Liberating Atlantis (18 page)

“No,” he said. She glared, but she left him alone after that.

When Major Duncan appeared at last, Stafford had all he could do to keep from laughing. The Atlantean officer had swathed himself in a great black cape that covered everything from the eyes down. A broad-brimmed black hat covered everything from the eyes up. He looked like a woodcut in a lurid novel translated from the French.

A man larger than he was planted himself in his path. “What are you supposed to be?” the fellow demanded.

Duncan’s voice came from behind the black cape as if from beyond the grave: “Get the hell out of my way, shitheel, or you’ll find out.”

The man let out a roar of rage and swung on him. A moment later, the fellow was on the floor. It happened so fast, Stafford couldn’t see what the major did. Whatever it was, Duncan had proved himself a man of parts. For good measure, he kicked the bigger man behind the right ear to make sure he didn’t get up for a while.

Then he looked around. “Anyone else?” he inquired.

Stafford wondered when the dive had last been so quiet. Into that silence, the ring of the silver tenth Sam Duncan tossed onto the bar seemed double sweet. Duncan took his barrel-tree rum and strolled back to the table where Stafford was sitting. Slowly, slowly, the tavern came back to life. People stepped over or around the man the major had decked. After several minutes, the fellow stirred and groaned, clutching the back of his head. He stayed flat. The dazed look in his eye said he didn’t remember what had happened to him: only that he hadn’t enjoyed it.

“That was nicely done,” Stafford remarked.

“Thanks,” Major Duncan said.

“All the same,” the Consul continued, “why didn’t you paint yourself blue and come in juggling flaming torches?”

“I didn’t want anybody to know what I looked like.” Duncan sounded aggrieved.

“But the idea is to make sure no one wonders about you,” Stafford said. “They’re not the same.”

The Major looked almost comically astonished. He’d lowered the cloak to reveal his face—and to be able to drink. After pouring down his rum, the officer gave his attention back to Stafford. “Be damned,” he said. “You’re right. Fry me for an oil thrush if you’re not. Have to remember that.” He waved for a refill.

“Do,” Stafford urged. “
Cloak and dagger
doesn’t mean literally.”

“I haven’t got a dagger, by God,” Duncan said. “I’ve got an eight-shooter in my belt, and a double-barreled derringer with a charge of shot in the bottom barrel, too. If that bastard gave me even a little trouble, I would have ventilated his spleen for him.”

“You don’t need to worry about that,” Stafford said. The tavern tough still lay where he’d gone down. He’d barely wiggled; he wouldn’t be getting up any time soon. Someone bent over him, perhaps to minister to him, perhaps to pick his pocket.

The barmaid brought the major a new shot of rum. She seemed to have to remind herself to linger long enough to get paid. Then she disappeared again.

Consul Stafford still had whiskey in his glass. He raised it. “Your health,” he said, and they both drank. Then he asked, “What’s gone wrong? Something must have, or you wouldn’t have come to meet me”
dressed like a damned fool
. But the last handful of words Stafford kept to himself.

“Newton knows what we’re up to.” Duncan delivered the bad news as straightforwardly as he would have reported a reverse on the battlefield.

But Leland Newton, damn his black heart, wouldn’t let the Atlantean army take the field against the colored insurrectionists. If he was going to try to snuff out covert aid to the southern states as well . . . “How did he find out?” Stafford asked.

“My best guess is, somebody blabbed.” Duncan spoke in tones of resigned anger. “I have a notion who, too: some clerks from the Ministry of War. They all looked like they wanted to hide when people came around asking questions.”

“Did they give straight answers?” Stafford asked. “That could be inconvenient.” He was proud of himself. Duncan would have to go some to outdo his understatement.

Instead of attempting it, the major drained his glass, then held it up and waved for another refill. Stafford finished the whiskey, too. He also waved for a fresh one. Maybe the first would have numbed his tongue enough to keep him from tasting the second so much. And his brain needed more numbing than it had got yet.

Only after Major Duncan got halfway down his third glass of rum did he say, “I can’t tell you for certain, Consul. The snoops made sure they questioned each man alone. In their boots, I would have done the same thing. Doesn’t make life any easier for us, though.”

