The Victorious Opposition (69 page)

So far, Moss had had no luck finding anyone like that. As far as he could tell, Peterhoff was a pillar of the community. As for what he’d been doing in 1925 and 1926, nobody seemed to have a lot of hard evidence one way or the other. Of course, in cases like this, hard evidence didn’t always matter. Hearsay counted for just as much, and often for more.

“Got to be some bastard after his money,” Moss muttered to himself. He hadn’t seen a case as blatant as this for a long time. It really belonged to the harsh years right after the revolt, not to 1941. But here it was, and the occupying authorities were taking it very seriously indeed. That worried Moss. Why were they flabbling about Peterhoff if they didn’t have a case?

Moss had just poured himself his second cup of coffee from the pot when the telephone rang. His hand jerked, but not enough to make him spill the coffee. He set down the cup and picked up the telephone. “Jonathan Moss speaking.”

“Hello, Mr. Moss.” That cigarette-roughened baritone could only belong to Lou Jamieson. Moss’ one-time client was not a pillar of the community, except perhaps for certain disreputable parts of it. He went on, “I think maybe I found what you were looking for.”

“Did you, by God?” That perked Moss up better than coffee. “Tell me about it, Mr. Jamieson, if you’d be so kind.”

Tell him about it Jamieson did. If the man with dubious connections was telling the truth—always an interesting proposition where he was concerned—then a couple of Peterhoff’s business associates stood to make a bundle if he vanished from the scene for ten or twenty years. It wasn’t anything showy or obvious, but it was there.

“By God!” Moss said again. His pen raced across a yellow legal pad as he jotted down notes. The more he heard, the happier he got. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart!” he exclaimed when Jamieson finally finished. “You’ve just saved an innocent man a hell of a lot of trouble. Even a military court will have to sit up and take notice when I use this.”

“That’s nice, Mr. Moss,” Jamieson said affably. “You done me a good turn a while ago with the goddamn Yanks. Figured this was the least I could do for you.” He couldn’t have cared less whether Allen Peterhoff was guilty or innocent. What mattered was that he owed Moss a favor. If he hadn’t, Peterhoff would have been welcome to rot in jail, as far as he was concerned.

His sometime client’s amoral cynicism would have bothered Moss much more if Jamieson hadn’t proved so valuable. As things were, Moss threw the notes in his briefcase, thanked Jamieson again, and got ready to go home early.
Dorothy will be glad to see me,
he thought,
and I hope Laura will, too.

He made sure he turned off the hot plate. He didn’t want to burn down the building by accident. Then he went out to his auto. His hand stayed in the overcoat pocket with the pistol, but he wasn’t very worried. Nobody could reasonably expect him to leave at this hour. He might even be back before the mailman got to the apartment building where he lived.

As usual, he parked around the corner from the building. Even though he didn’t expect trouble, it was one of those days where he would almost have welcomed it. He felt as if he were trouble’s master. He remembered that for a very long time. The thought filled his mind as he turned the corner. That was when the explosion knocked him off his feet.

“Holy Jesus!” he said. Bright shards of glass glittered in the snow, blown out of nearby windows. He picked himself up and ran toward the sound of the blast. If anyone needed help, he’d do what he could.

He hadn’t gone more than a few steps before he realized his building was the one that had suffered. The hole in the front wall gaped from his floor. And . . .

“No,” Moss whispered. But that was his apartment. Or rather, that had been his apartment. Not much seemed left of it. Not a whole lot seemed left of the ones to either side, either. Smoke started pouring out of the hole as broken gas lines or wires set things ablaze.

“Call the police!” someone shouted. “Call the fire department!” somebody else yelled. Jonathan Moss heard them as if from very far away. He ran toward the front steps of the building where he’d lived for so long. Try as he would, though, he couldn’t go up them, because all the people who’d lived in the apartment building were flooding out. Some of them were bloodied and limping. Others just had panic on their faces.

