Must and Shall

Most alternate-history stories about the Civil War have to do with a Confederate victory. I’ve done some of that sort myself—The Guns of the SouthandHow Few Remain look at two different ways the South might have won, and create two very different worlds. What’s less immediately obvious is that the North also had different ways of winning the war, ways that would have produced different aftermaths. “Must and Shall” looks at one of the less pleasant of these.


12 July 1864—Fort Stevens, North of Washington, D.C.

General Horatio Wright stood up on the earthen parapet to watch the men of the Sixth Corps, hastily recalled from Petersburg, drive Jubal Early’s Confederates away from the capital of the United States. Down below the parapet, a tall, thin man in black frock coat and stovepipe hat asked, “How do we fare, General?”

“Splendidly.” Wright’s voice was full of relief. Had Early chosen to attack the line of forts around Washington the day before, he’d have faced only militiamen and clerks with muskets, and might well have broken through to the city. But Early had been late, and now the veterans from the Sixth Corps were pushing his troopers back. Washington City was surely saved. Perhaps because he was so relieved, Wright said, “Would you care to come up with me and see how we drive them?”

“I should like that very much, thank you,” Abraham Lincoln said, and climbed the ladder to stand beside him.

Never in his wildest nightmares had Wright imagined the President accepting. Lincoln had peered over the parapet several times already, and drawn fire from the Confederates. They were surely too far from Fort Stevens to recognize him, but with his height and the hat he made a fine target.

Not far away, a man was wounded and fell back with a cry. General Wright interposed his body between President Lincoln and the Confederates. Lincoln spoiled that by stepping away from him. “Mr. President, I really must insist that you retire to a position of safety,” Wright said. “This is no place for you; you must step down at once!”

Lincoln took no notice of him, but continued to watch the fighting north of the fort. A captain behind the parapet, perhaps not recognizing his commander-in-chief, shouted, “Get down, you damn fool, before you get shot!”

When Lincoln did not move, Wright said, “If you do not get down, sir, I shall summon a body of soldiers to remove you by force.” He gulped at his own temerity in threatening the President of the United States.

Lincoln seemed more amused than anything else. He started to turn away, to walk back toward the ladder. Instead, after half a step, he crumpled bonelessly. Wright had thought of nightmares before. Now one came to life in front of his horrified eyes. Careless of his own safety, he crouched by the President, whose blood poured from a massive head wound into the muddy dirt atop the parapet. Lincoln’s face wore an expression of mild surprise. His chest hitched a couple of times, then was still.

The captain who’d shouted at Lincoln to get down mounted to the parapet. His eyes widened. “Dear God,” he groaned. “It is the President.”

Wright thought he recognized him. “You’re Holmes, aren’t you?” he said. Somehow it was comforting to know the man you were addressing when the world seemed to crumble around you.

“Yes, sir, Oliver W. Holmes, 20th Massachusetts,” the young captain answered.

“Well, Captain Holmes, fetch a physician here at once,” Wright said. Holmes nodded and hurried away. Wright wondered at his industry—surely he could see Lincoln was dead. Who, then, was the more foolish, himself for sending Holmes away, or the captain for going?

21 July 1864—Washington, D.C.

From the hastily erected wooden rostrum on the East Portico of the Capitol, Hannibal Hamlin stared out at the crowd waiting for him to deliver his inaugural address. The rostrum was draped with black, as was the Capitol, as had been the route his carriage took to reach it. Many of the faces in the crowd were still stunned, disbelieving. The United States had never lost a President to a bullet, not in the eighty-eight years since the nation freed itself from British rule.

In the front row of dignitaries, Senator Andrew Johnson of Tennessee glared up at Hamlin. He had displaced the man from Maine on Lincoln’s reelection ticket; had this dreadful event taken place a year later (assuming Lincoln’s triumph), he now would be President. But no time for might-have-beens.

Hamlin had been polishing his speech since the telegram announcing Lincoln’s death reached him up in Bangor, where, feeling useless and rejected, he had withdrawn after failing of renomination for the Vice Presidency. Now, though, his country needed him once more. He squared his broad shoulders, ready to bear up under the great burden so suddenly thrust upon him.

“Stand fast!” he cried. “That has ever been my watchword, and at no time in all the history of our great and glorious republic has our heeding it been more urgent. Abraham Lincoln’s body may lie in the grave, but we shall go marching on—to victory!”

