The Center Cannot Hold

III

A cold, nasty rain poured down on Augusta, Georgia. Had the town been up in the USA, Scipio suspected it would have got snow, even though this was only the end of October. He'd seen snow a few times, here and in South Carolina, where he'd lived most of his life. He didn't like it a bit.

The rain drummed on his cheap black umbrella. Some of the Negroes in the Terry, Augusta's black quarter, had no umbrellas. They dashed through the streets on the way to work, water splashing up under their galoshes-when they had galoshes. Scipio did. He was fastidious about his person. Part of that was personal inclination, part habit ingrained in him by more than half a lifetime spent as Anne Colleton's butler. She'd always insisted on perfection in everything, and she'd known how to get what she wanted.

His foot slipped out from under him. He had to make a mad grab for a lamppost with his free hand. That kept him from falling on his backside, but the desperate embrace left his arm and one side of his chest almost as wet as if he had fallen.

He muttered under his breath all the way to Erasmus' fish market and restaurant. YOU BUY-WE FRY! was painted on the window in big letters. The front door was unlocked. Scipio gladly ducked inside, closing the umbrella as he did so.

Erasmus, as always, had got there before him. The gray-haired black man was sipping on a steaming cup of coffee almost white with cream-he'd already been to the fish market alongside the Savannah River to get the best of the day's catch and put it on ice here.

"Mornin'," he said to Scipio, and then, "Wet out." He got the most mileage from every word he used.

"Do Jesus, sho' is!" Scipio exclaimed. "I's soaked clean through." His accent was that of the Congaree, thicker and more ignorant-sounding than Erasmus'. He could also use the English of an educated white man-again, Anne Colleton's doing-but he had nothing between the one and the other.

"Can't be helped." Erasmus took another sip of coffee. He pointed to the pot. "Pour yourself some if you got a mind to, Xerxes."

"I do dat," Scipio said. No one in Augusta, not even Bathsheba, his wife, knew his rightful name. He'd used several aliases since escaping from the wreckage of the Congaree Socialist Republic. His passbook said he was Xerxes, and he wasn't about to argue with it. Xerxes was as free as a black man in the Confederate States could be. Scipio still had a large price on his head back in South Carolina.

He poured less cream-the pitcher sat on ice next to some catfish-into his coffee than Erasmus used, but added a couple of teaspoons of sugar. His boss' eyes were on him. Erasmus didn't approve of anyone standing around idle, especially not someone he was paying. Getting a cup of coffee didn't mean lollygagging around for half an hour till Scipio finished it. He took the cup out in front of the display full of ice and fish, grabbed a push broom, and started sweeping up under and around the restaurant tables.

Erasmus said, "You's a pretty good fellow, Xerxes."

"I thanks you," Scipio answered, chivvying small specks of dust to destruction.

"Yes, suh, you's a pretty good fellow," Erasmus said again. "You works." By the way he spoke, those two traits were intimately connected. He watched Scipio sweep a little longer, then added, "You know what I say? I say you ought to git your own place, work for your own self. I hates to lose you, but you smart if you go."

Scipio stopped sweeping. Erasmus must have been serious, for he didn't give his employee a put-upon stare. Slowly, Scipio said, "Ain't never thought about that none."

He told the truth. Never in his life had he contemplated being his own master. He'd been born a slave, before the Confederate States manumitted their Negroes in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War. Even after manumission, he'd always been a house nigger, first in the kitchens at Marshlands, then as butler there. He'd done factory labor and worked as a waiter since. Every single place, he'd had somebody telling him what to do. (Whenever he thought of Anne Colleton, he shivered, even now. Getting out of South Carolina had put some distance between them, the state border being more important than the miles. Was it enough? He hoped so.)

"Ought to do some thinkin', then, I reckon," Erasmus said. "You ain't stupid. You kin read'n write'n cipher-more'n I kin do my ownself. You works hard, an' you saves your money. What else you need?"

Maybe he didn't expect an answer, but Scipio gave him one: "Dunno dat I wants to boss other niggers around. You hear what I sayin'?"

"Yeah, I hears it. But you ain't real likely to hire no white folks." Erasmus bared his teeth to show that was meant for a joke. Scipio dutifully smiled back. His boss went on, "I hear what you say. But you gots to have people working' fo' you. Job gits too big fo' one man to do it all by hisself."

"Don' want to play de buckra." Scipio made as if to crack a whip. He might have been driving along a slave coffle in the days before manumission.

"I hear black folks say that every now and again," Erasmus admitted. "But you tell me true, now-I treat you like white folks treats niggers?"

"No," Scipio admitted. "Had one fella, he weren't too bad, but de rest-" He shook his head.

"Oglethorpe," Erasmus said. Scipio nodded in surprise; he hadn't mentioned his earlier boss for quite a while. Erasmus owned a stubborn memory. He continued, "I knows Aurelius a bit. He been waitin' tables for John Oglethorpe since dirt. He says that there buckra a lot like me, you work for him, he don't give you no trouble. He could do that, too."

"Could," Scipio said. "Mebbe could. Dunno dat I gots it in me to give no orders, though, not no way." He hadn't even liked giving orders as a butler, when Anne Colleton was the ultimate authority behind them. Doing it on his own hook? No, he wasn't sure about that at all.

"Well, you don't want to do what you kin do, that's your business," Erasmus said. "Like I told you, I ain't sorry you works for me. But you is wastin' yourself, you wants to know what I think."

How many Negroes in the Confederate States aren't wasting themselves? Scipio wondered. He'd got himself an education as good as any white man's. What could he do with it? Sound impressive as the butler at Marshlands during the war. Now, wait tables. If he'd tried to set up as a businessman-not in the sense Erasmus meant, but as an investor, a capitalist-he would have been lucky if whites here only laughed at him. More likely, they would have lynched him.

And most blacks? Besides having whites hate them, most blacks never got the education that would have let them make the most of their abilities-that would have let them discover what abilities they had. And then whites called them stupid and inferior because they didn't succeed.

"Sometimes I reckons dem Red niggers, dey knew what dey was doin'," he said. He'd never dared say anything like that to Erasmus before.

The older man studied him, then slowly shook his head. "Them Reds, they was about tearin' down, not buildin' up. Tearin' down don't do no good. Never has, never will." He sounded very certain.

Before Scipio could answer, the day's first customer came in: a fat black man dripping rain from the brim of his homburg and from the hem of his rubberized-cotton raincoat. "Bacon an' a couple eggs over medium an' grits an' coffee," he called to Erasmus.

Erasmus already had the eggs and bacon on the stove. "Like I don't know what you has for breakfast, Sophocles," he said reproachfully.

Scipio poured coffee for Sophocles and brought it to him. As soon as Erasmus had the rest of the man's breakfast ready, he carried that over, too. "Half a dollar, all told," he said.

"Here y'are." Sophocles slapped down sixty cents. "Things is up a little from last year," he remarked.

"But only a little," Scipio said. "Do Jesus, when dey was playin' games wid de money, breakfas' cost you fifty million dollars, maybe fifty billion dollars. I's powerful glad dey fix it-dey pretty much fix it, anyways."

