Walk in Hell (37 page)

“It’s good to see you, too, Hal,” she answered. She didn’t view him with the relentless suspicion she aimed at most of the male half of the human race. For one thing, he was at least fifteen years older than she. For another, he’d never tried to get out of line with her. Up till the year before, they hadn’t even called each other by their Christian names.

“Would you like some lemonade?” he asked. “I made it myself.” He sounded proud of that. He’d been a widower for a good many years, and took pride in everything he did for himself.

“I’d love some, thank you,” Nellie said. He went into the back room and brought it out in a tumbler that didn’t match the one sitting by his last. Nellie sipped. She raised an eyebrow. “It’s very good lemonade.” And it was—tart and sweet and cool and full of pulp.

“For which I thank you,” he answered, dipping his head in what was almost a bow. His courtly, antique manners were another reason why he set off no fire bells of alarm in her mind. “I am going to fill my glass again. Would you like another?”

“Half a glass,” she answered. “I had a cup of coffee a couple of minutes before I came over here.”

“Did you?” He chuckled. “Drinking up your own profits, eh?” He went into the back room again, returning with his glass full and Nellie’s, as she’d asked, something less than that. After giving it to her, he asked, “And what do you hear in the coffeehouse these days?”

Before Nellie could reply, a young Confederate lieutenant came in, picked up his boots, and bustled out again without looking at her once. That suited her fine. Once he was gone, she answered the question that had sounded casual but wasn’t: “They’ve been talking about strengthening the bridges over the Potomac. I don’t know why. It can’t be for anything really important: they keep going on about barrels and tanks, not guns or trucks or wagons. Maybe they’re bringing beer up for their men.”

“Maybe they are. It would be fine if they were.” Jacobs muttered something his bushy gray mustache swallowed. Aloud, he said, “Anything you hear about tanks and barrels would be—interesting.”

“All right.” Nellie knew he wasn’t going to tell her anything more than that. Ignorance was her best protection, though she already knew too many secrets, guilty and otherwise. But Jacobs had connections—about most of which she was also ignorant—back to the U.S. government, whereas she was no more than one of his sources of news. She assumed that meant he knew how to run his business.

Another Confederate officer came in: the owner of the boot on which the cobbler was working. The fellow glowered. “You said that was going to be ready today,” he growled.

“So I did, sir,” Jacobs answered. “And it will be. I didn’t say it would be ready first thing in the morning, though.”

“As soon as you can,” the Reb said. “My unit is heading north this afternoon, and I want these boots.”

“I’ll do all I can,” Jacobs said. “If you come back about half-past eleven, this one should be all fixed up.” Shaking his head unhappily, the Confederate left. Nellie would have bet Hal Jacobs knew to which unit he belonged, and that the information about its movements would soon be in U.S. hands. And Jacobs had his own way of harassing the enemy: “Won’t it be a shame when some of the nails I put in go through the sole and poke the bottom of his foot? What a pity—he’s made me hurry the job.”

The bell rang again. Nellie wondered if it was the Reb, too impatient to wait for eleven-thirty. It wasn’t. It was Edna. That meant something was wrong. Except for a couple of times to get shoes fixed, Edna didn’t come in here.

“Ma,” Edna said without preamble, “there’s a Rebel major over across the street, says he’s got to talk to you right now.”

“You go tell him I’ll be right there,” Nellie said. When Edna had gone, she gave Mr. Jacobs a stricken glance. “What do I do now?”

“It depends on what he wants,” replied the cobbler who wasn’t only a cobbler. “I know you will do your best, come what may. Whatever happens, remember that you have more friends than you know.”

Cold comfort. Nellie nodded, composed herself, and went back across the street. The major was waiting for her outside the coffeehouse, which she did not take as a good sign. When she first came up to him, he said, “Mrs. Semphroch, you are acquainted with William Gustavus Reach.” It was not a question. She wished it had been.

“Yes, I know him some,” she said through ice in her belly so cold, she thought it would leave her too frozen to speak at all. Part of it was fear for herself, part fear for Mr. Jacobs, and part, maybe the biggest part, fear of what Edna, standing not five feet away, would hear and learn. “He came by this place every so often.” She made her lip curl. “Last time he came by, he was trying to steal things when they dropped bombs on us that night.”

“The acquaintance goes back no farther than that?” The Confederate major was one of those smart men who think themselves even smarter than they are. How much did he know? How much had Reach spilled? How much could she say without spilling more to Edna?

She picked her words with care, doing her best to sound careless: “I knew him a long time ago, a little, you might say, but I hadn’t set eyes on him from before my daughter here was born till he showed up again.” That was all true, every word of it; it helped steady her.