“No. It doesn’t,” Stafford said. He’d never denied Newton’s competence—he’d only regretted the other Consul’s adherence to the vile cause of equality for niggers and mudfaces. “Have you got any notion how much they know?”

“More than they ought to. That’s all I can tell you for sure,” Duncan answered. “Knowing anything at all is too damned much.”

“So it is. Well, I did need to know that myself, and I thank you for bringing me word,” Jeremiah Stafford said. “We should leave separately.” It might help less than Stafford wished it would. Anyone who saw the major wouldn’t forget him in a hurry, and might also remember his companion too well.

“I was last in. I should be first out,” Sam Duncan said. Why that followed eluded Stafford, but he didn’t argue. Life was too short. And so Duncan gulped what was left of the rum, stood up, and draped himself in his cape once more. He couldn’t have been less conspicuous had he caught fire.

The man he’d decked was just starting to sit up when he swept by. Stafford wondered whether Duncan would flatten him again—for the sport of it, you might say. But the officer just walked into the night.

“Who was that crazy son of a bitch?” someone asked.

“Beats me,” someone else answered. “He may look dumber’n a honker, but he’s nobody you’d want to mess around with—that’s for damned sure. Ain’t it, Scrap Iron?”

Scrap Iron proved to be Major Duncan’s victim. He rubbed the side of his head again, then winced and thought better of it. “He better hope I never see him again,” he said, but his voice lacked conviction.

And well it might. The fellow who’d addressed him laughed and said, “
You
better hope you never see him again.” Thus do the heroes fall. Scrap Iron got to his feet. He needed three tries, but he made it. When he set money on the bar, the man behind it poured him a restorative.

Consul Stafford slid out of the tavern. He had a pistol on his belt, too. In this part of town, you might need one. Better to have and not need than to need and not have. Gas lamps lit the streets and sidewalks in richer quarters of New Hastings. Hereabouts, the only warning a passerby gave was the glowing coal on the end of his cigar. And if he didn’t smoke a cigar, he gave no warning at all—which was just what footpads had in mind.

Stafford didn’t quite sigh with relief when he reached a lighted street. A less disciplined man surely would have, though. He made his way back to his residence. A couple of sentries stood outside the door. One puffed on a stogie—all of it visible under a hissing gas lamp—while the other sent up smoke signals from a pipe.

The cigar smoker’s rifle musket screaked on its sling as he shifted weight. How many longarms just like that did the insurrectionists have? One would have been too many, and they had far more than one.

“Out late tonight, sir,” the sentry said.

“Some business I needed to attend to,” Stafford answered.

“Yes, sir,” the sentry said. But his eyes slid toward his comrade’s. Did they think his business had to do with someone perfumed and softly curved? As a matter of fact, Stafford did not care one broad copper cent for what they thought. His wife’s opinion was another matter. Was Annabelle sitting up in there, waiting for him to come back? A man might take a mistress, but flaunting one was bad form.

Here, though, Stafford had done no such thing. And all he smelled of were whiskey and pipeweed—no perfume. Annabelle ought to notice that—if she was in a mood to notice anything.

She was waiting for him, darning socks by the light of a lantern. She was small and dark and sad-looking, as any mother who’d buried three babies would have been. Jeremiah Stafford feared he might be the last of his line. Annabelle put down the sock she was working on (she was shortsighted, which helped her with the needle if not with the wider world) and blinked up at him. Like the sentry, she said, “You were out late.”

“Business,” he said, as he had before. But he would explain to his wife, where he wouldn’t for a no-account soldier: “Sam Duncan.”

“Ah. Your . . . friend.” She knew the name if not the man. Her voice didn’t say whether she believed him.

He described Duncan’s disguise and the way it concealed and proclaimed at the same time. He also described how the major had rusted Scrap Iron. Annabelle smiled faintly. “Quite a man,” she said.

“Yes—almost as much as he thinks he his. If only he had more common sense to go with his courage and strength. That costume! Good Lord!” Stafford rolled his eyes.

“And why did you have to meet him in some low dive? Why wouldn’t a walk around the Senate House do as well?” Annabelle asked.