“Laura!” Moss shouted. “Dorothy!”

He didn’t see them anywhere. He hadn’t really thought he would. But hope died hard. Hope, sometimes, died harder than people. People, as he knew too well, could be awfully easy to kill.

A man who lived on the same floor as he did pushed him away. “You don’t want to try to go in, Mr. Moss,” he said. “The whole goddamn building’s liable to fall down.”

“My wife! My little girl!”

“Wasn’t that your place where it happened?” his neighbor asked. Helplessly, he nodded. The other man said, “Then there’s nothing you can do for ’em now, and that’s the Lord’s truth. If they come out, they come out. If they don’t . . .” He spread his hands.

More people pushed out of the building. More bricks fell off it. Some landed in the snow. One hit a man in the shoulder. He howled like a wolf. Moss tried again to go into the building. Again, he failed. People took hold of him and dragged him back by main force.

Sirens screamed in the distance, rapidly drawing closer. Screams bubbled in Moss’ throat. Why they didn’t burst out, he had no idea. Everything he cared about had been in that flat. Now the flat was gone, and twenty-five years of his dreams and hopes with it.

He tried to think, though his stunned wits made it next to impossible. He’d been getting threats for a long time. He hadn’t taken them too seriously till the bomb went off in the occupation center. After that, he realized disaster really could happen to him. And now it had.

“Who?” he muttered. Who would have wanted to blow up a woman and a child? For if this was a bomb, as seemed horribly likely, whoever had sent it must have addressed it to Laura or Dorothy. Had it had his name on it, they would have left it alone. He would have opened it. And it would have blown up in his face.

Fire engines howled to a stop. The police came right behind them. And soldiers in green-gray helped clear people away from the building. “Move it!” they shouted. “The whole thing may collapse!”

“Get out of the way!” the firemen shouted. They began playing streams of water on the spreading flames. A lot of the water splashed down onto the people who had lived in the building. That moved them away faster than the soldiers could have.

A major called, “Whose place was it that went up?”

“Mine,” Moss said dully.

“You weren’t inside there.” The officer stated the obvious. “You’d be hamburger if you were.”

“Hamburger.”
My wife is hamburger. My little girl is hamburger.
Moss managed to shake his head. “No. I was doing some work at the office. I had just got out of my auto when . . . when it happened. Laura . . . Dorothy . . .” He began to weep.

“Christ! You’re Jonathan Moss.” Recognizing him, the major suddenly put two and two together. “This wasn’t a gas leak, or anything like that. This was a bomb, or it probably was a bomb, anyway.”

Now Moss’ head moved up and down as mechanically as it had gone back and forth. “Yes. I think you’re right. Somebody killed them.” He could say it. It didn’t sound as if it meant anything. He was still deep in shock. But part of him knew it would mean something before long. The major seemed to sense it was too soon for questions. He led Moss down the street. Docile as a child, Moss went with him. Behind them, the building fell in on itself.

XVIII

“A
lec!” Mary Pomeroy called. “Don’t you dare pull the cat’s tail. If he scratches you or bites you, it’s your own fault.”

Mouser was, on the whole, a patient cat. Little boys, though, were liable to drive even patient cats past the limits of what they’d put up with. Mouser had bitten Alec only a couple of times, but he scratched whenever he thought he had to. Alec was still learning what would annoy him enough to bring out the claws. Sometimes his experiments seemed deliberately hair-raising.

Mary turned on the wireless just ahead of the hour to catch the news. The lead story was a bomb that had blown up a police station in Frankfort, Kentucky. Seventeen policemen were dead, another two dozen wounded. A group called the American Patriots—a group, the newscaster said sarcastically, that no one had ever heard of till they committed this outrage—was claiming responsibility.

And the president of the Confederate States was all but foaming at the mouth. Jake Featherston claimed the bombing proved Kentucky was full of pro-U.S. fanatics who refused to accept the results of the plebiscite. The newscaster poured more scorn on that idea. Mary was willing to believe it, simply because this smooth-voiced stooge for the Yanks didn’t.

