“Oh, yes, sir,” he said. “Anything alive, this’ll shift. You don’t need to worry about that at all.”
“You make it for bugs, though.”
“That’s right.” Slattery nodded.
“But it’ll kill rats and mice,” Jeff said. C.B. Slattery nodded again. Jeff went on, “And cats and dogs?” Another nod. “And people?”
“Yes, sir. It will absolutely kill people. That’s why you’ve got to be careful when you use it,” Slattery said. “Matter of fact, the chemical’s the same one some Yankee states use to kill criminals.”
“Really? Is that a fact?” Jeff said. One more nod from Slattery. He was one of the noddingest people Jeff had ever met. “If you wanted to, you could use it to kill a whole bunch of people, then?”
“Absolutely. You absolutely could.” The chemical-company official didn’t ask why Pinkard might want to use his product, made to get rid of roaches and other pests, to dispose of large numbers of people instead. What he did say was, “If you use large quantities, you’d be entitled to a bulk discount.”
“That’s nice. That’s white of you, matter of fact,” Jeff said. C.B. Slattery laughed uproariously. He didn’t ask what color the people who might die were. Pretty plainly, he already knew.
Somewhere in Camp Determination, a work gang of Negroes chanted rhythmically as they carried or dug or did whatever the guards told them to do. Slattery smiled at that, too, the way he might have smiled at a bear playing with a medicine ball in a zoo.
The shape of his smile decided Jeff. This wasn’t a man who would balk at what needed discussing here. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, then,” Jeff said. “Can your firm design us a facility, I guess you’d call it, that would let us reduce the camp population without leaving the niggers still here any the wiser about what was going on inside?” He’d talked about killing people when it was in the abstract. When it got down to something he might actually do, his own words turned abstract. Reducing population didn’t seem to mean so much.
“My firm? No, sir. Sorry, but that’s not what we do. We make insecticide,” Slattery answered. Pinkard muttered under his breath; he hadn’t expected a flat refusal. But when the bright young man continued, he discovered he hadn’t got one, either: “But I can put you in touch with some design outfits that will help you along those lines. Just as a guess, I’d say you’d want to call it a delousing station or a bath-house or something like that. Sound reasonable?”
“Sounds sensible. I was thinking along those lines myself, to tell you the truth,” said Pinkard, who hadn’t been. He picked up a pencil and wrote, Delousing? Baths? on a sheet of foolscap. Maybe Slattery saw through him, maybe not. He went on, “Now, these outfits you’re talking about-they in Arkansas like you? If I have my druthers, I want to work with somebody local, you know what I mean?”
“I sure do, and I respect that,” Slattery said quickly. Respecting it didn’t mean agreeing with it, but did mean he’d go along if he wanted the Cyclone Chemical Company to get the business. When Jefferson Pinkard wanted his druthers these days, he damn well got them. He remembered wishing for them in the last war, wishing and not getting. A lot of things about growing older were damned unpleasant (his last visit to the dentist leaped to mind). But if you were halfway decent at what you did, you got your druthers a lot more often than you had when you were younger. As if to underscore that, C.B. Slattery continued, “Naturally, we work with people from Little Rock a lot of the time. But I do believe a couple of these outfits have branches in Texas-Dallas or Houston, I’m not quite sure which.”
“Well, you can wire me the details when you get home,” Jeff said, and it was Slattery’s turn to write himself a note. “I’ll do some checking on my own, too.” If Slattery thought he could set up some sweetheart deal, maybe rig kickbacks for Cyclone Chemical, he could damn well think again.
He wasn’t fool enough to let on that he’d had anything like that in mind. “You go right ahead, sir. I think you’ll find out the firms I recommend are competitive in quality and in price.” He paused to pull out a pack of cigarettes, offer one to Jeff, and then stick one in his own mouth. Once they both had lights, he remarked, “Something else occurs to me.”
“What’s that?”
“You might want to site this, ah, facility away from the main camp and take prisoners to it. You’d be less likely to spook the spooks that way, if you know what I mean.” Slattery had a disarming grin.
He also had a point. Jeff scribbled some more on that sheet of foolscap. “Could be,” he said. It applied the same principle as telling Negroes they were going to another camp when they got into the trucks from which they would never get out. “We could move ’em right on through, just like a… factory.”
The word that first crossed his mind, that caused the pause, was slaughterhouse. He didn’t want to say that, any more than he wanted to talk about killing Negroes rather than reducing population. It made him think too openly about what this camp was for.
“You sure could.” C.B. Slattery fairly radiated enthusiasm. “It’d be a privilege for my firm to be affiliated with such a patriotic enterprise. Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Jeff echoed automatically. “You’ll be hearing from us. I expect some of those designers may, too, so get me that word quick as you can. Like I say, though, I’ll check out some other outfits in these parts along with ’em.”
“You know your business best.” No, Slattery wasn’t about to argue. No matter who built the places where the Negroes went in and didn’t come out, the chemical that made sure they didn’t come out would come from his company. He said, “Freedom!” one more time and hurried out of Pinkard’s office. By the way he moved, his next appointment was just as urgent and just as important as this one. It wasn’t likely to be, but treating it that way made him a good businessman.
Jeff got up and watched him leave the administrative center, then went back to his desk. He picked up the telephone and called Richmond. He wanted Ferdinand Koenig knowing what was going on every step of the way. The Attorney General heard him out-he did try to keep things short-and then said, “This all sounds pretty good. Only one thing bothers me a little.”
“What’s that?” Jeff asked. Whatever bothered Jake Featherston’s right-hand man was guaranteed to be dead on arrival.
“This whole business of building the, uh, fumigator-whatever the hell you want to call it-away from the camp. That means we’re using trucks again. I thought one of the big points of building the fumigator in the first place was getting away from the goddamn trucks.”
“Well, yes, sir,” Jeff said reluctantly. “Only problem I see with building it here is, the niggers won’t take long to figure out this is the end of the line if we do. We’ll have more trouble from ’em in that case. Camp’s been pretty quiet so far, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“I understand that, but we’ve got to think about efficiency, too,” Koenig said. “If we can give your trucks back to the Army-minus your exhaust hookup, of course”-he laughed, which meant Pinkard had to do the same-“that’ll help the war effort a lot. We need all the transport we can get right now, what with the big push into Pennsylvania. And you’ve got a good solid perimeter around the camp, right? You’ve got guards who know what they’re doing, right?”
“Well, yes, sir,” Jeff repeated. He couldn’t very well say the camp didn’t have a solid perimeter, or that the guards didn’t know what the hell they were doing. If he said that, he wouldn’t stay camp commandant for another five minutes, and he wouldn’t deserve to, either.
“All right, then,” the Attorney General said. “Any trouble comes up, I reckon you’ll be able to handle it. A few bursts from the guards’ submachine guns should settle most troubles pretty damn quick. If they don’t, well, the machine guns in the towers outside the barbed wire sure as hell will.”