American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (98 page)

  The fellow who’d led them here was a genial, middle-aged man named Robert E. Kent. He’d not only been in Washington, but insisted he’d been a regular at the coffeehouse. Nellie didn’t remember him; she did her best not to remember men. But he remembered her and her doings altogether too well. “What ever happened to that pretty daughter of yours?” he asked. “You know, the one who was going to marry our officer.”

  “After the war, she married a U.S. veteran,” Nellie said coolly. “Their son, Armstrong, will be twelve this year. They’ve got a little girl, too.” Kent was named for a C.S. hero, her own grandson for one from the USA. She used Custer’s middle name as a weapon against the genial Confederate.

  Another man from south of the border said, “I saw a girl, maybe thirteen or fourteen, in here a while ago.

  Is that your daughter’s daughter?”

  “No,” Nellie said. “Clara’s
my
daughter. I married Hal Jacobs, who ran the cobbler’s shop across the street. He died last year.” She looked down at the counter as she said that. It still hurt. A young Italian fellow had bought the cobbler’s shop. He looked to be running it into the ground. Watching that hurt, too.

  “Sorry to hear it, ma’am,” Robert E. Kent said politely. “He fixed my boots once or twice. He was right good at it.”

  He gave Hal the sort of impersonal praise he might have given a whore who’d pleased him. Maybe thinking of that particular comparison was what made Nellie ask, “Do you know what else he was good at?”

  “No, ma’am,” Kent said. Confederates
were
polite, sometimes even when Nellie wished they weren’t.

  She said, “He was good at finding out what you people were up to, that’s what. He was a big part of the U.S. spy ring in Washington during the war—and so was I.” That proud announcement spawned a considerable silence from the Confederates. At last, Kent said,

  “Well, ma’am, you helped your country, same as we helped ours.” He was, to Nellie’s way of thinking, too polite by half. She’d hoped to get a bigger rise out of him and his countrymen. What good was gloating if the people you were gloating over refused to acknowledge you were gloating? To cover her feelings, she poured herself a cup of coffee.

  One of the other Confederates said, “Ma’am, your country won the last war, no doubt about it. That’s one for you, and we can’t deny it.” His compatriots nodded. He went on, “You’ve got to remember, though, when Jake Featherston gets to be president of the CSA in a couple of weeks . . . well, tomorrow belongs to us.”

  Almost all of the Confederates, Robert E. Kent among them, nodded again. One man looked sour as vinegar. Nellie would have bet he hadn’t voted for Featherston. The others, though . . . The others looked as if they were talking not about ordinary earthly politics, but about the Second Coming. Kent said, “He’ll put us back on our feet, by heaven.”

  “And he’ll put the niggers in their place,” another man said. “If there’s anything worse than an uppity nigger, I don’t know what it is.”

  Still more nods. Nellie had the feeling she ought to listen carefully, then take what she heard across the street to Hal, just as she had during the Great War. But Hal wasn’t there, never would be there any more. The Italian fellow who had the place now would think she was crazy if she burst in and started babbling about what the Confederates were saying in her coffeehouse. He might be right, too.

  “You Yankees waited a long time before you finally whipped us,” Robert E. Kent said. “You needed to build yourselves up, and you went and did it. Now we’re the ones who have to do that.”

  “Why?” Nellie asked, as if she were still a spy trying to ease important information out of people and not simply a proprietor trying to get her customers to hang around and order more coffee and sandwiches.

  “What difference does it make? If we’re going to stay at peace, who cares whether one side’s built up and the other one isn’t?”

  Kent said, “Ma’am, I think there’s two different kinds of peace. One’s where this fellow’s strong and that fellow’s weak, and when
this
fellow says, ‘This is how we’ll do things,’ they do ’em that way, on account of
that
fellow’s got no choice. That there is what we’ve got nowadays. The other kind is where both fellows are strong, and neither one pushes the other one around because he knows he’ll get pushed back. That there is what Jake Featherston is after, and I reckon he can get it.” They all nodded again. Even the one who plainly hated Featherston and the Freedom Party nodded.

  Nellie wondered what that meant. Probably that he might not have much use for the president-elect of the CSA, but that he despised the United States still more. Nellie had never known any Confederates who had much use for the USA, not even when they came up here to do business.

