Walk in Hell (32 page)

“The Rebs put the niggers down!” That cry came out of the crowd at least twice every city block.

The Socialists were ready for it: “Does that mean you want us to act just like the Confederates?” Identifying U.S. actions with those of the hated enemy reduced all but the most politically savvy hecklers to confusion—better yet, to speechless confusion.

Jews and Irishmen, Italians and a few Negroes, Anglo-Saxons and Germans, too, the marchers made their way up to Central Park, where they congregated for the speeches. Herman Bruck and Flora climbed up onto the platform packed with politicians and labor leaders. Bruck eyed her with complacent glee and introduced her to some of the Socialist bigwigs (something even an egalitarian party possessed) she hadn’t yet met.

Big Bill Haywood eyed her, too, in a manner that tempted her to take out the hatpin. He had only one eye that tracked and he stank of whiskey, but the furious energy he brought to any cause—whether organizing or striking—made him a force for the money power to reckon with. “Give ’em hell, missy,” he said in a gravelly bass. “They deserve it.”

Senator Debs of Indiana was more urbane but no more ready to back down. “TR wants to deal with us as the French dealt with the Paris Commune,” he said. “We’ll show him we are stronger, even in the midst of this foolish war we never should have agreed to help finance.” He grimaced at the tactical blunder his party had made back in 1914. Flora wondered, though, whether he would say the same thing if, as seemed likely, he gained the Socialist nomination for president later in the year.

One speaker after another went up to the podium, blasted the Democrats, praised labor to the skies, and withdrew. “And now, from the Fourteenth Ward, home of the late, great Congressman Zuckerman, Mr. Herman Bruck!” yelled the fellow in charge of keeping the speeches in some kind of order.

He stepped back. Herman Bruck stepped forward. He delivered his speech. Flora stopped listening to it about a minute and a half in. It was everything she’d thought it would be, in its strengths and weaknesses, the latter summarized by the yawns she saw out in the crowd.

Bruck finished and stepped back to polite, tepid applause. “Also from the Fourteenth Ward, Miss Flora Hamburger!” the presenter shouted.

Trying to ignore the pounding of her heart, Flora looked out over the podium at the sea of faces out there. “Birds have nests!” she cried, and pounded a fist down on the polished wood. “Foxes have dens! What does the proletariat have? Nothing but the strength of its right arms, for the capitalists have stolen everything else! And now, not content with that, they send the workers of our country—the workers of the world—out to die by millions in a war that has nothing to do with them. Do we sit idly by and let that happen? Or do we take action, brothers and sisters?”

Maybe fear for David, who would go in for his examination tomorrow, lent her even more passion than she would have had otherwise. However that was, by the time she finished, the applause she got lifted her far higher above the crowd than could have been accounted for by the platform alone. She stepped back dazed, hardly knowing what she’d done.

Big Bill Haywood’s hungry stare put her in mind of a wolf eyeing a slab of steak. Eugene Debs said, “Young lady, I think I shall tear up my own speech.” Herman Bruck looked half astonished, half terrified. That, somehow, was sweetest of all.

Tom Kennedy put a friendly arm around Cincinnatus’shoulder. “Come on into the back room,” he said. “Have a cigar with us.” He laughed. So did Joe Conroy. The storekeeper waved Cincinnatus into that back room.

With no small reluctance, he followed the two white men in there. Inside, he was sighing—no, worse, he was sweating. He didn’t want to have anything to do with the Confederate underground still operating in Covington, Kentucky, not any more he didn’t. But, quite literally, they knew where he lived. If they wanted him to play along, he either had to do it or betray them to the U.S. occupying authorities and then live in fear for the rest of his life. For now, going along seemed less dangerous.

The back room smelled of tobacco and spices and sweets and leather, with a faint undertone of potatoes going bad. To his surprise, Conroy reached into a cigar box and handed him a plump panatella. “Thank you, suh,” he said in some surprise. Kennedy was the one who’d always treated him pretty well. To Conroy, he’d been just another hired nigger.

