In at the Death

by Harry Turtledove

  And then he forgot about it. He went back to being a busy Army doctor, because an auto bomb killed several U.S. soldiers and wounded two dozen more. He hated auto bombs. They were a coward’s weapons. You could be—and, if you had any brains, you were—miles away when your little toy went off. And you could laugh at what it did to the people you didn’t like.

  Digging jagged chunks of metal out of one soldier after another, O’Doull wasn’t laughing. He didn’t think the locals would be laughing very long, either, even though they probably were right now. “How many hostages will the authorities take after something like this?” he asked.

  “Beats me,” Goodson Lord answered. “But they’ll shoot every damn one of ’em. You can bet your last nickel on that.”

  “I know. And that will make some diehard mad enough to build another bomb, and then it just starts up again. Ain’t we got fun?” O’Doull said.

  “Fun. Yeah,” Lord said. “How’s this guy doing?”

  “We would have lost him in the last war—this kind of belly wound, peritonitis and septicemia would have got him for sure. But with the antibiotics, I think he’ll pull through. His colon’s more like a semicolon now, but you can live with that.”

  “Ouch!” Lord said. The pun seemed to distress him more than the bloody work he was assisting with. He’d done the work lots of times. The pun was a fresh displeasure. O’Doull had pulled it on Granny McDougald before, but not on him. I’m getting old, he thought. I’m using the same jokes over and over.

  After he’d repaired as best he could the wounded who were brought to him, he took a big slug of medicinal brandy, and poured another for Goodson Lord. He wouldn’t have done that during the fighting. No telling then when more casualties were coming in, and he’d wanted to keep his judgment as sharp as he could. Now he could hope he wouldn’t have anything more complicated than another dose of clap to worry about for a while.

  He lit a cigarette. It was a Niagara, a U.S. brand, and tasted lousy. But the C.S. tobacco firms were out of business—for the moment, anyway. Bad smokes beat no smokes at all.

  Puffing on a Niagara made him think of heading north again, out of the USA and back to the country he’d adopted. Living in the Republic of Quebec meant returning to a backwater. Things happened more slowly there. Movies got to Rivière-du-Loup months, sometimes years, after they were hits in the United States. Most of them were dubbed into French; a few had subtitles.

  O’Doull’s English would have got even rustier than it had if not for the need to read medical journals and try to keep up with the miracles happening in the USA—and the miracles the USA imported from Germany. Back before the United States fostered Quebecois independence, Canada tried ramming English down the locals’ throats. Older people still remembered the language, but not fondly. Younger ones wanted nothing to do with it.

  He could live with that if he had to. He had lived with it, for years. You took the bad with the good wherever you went. By now, his college French had picked up enough of the local accent to let people who didn’t know him think he was born in La Belle Province himself. Of course, not many people in Rivière-du-Loup didn’t know him. As far as he was concerned, that was part of the good.

  “Penny for ’em,” Sergeant Lord said.

  “Thinking about going home again,” O’Doull answered.

  “Figured you were,” Lord said. “You’re right here, but your eyes were a million miles away.”

  “Better than the thousand-yard stare the poor mudfoots get when they’ve been through the mill,” O’Doull said. Lord nodded. They both knew that look too well.

  O’Doull stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. He’d done something useful today, anyhow. If Colonel Tobin had sent him home, it would have been up to Goodson Lord. The guy with the shrapnel might have died then. Granny McDougald could have pulled him through, but O’Doull didn’t think Lord was up to it.

  But if the Confederates kept a rebellion smoldering for years, was that reason enough for him to stay down here till it finally got stamped out, if it ever did? He shook his head. He’d paid all the dues he felt like paying—more than he’d had to pay. He wasn’t so goddamn young any more. He’d had that thought not long before, too. He wanted the rest of his life for himself.

  Whether the U.S. Army or the authorities in the Republic wanted him to have it might be a different question. Well, he’d done what he could along those lines. Off in the distance, a train whistle blew. He smiled. If all else failed, he could hop a freight. What did the the soldiers say when you came out with something stupid? And then you wake up—that was it.

