Walk in Hell

by Harry Turtledove

  “Your son’s case is not clearcut: I admit as much,” Hannebrink said. “It is possible he did not know about this particular explosive device.” He held up one finger, as if expecting McGregor to interrupt. “Possible, I say. By no means proven. There appears to be no doubt he associated with these subversives and saboteurs.”

  “They’re his friends,” Maude McGregor burst out. “Captain, they’re boys he’s known as long as he’s been on this earth. And besides, where in Canada will you find any boys that age who don’t—”

  Conversations with Captain Hannebrink had a way of breaking down in midsentence. This one should have broken down a few words sooner. Hannebrink fiddled with one point of that absurd, upjutting mustache, then finished for Maude: “Where will I find Canadian boys that age who don’t despise the United States and everything they stand for? There are some, Mrs. McGregor, I assure you of that.”

  His matter-of-fact confidence was more chilling than bluster would have been. And Arthur McGregor feared he was right. Some people had to be on the winning side, no matter what, and the USA looked like the winning side right now. Bootlickers, McGregor thought.

  But that did not help Alexander. McGregor said, “You can’t blame him for what these others tried to do.”

  “Why can’t I?” Hannebrink returned. “Canadian law recognizes the concepts of an accessory before the fact and of concealment of knowledge of a crime to be committed.”

  “You’ve never claimed you had anyone who said Alexander knew about this, only that he knew some of the boys you say did it,” Arthur McGregor said stubbornly. “Is that enough to go on holding him?”

  “Of course it is,” Captain Hannebrink answered. “I assume anyone who consorts with saboteurs and says nothing about it either is a saboteur himself or wants to be one.”

  “You don’t want reasons to let my boy go.” Maude’s voice went shrill. “You just want an excuse to keep him in an iron cage when he hasn’t done anything.”

  Arthur McGregor set a big-knuckled, blunt-fingered hand on his wife’s arm. “That doesn’t help,” he said mildly. If Maude lost her temper here, it wouldn’t just be unfortunate. It would be disastrous.

  Captain Hannebrink said, “Mrs. McGregor, I can understand how you feel, but—”

  “Can you?” she said. “If we’d invaded your country and dragged your son away to jail, how would you feel?”

  “Wretched, I’m sure,” he answered, though he didn’t sound as if he meant it. He went on, “Please let me finish the point I was trying to make. You still do not seem to fully understand the situation. You are in occupied territory, Mrs. McGregor. The military administration of the United States does not need any excuses to confine individuals. We have the authority to do it, and we have the power to do it.”

  Maude stared at him, as if she’d never imagined he would put it so baldly. And McGregor stared, too, catching as his wife had not quite done what lay behind the American captain’s words. Hoarsely, he said, “You don’t care whether Alexander had anything to do with that bomb or not. You’re going to keep him locked up anyhow.”

  “I did not say that, Mr. McGregor.”

  “No, you didn’t, Captain, did you? But you meant it, and that’s worse, if you ask me.” McGregor got to his feet. Maude rose with him, uncertainty on her face. He took no notice of it. He took no notice of anything but his contempt, and that was big as the world. “But then, what do you care what Canuck trash thinks? I’m sorry we wasted your time—and ours. I had chores I could have done instead of coming here.” He walked out onto the street, Maude following.

  Maybe Captain Hannebrink stared at his back. He didn’t turn to see.

  Nellie Semphroch was about to cross the street to visit Mr. Jacobs, the cobbler, when the guns started roaring north of Washington, D.C. As if drawn by a lodestone, her head turned in that direction. She nodded in slow, cold satisfaction. For a while, Washington had been too far south of the front line to let her hear much artillery fire. Then the rumble had been distant, like bad weather far away. Now it was guns, unmistakably guns, and louder, it seemed, every day.

  A Confederate dispatch rider trotted past her, mounted on a bay gelding whose coat gleamed in the hot June sun. He tipped his slouch hat to her. Taken all in all, the Rebs were a polite lot. That made her distrust them more, not like them better.

