Sion Crossing

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Sion Crossing Page 24

by Anthony Price


  Maybe a pro revolved inside Latimer’s head. That was certainly what he was, though not within Joe’s terms of professionalism. But then … what sort of pro was Joe himself?

  It was the Ingram which most obviously set him apart from his comrade. But there was more to him than that deadly professional little weapon: the two of them spoke alike, genuinely in that distinctive Southern speech of theirs, which Kingston had falsely affected off and on, but which came from them as naturally and musically as the very different accent of Highland Scotsmen from Kyle of Lochalsh; and their inexplicable Confederate fancy-dress was identical, which by itself would have made it hard for him to take them seriously now.

  Except … it was not just the Ingram: there was an attention-to-detail and a cat-on-hot-bricks wariness about Joe which reinforced the Ingram dreadfully, tagging him with the same label as that worn by the special breed of men who operated on both sides of the Ulster border, whom he had briefed a couple of years back.

  “Mistah Latimer—” Joe caught him embarrassingly in the midst of his scrutiny, with a look of his own as cold as his voice “—you jus’ put your coat back on, nice an’ easy … an’ we’ll go see the man—okay?”

  The man?

  The heat of the day enclosed Latimer, as it had done all the time, though he had been too pre-occupied to feel it since Willy had come upon him from nowhere, in the ruins of Sion Crossing. But now there was also the heat of the private fires beneath Joe’s coldness, which frightened him.

  The Man?

  He could play the game of innocence now, but it would be useless: argument and bluster would at best only prolong the agony, and there was no point in that. And, at worst, neither the man Joe, nor that frightening weapon of his, were amenable to time-wasting games.

  Besides which … all the games were over now, which he perceived too late he had been playing from the start: Senator Cookridge’s game, and Colonel Howard Morris’s game, which he had played back in England—had played because of cretinous miscalculation and professional greed; and now Lucy Cookridge’s game (and Kingston’s too?), which must be part of the same game.

  He put on his coat and followed the direction of Joe’s nod meekly, without argument.

  And, besides which, there was The Man—

  It was extremely odd, thought Latimer.

  He knew that he was very frightened, but that didn’t surprise him: he had been frightened before, physically frightened, and more than once … frightened at school, when he had been forced to climb dangerous cliffs, and to do other unnatural things like that, which other boys had enjoyed doing … and frightened more recently, in that near-accident on the motorway … So he knew himself for a coward, where flesh and blood was concerned—his flesh and blood, anyway—just as he was not a coward in any other respect, when decisions had to be taken.

  But this was different: this was genuine physical fear, because he was being threatened now, as he had never been threatened before—which the man Joe had seen in his face.

  But this was not the same fear as those other old fears, so well-remembered: it was real enough—it was not a minor part of what he felt … but it had to share his consciousness with a mixture of anger and curiosity.

  The woods were still all around him—

  Anger … because this was all his own fault—he had been deceived, but he had let himself be deceived: he had known it, too—so that wasn’t so surprising.

  But curiosity—what was odd was that curiosity was still so strong, in relation to fear and anger!

  He wanted to see The Man—he wanted to do that almost as much as he was frightened for himself, and angry with himself, for being here—on the end of Joe’s gun.

  There was something through the trees ahead—something white—?

  His curiosity instantly receded, and he felt his spirit begin to weaken: there was something unhealthy about that curiosity, on second thoughts—a man didn’t need to plunge his hand into the flames to discover the properties of fire—

  Joe growled something unintelligible from behind him, but the meaning of the sound was all too plain: whether he wanted to meet The Man or not was not a choice programmed into Joe’s orders: willing or not, curious or not, frightened and angry or not, he was going to meet The Man, that sound meant.

  The trees fell away, on either side, and the white blur resolved itself into a house—a house set in well-cut lawns, unnaturally green, with banks of bright-flowering unEnglish trees setting off the green-and-white.