  Doctor Deserts! Heads for Home in Spite of Orders! He saw the headlines in his mind’s eye. Yes, it would be a scandal. It would if they caught him, anyhow. If they didn’t, he was home free. The Republic wouldn’t extradite him—he was sure of that.

  Stop it, he told himself. You’ll talk yourself into it, and then you’ll really be up the creek.

  Seventeen days after he wrote his letter, one with a Quebecois stamp came back. He opened the envelope with a strange mix of apprehension and anticipation. If they said no…But if they said yes…!

  And they did! In stilted English, a bureaucrat in Quebec City proclaimed that he was a valuable medical resource, and vitally needed to serve the populace of Rivière-du-Loup. He grinned from ear to ear. He’d been called a lot of things before, but never valuable, let alone a medical resource. He hurried off to show Colonel Tobin the letter.

  Jonathan Moss didn’t like Houston. It was even hotter and muggier than Georgia and Alabama, and that was saying something. New Orleans was supposed to be just as bad, or maybe worse, but you could have a good time in New Orleans. If you could have a good time in Houston, Moss hadn’t found out how.

  Defending a man he loathed sure didn’t help. Defending a man who might be the biggest murderer in the history of the world made things worse. And defending a man who might be the biggest murderer in the history of the world and didn’t seem the least bit sorry about it, who seemed proud of what he’d done, made things much worse.

  Defending Canadians who’d fallen afoul of occupation authorities was worth doing. This, on the other hand…Moss wished Major Isidore Goldstein hadn’t smashed his stupid motorcar and himself. Then he would be going through the torments of the damned right now. Moss would rather have been flying turbo fighters, even though there was no one to fly them against any more. Would he rather have been sitting on the shelf? Sometimes he thought yes, sometimes no.

  Pinkard’s trial, and that of guard chief Vern Green, and those of several other guards from Camp Humble and its predecessor farther west, went on in what had been the Confederate District Courthouse in Houston. The exterior was modeled after the Parthenon: all elegant columns. But it was built from cheap concrete, not marble, and it was starting to crumble in Houston’s savage weather.

  Filling in for Confederate judges were U.S. Army officers. They’d shot down Moss’ arguments for getting Jefferson Pinkard off the hook one after another. No, he couldn’t claim Pinkard was only acting on orders from Richmond.

  “The charge is crimes against humanity,” said the chief judge, a craggy brigadier general named Lloyd Meusel. “The defendant is assumed to have been aware that, regardless of orders, it is illegal and criminal to have murdered innocent people in literally carload lots by various ingenious methods and then either burying them in mass graves or burning them so that their passing became a stench in the nostrils of mankind forever.”

  “Dammit, they weren’t all that innocent,” Pinkard said—he wouldn’t keep his mouth shut, which was something any defendant needed to know how to do. “Plenty of rebels—and they all hated the CSA.”

  And, of course, that gave the military prosecutor, a bright young major named Barry Goodman, the chance to pounce. He grabbed it. “May it please the court,” he said, “how many of the Negroes who passed through these extermination camps were tried and convicted of any crime, even spitting on the sidewalk? Is i
t not a fact that the only thing they were guilty of was being colored, and that this became a capital crime in the Confederate States?”

  General Meusel leaned over backwards to be fair. “Well, Major, we are here to determine whether that is a fact. We can’t assume it ahead of time.”

  “Yes, sir,” Goodman replied. “I will endeavor to demonstrate and document its truthfulness. I believe I can do that.”

  Jonathan Moss believed he could, too. Moss had seen the photographs taken outside of Snyder, and the documents captured from the meticulous files kept at Camp Humble. They offered overwhelming evidence of what the CSA had done. And Goodman put them into evidence, again and again.

