“I can’t begin to tell you, and I wish I could,” Flora answered. “We might have a better chance now if we’d done something different a lifetime ago, but it’s a little late to worry about that now.”
“Yes—just a little,” Taft said. “We have this pack of people who hate us right there in the middle of the country, and the most we can hope for, as far as I can see, is that they do us as little harm as we can manage.” Taft absently wiped his high forehead with the heel of his hand, and left a red streak on his skin.
“This has gone on for too long,” Flora said. “If we don’t settle it once and for all during the war, we have to try afterwards.” That sounded good, but what did it mean? She listened to her own words with the same sick horror Taft had known before her. What could settling it once and for all during the war mean but killing all the Mormons? If the United States did that, they wouldn’t have to worry about it afterwards—except when the country looked at itself in a mirror. Flora shuddered. All the carnage around her hadn’t nauseated her the way that thought did. “Dear God in heaven,” she whispered. “There’s a little bit of Jake Featherston in me, too.”
“A little bit of that bastard’s in every one of us,” Taft said. “The point of the exercise is not to let him out.”
“Well, Senator, we’ve found one more thing we agree on.” Flora held out her bloodstained hand. Taft clasped it in his.
XIV
THE TELEPHONE on Clarence Potter’s desk rang. He picked it up. “Potter here,” he said crisply.
“Hello, Potter there,” Jake Featherston rasped in his ear. “I need you to be Potter here, fast as you can, so get your ass on over right now.”
“On my way, sir.” Potter hung up. He grabbed his hat, closed and locked the office door behind him, and went upstairs to get a motorcar. From the War Department to the Gray House on Shockoe Hill shouldn’t have taken more than five minutes. In fact, it took more like fifteen. The U.S. air raid the night before had cratered several streets on the most direct routes.
“Sorry, sir,” the driver kept saying as he had to double back. Potter suspected the President would make him sorry, too, but he didn’t take it out on the luckless young soldier behind the wheel. When he arrived, he hopped out of the Birmingham, showed his ID to the guards at the entrance to the battered Confederate Presidential residence, and was escorted below ground to the enormous bomb shelter in which Jake Featherston operated these days.
New York City had skyscrapers. Potter wondered how long it would be before men built twenty, thirty, even fifty stories underground to keep from getting blown up when bombers came overhead. He laughed. That wouldn’t work in New Orleans, where the cemeteries were on top of the ground because of the high water table. Such details and anomalies aside, the picture seemed scarily probable.
Saul Goldman sat in the waiting room. Potter nodded to the director of communications. “Am I after you in line?” he asked.
“I don’t think so, General,” Goldman answered. “I think we go in together.”
“Do we?” Potter kept his voice as neutral as he could. Goldman was good at making propaganda, but the Intelligence officer didn’t want to be part of any propaganda, no matter how good. He’d had that argument with the President before. He hadn’t completely lost it, which only went to show how good his case was.
Featherston’s secretary stuck her head into the room. “Come with me, gentlemen.” Goldman caught Potter’s eye and nodded. Sure enough, they were an entry, like 3 and 3A at the racetrack.
When Potter came into the President’s sanctum, Featherston fixed him with a fishy stare and barked, “Took you long enough. What did you do—walk?”
“Sorry, sir. Bomb damage.” Potter had been braced for worse.
And Featherston let him off the hook after that, which also surprised him. “We need to get down to brass tacks,” the President said. “You’ve both heard about these people bombs up in the USA—Mormons strapping on explosives and blowing themselves to hell and gone as soon as they can take a raft of damnyankees with ’em?”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Saul Goldman said. Potter nodded. Goldman went on, “We’ve been working on ways to play them up—to show the Yankees are so low and evil, people will kill themselves before they live under them.”
That sounded like a good line to take to Potter, but Jake Featherston shook his head. “I was afraid you were gonna do somethin’ like that,” he said heavily. “That’s how come I called you in here—to tell you not to. No way, nohow. Not a word about ’em out of us, and jam the Yankees hard as you can when they talk about ’em. You got that?”