“Because if anyone connected to northern Senators or to my esteemed fellow Consul”—Stafford’s tone turned the praise into a filthy lie—“saw us walking together, he would understand
why
we were talking together, whereupon trouble would immediately follow. You know we are quietly doing what we can to aid the states against the servile insurrection?”

“Well, of course.” His wife had been born in the state of Cosquer, too, down close to the border with Gernika. She came from a slaveholding family, as he did. In fact, the threat of uprisings always seemed worse in that part of the country. Gernika had still been Spanish Atlantis when she was a girl, and Spanish Atlantis always sizzled and sometimes exploded. The dons squeezed all they could from their copperskins and blacks, and squeezed out hatred along with everything else.

“You see,” Stafford said. “Duncan’s news was that Consul Newton has found out about our quiet efforts. Having learned of them, he is doubtless doing everything in his power to thwart them.”

“How wicked of him! No wonder you went out, then, Jeremiah,” Annabelle said, and something behind Stafford’s breastbone unknotted. Whatever she had thought, she believed him now. She went on, “What can you do to stop him from disrupting things?”

That question cut to the quick. “I don’t know yet,” Consul Stafford admitted. “But knowing we have a problem is bound to give us our best chance of keeping it from getting worse.”

Before his wife could answer, a clock that had been quietly ticking on a side table chimed the hour: two in the morning. Annabelle yawned. “Come to bed,” she said. “Whatever your best chance may be, you can’t do anything about it till the sun comes up.”

Stafford feared the nighttime might prove better. Some of the deeds that wanted doing would be dark. She was right about tonight, though—and her yawn was contagious. “Sleep,” he said longingly.

Things looked less bleary in the morning, if not necessarily better. Stafford primed his pump with several cups of strong, sugared coffee. Men from north of the Stour were more likely to drink tea. Leland Newton did, as Stafford had seen. The Consul from Cosquer thought he got the edge on his colleague in the morning.

Whether he could keep it might be another story. Consul Newton was up and doing ahead of him. Instead of ignoring him, as Newton often did, the other Consul made a point of buttonholing him. “I have a question for you, sir: one concerning the safety of the nation,” Newton said.

“I have had a good many questions of that sort for you lately, sir,” Stafford answered. “You seem less than less than willing to answer them, however. But let it be as you wish for now—how can I say no?”

“If you’ve ever had any trouble with the word, you hide it marvelously well.” Newton shook his head. “I will steer clear of gibes, as I do hope for a serious answer from you. My question is this: if so many capable officers and men leave the Atlantean army, how shall we defend ourselves against some foreign foe?”

“Does foreign war loom on the horizon? If so, against whom?” Stafford asked, adding, “I must confess, the portents have escaped my notice.”

“You are being deliberately difficult.” Newton sounded severe.

“You are being deliberately hypothetical,” Stafford retorted.

“Am I? It could be, but I think not,” Newton said. “The army depends on professional soldiers of large experience. If a number of them suddenly leave and must be replaced with less seasoned men, how can it fail to suffer a loss of efficiency—to say nothing of effectiveness?”

“You will not allow the army to be used to reestablish order in the southern states,” Stafford said. “This being so, how can it surprise you that soldiers would sooner do what they see as their duty even without army auspices than sit idly by with the blessings of the Ministry of War?”

“Their conception of duty is defective,” Newton said.

“I do not for a moment agree with you. But even supposing you are right, so what?” Stafford said.

Leland Newton frowned—scowled, in fact. “I did beg you for the courtesy of a serious response.”

“Serious? Sir, I am serious to the point of solemnity,” Stafford said. “You must bear something in mind: that your opponents are as much in earnest as you yourself. Their sense of duty may seem defective to you, but it does not seem so to them. They hold to it with as much devotion as you cling to the deluded idea of nigger equality. I know you believe in that, but I am damned if I know how.”

He wondered whether Newton would laugh in his face. The other Consul had a firm faith in his own beliefs, and faith every bit as firm that his foes’ beliefs were only delusions. After hearing Stafford out, he looked almost comically surprised. “Well, well!” he said, and then, “Upon my soul!”