Trying to cover that embarrassment, Dowling held out the bottle and asked, “Want some for yourself?”
“No, thank you, sir,” Captain Toricelli answered-not primly, but not in a way that suggested he’d change his mind, either. “We have a message from General MacArthur inquiring how the pullback is going in this corps.”
“Tell General MacArthur to-” Dowling broke off. If he went on in that vein, Toricelli would think it was the whiskey talking. That was nonsense. Dowling needed no booze to despise Daniel MacArthur. Still… “Tell General MacArthur to rest assured that we are complying with his orders and the War Department’s.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. That’s well phrased.” Toricelli’s dark eyes glinted. He knew what Dowling had been on the point of saying. But Dowling hadn’t said it. Neither he nor the half pint could get the blame. Toricelli saluted and left the room.
Dowling eyed the little bottle. It was almost as if the narrow escape gave him the license for another drink. He shook his head and put the bottle back in the desk drawer. It would be there when he really needed it. If he drank when he didn’t really need it… That was how trouble started.
Off in the distance, somebody’s artillery opened up. He thought those were U.S. guns. With fewer foot soldiers on the ground, artillery had to take up some of the slack. Of course, some of his artillery was getting pulled west to try to stop the Confederates, too.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, the guns fell silent. Dowling hoped that meant they’d smashed whatever they were aiming at. If not, some wireless man would rush in with news of a new disaster. And Dowling would have to try to put the pieces back together-and take the blame if Humpty Dumpty remained bits of eggshell.
His eyes went to the large-scale map of Virginia on the wall. He didn’t like the way his right flank was vulnerable. He never had. General Patton, the Confederates’ answer to Irving Morrell, had roared out of the mountains trying to roll him up. Patton hadn’t managed it. Dowling took a certain amount of pride in the way he’d defended against the CSA’s armored wizard, but they didn’t pin medals on your chest for losing only a few square miles. Often that deserved a medal, but it never got one.
If Patton or some other Confederate hotshot tried charging out of the mountains again, could Dowling’s corps hold the enemy again? He muttered unhappily. If the Confederates hit him as hard as they had the last time, he probably couldn’t. But he brightened a little a moment later. He might not have the wherewithal to defend that he’d had before, but he was pretty damn sure the boys in butternut couldn’t mount the same kind of attack as they had then. They seemed to be putting everything they had into the push through Ohio and into Pennsylvania.
He looked at the map again, then slowly nodded to himself. Ever since the war started, people had been saying that whoever could mount two big drives at once would likely win. So far, neither side had come close. Logic said the United States had the better chance. They had more men and more resources. They also had more problems. The Confederates had a smoldering Negro uprising to worry about; their response seemed to be massacre. The United States had to flabble about the Mormons, and now the Canadians, the Japanese in the Pacific, and the really mad naval struggle in the North Atlantic. With all the sideshows, they couldn’t concentrate on the main event.
Captain Toricelli came in again. “Yes? What is it?” Dowling asked with a sinking feeling. His adjutant could bear bad tidings at least as well as a wireless operator.
But Toricelli only asked, “Sir, do you know a Miss Ophelia Clemens?”
“The reporter? I should say I do,” Dowling answered. “I spoke with her outside General MacArthur’s headquarters not more than a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact. Why?”
“Because she just pulled up in front of this building, sir,” Toricelli said. “I doubt like the dickens she’s here to talk to me.”
“Send her in. Send her in,” Dowling said. “How subversive do you think I can be?”
“I couldn’t begin to guess.” By Toricelli’s expression, though, he feared for the worst.
When Ophelia Clemens marched into Dowling’s office, she looked him in the eye and said, “General, I’d murder somebody for a drink.”
“Not me, I hope.” Dowling opened his desk drawer and, with the air of a vaudeville conjuror, produced the half pint. “Here you are, ma’am. At your service.”
“God bless you,” Ophelia Clemens said. “I hoped I could find a St. Bernard in all these Alps.” After that rhetorical outburst, she unscrewed the cap and swigged like a man. She eyed the bottle in her hand with a certain amount of respect. “That’s what they call panther piss, isn’t it?”
“Something like that,” Dowling allowed. “It sure isn’t sipping whiskey.”
She handed the half pint back to him. When he put it away without drinking, she said, “Keep it around just for poisoning visitors, do you?”
“By no means, ma’am. You misunderstand me. I’m about half an hour ahead of you, that’s all. And what besides bartender duty can I do for you on this none too lovely day?”
“Well, I’ve got my own cigarettes,” she replied, and lit one to prove it. “I don’t suppose you could spare me some truth?”
Dowling snorted. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”
“If you had it, I think you might give it to me,” Ophelia Clemens told him. “That’s more than I can say about most of the people in your line of work I know.”
“You flatter me,” he said. “Keep it up. I love it.”
“I’ll give you the reporter’s ultimate flattery, then,” she said. “How would you like to be ‘a reliable source’?”
Dowling knew what that meant: somebody who shot off his mouth without getting called to account for it. At his age and station, such a chance tempted him more than a twenty-two-year-old virgin-more than a twenty-two-year-old professional, come to that. “Go ahead and ask,” he said, “and we’ll see how reliable I am.”
“All right.” Ophelia Clemens took out a spiral-bound notebook, opened it to a blank page, and poised a pencil above it. “How bad do things look in Ohio and Pennsylvania?”
“You just named Pennsylvania. Right there, that says we aren’t doing as well as we ought to be.” Dowling shook his head. “No, I take it back. That’s not fair. I don’t know what things are like on the ground over there. I have my own troubles, Lord knows. You can say things aren’t going as well as we wish they were.”
Her pencil scratched across the page. “Do you think Featherston’s going after Pittsburgh?”
“Too early to be sure, but that’s how it looks right now,” Dowling said.
“Uh-huh.” Ophelia Clemens wrote some more. “Do you know, they wouldn’t give me a straight answer in the War Department? You never heard so many variations on ‘No comment’ in all your born days. Franz Liszt couldn’t write variations like that.”
“Heh,” Dowling said doubtfully as the allusion flew over his head. Had he been up in the War Department, he would have played it cagey, too-he knew that. You could get in trouble for saying yes and being right, for saying yes and being wrong, and conversely with no as well. No comment looked pretty good under those circumstances.
“Can the Confederates take Pittsburgh?” Ophelia Clemens asked.
When Dowling got questions like that, being a “reliable source” looked a lot less enjoyable. “I hope not,” he blurted.
Scritch, scritch, scritch went the pencil point. “Can we stay in the war if they do take Pittsburgh?”
No, this wasn’t any fun at all. “I hope so,” Dowling answered. “Losing it would hurt us. We make an awful lot of steel there. But it’s not like Birmingham-it’s not just about the only place where we make steel. As far as that goes, we can hold on and hold out. Even so…”