Sophocles and Erasmus both nodded. Inflation had almost destroyed the CSA. How could anybody do business when money might lose half its value between the morning when you got it and the afternoon when you found a chance to spend it? Prices were higher now than they had been when the currency was restored; the C.S. dollar didn't trade at par with its U.S. counterpart. But it was still close, and didn't seem to be sinking very fast.

Erasmus said, "The white folks don't go runnin' to the Freedom Party fast as their legs can take 'em when their money worth somethin'."

Sophocles nodded again, chewing a mouthful of bacon. So did Scipio. "De Freedom Party buckra, dey scares me plenty," he said. "Dey wish we was all dead. Dey he'ps we along, too, case we don' feel like dyin'." More nods.

More customers came in. On such a miserable morning, business was slower than usual. Scipio kept hopping even so. When he wasn't carrying food out to hungry men and women, he was washing dirty dishes or making fresh coffee or stirring the big pot of grits. Erasmus didn't let him do much real cooking, but did give him jobs like that. He also wrapped fish for people who didn't come in to eat there.

However much he did, he would have felt like a fool complaining about it, for Erasmus did more. Erasmus worked harder than anybody he'd ever seen, save possibly John Oglethorpe. Maybe their both owning their businesses had something to do with that.

Erasmus certainly worked harder than any other black man Scipio had ever seen. And he'd been born a slave; he'd spent more time in bondage than Scipio had. A lot of Negroes still held to the slave's pace of labor, doing just enough to satisfy an overseer, even though they were free now. Erasmus worked to satisfy an overseer, too, but his lived inside his head. He had a harsher straw boss than any cursing, whip-wielding, tobacco-chewing white man. His boss whipped him on from within.

Could I do that? Scipio wondered. He had his doubts. He wanted things done properly, yes; Anne Colleton had made sure to instill that into him. But did he have the driving need to get things done, even when he was the only one urging himself on? He'd rarely seen it in himself. He'd rarely had to look for it, either. If he ever got his own place, he'd have to.

After the breakfast rush, such as it was, eased, Erasmus put on a wide-brimmed hat of no known make and a rain slicker. "Mind the store a spell, Xerxes," he said. "I gwine buy some more fish. One of the boats was late, and I reckon I kin git some prime deals, on account of most folks ain't comin' back."

"I do dat," Scipio said. Erasmus hurried out into the rain. Would I do the same? Scipio wondered. He was honest enough to admit to himself he didn't know.

T he closing whistle shrilled in the Toledo steel mill. Chester Martin pushed his helmet up onto the top of his head. He blinked against the glare as he hurried to clock out. He'd been looking at molten steel through smoked-glass rectangles all day. Now he saw all the light there was to see. It was almost too much to bear.

As he stuck his card in the time clock, he spoke up to anyone who'd listen: "Election day today. Don't forget to vote, dammit. Only way you should forget to vote is if you want the Democrats back in Powel House."

That made most of the men around him grin and wave and call out agreement. Socialists filled the Toledo steel mills, as they filled so many factories. After the postwar strikes, the Socialist Party had gained more ground than at any time since the 1880s.

Funny, Martin thought as he hurried out of the big building to catch a streetcar to his polling place and his home. I saved Teddy Roosevelt's life when he came into the trenches to see what the war was like. Well, maybe I did-I sure made him get down when the Confederates started shelling us. He had a letter from Roosevelt, written after he got wounded. He intended to keep that letter forever. But he was a Socialist all the same.

A streetcar clanged to a stop. That wasn't his route. Then the right one came. He climbed aboard, throwing five cents in the fare box. A lot of the passengers looked like him: tired, grubby men in overalls and heavy shoes and collarless shirts and cloth caps. He had sandy hair and a pointed nose to distinguish himself from most of the rest. The odor of perspiration filled the streetcar. Even in November, Toledo factory workers had no trouble breaking a sweat.

The American flag flew in front of the elementary school that housed his polling place. The new stars in the canton that represented Kentucky and Houston gave it a pattern he still hadn't got used to. The polling place itself was in the school auditorium, which was full of seats too small for grown-up backsides. Martin smiled, remembering the days when he'd sat in chairs like that. I'd never killed anybody then, he thought, and the smile slipped.

He had to wait in line to get his ballot. Lots of men-and women, who could vote in presidential elections in Ohio-lined up to get their ballots. "Here you are," the clerk said when he came to the front of the line. "Take the first available voting booth." He sounded bored. How many times had he said those identical words since the polls opened this morning? Too many, by all the signs.

A pretty woman a few years younger than Chester Martin pushed aside the curtain that kept her ballot secret and came out with the folded paper in her hand. They did a little accidental dance, each trying to get around the other, and were laughing by the time she went past him and he made his way into the booth.

He voted quickly. He put an X by the names of Upton Sinclair and Hosea Blackford, then went on to vote for the other Socialist candidates. He wasn't altogether happy with the way the Party had handled the Canadian uprising; had he been in charge of things, he would have taken an even stronger line than President Sinclair had. Why did we fight the war, if we coddle the Canucks once it's done? But the Socialists were his party, he was making good money, and there were plenty of jobs. He wasn't about to abandon the Party over foreign policy. He went down the line, from Congressman to state officials, voting the straight ticket.

After he'd finished, he handed the clerk the ballot. The fellow ceremoniously stuck it in the locked ballot box, declaring, "Chester Martin has voted." Martin felt proud, as if his vote had singlehandedly saved the country. He knew how silly that was, but couldn't help it.

He hurried out of the auditorium, out of the school. His family's flat was only four blocks away. He'd intended to walk it and save himself five cents, but seeing the pretty woman at the streetcar stop made him change his mind. "Did you vote for President Sinclair?" he asked, fumbling in his pocket for a nickel.

"As a matter of fact, I did," she said. That made him grin with relief; he wouldn't have wanted much to do with a staunch Democrat. He didn't think he would, anyhow. She added, "He's the only one I could vote for, of course. I don't think that's right."

"I don't, either," Martin said, more sincerely than otherwise. "My sister gets to vote for the first time today, and that's all she gets to mark: one square. It really doesn't seem fair."

They chatted, waiting for the streetcar. He found out her name was Rita Habicht, and that she was a typist for a company that made galvanized pipe. He gave her his own name just when the trolley clattered up. Slow down, he thought as it rattled along the tracks. Slow down, dammit. But it didn't. In no time at all, the streetcar got to his stop.

He let it start up again without getting off. "Have you got a telephone?" he asked.

She hesitated. Then she took a scrap of paper from her handbag, wrote on it, and gave it to him. "Here."

He tucked it into the front pocket of his overalls. "Thanks," he said. "I'll call you." He did leave at the next stop, and had to walk most of a mile back in the direction from which he'd come.

"What took you so long?" his younger sister asked when he finally came through the door. Sue had a sharp nose much like his, but her hair was brown, not sandy. Without waiting for an answer, she went on, "I got to vote. It took forever, but I got to vote." She'd been just too young at the last presidential election.

"Good for you, Sis." Chester gave her a hug. "I remember how that felt-the first time, I mean."

"What took you so long coming home?" Sue asked again.

"Trolley went past the stop, and I had to walk back," he answered.