“I hear you, sir, but I don’t understand.” Goldman looked and sounded pained. Clarence Potter didn’t blame him. Had he been in the communications director’s shoes, he would have been pained, too.
But Featherston repeated, “Not a word, goddammit, and I’ll tell you why.” He went on, “I don’t want the damn niggers to hear anything about people bombs, you hear me? Not one fucking word! Coons are enough trouble as is. You don’t reckon some of those bastards’d blow themselves to the moon if they could take a raft of decent white folks with ’em? I sure do.”
“But—” Saul Goldman began. Even starting the protest took nerve; not many people had the nerve to squawk to Featherston’s face.
Here, though, Potter agreed with the President. “I’m sorry, Mr. Goldman, but I think he’s right,” he said. “We’d better keep the lid on that one for as long as we can, because the niggers will make us sorry if we don’t.”
“Damn straight,” Featherston said.
The director of communications still looked unhappy. “Since you’ve made up your mind, sir, that’s the way we’ll do it.” He plainly thought the President was wrong to have made up his mind that way.
Jake Featherston just as plainly didn’t care. “Make sure you do. And pick up the jamming on the damnyankees, too. We will be sorry—we’ll be sorry as hell—if we can’t keep this quiet.”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. President. If you’ll excuse me . . .” The little Jew left the President’s office very abruptly.
As soon as the door clicked shut behind Goldman, Jake Featherston let out a long sigh. “I don’t like making Saul do like I tell him instead of like he wants to. He’s good—he’s damn good. You need to give a man like that his head. This time, though, I just don’t reckon I’ve got much choice.”
Potter nodded. “I think you’re right, Mr. President. I said so.”
“Yeah, you did.” Featherston eyed him. “You’re not one to do something like that just to make me wag my tail, either.”
Remembering the weight of the pistol in his pocket as he rode the train up to Richmond in 1936, Potter nodded again. “No, sir. Whatever else I am, I’m no yes-man.”
“Son of a bitch. I never would’ve known if you hadn’t told me.” Maybe Jake Featherston was remembering that pistol, too. He drummed his fingers on top of his desk. “Got a question for you, Mr. Straight Answer.”
“Go ahead,” Potter said.
“Those fucking Mormon people bombs—did any of your men give ’em the idea, or did they come up with it all by themselves?”
“Mr. President, our people did not have thing one to do with that,” Potter said positively. “Nobody in the CSA—no white man in the CSA, anyhow—is that crazy. The Mormons came up with it on their own.”
“All right. I believe you. But if I ever find out you’re lying to me about this one, I’ll have your head,” Featherston said. “People bombs hurt the damnyankees, yeah, but they can hurt us a lot worse. And you know as well as I do that Saul won’t be able to clamp down on the news forever. One way or another, this kind of shit always comes out.”
“I knew that, sir. I wasn’t sure you did,” Potter answered. People who weren’t in the intelligence business often had an exaggerated notion of how easy keeping a secret was.
Jake Featherston laughed at him. “I never went to a fancy U.S. college, General, but I reckon I
may know a thing or two anyways.”
“That’s not what I meant, Mr. President,” Clarence Potter said stiffly.
Featherston laughed some more. “Yeah, likely tell.” But amusement didn’t live long on his face. It never did, not that Potter had seen. The President of the CSA always had to be angry at something or worried about something. And today he had something to be angry and worried about. “Damn niggers are gonna start blowin’ themselves up, sure as hell they are. Damfino how much we can do about it, either.”
“Massive reprisals,” Potter suggested. “Kill ten coons for every white a people bomb blows up, or twenty, or a hundred.”
“That won’t stop ’em,” Featherston predicted morosely. “There’ll always be some bastards who think, Who gives a damn what happens after I’m dead? And the ones who go after us without counting the cost are the ones we’ve got to be afraid of.”
