“I don’t know what’s so impressive about it,” Nellie said with a sniff. “I saw him sitting right where you are when he was too drunk to know who I was even though he’d . . . known me before.” She didn’t want to put that pause there, but couldn’t help herself. “You can’t make me believe that was good for what he was doing.”
“But information from Washington kept right on getting to Philadelphia even so,” the professor said.
“Yes, and it kept right on getting to Philadelphia even when your precious Bill Reach spent time in jail on account of he stole something or other, or at least the Confederates thought he did,” Nellie said.
Ferguson scribbled furiously. “That’s fascinating,” he said. “It’s something else I hadn’t heard of, too. I wonder if Confederate records survive to confirm your statement. Hard to guess; much was destroyed in the bombardment, and Reach also might have used an alias with them. But it’s another avenue to explore. How do you suppose the ring continued to function with Reach in custody?”
“I’ll tell you how—through my Hal, that’s how,” Nellie answered proudly. “You know TR gave him a Distinguished Service Cross, I expect. He didn’t win that for playing tiddlywinks.”
“I’m sure he didn’t,” Ferguson said. “I wish he were alive today so I could ask him about this entire important period.”
“I wish he was alive today because I loved him and I miss him.” When she first said she’d marry Hal, there at the end of the Great War, she hadn’t dreamt how true that would be. What occasionally passed in their bedroom had next to nothing to do with it—with the large exception of causing Clara, who was the biggest surprise (and one of the most pleasant) Nellie had ever got. What made it true was that Hal had been a good man, and even Nellie, who had no use for the male half of the human race, couldn’t possibly have had a different opinion.
“I’m sorry,” the professor said. He was just being polite, though; Nellie could tell. He asked, “Is there anyone else who could possibly shed light on the way William Reach met his end in 1917, if that is what happened to him?”
“I can’t think of anybody else,” Nellie answered, which, again, was nothing but the truth. No one had been anywhere close by when Reach tried to rape her and she killed him.
But Professor Ferguson had ideas of his own. “What about your daughter, Edna”—flip, flip, flip went the notebook pages—“Semphroch?”
Even with his fancy research, he still got things wrong. “She’s been Edna Grimes for a long time now,” Nellie said, “and I guarantee she doesn’t know anything about that.” She did know about Nellie’s scandalous background, though. Would she tell some professor what she knew? Nellie didn’t think so, but wasn’t a hundred percent sure. Edna had a mean streak in her that came out now and again.
“Didn’t she receive a”—flip, flip, flip—“an Order of Remembrance, Second Class, at the same time as you were given your decoration?” Ferguson asked. “How can she be ignorant with that background?”
Nellie laughed in his face. “Easy as pie, that’s how. She worked here with me, and sometimes I’d pass on things she told me, things she heard and I didn’t. That’s what she got her medal for. She would’ve married a Confederate officer, you know, if an artillery bombardment hadn’t killed him on the way to the altar.”
“Oh.” Ferguson sounded faintly disappointed—and more than faintly revolted. He was old enough to have fought in the Great War. Like most men who were, he had no love for the Confederate States. He also seemed to have little understanding for what the people of Washington, who’d lived under Confederate occupation for more than two years, had gone through during that time. Nellie wasn’t surprised. Few who hadn’t lived here then did understand.
“You see?” Any which way, Nellie didn’t want Ferguson talking to Edna. “Nobody knows nothing about Bill Reach.”
Maynard Ferguson sighed. “I suppose not. I hope you realize how frustrating this is for me.”
“I’m sorry,” said Nellie, who was anything but. “Nothing I can do about it, though.” Nothing I will do about it, anyway.
The professor left the coffeehouse, head down, shoulders slumped. Nellie put his cup in the sink. She’d never dreamt anybody would come poking after Bill Reach. But it didn’t matter. In the end, it truly didn’t. Only she knew the answer—only she knew, literally enough, where the body was buried—and she wasn’t talking. Not now, not ever.