“Uh-
huh
.” The Reb looked down at his notebook. “You are not, and never have been, his wife?”

Edna stared at Nellie. Nellie stared, too, in astonishment commingled with relief. Maybe she’d come out of this in one piece after all. “I hope to Jesus I’m not,” she exclaimed—more truth. “I hope to Jesus I never was, and I surely hope to Jesus I never will be! If I never see him again in all my born days, it’ll be too soon.”

“Uh-
huh
,” the Confederate major said again. “Well, if you had been his wife and weren’t any more, you might say the same thing, but I reckon—” He didn’t say exactly what he reckoned, but it didn’t seem like anything bad for Nellie. “Maybe you can tell me what sort of friends he has, then.”

“Next friend of his I know about will be the first,” Nellie said.

Edna giggled. The major started to smile, then stopped, as if remembering he was on duty. He said, “This here Reach tells more stories than Uncle Romulus, and that’s a fact. Some of them, ma’am, we have to check.” He chuckled. “We’re going to send him to a place where nobody listens to his stories for a long, long time.”

“If you think I’m going to miss him, Major, you can think again.” Nellie sounded as prim and righteous as she did when taking the high line with Edna. The Rebel tipped his hat to her and went on his way.

“That wasn’t so bad, Ma,” Edna said. “Way he was asking after you, though, heaven only knew what he wanted.”

“You’re right,” Nellie said.
You don’t know how right you are
.

She went back across the street to the shoe-repair shop. The bell jangled. Mr. Jacobs looked up—warily—from his work. Her enormous smile said everything that needed saying. He set down the little hammer, came around the counter, and took both her hands in his. To her astonishment, she leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. She hadn’t done that with a man since well before her husband died. His arms went around her, and he kissed her, too. She enjoyed it. That hadn’t happened since well before her husband died, either.

“Some good out of Bill Reach after all,” she murmured to herself.

Hal Jacobs stiffened. “Out of who?” he barked, his voice too loud, his mouth too near her ear. She explained, sure he’d misheard. He sagged away from her, his face pale as whitewash. “I wondered what was wrong,” he gasped. “Hadn’t heard from him in too long. Bill runs—ran, maybe—our whole organization here. And he’s caught? Good God!”

“Good God!” Nellie said, too, for very different reasons. All at once, she wondered if she was backing the wrong side.

“Not much further now,” Lucien Galtier told his horse as he rode up the fine American-paved road toward Rivière-du-Loup. In the back of the wagon, several hens clucked, but they were not a true part of the conversation. He and the horse had been discussing things for years. The hens’ role, though they did not realize it, was strictly temporary.

Off to the east, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, a steam whistle shouted as a train hurried up toward the town.
“Tabernac,”
Galtier muttered under his breath: a Quebecois curse. The soldiers on the train, no doubt, would cross the St. Lawrence and then try to push on toward Quebec City. The Americans, worse luck, were making progress, too, for the artillery from the north bank of the river sounded farther off than it had when the campaign was new. The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French Revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.

The whistle screamed again. The horse twitched his ears in annoyance. The chickens squawked and fluttered in their cages. No, they were not suited for serious talk—too flighty.

Cannon by the riverbank started going off—
wham, wham, wham!
The horse snorted. The chickens went crazy. Lucien Galtier raised a dark eyebrow. “Those are quick-firing guns,” he told the horse, “the kind they use when trying to shoot down an aeroplane. And so—”

Through the cannons’ roar, he picked up a rapidly swelling buzz. Then he spotted the winged shapes. Before the war, he had never seen an aeroplane. Here, now, were two at once, flying hardly higher than the treetops. They both carried blue-white-red roundels on their wings and flanks. The red was in the shape of a maple leaf.

“There, what did I yell you?” Lucien said to the horse. “And not just any aeroplanes, but Canadian aeroplanes.” He reined in to watch.

In front of the pilots, machine guns hammered. He wondered how the men managed to fire through the propellers without shooting themselves down. However they did it, they shot up the troop train, spun in the air like circus acrobats, and then shot it up again. Then, still low, they streaked back toward the free side of the St. Lawrence.

Galtier expected the train to streak toward Rivière-du-Loup. Instead, it came to a ragged halt. Maybe the aeroplanes had killed the engineer, and the brakeman was doing what he did best. Maybe they had filled the boiler with so many holes, it was either kill the pressure inside or explode.

“It could even be—both,” Galtier said, not altogether unhappily.

Soldiers started spilling out of the train. Some of them came running his way. He scowled and thought himself a fool for having stopped to watch the spectacle. But if he tried to leave now, those soldiers would not be pleased with him. And they had rifles.

