She was skinny. Like any town with soldiers in it, Kamloops had its share of easy women, but she didn't look as if she'd been part of their sorry sisterhood for very long. "What did you used to do?" Morrell asked quietly.
"What difference does it make?" she answered. "Whatever it was, I can't do it any more. Do you want to go someplace?"
"No, thanks," he answered. She cursed him, too, with a sort of dreary hopelessness that hit him harder than the anger the male beggars had shown.
Even the storekeepers' attitudes seemed different from the way they had before things went sour. He'd never seen men so glad to take money from him. When he remarked on that, the fellow who'd just sold him a doll for Mildred said, "You bet I'm glad. You're only the second customer I've had today. Anybody with any money at all looks good to me right now. How am I going to pay my bills if nobody buys anything from me? And if I can't pay my bills, what happens then? Do I end up out on the street? I sure hope not."
Later, another shopkeeper said, "Hate to tell you this, but Kamloops'd wither up and die if it wasn't for you Yank soldiers. They still pay you regular, so you still have money in your pockets. Damn few folks do, and you'd better believe that."
A third man was even blunter: "If things don't turn around pretty quick, what the hell's going to happen to us?"
Morrell had to run the gauntlet of beggars once more on the way back to the U.S. Army base. The men cursed him all over again, this time for spending money on himself and not on them. "How would you like it if you were hungry?" one of them called after him-a parting shot, as it were.
It was a good question. He had no good answer. Nobody wanted to be hungry. He remembered that skinny woman. Nobody wanted to have to choose between whoring and starving. But nobody seemed to have much of an idea how to make things better, either. Morrell hurried home, a troubled man.
J onathan Moss was making a discovery as old as mankind: that not even getting exactly what you thought you'd always wanted guaranteed happiness. When he thought about it-which was as seldom as he could-he suspected Laura Moss, once Laura Secord, was making the same unpleasant discovery.
"I don't like the city," she said one morning over a cup of tea (Jonathan preferred coffee, which he brewed himself).
"I'm sorry," he answered, not altogether sincerely. "I don't know how I could practice law from a farm…" He almost added in the middle of nowhere, but let that go at the last possible instant.
He might as well have said it. By her sour expression, Laura heard it even if it remained technically unspoken. "But everybody here loves the Yanks and knuckles under to them," she complained.
The first part of that wasn't even close to true, as she had to know. As for the second… "Whether you like it or not, dear, the United States won the war," Moss pointed out.
Laura's expression got unhappier yet. Out on her farm, and even in Arthur-which was far enough off the beaten path for the American occupiers to pay little attention to it-she'd had an easier time pretending that blunt truth wasn't real. Here in Berlin, she couldn't ignore it. U.S. military courts here tried cases under occupation law. Soldiers in green-gray uniforms were always on the streets. "Even the newspapers!" she burst out. "They spell color c-o-l-o-r and labor l-a-b-o-r, not c-o-l-o-u-r and l-a-b-o-u-r."
"That's how we spell them in the States," Moss said.
"But this isn't the States! It's the province of Ontario! Can't you leave even the King's English alone?"
He finished his coffee at a gulp. "The King doesn't run things around these parts any more. The United States do. Sweetheart, I know you don't like it, but that doesn't mean it isn't so." Carrying his cup over to the sink, he went on, "I'm going to the office. I'll see you tonight."
"All right." She sounded almost as relieved to have him out of the apartment as he was to go. With a sigh, she added, "I don't know what I'm going to do around here, though."
Back on her farm, finding ways to pass the time had never been a worry. Moss knew just enough of farm life to be sure of that. If you weren't busy every waking moment on a farm, you had to be neglecting something. It wasn't like that here in the city. To Moss, that was one of the advantages of getting off the farm. He wasn't sure Laura saw things the same way.
Before leaving, he put on his overcoat and a fur hat with ear flaps that tied under his chin. Berlin, Ontario, might be under U.S. occupation, but its winters remained thoroughly Canadian. Moss had grown up in Chicago. He'd thought he knew everything there was to know about nasty winter weather. The war and coming back here afterwards to practice law had taught him otherwise.
Only after he was out the door and going down the stairs to his elderly Bucephalus did he realize he hadn't kissed Laura good-bye. He kept going. His sigh was more glum than bemused. For years, he hadn't been able to get the idea of her out of his mind. Then, when they finally did come together, their lovemaking had been the most spectacular he'd ever known.
And now they were married-and he forgot to kiss her good-bye. So much for romance, he thought unhappily. He got into the motorcar and turned the key, hoping the battery held enough charge to start the car. Someone down the street was cranking an old Ford. Most of the time, a self-starter was ever so much more convenient. In weather like this, though…
The Bucephalus' engine sputtered, coughed, and then came to noisy life. Moss let out a sigh of relief. The motorcar would get him to the office, which meant the odds were good it would get him home again, too. And then, once he got home, he would find out what new things Laura had found to complain about.
He put the Bucephalus in gear and pulled onto the street even though the engine hadn't had enough time to warm up. Only after the auto had started to roll did he wonder if he was running away from trouble. Well, what if you are? he asked himself. It's not as if you won't go back to it tonight.
Not many motorcars shared the streets with the Bucephalus. Considering the snow and the state of the machine's brakes, that might have been just as well. Moss saw one traffic accident, with steam pouring from a shattered radiator, and with two men in heavy coats standing there shouting at each other.
Moss thought fewer automobiles were on the streets than had been the winter before. He knew why, too: fewer people in Berlin had jobs to go to than had been so the winter before. That was true all over Canada, all over North America, all over the world. Everyone hated it, but no one seemed to have the faintest idea what to do about it.
Two words painted on the side of a building-YANKS OUT! Before long, somebody would come along and paint over them. The Canucks hadn't given up wanting their own country back. The United States remained determined they wouldn't get it. Since the USA had the muscle, the Canadians faced an uphill fight.
As Moss got out of the Bucephalus, a man in a ragged overcoat who needed a shave came up to him with a gloved hand out and said, "Can you give me just a little money, friend? I've been hungry a long time now."
"Here you are." Moss handed him a quarter. "Buy yourself something to eat."
The man took the coin. He went down the street muttering something about a damned cheapskate Yank. Jonathan Moss sighed. Try as you would, you couldn't win.
He had an electric hot plate in his office. As soon as he got in, he started perking more coffee. Not only would it help keep him awake, it would help keep him warm. Even before the coffee was ready, he got to work on the papers waiting for him on his desk.
He'd won his name among the Canadians of Berlin for keeping the U.S. occupiers off their backs as much as he could. That brought him a fair number of cases to be tried in military courts. It also brought him a lot of much more ordinary legal business. Most of his current case load involved bankruptcies.