He knew what he was talking about. The Freedom Party had always gone after its foes without counting the cost, whether those foes were Whigs and Radical Liberals, Negroes, or the United States. Potter said, “Yes, sir. You’re right—we’ll still have trouble even if we do that. But I think we’ll have less. We’ll make some niggers think twice before they turn into people bombs. And we’ll make the niggers who don’t want to blow themselves up think twice before they help or cover up for the ones who do. They’d better, anyhow, if they know they’re going to get shot after a people bomb goes off.”
“It could be.” Featherston picked up a pencil and wrote himself a note. “It’s a better scheme than anybody else has come up with, I’ll say that. Whatever else you are, General, you aren’t soft on niggers.”
“I should hope not, sir,” Potter said. “That’s how we first met, remember. I was trying to head off the Red uprising before it got started. I was after that officer’s body servant—”
“Pompey, his name was,” Jake Featherston said at once. Potter wouldn’t have remembered the Negro’s name if they’d set him on fire. Featherston had a truly marvelous memory for detail—and never forgot an enemy or a slight. He went on, “He was a mincing, prissy little bastard, thought his shit didn’t stink. Just what you’d expect from a stinking blueblood like Jeb Stuart III to have for a servant.” He looked as if he wanted to spit on the carpet, or possibly start chewing it.
And he wasn’t wrong. During the Great War and even afterward, the Confederate States had had too many sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of founding fathers in positions of authority for no better reason than that their ancestors had done big things. It wasn’t like that anymore, Nathan Bedford Forrest III notwithstanding. Forrest was there because of what he could do, not because of what great-grandpa the cavalry general had done. The Freedom Party had swept away most of the Juniors and IIIs and IVs. And that, Potter was willing to admit, needed doing.
Featherston let the pencil fall. “All right, General. That’s about it, looks like. Main reason I wanted you here was to find out if those damn people bombs were your notion. But you gave me a good idea, and I reckon we’ll try it out when the time comes—and it will, goddammit. I thank you for that.”
Potter got to his feet. “You’re welcome, Mr. President. We’re on the same side in this fight.”
“In this one, yeah. How about some of the others?” But Featherston waved that aside. “Never mind. Get out of here.”
A man in a State Department uniform went in as Potter went out. Potter wondered what that was all about. He knew he could learn with a little poking and prodding. He also knew he’d catch merry hell if anybody found out he was doing it. You didn’t try to find out what was none of your business. That was one of the rules in this game, too. There were often good reasons why it was none of your business.
After the air conditioning under the Gray House, ordinary Richmond late summer seemed twice as hot and muggy as usual. A haze of dust and smoke hung over the Confederate capital: a souvenir of Yankee bombing raids. The same sort of haze was said to hang over Philadelphia.
Will anything be left of either side when this war is over? Potter wondered. More and more, it reminded him of a duel of submachine guns at two paces. Both countries could strike better than they could defend.
He didn’t know what to do about that. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Maybe taking Pittsburgh away from the damnyankees really would knock them out of the fight. It had a chance of doing that, anyway. Potter couldn’t think of anything else that did.
A truck dumped gravel and asphalt on the street in front of the Gray House. A heavy mechanized roller started smashing it down into a more or less level surface. And it would stay level till the next time U.S. bombers visited Richmond, or the time after that, or perhaps the time after that.
The machine was more interesting to Clarence Potter than the job it was doing. Not long before, a swarm of Negroes with hand tools would have done work like that. No more. Machinery was much more common than it had been . . . and there weren’t so many Negroes around. Potter nodded to himself. Both halves of that suited him fine.
****
Hipolito Rodriguez awkwardly sewed a sergeant’s—no, a troop leader’s—stripes onto the left sleeve of his gray tunic. The letter that came with his promotion notice said it was for “contributions valuable to the safety and security of the Confederate States of America.” That left the guards at Camp Determination who hadn’t been promoted both puzzled and jealous. It also gave the noncoms whose ranks he’d suddenly joined something new to think about.
