The Great War: Breakthroughs Read online

  “Mornin’, Ma,” Edna Semphroch said when Nellie went back inside. The two women—one in her early twenties, the other in her early forties—looked very much alike, with long, oval faces and high foreheads that seemed higher because they both wore their hair pulled back. Edna painted her face; Nellie didn’t. With a sneer on her red lips, Edna added, “Good morning, Little Nell.”

  Although Nellie had been cold, her face heated and congealed like an egg left too long on a frying pan. “Don’t you ever call me that again,” she said in a low, furious voice. “Ever, do you hear me?”

  Edna’s sneer got wider. “I hear you—” She visibly debated throwing kerosene on the fire, but decided against it. “I hear you.”

  With grim determination, Nellie took what was left of the previous day’s bread off the icebox and started slicing it for the toast and sandwiches she’d be serving. Every stroke of the serrated bread knife made her wish she were drawing it across Bill Reach’s throat.

  Reach had been an annoyance from her past for a couple of years. A former reporter, he had, in Nellie’s much younger days, been in the habit of putting a price down on a nightstand in a cheap hotel and partaking of her services. She’d escaped that life and attained modest respectability. Edna had never known she’d been in it—till Reach, hideously drunk, lost a quarter of a century in what passed for his mind and tried to buy her in the coffeehouse when it was packed with Confederate officers.

  Edna started whistling, not too loud. Nellie ground her teeth and sliced even more viciously than before. The tune Edna was whistling had come up from the Confederate States the year before. It was called “I’ll Do as I Please.”

  Edna had largely done as she pleased before that night, but Nellie had been able to enforce some respect for the proprieties on her. Now—now Edna lived as fast as she chose, and laughed when Nellie protested. Nellie couldn’t protest much. Edna, at least, had a fiancé. What had Nellie had? Customers.

  “Ain’t seen that Reach character since that one night,” Edna remarked. “Wonder what the devil happened to him?”

  “I hope he’s dead,” Nellie said grimly. “If he’s not dead, he ought to be. If he ever shows his face in here again, he will be, too, fast as I can kill him.”

  “He didn’t do anything but tell the truth,” Edna said. She was still very young, too young, perhaps, to realize how deadly dangerous incautious doses of truth could be.

  The door opened. The bell above it jangled. Resplendent in butternut, in strode Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid. The big, handsome Confederate officer planted a kiss on Edna’s smiling mouth. His hands tightened greedily on her. “Mornin’, darling,” he said when they broke apart. Her lipstick branded him like a wound. He turned to Nellie. “Mornin’, ma’am.” He was polite. Very few Confederate officers were anything but. It did little to make her like him better.

  “Good morning,” she said, her own tone grudging. Edna looked daggers at her. Kincaid was not a man to notice subtleties. His smile reminded Nellie of a happy, stupid dog’s. She sighed. Against such an amiable idiot, what hope had she? Sighing, she asked, “What can I get you today?”

  “Couple of scrambled-egg sandwiches with Tabasco on ’em and a big cup of coffee,” he answered.

  Nellie made the eggs and toasted the bread while Kincaid and Edna sat at a table and gazed into each other’s eyes. Nellie was convinced that, had Edna gazed into one of his ears, she could have gazed out the other, there being nothing but empty space between the two. But she did not want him for his brains. Nellie knew that. She wanted him for the bulge he’d had in his pants when they’d separated after their embrace.

  Nicholas Kincaid’s eyes widened when he took his first bite—Nellie had plied the Tabasco bottle with vigor. He gulped scalding coffee. Nellie smiled. But then, enthusiastically, he wheezed, “Good!” The smile vanished.

  Edna said, “Ma, he wants us to tie the knot on the twenty-fifth of March. It’s the first Sunday of spring. Ain’t that romantic?”

  “Are the Confederates still going to be in Washington on the twenty-fifth of March?” Nellie asked. “Fighting sounds closer every day.”

  “You’d best believe we’ll still be here, ma’am.” Kincaid sounded positive. “Yankees won’t have any luck, not even a little, knockin’ us out again. Just to help make sure they don’t, we’re gettin’ more troops, whites and niggers both. This here is our town, and we aim to keep it.”

