"It means they're gonna fuck me," Jeff said. "That lousy crematorium never did work the way it was supposed to."
"I know. I've seen your letters to the company that built it," Moss said. "The people in charge of that company are also charged with crimes against humanity. The whole Confederacy went around the bend, didn't it?"
"Nope." If Jeff admitted that, he admitted he'd done something wrong. No matter what the damnyankees thought, he was damned if he believed it. "We were just taking care of what we had to do, that's all."
The U.S. officer sighed. "You don't give me much to work with, but I'll do what I can."
He sounded as if he meant it, anyhow. "Thanks," Jeff said grudgingly.
"Right." Moss put papers back into the briefcase, closed it, pushed back his chair, and got up. "We've done about as much as we can today, looks like."
He left. He could leave. Guards took Jeff back to his cell. He wasn't going anywhere, not until the damnyankees decided it was time to try him and hang him. The unfairness of it gnawed at him. When you won the war, you could do whatever you goddamn well pleased.
He imagined the Confederate States victorious. He imagined Jake Featherston setting up tribunals and hanging Yankees from Denver to Bangor for all the nasty things they'd done to the CSA after the Great War. There'd be Yankee bastards dangling from every lamppost in every town. Well, he could imagine whatever he pleased. Things had worked out the other way, and the sons of bitches from the USA were getting a brand new chance to work out on the Confederacy.
Where was the justice in that? Nowhere, not as far as he could see.
Of course, he couldn't see very far, not where he was. He could see lots and lots of iron bars, a forest of them. They weren't even damnyankee iron bars. They came to his eyes courtesy of the city of Houston. What mattered, though, was his own cell. It boasted a lumpy cot, a toilet without a seat (God only knew what kind of murderous weapon he could have come up with if they'd given him a toilet seat), and a coldwater sink. He knew why he didn't get hot water-that would have cost money, heaven forbid.
And he was an important prisoner, too. He had the cell to himself. Most cells held two men. He wouldn't have minded the company, but worrying about what he wanted wasn't high on anybody's list. Well, his own, but nobody gave a rat's ass about that any more. He'd been a big wheel for a long time. He'd got used to shoving Army officers around and arguing with the Attorney General. Now he might as well have been a coon himself, up on a drunk-and-disorderly rap.
Except they wouldn't hang a coon for that. They were going to hang him higher than Haman.
An attendant brought him a tray of food. He'd gone to jail in Birmingham a few times in his younger days. The chow then had been lousy. It still was.
"Sorry, buddy," the attendant said. "If it was up to me, I'd give you a fuckin' medal for what you did with the nigs."
"A medal doesn't do me a hell of a lot of good," Jeff said. "Can you get me out of here instead?"
The attendant shook his head. "Nope. No chance. Too many Yankees around. They'd hang me right alongside of you, and I got five kids."
Jeff could see the fear in his eyes. He would have said no if he were a fairy with no kids and no hope of any. The attendants were locals. Even though Texas was calling itself the Republic of Texas these days, they loved blacks no more than any other white Confederate did. But they loved their necks just fine. Nobody would help an important prisoner, nobody at all.
M y name is Clarence Potter," Potter told the U.S. interrogator in Philadelphia. "My rank is brigadier general." He rattled off his pay number. "Under the Geneva Convention, that's all I've got to tell you."
"Screw the Geneva Convention," the interrogator answered. He was a major named Ezra Tyler, a real Yankee from New England. "And screw you, too. You blew up half of Philadelphia. And you did it wearing a U.S. uniform. You get caught after that, the Geneva Convention won't save your sorry ass."
"You won. You can do whatever you want-who's going to stop you?" Potter said. "But you know you used U.S. soldiers in C.S. uniforms in front of Chattanooga-other places, too. And you dropped two superbombs on my country, not just one. So who do you think you're trying to kid, anyway?"
Major Tyler turned red. "You're not cooperating."
"Damn straight I'm not," Potter agreed cheerfully. "I told you-I don't have to. Not legally, anyway."
"Do you want to live?"
"Sure. Who doesn't? Are you people going to let me? Doesn't seem likely, whether I cooperate or not."
"Professor FitzBelmont doesn't have that attitude."
"Professor FitzBelmont isn't a soldier. Professor FitzBelmont knows things you can really use. And Professor FitzBelmont is kind of a twit." Potter sighed. "None of which applies to me, I'm afraid."
"A twit?" One of Tyler's eyebrows rose. "Without him, you wouldn't have had a superbomb."
"You're right-no doubt about it," Potter said. "Put a slide rule in his hands and he's a world beater. But when he has to cope with the ordinary world and with ordinary people…he's kind of a twit. You didn't have much trouble getting him to open up, did you?"
"That's none of your business," the interrogator said primly.
Henderson V. FitzBelmont, in his tweedy innocence, wouldn't have known what Tyler meant, but Potter did. "Ha! Told you so."
"He…appreciates the delicacy of his position. You don't seem to," Tyler said.
"My position isn't delicate. In international law, I'm fine. Whether you care about international law may be a different story."
"We're treating you as a POW for the time being. You weren't captured in our uniform. You'll have a trial," Major Tyler said. "But if we charge you with crimes against humanity-"
"Will you charge the Kaiser? What about Charlie La Follette? Like I said, you used two superbombs on us. We only had one to use on you."
"That's different."
"Sure it is. You won. I already told you that, too."
"Not what I meant, dammit." Tyler went red again. "We dropped ours out of airplanes, the way you would with any other bomb. We didn't sneak them over the border under false pretenses."
"Over, under, around, through-so what?" Potter said. "Shall I apologize because we didn't have a bomber that would carry one of the goddamn things? I'm sorry, Major-I'm sorry we didn't have more, and I'm sorry we didn't have them sooner. If we did, I'd be interrogating you."
Ezra Tyler changed the subject, which was also the victor's privilege: "Speaking of crimes against humanity, General, what did you know about your government's extermination policy against your Negroes, and when did you know it?"
Fear trickled through Potter. If the Yankees wanted C.S. officials dead, they could always throw that one at them.
"All I knew was that I was involved in sniffing out the Negro uprising in 1915-which really did happen, Major, and which really did go a long way toward losing us that war. And I know there was a black guerrilla movement-again, a real one-before the start of this war. Those people were not our friends."
"Do you think your government's policy had anything to do with that?"
Of course I do. You'd have to be an idiot not to. I'm not that kind of idiot, anyway. Aloud, Potter said, "I'm a soldier. Soldiers don't make policy."
"Yes, you are a soldier. You returned to the C.S. Army after the 1936 Richmond Olympics, where you shot a Negro who was attempting to assassinate Jake Featherston."
"That's right."
"Before that time, you opposed Featherston politically."
"Yes, I was a Whig."
"You traveled to Richmond for the Games. You had a gun. You were close to a President you opposed. Did you go there intending to shoot him yourself?"
"It's not illegal to carry a gun in the CSA, any more than it is here. The language in our Constitution comes straight from yours." For the past eight years, Potter had been automatically saying no to that question whenever it came up. Saying yes would have got him killed-an inch at a time, no doubt. He needed a deliberate effort of will to tell the truth now: "Scratch that, Major. Yes, I went up there with that in mind. Maybe things would have gone better if I did it, or if I let the coon do it. They couldn't have gone much worse, could they? But it's a little late to worry about it now."