Tom Porter, who’d been Rodriguez’s squad leader till he got the promotion, added two and two and got four. “This has to do with those new buildings going up alongside the men’s and women’s half, doesn’t it?” he said.
“I think maybe it does, sí,” Rodriguez answered. He was still getting used to the luxury of the noncoms’ quarters. He had a room of his own now, with a closet and a sink. No more cot in the middle of a barracks with a lot of other noisy, smelly guards. No more shoving everything he owned into a footlocker, either. He had more room to be a person as a troop leader; he wasn’t just one more cog on a gear in a vast machine.
“I know you helped give the commandant the idea for those new buildings,” Porter said. “If they work out as well as everybody hopes, I reckon you’ve earned your stripes.”
Porter’s acceptance helped ease the transition from ordinary guard to troop leader. It meant the other noncoms made it plain they would back Rodriguez if he ran into trouble. With that going for him, he didn’t, or never more than he could handle by himself. And those buildings rapidly neared completion.
Nobody ever called them anything but that. If you talked about one of them, it was that building. The guards knew what they were for; they’d been briefed. They had to be, by the nature of things. But, also by the nature of things, they didn’t call them by their right names. If you didn’t name something, you didn’t have to dwell on what it really was and really did. Not thinking about those things helped you sleep at night.
A few of the guards, men who’d come to Camp Determination as it went up, would sometimes talk about shooting Negroes in the swamps of Louisiana. They were mostly matter-of-fact, but they would also talk about comrades who couldn’t stand the strain. “So-and-so ate his gun,” they would say. That was how Rodriguez learned Jeff Pinkard’s new wife was a dead guard’s widow. He’d known she was married before; two boys made that obvious. The details . . .
“Poor son a bitch just couldn’t take it,” a guard said sympathetically.
“He shoot himself, too?” Rodriguez asked with a certain horrid fascination.
“Nope.” The veteran guard shook his head. “Chick must’ve got sick of guns. He ran a hose from his auto exhaust into the passenger compartment and fired up the motor. Sure as hell wish we’d’ve had those trucks back then. You don’t have to worry so much about what you’re doing when you load one of them.”
“The trucks, they came after this fellow kill himself?” Rodriguez said.
Rodriguez almost remarked on that. Then he thought better of it. He couldn’t prove a thing, after all—and he couldn’t unsay something once he’d said it. Better to keep his mouth shut.
And keeping his mouth shut proved a good idea, as it usually did. A few days later, an officer tapped him for special duty, saying, “The commandant tells me you won’t screw this up no matter what. Is that a fact?” He sent Rodriguez a fishy stare.
“I hope so, sir,” Rodriguez answered. He recognized that stare. He’d seen it before on white Confederates. They looked at him, saw a Mexican, and figured he wasn’t good for much. He asked, “What do I got to do?”
“Well, we’re going to test out one of those buildings,” the officer answered. “We’re going to pick about a hundred niggers and run ’em through it.”
“Oh, yes, sir. I do that. Don’t you worry,” Rodriguez said.
His confidence seemed to relieve the officer. “All right,” the man said. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the side of his leg. His right sleeve was pinned up short, as his right arm ended just below the shoulder—he too came out of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade. He went on, “This has to go good, mind you. We got bigwigs from Richmond comin’ out to watch the show.”
Rodriguez shrugged. “Maybe it go good. Maybe it go wrong. I dunno. All I know is, it don’t go wrong on account of me.”
The other man considered that. He finally nodded. “Fair enough. Make sure all the ordinary guards you’re in charge of feel the same way.”
“Sí, señor. I do that,” Rodriguez promised.
Because they were trying things out for the first time—and because bigwigs from Richmond were watching—they used far more guards than they normally would have to deal with a hundred black men. They got the Negroes formed up in a ten-by-ten square. The inmates carried whatever small chattels they intended to take away to the new camp where they thought they were going.
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