“Frenchie! Hey, Frenchie!” they shouted as they got closer. “Bring your wagon on over here. We got wounded.”

“Mauvais tabernac,”
Lucien snarled. No help for it, though. As he pulled the wagon off the road and bounced toward the track, he felt a curious mixture of joy at having the enemies of his country wounded and sorrow at having young men who had never personally done him wrong wounded.

The chickens did not approve of the rough ride he was giving them. “Be still, you fools,” he told them, for the first time including them in his…He groped for a word.
In my salon,
he thought, pleased with himself. “This will keep you alive a little longer.”

Ahead, soldiers in green-gray were sometimes helping out of the train, sometimes carrying from it other soldiers in green-gray extravagantly splashed with red. “How many can you hold?” a captain called to Lucien as he drew near. “Four, maybe five?”

“Yes, it could be,” the farmer had replied. Exposure had improved his English—to a point. When he turned to indicate the chickens and their cages in the wagon bed, he was reduced to a helpless wave and a single word: “But—”

“Here.” The American captain dug in a trouser pocket and tossed something to Galtier, who automatically caught it. “That ought to cover them.” He looked down to see what he had: a twenty-dollar U.S. goldpiece.

He took off his hat in salute.
“Oui, monsieur. Merci, monsieur.”
The American could simply have had the chickens thrown out onto the ground. He’d expected the
Boche americain
to do just that. Instead, the fellow had given him more than a fair price for them. Lucien jumped down and piled the cages in a wobbly pyramid, then hurried to help the Americans land their comrades in the space thus vacated.
A service for a service,
he thought.

“Here, pal,” an unwounded U.S. soldier said. “Careful with Herb here. He’s a damn good fellow, Herb is.” As gently as he could, Lucien arranged the damn good fellow so he could sit against the side of the wagon. Herb had a rough bandage, rapidly soaking through with blood, on his right leg. He also had a streak of blood running down his chin from one corner of his mouth; he must have bitten through his lip against the pain.

The horse snorted and tried to shy, uneasy at the stink of blood. One of the American soldiers caught his head and eased him back toward something approaching calm. There was no earthly reason Americans should not be good with horses. Nonetheless, Lucien felt almost as betrayed as if his wife had been unfaithful with a man who wore green-gray.

“We came past a hospital back there, didn’t we?” the captain asked. “I thought I saw it through the window.”

“Yes, sir,” Galtier answered. “It is, in fact, on my land.” The American didn’t notice the resentment with which he said that. Well, the fellow had paid him. One surprise of a day was plenty; with two, nothing would have seemed certain any more. In the memory of the one surprise, Galtier added, “And my daughter works as a nurse’s helper there.”

“I’m afraid we’ve given her more work to do,” the captain said, to which Lucien could only nod. The wagon was already packed tight with wounded, some moaning, some ominously still. More lay on the ground. Their unhurt comrades were doing what they could for them, but most, obviously, had little skill.

Lucien pointed to the road. “There is an ambulance from the hospital. It goes to Rivière-du-Loup to pick up the blessed.” The captain looked confused. Lucien realized he’d made a mistake, using a French word for an English one with the same sound but a different meaning. He corrected himself: “The wounded.”

“He doesn’t need to go that far, not now he doesn’t,” the captain said. Soldiers were waving to the ambulance. As Galtier had done before, it pulled off the road and came jouncing over the rough ground toward the tracks. The driver and his attendant scrambled out of the machine. The attendant shook his head. “What a mess,” he said.

“Yeah.” The ambulance driver scowled. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen or so, not with that unlined face, but was dark and handsome and looked strong as a bull. “This is what you do. You die.” He sounded world-weary beyond his years. “You do not know what it is about. You never have time to learn.”

“Let’s get ’em on the stretcher and into the bus,” the attendant said.

“Yeah,” the driver said again. But then he recognized Galtier. He nodded. “You are Nicole’s father,
n’est-ce pas
?” His French was bad, but few Americans spoke any.

“Yes,” Lucien answered. In spite of himself, he’d come to know some of the people at the hospital. “
Bonjour,
Ernest.”

“Not a
bon jour
for them,” the ambulance driver said. His broad shoulders—almost the shoulders of a prizefighter—went up and down in a shrug. “We will take them back. We will do what we can for them.”

Up in Rivière-du-Loup and elsewhere along the St. Lawrence, the antiaircraft guns started banging away again. Lucien noticed that only in the back part of his mind till he heard the buzz of aeroplane engines.

