The Victorious Opposition Read online

“I ain’t real happy with him, or with you, neither,” Cincinnatus said. “You got a lot o’ goddamn nerve, comin’ up here an’ tryin’ to drag me back into that shit. I done gone away a long time ago, an’ I ain’t never goin’ back.” He was almost shouting. If he’d been any angrier, he would have hurled himself at Lucullus.

  The younger man held out both hands, pale palms up, in a placating gesture. “All right. All right. I hears you. I tells my pa what you say.” He left the railroad yard in a hurry.

  “Who was that colored fella?” one of the railroad dicks asked Cincinnatus after Lucullus went away. Not that other colored fella, Cincinnatus noticed: they took him so much for granted, they almost forgot what color he was. That never would have happened in Kentucky, either. People there always paid attention to who was who. They were sometimes less overt about noticing than they were here in Iowa, but they always did.

  “I used to know him when I was livin’ down in Kentucky,” Cincinnatus answered. “Ain’t seen him for years till now.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Tryin’ to talk me into goin’ back there. He had some kind o’ business deal.” Cincinnatus shrugged. “I ain’t goin’. He’s a fly-by-night.”

  “You must be rich, if he came all this way from Kentucky to try and take your money,” the dick said. “He’ll have a long, empty time going back. Thought he could play you for a sucker, did he?”

  “Anybody reckon’s I’m rich, he ain’t never seen all the moths fly outa my wallet when I open it.” Cincinnatus hesitated to admit even to himself that he was doing well.

  Both railroad dicks laughed. “Yeah, well, I know that song,” said the one who did most of the talking. “Don’t I just, goddammit.” He and his partner both strode off to prowl around trains.

  Cincinnatus bolted the rest of his lunch. Then he went after work for the rest of the day. He got less than he wanted; wasting time with Lucullus had put him behind the other drivers. He muttered and fumed all afternoon. Not only had Lucullus bothered him, he’d cost him money. That hurt more.

  When he got back to his apartment building at the end of that long, frustrating day, he found not only Elizabeth but also Mr. and Mrs. Chang from upstairs waiting in the lobby. Mrs. Chang spoke next to no English, but started yelling at him in Chinese the minute he walked in the door.

  “Your foolish boy!” Mr. Chang shouted. “Foolish, foolish boy! What he think he do? He—” He broke down and started to cry.

  Cincinnatus looked a question to Elizabeth. All this excitement was likely to mean only one thing. Sure enough, his wife nodded. “Achilles and Grace, they run off to get married,” she said.

  “Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus said softly. He didn’t think that was a good idea—which put it mildly. But he didn’t know what he—or the Changs—could do about it. His son and their daughter were of legal age. If they wanted to tie the knot, they could. Whether they would live happily ever after was liable to be a different story, but they weren’t likely to worry about that now.

  He held out his hand to Grace Chang’s—no, to Grace Driver’s—father. “Welcome to the family,” he said. “I reckon either we make the best o’ this or else we spend all our time fighting from here on out.”

  Mr. Chang looked at the hand for close to half a minute before finally taking it. “I got nothing against you. You good man,” he said at last. “Your boy—against your boy I got plenty. But you, me—we no fight.”

  “That’s about as much as I can ask for right now,” Cincinnatus said. “Somehow or other, we’ll get through it.” The Changs didn’t look as if they believed him. For that matter, neither did Elizabeth. And he hadn’t said a word about Lucullus’ visit yet.

  Mort Pomeroy gave Mary a kiss on the cheek. He was bundled into an overcoat, with mittens and fur hat with earflaps. He was only going across the street to the diner, but in the middle of a blizzard all the clothes he could put on were none too many. “I’ll see you tonight, sweetheart,” he said.

  “So long,” Mary answered. “I’ve got plenty to keep me busy.”

  Her husband nodded, though that wouldn’t have been true at the McGregor farm. Mort didn’t realize how much harder life had been there. However much she loved him, Mary didn’t intend to tell him, either. She didn’t like keeping secrets from him, but thought she had no choice here.

