American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (95 page)

  “That does it,” Laura said, and got out of bed. “I don’t care what the books say. I don’t want the Boardmans hating us. I’m going to rock her.”

  “All right.” Moss didn’t want to argue. He wanted to go back to sleep. And he did, as soon as the screaming stopped.

  When the alarm went off a few hours later, Moss thought it was Dorothy crying again. “Turn it off, for Christ’s sake!” Laura snarled. Muzzily, he did. His wife started snoring again before he left the room. He made his own coffee in the kitchen, and scrambled some eggs to go with it. Then he put on his overcoat and went downstairs to see if the Bucephalus would start.

  It did. A new battery helped. As he piloted the auto to the office, he imagined he was piloting one of the fighting scouts he’d flown during the war. Aeroplanes were faster these days. One-deckers were replacing two-deckers—but then, he’d flown a one-decker, a U.S. copy of the German Fokker, through a long stretch of the war. He figured he could do it again if he ever had to.

  An old Ford ran a red light and shot across his path. That was moronic any time, and all the more so with snow on the ground, when stopping was as much a matter of luck as anything else. Fortunately for Moss and the other guy, the Bucephalus
did
stop. Even so, he wished its headlights were twin machine guns. Then he could have given the fool in the Ford just what he deserved.

  That was funny, in a way. He chuckled about it till he got to the office. But the world didn’t feel so comfortable as it had a couple of years before. The sputtering war with Japan was only one sign of that.

  With the
Action Française
in the saddle in France, with Charles XI on the throne there and sounding fiercer every day, with the Mosley thugs a noisy minority in the British Parliament, both the German Empire and the United States, he thought, had reason to worry.

  And with the Freedom Party set to take over the Confederate States, the USA had another reason to be anxious, one much closer to home. “Idiots,” Moss muttered, cautiously applying the brakes at another light. “How
could
they have voted for that crazy blowhard?” Actually, he knew how, or thought he did. The Confederates didn’t just want to put their own house in order. Like the French, they wanted revenge for what had happened to them during the Great War. Of course, the French had friends. Little by little, Russia was shaking off the trauma of the war and the endless Red uprising afterwards—an uprising that made the Red revolt in the CSA seem a walk in the park by comparison. And England wanted another crack at Kaiser Bill . . . and, no doubt, at the United States as well.

  A patrol of men wearing green-gray and carrying Springfields tramped past Moss’ building as he parked the Bucephalus. That reminded him he was in a land—not a country any more—that also despised his nation. His very shingle reminded him of the same thing. JONATHAN MOSS, it said. OCCUPATION LAW.

  He got out of the auto. He was laughing again as he went into the office, not that it was any too funny.

  Not a day went by when his marriage didn’t remind him he was in a land that despised his nation.

 
At least we’re occupying a place without all that many people
, he thought.
The Germans would
have needed to put half their men in France to keep an eye on all the frogs who hate them
. That was probably why they’d let the
Action Française
get off the ground: till too late, they hadn’t seen it as a real threat.
And now King Charles is talking about rearming. I’m sure the Kaiser loves that. But
would he start another war to stop it? He’s an old man now
.

  President-elect Featherston also made loud noises about rearming. Moss wished he hadn’t remembered that, not least since no one in the USA seemed much inclined to stop him.

  Moss turned the key in his door, turned on the lamp in his office, and turned the knob on the steam radiator to make the place feel as if it was at least a little south of the Arctic Circle. That done, he plugged in a hot plate and got a pot of coffee perking. It would be black, oily sludge by this afternoon.

  He knew that. He knew he’d go on drinking it anyway, too.

  A letter from a military prosecutor lay on his desk. He’d left it there when he went home the morning before. Major Lopat’s secretary had neatly typed,
We are not obligated to turn over this evidence to
you prior to its production in court. Rules of discovery applicable in
civilian cases do not apply
here, as you are doubtless perfectly well aware. If I can be of further assistance to you, do not
hesitate to call on me.
 Then Lopat had signed it—in red ink, for good measure.

