Freedom's Sons
Page 98
It was a bad week for everyone.
* * *
Over the border, Johnny Selkirk wasn’t having nearly as rough a time of it from his own family, but things were a bit tense. He wasn’t too worried about Danny’s immediate welfare, since in a small town like Boulder a family drama such as the Tollivers’ was meat and drink to the local gossips. This meant that enterprising vendors of informational services in Jefferson County picked up on it, which in turn meant that Civil Guard Lieutenant Bobby Campbell in Basin with his freshly replenished snitch fund of New American dollars knew almost as soon as Danny herself did that while she would remain grounded, she wasn’t headed for educational exile in Fargo. Bobby passed it on as a courtesy to John when they met one day in town, with a polite suggestion that he might want to let matters lie fallow for a while in the interest of not getting Danny into any more trouble. “You sneak over there and see her anyway, they might decide to re-assess that North Dakota option.”
“You cops giving advice to the lovelorn now, Lieutenant?” asked Johnny.
“All part of the service, citizen,” replied Campbell. “Seriously, it’s not in anybody’s interest for this to get out of hand. Her grandfather and maybe some others will probably pull down on you if they see you Over There, and somebody will get shot. That’s a call I don’t want to get from Sheriff Lomax on our little hotline. Add to that the fact that there’s some strangers over there in Boulder with hidden agendas who might want to stir up trouble in aid of whatever the hell they’re doing, which we haven’t figured out yet. Plus there’s the fact that if you really do like this girl, you could mess up her life real bad, John.”
“I know it,” Johnny replied with a sigh. “My dad and my grandfather have already given me stern talking-tos about my wicked and impolitic ways. For your information, Lieutenant, I think the wildest thing Danny and I ever did together was race my Pegasus in the stock car air show in Butte back in July. The way people talk, you’d think I’d descended on her farm with horse and foot, carried her off to my robber’s den and chained her in a dungeon or something.”
“Which would make her feel even worse, if trouble comes out of something genuinely innocent, when you two really haven’t been doing anything wrong,” replied Campbell soberly.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say innocent,” said Johnny, shaking his head. “Let’s just say open and aboveboard.”
John’s grandfather, former NVA Captain Ray Selkirk, put it to him even more directly after dinner that night, out on the porch of the Selkirk ranch house six miles or so west of Wickes. Selkirk, a thin and wiry white-haired man with a permanent scowl and a nicotine-stained moustache who looked like he’d been weaned on a pickle, came out onto the porch with a bottle of Jack Daniels in his hand; Johnny and Hatch always made sure to replenish his supply when they were on their contraband-smuggling trips. “Here, take a slug of this,” the old man ordered his grandson, handing him the bottle and lighting up one of his own long black cheroots. “You and me need to have a word or two or three, young man. You gonna marry that Tolliver girl?”
“Probably not,” replied Johnny, drinking from the bottle.
“What do you mean, probably not?” demanded his grandfather.
“Meaning I haven’t asked her yet, and even if I was so inclined, in order to ask her I’d have to be able to meet her and talk to her, and folks around here seem to have decided there’s something wrong with that!” replied John with exasperation. “Her grandfather is threatening to shoot me if he sees me anywhere near her, or as near as I can figure if he sees me anywhere Over The Road. Ben Lomax is threatening to arrest me for traffic violations if I go Over There, that Guard lieutenant in Basin is giving me friendly advice not to try to see her which might not be so friendly next time, if it threatens to cause him bother, and you and Dad keep trying to ship me off to college. By the by, Danny’s family is threatening to send her off to school too, in North Dakota.”
“Do you want to marry her?” demanded Ray.
“I think I might, yeah,” Johnny sighed. “If we could ever just spend some time together and concentrate on seeing if there’s anything there, and not have to worry about who’s gone see us, and whether there’s gone be any political repercussions because of the fact that there’s this strip of asphalt running through the ten miles between us.”
“It’s more than just a strip of asphalt, boy.”
“Yes sir, I know, and I meant no disrespect,” said Johnny. “But the Republic is supposed to be a Homeland for all white people, right? So why does that not include Danny Tolliver?”
“I understood what you meant,” said old man Ray, swigging from the bottle. “One of the reasons we went through all that hell back then was to simplify life. Make things black and white, right and wrong again. I think we succeeded to a large degree, but them damned exceptions and shades of gray just keep on creeping into life no matter what.”
“The Old Man used to say that shades of gray are where the Jew lies in wait to do harm,” Johnny reminded.
“Good, you paid attention in school. So why not go pay attention in Kennewick A & M for two years and come back with a degree you can use to run this place better, or join the Engineers instead of just being a rifleman on your reserve call-ups? Something you can use to get your second-class citizenship?”
“And you figure two years in Kennewick will be enough to make me forget about Danny, or make her forget about me?” asked John.
“I don’t know. Would it?” the old man asked.
