The Center Cannot Hold ae-2 Read online

  Giving pains, too, she thought. The house dick was about six feet three, with shoulders wide as a barn door. He wasn't visibly armed, but she was sure he had brass knucks or a blackjack stashed where he could get at them in a hurry. She wouldn't have wanted to run into him if he found her anywhere she wasn't supposed to be.

  When she waited on the street for a taxi, though, beggars hurried across Capitol Street to try to pry money out of her. She knew that, if she gave anything to anybody, none of them would ever leave her at peace. Closing the motorcar door on them was a relief.

  "Where to, ma'am?" the cabby asked.

  "Freedom Party headquarters," Anne answered. She wondered if she would have to give him the address.

  As things turned out, she didn't. The driver nodded. "Take you right over there. It ain't far at all. I'm thinking about voting that way myself come November, matter of fact."

  Alert guards armed with bayoneted Tredegars stood outside the headquarters. They wore what was almost but not quite Confederate Army uniform. Their clothes weren't quite the same as what the Tin Hats put on. These men looked somehow more menacing than most members of the big veterans' outfit. Anne didn't know whether that was the cut of their uniforms or the expressions on their faces. Some of each, she thought.

  "You're Mrs. Colleton, come to see Mr. Koenig?" one of them asked.

  Anne shook her head. "I'm Miss Colleton, and you'd better remember it."

  "Sorry," the disconcerted guard muttered, and passed her on into the building.

  She had to ask two more people how to find Ferdinand Koenig's office, which struck her as inefficient. When at last she got there, a pretty secretary led her inside. Koenig looked like a man who'd done time in the trenches. He had fierce eyebrows, a jutting jaw, and a rumbling baritone voice. "Good to see you again, Miss Colleton," he said. "It's been a few years, hasn't it? Sit down. Make yourself at home. Tell me why you've decided the Freedom Party isn't such a bad thing after all."

  He looked like a bruiser. He didn't sound like one, though. He'd been Jake Featherston's right-hand man for a long time now. That almost certainly meant he could think as well as break heads. Anne said, "When I left the Party, you were still tainted by what Grady Calkins did. Our politics have never been that far apart, whether I was formally with you or not."

  "You're saying you're a fair-weather friend. You'll back us if we look like winners and dump us if we don't," Koenig said. "Question is, in that case, why should we want to have anything to do with you?"

  "Because we're going the same way. Because I can help you get there. You'll know what I did in South Carolina. When I wasn't with you, I was trying to bring the Whigs more into line with what you've been saying all along."

  Ferdinand Koenig paused to light a cigarette. After blowing out a cloud of smoke, he said, "And you were doing us a favor by this, you say?"

  "No, I don't think so, and that isn't what I said," Anne answered. "But I think I was doing the country a favor. That's what this is really all about, isn't it? — what happens to the Confederate States, I mean."

  Another cloud of smoke rose from Koenig. "That's… some of what this is about," he said at last. "The rest of it is, why should we trust you now? You walked away once, walked away and left us in the lurch. Who says you won't do it again?"

  "No one at all, if I don't happen to like the way you're going," Anne said. "But as long as we're heading in the same direction, wouldn't you rather have me on your side than against you?"

  "Maybe," he answered. "Maybe not, too." His eyes measured her. She didn't care for that gaze; Koenig might have been looking at her over the sights of a rifle. "You don't pull any punches, though, do you?"

  "I try not to," Anne said. "Getting straight to the point saves time."

  "Maybe," Koenig said again. He didn't say anything more till he'd finished the cigarette and stubbed it out in an brass ashtray made from the base of a shell casing. Then he went on, "You talk a good game, I will say that for you. I'm not going to tell you yes or no. I'm going to pass you on to the Sarge. He'll make up his mind, and we'll go on from there. How does that sound?"

  "I came to Richmond to see him," Anne answered.

  Ferdinand Koenig shook his head. "No, you came up here to see me, remember? Now you've passed the first test, so you get to see him. See the difference?"

  "Yes," Anne said, though she'd always assumed she would pass it.