  “Well, screw you, Sam,” Moss muttered. What the military prosecutor didn’t know was that he already had back-channels photostats of the documents in question. They’d come in the same mail delivery as the snotty letter.

  He was gloating about the surprise he had planned for the prosecutor when the telephone rang. He was his own secretary. Picking up the telephone, he said, “Jonathan Moss.” A man’s voice on the other end of the line: “You’re the Yank barrister, aren’t you?”

  “That’s right,” Moss answered. “Who are you? What can I do for you?”

  “If I was you, I wouldn’t start my motorcar no more,” the voice said. A click followed. The line went dead.

  Moss looked out the window. There sat the Bucephalus, right where he’d left it. Had someone done something to it there on the street, brazen as could be? Or was somebody just trying to rattle his cage?

  That wasn’t the biggest question, he realized. The biggest question was, did he feel like finding out the hard way?

  He didn’t. He called the local garrison and reported what had just happened. The sergeant with whom he spoke knew who he was. The noncom thought the call highly amusing. “You’re worth more to the Canucks than a dozen of their own kind,” he said. “They ought to give you a medal, not blow you up.”

  “Funny. Ha, ha,” Moss said. “Will you send your bomb squad out to go over my auto?”

  “Yes,” the sergeant answered. “I’ll do that. The squad may take a while to get there, though. Yours is the fifth call we’ve had this morning.”

  “A hoaxer, then,” Moss said. “He must want to make people run around in circles and waste time.”

  “We thought so, too,” the sergeant told him. “The first two times we sent out the bomb squad, nothing. The third time, there was a bomb. They’re still playing with it. If you hear a bang and your windows rattle, you can bet the squad will be late to your place.” He laughed again.

  Moss remembered such humor from his own days in the Army. It had seemed funny then. It didn’t now—not to him, anyhow. The sergeant enjoyed it. “You ought to be trying to find out who your practical joker is,” Moss said. “We could have another Arthur McGregor on our hands.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Moss,” the sergeant said. “When we do catch this son of a bitch, whoever he turns out to be, you can get him off the hook. So long. The bomb squad will be along sooner or later.” He hung up.

 
  That shows what my own people think of me
, Moss thought unhappily.
I’m not doing anything
against the law—I’m working strictly within it. This is the thanks I get
.

  He wondered whether the bomb squad would show up at all, or whether he would get to find out if his car was wired by going out to it and turning the key. He heard no sudden and dreadful boom, though he worked with his ears peeled all day. Toward evening, a squad of men whose heavy armor made them look like a cross between modern soldiers and medieval knights showed up and went over his car. After twenty minutes or so, one of them waddled into the building.

  By the time he got to Moss’ door, he was sweating despite the chilly weather. How much did that protective clothing weigh? If a bomb went off, how much good would it do? Even had Moss intended to ask those questions aloud, he didn’t get the chance. The man from the bomb squad asked if he was Jonathan Moss. When he nodded, the fellow said, “No bomb. Just that asshole running us from pillar to post.” Without waiting for an answer, he waddled away.

  “Thanks,” Moss called after him. He raised a gauntleted hand and kept on walking.

 
  Who would want to blow me up, or at least to scare
me spitless?
 Moss wondered. The U.S. sergeant was right. He had done a lot of good for the Canucks. They shouldn’t have wanted to hurt him.

  They should have wanted to coat him in bulletproof glass.

 
  Do they hate me just because I’m a Yank?
 He shook his head in slow wonder. Who could be that stupid?

 
M
ary Pomeroy. Mary Pomeroy. Mary Pomeroy.
No matter how often she wrote her new name, trying to get used to it, she still thought of herself as Mary McGregor. She’d been married only a couple of months. The change in her name sometimes seemed the smallest of the changes that had swept over her.

  She’d known they would be there when she said yes after Mort got down on one knee in front of her.

  She’d known they would be there, but she hadn’t had any idea how overwhelming they would prove.

