"It's all right, sir. I know the railroads on the way down here are really screwed up," the noncom said. "I've got an auto waiting for you. Can I grab your duffel? Colonel Einsiedel said you were coming off a wound."
"Afraid I am." Pound took the green-gray canvas sack off his shoulder and gave it to the sergeant. "Sorry to put you to the trouble, but if you're kind enough to offer I'll take you up on it."
"Don't worry about it, sir. All part of the service." The sergeant was in his early twenties. He'd probably been a private when the war started, if he'd been in the Army at all. Michael Pound knew what his curious glance meant. You're the oldest goddamn first looey I ever saw. But the man didn't say anything except, "I've got it. Follow me."
The motorcar was a commandeered Birmingham. The sergeant drove him past the bomb-damaged State Capitol and then north and east up to Clark Park, where the armored regiment was bivouacked. It wasn't a long drive at all. "Tallahassee's the capital of Florida, isn't it?" Pound said. "I thought there'd be more of it."
"It's only about a good piss wide, sure as hell," the sergeant agreed. "Christ, the Legislature only meets for a coupla months in odd-numbered years. We had to call 'em back into session so we could tell 'em what to do."
"How did they like that?" Pound asked.
"Everybody hates us. We're Yankees," the sergeant said matter-of-factly. "But if anybody fucks with us, we grease him. It's about that simple. All of our barrels have a.50-caliber machine gun mounted in front of the commander's cupola, and we carry lots of canister, not so much HE and AP. We're here to smash up mobs, and we damn well do it."
"Sounds good to me." Pound had wished for a machine gun of his own plenty of times in the field. Now he'd have one-and a.50-caliber machine gun could chew up anything this side of a barrel. And if God wanted a shotgun, He'd pick up a barrel's cannon firing canister. Canister wouldn't just smash up a mob-it would exterminate one.
Barbed wire surrounded Clark Park. So did signs with skulls and crossbones on them and a blunt warning message: HEADS UP! MINES! U.S. guards carrying captured C.S. automatic rifles talked to the sergeant before swinging back a stout, wire-protected gate and letting the Birmingham through.
"Had trouble with auto bombs or people bombs?" Pound asked. "Do they shoot mortars at you in the middle of the night?"
"They tried that shit once or twice, sir," his driver answered. "When we take hostages now, we're up to killing a hundred for one. They know we'd just as soon see 'em dead, so they don't mess with us like they did when we first got here. Now they've seen we really mean it."
"That sounds good to me, too." Pound was and always had been a firm believer in massive retaliation.
The sergeant drove him up to a tent flying a regimental flag-a pugnacious turtle on roller skates wearing a helmet and boxing gloves-that looked as if some Hollywood animation studio had designed it. Colonel Nick Einsiedel looked as if some Hollywood casting office had designed him. He was tall and blond and handsome, and he wore the ribbons for a Silver Star and a Purple Heart.
"Good to have you with us," he told Pound. "I did some asking around-you've got a hell of a record. Shame you didn't make officer's rank till the middle of the war."
"I liked being a sergeant, sir," Pound said. "But this isn't so bad." As Einsiedel laughed, he went on, "How can I be most useful here, sir?"
"That's the kind of question I like to hear," the regimental CO replied. "We're trying to be tough but fair-or fair but tough, if you'd sooner look at it that way."
"Sir, if I've got plenty of canister for the big gun and a.50 up on my turret along with the other machine guns, you can call it whatever you want," Pound said. "The people down here will damn well do what I tell 'em to, and that's what counts."
Colonel Einsiedel smiled. "You've got your head on straight, by God."
"I've been through the mill. Maybe it amounts to the same thing."
"Wouldn't be surprised," Einsiedel said. "One thing we don't do unless we can't help it, though-we don't send a barrel out by itself. Too many blind spots, too good a chance for somebody to throw a Featherston Fizz at you."
That didn't sound so good. "I thought the locals were supposed to be too scared of us to try any crap," Pound said.
"They are-supposed to be," the regimental CO answered. "But in case they aren't, we don't want to lead them into temptation, either. Does that suit you?"
"Oh, yes, sir. I want to know what I'm getting into, that's all," Pound said.
Einsiedel gave him a crooked grin. "Whatever you get into down here, make sure you go to a pro station afterwards, 'cause chances are you'll end up with a dose if you don't."
"Understand, sir," Pound said, thinking back to his joke with the doctor before he got released. "Uh-is there an officers' brothel in town?"
"Officially, no. Officially, all the brown-noses back up in the USA would pitch a fit if we did things like that. Unofficially, there are two. Maude's is around the corner from the Capitol. Miss Lucy's is a couple of blocks farther south. I like Maude's better, but you can try 'em both."
"I expect I will. All the comforts of home-or of a house, anyway," Pound said. Colonel Einsiedel winced. Pound figured he'd got off on the right foot.
L ike most Congressional veterans, Flora Blackford spent most of her time in Philadelphia. As summer swung towards autumn every other year, though, she went back to the Lower East Side in New York City to campaign for reelection. And this was a Presidential election year, too.
She thought Charlie La Follette ought to win in a walk. But the Democrats had nominated a native New Yorker, a hotshot prosecutor named Dewey, to run against him. Dewey and his Vice Presidential candidate, a blunt-talking Senator from Missouri, were running an aggressive campaign, crisscrossing the country saying they could have handled the war better and would ride herd on the beaten Confederacy harder. President La Follette and his running mate, Jim Curley of Massachusetts, had to content themselves with saying that the Socialists damn well had won the war. Would that be enough? Unless people were uncommonly ungrateful, Flora thought it would.
Normally, she wouldn't have wanted to see Congressman Curley on the ticket. He came straight from the Boston machine, an unsavory if effective apparatus. But Dewey's would-be veep was a longtime Kansas City ward heeler, and the Kansas City machine was even more unsavory (and perhaps even more effective) than Boston's.
Visiting Socialist Party headquarters felt like coming home again. The only difference from when she worked there thirty years earlier was that the butcher's shop underneath the place was owned by the son of the man who'd run it then. Like his father, Sheldon Fleischmann was a Democrat. And, like his father, he often sent cold cuts up anyhow.
The district had changed. Far fewer people here were fresh off the boat than had been true in 1914. Native-born Americans tended to be more conservative than their immigrant parents. All the same, Flora worried more about the national ticket than her own seat. The fellow the Democrats had nominated, a theatrical booking agent named Morris Kramer, had to spend most of his time explaining why he hadn't been in uniform during the war.
"He's got a hernia," Herman Bruck said. He'd been a Socialist activist as long as Flora had. "So all right-they didn't conscript him. But do you think anybody wants a Congressman who wears a truss?"
"If he didn't wear it, his brains would fall out," somebody else said. That got a laugh from everyone in the long, smoky room. Half the typewriters stopped clattering for a moment. The other half wouldn't have stopped for anything this side of the Messiah.