  He kissed her again and went out the door. She went to the window so she could watch him cross the street. She always did that. He knew it, too. He looked up, waving through the snow that blurred his outline. She waved back, and blew him another kiss. He jerked his head to show he’d got it.

  As soon as Mort went into the diner, Mary washed the breakfast dishes. She put them in the drainer; she saw no point to drying them herself. Once she’d done that, she looked out the window again. An auto painted U.S. Army green-gray made its slow way up the street in Rosenfeld. Whoever was in it paid no attention to the Canadian woman looking down on him from the apartment building.

  “One of these days, I’ll make you pay attention,” she muttered. “You see if I don’t.” She started to fix herself a fresh cup of tea, but stopped and shrugged instead. The cup she’d had with breakfast hadn’t sat so well as she would have liked. Maybe the next one ought to wait till later.

  Even without the tea, her heart beat faster when she got out the bomb-making gear she’d taken from the barn at the farm a year and a half before. After all this time, Mort had no idea the tools and explosives were here. He was busy in the diner’s kitchen, but the kitchen pantries in the apartment were her place, and he left them alone.

  She thought she knew as much as she needed to know about this business. Only the experiment, of course, would prove that one way or the other. She hadn’t made the experiment yet.

  A clock chimed the hour: eight o’clock. Not far away, the general store would be opening for business. It wasn’t Henry Gibbon’s store any more. Peter Karamanlides, the new owner, was a big-nosed Greek from Rochester, New York. His selection of merchandise was almost identical to what Gibbon’s had been. His prices were, if anything, microscopically lower. Mary disliked him just the same, though she bought from him. A lot of things had to come from the general store, because nobody else in Rosenfeld carried them.

  Karamanlides seemed decent enough. But here he was, one more Yank yankifying Canada. Mary wished there were Canadians buying general stores in Rochester instead, but there weren’t, or she’d never heard of any.

  She gave her attention back to the business at hand. Her father’s bombs had always had wooden cases. Hers fit into a cardboard box. She could have made the same sort of case as Arthur McGregor had, but she’d decided not to. She didn’t want investigators reminded of her father’s work. That might make them look her way.

  For the same reason, she didn’t use the big tenpenny nails her father had. Thumbtacks would do the job well enough. She wound and carefully set an alarm clock, then even more carefully lowered it into the cardboard box. If she dropped it, if the impact made its bells clack against each other . . . Pa never made a stupid mistake like that, she told herself fiercely. I won’t, either.

  And she didn’t, though a drop of sweat trickled down her forehead and between her eyes and fell from the tip of her nose onto the glass face of the clock. She wiped it away with a forefinger. Then she poured the thumbtacks into the box, put on the lid, and tied it shut with brown twine.

  She yawned as she put on a heavy coat and a scarf to cover her red hair. Now she wished she’d had that second cup of tea after all. Well, no help for it. The coat was big and bulky. She had no trouble concealing the box under it. Out the door and down the stairs she went.

  The general store was around the corner and two blocks away. Her heart pounded harder and harder as she walked towards it. Again, she spoke sternly to herself: Father did this lots of times. You can, too. And you will.

  Hardly anyone was on the street yet. That was good. That was how she wanted things. The fewer people who saw her, the better.
There was the post office. Wilf Rokeby would be getting ready to open up there, as he had for as long as she could remember. And here was the general store.

  She jumped when the bell above the door jingled as she went in. “Good day to you, Mrs. Pomeroy,” Karamanlides said from behind the counter. “What can I get for you today?” He chuckled. “So early, and I’m all yours.”

  She’d counted on being the only customer in the place. She hadn’t counted on how hot it was inside. He had the potbellied stove going full blast. The sweat on her face now had nothing to do with nerves. She gave him her list, finishing, “And a pair of the strongest reading glasses you’ve got. I’ll give them to my mother for her birthday.” Her mother’s birthday was indeed coming up in a few weeks.

  Karamanlides piled goods on the counter, then said, “Excuse me. The glasses I keep in the back room.” He disappeared.

