The Victorious Opposition (35 page)

Why didn’t the rest of you notice that?
bubbled just below the surface of his voice. Three or four officers sent Sam resentful looks. He was the least senior man in the mess except an ensign just out of Annapolis—and that smooth-cheeked ensign had a much brighter future in the Navy than a middle-aged mustang. Picking his words with care, Sam answered, “That sure is the way it sounds on the wireless, sir.”

He wondered whether Commander Cressy would land on him like a ton of bricks for listening to the wireless. But Cressy didn’t. His eyes stayed cold—Carsten didn’t think they
could
warm up—but the light in them was undoubtedly approval. “Good,” he said. “The more ways you can find out about the enemy, the better.” Formally, of course, the Confederate States weren’t the enemy. But among the fruit salad on Cressy’s chest was the ribbon for a Purple Heart. He’d got a broken ankle aboard a U.S. destroyer torpedoed by a C.S. submersible in 1916. After another sip of coffee, he went on, “But you asked why, didn’t you?”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Carsten said.

The exec nodded again. “That’s always the right question, because everything else comes out of it. Not what. Not how. Why. Know why, and what and how and often when and where and who take care of themselves. This time, why is pretty easy. Louisiana is the only Confederate state the Freedom Party doesn’t own lock, stock, and barrel. Long, the governor there, is a Radical Liberal, and he’s pulled off the same kind of coup inside the state as the Freedom Party has in the rest of the CSA. Outside of Louisiana, what Jake Featherston says, goes. Inside Louisiana, it’s what Governor Long says.”

Carsten nodded. That told him what he needed to know, all right. It also raised another question: “Can he get away with it?”

Before Commander Cressy could answer that, the general-quarters klaxon started hooting. Cressy and Carsten and all the other officers sprang to their feet. The exec said, “We’ll take this up another time, if you like. Meanwhile . . .” Meanwhile, he was the first one out the door, trotting toward his station on the bridge.

Sam was only a step behind Cressy. As he hurried to his own post down in the bowels of the
Remembrance
, he wondered how many times he’d gone to general quarters, either as a drill or during real combat. He wouldn’t have cared to give a precise number, but it had to be up in the hundreds.

He also wondered whether this was a drill or the real thing. You always did, if you had any sense. He heard sailors asking one another the same question as they clattered up and down iron staircases and rushed along corridors. Nobody seemed to have an answer, which was par for the course.

He was panting a little when he got to his own post.
Too goddamn many cigarettes,
he thought.
They’re hell on the wind.
Thinking of them made him want one. But the smoking lamp went out during general quarters. The pack stayed in his pocket.

“What’s up, sir?” asked one of the sailors in the damage-control party.

“Beats me,” Sam answered. “Here’s Lieutenant Commander Pottinger, though. Maybe he knows.” He turned to the officer who headed the damage-control party. “You know what’s going on, sir?”

“I think so,” Hiram Pottinger said. “Don’t know for a fact, but the scuttlebutt is, somebody spotted a periscope off to port.”

That produced excited chatter from the sailors in the party. One of them, an enormous redhead named Charlie Fitzpatrick, asked the cogent question: “Whose?”

“Subs don’t usually fly flags on top of their periscopes,” Pottinger said dryly. “In these waters, though, that boat isn’t awfully goddamn likely to be Japanese.”

The sailors laughed. But then somebody said, “The Confederates aren’t supposed to have any submersibles,” and the laughter stopped. Everybody in the U.S. Navy was convinced the CSA had quite a few things the armistice at the end of the war forbade. Carsten remembered those sleek aeroplanes with
CONFEDERATE CITRUS COMPANY
painted on their sides. They hadn’t been armed—he didn’t think they had, anyhow—but they’d looked mighty ready to take guns.

“No way to know the submarine
is
Confederate,” Pottinger said. “It could be British or French, too.”

That didn’t make Sam any happier. The British, who’d been beaten but not crushed, had been allowed a few submarines after the war. The French hadn’t. But Kaiser Bill’s Germany wasn’t pushing them about that. For one thing, the Kaiser was an old, old man these days. For another, the
Action Française
regime, like the Freedom Party in the CSA, wanted to do some pushing of its own. And, for a third, Germany kept looking anxiously toward the Balkans, where restive South Slavs were making Austria-Hungary totter the same way they had a quarter of a century before.