Applause rose from the crowd at the allusion to “John Brown’s Body”—and not just from the crowd, but also from the soldiers posted on the roof of the Capitol and at intervals around the building to keep the accursed rebels from murdering two Presidents, not just one. Hamlin went on, “The responsibility for this great war, in which our leader gave his last full measure of devotion, lies solely at the feet of the Southern slaveocrats who conspired to take their states out of our grand Union for their own evil ends. I promise you, my friends—Abraham Lincoln shall be avenged, and those who caused his death punished in full.”

More applause, not least from the Republican Senators who proudly called themselves Radical: from Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Benjamin Wade of Ohio, Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, and bespectacled John Andrew of Massachusetts. Hamlin had been counted among their number when he sat in the Senate before assuming the duties, such as they were, of the Vice President.

“Henceforward,” Hamlin declared, “I say this: let us use every means recognized by the Laws of War which God has put in our hands to crush out the wickedest rebellion the world has ever witnessed. This conflict is become a radical revolution—yes, gentlemen, I openly employ the word, and, what is more, I revel in it—involving the desolation of the South as well as the emancipation of the bondsmen it vilely keeps in chains.”

The cheers grew louder still. Lincoln had been more conciliatory, but what had conciliation got him? Only a coffin and a funeral and a grieving nation ready, no eager, for harsher measures.

“They have sowed the wind; let them reap the whirlwind. We are in earnest now, and have awakened to the stern duty upon us. Let that duty be disregarded or haltingly or halfway performed, and God only in His wisdom can know what will be the end. This lawless monster of a Political Slave Power shall forevermore be shorn of its power to ruin a government it no longer has the strength to rule.

“The rebels proudly proclaim they have left the Union. Very well: we shall take them at their word and, once having gained the victory Providence will surely grant us, we shall treat their lands as they deserve—not as the states they no longer desire to be, but as conquered provinces, won by our sword. I say we shall hang Jefferson Davis, and hang Robert E. Lee, and hang Joe Johnston, yes, hang them higher than Haman, and the other rebel generals and colonels and governors and members of their false Congress. The living God is merciful, true, but He is also just and vengeful, and we, the people of the United States, we shall be His instrument in advancing the right.”

Now great waves of cheering, led by grim Thaddeus Stevens himself, washed over Hamlin. The fierce sound reminded him of wolves baying in the backwoods of Maine. He stood tall atop the rostrum. He would lead these wolves, and with them pull the rebel Confederacy down in ruin.

11 August 1942—New Orleans, Louisiana

Air brakes chuffing, the Illinois Central train pulled to a stop at Union Station on Rampart Street. “New Orleans!” the conductor bawled unnecessarily. “All out for New Orleans!”

Along with the rest of the people in the car, Neil Michaels filed toward the exit. He was a middle-sized man in his late thirties, most of his dark blond hair covered by a snap-brim fedora. The round, thick, gold-framed spectacles he wore helped give him the mild appearance of an accountant.

As soon as he stepped from the air-conditioned comfort of the railroad car out into the steamy heat of a New Orleans summer, those glasses steamed up. Shaking his head in bemusement, Michaels drew a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and wiped away the moisture.

He got his bags and headed for the cab stand, passing on the way a horde of men and boys hawking newspapers and rank upon rank of shoeshine stands. A fat Negro man sat on one of those, gold watch chain running from one pocket of his vest to the other. At his feet, an Irish-looking fellow plied the rag until his customer’s black oxfords gleamed.

“There y’are, sir,” the shoeshine man said, his half-Brooklyn, half-Southern accent testifying he was a New Orleans native. The Negro looked down at his shoes, nodded, and, with an air of great magnanimity, flipped the shoeshine man a dime. “Oh, thank you very much, sir,” the fellow exclaimed. The insincere servility in his voice grated on Michaels’ ears.

More paperboys cried their trade outside the station. Michaels bought aTimes-Picayune to read while he waited in line for a taxi. The war news wasn’t good. The Germans were still pushing east in Russia and sinking ship after ship off the American coast. In the South Pacific, Americans and Japanese were slugging away at each other, and God only knew how that would turn out.