“Hear tell you’ve been drivin’ trucks all over creation for the damnyankees these past few weeks,” Conroy said. “Reckon that’s why you ain’t been in to see us much, even when we put the signal up in the window for you.”

“It’s a fact, suh,” Cincinnatus agreed, gratefully seizing on the excuse the storekeeper offered him. “Sometimes I’m gone fo’ days at a time.”

“That’s fine,” Tom Kennedy said. He was thin and dapper and clever; it wasn’t by accident he’d been running the hauling firm for which Cincinnatus had worked before the war. “I always knew there was a lot to you, Cincinnatus. Once we win the war, smart black fellows like you will have a lot more chances in the CSA, I reckon. It’s in the cards.”

“You say that even after the Red uprisin’?” Cincinnatus asked. Kennedy and Conroy didn’t know he was a part-time Red himself, but he was in no danger of blowing his cover with the question—the only people who didn’t know about the Red Negro attempted revolution were dead.

Kennedy nodded, quite seriously. “Hell, yes, I say that. Richmond won’t ever want that kind of thing to happen again, not ever, I tell you. Too many niggers to hold down all of you, so I figure they’ll have to give you some of what you want. Don’t you?”

Cincinnatus shrugged. He eyed Joe Conroy. The storekeeper nodded, however unenthusiastically. That made Cincinnatus think Kennedy might be right. The next question was, did he care? That was harder to answer. A few weeks before, he would have said a Confederacy with some rights for blacks didn’t sound too bad. But now that he’d met Lieutenant Straubing, it didn’t sound too good, either. He’d seen that men who didn’t care about color were rare in the USA. In the CSA, they weren’t rare—they simply didn’t exist.

Taking his silence for consent, Kennedy picked up the box from which Conroy had drawn the panatella and the box under it. He opened the one under that. It held, not cigars, but thin-walled lead cylinders of about the same size. Cincinnatus didn’t know what they were for, but he figured Kennedy would tell him.

He was right. Kennedy picked up one of the tubes and said, “Thanks to these little sugar plums, we can make the Yankees very unhappy. There’s a copper disk edge-on right in the middle here”—he held the cylinder toward a kerosene lamp, so Cincinnatus could see it wasn’t hollow quite all the way through—“that divides it into two compartments. You put sulfuric acid in one, picric acid in the other, cork both ends with wax plugs—and then all you have to do is wait.”

“Wait for what?” Cincinnatus was starting to get an idea, but, again, he didn’t know enough to be sure.

“When the sulfuric acid eats through the copper, it mixes with the picric acid, right?” Kennedy said with a grin that would have made him a hell of a snake-oil salesman. “And out both ends of the tube comes the nicest little spurt of flame you ever did see. Melts down the bomb so nothing’s left and starts a hell of a fire, both at the same time. Set one in a crate of shells, say—”

“I see what you’re talkin’ about, Mr. Kennedy, I surely do,” Cincinnatus said. The Confederates had indeed come up with a nasty little toy here. “How much time goes by ’fore the stuff in there eats through the copper and the fire starts?”

“Depends on how thick the copper disk is,” Conroy answered. “Anywhere from an hour or so to a couple of weeks. We got all kinds. You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Good,” Cincinnatus said. It wasn’t good, but it was better than it might have been. If he started setting firebombs all over creation, the Yankees would take a while to associate the blazes with him. But, sooner or later, they would. He had no doubt of that. The Yankees weren’t stupid. Even Lieutenant Kennan did his job well enough, no matter how wrongheaded his ideas about Negroes were.

Conroy and Kennedy probably didn’t think the Yankees were stupid, either. What they did think was that Cincinnatus was stupid. With a big, false smile pasted across his face, the storekeeper said, “See how easy it’ll be, boy? Not a chance in the world of getting caught.”

Cincinnatus glanced over to Tom Kennedy. Kennedy treated him as well as any Confederate white had ever done, and sometimes showed, or seemed to show, some understanding that dark skin didn’t mean no brains. If Kennedy warned him to be careful now when he picked his spots, and to make sure he didn’t bring suspicion down on himself…he wasn’t sure what he’d do then, but at least he’d have proof in his former boss’ actions that the CSA might see its way clear to looking at Negroes as human beings once the war was done.