  For an instant the scene almost took Latimer’s breath away, not so much because it was surprising, as because it wasn’t altogether a surprise: it was something he had never expected consciously, but it was quite unbelievably like another house which had never existed.

  He was looking at the great house of Sion Crossing, as he had imagined it!

  His feet walked, remembering Joe, while his mind tried to accommodate what he saw.

  It was a wonderfully elegant house—it wasn’t really like any house he had actually imagined, at second glance, because it was not like any house he had ever seen; so it was neither Tara nor Fair Oaks, never mind Sion Crossing.

  It was a house built for hot southern weather—for this very heat—long before air-conditioning: it was a house built inside a square of Corinthian columns holding up its wide overhanging roof, with cool shadowed verandahs all around it at two levels, raised ground floor and first floor.

  That was how Sion Crossing ought to have been … but—what had made it momentarily more unbelievable, until recent memory reasserted itself—it was also Sion Crossing true-and-false, with Confederate soldiery in attendance.

  But recent memory was almost instantaneously stronger, enough to destroy the illusion: reality was behind him, and there was only more fancy-dress ahead of him, with 1984 playing 1864 for some childish reason of its own, in a game in which he had no part.

  The fancy-dress men reacted to his approach—two, three … and now a fourth appearing from behind a bright red-flowered bush—taking up their weapons, but then relaxing as they saw Joe behind him.

  “What the hell?” Joe’s voice was sharp with sudden anger. “For chrissake!”

  The man from behind the bush ceased studying Latimer. “Huh?”

  “For chrissake!”

  “Joe—” The man passed out of Latimer’s line of vision “—who you got there?”

  They were well out on the lawn now, and with Joe’s anger behind him Latimer felt himself hurrying towards the house in spite of the appalling heat.

  “Joe—”

  “Shuddup! Shuddup an’ listen—” Joe drew a breath “—Willy’s back there, by the ol’ place, but ah want someone down by the creek with a sight of the bridge—” another breath “—so you get the hell down there, an’ you doan take your goddam’ eyes off’n that goddam’ bridge … an’ anythin’ crosses it—an’ ah mean anythin’—you call in Control right away—you got that?”

  There was a pause. “We … we got trouble, Joe?”

  A matched pause. “We got trouble? You jus’ think … anythin’ gets ’cross that bridge—anythin’ on wheels, anythin’ on legs, anythin’ that goddam’ crawls—an you got trouble—that’s for sure, if’n you doan call in. An’ that’ll be all the trouble you’ll need—okay?”

  “Sure, Joe—”

  Sure, Joe: the man from behind the bush had got the message. But there was also information in it for Latimer, and he knew he was badly in need of information, any scrap of it, with the house only twenty yards ahead now, cool and elegant and tree-shaded, and very frightening.

  These were not fancy-dress men, for all their grey uniforms and brass buttons and silly little képis. They were guards—and they were armed guards … and they were on the alert for trouble.

  But what sort of trouble? And why—?

  The little knot of Confederates by the steps up to the ground floor verandah had evidently picked up the vibrations of Joe’s anger, if not his actual words: they had unrelax
ed themselves into readiness again, although they looked as though they weren’t quite sure what they were ready for, any more than Latimer himself did. All that was apparent was that they shared his fear of the man with the Ingram machine-pistol.

  “For chrissake!” The original anger had decayed into contempt during the passage of the lawn. “Y’all got rocks for brains?”

  Latimer stopped at the foot of the steps. Somehow, although no one had worn those uniforms as real soldiers for over a century, they had the look of real squaddies wilting under their sergeant-major’s scorn, as their great-great-grandfathers might have done outside another house at Sion Crossing. But perhaps that fancy originated in the cold suspicion that there were real bullets in their rifles.

  “Jee-sus—Jee-sus!” Joe swept a glance across his hoplites and selected a target. “Ronnie—for chrissake—you should’a bin watchin’ the gate by now, not takin’ part in a goddam’ convention! The Man pays you—an’ you’re tryin’ to prove somethin’? You tell me?”