Across the street from Union Station, somebody had painted a message: yanks out! Michaels sighed. He’d seen that slogan painted on barns and bridges and embankments ever since his train crossed into Tennessee—and, now that he thought about it, in Kentucky as well, though Kentucky had stayed with the Union during the Great Rebellion.

When he got to the front of the line at the cab stand, a hack man heaved his bags into the trunk of an Oldsmobile and said, “Where to, sir?”

“The New Orleans Hotel, on Canal Street,” Michaels answered.

The cabbie touched the brim of his cap. “Yes, sir,” he said, his voice suddenly empty. He opened the back door for Michaels, slammed it shut after him, then climbed into the cab himself. It took off with a grinding of gears that said the transmission had seen better days.

On the short ride to the hotel, Michaels counted five more scrawls of yanks out, along with a couple of patches of whitewash that probably masked others. Servicemen on the street walked along in groups of at least four; several corners sported squads of soldiers in full combat gear, including, in one case, a machine-gun nest built of sandbags. “Nice quiet little town,” Michaels remarked.

“Isn’t it?” the cabbie answered, deadpan. He hesitated, his jaw working as if he were chewing his cud. After a moment, he decided to go on: “Mister, with an accent like yours, you want to be careful where you let people hear it. For a damnyankee, you don’t seem like a bad fellow, an’ I wouldn’t want nothin’ to happen to you.”

“Thanks. I’ll bear that in mind,” Michaels said. He wished the Bureau had sent somebody who could put on a convincing drawl. Of course the last man the FBS had sent ended up floating in the Mississippi, so evidently his drawl hadn’t been convincing enough.

The cab wheezed to a stop in front of the New Orleans Hotel. “That’ll be forty cents, sir,” the driver said.

Michaels reached into his trouser pocket, pulled out a half-dollar. “Here you go. I don’t need any change.”

“That’s right kind of you, sir, but—you wouldn’t happen to have two quarters instead?” the cabbie said. He handed the big silver coin back to his passenger.

“What’s wrong with it?” Michaels demanded, though he thought he knew the answer. “It’s legal tender of the United States of America.”

“Yes, sir, reckon it is, but there’s no place hereabouts I’d care to try and spend it, even so,” the driver answered, “not withhis picture on it.” The obverse of the fifty-cent piece bore an image of the martyred Lincoln, the reverse a Negro with his manacles broken and the legend sic semper tyrannis. Michaels had known it was an unpopular coin with white men in the South, but he hadn’t realized how unpopular it was.

He got out of the cab, rummaged in his pocket, and came up with a quarter and a couple of dimes. The cabbie didn’t object to Washington’s profile, or to that of the god Mercury. He also didn’t object to seeing his tip cut in half. That told Michaels all he needed to know about how much the half-dollar was hated.

Lazily spinning ceiling fans inside the hotel lobby stirred the air without doing much to cool it. The colored clerk behind the front desk smiled to hear Michaels’ accent. “Yes, sir, we do have your reservation,” she said after shuffling through papers. By the way she talked, she’d been educated up in the Loyal States herself. She handed him a brass key. “That’s room 429, sir. Three dollars and twenty-five cents a night.”

“Very good,” Michaels said. The clerk clanged the bell on the front desk. A white bellboy in a pillbox hat and uniform that made him look like a Philip Morris advertisement picked up Michaels’ bags and carried them to the elevator.

When they got to room 429, Michaels opened the door. The bellboy put down the bags inside the room and stood waiting for his tip. By way of experiment, Michaels gave him the fifty-cent piece the cabbie had rejected. The bellboy took the coin and put it in his pocket. His lips shaped a silent word. Michaels thought it wasdamnyankee , but he wasn’t quite sure. The bellboy left in a hurry.

A couple of hours later, Michaels went downstairs to supper. Something shiny was lying on the carpet in the hall. He looked down at the half-dollar he’d given the bellboy. It had lain here in plain sight while people walked back and forth; he’d heard them. Nobody had taken it. Thoughtfully, he picked it up and stuck it in his pocket.



A walk through the French Quarter made fears about New Orleans seem foolish. Jazz blasted out of every other doorway. Neon signs pulsed above gin mills. Spasm bands, some white, some Negro, played on streetcorners. No one paid attention to blackout regulations—that held true North and South. Clog-dancers shuffled, overturned caps beside them inviting coins. Streetwalkers in tawdry finery swung their hips and flashed knowing smiles.

