"Is he?" Jamieson's laugh had a wheezy sound to it. "You know Lucille Cheever?"
"Personally? No," Moss said, and Lou Jamieson laughed again. Dryly, Moss went on, "I know who she is, though." She ran the leading sporting house in Berlin, and had for years.
"That'll do." Jamieson stubbed out the cigarette and lit another one. "Ask her about Lieutenant Szymanski and Yolanda. She can name dates and amounts and what the damn Polack got each time. He has a wife and twins down in Pennsylvania. You hit him with that, what you want to bet he loses his memory?"
"Yolanda?" Moss echoed.
Jamieson nodded. "Yolanda. Big blond gal." His hands shaped an hourglass. "Big jugs, too. Gotta be better than what he was getting at home. 'Course, he's no bargain himself. He knows we know about Yolanda, he'll shut up."
"I'll take care of it." Moss didn't write down Lucille Cheever's name. He knew he would remember it-and the less in writing when he went on the shady side of the street, the better.
"What else they got?" Jamieson inquired.
"Unless somebody's pulling a fast one on me, he's their heavy artillery."
Jamieson snorted contemptuously. "Dumb assholes." Moss knew what that was likely to mean. He hadn't studied occupation law to help real crooks wiggle off the hook. But you couldn't turn down clients because you thought they were guilty. Jamieson went on, "If Szymanski's all they've got, we'll kick their asses. See you over in London." He fired up another cigarette and swaggered out of the office.
And how do I explain talking to Lucille Cheever to Laura? Moss wondered. He knew he would have to tell her. If he didn't and she found out later, that would be worse. He sighed. Northwestern Law School hadn't covered all the points of legal ethics it might have.
The telephone rang. "Jonathan Moss," he said crisply. It was occupation headquarters in Galt, announcing a delay in a case there: the prosecutor was in the hospital with a case of boils. "How… biblical," Moss murmured. The officer on the other end of the line hung up on him.
Chuckling, he went back to work. His next client came in fifteen minutes later. Clementine Schmidt was embroiled in what looked to be a permanent property dispute with the occupation authorities. Appeals over what was and what wasn't acceptable documentation that she owned the property she claimed to own dragged on and on. Since the war ended, military judges had changed their minds at least four times. All in all, it was not the USA's finest hour in handling Canadian affairs.
Miss Schmidt (Moss couldn't blame men for fighting shy of marrying such a disputatious woman) brandished a letter. In a voice ringing with triumph, she declared, "I have found my cousin, Maximilian."
"Have you?" Moss blinked. She'd been talking about Maximilian for years. He'd always assumed her cousin had died in the war.
But she nodded. "Yes, I have," she said triumphantly. "He fought in the Rockies and was badly wounded there. That is why he never came home." It had nothing to do with you? Amazing, Moss thought. His client went on, "He settled in a town called Kamloops, in British Columbia. And he remembers very well the situation of the property." She thrust the letter at him.
He rapidly read through it. When he'd finished, he nodded. "We'll definitely show this to the appellate judge when the time comes," he said. Miss Schmidt beamed. The letter was in fact a lot less ironclad that she seemed to think. Cousin Maximilian recalled that the family had owned the property in question once upon a time. He had no new documentation to prove that. If he'd lived out in Kamloops since being wounded, it wasn't likely that he would.
Clementine Schmidt was still elated that she'd found good old Cousin Max. Moss let her chortle, then eased her out of the office. He poured himself more coffee once she finally left. He was still drinking it when the postman knocked on the door. "Here you are, Mr. Moss," the fellow said, and dumped a pile of envelopes on what had been a nearly clean desk.
"Thanks." Moss surveyed the pile with something less than joy unalloyed. He sorted through the day's mail, separating it into piles: papers related to cases, advertisements, payments (only a couple of those-and why was he not surprised?), and things he couldn't readily classify.
He opened a plain envelope in that miscellaneous pile, then unfolded the sheet of paper inside it. Neatly printed on it in large letters were the words, we HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT YOU, YOU YANK SON OF A BITCH. WE HAVE NOT FORGOTTEN ABOUT YOUR WHORE OR HER BRAT, EITHER.
He stared in dismay. Since the bombing of occupation headquarters, he hadn't had a missive like this. He'd hoped he wouldn't. Considering what had happened to occupation headquarters, he couldn't very well ignore it. Whoever was behind this had proved he was playing for keeps.
His hand trembled as he reached for the telephone and rang up Galt. As bad luck would have it, he was connected to the officer with whom he'd cracked wise about the military prosecutor's boils. "You're not so goddamn funny when you need the Army, are you?" the other American said.
"Well, maybe not," Moss admitted. "I'm no fonder of being blown up than anybody else."
"Shows how much gratitude your clients have," the officer said.
"I doubt my clients are behind this," Moss said stiffly. The gibe stung all the same. He didn't know why Canadians wanted him dead, either. He'd spent his whole career fighting their legal battles-and winning quite a few of them. And this was the thanks he got?
"Bring in the paper," the man in Galt said. "We'll run it through the lab. I doubt they'll come up with anything, but you never know till you try."
"I'll do it," Moss said. Doing it right away meant canceling a meeting. He canceled it. Whoever was doing this, Moss wanted him caught. He didn't like living in fear. Somebody out there, though, didn't care what he liked.
VI
Spring and snow went together in Quebec. Lucien Galtier drove with exaggerated care. He knew the Chevrolet would skid if he did anything heroic- which was to say, stupid or abrupt-on an icy road. The point of going to a dance, after all, was getting there in one piece. He wondered if he would have thought the same as a young buck courting Marie. Of course, back in those days before the turn of the century, only a few millionaires had had motorcars. It was hard to do anything too spectacularly idiotic in a carriage.
Marie… His hands tightened on the steering wheel. She was seven years dead, and half the time it felt as if she were just around the corner visiting neighbors and would be back any minute. The other half, Galtier knew she was gone, all right, and the knowledge was knives in his soul. Those were the black days. He'd heard time was supposed to heal such wounds. Maybe it did. The knives, now, didn't seem to have serrated edges.
A right turn, a left, and yes, there was the path leading to Franзois Berlinguet's farmhouse and, even more to the point, to the barn nearby. Plenty of other autos and carriages and wagons sat by the house. Lucien found a vacant spot. He turned off his headlights and got out of the Chevrolet. Snow crunched under his shoes.
Lamplight spilled out of the barn door. So did the sweet strains of fiddle music. Then, suddenly, a whole band joined in. Galtier shook his head in bemusement. Back in his courting days, nobody had owned a phonograph, either. Music meant real, live musicians. It still could-those fiddlers were real, live human beings. But it didn't have to, not any more.
The band stopped. People in the barn laughed and clapped their hands. Then the music started up again-someone must have turned the record over or put a new one on the phonograph. The live fiddlers joined in.
Lucien blinked against the bright lights inside the barn. He'd got used to the darkness driving over. Couples dipped and swirled in the cleared space in the middle. Men and women watched from the edges of the action. Some perched on chairs; others leaned against the wall. Quite a few of them were holding mugs of cider or beer or applejack. Galtier sidled toward a table not far from the fiddlers and the phonograph. Berlinguet's wife, Madeleine, a smiling woman of about forty-five, gave him a mug. He sipped. It was cider, cider with a stronger kick than beer.