Kennedy smiled, too. “Joe is right, Cincinnatus,” he said. “You can see for yourself, they won’t ever have a clue about how the fires start. You can do the cause a whole lot of good.”

“I see that, Mistuh Kennedy, suh,” Cincinnatus said slowly. The Confederate cause came first with Kennedy, too. “How do I tell the few-hour bombs from the ones that go for days ’fore they catch on fire?”

Tom Kennedy’s smile got broader. He clapped Cincinnatus on the back. “You’re a good fellow, you know that? Here, I’ll show you.” He held out one of the lead tubes. “The time it’s set for is stamped right here, you see. This one’s a six-hour delay.” He held up a warning forefinger. “That’s not perfect, mind you. It might be four hours, and it might be eight. But it won’t be two hours, and it won’t be two days, either.”

“I got you,” Cincinnatus said. It was a good system. It would do damage. It would also get traced back to him, sure as the sun would set tonight and come up again tomorrow.

Conroy and Kennedy had a rucksack ready for him to carry home. It contained lead tubes inset with copper disks of varying thickness, a glass jar full of oily-looking sulfuric acid, and another jar that held a powdery, yellowish substance, presumably picric acid. It also had a couple of dozen wax stoppers, a spoon, and a couple of glass funnels. “You don’t want to get this stuff, either kind, on your skin, or let the one go through the funnel that’s held the other,” Conroy said. If the storekeeper was warning him, Cincinnatus figured he was dealing with nasty stuff indeed.

The rucksack was small, but surprisingly heavy—lead was like that. Cincinnatus felt almost as if he’d lugged a crate of ammunition home with him. When he got back to the house, Elizabeth’s eyebrows shot up at the burden he brought in. “You don’t want to know,” he told her, and she didn’t ask any more questions. She’d learned you were liable to be better off without some answers than with them.

That evening, working in the sink after Elizabeth had gone to bed, Cincinnatus carefully made up three firebombs, one with a one-day disk, one with a two-day disk, and one with a fourteen-day disk, the longest in the whole set of tubes the men from the Confederate underground had given him. He accidentally spilled a drop of sulfuric acid on the galvanized iron. It steamed and bubbled and was doing its best to eat its way right through the sink till he poured lots of water on it. Afterwards, he eyed the discolored spot with considerable respect.

He didn’t like having the bombs in his pocket when he went to work the next morning. If a stopper came loose, he figured he’d like it even less. Nodding in a friendly way to Lieutenant Straubing came hard.

Along with the other drivers, he rattled south, and stopped to drop his cargo—small-arms ammunition, from what was stenciled on the crates—a little past one in the afternoon. While laborers unloaded the trucks, he ate his lunch and wandered around. Planting a couple of bombs was as easy as Kennedy and Conroy had said it would be.

Night had fallen by the time he got back to Covington. “See you tomorrow, Cincinnatus,” Lieutenant Straubing called, and waved.

“Yes, suh.” Cincinnatus waved back. He walked home. No signal for him in Conroy’s front window today—the Confederate underground had got what it wanted from him. The general store was quiet and dark, closed for the day. He ducked into the alley behind the place to make sure nothing was wrong, then went on home.

He made up a couple of more bombs that evening, and planted them the next day. That evening, Conroy waved to him as he walked past—word of the first fire he’d set must have already got back to the storekeeper.
Glad you’re happy,
Cincinnatus thought, and returned the wave, as he had Lieutenant Straubing’s.

Twelve days later, Conroy’s store burned to the ground.

Jonathan Moss’ thumb stabbed the firing button. The tracers his machine gun spat helped him guide the line of fire across the fuselage of the British biplane whose pilot hadn’t spied him coming till too late. The flier slumped over his controls, dead or unconscious. His aeroplane spun down, down, down. Moss followed it down, on the off chance the limey was shamming. He wasn’t. The aeroplane crashed into the battered ground of no-man’s-land and began to burn.