  The youngest of the juvenile trio stiffened under the blasphemy, but the eldest shuffled half a step nearer to Ronnie, as though defensively. “Shit, Joe! We gotta be in town, for the parade—” he looked at his wrist-watch, an anachronism below the pale blue cuff of his grey uniform coat “—like, we gotta be there now.” He looked up again, and caught Latimer’s eye accidentally for an instant, and then transferred the look back to Joe. “How we gotta be there now an’ here too, the same time—huh?”

  Latimer felt his soul contract. In that instant of contact, he had not even been a blue-coated Iowan prisoner from Sherman’s army from long ago, let alone a prisoner-of-war protected by any more modern convention. He had simply not been anything requiring human recognition, neither to be feared nor pitied.

  “Huh?” Joe reacted predictably. “You tryin’ to blow smoke up my ass, boy? We got intruders an’ you wanna play soldiers in town, an’ take time off to feel up Di-anne when you through flag-wavin’—that it?”

  Ronnie’s defender opened his mouth to deny the allegation, but he was a breath too late to pre-empt Joe’s follow-through.

  “You get the hell over by the smoke-house, where you oughta be now—an’ you doan let no one in there, less’n ah tell you—not if it was the goddam’ Governor of the State … not if Di-anne was to’come showin’ that cute little fanny of hers … Do ah make mahself plain?”

  Very plain, thought Latimer. And there was more useful information there too, in the plainness. Joe was a professional burdened with low-grade local help … or maybe it had been carefully chosen for the lack of curiosity which went with low intelligence. But that was beside the point—

  “Then for chrissake move it!” Joe broke the moment of acquiescent silence, galvanizing Ronnie and his comrade in opposite directions and leaving the last member of the trio petrified in front of him.

  The point was that these mock-Confederates had been expecting trouble of some sort.

  “As for you …” Joe shook his head speechlessly, in the manner of sergeants down the ages in the presence of insuperable stupidity.

  The youth blinked nervously. “Ah’m t’set … an’ ring the house bell if’n ah see anythun—you said.”

  Joe studied the youth for a moment. “You rung the bell then, sonny?” He nodded up the verandah steps towards the big white door.

  The youth stared at Joe for a second, his hands clenching and unclenching on the rifle in them. Then he gave the door a quick glance, as though he was seeing it for the first time. “But … but …”

  “You see anythin’?” asked Joe, not unkindly. “Comin’ ’cross the lawn jus’s now—anythin’—” he nodded at Latimer “—like him, mebbe?”

  The youth blinked at Latimer, and then at the wide empty lawn, and then frowned at Joe. “Ah saw you, Joe.”

  It suddenly came to Latimer why they were all wearing uniforms. Kingston had said something about “the parade”, and Joe had referred to “playing soldiers in the town” and “flag-waving”. And, of course, the legend of the Old South and the Lost Cause was still cherished by the descendants of the Confederates—and Americans loved parades, even more than Frenchmen did.

  “Ah saw you, Joe,” repeated the youth.

  Something else came to Latimer, quite unbidden. Long ago, with all the men away at war in Virginia and Tennessee, there would only have been old men and young boys like this one to defend Sion Crossing from Sherman—

  “You see anyone—you ring the bell, sonny,” said Joe. “So you go ring it now, like ah said.”

  But … to hell with Sherman and fancy-dress Confederates—that was not what all this was about—it couldn’t be—

  “Okay, fella—go on up,” ordered Joe.

  The big white door opened for them before Latimer had reached the top of the steps. Under the verandah it was hardly less oppressive, but only a few steps took him into the doorway and a blissful air-conditioned coolness—if there was a heaven, it was air-conditioned.

  It wasn’t dark inside the house, but for a moment it seemed so, until his eyes accustomed themselves to deliverance from the glare outside. But it was chiefly the wonderful chill: he was still bathed in sweat under his coat, but at least he could think again.