  Mary set the cardboard box on a bottom shelf. It didn’t look much different from the boxes of epsom salts already sitting there. She left her coat open afterwards. That was all to the good. If she’d kept it closed much longer, the storekeeper would have started wondering why.

  He came back with the spectacles. “I have a couple styles here. Which ones you like better? The lenses are the same in both.” His accent wasn’t just American; a faint trace of his native country lingered in it, too.

  “Let me have the pair with the bronze frames,” Mary answered. “What does it all come to?”

  As Henry Gibbon would have, Karamanlides scribbled figures on a scrap of paper and added them up. “Three dollars and nineteen cents,” he said after checking everything twice.

  She gave him four dollar bills and checked to make sure the change was right. Then she took what she’d bought back to the apartment building. She put everything away. She didn’t want Mort noticing she’d been to the general store this morning. She didn’t think anyone but Karamanlides had seen her go in or come out.

  She fell back into housework, but then broke off with a gasp. What would she do if the U.S. authorities decided to search the apartment just because she was her father’s daughter? Stowing bomb-making tools in the kitchen was enough to keep Mort from knowing they were there. Hard-eyed men in green-gray uniforms? Probably—no, certainly—not. Having a really good hiding place didn’t matter . . . so long as she didn’t use the tools. But now she had.

  Everything went into another cardboard box, this one considerably larger than the one waiting with the epsom salts. Then she took the box downstairs. Everybody in the building stashed things in the basement. It wasn’t such a good hiding place as her father had found in the barn, but it would have to do for now. The Yanks would have trouble proving those tools were hers even if they did find them. She hoped they would, anyhow.

  Halfway back up the stairs, Mary paused and yawned and yawned and yawned. She shook her head in amazement when she finally stopped. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this tired in the middle of the day. Finishing the climb felt like going up Mount Everest, which had recently killed a couple of German climbers who’d wanted to be the first to the summit.

  When she returned to the apartment, she thought about fixing that cup of tea to perk herself up. But the last one had been so bitter, she just didn’t feel like another. Her stomach lurched at the mere thought.

  What’s wrong with me? she thought, although she had at least the beginnings of a suspicion. She hadn’t finished the morning dusting when she started yawning again. She sat down in the nearest chair, closed her eyes, and tilted her head back. I’ll just rest for a little. . . . She didn’t even finish the thought before sleep claimed her.

  She woke with a start an hour and a half later, blinking and confused. Had it? Hadn’t it? Had she slept through it if it had? She didn’t think she could have, and yet. . . . A glance at a clock went some way toward reassuring her. It shouldn’t have, not unless she’d done something wrong.

  Feeling guilty about dozing off in the middle of the day, she got back to work. She should have been refreshed, but she kept wanting to start yawning again. Excitement that had nothing to do with waiting built in her. This wasn’t her imagination; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a nap in the middle of the morning.

  When the bang! came at last, it sounded less impressive than she’d expected. She’d heard a bomb go off once before, back during the war. She’d been a little girl then, and remembered the noise as seeming like the end of the world. This—was just a bang. The windows rattled briefly, and that was that. She was farther away now than she had been then. Maybe her bomb was smaller, too.

  Before long, the town fire engine’s siren screamed to life. Mary looked out the window. Some people, Mort among them, came out of the diner across the street to see what had happened. One of them pointed in the direction of the general store. Mary wondered if Mort would look up at her, but he didn’t. In a way, she was sorry; in another way, relieved. He didn’t automatically think of her as a bomber, then. If he didn’t, maybe the U.S. occupiers wouldn’t, either.

  No one knocked on her door till her husband got home. She didn’t need to ask him about the news. He was full of it: “Somebody blew Gibbon’s general store—of course, it’s not Gibbon’s any more—to hell and gone. We haven’t seen anything like this since—er, in a long time.” Since your father’s day, he’d started to say.

  “I heard a boom. I didn’t know what it was,” Mary said.