She looked at him. "It must have gone a long way past the stop, for you to be as late as you are." He could feel himself turning red. His sister started to laugh. "You're blushing!" she exclaimed, as she might have done when they were both children. She wagged a saucy finger at him. "Was she pretty?"

He looked down at the carpet, and at the woven flowers and birds he'd seen every day for years without really looking at them. "Well.. yeah," he mumbled.

Now Sue stared. "You're not doing that just to drive me crazy," she said. "You really did meet somebody."

"I met her at the polling place, matter of fact," Martin said. "We got to talking, and we seemed to like each other all right, and I got a telephone number from her."

"Will you call her?" Sue asked.

"I'd be a fool not to, don't you think?" he answered.

The door opened behind him. His father came into the flat. "What would you be a fool about this time, Chester?" Stephen Douglas Martin asked. He was an older version of his son, also a steelworker, and a man who'd stubbornly remained a Democrat.

"I'd be a fool to think I could say anything without you making a crack about it," Chester replied.

His sister said, "He met a girl."

"Happens to a lot of people," his father observed. "Well, to a lot of fellows, anyhow." He turned to Chester. "Come on, boy, tell me more. Who is she? What does she do? How did you meet her? Why didn't you tell me about it sooner?"

"How could I tell you about it sooner when it only just now happened?" Martin asked in some irritation. "Her name's Rita. She's a typist. I met her at the polling place. There. Are you happy now?"

"I don't know." His father looked as surprised as his sister had. "This all sounds pretty sudden."

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Chester said. "I didn't propose to her. All I did was ask for her telephone number."

"Ask for whose telephone number?" his mother asked. Louisa Martin had heard her husband come in, where she hadn't heard her son. She hurried out from the kitchen to give them both a peck on the cheek.

Chester told the whole story over again for the third time. By then, he'd started to feel as if it had happened to somebody else. His mother exclaimed. So did his father, in chorus with her. They sounded pleased and dubious at the same time.

At the supper table, over a pork roast stuffed with cabbage, his mother said, "It really is about time you settled down, son, and started raising a family of your own."

He rolled his eyes. "I haven't even asked if she wants to go to a picture show with me, and you've already got me married off."

"You shouldn't rush into things with a girl you just met," his father said.

He could have pointed out that he wasn't rushing into anything. He could have, but he didn't. What point? Neither his father nor his mother would pay the least attention. He was sure of that. He changed the subject: "I wish we had one of those wireless machines. Then we could find out who's winning the election tonight without waiting for the morning paper."

"They're so expensive," his mother said.

"They're less than they were last year," Chester said.

"Maybe they'll be still less next year, or the year after that," his mother said. "If they are, maybe I'll think about getting one. But I've got better things to do with a few hundred dollars right now than to put them into a cabinet that sits there and makes noise all the time."

"It's not just noise, Mother," Sue said. "It's music and people talking and all sorts of exciting things."

"I think it's nothing but a fad, myself," Stephen Douglas Martin said. "After all, once you've heard a band playing John Philip Sousa marches once, how many more times are you going to want to?"

"You could hear something different the next time," Chester said.

"Yes, but are there enough different new things to put on the wireless every hour of the day, every day of the week, every week of the year?" His father shook his head. "I don't think so."

Since Chester had no idea whether there would be or not-and since he didn't think his father had any idea, either-he didn't argue. He said, "I could go over to the Socialists' hall and find out."

"Well, if you want to," his mother said, her tone suggesting she would sooner he stayed.

In the end, he did stay. He'd already put in a long, hard day, one made longer and harder by voting and by walking back to the flat after he'd met Rita Habicht. He went to sleep in his cramped little bedroom. Whenever he thought about how crowded things were, he remembered three years of sleeping in the trenches, sometimes under rain or snow. Compared to that, this didn't look so bad.

In the morning, newsboys hawked papers with big, black headlines: SINCLAIR REELECTED! They shouted out the same thing. Chester felt like cheering; his father, no doubt, would be irate. His father could lump it, for all of him. Four more years to show the country what we can do, he thought, and went off to his own dangerous, backbreaking job whistling a cheery tune.

C incinnatus Driver was sure he was the happiest black man in Des Moines, Iowa. Des Moines didn't have a whole lot of black men in it, happy or otherwise, but he would have bet he led the parade. The reason he was a man with a song in his heart was simple: he'd just found the perfect Christmas present for his son, Achilles.

The tin fire engine was a foot and a half long, with rubber tires, a ladder that went up almost a yard, a bell that made a godawful racket, and half a dozen lead firemen. He was sure Achilles, who was nine, would play with it not just for hours but for weeks. Grinning, he carried it over to the clerk behind the cash register.

"That'll be a dollar and ninety-nine cents," the woman said briskly.

"Here y'are, ma'am." Cincinnatus gave her two dollar bills. His accent was softer than the sharp local English; along with his family, he'd left Covington, Kentucky, not long after the war ended. He'd hoped he'd left his troubles behind him. So far, his hopes looked like coming true.

"Here's your change." The clerk handed him a penny. She smiled. "I hope your little boy enjoys it."

"Thank you kindly, ma'am." Cincinnatus smiled, too. He wouldn't have got so much politeness from a white woman in Covington. He might not have got it here, either. He'd seen that-some places, they wouldn't sell him things till they saw his money. But, on the whole, Negroes didn't have too hard a time in Des Moines. They were thin enough on the ground here to be reckoned a novelty, not a menace.

Still smiling, Cincinnatus took the fire engine out to his truck. The machine was a beat-up White of Great War vintage. Cincinnatus had driven such snorting beasts all through Kentucky and down into Tennessee during the war, in the service of the U.S. Army. Now he worked on his own behalf-and a White made in 1916 or 1917 was, by the end of 1924, something less than it had been.

He didn't care. The truck was a lot better than the spavined Duryea he'd driven from Covington to Des Moines. It held a lot. He was able to make a good many repairs on it himself; he'd had practice. And, when he couldn't fix the truck, he'd found a mechanic who was both cheap and competent: an immigrant from Italy for whom a black man was but one wonder of a wonder-filled America.

He cranked the engine to get it to turn over. One of these days, I'm going to put a self-starter in this machine. He'd had that thought before, too. But the motor hadn't had a chance to cool down, so cranking it was easy. He got behind the wheel, trod on the clutch, put the truck in gear, and drove off. Night fell as he made his way to the northwestern side of town. The White was of recent enough vintage to have electric headlights and not acetylene lamps; he could turn them on from the cabin, and didn't have to get out and fiddle with matches.

The truck wheezed to a stop in front of the apartment building where his family lived. The motor shook and coughed a couple of times after he took out the ignition key, then fell silent. He got out. Wrapping the toy fire engine in some burlap, he carried it into the building.

In the lobby, Joey Chang, who ran a laundry and whose family lived on the floor above Cincinnatus, nodded to him and said, "Hello."

"Hello, Joey," he answered, doing his best to hide a smile. The Chinaman seemed as exotic to him as a mere Negro did to an Italian immigrant. There might have been a couple of Chinese in Covington back when it was part of the CSA. On the other hand, there might not have, too. He'd never eaten chop suey before coming to Des Moines. He liked Chinese food. It was cheap and good and something out of the ordinary.

