American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (88 page)

  “Ah,
Señor
Rodriguez, you do ask interesting questions.” As always, Quinn was scrupulously polite. He treated the men who’d joined the Freedom Party as if they were dons. Most white men thought of Sonorans and Chihuahuans as nothing but greasers. If Quinn did, he kept it to himself. That was another reason his following grew and grew. He continued, “We cannot stop that, not altogether—not yet. But it does not matter so much here in Sonora, because fewer places here have electricity than is true in most of the Confederate States.”

  Carlos Ruiz clicked his tongue between his teeth. “That is not fair. That is not right.”

  “I agree with you,
Señor
Ruiz,” Quinn said. “It is one of the things the Freedom Party will fix once we have power. But, whether we like it or not, it is true, and we have to take it into account.” He paused and looked around the room. “Are there any more questions? No? All right, then. This meeting is adjourned.”

  Rodriguez was the first one to start out of the Freedom Party headquarters. From across the street, a shot rang out. Whoever held that gun didn’t really know what to do with it. The bullet cracked past Rodriguez’s head and thudded into the planking of the building behind him. Automatic reflex made him throw himself flat. Another bullet sang through the air where he’d stood a moment before. Glass shattered. Chunks rained down on him.

  He rolled back into the building. “Blow out the lamps!” he cried. The headquarters plunged into darkness.

  “Here.” Someone pressed a Tredegar into his hands. “If they want to play such games . . .” He crawled up to the shot-out window. One of the men who’d fired at him was running across the street, straight toward the headquarters, a lighted kerosene lantern in hand. That made the fellow an even easier target than he would have been otherwise. He wanted to fight fire with fire, did he? The rifle leaped to Rodriguez’s shoulder. He squeezed the trigger. The man with the lantern shrieked, whirled, and crumpled, clutching his belly. The lantern fell on his chest. Burning kerosene poured out and made him into a torch.

  Never shoot twice in a row from the same place unless the cover is very good—one more lesson Rodriguez had absorbed during the Great War. Staying low, he wriggled over to the other side of the window. Another Tredegar banged, this one at the back of Party headquarters. No cry of anguish from outside, but a triumphant yell from inside the building: Robert Quinn shouting, in English, “Take that, you fucking son of a bitch!” For good measure, he added,
“Chinga tu madre!”
  Bang! Bang! Bang!
 Somebody emptied a pistol into the headquarters as fast as he could shoot. Behind Rodriguez, a man yowled. At least one of those bullets had struck home. Rodriguez fired at the muzzle flashes. He worked the bolt, fired again, and then rolled away from that spot. He didn’t know whether he’d hit the enemy, but no more shooting came from that direction, so he hoped he had.

  Running feet in the street, these from the direction of the
alcalde’s
house. A sharp cry of
“Vámonos!”
came from behind Freedom Party headquarters. Rodriguez heard more running feet, these running away.

  Quinn’s Tredegar barked again. The Freedom Party leader whooped again, the high, shrill cry English-speaking Confederates called the Rebel yell.

 
  “Madre de Dios.”
 An officer of the
guardia civil
—a policeman, in other words—stared at the burning corpse in the middle of the street. He crossed himself, not bothering to take the heavy pistol from his hand first. Then, pulling himself together, he strode up to Freedom Party headquarters. In a loud voice, he demanded, “What happened here?”

  “I will handle this,” Robert Quinn declared. To the policeman, he said, “They tried to murder us. They tried to burn down our building and roast us inside of it. They wounded one of our men—I do not know how badly poor Carlos is hurt. All we did was defend ourselves.”

  “Some defense,” the officer muttered. “If you’d done any more defending, nothing would be left of Baroyeca. Come out here now, with your hands up, all of you.” He sounded nervous, as well he might have. If the Freedom Party men felt like fighting instead of obeying, the
alcalde
—the mayor—probably didn’t have enough force to make them follow orders.

  But Quinn said, “We are law-abiding citizens. The Freedom Party is the party of law and order. And I told you, we have a wounded man. We will come out.” In a low voice, he added, “Hip, stay behind and cover us in case this
pendejo
is not to be trusted.”