  “A bomb,” her husband said solemnly. “The store went up in smoke. Big fire. If what’s-his-name, the Greek, hadn’t been in the back room, he would have gone up with it. As is, he got a nail or something right here.” He patted his own left buttock. “He’ll sit on a slant for weeks, I bet.”

  Mary laughed. She wasn’t too sorry Karamanlides hadn’t got badly hurt. She wondered whether she had the stomach to go on fighting the USA. Pa wouldn’t’ve cared who got hurt. They were just the enemy to him.

  “I have news, too,” she said.

  “What is it?” Mort sounded indulgent: what could be interesting or important after the bomb?

  But Mary had an answer for him: “I’m going to have a baby.”

  His eyes went wide, wider, widest. “Are you sure?” he asked, a question men uncounted regret the moment it passes their lips.

  But Mary, a good part of her mind on other things, let him down easy. All she said was, “Yes, very sure.” Even if the U.S. occupiers didn’t catch her, she doubted she would be doing much with the bomb-making tools for a while now.

  When Jonathan Moss left his apartment these days, his hand was always on the stock of the pistol he carried. If anybody wanted to fight, he was ready. He took threats a lot more seriously than he had before. Major Sam Lopat had thought they were a pack of nonsense. Then occupation headquarters went up in smoke. The military prosecutor’s opinions were no longer relevant.

  Berlin, Ontario, had been quiet since the blast. Even new YANKS OUT! graffiti were harder to come by than they had been before the bomb went off. American soldiers had gone back to shooting first and asking questions later. The lawyer in Moss deplored that. The American in Canada in him thought it made him more likely to live to a ripe old age.

  An armored car rattled down the street. The machine would have been hopelessly obsolete in time of war. But it was ideal for making terrorists and would-be revolutionaries think twice. A couple of the soldiers inside the machine jeered at Moss. Everybody around here knew who he was, Canucks and Americans alike.

  Again, part of him savored that recognition and part of him could have done without it. He slid behind the wheel of his Model D Ford. He’d finally got rid of the Bucephalus, not only because it was old but also because it was distinctive. So far as he knew, it had been the only Bucephalus in Berlin, while there were four or five Model D’s on this block alone.

  In obscurity there is strength, he thought, and turned the key. Not only did the Ford start more readily than the Bucephalus had been in the habit of doing, he thought it
less likely to have explosives waiting under the hood on any given day. He hadn’t really worried about that, either, not till after occupation headquarters blew up.

  He laughed as he put the motorcar in gear, not that it was really funny. Nothing like a bomb going off to concentrate the mind. When he got to the building that held his office, he didn’t park the Ford in front of it, as he’d been in the habit of doing. Instead, he went on to a lot a couple of blocks away, a lot surrounded by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards. SECURE PARKING, said the sign above the entrance. Moss gave the attendant twenty cents and drove in.

  The sign might as well have read, PARKING FOR AMERICANS. The only Canadians who used it were a handful of collaborators. They were, of course, doubtless the ones who felt they needed it most.

  Moss felt he needed it. That he felt he needed it infuriated him. Dammit, couldn’t the Canucks see he was on their side? Evidently not. They only saw he was a Yank. If he came from south of the forty-ninth parallel, he had to be an enemy.

  Most of the buildings in downtown Berlin had had their glass replaced since the bomb went off. Here and there, though, plywood sheets still covered those openings. Some people couldn’t afford to reglaze. Some buildings simply stood empty; the business collapse had been no less savage here than anywhere else.

  When he got to his office, he plugged in the hot plate and got some coffee going. The pot would be good in the morning, tolerable around noon, and battery acid towards evening. He knew he’d go right on drinking it anyway. How could anybody function without coffee? He yawned. Life was hard enough with it.

  As soon as he’d poured the coffee, he started going through paperwork. Like a lot of busy men who worked for themselves, he was chronically behind. He had a better excuse than most, though. Since the bombing in Berlin, he’d had to try cases in Galt, in Guelph, in London, even in Toronto. That did nothing to make him more efficient. He was pleased with the record he’d managed to ring up despite the added difficulty of travel.