  Flies buzzed in the street as she crossed. She flapped with a hand to drive them away. There were fewer than there had been ten years before. Say what you would about motorcars, they didn’t attract flies.

  She opened the door to Mr. Jacobs’ shop. The bell above it chimed. Jacobs looked up from the buttery-soft black cavalry boot to which he was fitting a new heel. The wrinkles on his face, which had been set in lines of concentration, rearranged themselves into a smile. “Good morning, Nellie,” he said, setting down his little hammer and taking from the corner of his mouth a couple of brads that hadn’t interfered with his speech at all. “It’s good to see you today. It’s good to see you any day.”

  “It’s good to see you, too, Hal,” she answered. She didn’t view him with the relentless suspicion she aimed at most of the male half of the human race. For one thing, he was at least fifteen years older than she. For another, he’d never tried to get out of line with her. Up till the year before, they hadn’t even called each other by their Christian names.

  “Would you like some lemonade?” he asked. “I made it myself.” He sounded proud of that. He’d been a widower for a good many years, and took pride in everything he did for himself.

  “I’d love some, thank you,” Nellie said. He went into the back room and brought it out in a tumbler that didn’t match the one sitting by his last. Nellie sipped. She raised an eyebrow. “It’s very good lemonade.” And it was—tart and sweet and cool and full of pulp.

  “For which I thank you,” he answered, dipping his head in what was almost a bow. His courtly, antique manners were another reason why he set off no fire bells of alarm in her mind. “I am going to fill my glass again. Would you like another?”

  “Half a glass,” she answered. “I had a cup of coffee a couple of minutes before I came over here.”

  “Did you?” He chuckled. “Drinking up your own profits, eh?” He went into the back room again, returning with his glass full and Nellie’s, as she’d asked, something less than that. After giving it to her, he asked, “And what do you hear in the coffeehouse these days?”

  Before Nellie could reply, a young Confederate lieutenant came in, picked up his boots, and bustled out again without looking at her once. That suited her fine. Once he was gone, she answered the question that had sounded casual but wasn’t: “They’ve been talking about strengthening the bridges over the Potomac. I don’t know why. It can’t be for anything really important: they keep going on about barrels and tanks, not guns or trucks or wagons. Maybe they’re bringing beer up for their men.”

  “Maybe they are. It would be fine if they were.” Jacobs muttered something his bushy gray mustache swallowed. Aloud, he said, “Anything you hear about tanks and barrels would be—interesting.”

  “All right.” Nellie knew he wasn’t going to tell her anything more than that. Ignorance was her best protection, though she already knew too many secrets, guilty and otherwise. But Jacobs had connections—about most of which she was also ignorant—back to the U.S. government, whereas she was no more than one of his sources of news. She assumed that meant he knew how to run his business.

  Another Confederate officer came in: the owner of the boot on which the cobbler was working. The fellow glowered. “You said that was going to be ready today,” he growled.

  “So I did, sir,” Jacobs answered. “And it will be. I didn’t say it would be ready first thing in the morning, though.”

  “As soon as you can,” the Reb said. “My unit is heading north this afternoon, and I want these boots.”

  “I’ll do all I can,” Jacobs said. “If you come back about half-past eleven, this one should
be all fixed up.” Shaking his head unhappily, the Confederate left. Nellie would have bet Hal Jacobs knew to which unit he belonged, and that the information about its movements would soon be in U.S. hands. And Jacobs had his own way of harassing the enemy: “Won’t it be a shame when some of the nails I put in go through the sole and poke the bottom of his foot? What a pity—he’s made me hurry the job.”

  The bell rang again. Nellie wondered if it was the Reb, too impatient to wait for eleven-thirty. It wasn’t. It was Edna. That meant something was wrong. Except for a couple of times to get shoes fixed, Edna didn’t come in here.

  “Ma,” Edna said without preamble, “there’s a Rebel major over across the street, says he’s got to talk to you right now.”