  The bell above the door rang again. Kincaid was usually the first customer, but then, he had an ulterior motive. He rarely stayed alone with Edna and Nellie for long. In came a couple of field-grade Confederate officers. As they ordered breakfast, they chatted about the fighting off to the west, in northern Virginia. Edna had taken everything Kincaid said as gospel (which was a devil of a thing for a woman bent on marriage to do), but Nellie added together what she had heard from many different people. Her picture of the way the war was going didn’t match his optimistic words.

  After the morning rush of soldiers and collaborators and their sleek, expensive women ebbed, Nellie said, “I’m going across the street to say hello to Mr. Jacobs.”

  “Have fun, Ma,” Edna answered.

  In another tone of voice, the remark would have been harmless. Nellie felt her face heat. “He’s a gentleman, Edna. I know it’s a word you may not understand, but it’s so. We don’t do what you and that overgrown side of beef most assuredly do.”

  “That makes you the fools, not Nick and me,” Edna shot back.

  Nellie went outside without answering. It was still chilly, but not savagely cold. As it had at dawn, as it did around the clock, artillery rumbled to the north. Every so often now, Nellie could hear individual shells screaming in on Confederate fortifications defending the Rebels’ grip on the capital of the United States.

  The bell above Hal Jacobs’ door jingled instead of jangling. The cobbler looked up from the Confederate officer’s riding boot he was resoling. “Widow Semphroch—Nellie,” he said, and smiled a smile that made him look young in spite of gray mustache and thinning gray hair. “How good to see you.”

  “And you, Hal,” she answered, closing the door behind her to keep the heat inside. She looked around. Almost all the shoes in Jacobs’ shop these days belonged to Confederate soldiers. Some awaited his attention, some their owners’ return. Nellie sighed and said, “The Rebs have been here a long time.”

  “That they have,” Jacobs agreed. “That they have.” He sighed, too.

  Casually, she went on, “They’re going to try to hold on here, too. They’re bringing in reinforcements—whites and niggers both, matter of fact.”

  “Is that so?” the shoemaker said. “How interesting.” Nellie always passed him the gossip she picked up in the coffeehouse in that easygoing, conversational way. He always responded in kind, and then sent the information on so the United States could get some use from it.

  “I thought so,” she answered now. After a moment, she went on, “My daughter and that Rebel lieutenant are planning to get married here, a few days after the start of spring.”

  For one of the rare times since she’d begun letting Hal Jacobs know what she heard, she was looking for information from him. He understood that, and did not look very happy about it. At last, grudgingly, he said, “I do hope their plans won’t have to be changed, as could happen.”

  He wasn’t going to say anything more. She could see it in his eyes. He’d told her something, anyhow. She nodded brusque thanks. Then, even more brusquely, she asked, “What do you hear from Bill Reach?”

  Jacobs knew Bill Reach. Along with being a humiliating piece of Nellie’s past, along with drinking like a fish, he had also been the cobbler’s superior among the U.S. spies in Washington. Jacobs said, “Since that unfortunate evening, Widow Semphroch, I have not heard from him at all. Perhaps the Confederates have again jailed him as a thief.”

  “Perhaps he’s frozen to death in a gutter.” Nellie’s voice was full of fierce hope.

 
; “I never knew what he did to offend you so greatly,” Jacobs said.

  “Never mind, but he did.” Nellie thought Jacobs was lying about his ignorance. If he wasn’t, she didn’t intend to enlighten him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry because, since you have been angry at him, you have not brought so many pieces of useful information to me—and you must hear a great deal, because your coffeehouse is so popular with the Confederates and those who deal with them.”

  Jacobs and his friends—about whose identities Nellie had carefully not inquired—had helped keep her coffeehouse in coffee and food, when both were in short supply in occupied Washington. She probably would have gone out of business without their help. “I am sorry, too,” she said. “I do pay my debts, or try to. But that man…I want to pay him back—oh, yes, very much.”

  The cobbler held up a hand. “I had not finished. I am also sorry because, with you angry at Bill Reach, I don’t get to see you as often as I would like. I’ve missed you, you know.”