“In another bombing case,” the broadcaster went on, “investigators continue to probe the ruins of a Berlin, Ontario, apartment building, seeking clues to the perpetrator of the atrocity. A mother and child, Laura and Dorothy Moss, are confirmed dead. Several other persons were injured in the blast, and three remain missing. . . .”

A mother and a child. That wasn’t how Mary had thought of them. A traitor and her half-American brat was more what she had in mind. That way, she didn’t have to remind herself that the woman who’d been born Laura Secord—born with the name of a great Canadian patriot—had been a person as well as a political symbol. She didn’t want to think of the late Laura Moss as a person. If she did, she had to think about what she’d done.

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d physically hurt anyone, aside from spanking Alec when he needed it. Maybe when she was little, in a fight with her older sister. But Julia had several years on her, so she might not have managed it even then.

Well, she’d managed it now. She’d blown a woman and her little girl to kingdom come, and she’d hurt some other people with them. Not bad for a package she’d mailed from Wilf Rokeby’s post office. Not bad? Or not good?

This is war,
she told herself.
Look what the Americans did to my family. Why should I care what happens to them, or to the people who collaborate with them?

Had the Americans blown up women and children? Mary nodded defiantly. Of course they had, with their bombs and their artillery. She didn’t feel guilty. She paused, too honest to go on with that. The trouble was, she did feel guilty. Unlike the Yanks—or so she insisted to herself—she had a working conscience. At the moment, it was working overtime.

“No one has claimed to be responsible for the murderous attack in Berlin,” the newsman continued. “Attention is, however, focusing on several known subversive groups. When the truth is known, severe punishment will be meted out.”

Mary laughed at that. The Yanks were liable to grab somebody, say he was guilty, and shoot him just to make themselves look good. She remained certain that was what they’d done with her brother, Alexander, Alec’s namesake. Her conscience twinged again. Did she want them to punish someone else, someone who hadn’t done anything, for what she’d done?

She wanted them to get out of Canada. Past that, she didn’t—or tried not to—care.

“Ironically, the victims’ husband and father, barrister Jonathan Moss, though a U.S. aviation ace during the Great War, was well known in Ontario for his work on behalf of Canadians involved in disputes with the occupying authorities,” the man on the wireless said. “Only desperate madmen who hate Americans simply because they are Americans would have—”

Click!
“Why’d you turn it off, Mommy?” Alec asked.

“Because he was spouting a lot of drivel,” Mary answered.

Alec laughed. “That’s a funny word. What does it mean?”

“Nonsense. Hooey. Rubbish.”

“Drivel!” Alec yelled, alarming Mouser. “Hooey!” He liked that one, too. The cat didn’t, at least not yelled in its ears. It fled. Alec ran after it, screeching, “Drivel! Hooey! Hooey! Drivel!”

“Enough,” Mary said. He didn’t listen to her. “Enough!” she said again. Still no luck.
“Enough!”
Now she was yelling, too. Short of clouting Alec with a rock, yelling at him was the only way to get his attention.

She didn’t usually turn off the wireless in the middle of the news. She found she missed it, and turned it back on, hoping it would be done talking about what had happened in Berlin. It was. The newscaster said, “King Charles XI of France has declared that the German Empire is using Kaiser Wilhelm’s illness as an excuse for delay on consideration of returning Alsace-Lorraine to France. ‘If strong measures prove necessary, we are not afraid to take them,’ he added. Prime Minister Churchill of Great Britain voiced his support for the French. In a speech before Parliament, he said, ‘High time the Germans go.’ ”

Music blared from the speaker. A chorus of women with squeaky voices praised laundry soap to the skies. When Mary first listened to the wireless, she wanted to go out and buy everything she heard advertised on it. She was vaccinated against that nonsense these days. She did sometimes wonder why a singer with a voice good enough to make money would choose to sing about laundry soap. Because she couldn’t make money with her voice any other way? Sometimes that didn’t seem reason enough.

