The limousine's horn blared. That was Joyner's body slumping forward onto the button-the assassins' fire had struck home after all. One son of a bitch left, Jake thought: one son of a bitch and me. And I'm the meanest s.o.b. this country ever saw.
If he'd been out there, he would have jumped up on the hood, stuck the submachine gun through the now-shattered windscreen, and finished the job. The last surviving assassin didn't. Maybe losing two of his buddies had unnerved him. Must be a kid, went through Featherston's mind. He's never seen action before, and he doesn't quite know what to do.
What the assassin did was go around to the side of the motorcar where Jake had been sitting. He grabbed for the door handle, intending to yank the door open and shoot through the gap.
What he intended wasn't what he got. Featherston kicked the door from the inside with both feet, using all his strength. It caught the assassin in the midsection. With a startled squawk, he went down on his wallet. He hung on to the submachine gun, but he was still trying to swing it back toward the limousine when Jake shot him in the belly. He was trying to shoot him in the balls, but didn't quite get what he wanted. The assassin's shriek was satisfying enough as things were. Featherston's next shot, more carefully aimed, blew off the bottom half of his face.
Ears ringing, Jake looked around for more trouble. He didn't see any, only cops and ordinary people running toward the limousine to find out what the hell had happened. All of a sudden, he regretted that last vengeful shot. With just a bullet in the gut, the last assassin might have lived long enough to tell him a lot about what the hell had happened. As things were, he was dying fast and couldn't talk even if he wanted to.
"But I'll find out anyhow," Jake said, and nodded slowly to show how much he meant it. "Oh, yes. You just bet I will."
Even now, the Negroes of Augusta managed to snatch fun where they could. The joint called the Ten of Clubs was a case in point. Its sign showed the card for which it was named: lots of black spots on a white background. Scipio got the joke. He was sure everybody who lived in the Terry got it. So far, no white man seemed to have figured it out, which only made it more delicious.
He and Bathsheba paid fifty cents each at the door. Drinks weren't cheap, either. But the best bands came to the Ten of Clubs. If you wanted to cut a rug in the Terry, this was the place to do it.
Scipio slipped the headwaiter another half dollar for a tiny table by the dance floor. He pulled out one of the chairs so Bathsheba could sit down. "You spoil me," she said, smiling.
"Hope so," Scipio answered. His butler's training back at Marshlands made such politesse automatic in him. His wife still didn't know about that, and she'd pretty much given up nagging him to explain how he could pull a different way of speaking out of the woodwork just when they needed it most.
He ordered a bottle of beer, Bathsheba a whiskey. The air was thick with cigarette smoke, cheap perfume, and sweat. People wore what finery they had. Jewelry flashed on the women. Most of it was cheap costume jewelry, but in the dim light of the Ten of Clubs rhinestones did duty for diamonds, colored glass for rubies and sapphires.
A comic in white tie and tails several sizes too big for him came out and stood behind the microphone. Surveying the audience, he sadly shook his head. "You ain't here for me. You is here for the band. You don't make my life no easier, you know."
He was right, of course. People in the shabby little night spot were waiting for the band, which was on a tour that took it to colored districts of major towns all over the Confederate States. A heckler called, "Why don't you shut up and go away?"
How many hecklers had the funny man faced, and faced down, during his own years on the road? Hundreds, surely. "You ain't gonna git rid o' me that easy," he answered now. " 'Sides, ain't it sweet how the white folks loves the president just as much as we does?"
That brought not only giggles but a few horrified gasps from the crowd. The papers had been full of Jake Featherston's latest escape from assassination. These assailants had been white. From everything Scipio could gather, they'd been Freedom Party men unhappy with Featherston for seeking a second term. Nobody in public said much about who might have been behind them. Nobody said anything at all about imposing a fine on the white community like the one that had been taken from the CSA's Negroes after that frankfurter-seller tried to ventilate the president at the Olympics. That surprised Scipio not a bit.
Bathsheba leaned forward and said, "He got nerve."
"He gots more nerve'n he gots sense," Scipio replied. Even in a place like this-maybe especially in a place like this-informers were bound to be listening. Plenty of Negroes would betray their own people for a little money or simply for the privilege of being left alone by Freedom Party goons. Scipio thought they were fools. Whatever tiny advantages they got wouldn't last long. But a lot of men-and women-couldn't see past the end of their noses.
"When I heard they was shootin' at the president, I prayed," the comic said. "I tell you, I got down on my knees an' prayed. I prayed, God keep Mistuh Featherston… a long ways away from me."
More giggles. More gasps, too. Scipio wondered again whether the comic had more nerve than sense. He skated awfully close to the line. In fact, he likely skated right over the line. In how many towns, in how many rooms full of strangers, had he told jokes like that and got away with them?
Then Scipio had another thought, one that chilled him worse than the December weather outside. Maybe the funny man wasn't worried about informers. Maybe he was an informer himself. Maybe he was trying to smoke out rebellious Negroes in the audience. They would come to him because he said what they were thinking, and then… then they'd be sorry.
Scipio shivered again. He didn't know that was true. That it could even occur to him was a measure of the time he lived in.
"Reckon you heard Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces is from New Orleans," the comic went on with a sly leer. "But I reckon you don't know why they is from New Orleans an' not in New Orleans." He paused, setting up his punch line: "The Freedom Party gits in there, they gits outa there."
It might even have been true. A lot of bands from New Orleans had started touring when Huey Long met an assassin who, unlike those who'd tried for Jake Featherston, had known how to shoot straight. Had Long been easier on Negroes than the Freedom Party? He couldn't have been much tougher. And any which way, a joke about the Party was bound to draw a laugh from this crowd.
That only made Scipio wonder again whether the funny man was a stalking horse for the people he pretended to mock. No way to know, not for sure, but even the question spoiled his enjoyment of the comic's lines. He ordered another overpriced beer.
After what seemed a very long time, the comic retreated and Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces came out. The trumpeter who led the band was an engagingly ugly fellow with a froglike bass voice. When he raised the horn to his lips and began to play, Scipio's eyes went wide, not only at the sounds he produced but also at the way his cheeks swelled up. He looked like a frog, too: like a spring peeper calling from a tree.
But the way he played made Scipio and everybody else forget about the way he looked. In his hands, that trumpet didn't just speak. It laughed and it moaned and it wept. And when it did, everyone who heard it wanted to do the same.
The Rhythm Aces-fiddler, sax man, bass man, drummer-couldn't have backed him better. And the music that poured from the band sent people hurrying from their seats and onto the dance floor. Now and again, in the Huntsman's Lodge, Scipio had heard rich white men sneering about nigger music. But the wilder, freer rhythms blacks enjoyed had also infected whites' music in the Confederate States. You could hardly find a song or a record on the wireless that didn't sound as if the musicians, no matter how white, had been listening to what came out of New Orleans and Mobile and Atlanta and other towns with a lively colored music scene. Sometimes they didn't seem to know it themselves. But the alert ear could always tell, especially when a song from the USA got played for comparison. Music from north of the border wasn't necessarily bad, but it was different: more staid, less surprising.