  He had letters where the gasketing of trucks was said to be tightened up “to improve their asphyxiating efficiency.” Jefferson Pinkard’s initials said he’d read and approved—and approved of—those letters. Goodman had other letters about the construction of the bathhouses at Camp Humble, and about the airtight doors that made sure Negroes didn’t escape from the “termination chambers.” He had letters to and from the people who provided the cyanide for the termination chambers. And he had a small mountain of letters complaining about the shoddy workmanship and design of the crematoria of Camp Humble.

  Just listening to those letters being read into evidence pissed Pinkard off. Jonathan Moss could tell. And it wasn’t because his client had written them. It was because Pinkard still wanted to slug the bastards who’d sold him a bill of goods about the body-burning ovens and their smokestacks.

  After court adjourned that day, Moss badly needed a drink. Soldiers in U.S. uniform were not welcomed with open arms in most of Houston’s watering holes. Out of consideration for that fact, the Army had set up an officers’ club and one for enlisted men in the courthouse basement. Moss hied himself thither for a snort.

  Barry Goodman was already down there, working on a double whiskey over ice. That looked so good, Moss ordered the same thing. “Every day when General Meusel turns us loose, I feel like I ought to go back to the barracks and take a bath,” he said.

  “Tell me about it!” the prosecutor exclaimed. “You’ve got it worse than I do, Counselor, because at least I’m on the side of the angels this time, but I am so sick of wading through this shit…”

  “You know what the worst part is?” Moss paused to drink so the whiskey would put a temporary shield between him and his current duty.

  “I’m all ears,” Goodman said.

  “Talk about wading through shit? We’ve barely got our feet wet. We ought to hang the Cyclone people—they knew what the cyanide was going for. We ought to hang the people who fixed up the trucks, and the people who made the bathhouses, and the engineers who designed the airtight doors, and the ones who designed the heavy-duty crematoria, even if they didn’t know what the hell they were doing—”

  “Did you see your client, Colonel? He still hates those people for botching the job,” Goodman broke in.

  “I know, I know,” Moss said wearily. “But you can’t put that into evidence, thank God.”

  “Like I need to,” Goodman said, which was nothing but the truth. He added, “Besides, d’you think the judges didn’t notice?”

  “They did.” Moss knocked back the drink and signaled for another. As the uniformed bartender made it, he went on, “And we need to hang the guys who built the crematoria, and the guys who installed them, and…Where does it end, Major? Does anybody down here have clean hands?”

  “Good question.” The prosecutor finished his drink. He also waved for a refill. “We can’t kill all of them, though. I don’t think we can, anyway. If we do, how are we better than they are?”

  “If we don’t, plenty of guilty bastards walk,” Moss said. “When I was in Alabama, occupation officials were already starting to slide around the ban on using Freedom Party personnel to run things. All the people with brains and energy were in the Party, they said. Those were the people who could get things done. So they used them, and they bragged about how things were coming back to life.”

  The bartender brought them their fresh drinks and took away the empty glasses. Goodman stared down into his whiskey as if hoping for answers there, not just surcease. He shook his head. “I don’t know what you can do. A lot of them are going to get off, and they’ll brag about what they did till they’re old and gray.”

  “Except when Yankees are around,” Moss said. “Then they’ll swear up and down that they didn’t know what was going on. Some prick will probably write a book that shows how they didn’t really massacre their Negroes after all.”

  “Oh, yeah? Then where’d the smokes go?” Goodman asked. “I mean, they were there before the war, and then they weren’t. So what happened?”

  “Well, we killed a bunch of ’em when we bombed Confederate cities.” Moss was a well-trained attorney; he could spin out an argument whether he believed in it or not. “Some died in the rebellion. Some went up to the USA. Some died of hunger and disease—there was a war on, you know. But a massacre? Nah. Never happened.”

  Barry Goodman’s mouth twisted. “That’s disgusting. That’d gag a maggot, damned if it wouldn’t.”

  “Bet your ass,” Moss said. “You think it won’t happen, though? Give it twenty years—thirty at the outside.”

  “Disgusting,” Goodman repeated. “Well, we’re gonna hang some people, anyway. Better believe we are. Maybe not enough, but some. And Pinkard’s one of ’em.”