An aeroplane buzzed over the Charles XI as the French liner approached the Confederate coast. Anne Colleton glanced up at the machine, which roared past low enough for her to make out the words CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY painted on the fuselage in big, bright orange letters. The lines of the aeroplane suggested falcon much more than grouse. She wondered why a citrus company needed such a swift, deadly-looking aircraft.
Beside her, Colonel Jean-Henri Jusserand watched the aeroplane speed back toward the Virginia coast. The Frenchman said, “I suspect it would not be too very difficult to fit this aeroplane with weapons. Would you not agree, Mademoiselle Colleton?”
“I would agree that am I an idiot,” Anne replied, also in French. “I should have seen that for myself.” She kicked at the decking, angry at missing something so obvious.
“But—” Colonel Jusserand stopped, just in time. Anne sent him a sour look. He’d been about to say something like, But you are only a woman, Mademoiselle Colleton, so how could you be expected to notice such a thing? Then, fortunately, he’d remembered Anne had spent the last two years in Paris, dickering with some of the more prominent people in Action Française—not always the people with fancy titles, but those who could promise results and mean it.
With wry amusement, Anne thought, But you are only a boy, Colonel Jusserand, so how could you be expected to know anything? Jusserand was in his mid-thirties, as young as he could be and still have fought in the Great War. He paid attention to Anne as a negotiator, but never once to her as a woman. She had fifteen years on him, give or take a couple. Most of the officers with whom she’d dealt were close contemporaries of the boyish colonel. Action Française had, so far, done a better job of pruning deadwood from the French Army than the Freedom Party had of purging the Confederate Army.
The Charles XI pressed on toward Norfolk. More aeroplanes buzzed by to examine the liner. All of them said CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY. They shared the same sleek, dangerous look.
Colonel Jusserand asked, “Will there be an open display of these machines at the Olympic Games?”
“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I’m a stranger here myself.” That held more truth than she felt comfortable admitting. She’d enjoyed her two years in France. She thought she’d helped her country while she was there. But, with Virginia in sight once more, she had to remember what she’d worked so hard to forget: that her time out of the CSA had also been an exile of sorts.
July in Norfolk brought memory flooding back. Though she was close to two hundred miles north of St. Matthews, the heat and humidity reminded her all too much of home. She’d never known weather like this in Paris. She wouldn’t have been sorry not to renew acquaintance, either.
When the customs men saw her passport and Colonel Jusserand’s, they very quickly became very respectful. “You’re on our list, sir, ma’am,” one of them said, touching the brim of his cap. He wore a snappier uniform than he would have when she left the Confederate States, one that made him look like a soldier rather than a functionary. “Our good list, I mean—we’ve got train tickets to Richmond waiting for both of you, and we’ll get you to the station fast as we can.”
He kept his promise, too. Anne wondered what sort of treatment she would have got had her name been on a different sort of list. She was just as glad not to have to find out.
Sweating in his brown wool uniform, Colonel Jusserand let out a sigh of relief when their railroad car proved air-conditioned. Anne found herself less delighted; too cold seemed as unpleasant as too hot. But she could add clothes for more warmth. She couldn�
��t take them off outside, not if she wanted to stay decent.
With a cloud of coal smoke erupting from the stack, the locomotive began to roll. Jusserand stared at the countryside, which he was seeing for the first time. “How very many tractors and other farm machines there are,” he remarked.
Anne nodded. “More than I remember seeing before I went to France,” she said. “A lot more, as a matter of fact. Then there would have been nothing but sharecroppers working the land.” Sharecroppers had come out in English. She thought for a moment before coming up with a French equivalent: “Tenant farmers.”
“With so many machines, who needs men?” Colonel Jusserand said. “Where do you suppose the tenant farmers have gone?”
That was a good question. Anne answered it with no more than a shrug, for she didn’t know, either. She did know most of the displaced sharecroppers were colored. Was it like this all over the CSA, or just in this stretch of Virginia? She couldn’t guess. If this went on nationwide, what would the Confederacy do with all the displaced Negroes? One more question she couldn’t answer. But, remembering what Negroes had done to the Marshlands plantation, remembering what they’d almost done to her, she hoped they got everything they deserved.