  "Well, come on, then." Koenig heaved his bulk out of the chair. He led her down the hall, up a flight of stairs, along the corresponding hall on the next floor up, and into an office. The secretary there wasn't decorative; she was, in fact, severely plain. That probably meant she was very good at what she did. Koenig nodded to her. "Morning, Lulu. Here's Miss Colleton, to see the boss."

  Lulu gave Anne the once-over. She sniffed, as if to say, What can you do? Anne bristled. The secretary took no notice of that at all. With a small sigh, she said, "Go right in, Miss Collins. He'll be expecting you." She wasn't the sort who'd get names wrong by accident. That meant she'd done it on purpose. Anne bristled all over again, and again got nothing resembling a rise from Lulu.

  When she walked into Jake Featherston's office, the leader of the Freedom Party rose and leaned across the desk to shake her hand. He wasn't handsome. Still, those strong, bony features and the energy that sparked from him made mere handsomeness seem insipid. Anne had had that thought before. "Sit down," he said, waving her to a chair. "Sit down and tell me why I should pay any attention to you after you went and left us when we needed you bad."

  He hadn't forgotten. Anne doubted he ever forgot anything that went against him. They weren't so far apart there. She answered, "Two reasons: my money and my brains."

  He frowned. "If you had any brains, you never would've walked out on us in the first place."

  "No." Anne shook her head. "I back winners. If you think you looked like a winner after Calkins killed President Hampton, you're not as smart as you think you are. But times are hard again, and in hard times the Freedom Party shines. So… here I am."

  How many people gave him such straight talk? Not many, Anne suspected. What would he do when he heard it? Get angry? Yes, by the slow flush that mounted to his cheeks and by the way his eyes flashed. But he held it in, saying, "You're a cool one, aren't you? You're telling me straight out you'd walk away again if you saw us in trouble."

  "No," Anne replied. "What I'm telling you is, this time I expect you to win."

  "And you want to come along for the ride," Featherston said.

  "Of course I do," Anne answered. "Sooner or later, we're going to have some things to say to the United States. If you don't think I want to be part of that, you don't know me at all. And I can help. At your rallies, you're still using tricks I figured out for you ten years ago, and you know it."

  "You spent the last few years trying to teach the Whigs new tricks," he said.

  "Yes, and they're old dogs-they couldn't learn them," Anne answered. "They've been in power too long. They can't learn anything any more. That's why they've got to go."

  "They're dogs, all right, the sons of-" Featherston caught himself. "Well, I have plans for them, too. You'd best believe that. Way they've stomped on the people of the Confederate States… You're dead right they've got to go, Miss Colleton. And I aim to get rid of 'em."

  Anne wondered how he meant that. Literally? She knew he was ruthless. Was he that ruthless? Maybe. She wouldn't have been astonished, but even the most ruthless man faced a formidable barrier of law. Anne nodded to herself. Here, that kind of barrier might not be bad at all.

  "You come back in, you'll follow the Party line?" Jake Featherston asked.

  You'll do as I say? was what he meant. Anne had never been one to do as anybody said. But if she said no, she'd have no place in the Freedom Party, not now, not ever. That was ever so clear. This is why you came to Richmond, she reminded herself. Do you want to go home empty-handed? Part of her said she did. She ignored it. Nodding to Featherston
, she said, "Yes, I'll do that."

  He didn't warn her-no, You'd better, or anything like that. "Good," he said. "We've got a deal." He didn't ask for her soul, either. But why would he? She'd just handed it to him.

  XIII

  The alarm clock jangled, bouncing Jefferson Pinkard out of bed at what he reckoned an ungodly early hour. His shift at the Birmingham jail started an hour and a half earlier than he'd gone to the Sloss Works. He yawned, lurched into the bathroom of his downtown flat-one more thing he was getting used to after so long in company housing-brushed his teeth, lathered his face and slid a straight razor over his cheeks, and then went into the kitchen and made coffee and the inevitable bacon and eggs on the fancy, newfangled gas-burning stove in there.

  Thus fortified, he got out of his nightshirt and into the gray jailer's uniform he'd worn since Caleb Briggs found out the Sloss Works had given him the boot. He planted his wide-brimmed hat on his head at a jaunty angle and looked at himself in the mirror. His reflection happily nodded approval at him. "I'm hot stuff, no two ways about it," he said, and that reflection did not presume to disagree.