“What have you got against her?” demanded Johnny. “She wasn’t the one who sent Carol and the children to Nevada, that was that old bastard Elwood Tolliver! She wasn’t even born when all that happened, and neither was I. Pop, you were a hero. I understand that, and I would never disparage what you and your men did for us all, any more than what Dad did in the Seven Weeks War. I just got out of the army myself, and if it happens again and needs to be done, I’ll go over to Boulder in my gear with my X-4, although I hope and pray that day never comes. But this thing between you and Elwood Tolliver was forty years ago, Pop. Not my war. It has to end sometime. Why not now, with me and Danny!”
“Does Danielle feel the same way?” asked Ray morosely. “Does she want to marry you?”
“I don’t know. Like I said, we’ve never really had the chance to sit down and talk calmly about it without somebody worrying at us or pressuring us.”
“To answer your question, boy, I haven’t got anything against her personally, although in view of who she’s grown up around and that tub-thumping hoot-and-holler religion her family are into, I’m not expecting to be impressed.”
“Not all Christians worship Jews,” said Johnny.
“Well, we won’t get into that,” said the old man. “But there is one thing I want to make crystal clear to you. When you are with her, you damned well will remember who you are and who you represent, not just in the eyes of Danielle’s family but in the eyes of everybody on the eastern side of that highway! You will treat that girl with the respect, courtesy, and gallantry that marks a real man. If you want her, then you stand up by her side and take her as your wife, like a real man does. If not, then you break it off clean and go find yourself a Northwest girl, or let your mom and dad or a matchmaker find one for you. You do not just play with her for a while and dump her. Elwood Tolliver’s girl or not, Union or not, she is a white girl, and you were raised better than that. There’s most likely going to be trouble over this, and when it comes I will not have it said that it happened because a grandson of mine comported himself in the manner of a nigger!”
“Don’t worry, Pop, Danny’s religious and I respect her faith more than you seem to. We’ve already settled that the hot and heavy stuff is on hold. I won’t embarrass you,” replied Johnny in a surly voice.
“That’s not what I’m worried about,” said the old man. “I’m worried that Elwood Tolliver may carry out his threat to kill you, and I’m going to have to go in there to that living room
and tell your mother and your father that their son is dead, because forty years ago I started a job I didn’t finish.”
“Why didn’t you?” asked Johnny. “Finish the job, I mean? Why did you just kneecap Tolliver?”
“Long story,” said Ray.
* * *
On the afternoon of September the fifth, Ms. Gabrielle Martine of the Economic Recovery Administration decided that she was bored, so she would go visiting. She decided to visit Lieutenant Robert Campbell the Third in the Civil Guard Station in Basin, just drop in and say hello to the man she had come to view as her opposite number.
Why she decided to do this was difficult for anyone to understand. It might have been described as hubris in a white person, but in a black it was not so complex as that: simple, childish stubbornness which demanded that Gabi do something she had been told not to do, precisely because she had been told not to do it, by white people. Repeatedly told, in fact. The big mystery was why she never understood that she would almost certainly be shot on sight the moment she set foot anywhere on the western side of Interstate 15. “I thought all American kids were taught in school that the Northmen are marauding ghouls who eat little black babies for breakfast?” commented Monty Sanderson later, when he heard what happened. “Hell, they probably would, too, if there were any little black babies Over There to eat. What in God’s name was she thinking of?”
The subject had resurfaced on numerous occasions since the meeting where Gabi had first brought it up. Virtually everyone around her had attempted to explain, with varying degrees of politically correct circumlocution, that what she proposed to do was impossible, not to say insane. Brandon Blackwell told her, “In the first place, Gabrielle, I have to remind you that it is illegal for a United States citizen to enter the Northwest Republic under any circumstances without a travel permit. It has been illegal for forty years, and even today is still a serious offense that could have adverse effects on your career. To take even so much as a step towards that highway, you have to get authorization from the Office of Northwest Recovery or the Justice Department.” (Thus the American government stubbornly maintained four decades of pretense that the NAR was a criminal matter, and not a political issue, certainly not a foreign policy one.)
“So I’ll get a permit,” said Gabi brightly. “You can take care of that for me, Brandon. Call Ayesha Jones at the ONR in Burlington, or if you can’t get hold of Ayesha see if you can track down Julie Chan, I think she’ll be in D.C. for the formal opening of Congress before she flies back to Burlington.”
“If you insist, ma’am,” said Blackwell, with a formal show of resignation. He then disregarded Gabi’s command to try and obtain a permit, hoping her short attention span would kick in and she would forget about it. She didn’t. For two days she pestered him on the subject of the permit, until Blackwell changed tack and did, in fact, submit a formal request on her behalf to the Office of Northwest Recovery for a Northwest Exclusion Zone Entry and Travel Permit. (When the United States bureaucracy absolutely had to refer to the NAR in any formal way, it was either as “the racist entity” or the “exclusion zone.”) Under “purpose of proposed visit” in the long form he had to fill out, he put “confer with Northwest police and military officers regarding future of region,” which he figured would cause all kinds of bells and whistles to go off back in Burlington. That comment alone should be enough to get her recalled to Burlington and himself along with her. Maybe even get her sent to a punishment posting in Mississippi, where she would be forced to live only among her own kind, with no white servants. That was fine with Brandon Blackwell, so long as he didn’t get transferred to the bizarre, all African-American “prosperity zone” in the deadly malarial Delta swamps along with her.
