Colonel Einsiedel smiled. "You've got your head on straight, by God."
"I've been through the mill. Maybe it amounts to the same thing."
"Wouldn't be surprised," Einsiedel said. "One thing we don't do unless we can't help it, though-we don't send a barrel out by itself. Too many blind spots, too good a chance for somebody to throw a Featherston Fizz at you."
That didn't sound so good. "I thought the locals were supposed to be too scared of us to try any crap," Pound said.
"They are-supposed to be," the regimental CO answered. "But in case they aren't, we don't want to lead them into temptation, either. Does that suit you?"
"Oh, yes, sir. I want to know what I'm getting into, that's all," Pound said.
Einsiedel gave him a crooked grin. "Whatever you get into down here, make sure you go to a pro station afterwards, 'cause chances are you'll end up with a dose if you don't."
"Understand, sir," Pound said, thinking back to his joke with the doctor before he got released. "Uh-is there an officers' brothel in town?"
"Officially, no. Officially, all the brown-noses back up in the USA would pitch a fit if we did things like that. Unofficially, there are two. Maude's is around the corner from the Capitol. Miss Lucy's is a couple of blocks farther south. I like Maude's better, but you can try 'em both."
"I expect I will. All the comforts of home-or of a house, anyway," Pound said. Colonel Einsiedel winced. Pound figured he'd got off on the right foot.
L ike most Congressional veterans, Flora Blackford spent most of her time in Philadelphia. As summer swung towards autumn every other year, though, she went back to the Lower East Side in New York City to campaign for reelection. And this was a Presidential election year, too.
She thought Charlie La Follette ought to win in a walk. But the Democrats had nominated a native New Yorker, a hotshot prosecutor named Dewey, to run against him. Dewey and his Vice Presidential candidate, a blunt-talking Senator from Missouri, were running an aggressive campaign, crisscrossing the country saying they could have handled the war better and would ride herd on the beaten Confederacy harder. President La Follette and his running mate, Jim Curley of Massachusetts, had to content themselves with saying that the Socialists damn well had won the war. Would that be enough? Unless people were uncommonly ungrateful, Flora thought it would.
Normally, she wouldn't have wanted to see Congressman Curley on the ticket. He came straight from the Boston machine, an unsavory if effective apparatus. But Dewey's would-be veep was a longtime Kansas City ward heeler, and the Kansas City machine was even more unsavory (and perhaps even more effective) than Boston's.
Visiting Socialist Party headquarters felt like coming home again. The only difference from when she worked there thirty years earlier was that the butcher's shop underneath the place was owned by the son of the man who'd run it then. Like his father, Sheldon Fleischmann was a Democrat. And, like his father, he often sent cold cuts up anyhow.
The district had changed. Far fewer people here were fresh off the boat than had been true in 1914. Native-born Americans tended to be more conservative than their immigrant parents. All the same, Flora worried more about the national ticket than her own seat. The fellow the Democrats had nominated, a theatrical booking agent named Morris Kramer, had to spend most of his time explaining why he hadn't been in uniform during the war.
"He's got a hernia," Herman Bruck said. He'd been a Socialist activist as long as Flora had. "So all right-they didn't conscript him. But do you think anybody wants a Congressman who wears a truss?"
"If he didn't wear it, his brains would fall out," somebody else said. That got a laugh from everyone in the long, smoky room. Half the typewriters stopped clattering for a moment. The other half wouldn't have stopped for anything this side of the Messiah.
"I won't give him a hard time for not going into the service," Flora said. "The voters know the story." If they didn't know it, she would make damn sure they found out before Election Day. "I want to show them what having somebody who's been in Congress for a while means to them."
"Well, you've got a chance to do that," Bruck said.
"I know," Flora answered unhappily. During the Great War, C.S. bombers hardly ever got as far north as New York City. They did little damage on their handful of raids. It wasn't like that this time around, worse luck.
Most of the Confederates' bombs had fallen on the port-most, but far from all. Some rained down on the city at random. In a place so full of people, the bombardiers must have assumed they would do damage wherever their explosions came down-and who was to say they were wrong?
Flora's district had suffered along with the rest of New York. Bombs had blown up apartment buildings and clothing factories and block after block of shops. Incendiaries had charred holes in the fabric of the city. Rebuilding wouldn't be easy or quick or cheap.
One advantage incumbency gave Flora was her connections down in Philadelphia. If she asked for money to help put her district back together, she was more likely to get it than a Congressman new in his seat.
Her campaign posters got right down to business when they talked about that. DO YOU WANT A NEW KID ON YOUR BLOCK? they asked, and showed Morris Kramer in short pants pulling a wheeled wooden duck on a string. That wasn't even remotely fair, but politics wasn't about being fair. Politics was about getting your guy in and keeping the other side's guy out. Once you'd done that, you could do all the other neat stuff you had in mind. If you stood on the sidelines looking longingly toward the playing field, all the neat ideas in the world weren't worth a dime.
"We want to make this district a better place than it was before the war," Flora said to whoever would listen to her. "Not the same as it used to be, not just as good as it used to be. Better. If we can't do that, we might as well leave the ruins alone, to remind us we shouldn't be dumb enough to fight another war."
Herman Bruck brought a blond kid in a captain's uniform up to her one afternoon at the Socialist Party headquarters. "Flora, I'd like you to meet Alex Swartz," he said.
"Hello, Captain Swartz," Flora said. "What can I do for you?" She had no doubt that the earnest young officer with a roll of papers under one arm was on the up and up. Whether Herman Bruck had an ulterior motive in introducing him…Well, she'd find out about that.
"Very pleased to meet you, ma'am," Alex Swartz said. He had broad, Slavic cheekbones and a narrow chin, giving his face a foxy cast. "I graduated from Columbia with a degree in architecture two weeks before the war started. I'm on leave right now-in a week, I go back down to occupation duty in Mississippi. But I wanted to show you some of the sketches I've made for how things might look once we put them back together."
"I'd like to see," Flora said, not exaggerating too much. If the sketches turned out to be garbage, she could come out with polite nothings, let the captain down easy, and then get on with her reelection campaign and with taking care of the damage in the district.
But they weren't garbage. As he unrolled them one by one and talked about what he had in mind, she saw she wasn't the only one who'd been thinking along those lines. The sketches showed a more spacious, less jam-packed, less hurried place than the one her constituents lived in now.
"This is a lot like what I have in mind," she said. "I particularly like the way you use green space, and the way you don't forget about theaters and libraries. The next question is, how much does it all cost?" That was the one that separated amateurs from professionals. She wouldn't have been surprised if Alex Swartz hadn't worried about it at all.