"Good morning, Mr. President," Goldman said.
"Morning, Saul," Jake answered cordially. Goldman was another one who'd stayed loyal through thick and thin. There weren't that many. Featherston gave back loyalty for loyalty. He repaid disloyalty, too. Oh, yes. No one who crossed him or the country could expect to be forgotten. He put on a smile. "What can I do for you today?"
The round little Jew shook his head. "No, sir. It's what I can do for you." He held out a neat rectangular package wrapped in plain brown paper and string. "This is the very first one off the press."
"Goddamn!" Jake snatched the package with an eagerness he hadn't known since Christmastime long before the last war. He tugged at the string. When it didn't want to break, he reached into a trouser pocket on his butternut uniform and pulled out a little clasp knife. That made short work of the string, and he tore off the brown paper.
over open sights was stamped in gold on the front cover and spine of the leather-bound book he held. So was his name. He almost burst with pride. He'd started working on the book in Gray Eagle scratch pads during the Great War, and he'd kept fiddling with it ever since. Now he was finally letting the whole world see what made him tick, what made the Freedom Party tick.
"You understand, of course, that the rest of the print run won't be so fancy," Saul Goldman said. "They made this one up special, just for you."
Featherston nodded. "Oh, hell, yes. But this here is mighty nice-mighty nice." He opened the book at random and began to read: ", 'The Confederate state must make up for what everyone else has neglected in this field. It must set race at the center of all life. It must take care to keep itself pure. Instead of annoying Negroes with teachings they are too stupid to understand, we would do better to instruct our whites that it is a deed pleasing to God to take pity on a poor little healthy white orphan child and give him a father and mother." " He nodded. "Well, we've gone a hell of a long way towards doing just that."
"Yes, Mr. President," the director of communications agreed.
Jake held the book in his hands. It was there. It was real. "Now folks will see why we're doing what we're doing. They'll see all the things that need doing from here on out. They'll see how much they need the Freedom Party to keep us going the way we ought to."
"That's the idea," Goldman said. "And the book will sell lots and lots of copies. That will make you money, Mr. President."
"Well, I don't mind," Jake Featherston said, which was not only true but an understatement. He'd lived pretty well since coming up in the world. But he added, "Money's not why I wrote it." And that was also true. He'd set things down on paper during the war and afterwards to try to exorcise his own demons. It hadn't worked, not altogether. They still haunted him. They still drove him. Now they were all out in the open, though. That was where they belonged.
"Everyone who joins the Freedom Party should have to buy a copy of this book," Goldman said.
Featherston nodded. "I like that. It's good. See to it." The Jew pulled a notebook from an inside pocket of his houndstooth jacket and scribbled in it. Jake went on, "Other thing you've got to do is arrange to get it translated into Spanish. The greasers in Texas and Sonora and Chihuahua may not be everything we wish they were, but they don't much fancy niggers and we can trust 'em with guns in their hands. An awful lot of 'em are good Party men even if their English isn't so hot. They need to know what we stand for, too."
Goldman smiled and said, "Sir, I've already thought of that. The Spanish version will only be a couple of weeks behind the English one."
"Good. That's damn good, Saul. You're one sharp bastard, you know that?" Jake was usually sparing of praise. Finding fault was easier. But without Saul Goldman, the Freedom Party probably wouldn't have got where it was. The wireless web he'd stitched together sent the Party's message all over the Confederate States. It got that message to places where Jake couldn't go himself. And now all the wireless stations and newspapers and magazines and newsreels in the CSA put out what Goldman told them to put out.
"I try, Mr. President," Goldman said now. "I owe you a lot, you know."
"Yeah, you've said." Jake waved that away. Inside, he wanted to laugh. Right at the start of things, Goldman had worried that the Freedom Party might come after Jews. It was a damn silly notion, though Featherston had never said so out loud. Why bother? There weren't enough Jews in the Confederate States to get hot and bothered about, and the ones who were here had always been loyal. Blacks, now, blacks were a whole different story.
"Well…" Goldman dipped his head. All these years, and he was still shy. "Thank you very much, Mr. President."
"Don't you worry about a thing." Jake shook his head. "No-you worry about one thing. You worry about how we're going to tell the world we've kicked the damnyankees' asses, on account of we're going to." He looked toward the door. Saul Goldman took a hint. He dipped his head again and stepped out.
Jake went back to the desk. He spent the next little while flipping through Over Open Sights. The more he read, the better he liked it. Everything-everything!-you wanted to know about what the Freedom Party stood for was all there in one place. Everybody all over the Confederate States, even those damn greasers, would be able to read it and understand.
He expected the telephone to ring and ruin the moment. As far as he could see, that was what the lousy thing was for. But it held off. He had twenty-five minutes to flip through twenty-five years' worth of hard work. Oh, he hadn't fiddled with the book every day through all that time, but it had never escaped his mind. And now the fruits of all that labor were in print. The more he thought about it, the better it felt.
In the end, the telephone didn't interrupt him. Lulu did. "Sir, the Attorney General is here to see you," she said.
"Well, you'd better send him in, then," Jake answered. His secretary nodded and withdrew. Ferdinand Koenig came into the President's office a moment later. Jake beamed and held up his fancy copy of Over Open Sights. "Hello, Ferd, you old son of a bitch! Ain't this something?"
"Not bad," Koenig answered. "Not bad at all, Sarge." He was one of the handful of men left alive who could call Featherston a name like that. A massive man, he'd been in the Freedom Party even longer than Jake. He'd backed the uprising that put Jake at the head of the Party, and he'd backed him ever since. If anybody in this miserable world was reliable, Ferdinand Koenig was the man.
"Sit down," Featherston said. "Make yourself comfortable, by God."
The chair on the other side of the desk creaked as Koenig settled his bulk into it. He reached for the book. "Let me have a look at that, why don't you? You've been talking about it long enough."
"Here you are," Jake said proudly.
Koenig paged through the book, pausing every now and then to take a look at some passage or another. He would smile and nod or raise an eyebrow. At last, he looked up. "You saw a lot of this before the last war even ended, didn't you?"
"Hell, yes. It was there, if you had your eyes open," Jake answered. "Tell me you didn't know we'd never be able to trust our niggers again. Everybody with an eye to see knew that."
"That's what I came over here to talk about, as a matter of fact," Koenig said. "Way things are going, I need to ask you a couple of questions."
"Go right ahead," Featherston said expansively. With Over Open Sights in print and in his hands at last, he felt happier, more mellow, than he had for a hell of a long time. Maybe this was what women felt when they had a baby. He didn't know about that; he'd never been a woman. But this was pretty fine in its own way.
Koenig said, "Well, the way things are, we're doing two different things, seems to me. Some of these niggers are going into camps like the one that Pinkard fellow runs out in Louisiana."
"Sure." Jake nodded. "Bastards are going in, all right, but they're not coming out again. Good riddance."