Gabi e-signed the application without a murmur and he duly sent it off, hoping that either the request would simply disappear into the bowels of the bureaucracy back in Burlington and no more would be heard of it, or else it would generate such consternation along the power corridors and in the cubbyholes of the ERA that even if Gabrielle weren’t relieved and ordered home, she would at least be called on the carpet and commanded to stop rattling cages Across The Road before she woke up the animals. Either way, it should have been an end to this Meet-The-Gestapo madness.
Instead, after another two days, Blackwell came into the conference room in the Boulder Hot Springs Inn and Spa, an elegant hotel dating back to 1881 when it had been a watering hole for newly-wealthy silver rush millionaires, where the team had set up their headquarters. On the teleprinter he found a hard copy of Gabrielle Martine’s duly signed and stamped travel permit into the Northwest Republic, good for six months and “multiple entries.” There was no cover letter or accompanying comment of any kind, no acknowledgement of the fact that due to Ms. Martine’s negritude there would be no multiple entries, only the first one, from which she would not return.
Blackwell was startled. It didn’t make sense to him, and like all bureaucrats, when confronted with something that didn’t make sense or looked dangerous, his first instinct was to kick the can on down the road and wash his hands of it. Knowing full well who was really in charge, he went to find FBI Agent Mona James. He found her in one of the rooms hunched over a computer going over something on the screen with the British officer, Colonel Malcolm Hart, while Agent Hornbuckle sat at the round table between the bed and the rumbling air conditioner, reading the Bible. The two of them turned off the computer and closed the cover as Blackwell entered the room. He did not know what they were doing together, nor did he care. He tossed the permit to Mona. “Agent James, you’re pretty well connected back in Burlington. Any idea who wants our boss dead?”
“Wait a minute, they approved it?” said Mona, stunned.
“As you see.”
“Who signed it?” asked Mona, holding up the paper and examining it. “Simonetta Toledano from the ONR. She’s an assistant director, so this comes from the top. She wouldn’t sign it without Director Goldblum’s okay.”
“The chaps at ONR are presumably aware of the Republic’s shoot-on-sight policy regarding dark pigmentation?” asked Hart. Like most real soldiers, he disdained the use of politically correct terminology.
“Of course,” replied Mona.
“Then Brandon is quite right,” replied the Colonel in his imperturbable Empire Club manner. “This has to be deliberate. Someone in Burlington wants Ms. Martine killed by Northmen, almost certainly in public when she tries to stretch out her hand in peace and good will, all that rot.”
“Why?” asked Hornbuckle from across the room.
“Who knows?” replied Blackwell with a shrug. “I can’t say I’m surprised. Nobody seems able to figure out why they sent a black woman on this assignment at all, other than to provoke the fascists into doing something violent.”
“They’re racists, not fascists,” said Mona absently, looking at the paper in her hand and trying to think. “Not necessarily the same thing.”
“Whatever,” said Brandon with a shrug. “Maybe she’s just a sacrificial lamb of some kind. Maybe she got inconvenient for somebody back in Burlington and they put this asinine constructive engagement idea in her head so she’d stick her head in the lion’s mouth and get it bitten off. Having the goots do it would give whoever it is plenty of plausible deniability.” He carefully avoided looking at Hart, since he wasn’t sure he understood why the Brit was along, either. “The question is, what do we do about it?” He looked pointedly at Mona.
“Uh, we don’t have any secret orders to whack Gabi, do we?” asked Agent Hornbuckle. He understood that any such orders would have been given to Mona and not to him.
“We do not,” said Mona firmly. “So far as I know, we really are here to protect her as well as assess the security and intelligence situation.”
“Maybe somebody in Burlington is setting us up as well,” said Hornbuckle with a frown. “A couple of FBI agents who die defending a woman of color from Nazi murderers would be great propaganda.”
“So what do we do?” asked Blackwell again.
“Can you hide this document somewhere she can’t get hold of it, until I can make some calls?” asked Mona.
“Sure, but she’s going to get an email notification as well,” replied Blackwell. “She may already know about it.”
“You’ve got her password, don’t you?” asked Mona. “Can’t you get into her account and delete it?”
“I can try,” said Blackwell. “Let me use that laptop.” He sat down and in about thirty seconds he was into Gabrielle Martine’s email folder. “Crap!” he exclaimed. “She’s already opened it! She’s probably heading for the office now to get the hard copy off the printer!”
“Okay, give it to her,” said Mona with a sigh. “Tell her you were on your way to find her, but don’t mention you stopped here first. We’ll have to stall her while I make those calls to Burlington. We need to think up some kind of make-work for her to occupy herself with for a couple of days while I try to find out what the hell is going on.”