Unforced Error

by Michael Bowen

  A sergeant and a private marched stiffly from the ranks to the flagpole. No radio or television noises reached them. No cell-phones beeped. No air conditioners panted, and no traffic noise intruded.

  The sergeant barked a command that Rep couldn’t make out, and the private prepared to lower the flag. Rep didn’t have a military bone in his body, but he straightened his back and squared his shoulders in a semblance of coming to attention. Peter raised the bugle to his lips.

  The flag began to come down as the haunting notes of Taps blared from the bugle. Jedidiah Trevelyan suddenly seemed very far away. And, Rep realized with a bit of surprise, so did John Paul Lawrence.

  Chapter 8

  The two stories of sprawling New England Revival architecture occupied by Jackrabbit Press lay only three-quarters of a mile from the encampment. The last quarter-mile, though, sloped steadily uphill, and Rep’s all wool uniform felt sodden by the time he and Peter finally pulled close enough to count the slats on the building’s dark green shutters. A few hundred yards from the house a silo that Rep recognized with satisfaction as a Harvestore® dominated weather-beaten outbuildings.

  A maid in an ankle-length black dress and starched white apron opened the front door for them. She directed them to an anteroom where racks and shelving awaited sabers, hats, and accoutrements. Peter wrote his name on the tag affixed to one of the rack-spaces, tied the tag with twine to his saber, and stowed the weapon. Rep imitated him.

  They moved then into a room as large as the entire first floor of the comfortable home Rep and Melissa occupied in Indianapolis. Lace doilies protected dark maple tabletops from cut-glass punch bowls and vases holding prairie flowers. Oil portraits and daguerreotypes decorated ivory-colored walls. Tomes by Shakespeare, Emerson, Melville, and Hawthorne competed with oversized Bibles for bookshelf space. At least twelve dozen elegantly tapering candles in chimney-glass hurricanes and sconces combined with four oil lamps to provide gently abundant light.

  Ample as it was, the room already seemed crowded. At least forty uniformed guests mingled with sutlers and women in period dress and one jarringly contemporary figure, who turned out to be the society reporter for the Kansas City Star. As Rep circulated he noticed four or five men in uniforms far too neat and spiffy for them to have spent even an afternoon amidst the dirt, dust, and campfire smoke at the encampment. It seemed absurd, but he felt vaguely superior to them, as if he’d put himself in a different class by having hardtack and salt pork for dinner while they were eating fast food. He wondered if his face had had the same wary, cards-close-to-the-vest, outsider’s look when he’d first hit the encampment.

  “How about a date, soldier?”

  Rep swiveled to catch Melissa’s sly smile, enhanced by the softer glow of the candle light. She handed him a cup of punch and clinked hers against his.

  “If the Union Army had had camp followers as lovely as you, the Civil War might have lasted fifteen years,” he said.

  “Very nicely put. A few more compliments like that and before long we’ll be playing Dorothea Dix and the Naughty Scholar. Should someone tell that corporal in the white pants over there that he sewed his stripes on the wrong way? Every other striper has them tips down, and his are tips up.”

  “If he has white pants and red trim on his collar, his stripes are right. He’s here as a Marine—probably the only one—and Peter told me that’s the way Marine noncoms wore their stripes in the Civil War.”

  “If a few hours at the encampment has left you this insufferably knowledgeable, you may be impossible to live with by the end of the weekend,” Melissa said. “Apart from encouraging your penchant for arcane pedantry, how do you like the experience so far?”

  “More than I thought I would. Some of the guys who were playing old soldier on me this afternoon shook hands with me just now and it made me feel like a million bucks. Us/them kind of thing. Are you noticing any subtle effects on your attitudes from your immersion in the era?”

  “I’m not ready to start lashing Latin and arithmetic into trembling schoolgirls, but there’s something there, all right. You move more carefully in a dress like this, and I think it carries over into being a little more polite, a bit more formal—maybe even a tiny bit stiff.”

  “Heaven forbid. Where’s Linda, by the way?”

  “Finding Peter and cutting him out of the herd.”