  “Let me have another cup of coffee, ma’am, if you’d be so kind,” Robert E. Kent said, “and if you could get me a ham and cheese sandwich to go with it, that’d be good.” Three or four of the others ordered more food and drink, too. They had plenty of money—U.S. coins and greenbacks, not the scrip and brown Confederate banknotes they’d used during the war. Nellie was glad to take it from them, and they tipped generously. All in all, it was the best business day she’d had in weeks.

  Even so, she wasn’t sorry when they finally left. She wanted Confederates to know their country was weaker than the United States. She wanted them afraid of the USA. When she found them cocky instead, she worried. She’d seen the CSA bombard Washington in the Second Mexican War as a child and in the Great War when she was in the prime of life. She didn’t want it to happen again when she was an old woman.

  Edna came by at closing time, as she often did now that Hal was dead. “How are you, Ma?” she said.

  “How was your day?”

  “Fair. No, better than fair,” Nellie answered, and told her about the Confederates.

  Her daughter sighed, probably thinking of Confederate Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid and what might have been.
Another world,
 Nellie thought, and laughed a little. If she was going to think of other worlds, why not one where the United States won the War of Secession and there never was any such thing as the Confederate States of America? With Virginia still in the USA, Washington wouldn’t have been shelled. It would still be the capital in more than name, too. And who would ever have heard of Jake Featherston? Nobody at all, odds were.

  “What are you smiling about?” Edna asked. When Nellie told her, she said, “Wouldn’t that be something? You ought to write a book, Ma, like that gal from Boston did—you know, the one who shot the Confederate submersible skipper. You could get rich.”

  “Maybe I could get rich—if I could write a book. And if pigs could fly, we’d all carry umbrellas,” Nellie said.

  “You wouldn’t have to do it all by your lonesome,” Edna said. “That other gal had somebody else, a real writer, do most of the work. You could split the money and still have plenty.”

  “I haven’t got enough ideas for a book,” Nellie said firmly. “The only other thing I’m sure of is that we wouldn’t have had this stinking collapse if we were one big country, and anybody can see that. It’s not worth writing about.”

  “I suppose.” Her daughter didn’t want to give up the idea. “I know what you could do, then. Write about your life story. That’s exciting enough for anybody, what with the spy stuff during the war and the . . . the other stuff back before the turn of the century.” By
the other stuff
, of course, she meant Nellie’s time in the demimonde. “I don’t want to write about that!” Nellie exclaimed. “I wish to heaven none of that ever happened. I spent all these years getting to be halfway respectable, and now you want me to write about . . . that? Forget it, Edna.”

  “Too bad,” Edna said. “It’d be exciting. People’d pay money to read about it.”

  “It wasn’t exciting. It was just nasty.” Nellie couldn’t imagine how anybody who’d actually been in the demimonde could think it was exciting. She hadn’t come close to warming up to a man more than a couple of times in all the years since she’d left. And how much would people want to read about
that
?

  She expected Edna to go on harping about it. Her daughter refused to believe how foul it had been, how foul it had made Nellie feel after a man put gold on the dresser, got undressed, and then did what he wanted—and had her do what he wanted. But Edna didn’t nag, or not exactly. Instead, she said, “You remember that Bill Reach, the fellow who Hal said ran the whole spy show?”
 The fellow who made me out to be a whore in front of a coffeehouse full of Confederates,
 Nellie thought grimly. “I remember him,” she said, and not another word.

  “I wonder what ever happened to him,” Edna said. “If you know that, you could stick it in the book, too.”

 
I know what happened to him. I killed the drunken son of a bitch when he tried to rape me.
 She almost told that to Edna, just to shut her daughter up. How much could it matter now that Hal, who’d idolized Bill Reach for no good reason Nellie could ever see, was dead? But she swallowed the words.

  She’d promised herself she would take that secret to her own grave, and she aimed to do it.

  “If I had to guess,” she said after an all but imperceptible pause, “he got killed when the United States bombarded Washington before they took it back. An awful lot of people did.”

  “No story in that, though,” Edna said.

  “I don’t care,” Nellie said. “That’s what I’m telling you. There
was
no story.”