“Jesus fucking Christ!” an American screamed—doubly a blasphemy for Galtier. Then the man in green-gray said something even worse: “Here they come again!”

Whether they were the same two aeroplanes or two others, Lucien never knew. All around him, soldiers scattered, some diving for cover under the halted train, others running as far away from it as they could. Lucien stood there, foolishly, as the machine guns began chewing up the dirt close by.

The pilots did not try to shoot up either his wagon or the ambulance near it. He was and remained convinced of that. But they were flying fast, and didn’t miss by much. The captain who’d given him the goldpiece spun and toppled like someone with no bones at all, the top of his head shot off. Fresh cries of pain rose from every direction.

Roaring just above his head, the aeroplanes streaked away. A couple of Americans fired their rifles at them. It did no good. They were gone. Galtier looked around at carnage compounded.

A moan that stood out for anguish even among all the others made him turn his head. The young, strong ambulance driver lay beside the soldier he had been about to help. Now he was wounded, too. His hands clutched at himself. Lucien shivered and made the sign of the cross. Maybe, if God was kind, he had been wounded near there, but not
there
.

The ambulance attendant, whose name Galtier did not know, came over to him and the injured driver. “We’re going to have to bandage that and get him back to the hospital,” he said, to which Lucien could only nod. The attendant stooped beside the driver. “Come on, kid, you got to let me see that.”

In the end, Lucien had to hold the fellow’s hands away from the wound while the attendant worked. The driver writhed and fought. He wasn’t altogether conscious, but he was, as he looked, strong as the devil. Hanging onto his hands turned into something just short of a wrestling match.

Lucien hadn’t intended to look as the attendant cleaned and bandaged the wound. But his eyes, drawn by some horrid fascination of their own, went to it. He winced and wanted to cross himself again.
There,
indeed.

He and the attendant got the driver into the back of the ambulance with another wounded man. “Thanks for the help,” the attendant said.

“Not at all.” Galtier hesitated. “With this bl—
wound
—do you think he can—? Will he be able to—?” He ran out of English and nerve at the same time.

“If he’s lucky,” the attendant said, understanding him anyhow, “if he’s real lucky, mind, he’ll be able to
just
do it.” He climbed into the ambulance and drove it back toward the hospital. Galtier followed at his necessarily slower pace. He said nothing at all to the horse.

Klaxons hooted, everywhere on the
Dakota
. Sam Carsten threw his mop into a bucket and ran for his battle station. He’d expected the call even before the battleship fished its aeroplane out of the waters of the Pacific. Officers had been bustling around with the look that said they knew something he didn’t. The aeroplane must have spotted something out there ahead of the fleet and sent word back by wireless.

And, out here south and west of the Sandwich Islands, the only thing to spot was the enemy. “The limeys!” Carsten gasped to Hiram Kidde when he ducked into the forwardmost starboard five-inch gun sponson.

“Them or the Japs,” Kidde agreed. The gunner’s mate rubbed his chin. “Taken ’em damn near two years, but they finally figured they could come out and play with the big boys. Now we got to show ’em they made a mistake, on account of if we don’t, the Sandwich Islands are up for grabs again.” He’d been in the Navy his whole adult life. He might not have been able to order units around like an admiral, but he had no trouble figuring out the way tactics led into strategy.

Lieutenant Commander Grady stuck his head into the sponson. “All present and accounted for?” asked the commander of the starboard-side secondary armament.

“Yes, sir,” Kidde answered. “Loader”—he nodded at Carsten—“gun layers, shell jerkers, we’re all here. Uh, sir, who are we fighting?”

Grady grinned. “Looks like one hellacious fleet of British battleships over the horizon,” he answered, “along with all their smaller friends. I don’t expect they sailed out of Singapore just to pay their respects.” His face clouded. “By what the pilots say, they’re at least as big a force as we are. They’re playing for keeps, no doubt about it.”

“So are we, sir,” Kidde said. “We’ll be ready.” Grady nodded and hurried away, his shoes ringing off the steel of the deck.

“We don’t have the whole Sandwich Islands fleet out here on patrol with us,” Carsten said unhappily. “If the limeys smash us up and push past us—”

Kidde shrugged. “Chance you take when you join the Navy. If they smash us up and push past us, thing we have to make sure of is that we do some smashing of our own.”

The sponson had only small vision slits for laying the gun. Even those had armored visors to protect against shell splinters in action. The visors were up now. Carsten looked out through one of the slits as the
Dakota
swung into a long, sweeping turn. The patrolling fleet was going into battle formation, the line of half a dozen battleships anchoring it, with smaller, swifter cruisers and destroyers supporting and screening them.