  Following Melissa’s nod, Rep saw Linda leading Peter halfway across the room, toward a doorway that presumably led to the back of the house. He noticed that Melissa’s expression now bespoke a dauntingly single-minded focus that he’d seen before—during the prep for her comprehensive examinations, for example.

  “Something’s up,” he said. “What is it?”

  “Oh, dear, am I that transparent?”

  “Only to an intellectual property lawyer. A litigator would have missed it.”

  “All I’m allowed to tell you is that they need to spend some time alone with each other. And I may have to run interference for them.”

  “Someone has to. This isn’t a place for private conversation.”

  “Linda has a key to the editorial offices on the second floor. She also has a minibar bottle of scotch they brought back as a souvenir from New York last summer—for courage, I assume, but maybe just as a good luck charm.”

  “This sounds serious,” Rep said.

  “Amen. I doubt she’s had anything stronger than Chablis since our senior prom. Where I come in, though, is that other people also have keys. So if I disappear for awhile later on—”

  “You’ve said enough. If you tell me any more you’ll have to kill me.”

  “How do you achieve such impressive levels of intellectual penetration?”

  “I married a clever girl and I have to keep up.”

  A hint of a commotion drew Rep and Melissa’s attention toward the center of the room. The man making his leisurely but determined way toward them had iron gray hair combed with an elegance just offhand enough to suggest swagger. Rep guessed that he was in his mid-sixties. A pair of wrinkles near the jaw line on each cheek served to emphasize the overall firmness of his tanned face, while bespeaking a wholesome contempt for the plastic surgeon’s knife and needle. He wore a federal blue, long-tailed coat with oversized brass buttons and a buff suede vest that reminded Rep of paintings of Daniel Webster arguing for the Compromise of 1850.

  “Good evening.” The man extended his hand and smiled as he reached Rep and Melissa. “I am John Paul Lawrence, and I believe I have the honor of addressing attorney Reppert G. Pennyworth and his good wife.”

  He somehow managed to get this out without the words sounding stilted, which struck Rep as a pretty good trick. Lawrence grasped Melissa’s hand and bowed to kiss her fingers.

  “This is a very special event you’ve arranged,” Melissa said. “The building is magnificent, and you’ve gotten things exactly right for this group.”

  “You’re very kind to say so,” Lawrence said. “I wish I could claim that commercial considerations were entirely foreign to the effort, but I can’t. Right now Civil War re-enactment is just an esoteric hobby for a fairly small group of enthusiasts. If the media start hyping it enough to make a real splash with the general public, a large backlist of period romances from Jackrabbit Press will be ready for fresh covers and republication.”

  “Don’t apologize for commercial considerations,” Rep said. “They keep copyright lawyers in wine and cheese.”

  Melissa spotted Linda and Peter slipping through the doorway.

  “I sense a brandy-and-cigars moment coming up, so in the spirit of the age I will discreetly excuse myself,” Melissa said. Exchanging nods and tolerant smiles with Lawrence, she glided away.

  “Mrs. Pennyworth is quite discerning,” Lawrence said. “I do have business to discuss. Let’s go to my study.”

  “By all means,” Rep said.

  Rep followed Lawrence through the parlor to the inside doorway that Peter and
Linda had already used. This led to a hall between a stairway and dining room on the right and a substantial wooden door on the left. Lawrence unlocked the latter and turned toward Rep as he swung it open.

  “We are now officially out of role,” he said. “On the other side of this door we step back into the twenty-first century.”

  Lawrence had put it mildly. They walked into an ultra-modern conference room. Chrome, glass, and black leather furniture. Built-in Sub-Zero mini-refrigerator and wine cooler. Imac desktop computer in a turqoise housing, and a Hewlett-Packard laser printer. Large screen Sony television and Bose radio/CD player. Framed covers of Jackrabbit Press books mounted on walls whose pale blue linen covering looked like it cost eighty dollars a square foot. The only apparent period touches were a black-framed, yellowed document signed in spidery, old-fashioned handwriting and a very busy medal mounted on a plaque. Rep could barely make out “General Order No. 11” typeset in large letters at the top of the document.

  He saw only one photograph. The badly focused, black-and-white print showed a thin, light-haired man in horn-rimmed glasses. Rep thought shackles bound his wrists, but grainy resolution made it hard to tell for sure.