  How could living in Rosenfeld, for instance, be so very different from living on a farm not
that
far outside of town? So she’d asked herself before going from the farmhouse where she’d spent her whole life to rooms across the street from the diner where her new husband worked with his father. So she’d asked herself, and she’d found out.

  Electricity, for instance. She’d never had it at the farm, so she’d never known what she was missing.

  Now she felt as if she’d spent her life in the Dark Ages. That was literally true; kerosene lamps didn’t come close to matching light bulbs for brilliance or convenience. But there was so much more. A refrigerator beat an icebox all hollow. A vacuum cleaner was ever so much easier to use and more effective than a carpet sweeper. An electric toaster knocked the stuffing out of the wire grid that went over the fire. An electric alarm clock didn’t stop running if she forgot to wind it.

  An electric phonograph also didn’t run down, unlike the windup machine the McGregors had had on the farm. And a wireless set—a wedding present from Mort’s father—offered a window on the world Mary had never imagined. Music, dramas, comedies—all in the apartment, all at the twist of a dial? If that wasn’t a miracle, what was? She had to keep reminding herself the news that came from the machine on the hour was only what the Yanks wanted her to hear.

  The apartment had a telephone, too. That didn’t impress Mary so much. None of the few people who might have wanted to call her had telephones of their own, so they couldn’t. Whenever it rang, it was for Mort. She suspected that would change as time went by. The Pomeroys were still a very new couple. Bit by bit, they would fit themselves into Rosenfeld’s jigsaw puzzle of class and sociability.

  That thought had hardly crossed her mind before the other half of the Pomeroys came out of the bedroom pulling his overcoat tight around himself. “I’m off to the diner,” he said, and paused to give Mary a kiss.

  “Oh, Mort,” she said. Her arms tightened around him. The kiss took longer and got hotter than he’d probably expected. He didn’t seem disappointed, though, when they finally broke apart.

  “I’ll see you tonight,” he said huskily.

  Mary nodded. Some of the other things that went with marriage and a move to town were even more startling, even more exciting, than electricity. Although if it wasn’t electricity that set her pulse racing now, what was it? She knew what it was, all right. “Tonight,” she said.

  Mort looked as if he had to remind himself he was supposed to go out the door, down the stairs, and across the street to the diner. Mary watched him from the window. He hurried across when no motorcars were coming in either direction. Snow flew up from his overshoes as he crossed the street.

  Rosenfeld would have a white Christmas in a couple of weeks. More snow started falling even as Mary watched.

  Mort opened the front door to the diner, ducked inside, and closed it after him. With a regretful sigh, Mary turned away.
What shall I do with the rest of my day?
 she wondered. Oh, she had work to do keeping the place clean and getting supper ready for tonight. But that was work for a few hours, not work that would devour a day. She had no livestock to look after but a cat, and Mouser, like any of his kind, looked after himself perfectly well.

  Mary laughed. “I never thought I would miss shoveling manure,” she said. It wasn’t that she missed it, exactly, but she didn’t have certainty in her routine any more.

  Once she was done with what she had to do, she could go out and explore Rosenfeld. She’d done that a lot after coming back from her honeymoon at the Canadian side of Niagara Falls. She hadn’t wanted to set foot in New York, and Mort hadn’t argued with her. She didn’t go out into Rosenfeld so often as she had on first coming home. She hadn’t needed long to figure out there was only so much to see and do here. Compared to a farm, Rosenfeld was a metropolis. Compared to a real metropolis, Rosenfeld . . . might as well have been a farm.

  When she finished her chores today, she sat down and turned on the wireless. The tubes inside glowed to life. She waited for sound to start coming out of the machine.
This is what it’s for,
 she realized.
It fills
up the spaces when you’re not working
. She hadn’t had to worry about many spaces like that on the farm, for she was almost always working or eating or sleeping. But town life was different.

  She could make herself a cup of tea, sit down in a rocking chair and read a book or a magazine, and listen to the wireless, and nobody would call her lazy or worthless. And she wasn’t, either; she’d done everything that needed doing except for making supper, and that could—should—wait till the afternoon.