As soon as he walked into his own flat, Cincinnatus was glad he'd camouflaged the fire engine, because Achilles sat at the kitchen table doing homework. The boy pointed. "What you got, Pa?"

"None o' your business. Get back to work," Cincinnatus answered. Back in Covington, before the war, there'd been no public schools for Negroes. Finding school not only present but required in Des Moines had made a lot of the hardships in uprooting his family worthwhile. Wagging a finger at Achilles, he went on, "I had to sneak around to learn my letters. You got help. I expect you to take advantage of it."

"I am, Pa," his son said. "But you still haven't told me what you got there." Achilles' accent was an odd mix of Kentucky and Iowa. Cincinnatus knew he would have said ain't told me himself. He also knew that was wrong, but it seemed natural to him in a way it didn't to the boy.

He went into the kitchen, where Elizabeth had a beef tongue boiling in a pot with potatoes and carrots, and with some cloves that gave the air a spicy smell. She too pointed to the burlap-wrapped toy. "What's that?"

Cincinnatus showed her-the fire engine wasn't for her, after all. Her eyes widened. She nodded. He said, "You got a place in here where we can hide this till the day?"

"Right here." She opened a cabinet and pointed to a top shelf. He stood on tiptoe to push the fire engine back as far as he could. That done, he gave her a kiss. She smiled, as if to say something might come of that later on.

Then Amanda toddled into the kitchen and wrapped her arms around his shins. "Dada!" she said. Hard to believe she was a year and a half old now. Above her head, Cincinnatus and Elizabeth exchanged wry, tired grins. Something might not come of Elizabeth's inviting smile, too. Before Amanda was born, Cincinnatus had forgotten, perhaps mercifully, how much of a handful a baby in the house was. She'd reminded him, though.

"Oh, I almost forgot," Elizabeth said. "We got us a letter today."

"A letter?" Cincinnatus said in surprise. "Who from?" Most-almost all-the mail they got was either bills or advertising circulars. Only a few people they knew, either friends or relatives, could read and write.

For that matter, Elizabeth could hardly read and write herself. Till Achilles started going to school, she hadn't even known the ABCs. But he'd taught her some of what he'd learned. Now she said, "It came from Covington, I know that. But I can't make out who sent it, and I didn't open it up. Didn't reckon I could cipher it out myself, and I didn't know if it was anything Achilles ought to see, you know what I mean?"

"Sure do." Cincinnatus looked in the icebox and took out a bottle of beer. Iowa was a dry state that took being dry seriously. The beer was unofficial, illegal homebrew, made by Mr. Chang upstairs. Till he came to Des Moines, Cincinnatus hadn't know that Chinamen drank beer, let alone made it themselves. As he yanked the cork out of the bottle, he said, "Why don't you let me have a look at it now?"

"I do that," she said. When she left the kitchen, her skirt swirled, showing off her ankles and several inches of shapely calf. She'd finally given in to what everyone else was wearing these days. Cincinnatus thought the new styles risque, but that didn't keep him from looking. On the contrary. She brought back the envelope. "Here."

Sure enough, it bore a Covington postmark. Cincinnatus tried to puzzle out the return address, but couldn't. He took a clasp knife from his pocket and opened the envelope. Looking up from the letter, he asked Elizabeth, "You recollect a fellow name of Hadrian, moved next door to my folks a little after the war ended?"

She thought, then nodded. "Believe I do. Never had nothin' much to do with him, though. How come? What's he say?"

"Says Pa's sick, mighty sick, maybe fixin'-to-die sick." Cincinnatus wished he'd never got the letter. He went on, "Says Ma asked him to write me, get me to come back down there 'fore Pa goes." Tears blurred his vision. His father wasn't an old man, but anybody could take sick.

"Mama Livia, she can't very well write you her own self," Elizabeth said. That was true; Cincinnatus' mother and his father, Seneca, were both illiterate. They'd grown up as slaves, back in the days when teaching a Negro his letters was against the law.

"I know." Cincinnatus took a long pull at the beer bottle, wishing it were something stronger. He read the letter again, as if expecting it to say something different the second time around. That was foolish, but who wasn't foolish sometimes?

"What you gwine do?" Elizabeth asked.

"I got to go," Cincinnatus said. "We got enough money to pull through if I'm gone a week or two." They had more money than that, even after he'd bought the bigger truck. He'd always salted away as much as he could. Even when Kentucky was still a Confederate state, he'd done his best to get ahead, and his best had been about as good as a Negro's could be in the CSA.

Elizabeth nodded. "All right. You take the truck or you ride a train?"

"Train," he answered. "Hadrian, he say to wire him when I come, an' he'll meet me at the station." He finished his beer in a couple of big gulps. "Wish he would've wired me. I be there by now." He sighed. "Letter's cheaper, I reckon. What can you do?"

"I say prayers Sunday an' every night for your father," Elizabeth said. "Papa Seneca, he's a nice man."

"Yeah," Cincinnatus said tonelessly. As people will, he'd come to take his father for granted. The idea that the older man might not be there forever-might not be there for very much longer-hit him hard, and all the harder because it caught him by surprise. Everything had been going so well. Everything still was-for him. But with his father sick, that didn't matter any more.

There was a Western Union office in the Des Moines train station. Cincinnatus sent Hadrian a telegram from there. A couple of hours later, he boarded an eastbound train. A crow flying from Des Moines to Covington would have gone about six hundred miles. The train took a longer route, and took its own sweet time getting there. It seemed to stop at every worthless little town along the way, too. Cincinnatus stared out the window, now and then drumming his fingers on his trouser leg in impatience.

On a train in the CSA, the attendants would have been black men. Here, they were almost all foreigners of one sort or another. They muttered things about Cincinnatus that he couldn't understand, but he didn't think any of them were compliments.

The Confederates had dropped the old railroad bridge from Cincinnati to Covington into the Ohio when the Great War broke out. The train rattled over its replacement in the wee small hours. Cincinnatus yawned and knuckled his eyes. He hadn't slept a wink. He hoped his father was still breathing.

He had no trouble spotting Hadrian: his family's neighbor was the only Negro waiting on the platform. He didn't look to have slept much, either. "C-come along with me," he said. Cincinnatus didn't remember him stammering. He had a nervous tic under one eye, too.

No sooner had they got off the platform than four big, tough-looking white men in plain clothes surrounded them. "You fuckin' bastard!" Cincinnatus exclaimed. He knew he'd been betrayed-he just didn't know to whom yet. Hadrian miserably hung his head. What had these people done or threatened to get him to write that letter?

They all piled into a big Oldsmobile. When it stopped in front of the city hall, Cincinnatus knew who had him. It didn't make him feel any better-worse, in fact. "Come along, boy," one of the whites snapped. He'd probably been a cop in the days when Covington belonged to the CSA.

However unwillingly, Cincinnatus went. The man waiting for him inside gave him a smile that might have come from a hunting hound. His luminous, yellow-brown eyes strengthened the resemblance. "Howdy, Cincinnatus," Luther Bliss said. "Been a while, hasn't it?" The head of the Kentucky State Police-the Kentucky secret police-didn't wait for an answer. He turned to Cincinnatus' hard-faced escorts and spoke three words: "Lock him up."