  “You go tell him I’ll be right there,” Nellie said. When Edna had gone, she gave Mr. Jacobs a stricken glance. “What do I do now?”

  “It depends on what he wants,” replied the cobbler who wasn’t only a cobbler. “I know you will do your best, come what may. Whatever happens, remember that you have more friends than you know.”

  Cold comfort. Nellie nodded, composed herself, and went back across the street. The major was waiting for her outside the coffeehouse, which she did not take as a good sign. When she first came up to him, he said, “Mrs. Semphroch, you are acquainted with William Gustavus Reach.” It was not a question. She wished it had been.

  “Yes, I know him some,” she said through ice in her belly so cold, she thought it would leave her too frozen to speak at all. Part of it was fear for herself, part fear for Mr. Jacobs, and part, maybe the biggest part, fear of what Edna, standing not five feet away, would hear and learn. “He came by this place every so often.” She made her lip curl. “Last time he came by, he was trying to steal things when they dropped bombs on us that night.”

  “The acquaintance goes back no farther than that?” The Confederate major was one of those smart men who think themselves even smarter than they are. How much did he know? How much had Reach spilled? How much could she say without spilling more to Edna?

  She picked her words with care, doing her best to sound careless: “I knew him a long time ago, a little, you might say, but I hadn’t set eyes on him from before my daughter here was born till he showed up again.” That was all true, every word of it; it helped steady her.

  “Uh-huh.” The Reb looked down at his notebook. “You are not, and never have been, his wife?”

  Edna stared at Nellie. Nellie stared, too, in astonishment commingled with relief. Maybe she’d come out of this in one piece after all. “I hope to Jesus I’m not,” she exclaimed—more truth. “I hope to Jesus I never was, and I surely hope to Jesus I never will be! If I never see him again in all my born days, it’ll be too soon.”

  “Uh-huh,” the Confederate major said again. “Well, if you had been his wife and weren’t any more, you might say the same thing, but I reckon—” He didn’t say exactly what he reckoned, but it didn’t seem like anything bad for Nellie. “Maybe you can tell me what sort of friends he has, then.”

  “Next friend of his I know about will be the first,” Nellie said.

  Edna giggled. The major started to smile, then stopped, as if remembering he was on duty. He said, “This here Reach tells more stories than Uncle Romulus, and that’s a fact. Some of them, ma’am, we have to check.” He chuckled. “We’re going to send him to a place where nobody listens to his stories for a long, long time.”

  “If you think I’m going to miss him, Major, you can think again.” Nellie sounded as prim and righteous as she did when taking the high line with Edna. The Rebel tipped his hat to her and went on his way.

  “That wasn’t so bad, Ma,” Edna said. “Way he was asking after you, though, heaven only knew what he wanted.”

  “You’re right,” Nellie said. You don’t know how right you are.

  She went back across the street to the shoe-repair shop. The bell jangled. Mr. Jacobs looked up—warily—from his work. Her enormous smile said everything that needed saying. He set down the little hammer, came around the counter, and took both her hands in his. To her astonishment, she leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. She hadn’t done that with a man since well before her husband died. His arms went around her, and he kissed her, too. She enjoyed it. That hadn’t happened since well before her husband died, either.

  “Some good out of Bill Reach after all,” she murmured to herself.

  Hal Jacobs stiffened. “Out of who?” he barked, his voice too loud, his mouth too near her ear. She explained, sure he’d misheard. He sagged away from her, his face pale as whitewash. “I wondered what was wrong,” he gasped. “Hadn’t heard from him in too long. Bill runs—ran, maybe—our whole organization here. And he’s caught? Good God!”

  “Good God!” Nellie said, too, for very different reasons. All at once, she wondered if she was backing the wrong side.

  “Not much further now,” Lucien Galtier told his horse as he rode up the fine American-paved road toward Rivière-du-Loup. In the back of the wagon, several hens clucked, but they were not a true part of the conversation. He and the horse had been discussing things for years. The hens’ role, though they did not realize it, was strictly temporary.