  “I’ve got to do everything I can to stop you,” Moss said. “And I will.”

  “Sure.” Major Goodman didn’t despise him for playing on the other side, the way several military prosecutors up in Canada had. That was something, anyhow. “You have a job to do, too. But they aren’t just asking you to make bricks without straw. They’re asking you to make bricks without mud, for cryin’ out loud.”

  Since Moss knew exactly the same thing, he couldn’t very well argue. He just sighed. “I’d feel better about defending him if he thought he was a murderer, you know? If he felt bad about it, if he felt guilty about it, he’d be somebody I could give a damn about. I’d want to get him off the hook. It wouldn’t be just an assignment. But as far as he’s concerned, everything he did was strictly line of duty, and every one of the Negroes he got rid of had it coming.”

  “I know. I’ve seen the documents, and I’ve seen him in court. What he was doing, it was a job for him. He turned out to be good at it, so they kept promoting him.” Goodman shook his head. “And look where he ended up.”

  “Yeah. Look.” Moss looked at his glass. It was empty again. How did that happen? Two quick doubles were making his head spin, so that was how it happened. If he got another one…If he got another one, he’d stagger back to BOQ, and he’d need aspirins and coffee in the morning. His client deserved better than that. On the other hand, his client also deserved worse than that. He glanced over to Goodman. “I’ll have another one if you do.” That would even things up—and salve his conscience.

  The prosecutor laughed. “I was going to say the same thing to you. I need another one, by God.” They both waved to the barkeep. Stolidly, the enlisted man built two more doubles.

  Moss got about halfway down his before a really ugly thought surfaced. “What if we elected somebody because he wanted to get rid of all the people with green eyes in the country? Do you think he could find guys like Pinkard to do his dirty work for him?”

  Barry Goodman frowned. “It’d be harder,” he said slowly. “We haven’t hated people with green eyes since dirt, the way whites hate blacks in the CSA.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.” Moss conceded the point. Why not? They weren’t in court now. “All right—suppose we elected a guy who wanted to get rid of our Negroes, or our Jews. Could he get help?” Was Goodman Jewish? With a name like that, maybe yes, maybe no. His looks didn’t say for sure, either.

  Whatever he was, he answered, “I’d like to tell you no, but I bet he could. Too damn many people will do whatever the guy in charge tells ’em
to. They figure he knows what he’s doing, and they figure they’ll get in trouble if they don’t go along. So yeah, our Featherston could get his helpers. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

  “Christ, I wish I did,” Moss answered. “But the Turks did it to the Armenians way back when, and the Russians have been giving it to the Jews forever. So it’s not just the Confederates going off the deep end. They were more efficient about it than anybody else has been, but we could do that, too.”

  “Now we’ve got this big, ugly, bad example staring us in the face,” Goodman said. “Maybe it’ll make everybody too ashamed to do anything like it again. I sure want to think so, anyhow. It’d give me hope for the goddamn human race.”

  “I’ll drink to that. To the goddamn human race!” Moss raised his glass. Goodman clinked with him. They drank together.

  U.S. authorities in Hugo, Alabama, took their own sweet time about trying the Negro accused of raping a white woman there. They wanted to let things calm down. Armstrong Grimes approved of that. He’d managed to stave off one riot in front of the jail. He knew he might not be so lucky the second time around.

  He’d lost his enthusiasm for the uniform he wore. He’d gone through the whole war from start to finish. All right, fine. He’d seen the elephant. He’d got shot. He’d paid all the dues anybody needed to pay. As far as he was concerned, somebody else could come down and occupy the CSA.

  The government cared for his opinion as much as it usually did. It already had him down at the ass end of Alabama, and it would keep him here as long as it wanted to. If he didn’t like it, what could he do about it? Not much, not when his only friends for hundreds of miles were other U.S. soldiers in the same boat he was.

  So all right. He was stuck here. But he was damned if he’d give the U.S. Army a dime’s worth more than he had to. Sitting quiet and not stirring up the locals looked mighty good to him.