Night was falling when the train pulled into Richmond from the south. As soon as Anne descended to the platform, someone called her name. All she had to do was answer. As before, uniformed men whisked her and Colonel Jusserand away. She barely had time to note how many people in the station spoke with Yankee accents—men and women down from the USA to see the Olympic Games—before she and the Frenchman were in a motorcar bound for the Gray House.
No waiting in the waiting room this time, either. Jake Featherston saw them right away. “Congratulations,” he told Anne. “I’ve read every report you sent. You did a first-rate job over there. First-rate, I tell you.” He stuck out his hand and gave Colonel Jusserand a big, friendly smile. “And I’m damned pleased to meet you, Colonel. Action Française”—he didn’t butcher the French too badly—“is doing the same thing for your country that the Freedom Party is for this one.”
“Yes, I think so, too.” Jusserand spoke good English, though Anne’s French was even better. “Revenge is a sweet word, is it not?”
He couldn’t have said anything better calculated to hit the Confederate president where he lived. “Oh, yes,” Featherston said softly. “Oh, yes, indeed. None sweeter. So we will be able to count on France when the day comes?”
“That depends,” Jusserand answered. “Can we count on the CSA if we first find that day?”
Here was something Anne hadn’t seen before: someone hustling Jake Featherston. “Like you said, that depends.” The president spoke carefully. “You start a fight with the Germans tomorrow afternoon, we’ll have to sit out—we aren’t ready yet. You give us the chance to get ready, we’ll back you all the way.”
In Paris, Anne and the Frenchmen with whom she’d dealt had gone round and round over that. The Kaiser’s government watched the French as carefully as the United States watched the Confederate States, maybe more carefully. Colonel Jusserand thought so. He said, “You have the advantage over us. You are a large country, with more room to hide what you do not want your neighbors to see. With us, les Boches could be anywhere at any time.”
“Since we’ve been good little boys, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Featherston answered. Even his grin didn’t make those long, bony features handsome. But a smiling Jake Featherston made handsomer men seem insipid. Anne had thought so since the first time she met him, back in the days when she thought she could control him. She wasn’t wrong very often. When she was, she wasn’t wrong in a small way.
“How fortunate you are to have these Olympic Games,” Jusserand murmured. “You show your own people and the world the Confederate States are once more a nation to be reckoned with.”
“That’s right. That’s just exactly right,” Featherston said. “You’re a pretty sharp fellow, aren’t you, Colonel?” The French officer did his best to look modest. His best, as Anne had seen, was unconvincing.
She asked, “How serious are the Negro uprisings, Mr. President? Some of the stories I heard in Paris played them down. The others made it sound as bad as 1915.”
“That’s crap. It’s nothing like 1915—nothing, you hear?” Featherston’s voice was hard and cold. “More than a nuisance, less than real trouble, you know what I mean? Bad enough so the USA couldn’t say no when we asked to beef up the Army a bit—and we may beef it up a bit more than the damn-yankees know about.”
He sounds . . . pleased the blacks are trying to hit back, Anne realized. He expected them to, and he was ready to take advantage of it. She eyed the Confederate president with respect no less genuine for being reluctant. He always seemed to see a move or two further than anybody else.
Featherston went on, “But the hell with that for now.” Colonel Jusserand looked shocked; he’d never have sworn in front of a woman. Featherston said, “You’re here in Richmond when we’ve got the Olympics. You want to enjoy yourselves, right? Here.” He scribbled on a couple of sheets of paper from a pad on his desk, then handed one to Anne, the other to the Frenchman. “Passes to whatever you want to see. Go on over to the ticket bureau and exchange ’em. Anybody gives you a hard time about it, let me know. I’ll make the son of a bitch pay.”