I killed two people, one of them a little girl who never did anybody any harm.
The thought didn’t want to go away; even if she hadn’t watched them die, they were as dead as if she’d taken them to a chopping block and whacked off their heads with a hatchet, the way she had with so many chickens on her mother’s farm.
Laura Secord betrayed her country.
Mary had no doubt of that.
But who appointed you her executioner?
she asked herself.

Her back stiffened. She was damned if she’d let herself feel guilty for long.
Who appointed me her executioner? The Yanks did.
If they hadn’t shot Alexander, her father never would have felt the need to go on the war path against them. She was entitled to revenge for that. She was entitled to it, and she’d taken it.

She nodded to herself. Nothing was going to make her feel sorry about ridding the world of Laura Secord. Every so often, though, she couldn’t help feeling bad about Dorothy Moss. She wished she’d blown up the girl’s father instead. Yes, the newsman went on and on about how he struggled for Canadians’ rights, but that overlooked several little details. First and foremost, no Yank should have had any business saying what rights a Canadian had or didn’t have. And Jonathan Moss had been one of the Yanks who’d beaten Canada down during the Great War.
And
he was still a combat flier; she remembered the newspaper stories about him. Yes, better the bomb should have got him.

She was cutting up a chicken for stew in the kitchen when two trucks pulled to a stop in front of the diner. They looked like the sort of trucks in which U.S. Army soldiers rode, but they were painted a bluish gray, not the green-gray she’d known and loathed since she was a little girl. The men who piled out of the back of the trucks were in uniforms cut about the same as those U.S. soldiers wore—but, again, of bluish gray and not the familiar color. Mary wondered if the Yanks had decided to change their uniforms after keeping them pretty much the same for so long. Why would they do that?

The soldiers all tramped into the diner.
That will make Mort happy,
Mary thought. Soldiers ate like starving wolves. These days, they also paid their bills. The occupation was more orderly than it had been during the war and just afterwards. That made it very little better, not as far as Mary was concerned.

Forty-five minutes later, the soldiers came out and climbed into the trucks again. The engines started up with twin roars. Away the trucks went, beyond what Mary could see from the window. She reminded herself to ask Mort about the men when he came back to the flat, and hoped she wouldn’t forget.

As things turned out, she needn’t have worried about that. When her husband got home, he was angrier than she’d ever seen him. “What’s the matter?” she asked; he hardly ever lost his temper.

“What’s the matter?” he repeated. “Did you see those trucks a couple of hours ago? The trucks, and the soldiers in them?”

Mary nodded. “I wanted to ask you—”

He talked right through her: “Do you know who those soldiers were? Do you? No, of course you don’t.” He wasn’t going to let her get a word in edgewise. “I’ll tell you who they were, by God. They were a pack of Frenchies, that’s who.”

“Frenchies? From Quebec?” The news made Mary no happier than it had Mort. She was damned if she would call their home the Republic of Quebec, though, even if it had been torn away from Canada for twenty-five years now.

“That’s right,” Mort answered. “And do you know what else? They’re going to be part of the garrison here. At least the United States beat us in the war. What did the Frenchies do? Nothing. Not one single thing. They don’t even talk English, most of ’em. I swear to God, honey, I’d sooner have a pack of niggers watching over us than those people.”

“What’s even worse is, they’re Canadians, too,” Mary said. Her husband gave her a look. “Well, they are.” Even to herself, she sounded defensive. “They used to be, anyhow.”

“Maybe,” Mort said. “They sure don’t act like Canadians now, though. They sat there in the diner jabbering back and forth in French like a bunch of monkeys. The only one who spoke enough English to order anything for them was a sergeant who’d been in the Canadian Army once upon a time. And he sounded like the devil, too.”

“That’s terrible,” Mary said, and Mort nodded. She asked him, “Why are there Frenchies here? Did you find out? Would they say?”