E very once in a while, Nellie Jacobs would take her Order of Remembrance out of its velvet box and look at it. She didn't wear it much-where would a woman who ran a coffee shop in Washington, D.C., have occasion to wear the USA's highest civilian decoration? The last time she'd put it on was for Teddy Roosevelt's funeral. Roosevelt had presented the medal to her with his own hands. He'd given Nellie's daughter, Edna, a medal, too, but hers was only second class, not first.

She didn't know she was being a spy, Nellie thought. Lord, she wouldn't have cared if the Confederates held Washington forever. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way.

The eagle on the Order of Remembrance stared fiercely back at her. Of course, Roosevelt hadn't known the whole story, any more than Edna had. Roosevelt hadn't known she'd stuck a knife into Bill Reach, the U.S. spymaster in Washington. Nobody knew that, nobody but Nellie. Not even her husband knew, and Hal Jacobs had reported directly to Reach.

"He had it coming, the filthy son of a bitch," Nellie muttered. It wasn't that Bill Reach had been a drunkard, though he had. But he'd also been a lecher and, in his younger days, a man who'd had-and paid for-assignations with Nellie. He'd thought he could keep on having them, too, if he just slapped down the cash.

Nellie's long oval face settled into the lines of disapproval it had worn so often since she'd escaped the demimonde. Shows how much he knew, she thought. She'd fought hard for respectability. She hadn't been about to throw it away for a drunken bastard and his red, throbbing prick. One of the things she liked about her husband was that he didn't trouble her in the bedroom very often. Old men have their advantages.

Her mouth twisted. You're no spring chicken yourself, she thought. She'd turned fifty earlier in the year. She felt every year of her age, too. It wasn't so much that she was going gray, though she was. That aside, she looked a good deal younger than her years. But keeping up with a four-year-old would have made anybody feel her years.

As if the thought of Clara were enough to make her get into mischief, she called, "Ma! Help me tie my shoe!"

"I'm coming," Nellie said. Her back twinged when she got off her bed. Clara couldn't tie her shoes yet. Sometimes she insisted on trying anyhow. Four-year-olds were nothing if not independent. That they drove their parents mad never once crossed their minds, of course. That was part of their… charm.

"I'm going to go out and play," Clara declared when Nellie hurried into her bedroom.

"Not yet, you're not." Nellie surveyed the damage. "Oh, child, what have you gone and done?"

Actually, the damage itself left little room for doubt. Clara had put her shoes on the wrong feet and then tied as many knots as she could in the shoelaces. She couldn't manage a bow, but knots she had no trouble with. The shoes came up well over her ankles; they were almost boots, and fit snugly even before Clara created her knotty problem.

Nellie couldn't even get the shoes off her daughter till she untied some-several-of the knots. Clara didn't want to hold still for the process. Four-year-olds didn't hold still unless they were asleep or coming down with something. Nellie asked her twice not to squirm. That failing, she swatted Clara's bottom. Her daughter squalled, but then did hold still… for a little while.

It was, Nellie decided, long enough. It was, at any rate, long enough for her to get the shoes on their proper feet and tie a couple of bows. "Play on the sidewalk in front of the shop here," Nellie warned. "Don't you go out in the street. I'm going to come downstairs and keep an eye on you. If you even go near the street, you'll get a spanking like you'll never forget. No, you'll get two-one from me, and one from your pa."

"I promise, Ma." Clara solemnly crossed her heart. "Hope to die."

No, it's so you don't die, Nellie thought, but Clara wouldn't have had the faintest idea what she was talking about. "Let's go downstairs," Nellie said. Clara took her favorite toy, a rag doll named Louise, and went down to the ground floor at what Nellie would have reckoned a suicidal pace. Nellie followed more sedately.

Nellie turned away for a moment to get a whisk broom and a dust pan. The coffee shop was closed on Sundays, of course; Washington's blue laws were as strict as any in the USA. But the more cleaning she did now, the less she would have to worry about come Monday morning, when she'd also be busy brewing coffee, frying eggs and ham and bacon and potatoes, toasting bread, and serving her customers. Her door might be shut, but she didn't reckon Sunday a day of rest.

Before Nellie had taken more than three steps, brakes screeched out in the street. Metal crumpled. Glass tinkled musically. It reminded her of artillery bombardments during the war, but wasn't so dramatic.

Or it wouldn't have been… "Oh, God in heaven!" Nellie said, and dashed outside. "Clara!" she shouted. "Where are you, Clara?"

No answer. Fear rising in her like the tide, Nellie stared at the accident. A Ford and a Packard had locked horns. The Ford, predictably, was the loser. Steam gushed from its ruptured radiator. Its driver descended to the street holding a handkerchief to his head, which he'd bloodied when he greeted his windshield face first.

"Clara!" Nellie called again. "Dear God, please…" The last time she'd prayed had been during the U.S. artillery barrage that nearly leveled Washington before the Confederates finally, sullenly, drew back into Virginia. God must have heard that prayer-she'd come through alive. But everything back then seemed small and unimportant when set against her daughter's safety. "Clara!"

The gray-haired man who'd been driving the Packard had to kick at his door before it would open. He didn't seem badly hurt, and started shouting at the other man: "You idiot! You moron! You thumb-fingered baboon!"

"Fuck you, Grandpa," the man with the bloodied face replied. "You drove right into me."

"Liar!"

"Liar yourself!"

Neither one of them said anything about a little girl, and neither one of them paid any attention to Nellie. "Clara!" she called once more. She didn't want to look closely at the accident, for fear she would see little legs sticking out from under a wheel. "Clara!"

"Boo!"

Nellie sprang a foot in the air. There stood her daughter, coming out from behind the stout iron base of a street lamp. "Thank you, Jesus," Nellie whispered. She ran to her little girl and held her tight.

"Fooled you, Mama!" Clara said happily. "I got down there and- Ow! " Nellie applied her hand to the part on which her daughter was in the habit of sitting, much harder than she had before they went outside. Clara started to howl. "What's that for, Mama? I didn't do nothing!"

"Oh, yes, you did," Nellie said, and spanked her again. "You scared me out of a year's growth, that's what you did. I was afraid one of those cars ran over you, do you know that?"

Clara, at the moment, knew nothing except that her fanny hurt. She tried to get away, and had no luck whatsoever. Nellie dragged her back into the coffee shop. "Louise!" Clara wailed.

Although Nellie was tempted to leave the doll out on the sidewalk, that would have cost more tears and hysterics than it was worth. She snarled, "You stay here. Don't move a muscle!" at Clara, and then went back to retrieve Louise. She all but threw the rag doll at her daughter. "Here!"

"Thank you, Mama," Clara said in an unwontedly small voice. She hadn't moved a muscle, and evidently had figured out this was no time to say or do anything that might land her in more trouble.

When Nellie's husband came back from a friend's later that morning, Nellie told him the whole story. Clara looked at him in silent appeal; he was often softer than her mother. But not this time. Hal Jacobs sighed, wuffling out his white mustache. "Clara, you must not play games like that," he said. "Your mother thought you were hurt, maybe even killed."