  “There has to be a story behind that,” Rep said.

  “His name was Robert Brassilach,” Lawrence said, pronouncing the first name Ro-BARE. “He was a respected poet, a fine novelist, and a truly gifted critic. If he had lived to fulfill his promise, he might have become the greatest French literary commentator of his generation.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “He was executed by a firing squad in France during World War II.”

  “Resistance?”

  “A broad term,” Lawrence said with an eloquent shrug. “Essentially, Brassilach was shot for editing a newspaper.”

  “A martyr to freedom of thought,” Rep said.

  “Exactly.” Lawrence picked up a telephone and murmured something into it. Then he poured amber liquid from a crystal decanter into two thimble glasses and offered one to Rep. “Cigars hadn’t occurred to me, but I can certainly provide some brandy. Please make yourself comfortable.”

  As Rep sat down, a rap sounded at the door. Lawrence buzzed it open. A man in a blue uniform came in, looked uncertainly around him, then shuffled over to where Lawrence was standing. Rep recognized him as one of the re-enactors in the parlor who had seemed out of place.

  “Mr. Pennyworth,” Lawrence said, “meet Sergeant Jones of the Kaw River Volunteers. No such unit fought in the Civil War, of course. We’ve taken a number of other historical liberties as well. The uniform is combed cotton instead of wool—no trivial matter at Gettysburg in July. Dark blue wide-brimmed slouch hat instead of a forage cap. Although this is an infantry unit, you’ll notice that the outer garment isn’t a sack coat but a cloak, shamelessly calculated to appeal to the generation that made Lord of the Rings a mega-hit. The basic small arm won’t be a muzzle-loading rifled musket but the Spencer repeating rifle, which actually was used by a few units.”

  “All in the interest of broadening appeal?” Rep asked.

  “Exactly. Thank you, Sergeant, that was quite helpful.” The blue-clad figure nodded briefly and left. “I respect the purists who hope through meticulous authenticity to achieve some kind of spiritual communion on the parade ground or picket duty with the soldiers who actually fought the war. But mysticism isn’t a commercial proposition.”

  “Right,” Rep said. “After all, you’re trying to reach as wide an audience as possible.”

  “Indeed I am. Imagine my corps as a kind of living novel. An instant publicity hook for author signings and fan conventions. Honorary memberships for readers, linked with advance notice of upcoming books. I know I sound philistine, but the possibilities are glittering.”

  Well, Rep thought, they would be if romance novels were bought by guys instead of women. But maybe that’s the point.

  “It’s hard to argue with that,” Rep said.

  “So let’s talk about those possibilities, shall we?”

  They did. Rep began to explore the general issue of getting legal protection for what Lawrence rather elegantly called a living novel. And while he talked, half of his mind ran the numbers from the Jackrabbit Press Dunn and Bradstreet Report he had reviewed, and computed the payback rate from eight, twelve—why not?—twenty titles a year.

  You know what? he thought to himself. This guy must be a lot smarter than I am. Because bottom line, I don’t see how this thing can work.

  Chapter 9

  While Rep’s chat with Lawrence ran its course, Melissa stood outside the back door to the house, anxiously watching a battleship-gray DeLorean screech to a stop near the crown of a turnaround at the end of the driveway. She hadn’t flirted with anyone but Rep in a long time, and she’d hoped that Peter and Linda would get their little chat over with before she had to deploy her rusty wiles on R. Thomas Quinlan. Now that the DeLorean had arrived, though, game time had arrived with it.

  She had a few minutes to consider tactics because it took Quinlan that long to whip out a car cover and fit it lovingly over his vehicle, singing jauntily as he did so. The tune was My Favorite Things from The Sound of Music. With the wind blowing from Quinlan’s direction, Melissa could pick up lyrics that departed from the original score:

  Half-slips and full slips and pink satin panties,

  Black leather teddies and silken blue scanties,

  Thongs more exquisite than strippers’ g-strings—

  These are a few of my girl’s underthings.

  Finally Quinlan, in all of his sandy-haired, muscle-rippling, Crest-commercial smiling, health-glowing magnificence approached the building. And Melissa discovered that all she’d need to draw his attention was to be a moderately attractive woman under fifty.