  He put his nightstick on his belt and headed out the door. He'd toted longer, heavier bludgeons while breaking up Whig rallies with his Freedom Party pals, but he supposed he understood why jailers didn't usually carry guns. If something went wrong, that would give prisoners deadly weapons, which was the last thing anybody wanted.

  People got out of his way when he walked down the street in that uniform. He liked that. He'd never had it happen before, except when he was in the company of a lot of his pals, all of them in white shirts and butternut pants, all of them ready-even eager-for trouble. Now he strode along by himself, but men and women still made way for him. He lit a cigarette and blew out a cheerful cloud of smoke.

  Birmingham City Jail was a squat red-brick building that looked like a fortress. As far as Jeff was concerned, it looked just the way it was supposed to. He tipped his hat to a policeman in an almost identical uniform coming out. "Mornin', Howard," he said. "Freedom!"

  "Mornin', Jeff. Same to you," the cop answered. A lot of policemen in Birmingham belonged to the Freedom Party. Pinkard had seen some of them at meetings. Since becoming a jailer, he'd found out that a good many who didn't go to meetings or knock heads were members just the same. Some policemen felt they shouldn't flaunt their politics. But that didn't mean they had none.

  Inside the city jail, Jeff stuck his card in a time clock just like the one at the Sloss Works except for being painted gray rather than black. He stuck his head into the cramped little office where he had a battered desk. "Mornin', Billy," he said to his night-shift counterpart, who was writing a report at an equally beat-up desk. "What's new for me?"

  "Not a whole hell of a lot," Billy Fraser answered. He was about Jeff's age, and like him a veteran-precious few white men of their generation in the CSA hadn't gone to the front. "A couple of niggers in for drunk and disorderly, and one burglar who was the easiest collar you'd ever want-dumb asshole fell out a second-story window making his getaway and broke his ankle. Yell he let out woke up the whole goddamn block. They were beating on him pretty good. He was probably glad when the cops pulled the citizens off him and hauled him away."

  "Don't reckon we have to worry about him bustin' out for a while," Pinkard said with a chuckle.

  "Hell, no," Fraser said. "Like I told you, a quiet night."

  Jeff nodded. "Anything else I need to know?"

  "Don't reckon so," the other man answered. He threw the report in his Out basket and got to his feet. "Gonna head on home and catch me some shuteye. See you tomorrow. Freedom!"

  "Freedom!" Pinkard echoed. "Get some rest. I don't expect the bastards we've got locked up are going anywhere much."

  "They better not," Billy Fraser said. "That'd leave us some pretty tall explaining to do." He grabbed his hat-the twin of Jeff's-from the rack, stuck it on his head, and went out whistling "The Pennsylvania Rag," a tune that had been popular during the early days of the Great War, back when the CSA had held a large part of Pennsylvania.

  The first thing Jefferson Pinkard did then was look at the report Fraser had written. It was meant for the warden, not for him, but he didn't care about that. He'd discovered Billy sometimes wrote things down that he forgot to say, things Jeff needed to know. Nothing like that was in there today, but you never could tell. When you were dealing with prisoners, you couldn't be too careful, either. If his experience in the Empire of Mexico had taught him anything, that was it.

  After Jeff put the report back where he'd got it, he ambled down to the kitchen and snagged himself a cup of coffee. He snagged a roll, too. One of the colored cooks clucked reproachfully at that, but he was grinning while he did it, a grin that showed several gold teeth. Jeff grinned back. He had no trouble with Negroes, as long as they remembered who the boss was.

  After he did that, he prowled through the whole jail, peering into every cell to see who was where. He couldn't take the prisoners out of the cells and line them up for roll call, the way he had down in Mexico. He'd had all the room in the world down there: he'd built his prison camp on the loneliest stretch of ground he could find. Things were different in Birmingham, but he wanted to know as much about what was going on as he could.

  "I ain't run away, jailer man," said a Negro named Ajax, who was doing a year for beating up another man whom he'd caught using loaded dice. The victim was also black. Had he been white, Ajax would have faced a lot more time behind bars. "I's still here. You don't got to check on me every mornin'."

  "Morning I don't check on you is probably the morning you'll try some damnfool thing or other," Pinkard answered. "More I check, harder it is for me to get a nasty surprise."