  There was a man on his left—a man who was not an ersatz Confederate, but a twentieth century civilian, in twentieth century shirt-and-tie.

  “Mr. Latimer?”

  Dr Livingstone, I presume? he might just as well have said.

  “Yes.” The thought-processes were accelerating. Whatever was happening, he had one thing going for him: he was not here on official business, so he had nothing to hide and nothing to protect, and nothing whatsoever to risk his skin for. In fact … whatever was happening, he was an innocent bystander!

  “I believe you have a passport?” The twentieth century man resolved himself into a middle-aged, medium-sized American. “May I see it please?”

  American? If an American, from a long way north and east of Sion Crossing. But, from wherever, at least polite.

  “Of course.” There would be time for protest, but it was not yet come, with Joe still at his back.

  “Close the door.” As the man took his passport he addressed Joe more curtly. “Thank you, Mr Latimer.” The voice readjusted itself for Latimer.

  He couldn’t place the accent at all: it was neither the Queen’s English nor the President’s American—it was statelessly educated.

  Rimless spectacles—hair without a trace of grey, but maybe dyed: chief accountant in a middle-sized multi-national, rather than a civil servant, Latimer estimated, speculating a little wildly … a civil servant might have spoken as politely, but there would not have been an extra edge of menace deep down, which this man had.

  “Thank you.” The passport was not returned with the thanks. “You have a map, I think?”

  Was this the moment to protest?

  No.

  “I have a map—yes.” Latimer felt in his pockets, unsure where Willy had replaced the map. “And I have a wallet and four hundred and fifty dollars—do you want them too?”

  “Just the map, Mr. Latimer, if you please.”

  Having taken in the man, Latimer used his next ration of time to take in the man’s setting.

  It wasn’t quite Tara—the staircase fell short of a Scarlett O’Hara sweep … But, although it must have been built in the generation after the original Sion Crossing house had gone up in flames, it owed nothing to Victorian gothic taste: it had a pleasing style of its own which he couldn’t identify at all, except that it seemed to lean more to the eighteenth century than the nineteenth … Only, that didn’t fit at all with his brief reading of post-Civil War Georgia—the Georgia of Reconstruction, in which the vulgar Carpetbaggers had displaced the old families … the old families like the Alexanders of Sion Crossing, which had been extinguished by the war.

  “Would you come this way, Mr. Latimer?” The man gestured towards the staircase which Latimer had been admiring only a moment be
fore.

  Latimer just managed to take in the rest of the entrance hall, which filled the centre of the house. There were packing cases to his left—but they gave no hint of arrival or departure—

  “This way, Mr. Latimer.” The second time there was an edge of command to the politeness.

  Was this The Man? If he was, he didn’t fit this Sion Crossing any better than the Carpetbaggers fitted it: he was an organization man of some sort—a professional very different from Joe, but nonetheless professional.

  But … on balance, not The Man—?

  Latimer ascended the staircase. At the second turn there was a window which gave him a brief view of an avenue of trees at the front of the house, to the end of which the half-witted Ronnie had been despatched. Then the final stairs and the landing were ahead of him, with a choice of passages and doors.

  “Straight ahead, Mr. Latimer.”

  There was a door ahead, pale oak like the other doors and the panelling: it looked as though some vandal had once painted it all, and then it had all been decently stripped down to reveal the original fine grain by some later owner whose taste matched his wealth.

  “Go on in.”

  Latimer opened the door. They were at the back of the house again after that double-turn on the staircase: over the first-storey verandah he could see the lawn across which Joe had so recently marched him at gunpoint. But it wasn’t a bedroom, for there was a fine walnut desk with a comfortable leather chair behind it to his left, and … and there was a matching chair to his right, out of which a white-haired man was staring at him.

  The Man?

  Latimer decided to break first. Having come here with an Ingram at his back he could by no stretch of the imagination consider this a friendly meeting. But, even though he well knew the fate of innocent bystanders in the barbarous twentieth century, that was the only rôle he could play, because that was what he actually was.

 

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