  “Ma, you’re a stick.”

  “Well, maybe I am. I don’t care. I worked too hard for too long to tell a bunch of fancy lies now that I’m on the edge of turning into an old lady. What would Hal say if I did?”

  “Tell the truth, then,” Edna said.

  “I have been telling the truth,” Nellie lied.

  Her daughter threw her hands in the air. “What am I supposed to do with you, Ma?” she said, half affectionate, half exasperated.

  “You could just leave me alone. That’s what you told me and told me, and then I finally went and did it.” Nellie came as close as she ever had to admitting she might have meddled too much and too long in Edna’s life. “Now maybe I get to tell you the same thing.”

  “Why do you think I’ll listen any better than you ever did?” Edna asked. Nellie had no answer to that, and not having one frightened her. A child outgrew a parent’s efforts at care, but a parent wasn’t likely to outgrow a child’s.

 
M
arch 4, 1934, was a Sunday. Church bells rang in Richmond. Some of them summoned the faithful to worship. Others, later, proclaimed the imminent inauguration of a new president of the Confederate States of America.

  At Freedom Party headquarters, Lulu fussed over Jake Featherston, fiddling with his collar as if she were his mother and not his secretary. He put up with it for as long as he could. Then he stepped away and said, “I’m fine. You don’t need to fool with it any more.”

  “I want it to be perfect,” Lulu said, for about the fifth time that day.

  “Come two o’clock this afternoon, the chief justice of the Supreme Court is going to swear me in,” Jake said. “Nothing in the world—in the
world
, you hear me?—could be more perfect than that.” He shook his head. “No, I take it back. Burton Mitchel, that . . . so-and-so”—he was careful of his language around Lulu—“has to stand there and watch me do it and shake my hand before I do it—and afterwards, too. That’s even better than all the rest.”

  “I mean, I want you to
look
perfect.” His longtime secretary had said that five or six times, too.

  “I’m fine,” Jake answered. And he was fine, too, as far as he was concerned. No clawhammer coat for him, no white tie and stiff-fronted white shirt, no top hat. The butternut outfit he had on was almost identical to what he’d worn during the three years of the war. He even had three stripes on his sleeve, though these were also of butternut, not artilleryman’s red. The War Department had left him a sergeant, had it? Well, all right. Now the whole country had a sergeant heading it up. He wasn’t ashamed of that.

  He was proud of it, by God.

  Willy Knight strode into his office. The vice president–elect also wore a quasi-uniform, one a good deal fancier than Featherston’s. Some European armies had a grade one step up from general. They usually called it field marshal. Had the CSA used that rank, the men who held it would have worn uniforms a hell of a lot like Knight’s.

  “Whoa!” Jake shielded his eyes against the glare of gold lace and brass buttons. “You look like the nigger doorman at an expensive hotel, you know that?”

  “Go to hell,” Knight said, and grinned enormously. He stuck out his hand. Featherston shook it. No furtive trial of strength today. For once, they both had all the strength they needed. “We did it!” Knight’s grin got wider. Jake hadn’t thought it could. “We really did it!”

  “You bet we did,” Featherston said, “and this is only the first day. What you got to remember, Willy, is that getting here’s just the start. Now we’ve got to do what we set out to do with the Party—”

  “And with the Redemption League,” Willy Knight added.

  “Yeah—and with the Redemption League,” Jake allowed generously. “We’re in. We keep going right on forward.” That was where he had the edge on Knight and everybody else. He kept thinking about the next step, the step to take after the one he was on now. He looked at his pocket watch. “Where’s Ferd?”

  “I’m here.” Ferdinand Koenig stepped into the office. He wore a plain business suit that seemed all the plainer next to the uniforms.

  “Then let’s get on with it,” Jake said.

  They went downstairs. Two identical limousines waited there. Featherston and Koenig got into one, Knight into the other. As they drove the short distance to Capitol Square, they traded places in the motorcade several times. An assassin wouldn’t have an easy time figuring out who was who, not in the welter of escorting motorcycle cops and government bodyguards and Freedom Party bodyguards—who regarded one another like two rival packs of mean dogs. That instant rivalry suited Jake fine; the more everybody stayed on his toes, the better.