 
“Sí, señor,”
 Rodriguez whispered. The other Freedom Party men strode past him and out into the street. Carlos Ruiz walked unsteadily, his right hand pressed tight to his left shoulder.

  A couple of more men from the
guardia civil
came up. They spoke with Quinn and the rest of the Freedom Party men in low voices, then led them away. Nobody made any move to shoot anyone, not now. Hipolito Rodriguez set down his Tredegar. As quietly as he could, he crawled to the back door and left. No one waited for him there—no one living, anyhow. Two bodies lay in the alley behind the headquarters. Magdalena wouldn’t be happy with him. He was happy just to be breathing. He expected he could deal with his wife. She argued much less than a bullet.

 
E
arly summer in Nashville made a good practice ground for hell. Of course, that was true through most of the Confederate States. Jake Featherston had brought the Freedom Party nominating convention to the capital of Tennessee for a couple of reasons. Moving it off the Atlantic coast reminded people the Party was a national outfit. And looking just a little north into stolen Kentucky reminded them what was at stake.

  Flash bulbs popped when Jake got off the train from Richmond. Purple and iridescent green spots danced before his eyes. Supporters on the platform shouted, “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Others called his name, again and again: “Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
!” The two cries merged and blended in his ears. Together, they felt sweeter than wine, stronger than whiskey. Despite those spots before his eyes, he waved to the crowd.

  Despite those shouts, his bodyguards formed up around him, protecting his flesh with their own. One bastard with a rifle had gunned down a Confederate president and sent the Freedom Party on a ten-year journey through hell. Another one now could wreck things again. If they put Willy Knight in the top spot instead of number two, could the Party win in November?
Probably,
 Jake thought.
This year, probably.

  But it wouldn’t be the same. He was sure of that. Willy Knight had a handsome face and handled himself pretty well on the stump. Jake . . . Jake had plans.

  Maybe, just maybe, Knight had plans, too. Maybe, just maybe, those plans involved a hero’s funeral for Jake Featherston. That was another reason the bodyguards in their almost-Confederate uniforms didn’t leave an assassin a clear shot.

  “What will you do if you’re elected, Mr. Featherston?” a reporter shouted through the din.

  “Put this country back on its feet,” Jake answered, as he had so many times before. “Settle accounts with everybody who’s done us wrong.”

  “Who would that be?” the eager beaver asked.

  “You know who. You know what we stand for. Traitors better run for the hills. Niggers better behave themselves. The Confederate States have been too soft for too long. We won’t be soft any more.”

  “Would you—?” The reporter never got to finish the question. The phalanx of guards, with Featherston at its core, pushed off the platform and through the station towards a waiting limousine. Freedom Party men and women waving Confederate and Party flags surrounded them, hands reaching between the bodyguards to touch Jake, if only for an instant. He shook some of them. When he squeezed one woman’s soft, plump fingers, she moaned as if she were coming right where she stood. He almost laughed out loud. He’d seen that before, and heard it, too.

  The limousine took him to the Heritage Hotel. The lobby was full of painted scenes of Confederate victory in the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War; a plaque said they came from the brush of Gilbert Gaul. There were no scenes from the Great War, perhaps because Gaul died in 1919, but more likely because there were no victories to record.

  The Hermitage Hotel had come through the war without much damage. Most of Nashville hadn’t been so lucky when Custer’s First Army seized it from the Confederate defenders in 1917. The Memorial Auditorium, across the street from the hotel, was a postwar building. What ever had stood there before wasn’t standing when the damnyankees grudgingly gave the land south of the Cumberland back to the CSA in exchange for the bit of Kentucky they hadn’t overrun. Jake reluctantly acknowledged that that was smart—with all of Kentucky in U.S. hands, no Confederate Senators and Representatives from the rump of the state could fulminate in Congress about how it needed to be redeemed.

  His suite looked out at the Memorial Auditorium. Confederate flags and Freedom Party banners flew above it. Inside, delegates would be going through the motions of a political convention. Going through the motions was all they’d be doing. Unlike Whig and Radical Liberal conventions, this one was sewn up tight as a drum.