No one gave Anne anything close to a hard time. She found that instructive; people in the CSA took Featherston’s orders seriously—or at least they’d learned they would be sorry if they didn’t. Anne rode a bus to the enormous Olympic stadium on the northern outskirts of town. It hadn’t existed when she’d left the country two years earlier. Now the great bowl of marble and concrete, Confederate and Party flags aflutter all around the rim, dominated the skyline in that part of Richmond. Other Olympic buildings and the village where the athletes lived surrounded the stadium.
In the stands near her, Anne heard American accents from both CSA and USA, clipped British tones, Irish brogues, and people speaking French, German, Spanish, Italian, and several languages she didn’t recognize. For that matter, she had trouble following some of the French she heard. When the couple with the odd accent cheered the athletes from the Republic of Quebec, she understood why.
Black men from Haiti and Liberia competed along with everyone else. When a Haitian sprinter won a bronze medal, Jake Featherston looked as if he’d swallowed a big swig of lemon juice. In France, Anne had heard he’d had to accept the Negroes’ participation on equal terms, like it or not: otherwise the Games would have gone elsewhere. She wondered how furious Featherston was, and whether he could extract any sort of revenge on the International Olympic Committee.
But that was a question only a handful of insiders would know about. To most citizens of the Confederate States, to most of the swarms of visitors from abroad, all that mattered was whether the Olympics came off well. By that standard, Featherston and the CSA were doing fine.
A Confederate runner narrowly beat a man from the USA in the 800-meter run. The crowd went wild. Anne clapped and yelled as loud as anyone else. She would never be behindhand in cheering for Confederate victories over the damnyankees. She wished there were more of them, and on fields different from the track. One of these days, she thought. Maybe one of these days before too long.
With a grunt, Clarence Potter rose from the seat he’d been occupying for what seemed like forever. He hadn’t wanted to pay for a Pullman berth from Charleston up to the Confederate capital. Now he was paying in a different way: with a sore back, and with eyes gritty from lack of sleep. His seat had reclined, but not far enough. He’d managed to doze a bit on the way north, but he hadn’t got nearly enough rest.
As he stood and grabbed his carpetbag from the rack above his head, the weight of the pistol in the shoulder holster reminded him of the weapon’s presence. He wondered if Freedom Party goons would be waiting for him when he got off the train. If they were, they’d be sorry.
But no one tr
oubled him on the platform or in the station. He hurried through the cavernous building, and got to the cab stand outside ahead of most of the other passengers, who’d had to go to the baggage car to retrieve their suitcases.
“Where to, pal?” asked the driver of the frontmost cab when Potter got in. The fellow added, “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Potter echoed, hating the word. He felt the weight of the pistol again. “Ford’s Hotel, across from Capitol Square.”
“Right you are.” The cabby put his auto—a middle-aged Ford imported from the USA—into gear, waiting for an opening in the traffic. “You here for the Olympics?”
“That’s right.” Among other things, Clarence Potter thought. “I know they started a couple of days ago, but I couldn’t get away from work till now. These days, you hold on tight to a job if you’ve got one.” He’d had more flexibility than he let on, but the driver didn’t need to know that.
The fellow nodded. “Ain’t it the truth?” he said. “Even this lousy job—I couldn’t very well leave, could I? Not if I want my kids to eat, I couldn’t. Business was crummy till the Games started, too—you’d best believe that.”
“Oh, I do,” Potter said solemnly. “Times aren’t easy anywhere.”
“Yeah.” The driver pulled away from the curb. Behind him, the next cab moved up to wait for a passenger.
Richmond had changed since Potter last saw it. Of course, that had been during the dark days at the end of the Great War, when U.S. bombers were methodically knocking the Confederate capital flat. Now it seemed so fresh and clean, someone might have rubbed the buildings and even the sidewalks with soap and water. And maybe someone had, to give visitors the impression Jake Featherston wanted them to have. Potter wouldn’t have been surprised.
Freedom Party stalwarts stood on every other corner. They weren’t wearing their usual bludgeons, and were giving strangers directions. How long would they stay on their best behavior? Till the Olympics were over, no doubt, and not a minute longer.
The Victorious Opposition Page 21