  Nellie’s mouth fell open. She wasn’t used to having men say such things to her. Edna’s father had been decent enough to marry her when she found herself in a family way. It was one of the few decent things he’d ever done. After he died, she’d been content—more than content—to live as a widow. Now—

  “How you do go on, Hal,” she said, trying to make light of it.

  He didn’t want to make light of it. “I meant what I said,” he told her, and she could hear the truth in his voice. “You are a fine woman—a finer woman, I think, than even you know. Maybe you have been a widow too long to remember these things, but you must believe me here, for I know what I am talking about.”

  “Well, good day, Mr. Jacobs,” Nellie said. “I really have to get back to the coffeehouse now.” She fled from the shoemaker’s shop as if a hundred Confederate spycatchers were on her trail. Her heart thudded. A man who said he missed her, a man who thought her a fine woman, was to her a more frightening apparition than all the Confederate spycatchers in the world.

  Commander Roger Kimball let out a long, lugubrious sigh as the CSS Bonefish sailed away from Habana. Standing atop the submarine’s conning tower, he peered back toward the red tile roofs and brightly painted plaster walls of the capital of the Confederate state of Cuba.

  “Damn,” he said with all due respect. “That sure as hell is one fine town for a shore leave, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir,” agreed Senior Lieutenant Tom Brearley, his executive officer. Both men were recently promoted, after their successful raid on New York harbor. The fresh gold stripes on the sleeves of their dark gray uniform coats were easy to tell apart from the duller ones they’d worn for a while. Brearley went on, “I thought I was a whiskey-drinking man, but I expect I could get used to rum.” He grinned. “I expect I did get used to rum.”

  “Hot and cold running whores, too,” Kimball said with a reminiscent leer. “Black ones, brown ones, white ones—whatever you happen to feel like. Cheap, too. Cuba’s a damn sight cheaper than Charleston, and you can have a better time, too—although I had me some pretty fair times in Charleston, now that I think about it.”

  Anne Colleton naked on a bed had been worth a dozen Habana whores. His blood heated at the memory. She’d been a tigress between the sheets—and she’d wanted him for himself, not for the money he laid down. And she was a rich lady, an influential lady. To a man who’d gone from a backwoods Arkansas farm to the Confederate Naval Academy at Mobile, a connection like that was worth its weight in rubies. Kimball didn’t intend to go back to that miserable farm when his Navy days were over. The only direction he intended to head was up.

  “Weather’s a lot better here than up in the North Atlantic,” Brearley said. “Sea’s a lot calmer, too. I’m just as glad they sent us down here.”

  “Far as the Bonefish goes, so am I,” Kimball agreed. “Hell of a lot easier, hell of a lot more fun where the sea doesn’t try to throw your boat away or tear it in half whenever you’re on the surface. But I don’t care for what the move south says about the way the war is going.”

  Brearley shrugged. “If England doesn’t get the bread and meat she needs from Argentina, she’s out of the war. If she’s out of the war, the Kaiser runs roughshod in Europe and the damnyankees do the same thing in America. If the United States are starting to try and take a bite out of the route from Pernambuco to Dakar, we’ve got to stop ’em.”

  Kimball clicked his tongue between his teeth. His exec was a good kid, but you needed to give him the C and the A if he was going to spell CAT. “Yeah, Tom, we’ve got to stop ’em. But if things were going better farther north, they wouldn’t be able to turn ships loose to go after this shipping route.”

  “Oh, I see what you’re saying, sir,” Brearley answered. No doubt he did, too; he wasn’t stupid, only a little slow. “We’ve got them beat hollow when it comes to logistics.”

  “Good thing, too,” Kimball said. “Otherwise, this war would be within shouting distance of over. But they’ll need coal and fuel oil if they’re going to operate for long in those waters from out of Boston or New York or Philadelphia. We want the supply ships as much as we want the warships.”

  He took his binoculars out of their leather case and scanned the horizon for plumes of smoke. He knew that was foolish. If he spotted enemy ships less than an hour out of Habana, the war wouldn’t just be within shouting distance of the end. It would be history.

  “Anything, sir?” Brearley asked. He had to be jumpy, too, if he thought there might be something so close to the Cuban coast.