Neil Michaels moved through the crowds of soldiers and sailors and gawking civilians like a halfback evading tacklers and heading downfield. He glanced at his watch, partly to check the time and partly to make sure nobody had stolen it. Half past eleven. Didn’t this place ever slow down? Maybe not.

He turned right off Royal Street onto St. Peter and walked southeast toward the Mississippi and Jackson Square. The din of the Vieux Carré faded behind him. He strode past the Cabildo, the old Spanish building of stuccoed brick that now housed the Louisiana State Museum, including a fine collection of artifacts and documents on the career of the first military governor of New Orleans, Benjamin Butler. Johnny Rebs kept threatening to dynamite the Cabildo, but it hadn’t happened yet.

Two great bronze statues dominated Jackson Square. One showed the square’s namesake on horseback. The other, even taller, faced that equestrian statue. Michaels thought Ben Butler’s bald head and rotund, sagging physique less than ideal for being immortalized in bronze, but no one had asked his opinion.

He strolled down the paved lane in the formal garden toward the statue of Jackson. Lights were dimmer here in the square, but not too dim to keep Michaels from reading the words Butler had had carved into the pedestal of the statue: the union must and shall be preserved, an adaptation of Jackson’s famous toast, “Our Federal Union, it must be preserved.”

Michaels’ mouth stretched out in a thin hard line that was not a smile. By force and fear, with cannon and noose, bayonet and prison term, the United States Army had preserved the Union. And now, more than three-quarters of a century after the collapse of the Great Rebellion, U.S. forces still occupied the states of the rebel Confederacy, still skirmished in hills and forests and sometimes city streets against men who put on gray shirts and yowled like catamounts when they fought. Hatred bred hatred, reprisal bred reprisal, and so it went on and on. He sometimes wondered if the Union wouldn’t have done better to let the Johnny Rebs get the hell out, if that was what they’d wanted so badly.

He’d never spoken that thought aloud; it wasn’t one he could share. Too late to worry about such things anyhow, generations too late. He had to deal with the consequences of what vengeful Hamlin and his like-minded successors had done.

The man he was supposed to meet would be waiting behind Butler’s statue. Michaels was slightly surprised the statue had no guards around it; the Johnny Rebs had blown it up in the 1880s and again in the 1920s. If New Orleans today was reconciled to rule from Washington, it concealed the fact very well.

Michaels ducked around into the darkness behind the statue. “Four score and seven,” he whispered, the recognition signal he’d been given.

Someone should have answered, “New birth of freedom.” No one said anything. As his eyes adapted to the darkness, he made out a body sprawled in the narrow space between the base of the statue and the shrubbery that bordered Jackson Square. He stooped beside it. If this was the man he was supposed to meet, the fellow would never give him a recognition signal, not till Judgment Day. His throat had been cut.

Running feet on the walkways of the square, flashlight beams probing like spears. One of them found Michaels. He threw up an arm against the blinding glare. A hard Northern voice shouted, “Come out of there right now, you damned murdering Reb, or you’ll never get a second chance!”

Michaels raised his hands high in surrender and came out.



Outside Antoine’s, the rain came down in buckets. Inside, with oysters Rockefeller and a whiskey and soda in front of him and the prospect of an excellent lunch ahead, Neil Michaels was willing to forgive the weather.

He was less inclined to forgive the soldiers from the night before. Stubbing out his Camel, he said in a low but furious voice, “Those great thundering galoots couldn’t have done a better job of blowing my cover if they’d rehearsed for six weeks, God damn them.”

His companion, a dark, lanky man named Morrie Harris, sipped his own drink and said, “It may even work out for the best. Anybody the MPs arrest is going to look good to the Johnny Rebs around here.” His New York accent seemed less out of place in New Orleans than Michaels’ flat, Midwestern tones.

Michaels started to answer, then shut up as the waiter came over and asked, “You gentlemen are ready to order?”

“Let me have thepompano en papillote ,” Harris said. “You can’t get it any better than here.”

The waiter wrote down the order, looked a question at Michaels. He said, “I’ll take thepoulet chanteclair .” The waiter nodded, scribbled, and went away.