Fifteen minutes later, the all-clear sounded. Carsten warily accepted it. But, as he headed up to the flight deck, he couldn’t help wondering how long things would stay all clear.

T
he southbound train hurried through the night. Anne Colleton had done a lot of traveling, and a lot of sleeping in Pullman cars. She had trouble sleeping now. Here in Mississippi, she couldn’t help wondering if machine-gun fire would stitch its way along the side of the train, or if a charge of dynamite buried in the roadbed would blow the engine off the tracks. The Confederate Army was doing its best to put down the simmering Negro uprising, but guerrillas weren’t easy to quell. As soon as they hid their guns, they looked like any other sharecroppers. And plenty of blacks who wouldn’t go out bushwhacking themselves would lie for and conceal the ones who did.

This wasn’t a revolt like the one in 1915. That one had hoped to topple the Confederacy, and had come too close to success. This was more like a sore that didn’t want to heal. Anne feared Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party had pushed blacks too hard after taking power—pushed them too hard without being able to crush them if they did rise up. Now the country had to pay for that lack of foresight.

Eventually, she did doze off. When she woke, the sky was getting light. Nobody had shot up the train. She yawned enormously, trying to drive away sleep. A few minutes later, a colored steward came by with a pot of coffee. She all but mugged him to get her hands on a cup. Even as she drank it, though, she wondered if the man had any connection to the guerrillas. You never could tell. She’d found that out the hard way.

She knew to the minute when the train passed from Mississippi down into Louisiana. Billboards with Jake Featherston’s picture and Freedom Party slogans disappeared, to be replaced by those with Governor Long’s picture and his slogans. Long called himself a Radical Liberal, but in fact he was just as much a strongman in Louisiana as Featherston was in the CSA as a whole. He’d learned a lot from the way the Freedom Party had risen, learned and applied the knowledge in his own state.

Fortified by that cup of coffee, Anne got dressed and went to the dining car for breakfast. She was just finishing when the conductor came through, calling, “Baton Rouge! Next stop is Baton Rouge!”

She went back to her compartment, threw her nightclothes into a suitcase, and waited for the train to stop. A porter came to collect the luggage: another Negro, and so another man to wonder about, no matter how fulsomely he thanked her for the tip she gave him.

Flashbulbs burst in a startling fusillade when she got down onto the platform from the Pullman car. “Welcome to Louisiana, Miss Colleton!” boomed a pudgy, dark-haired man in his mid-forties: Governor Huey Long. He swarmed forward, first to shake her hand, then to plant a kiss on her cheek. More flashbulbs popped. The papers in Louisiana were as much in his pocket as those in the rest of the Confederacy were in Jake Featherston’s.

“Thank you very much,” Anne answered, slightly dazed. “I hadn’t expected such a fancy reception.” She’d expected to be met by a driver and possibly bodyguards, and to be whisked from the station to the state Capitol.

But Huey Long didn’t operate that way. “Anything worth doing is worth overdoing,” he declared, and turned to play to the crowd on the platform. “Ain’t that right, folks?”

People burst into noisy applause. “You tell ’em, Kingfish!” a woman called, as if to a preacher. Long lacked some of President Featherston’s fiery intensity, but he seemed a more likable, more
human
figure. They both got what they wanted—people did as they told them to—but by different roads. That
ain’t
was a nice touch. Huey Long had a law degree; such language wasn’t part of the way he usually talked. But he brought it out naturally, using it to connect with the crowd.

“Come on,” he told Anne. “Let’s get on over to the statehouse and talk.” She nodded. That was what Jake Featherston had sent her to Louisiana to do.

The governor’s limousine was a Bentley with a hood as long as a battleship. Featherston would never have set foot in such a flashy motorcar. He had, so to speak, risen from the ranks, and didn’t want to lose the common touch. Governor Long, by contrast, reveled in luxury.

Motorcycles ridden by state troopers preceded and followed the limousine. So did police cars with red lights flashing and sirens blaring. Long turned the short trip from the station to the Capitol into a procession. More photographers were waiting for him and Anne as they went up the steps into the impressively domed building.