  Ajax reproachfully clicked his tongue between his teeth. "You ain't no fun a-tall," he said.

  "You wanted fun, you shoulda thought twice about pounding on that other nigger," Jeff said.

  "That cheatin' son of a bitch won ten dollars o' my money with them goddamn dice," Ajax exclaimed, nothing but indignation in his voice. "I see him when I gits out o' here, I kick his shiftless ass again, teach him not to try none o' that shit no more." If jail was supposed to rehabilitate, it wasn't working with the aggrieved Ajax.

  But Jeff didn't think jail was supposed to rehabilitate. Like the other jailers he was getting to know, he thought it was supposed to keep people who belonged there inside till it was time to let them out again. He didn't worry his head about who belonged and who didn't, either. Figuring that out wasn't his job. As far as he was concerned, if somebody ended up in the Birmingham City Jail, he damn well belonged there.

  By the time his rounds ended, the trusties were going through the corridors serving breakfast to the other prisoners. Jeff didn't like that, either. He thought using trusties begged for trouble, because they were so likely to be anything but. But the jail didn't have the money to hire enough guards to do everything inside that needed doing, and so trusties took care of a lot of work. He scowled at them as he headed back to his office. How much contraband did they smuggle in? They knew. Nobody else did.

  He was halfway through a circuit of the jail before lunch when one of the corridor guards waved to him and called, "Hold on there. Warden wants to see you in his office right away."

  "Does he?" Jeff said uselessly. The guard nodded, as if to affirm he hadn't been kidding. "What the hell does he think I did?" Pinkard muttered. The guard didn't hear that. A prisoner did, and leered at Jeff. As far as the former steelworker knew, the boss wanted to see you only when you were in trouble. Still cursing under his breath, he walked to the warden's office.

  Ewell McDonald had all to himself more space than Jeff and the other assistant jailers put together. He was a beefy man in his early sixties, with his silver hair greased down and with a bushy gray mustache he'd probably worn since it was dark and stylish back in the 1890s. He heaved himself out of his swivel chair and stuck out a well-manicured hand for Jeff to shake. "Sit down, Pinkard, sit down
," he boomed, sounding more like a politician on the stump than anything else. "Sit down and make yourself comfortable."

  "Uh, thank you kindly, sir," Jeff replied, wondering when and how and why McDonald was going to lower the boom on him. "What can I do for you?" Might as well make it short and sweet, he thought.

  Instead of answering right away, McDonald reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. Pinkard's eyes widened slightly, or more than slightly. Alabama was a dry state, though there were ways around that. He knew as much. He didn't expect the warden of the Birmingham City Jail to know it, or at least to show he knew it to a man he was going to bawl out. But Ewell McDonald yanked out the cork, swigged, and then passed the bottle across the wide expanse of his desk to Jeff. "Here you go, Pinkard," he said. "Have a snort."

  "Thank you kindly," Pinkard said again. He knew he sounded bewildered, but couldn't help it. After he drank, he whistled appreciatively. That was real whiskey, not something cooked up in a hurry over an illegal still. He hadn't drunk anything so tasty in quite a while. He passed the bottle back, more worried than ever. McDonald wouldn't waste that kind of whiskey on him if he were in only a little trouble.

  But the warden beamed at him. "You know, Pinkard, when I hired you, I reckoned I was stuck with you on account of Freedom Party business," he said. "Happens sometimes; nothing you can do but make the best of it. But I'll be goddamned if you ain't pulled your weight and then some. You weren't lyin' 'bout that prison-camp business down in Mexico, were you?"

  "Lying, sir?" Pinkard shook his head. "Hell, no. I did all that stuff."

  "I guess maybe you did," McDonald said. "I wouldn't have bet on it when I took you on, I'll tell you that. But you've worked out fine. Hell, son, you're doing better than some of the fellows who've been here ten years." He grabbed the whiskey bottle and tilted it back for another knock.

  "Thank you very much, sir," Jeff said, more than a little dazedly. He'd thought the same thing himself, but he'd never dreamt the warden would come out and say so. "Thank you very much. I've learned a hell of a lot here, too. Down in Mexico, I was making it up as I went along. You-all really know what you're doing."