So many of those were on his desk right now, in fact, that he thought of adding a slug of whiskey to the coffee he poured for himself. Maybe that would help him face the ruin of other men's hopes with something more like equanimity. Or maybe it'll turn me into a drunk, he thought, and left the whiskey bottle-it was only a pint-in his desk drawer.
How many of those bankruptcies would have happened if the Russians had managed to pay their loan to that Austro-Hungarian bank? Moss didn't know, not exactly. The only sure answer that occurred to him was, a lot fewer. Of course, he was lucky he was still in business himself. He'd sold out when the stock market started dropping like a rock, and had escaped before Swan-Dive Wednesday. The longer he'd stayed in, the worse he'd have got hurt.
By ten o'clock, he was starting to come up for air in his paperwork. That was when the door to his office opened and his first appointment of the day came in. "Good morning, Mr. Harrison," Moss said, getting up and leaning forward across the desk to shake hands. "What can I do for you today?"
"You can call me Edgar, for starters," Edgar Harrison answered. He was a short, thin, intense-looking man of about Moss' age. The top half of his left ear was missing: a war wound. Had the bullet that clipped him traveled a couple of inches to the right of its real course, he would have died before he hit the ground. As he sat down in the chair to which Moss waved him, he added, "It's not like we haven't worked together before."
"No, it's not," Moss agreed. Harrison sailed as close to the wind as he could when it came to urging more freedom for the conquered Canadian provinces. He'd spent time in jail not long after the Great War ended. Moss thought he'd been lucky not to get shot, though he'd never said that out loud. "Care for some coffee?" he asked, pointing to the pot on the hot plate.
Edgar Harrison shook his head. "Nasty stuff. Never could stand it. Don't know how you Yanks pour it down the way you do."
"We manage," Moss said dryly, and refilled his cup. "You've got something on your mind-I can tell by your lean and hungry look."
"Such men are dangerous," Harrison said with a laugh. "How would you like to mount a court challenge to the whole rationale for the U.S. occupation of Canada?"
"How would I like it?" Moss echoed. "Personally, I'd like it fine. I'll tell you straight out, though, you'll lose. Occupation law says the U.S. Army can do whatever it has to in occupied territory, and the Constitution doesn't apply here."
"I know that." The Canadian's face clouded. "I don't see how I could help knowing it. But that's what I want to challenge: the notion that your fancy, precious Constitution shouldn't apply in Canada. Don't we deserve the rule of law, same as you Yanks?"
"What you deserve and what you're going to get are two different things," Moss replied. "I'm sorry, Mr. Harrison-Edgar-but I can't help you make that case. I don't see any point to even trying to get a judge to hear it. The law here isn't any different from the law in Utah, and that's part of the USA."
"Yes, and you Yanks were right on the point of letting it go back to being a regular part of the USA, too," Harrison said.
"We were," Moss said. "Then that Mormon murdered General Pershing, and now it'll be another ten years before anybody so much as mentions making Utah a normal state again."
"Nobody's murdered a military governor here," Harrison said.
"That bomber tried, whatever his name was," Moss answered. "He tried twice, as a matter of fact. And there was the uprising a few years ago." He felt like fortifying this cup of coffee, too, but he wouldn't, not with Harrison watching. "I'm sorry. Whether you're right or wrong, you haven't got a Chinaman's chance of making an American court take you seriously."
Edgar Harrison's eyes were gray as ice-and, at the moment, every bit as cold. "What will your wife say, Mr. Moss"-he wouldn't use Jonathan's first name now-"when she finds out you don't want to help us toward our freedom?"
"I hope she'll say I'm the lawyer in the family, and I know what I'm doing," Moss answered. "That's what I hope. If she says anything else, well, that's between her and me, wouldn't you agree?"
"That depends," Harrison said. "Yes, indeed-that depends."
Moss looked at him. "Mr. Harrison, I think we're done here. Don't you?"
"Yes, I'm afraid we are," the Canadian replied. "I'm sorry you turned out to be just another goddamn Yank after all." He got to his feet. "Well, we have ways of dealing with that, too."
Stung by the injustice of Harrison's words, Moss exclaimed, "If it weren't for me, half the Canucks in this town would be in jail or dead." The other man paid no attention, but turned on his heel and walked out the door. Only after he was gone did Moss wonder if his words had been more than unjust. He wondered if they'd held a threat.
C incinnatus Driver didn't like having to start over as he approached middle age. He'd spent the years since moving up to Des Moines getting his hauling business up to the point where it made a pretty good living for him and his family. He'd sold the beat-up old Duryea truck he'd driven to Des Moines from Covington, and bought himself a less beat-up, middle-aged White: a bigger, more powerful machine.
And then Luther Bliss had lured him back to Kentucky and thrown him into jail. Elizabeth had to sell the White to keep food on the table for his family and a roof over their heads. Cincinnatus had a little celebrity value when he got back. Thanks to that, he'd been able to get a new truck-well, actually, an old truck, a Ford that had seen a lot of better years-on credit. For a Negro, that was something not far from a miracle.
He'd kept up the payments, too. He'd never been afraid of work. If he had to get up before the sun rose and keep driving till long after it set, he would do it without a word of complaint. He had done it without a word of complaint.
And then the bottom fell out of the stock market. All of a sudden, fewer goods came into the railway yard. Fewer riverboats and barges tied up at the docks by the Des Moines River. But just as many hauling companies and independent drivers like Cincinnatus were fighting for less business.
One way to get it, of course, was to charge less for hauling. If, after that, you worked more hours still, you might make ends meet. You might-provided you didn't charge less than fuel and upkeep on your truck cost. Cincinnatus-and everybody else who drove a truck in Des Moines, and elsewhere in the country-collided head-on with that painful limitation.
"What am I supposed to do?" he asked Elizabeth one evening over supper. "What can I do? Can't charge less now. Don't make no money at all if I charge less."
"Don't make any money," Achilles said. After so long in Iowa, he'd lost a good part of the Kentucky Negro accent Cincinnatus still kept. And, having entered his teens, he was inclined to look on everything his father did with a critical eye. He went on, "I know you're not ignorant, Pa, but you sure do sound that way sometimes."
In another year or so, he probably would have come right out and called Cincinnatus ignorant. Cincinnatus knew it, too; he remembered the hell-raiser he'd been at Achilles' age. This was what boys did when they started turning into men. "I can't help it, son," Cincinnatus said now, as mildly as he could. "I talk the way I've always talked. Don't know no other-"
"Any other," Achilles broke in.
"-way to do it," Cincinnatus finished, as if his son hadn't spoken. "And I'm talkin' about important stuff with your ma, stuff we got to talk about. Maybe your English teacher don't like the way we do it"-this time, he quelled Achilles with a glance-"but we got to hash it out just the same."