him tore out.

The limousine’s horn blared. That was Joyner’s body slumping forward onto the button—the assassins’ fire had struck home after all.
One son of a bitch left,
Jake thought:
one son of a bitch and me. And I’m the meanest s.o.b. this country ever saw.

If he’d been out there, he would have jumped up on the hood, stuck the submachine gun through the now-shattered windscreen, and finished the job. The last surviving assassin didn’t. Maybe losing two of his buddies had unnerved him.
Must be a kid,
went through Featherston’s mind.
He’s never seen action before, and he doesn’t quite know what to do.

What the assassin did was go around to the side of the motorcar where Jake had been sitting. He grabbed for the door handle, intending to yank the door open and shoot through the gap.

What he intended wasn’t what he got. Featherston kicked the door from the inside with both feet, using all his strength. It caught the assassin in the midsection. With a startled squawk, he went down on his wallet. He hung on to the submachine gun, but he was still trying to swing it back toward the limousine when Jake shot him in the belly. He was trying to shoot him in the balls, but didn’t quite get what he wanted. The assassin’s shriek was satisfying enough as things were. Featherston’s next shot, more carefully aimed, blew off the bottom half of his face.

Ears ringing, Jake looked around for more trouble. He didn’t see any, only cops and ordinary people running toward the limousine to find out what the hell had happened. All of a sudden, he regretted that last vengeful shot. With just a bullet in the gut, the last assassin might have lived long enough to tell him a lot about what the hell had happened. As things were, he was dying fast and couldn’t talk even if he wanted to.

“But I’ll find out anyhow,” Jake said, and nodded slowly to show how much he meant it. “Oh, yes. You just bet I will.”

E
ven now, the Negroes of Augusta managed to snatch fun where they could. The joint called the Ten of Clubs was a case in point. Its sign showed the card for which it was named: lots of black spots on a white background. Scipio got the joke. He was sure everybody who lived in the Terry got it. So far, no white man seemed to have figured it out, which only made it more delicious.

He and Bathsheba paid fifty cents each at the door. Drinks weren’t cheap, either. But the best bands came to the Ten of Clubs. If you wanted to cut a rug in the Terry, this was
the
place to do it.

Scipio slipped the headwaiter another half dollar for a tiny table by the dance floor. He pulled out one of the chairs so Bathsheba could sit down. “You spoil me,” she said, smiling.

“Hope so,” Scipio answered. His butler’s training back at Marshlands made such politesse automatic in him. His wife still didn’t know about that, and she’d pretty much given up nagging him to explain how he could pull a different way of speaking out of the woodwork just when they needed it most.

He ordered a bottle of beer, Bathsheba a whiskey. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and sweat. People wore what finery they had. Jewelry flashed on the women. Most of it was cheap costume jewelry, but in the dim light of the Ten of Clubs rhinestones did duty for diamonds, colored glass for rubies and sapphires.

A comic in white tie and tails several sizes too big for him came out and stood behind the microphone. Surveying the audience, he sadly shook his head. “You ain’t here for me. You is here for the band. You don’t make my life no easier, you know.”

He was right, of course. People in the shabby little night spot
were
waiting for the band, which was on a tour that took it to colored districts of major towns all over the Confederate States. A heckler called, “Why don’t you shut up and go away?”

How many hecklers had the funny man faced, and faced down, during his own years on the road? Hundreds, surely. “You ain’t gonna git rid o’ me that easy,” he answered now. “ ‘Sides, ain’t it sweet how the white folks loves the president just as much as we does?”

That brought not only giggles but a few horrified gasps from the crowd. The papers had been full of Jake Featherston’s latest escape from assassination. These assailants had been white. From everything Scipio could gather, they’d been Freedom Party men unhappy with Featherston for seeking a second term. Nobody in public said much about who might have been behind them. Nobody said anything at all about imposing a fine on the white community like the one that had been taken from the CSA’s Negroes after that frankfurter-seller tried to ventilate the president at the Olympics. That surprised Scipio not a bit.

Bathsheba leaned forward and said, “He got nerve.”

“He gots more nerve’n he gots sense,” Scipio replied. Even in a place like this—maybe especially in a place like this—informers were bound to be listening. Plenty of Negroes would betray their own people for a little money or simply for the privilege of being left alone by Freedom Party goons. Scipio thought they were fools. Whatever tiny advantages they got wouldn’t last long. But a lot of men—and women—couldn’t see past the end of their noses.

“When I heard they was shootin’ at the president, I prayed,” the comic said. “I tell you, I got down on my knees an’ prayed. I prayed, God keep Mistuh Featherston . . . a long ways away from me.”

More giggles. More gasps, too. Scipio wondered again whether the comic had more nerve than sense. He skated awfully close to the line. In fact, he likely skated right over the line. In how many towns, in how many rooms full of strangers, had he told jokes like that and got away with them?

Then Scipio had another thought, one that chilled him worse than the December weather outside. Maybe the funny man wasn’t worried about informers. Maybe he was an informer himself. Maybe he was trying to smoke out rebellious Negroes in the audience. They would come to him because he said what they were thinking, and then . . . then they’d be sorry.

Scipio shivered again. He didn’t know that was true. That it could even occur to him was a measure of the time he lived in.

“Reckon you heard Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces is from New Orleans,” the comic went on with a sly leer. “But I reckon you don’t know why they is
from
New Orleans an’ not
in
New Orleans.” He paused, setting up his punch line: “The Freedom Party gits in there, they gits
outa
there.”

It might even have been true. A lot of bands from New Orleans
had
started touring when Huey Long met an assassin who, unlike those who’d tried for Jake Featherston, had known how to shoot straight. Had Long been easier on Negroes than the Freedom Party? He couldn’t have been much tougher. And any which way, a joke about the Party was bound to draw a laugh from this crowd.

That only made Scipio wonder again whether the funny man was a stalking horse for the people he pretended to mock. No way to know, not for sure, but even the question spoiled his enjoyment of the comic’s lines. He ordered another overpriced beer.

After what seemed a very long time, the comic retreated and Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces came out. The trumpeter who led the band was an engagingly ugly fellow with a froglike bass voice. When he raised the horn to his lips and began to play, Scipio’s eyes went wide, not only at the sounds he produced but also at the way his cheeks swelled up. He looked like a frog, too: like a spring peeper calling from a tree.