  Off to the east, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, a steam whistle shouted as a train hurried up toward the town. “Tabernac,” Galtier muttered under his breath: a Quebecois curse. The soldiers on the train, no doubt, would cross the St. Lawrence and then try to push on toward Quebec City. The Americans, worse luck, were making progress, too, for the artillery from the north bank of the river sounded farther off than it had when the campaign was new. The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French Revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.

  The whistle screamed again. The horse twitched his ears in annoyance. The chickens squawked and fluttered in their cages. No, they were not suited for serious talk—too flighty.

  Cannon by the riverbank started going off—wham, wham, wham! The horse snorted. The chickens went crazy. Lucien Galtier raised a dark eyebrow. “Those are quick-firing guns,” he told the horse, “the kind they use when trying to shoot down an aeroplane. And so—”

  Through the cannons’ roar, he picked up a rapidly swelling buzz. Then he spotted the winged shapes. Before the war, he had never seen an aeroplane. Here, now, were two at once, flying hardly higher than the treetops. They both carried blue-white-red roundels on their wings and flanks. The red was in the shape of a maple leaf.

  “There, what did I yell you?” Lucien said to the horse. “And not just any aeroplanes, but Canadian aeroplanes.” He reined in to watch.

  In front of the pilots, machine guns hammered. He wondered how the men managed to fire through the propellers without shooting themselves down. However they did it, they shot up the troop train, spun in the air like circus acrobats, and then shot it up again. Then, still low, they streaked back toward the free side of the St. Lawrence.

  Galtier expected the train to streak toward Rivière-du-Loup. Instead, it came to a ragged halt. Maybe the aeroplanes had killed the engineer, and the brakeman was doing what he did best. Maybe they had filled the boiler with so many holes, it was either kill the pressure inside or explode.

  “It could even be—both,” Galtier said, not altogether unhappily.

  Soldiers started spilling out of the train. Some of them came running his way. He scowled and thought himself a fool for having stopped to watch the spectacle. But if he tried to leave now, those soldiers would not be pleased with him. And they had rifles.

  “Frenchie! Hey, Frenchie!” they shouted as they got closer. “Bring your wagon on over here. We got wounded.”

  “Mauvais tabernac,” Lucien snarled. No help for it, though. As he pulled the wagon off the road and bounced toward the track, he felt a curious mixture of joy at having the enemies of his country wounded and sor
row at having young men who had never personally done him wrong wounded.

  The chickens did not approve of the rough ride he was giving them. “Be still, you fools,” he told them, for the first time including them in his…He groped for a word. In my salon, he thought, pleased with himself. “This will keep you alive a little longer.”

  Ahead, soldiers in green-gray were sometimes helping out of the train, sometimes carrying from it other soldiers in green-gray extravagantly splashed with red. “How many can you hold?” a captain called to Lucien as he drew near. “Four, maybe five?”

  “Yes, it could be,” the farmer had replied. Exposure had improved his English—to a point. When he turned to indicate the chickens and their cages in the wagon bed, he was reduced to a helpless wave and a single word: “But—”

  “Here.” The American captain dug in a trouser pocket and tossed something to Galtier, who automatically caught it. “That ought to cover them.” He looked down to see what he had: a twenty-dollar U.S. goldpiece.

  He took off his hat in salute. “Oui, monsieur. Merci, monsieur.” The American could simply have had the chickens thrown out onto the ground. He’d expected the Boche americain to do just that. Instead, the fellow had given him more than a fair price for them. Lucien jumped down and piled the cages in a wobbly pyramid, then hurried to help the Americans land their comrades in the space thus vacated. A service for a service, he thought.

  “Here, pal,” an unwounded U.S. soldier said. “Careful with Herb here. He’s a damn good fellow, Herb is.” As gently as he could, Lucien arranged the damn good fellow so he could sit against the side of the wagon. Herb had a rough bandage, rapidly soaking through with blood, on his right leg. He also had a streak of blood running down his chin from one corner of his mouth; he must have bitten through his lip against the pain.