Cincinnati looked like hell. The Confederates made a stand here before pulling back across the Ohio into Covington. As the USA taught the CSA in Pittsburgh, attacking a built-up area could be hellishly expensive. The bastards in butternut did their damnedest to make it so here.
Great flocks of metallically twittering starlings darkened the sky as they rose when Cincinnatus’ truck convoy rolled by. The war didn’t bother them much, except for the ones unlucky enough to stop bullets or bomb or shell fragments. Those made only a tiny, tiny fraction of the total.
Back when Cincinnatus’ father was a little boy, there were flocks of passenger pigeons instead. Cincinnatus had seen only a handful of those; they were in a steep decline when he was a boy around the turn of the century. They were all gone now, every one of them. Confederate artillery fire killed the last surviving specimen, a female in the Cincinnati zoo, early in the Great War.
By the same token, he remembered starlings arriving in the area not long after the war ended. Some crazy Englishman brought them to the USA in the 1890s, and they’d moved west ever since. He wondered if they filled up some of the hole in the scheme of things that was left when passenger pigeons disappeared.
And then he had more urgent things to wonder about, like whether he’d live long enough to deliver the shells he was carrying in the back of his truck. The Confederates on the far side of the river went right on lobbing their own shells into the ruins of Cincinnati, trying to make them even more ruinous.
Fountains of upflung dirt and smoke rose from not nearly far enough away. Cincinnatus kept on driving. Why not? He was just as likely to stop a fragment standing still as he was moving forward.
The trucks in the convoy stayed well separated from one another. If a shell blew one of them to hell and gone, even one carrying munitions, the blast wouldn’t take out the trucks in front of and behind it. Everybody hoped it wouldn’t, anyhow.
He pulled to a stop in front of the city jail. A lot more than one shell had fallen on that squat, ugly building. The Confederates must have made a stand there. That made sense-a place designed to keep unfriendly people in would also be pretty good at keeping unfriendly people out.
When Cincinnatus got down from the cab of his truck, he was laughing to beat the band. “What’s so funny?” asked one of the other drivers, a white man named Waldo something. “Way you’re going on, anybody would think you did a couple months in there.” He jerked a thumb toward the wreckage of the jail. A big grin took the sting from his words.
“You ain’t so far wrong,” Cincinnatus answered. “Damn Confederates jugged me across the river, over in Covington. But when they went an’ exchanged me, they stopped here an’ got some other guys out, too. So I ain’t sorry to see this place catch hell, not even a little bit.”
“Suits me,” Waldo said. “The more jails they blow up, the happier I am. I’ve done stretches in too goddamn many of ’em. Never any big shit, but I like to drink, and when I drink I like to fight, and so…” His face showed that he’d caught a few lefts and rights, or maybe more than a few, as well as dishing them out. He sounded proud of his escapades. A moment later, in fact, he went on, “I wonder if they got any saloons open in what’s left of this town.”
“You sure you want to find out?” Cincinnatus asked. “You got the government tellin’ you what to do, they can give you a lot more grief if you get in trouble than some city police can.”
Waldo thought it over. He nodded. “Makes sense. Thanks.” If he’d left it there, everything would have been fine. But then he added, “You’re pretty goddamn smart for a nigger, you know?”
The worst part was, he meant it for a compliment. “Thanks a bunch,” Cincinnatus said sourly.
A few more 105s came whistling in, but none of them burst close to where swarms of young soldiers unloaded the trucks. Watching them, Cincinnatus remembered how he’d done the same thing during the Great War. A lot of years had landed on his shoulders since, a lot of years and that encounter with the motorcar he didn’t see before it almost killed him. He still didn’t remember getting hit. He didn’t suppose he ever would.
A second lieutenant who looked even younger than the soldiers doing pack-mule duty wandered through the unloading zone with a clipboard in his hands. It made him seem official, so official that Cincinnatus got suspicious. The Confederates would have no trouble putting one of their people in a U.S. uniform and sending him up here to see what he could see. They were supposed to do stuff like that all the time. Cincinnatus hoped the USA did it, too.
Then the young lieutenant talked to an officer who came down with the truck convoy. That made Cincinnatus feel better. A spy wouldn’t talk to anybody if he didn’t have to-or so it seemed to Cincinnatus, anyway. The older officer nodded. He said something; Cincinnatus was too far away to make out what.
“Driver!” the second lieutenant yelled, plainly reading the name from his clipboard. “Cincinnatus Driver!”
Alarm sleeted through Cincinnatus. What the devil did they want with him? And who were they, anyhow? “I’m here,” he said, and picked his way through the rubble over to the shavetail. “What’s up?”
“My superiors need to talk with you,” the baby-faced officer said. He wore green-and-white arm of service colors on his collar, a combination Cincinnatus hadn’t seen before. A badge-a wreath with the letters INT inside-gave him a pretty good idea of what those colors meant. Intelligence.
That made him feel better, not worse. He’d got out of Covington-and got out of its colored district-only a little while before. If the U.S. Army was looking for ways to use Covington’s Negroes, he had some ideas. He also had the names of people they could get in touch with-and names of people to stay away from at all costs.
Sentries in green-gray uniforms stood in front of what used to be an office building. The young lieutenant needed to exchange password and countersign with them before they let him in. Nobody trusted anybody these days. Cincinnatus hoped that was just as true on the side of the line where the men wore butternut.
A white-haired fellow in civilian clothes was talking with a lieutenant colonel and a major when Cincinnatus followed the lieutenant into the room where they sat. The man’s eyes were the light, almost golden brown of a hunting dog’s-a most unusual shade for a man. Cincinnatus stiffened. He knew those eyes anywhere, and the clever, engagingly homely face that housed them. Luther Bliss was trouble with a capital T.
When Kentucky belonged to the USA between the wars, Luther Bliss headed the Kentucky State Police, an outfit that hunted Confederate diehards and black radicals with equal enthusiasm. Cincinnatus spent almost two years in a Kentucky State Police jail. Bliss was a law unto himself, and paid attention to other law only when he felt like it.
He nodded to Cincinnatus now. “As long as you’re against the Freedom Party, we’re on the same side,” he said. To the officers, he added, “We’ve had our run-ins, Cincinnatus and me, but he’s all right. I’m glad his card came up.”
Cincinnatus wasn’t sure he was glad his card-what card?-turned up. Forced to choose between Luther Bliss and Jake Featherston, he would choose Bliss. No black man could possibly disagree there. Forced to choose between Bliss and anyone else-anyone else at all…But that wasn’t the choice he had.
Bliss went on, “I was hooked in with Lucullus Wood and the other colored activists, but only from the outside.” He brushed one hand across the back of the other, noting his own white skin. “Cincinnatus here, though, he knows all that stuff from the inside out.”