"If I got out of the Army before Election Day, I was going to vote for you anyway," he said. "Now I want to vote for you two or three times."
From behind Flora, Herman Bruck said, "That can probably be arranged."
"Hush, Herman," Flora said, though she knew he might not be kidding. She turned back to Captain Swartz. "Instead of doing that, take your plans to Morris Kramer. If he wins, he can do his best to push them through, too. And they're important. They ought to go forward regardless of politics." Did she really say that? Did she really mean it? She nodded to herself. She did. When it came down to the district, you could…every once in a while.
F rom Virginia all the way down to Florida-except the area around Lexington, Virginia, which was the most special of special cases-Irving Morrell's word was law. Military governor was a bland title, but it was the one he had. In the Roman Empire, he would have been a proconsul. That held more flavor, at least to him. A Roman, to whom Latin came naturally, might have disagreed.
Morrell had always had a bitch of a time with Latin. He set up shop in Atlanta. It was centrally located for his current command, and it also hadn't taken the pounding Richmond had. One of these days, the states under his jurisdiction might rejoin the USA. That was the long-term outlook in Philadelphia. Morrell would believe it when he saw it. Right now, his main job was making sure smoldering resentment didn't burst into flaming revolt.
Thick tangles of barbed wire strengthened by iron and concrete pillars made sure autos couldn't come within a couple of hundred yards of his headquarters. No auto bomb was going to take out the whole building. Everyone who approached on foot, male or female, was methodically searched.
Security was just as tight at other U.S. headquarters throughout the fallen Confederacy. Neither that nor brutal retaliation for attacks had kept a couple of colonels and a brigadier general from joining their ancestors.
"And these people are supposed to become citizens?" Morrell said to his second-in-command. "How long do they expect us to wait?"
"The French and Germans don't love each other, either," Harlan Parsons replied.
"But they both know they're foreigners," Morrell said. "The Confederates speak English. These states used to belong to the USA. And because of that, the bigwigs in Philadelphia think it can happen again, easy as pie. And I've got one thing to say to that: bullshit!"
"You get to try to make it work," Brigadier General Parsons said. "Aren't you lucky…sir?"
"Yeah. I'm lucky like snow is black," Morrell answered.
His number two sent him a quizzical look. "You're the first officer I ever heard who used that line and wasn't Jewish."
"I knew I stole it from somebody. I forgot who," Morrell said.
The telephone on his desk rang. Parsons picked it up. "General Morrell's office." Maybe he could protect his superior from the slings and arrows of outrageous-or outraged-idiots. Here, though, he listened for a little while and then said, "I'll pass you through. Hold on." Putting his hand over the mouthpiece, he told Morrell, "It's Colonel Einsiedel, down in Tallahassee."
"Thanks." Morrell took the telephone. "Hello, Colonel. What's gone wrong now?" He assumed something had. People didn't call him to talk about the weather.
Sure enough, the local commander said, "We're facing a boycott here. All the locals are pretending we don't exist. And they aren't going into any of the stores that sell to us. Some of the merchants are starting to feel the pinch."
"That's a new one," Morrell said. "Any violence?"
"Not aimed at us," Colonel Einsiedel answered. "They may have used some strong-arm tactics to get their own people to go along. What are we supposed to do about it?"
"Ignore them. Wait it out," Morrell said. "What else is there?"
"Some of the storekeepers don't want to sell to us any more," the colonel said. "They're trying to get out of the deals they made. It's hard to blame them. If they keep doing business with us, they starve."
"You can't let 'em get away with that. If you do, this time tomorrow there won't be a shop in the old Confederacy where we can buy anything. We aren't niggers, and our money's good."
"Yes, sir. We'll try," Einsiedel said. "One of my lieutenants said we ought to shoot any storekeeper who won't sell to us."
Morrell laughed. "Damned if that doesn't sound like Michael Pound."
"How the devil did you know, sir?" The colonel in Florida sounded flabbergasted.
"You mean it is?" Morrell laughed again. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised. I've known Pound for twenty-five years now. He has a straightforward bloodthirstiness that would scare the crap out of any General Staff officer ever born. He's not always right, but he's always sure of himself."
"Boy, you can say that again," Einsiedel said. "All right, sir. We'll see what we can do to nip this stuff in the bud."
"Don't be too gentle," Morrell said. "We won the war. If they think they're going to win the peace, they can damn well think again."
"I sure hope so," Colonel Einsiedel said, which wasn't exactly the encouraging note on which Morrell would have wanted the conversation to end. But the colonel hung up after that, so Morrell couldn't pump him any more without calling him back. Deciding that would make more trouble than it saved, Morrell put the handset back into its cradle instead.
"Boycott, huh?" Brigadier General Parsons said. "That's…different."
"Yeah. It lets them annoy us without giving us a good excuse to shoot them," Morrell said. "Some of them are still fighting the war, even if they don't carry guns any more. Every time they make us blink, they figure they've won a battle."
"So we don't blink, then," Parsons said.
"That's about the size of it." Morrell hoped he could get his own officers to go along. Not all of them would see that this was a problem.
Michael Pound did, by God! Morrell smiled and shook his head. Pound saw problems and solutions with an almost vicious clarity. As far as he was concerned, everything was simple. And damned if watching him in action didn't make you wonder whether he had it right and everybody else looked at the world through a kaleidoscope that made everything seem much more complicated than it should have.
The telephone rang again. "General Morrell's office," Harlan Parsons said. This time, he didn't hesitate in answering on his own hook: "That's right. As of the surrender, Negroes have the same rights on ex-Confederate territory as whites do. Anyone who tries to go against that goes up against the U.S. government… Yes, that includes intermarriage, as long as the people involved want to go through with it."
After he hung up, Morrell asked, "Where?"
"Rocky Mount, North Carolina," his second-in-command answered. "Nice to know there are still some Negroes there."
"Still some Negroes all through the CSA," Morrell said. "Just not many." He'd heard so many stories of survival by luck and by stealth and by guerrilla war that they started to blur. He'd heard some of survival by the kindness of whites, but fewer than he wished he had.
"Featherston turned a whole country upside down and inside out," Parsons said. "It'll never be the same down here. Never. How many dead?"
"Six million? Seven? Ten?" Morrell shrugged helplessly. "I don't think anybody knows exactly. Maybe they can figure out how many Negroes the Confederates shipped to their camps. I bet it'd be easier to count how many are left now, though. Then subtract from how many there were before the Freedom Party started killing them, and the number you get is how many bought a plot."
"Those Freedom Party bastards had to be out of their skulls," Parsons said: far from the first time Morrell had heard that opinion. "Imagine all the effort they put into killing colored people. All the camps they had to build, all the trains they had to use…They would have done better if they aimed that shit at us."