  “Hi,” he said, as he spotted her by the door. “Here for the social, right?”

  “Guilty.”

  “Sneak out for a cigarette?”

  “Just some fresh air,” Melissa said. “I don’t smoke. I’m not prissy about it, though. You go ahead if you like.”

  Quinlan flashed a rueful, ten-thousand megawatt grin at her.

  “Like?” he said. “I would love a cigarette. I would kill for a cigarette. But I can’t have one.”

  “I don’t see how it could be a health problem,” Melissa said, unsubtly admiring Quinlan’s physique, “And offhand I’d guess against religious scruples as well.”

  “Dropped the church thing a long time ago,” Quinlan nodded, all lovable scamp. “Got tired of giving up adultery for Lent.”

  “I see,” Melissa said. The seduction had now officially begun.

  “It’s the Boston Marathon,” he said. “Greatest running experience in the world. Been dreaming of it for two years. But I need to finish a qualifying marathon in under four hours to get there. There’s one coming up in St. Louis next month. I’m training for it. Seriously training.”

  Well, aren’t you a splendid chap? Melissa thought, noting that this was exactly what she was supposed to think.

  “Daunting dedication,” she said, shaking her head in ostensible wonder.

  “What can I say? Listen, would you like to go for a drive? Ever been in a DeLorean?”

  “Maybe not a drive,” Melissa said. “But I would like to see the car, and it’s very nice of you to offer.”

  She had apparently hit on the only topic Quinlan cared about as much as himself, for he instantly led her over to the vehicle and raised the cover from the hood and driver’s side. He lifted the gull-wing door open, helped her into the driver’s seat, and pointed out the leather-wrapped steering wheel and knurled walnut dashboard with its impressive array of dials and gauges. Melissa did her best to look interested.

  “Check this out,” Quinlan said then.

  Reaching across her and brushing her breasts, he popped open a near-invisible compartment under the dash and pulled out a thick plastic bag full of what Melissa readily ident
ified as pot. “Plastic bag” understated things considerably. Sides many mills thick gave it a feeling of substance, and no-nonsense, heavy-duty seals secured the top. If Tiffany’s made Zip-Lok bags, she thought, they might look something like this.

  “Pure Jamaican gold,” Quinlan said reverently, pressing a bit closer.

  “I hope you enjoy it.”

  “Would you like to enjoy some right now?”

  “No, thanks.”

  “Are you telling me you’ve never smoked marijuana?”

  “No,” Melissa said.

  “But you’ve gotten all grown up and stuffy and now you’re ashamed of your naughty past?”

  “No. It was something I did at a certain time in my life. Looking back on it, I think it was a mistake. But maybe a bigger mistake would have been living my life without making any mistakes. Why don’t I get out now so that you can re-stash your Jamaican gold without my brassiere getting in the way?”

  “Now, now, coy mistress,” Quinlan chided, as he pointedly didn’t move. “World enough and time and all that.” He closed in even more, reaching across her so that his arms framed her shoulders and Melissa could guess with considerable confidence that his dinner had involved pepperoni.

  “Let me out right now,” Melissa said in a quietly fierce voice. She swung her right fist toward his chops, but she had a bad angle and no leverage in the cramped quarters. She landed a pathetic love-tap instead of an eye-opener.

  “YEOOWWW!” Quinlan nevertheless yelped, to Melissa’s vast surprise. He leaped back, smacking his head on the upswung door in the process.

  “I think you should take that as a no, dearie,” a richly rolling female voice said.

  “Hey, CT, fun’s fun but that really hurt!”

  “If it didn’t hurt, then Big Dee’s Tack and Veterinary Supply Company gypped me out of thirty-nine-ninety-five plus shipping and handling.”

  CT? Melissa thought. Trouble with the English subjunctive? Could it be?

  Melissa climbed out. She saw Quinlan rubbing his bottom with one hand while he cradled his pot with the other. Confronting him was a stocky woman with frosted blond hair. Dressed in full English hunting pinks and knee-high black leather stirrup boots and swishing a wicked-looking riding crop, she carried fifty-plus years with stolid confidence.