“Oh, yes. They aren’t shy about talking, even if they don’t do it very well,” he answered. “Reason they’re here is, some of the U.S. soldiers who’ve been on garrison duty are going back to the States.”

“That doesn’t explain anything,” Mary said. “Why would the Yanks want to do a thing like that after all these years?” The USA had occupied Rosenfeld since she was a little girl. No matter how much she hated that, it was in a way part of the natural order of things by now.

“I don’t know for sure. The Frenchies didn’t say anything about that,” Mort replied. “But I know what my guess would be—that the Yanks are starting to worry about that Featherston fellow down in the Confederate States.”

“You think they’re moving men to stop him?” Mary asked. Her husband nodded again. Excitement blazed through her. “If you’re right, we’ve got a chance to be free!”
And maybe this has been a war all along, and I don’t have to think I’m a murderer. Maybe. Please, God.

C
incinnatus Driver watched a spectacle he had hoped he would never see, a spectacle he’d gone to Kentucky to keep from seeing: Confederate troops marching into Covington. He was, by then, just starting to get up on crutches and move around. He supposed he was lucky. The auto that hit him could easily have killed him. There were times, when he’d lain in the hospital and then back at his parents’ house, that he wished it would have.

His mother took care of him as if he were a little boy. She plainly thought he was. All the years that had gone by since might as well not have happened. She didn’t even realize anything was wrong. That, to Cincinnatus, was the cruelest part of her long, slow slide into senility.

And his father took care of both of them, with as much dignity as he could muster and without much hope. Some of the neighbors helped, as they found the chance. His mother wandered off a couple of times, but she didn’t get far. People watched her more closely than they had till Cincinnatus got hit. That was funny, in a bitter way.

Getting out of the house for a little while felt good to Cincinnatus. He’d stared at the cracked, water-stained plaster of the ceiling for too long. He was weak as a kitten and he still got dreadful headaches that aspirin did nothing to knock down, but he was alive and he was upright. When a little more strength returned, he would figure out how to get himself and his father and mother back to the USA. Meanwhile . . .

Meanwhile, he stumped along the neglected sidewalks of the colored district of Covington toward the parade route. The whole district seemed even more rundown than it had when he came back to Covington. It also seemed half deserted, and so it was. A lot of Negroes had already fled to the United States.

He glanced over to his father, who walked beside him, ready to steady him if he stumbled. “You sure Ma be all right while we’re gone?”

“I ain’t sure o’ nothin,” Seneca Driver answered, “but I reckon so.” He walked on for a few paces, then said, “One thing I ain’t sure of is how come you wants to see these bastards comin’ back.”

Cincinnatus wasn’t altogether sure of that himself. After a little thought, he said, “I got to remind myself why I want to git back to Iowa so bad, maybe.”

“Maybe.” His father sounded deeply skeptical.

Seneca had reason to sound that way, too. Only a handful of blacks headed for the parade route. Most of the people who came out to see this underscoring of the return of Confederate sovereignty were white men with Freedom Party pins in their lapels—or, if they didn’t wear lapels, as many didn’t, on the front of denim jackets or wool sweaters. Cincinnatus hadn’t been the target of looks like the ones they gave him for many years. People in Des Moines thought Negroes curious beasts, not dangerous ones.

One of the blacks on the street was a familiar face: Lucullus Wood. He’d visited Cincinnatus at the hospital, and several times at his parents’ house. As far as a Negro could be, Lucullus was a man to reckon with in Covington. A generation earlier, his father had been, too.

Seeing Cincinnatus and Seneca, Lucullus came across the street to say hello. “Ain’t this a fine day?” he said. A Freedom Party man might have used the same words. A Freedom Party man might even have used the same tone of voice. But the words and the tone would have had a very different meaning in a Freedom Party man’s mouth. Lucullus understood irony—blacks who’d been born in the CSA understood irony from the moment they could talk—and no Party stalwart ever would.