"I'm sorry, Pa," Clara said. Maybe she even meant it. She seemed more inclined to be good for Hal than she was for Nellie. She takes after her half sister, Nellie thought sourly. Edna had always done what she wanted, not what Nellie wanted. She'd taken great pleasure in flaunting it, too.

And she'd married well in spite of everything. When she came to visit as the sun was setting, she wore a maroon silk dress that daringly showed her legs halfway to her knees. Nellie, who'd had a really gamy past, had spent more than thirty years trying to live it down. Edna, in keeping with young people everywhere these days-or so it seemed to Nellie-flaunted her fast life.

"Be good, Armstrong," she told her son. Armstrong Grimes-Edna's husband, Merle, came from the same town in Michigan as General Custer-was two, only a couple of years younger than Clara, his aunt. Having told him to be good, Edna let him run wild-that seemed to be her idea of how to raise children.

"How are you, dear?" Nellie asked, pouring Edna a cup of coffee.

"Couldn't be better, Ma," Edna answered expansively. She looked like a twenty years' younger version of her mother, but without the pinched, anxious expression Nellie so often wore. She still thought she could beat the game of life. Nellie was convinced nobody could. But Edna had her reasons. She went on, "Merle just got himself promoted in the Reconstruction Agency. That's another forty dollars a month, and you'd best believe it'll come in handy."

"Bully," Nellie said, meaning perhaps a third of it. She'd had to fret and scrape for every dime she ever made-she'd had to do worse things than fret and scrape for some of the dimes she'd made before Edna was born. As far as she could see, her daughter had things easy but didn't begin to guess how lucky she was.

Before Edna could go on bragging, a shriek rose from the direction of the kitchen. "Ma!" Clara squealed. "Armstrong just pulled my hair, Ma!"

Edna laughed. Nellie didn't. "Well, pull his back," she said.

Her older daughter bristled. A moment later, Armstrong Grimes started to cry. Then Clara shrieked again. "Ma! He bit me!"

"You going to tell her to bite him back, too?" Edna asked. Nellie glared. Children, whether four or thirty, could drive you right out of your mind.

R eggie Bartlett was a first-rate weather prophet. He looked at his boss and said, "Reckon it'll rain tomorrow."

Jeremiah Harmon looked up from the pills he was compounding. "Shoulder kicking up again?" the druggist asked.

"Sure is," Bartlett answered. "Leg, too, matter of fact. I took me a couple of aspirins, but they don't shift the ache." He'd spent the end of the war in a U.S. military hospital after catching two bullets from a machine-gun burst and getting captured down in Sequoyah. The wounds had finally healed, but their memory lingered on.

"Wouldn't surprise me if you were right." Harmon added a little water to his mix and put it in a twenty-pill mold. He swung the hinged top of the mold into place. "There we go. These'll make somebody piss like a racehorse."

"I've heard that one a million times. How do racehorses piss?" Reggie asked, and then, before his boss could, he answered his own question: "Pretty damn quick, I bet."

Jeremiah Harmon snorted. "You've always got a snappy comeback, don't you?"

"I do my best," Bartlett answered. He had an engaging grin, one that let him say things a dour man could never have got away with.

The bell over the front door jangled. A customer came in. "Help you with something, sir?" Reggie asked.

"Yes. Thanks. Chilly out there." The man came up to the counter. Bartlett wished he hadn't. His breath was so dreadful, he might not have used a toothbrush since before the Great War. Maybe, if God were kind, he'd ask about one now, or about mouthwash. But no such luck; he said, "What have you got in the way of rat poison?"

You could breathe on them, Reggie thought. That'd do the job, the way the Yankees' chlorine killed the rats in the trenches on the Roanoke front. No matter how engaging his grin, though, he knew he couldn't get away with that. Life in Richmond was too civilized for such blunt truths. "Here, let me look," he said, and pulled up a bright yellow box with an upside-down rat with X's for eyes on the front of it. "This ought to do the job."

"It'll shift 'em, will it?" the man asked, breathing decay into Reggie's face.

"Sure will, sir." Reggie drew back as far as he could, which wasn't nearly far enough. "Rats, mice, even cockroaches. You put it down, they eat it, and they die."

"Reckon I can manage that." The customer dug a hand in his pocket. Coins jingled. "How much?"

"Twenty-two cents," Bartlett said. The man gave him a quarter. He solemnly returned three pennies.

"Thanks." The fellow put them in his pocket. He took the box of rat poison and headed out the door. "Freedom!" Without waiting for an answer, he left the drugstore.

Reggie's boss looked up from the pills, which he was removing from the mold. "You showed fine patience there," he said. "I don't know if I could have done the same. I could smell him all the way over here."

"You could give a man like that a straight flush in a poker game, and he'd still find a way to lose," Bartlett said. "No wonder he's a Freedom Party man."

"His money is as good as anyone else's," Harmon said. "In fact, you can gloat if you like, because his money's going into my pocket, and into yours, and neither one of us can stand Jake Featherston."

"We're not fools. I hope to God we're not fools, anyway," Reggie answered. "The only thing Featherston can do is make a speech that sounds good if you're a sorry so-and-so who can't add six and five without taking off your shoes."

"I'm not going to try to tell you you're wrong-you ought to know that." Harmon looked at the clock on the wall. "Just about quitting time. Why don't you knock off a couple of minutes early? Call it a bonus for the way you dealt with that fellow."

"Thank you kindly. I don't mind if I do." Bartlett put on his coat and his fedora. "I'll see you in the morning."

"See you then." Jeremiah Harmon was busy making more pills. Reggie sometimes wondered if he ever went home at night.

The man with slit-trench breath had been right: it was chilly outside. Bartlett wished he'd brought along a pair of earmuffs. As he hurried toward the trolley stop a couple of blocks away, he went past some posters that hadn't been pasted to a half ruinous wall when he walked by it on the way to work that morning.

VOTE FREEDOM IN 1925! they shouted in red letters on a white background. Below that, in smaller type, they added, Jake Featherston talks straight. Every Wednesday on the wireless. The truth shall set you free.

"And when will you ever hear the truth from that son of a bitch?" Reggie muttered. He'd heard Jake Featherston on the stump in the very earliest days of the Freedom Party. He hadn't liked what he heard then, and he hadn't liked anything he'd heard from Featherston or the Freedom Party since.

Only difference is, Featherston was a little snake then, and he's a big snake now, Bartlett thought. But even a big snake could lose some hide now and then. Reggie hooked his fingernails under the top of one of those posters and yanked. As he'd hoped, most of it tore away. The fellows who'd hung the posters had done a fast job, a cheap job, but not a good one. They hadn't used enough paste to stick them down tight. Whistling "Dixie," he ripped down one poster after another.

He hadn't got all of them, though, before a raucous voice shouted, "Hey, you bastard, what the hell you think you're doing?"

"Taking down lies," Reggie answered calmly.

"Them ain't lies!" the man said. He was about Reggie's age, but shabby, scrawny, still wearing a threadbare butternut uniform tunic that had seen a lot of better years. Veterans down on their luck swelled the ranks of the Freedom Party. This one snarled, "You touch another one o' them posters, and I'll beat the living shit out of you."