  “Damn all,” Kimball told him. He put the binoculars back in the case. “I’m going below.”

  Tropical sun, calm water, and a mild breeze smelling of the salt sea made the top of the conning tower a pleasant, even a delightful, place to stand and pass the time. Going down into the long steel tube of the Bonefish was like descending into another world, perhaps one found in the infernal regions.

  Instead of the illimitable confines of the ocean, Roger Kimball found himself in confines as severely limitable as any in the world, confines where space for machinery was a sine qua non and space for men a distinct afterthought. He banged his head on a pipe fitting he hit about every other day, and he was not an especially tall man.

  Dim orange-tinted electric lamps replaced bright sun. Slowly, slowly, Kimball’s eyes adjusted. He knew he would squint like a blind thing when he went topside again.

  Hardest of all, though, was the transition from fresh sea air to the horrible stuff inside the Bonefish. Even with the hatches open, even with a refit in Habana, she stank: an unforgettable mixture of bilgewater and diesel fuel and food and sweat and the reek of the heads. Kimball knew what she would be like when she came back from her cruise: like this, only magnified a hundredfold. A landlubber boarding a submersible just into port was like as not to add vomit to the reek. Kimball didn’t like the stink, but held it in wry affection. It was the smell of home.

  Ben Coulter had the helm. “Steady on 075, sir,” the veteran petty officer said in response to Kimball’s unspoken question. “Listen to her. Doesn’t she sound good? Those greaser mechanics did a hell of a job.”

  Kimball cocked his head to one side. The engine did sound unusually smooth. “Greasers are loyal,” he said. “It’s the goddamn niggers you got to watch out for.”

  “Not in Cuba,” Coulter said. “Niggers didn’t hardly rise up at all in Cuba, what I hear tell. Never was so many Reds in Cuba like there is back home.” The unlit cigar he clenched between his teeth twitched as he talked.

  “Sad state of affairs when the greasers keep their niggers quiet and white men can’t do it,” Kimball said. “Sad state of affairs when they think they’ve got to give niggers guns or the whole country goes under, too. Anybody wants to know, President Semmes is out of his goddamn mind.”

  Ben Coulter nodded. So did most of the other crewmen within earshot. And then Kimball remembered that Anne Colleton had favored creating Negro milita
ry units, and also favored making Negroes Confederate citizens after their service. He thought as much of her brains as he did of her body, which said a great deal. If, after what she’d gone through at the hands of the Reds, she still thought the CSA needed Negro troops…She’s still wrong, dammit, Kimball thought.

  The Bonefish moved steadily east toward the rectangle on the chart through which the submersible was supposed to sweep till her patrol was done. Kimball drilled the crew hard, regaining whatever edge they’d lost in the fleshpots of Habana. When the boat slid below the surface of the Atlantic in less than thirty seconds, he pronounced himself satisfied—privately, to Tom Brearley. As far as the crew was concerned, he was never satisfied.

  Navigating aboard a submersible wasn’t easy, but repeated sights and hard work with the tables—much of it by Brearley, who had a fine head for mathematics—brought the Bonefish into the box between fifteen and seventeen degrees north latitude, thirty and thirty-three degrees west longitude, her assigned area for this patrol. Kimball chafed at working a set zone instead of hunting freely. Back and forth, back and forth the Bonefish prowled, like a shark in a tank.

  “This isn’t what war is supposed to be about,” Kimball grumbled to his executive officer. “This is hide-and-seek, nothing else but.”

  “Orders,” Brearley said placidly. As far as he was concerned, that made everything right. He had more imagination than a fence post, but not a whole lot. If he ever got his own boat, Kimball was sure he would command it competently. He was also sure his exec would never do anything spectacular.

  Kimball was frustrated not least because he doubted whether any Yankee ships would come into his search zone. A patrol with a log book essentially empty of action was not what he had in mind.

  He was in his bunk—which, however tiny and cramped, was the only one the Bonefish boasted, everyone else sleeping in hammocks or in odd places amongst the gear and machinery in the pressure hull—when the lookout on the conning tower spotted a plume of smoke to westward. Roused by the shouts, he put on his shoes and cap (the only items he’d taken off) and hurried up for a look of his own.