Hard-faced guards surrounded them going up those steps. More guards waited at the entranceway. Still more patrolled the corridors. However much Huey Long posed as a friend of the people, he didn’t trust them very far. A horde of sweepers also patrolled the hallways, and kept them spotlessly clean.

“If I’m rushing you, just sing out,” Long told Anne. “You want to go to a hotel and freshen up, maybe even take a day to rest, it’s all right by me.”

“Thank you, but I’m fine,” she said. “I’m here now. We may as well talk now, don’t you think?”

“However you want it, that’s how it’ll be,” he said grandly. “Suppose you go on and tell me
why
you’re here.”

“That’s simple, Governor: I’m here to deliver a message for President Featherston,” Anne answered. “You must understand that, or you wouldn’t have given me such a . . . splendid reception.”

“Well, now, I want you to know it was my pleasure,” Long said, and then, as if relishing the phrase, repeated it: “My pleasure. I’ll be glad to listen to this here message, whatever it is, even though I have trouble seeing what sort of a message the president of the CSA would want to send to me. I’m just minding my business here in Louisiana, and I reckon he ought to do the same outside my state.”

“That’s . . . part of what the message is about,” Anne replied, much more nervous here than she’d ever been while dealing with
Action Française
. If Governor Long didn’t like what she had to say, she might not get home to South Carolina.

He nodded now, though, all graciousness. “Go on, then,” he told her.

“You understand that this is unofficial,” Anne said. “If you quote me, the president will either call you a liar or say I wasn’t speaking for him.” Long nodded impatiently. He’d trumpet what came next anyhow, and Featherston would disown it. But now the formalities of things unofficial had been observed, so Anne went on, “You could call this a warning, Governor. If you don’t bring Louisiana into line with the rest of the CSA, you’ll be sorry.”

Huey Long scowled. “Bring it into line, you say? What’s that supposed to mean? Knuckle under to the Freedom Party? Pardon my French, Miss Colleton, but I’ll be damned if I’ll do that.”

You’ll be damned if you don’t,
Anne thought. Aloud, she said, “The president is concerned about the direction you’re taking Louisiana in.”

“I’m not doing anything he hasn’t done,” Long said.

He was right, of course. But he’d started later, and had only a state to work in. That wasn’t enough, not when he was up against the rest of the country. If he didn’t see that . . . If he didn’t see that, maybe he was too full of himself to see it. Anne said, “You’d do better not to get all stiff-necked about this, Governor. The president is very determined.”

“What’s he going to do? Invade my state?” Long snorted, ridiculing the mere idea. “If he does, we’ll fight, by God. I’m just as good a Confederate patriot as he is any day of the week.”

Despite his threat, he didn’t take the idea seriously. Anne did. One thing she was sure of: Jake Featherston would tolerate no threats to his own authority. She said, “I don’t know what he’ll do. Whatever it is, do you really think you could stop it? This is only one state, after all.”

“I’ll take my chances,” said the governor of Louisiana. “We haven’t seen much freedom since the Freedom Party took over. But Featherston can’t run again in 1939; it’s against the Confederate Constitution. I think maybe I can whip anybody else in the Party. Willy Knight?” He gave a contemptuous shrug. “If he hadn’t climbed onto Featherston’s coattails, he’d still be a loudmouthed Texas nobody.”

He wasn’t wrong about that, either, or about the single six-year term to which the Confederate president was limited. More than once, Anne had wondered what Jake Featherston intended to do about that. What
could
he do? She didn’t know. To Huey Long, she said, “That’s all, then. I’ve told you what I came here to tell you. I have a reservation at the Excelsior. May I go there?” It wasn’t an idle question; Long might want to hold her hostage. “Just so you know, the president won’t pay ransom or anything like that to get me back.”

“Oh, yes. I know. Run along,” Long said. “You’re not a big enough centipede in my shoe to get excited about.”

That stung. Of all the things Anne least wanted to be called,
small-time
ranked high on the list. Smiling as if he knew as much, Long escorted her to the limousine. The driver put the car into gear without asking where she was going. Five minutes later, he pulled up in front of the Excelsior. “Here you are, ma’am.”

“Thank you.” She tipped him. A colored bellboy put her suitcases on a cart and wheeled them into the hotel. Anne went to the front desk. After fuming while she waited in line, she gave her name to the clerk.