"You don't want to try that, buddy," Bartlett said. Down came another poster. The shabby veteran howled with rage and trotted toward him. Thanks to the wounds Reggie had taken in Sequoyah, he wasn't much good either at fisticuffs or running away. He'd had run-ins with Freedom Party men before, too.

During the war, a. 45 had been an officer's weapon, nothing to speak of when set against the Tredegar rifles most ordinary soldiers carried. These days, the. 45 in a hidden holster on Reggie's belt put him in mind of an extra ace up his sleeve. He took it out and pointed it at the onrushing would-be tough guy. His two-handed grip said he knew exactly what to do with it, too.

The Freedom Party man skidded to a stop in the middle of the street, so abruptly that he flailed his arms and rocked back on his heels. The barrel of the. 45 had to look the size of a railroad tunnel as Reggie aimed it at his midriff. "I told you, you don't want to try that," Reggie said.

"You'll pay for this," the scruffy veteran said. "Everybody's gonna pay for fucking with us. You're going on a list, you-" He decided not to do any more cussing. Running your mouth at a man with a pistol when you didn't have one of your own wasn't the smartest thing you could do. Even a Freedom Party muscle man could figure that out.

"Get lost," Bartlett told him. He gestured with the. 45 to emphasize the words. "Go on down to the corner there, turn it, and keep walking. You do anything else, you'll be holding up a lily."

Face working with all the things he dared not say, the other man did as he was told. Bartlett finished tearing down the posters, then went on to the trolley stop. His only worry was that the Freedom Party man had a weapon of his own, one he hadn't had a chance to use. But the fellow had talked about beating him up, not shooting him. And he didn't reappear.

Up came the trolley, bell clanging. Reggie tossed a dime into the fare box and took a seat. The dime should have been five cents; prices weren't quite what they had been before the war. But they weren't what they had been afterwards, either-he wasn't paying a million dollars, or a billion, for the privilege of riding across town to his flat.

Nobody on the trolley car had the slightest idea who he was or what he'd just done. That suited him fine, too. He had a chance to relax a little and look out the window. Before long, the trolley passed more of those VOTE FREEDOM IN 1925! posters. Reggie's lip curled. He couldn't rip them all down, however much he wished he could.

Seven and a half years after the Great War ended, not all the destruction U.S. aeroplanes had visited on Richmond was yet repaired. Plenty of burnt-out and bombed building fronts stared at the street through window frames naked of glass; they might have been so many skulls peering out through empty eye sockets. The damnyankees made my home town into Golgotha, Bartlett thought. One of these days, we'll have to pay them back. But how?

He shivered, though the crowded trolley was warm with humanity. That was how the Freedom Party thought, and how it got its members. Haven't you had enough of war? he asked himself. Asked that way, he could hardly say no.

He got off at the shop nearest his flat. For supper, he fried up a ham steak and some potatoes. After he did the dishes-he was a fussy, neat bachelor-he read for a while and went to bed. He wouldn't have minded a wireless set, so he could listen to music or a football game, but not on the salary of a druggist's assistant.

The next day did bring a chilly drizzle. Work at the drugstore went much as the previous day had. He didn't bother telling his boss about the fuss over the posters. Jeremiah Harmon had no use for the Freedom Party, no, but Reggie didn't want him fussing like a mother hen, which was just what he would have done.

"Hey, you!" somebody called to Reggie when he walked to the trolley stop that evening. It was the veteran he'd quarreled with. He wore a disreputable hat to keep the rain off his face.

His hand went to the. 45. "Told you I didn't want you bothering me," he said.

"No bother, pal," the fellow said. He pasted on a smile as he came up to Bartlett, and he made sure he kept his hands in plain sight. "We've all got to live and let live, ain't that right?"

Reggie stared. "That's not how you talked yesterday," he said, his voice hard with suspicion. "What's wrong with you now?"

"Not a thing," the Freedom Party man said. "I just got a little hasty, is all. You went through some of the things I did, you'd get hasty, too."

"I went through plenty myself," Bartlett said. "You want to go through it again? That's what that damn Featherston's got in mind."

"No, pal. You don't understand at all," the veteran said. He still had on the same ancient tunic he'd worn the evening before.

Noticing that, Reggie didn't notice the footsteps coming up behind him till they stopped. That made him notice, and made him start to turn, his pistol coming out of the holster. Too late. He heard three shots. Two slugs hammered him in the chest. The next thing he knew, he was on the ground, reaching for the. 45 that had fallen from his fingers.

The veteran scooped it up. "Nice piece," he said, and then, grinning, "Freedom!" Reggie heard him as if from far away, and further every moment. He didn't hear the man and his friend running away at all, or anything else ever again.

Three guards came up to Cincinnatus Driver's cell. Two of them stood in the corridor, their pistols aimed at his midsection. The third opened the cell door. "Come along," he said.

"Where you takin' me?" Cincinnatus asked.

"That ain't none o' your business, boy," the guard snapped, for all the world as if Kentucky were still part of the CSA, not the USA. "Come along, you hear?"

"Yes, suh." Cincinnatus got up off his cot and came. He'd quickly learned how far he could go with these guards before they stopped talking and started persuading him by other means. One beating had been plenty to drive the lesson home: not just the beating itself, but how much they enjoyed giving it to him. If they ever decided to beat him to death, they would do it with smiles on their faces.

"Hands behind your back," the guard told him. He obeyed. The guard clicked handcuffs onto his wrists. They were cruelly tight, but Cincinnatus kept his mouth shut about that, too. Complaining just got them tightened more.

The guards marched him along the corridor. He recognized some of the men sitting or lying in their cells. Some, black like him, were Reds. Others, whites, were men who'd been Confederate diehards during the war and probably belonged to the Freedom Party nowadays. Maybe some of the other prisoners recognized him, too. If so, no one gave a sign.

"This way," one of the guards told him. They led him across the exercise yard he normally saw for an hour a week, down another corridor, and into an office. A tall, backless stool sat in front of the desk. Luther Bliss sat behind it. The guards slammed Cincinnatus down on the stool, hard.

"Here we are again," the head of the Kentucky State Police said.

"Yes, suh," Cincinnatus said. "I want a lawyer, suh." He hadn't tried that one in a while. The worst the other man could tell him was no.

Bliss' smile never touched his hunting-dog eyes. "If you was still in Des Moines, maybe you could have one," he answered. "But this here's Kentucky, and the rules are different here. This is one of the reclaimed states, and we aren't about to put up with treason or rebellion. You mess around with that stuff and you get caught, we take care of you our own way."

"I wasn't messin' around with nothin' here," Cincinnatus said bitterly. "I was just livin' my life up in Iowa till you got that sorry Hadrian nigger to write that lyin' letter to get me down here in the first place. You call that fair… suh?"

"I had you once before," Luther Bliss replied in meditative tones. "I had you, and I was going to squeeze you, and Teddy Roosevelt made me turn you loose. He made me pay you a hundred dollars out of my own pocket, too. I have… a long memory for these things, Cincinnatus."