 
And I know who did the sewing.
 Featherston peered into a mirror with a gilt frame of rococo extravagance. His lean, leathery features suddenly lit up in a grin. “Me,” he said aloud, and pointed at his own reflection.

  He’d just fixed himself a drink when someone knocked on the door. He had guards in the hallway. They wouldn’t let anyone dangerous past. He opened the door without hesitation. There stood Ferdinand Koenig, who’d come west from Richmond with him. “Come on in, Ferd,” he said.

  “Willy here yet?” Koenig asked as he stepped into the suite.

  Featherston shook his head. But then another door down the hall opened. Out stepped Knight, dapper in a gray pinstriped suit with sword-sharp lapels. He waved and walked down the hall toward the two longtime Freedom Party men. “Pat him down, boss?” one of the guards asked out of the side of his mouth.

  “No, it’s all right,” Jake whispered back. “Nothing to worry about.” The guard looked dubious. So did Koenig. They both played it Jake’s way, though.
Everybody plays it
my way from now on,
 he thought, and smiled.
Everybody.

  Maybe Willy Knight thought the smile was meant for him. He grinned back and stuck out his hand. Jake took it. The clasp turned into a quiet trial of strength. Knight was a little taller and a lot wider through the shoulders, but Featherston’s rawboned frame carried more muscle than it seemed to. When the two men let go, Knight was the one who opened and closed his hand several times to ease the pain and bring it back to life.

  “Come on in,” Jake said genially. “Have a drink.”

  “Don’t have to ask me twice.” In spite of the hand that was surely throbbing, Willy Knight managed another grin. “You barely have to ask me once.”

  They all went into Jake’s hotel room. He closed the door behind them. The guards looked even less happy. He still wasn’t worried. Knight wouldn’t plug him himself. That wouldn’t just take Jake off the ticket—it would take him off, too. He didn’t want that. He wanted to be number one, but he’d settle for number two.

  Jake made himself another drink. Ferdinand Koenig and Willy Knight fixed whiskeys for themselves, too. He raised his glass in salute first to Knight, then to Koenig. “Mr. Vice President,” he said. “Mr. Attorney General.”

  “Mr. President,” the other two men said together. All three drank.

  “It’s going our way,” Featherston said. “We’ve got what it takes, and the country finally knows it. What we have to do now is make sure the Rad Libs and especially the Whigs are whipped dogs long before November rolls around. I like what’s happening down in Sonora—somebody hits you in the cheek, hit him back so goddamn hard, you knock his head off.”

  Koenig chuckled. “That’s not quite what Jesus said.”

  “Yeah, and look what happened to him,” Jake answered.

  “Maybe we don’t want to come on
too
strong,” Willy Knight said. “We’ve spent the last ten years trying to live down that Grady Calkins son of a bitch.”

  “But now we’ve done it,” Featherston said. “I want people to know—they’ll be sorry if they even think about going the wrong way. We backed down ten years ago. We had to. We don’t have to any more.

  We’re going to win in November. You can take it to the bank. But even if we don’t, by God, we’re going into Richmond anyways.”

  Knight’s bright blue eyes widened. “That’s treason!” he said, and finished his drink with a gulp.

  “It’s only treason if you don’t bring it off,” Jake said calmly. “If we have to grab it, we’ll win. We’re getting things ready, all nice and quiet-like. Like I told you, I don’t reckon we’ll need it.”

  “We’d better not,” Willy Knight said, still jolted. “Christ, you’re talking civil war.”

  “Jeff Davis wasn’t afraid of it. We shouldn’t be, either,” Jake answered. “I keep telling you and telling you, this is just in case. You’ve got to cover everybody who can carry the ball, and that’s what I intend to do.”

  He almost hoped he would have to try to seize power by force. Storming the War Department would be as sweet as marching into Philadelphia would have been during the Great War.

  “Once we’re in, however we’re in, we’ll make everything legal,” Koenig said. “If you’re in, you make the rules, and that’s just what we’ll do.”

  Knight managed a sheepish smile, as if realizing he’d shown weakness. “You don’t think small, do you, Jake?”

  “Never have. Never will,” Featherston replied. “As long as you can imagine something, you can make it real. That’s what the Freedom Party’s all about. We know the Confederate States can be great again.