Cincinnatus hadn't forgotten that, either, though Bliss hadn't mentioned it till now. "Do Jesus, Mr. Bliss, you want your hundred dollars back, I'll pay it to you. Just let me wire my wife an'-"

Bliss shook his head. "I get paid back with interest."

"I'll pay you interest. I got the money. I done pretty good for myself up there."

"I don't want your money. I get paid back my kind of interest."

He was what he was. His kind of interest involved pain and misery. That was what he dished out. That was what the people who told him what to do wanted him to dish out. If, every once in a while, he dished them out to people who didn't really deserve them, the people who told him what to do probably didn't mind. They might even figure he deserved a little fun on the job.

Like a hunting dog taking a scent, Luther Bliss leaned forward. "Enough chitchat. About time we get down to business, I reckon."

Before Cincinnatus could brace himself, one of the guards slapped him in the face. He tumbled off the stool and also banged his funny bone on the floor as he fell. "Why'd he do that, Mr. Bliss?" he said, slowly climbing to his feet. "I ain't done nothin' to nobody."

"You lie. Everyone lies." Luther Bliss sounded sad but certain. Policemen got used to people lying to them. Maybe they even got to where they expected it. Secret policemen probably heard and expected even more lies than any other kind. Bliss pointed to the stool. "Sit your nigger ass back down, Cincinnatus. You got to tell the truth when I ask my questions."

"You didn't ask me no questions," Cincinnatus said reproachfully. "Joe there, he jus' hauled off an' hit me."

"That's for all the lies you've already told me, and to remind you not to tell me any more," Luther Bliss answered. Again, his smile never reached his eyes. "You ought to be thankful we've gone easy on you so far."

"Easy!" Cincinnatus exclaimed. "He damn near knocked my head off." A few months in jail-and years of sparring before then-had given him and the secret policeman an odd sort of camaraderie. He could, up to a point, speak his mind without making Luther Bliss any more likely to do something dreadful to him.

Bliss nodded now. "He just thumped you a bit. Worse we've done, we've beaten you up. That ain't so much of a much, Cincinnatus, believe you me it ain't. It's a new age we're livin' in. Electricity's everywhere. You take an ordinary car battery and some wires, and you clip 'em to a man's ears, or to the skin of his belly, or maybe to his privates…"

Cincinnatus didn't want to show fear. But his mouth went dry at the thought of electricity trickling through his balls. Would he ever be able to get it up again after something like that? Please, Jesus, don't let me find out!

Meditatively, Bliss went on, "Other nice thing about that is, it doesn't leave any marks. You niggers don't show bruises as much as a white man would, but even so…" He leaned forward. "I reckon you already told me everything you know about Kennedy and Conroy and the rest of those goddamn diehards."

"Mr. Bliss, I done sung like a canary 'bout them bastards." There Cincinnatus spoke the truth. He owed no loyalty to the white men who'd done all they could to help the Confederate cause in Kentucky. They might have killed him or betrayed him to U.S. authorities, but they'd had no great hold on his loyalty. As far as he could see, any Negro who backed the Confederates from anything but compulsion was some kind of idiot.

The secret policeman pointed to him. "You're still holding out, though, when it comes to Apicius and the rest of the Reds. Like calls to like. Just like the diehards, you coons stick together."

"Do Jesus, how can I know what they're up to when I moved away years ag-" Cincinnatus got that far before the guard belted him again. This time, he was braced for it, and didn't fall off the stool. He tasted blood in his mouth.

"You don't expect me to believe anything like that, do you?" Luther Bliss sounded sad, like a preacher contemplating sinful mankind. "I ain't stupid, Cincinnatus, no matter what you think."

"I never reckoned you was." Again, Cincinnatus told the exact truth. Fear of Bliss had helped him decide to leave Kentucky, but he'd never thought the other man was dumb. Just the opposite: he didn't care to live under Bliss' magnifying glass for the rest of this days. Living under his thumb, though, was even worse.

"You get letters. You know what's going on here," the secret policeman said.

"Not hardly," Cincinnatus told him. "Don't hardly know that many folks what can read an' write. You keepin' tabs on me all the time like I reckon you been doin', you know that's true."

For a moment, he thought he'd got through to Bliss. The man's eyes narrowed. He looked thoughtful. But then, a moment before he spoke, Cincinnatus realized he was playing a part. He was building up hope in his captive only to dash it: "Well, sonny, so what? Long as you're here, you'll pay for everything you done anyways."

Cincinnatus would have been more devastated if he'd had more hope to lose. He wanted to tell Bliss where to head in. A couple of times, back in the days when he was still free, he had told Bliss where to head in. He'd enjoyed it mightily then, too. But he was paying for it now.

"What you got to tell me about them Reds?" Luther Bliss asked now.

"I done told you everything I ever knew," Cincinnatus answered. It wasn't quite true, but he didn't think Bliss knew that.

He did know what was coming next. It came. Joe and the other guards got to work on him. They enjoyed what they did, yes, but not to the point of getting carried away and doing him permanent harm: they were, in their way, professionals. It went on for a very long, painful time.

What hurt most of all, though, was a casual remark Bliss made halfway through the torment: "You might as well sing, by God. It isn't like anybody on the outside gives a damn about what happens to one miserable nigger in a Kentucky jail."

At last, the beating stopped. The guards dragged Cincinnatus back to his cell. He probably could have walked. He made himself out to be weaker and hurt worse than he really was. Maybe that made them go a little easier on him than they would have otherwise. On the other hand, maybe it didn't do a single goddamn thing.

"See you next time, boy," Joe said as his pal undid the manacles from Cincinnatus' wrists.

Cincinnatus lay on his cot like a dead man. Had Luther Bliss sent for him more often, he would have been a dead man in short order. Maybe Bliss didn't want to kill him right away. Maybe, on the other hand, the secret policeman was taking so many different vengeances, he wasn't in a hurry about finishing off any one of them.

It isn't like anybody on the outside gives a damn about what happens to one miserable nigger in a Kentucky jail. In a way, that was a lie. Cincinnatus knew as much. Elizabeth cared. Achilles cared. Amanda cared. But what could they do? They were black, too, black in a white man's country. Nobody who could do anything cared about Cincinnatus. That burned like acid. It would keep on burning long after the pain of this latest beating eased, too.

He ran his tongue over his teeth. So far, the goons had broken only one. He'd taken no new damage there today. They hadn't done anything to him this time that wouldn't fade in a couple of weeks. In the meantime… In the meantime, it's gonna hurt, and ain't nothin' you can do about it.

A cart squeaked up the corridor: supper trays. Cincinnatus wondered if he'd be able to eat. You better. You got to stay strong. A redheaded white man shoved a tray of something that smelled greasy into Cincinnatus' cell. The fellow wore the same sort of uniform as the guards who'd beaten him.

In a low voice, the redhead said, "Freedom." Cincinnatus suppressed a groan. Just what he needed-somebody with diehard sympathies mocking him. I ought to report you, you bastard. Luther Bliss'd make you pay. But then the fellow went on, "We'll get you out." He pushed the cart away. Cincinnatus stared after him. Did he mean that? And, if he did, whose side was he really on?