Glancing around to make sure no one else was paying undue attention to him or his conversation, Michaels resumed: “Yeah, that may be true now. But Ducange is dead now. What if those stupid dogfaces had busted in on us while we were dickering? That would have queered the deal for sure, and it might have got me shot.” As it hadn’t the night before, his smile did not reach his eyes. “I’m fond of my neck. It’s the only one I’ve got.”

“Even without Ducange, we’ve still got to get a line on the underground,” Harris said. “Those weapons are somewhere. We’d better find ’em before the whole city goes up.” He rolled his eyes. “The whole city, hell! If what we’ve been hearing is true, the Nazis have shipped enough guns and God knows what all else into New Orleans to touch off four or five states. And wouldn’t that do wonders for the war effort?” He slapped on irony with a heavy trowel.

“God damn the Germans,” Michaels said, still quietly but with savage venom. “They played this game during the last war, too. But you’re right. If what we’ve heard is the straight goods, the blowup they have in mind will make the Thanksgiving Revolt look like a kiss on the cheek.”

“It shouldn’t be this way,” Harris said, scowling. “We’ve got more GIs and swabbies in New Orleans than you can shake a stick at, and none of ’em worth a damn when it comes to tracking this crap down. Nope, for that they need the FBS, no matter how understaffed we are.”

The waiter came then. Michaels dug into the chicken marinated in red wine. It was as good as it was supposed to be. Morrie Harris made ecstatic noises about the sauce on his pompano.

After a while, Michaels said, “The longer we try, the harder it gets for us to keep things under control down here. One of these days—”

“It’ll all go up,” Harris said matter-of-factly. “Yeah, but not now. Now is what we gotta worry about. We’re fighting a civil war here, we ain’t gonna have much luck with the Germans and the Japs. That’s what Hitler has in mind.”

“Maybe Hamlin and Stevens should have done something different—God knows what—back then. It might have kept us out of—this,” Michaels said. He knew that was heresy for an FBS man, but everything that had happened to him since he got to New Orleans left him depressed with the state of things as they were.

“What were they supposed to do?” Harris snapped.

“I already said I didn’t know,” Harris answered, wishing he’d kept his mouth shut. What did the posters say?—loose lips sink ships. His loose lips were liable to sink him.

Sure enough, Morrie Harris went on as if he hadn’t spoken: “The Johnnies rebelled, killed a few hundred thousand American boys, and shot a President dead. What should we do, give ’em a nice pat on the back? We beat ’em and we made ’em pay. Far as I can see, they deserved it.”

“Yeah, and they’ve been making us pay ever since.” Michaels raised a weary hand. “The hell with it. Like you said, now is what we’ve got to worry about. But with Ducange dead, what sort of channels do we have into the Rebel underground?”

Morrie Harris’ mouth twisted, as if he’d bitten down on something rotten. “No good ones that I know of. We’ve relied too much on the Negroes down here over the years. It’s made the whites trust us even less than they would have otherwise. Maybe, though, just maybe, Ducange talked to somebody before he got killed, and that somebody will try to get hold of you.”

“So what do you want me to do, then? Hang around my hotel room hoping the phone rings, like a girl waiting to see if a boy will call? Hell of a way to spend my time in romantic New Orleans.”

“Listen, the kind of romance you can get here, you’ll flunk a shortarm inspection three days later,” Harris answered, chasing the last bits of pompano around his plate. “They’ll take a damnyankee’s money, but they’ll skin you every chance they get. They must be laughing their asses off at the fortune they’re making off our boys in uniform.”

“Sometimes they won’t even take your money.” Michaels told of the trouble he’d had unloading the Lincoln half-dollar.

“Yeah, I’ve seen that,” Harris said. “If they want to cut off their nose to spite their face, by me it’s all right.” He set a five and a couple of singles on the table. “This one’s on me. Whatever else you say about this damn town, the food is hellacious, no two ways about it.”

“No arguments.” Michaels got up with Harris. They went out of Antoine’s separately, a couple of minutes apart. As he walked back to the New Orleans Hotel, Michaels kept checking to make sure nobody was following him. He didn’t spot anyone, but he didn’t know how much that proved. If anybody wanted to put multiple tails on him, he wouldn’t twig, not in crowded streets like these.

The crowds got worse when a funeral procession tied up traffic on Rampart Street. Two black horses pulled the hearse; their driver was a skinny, sleepy-looking white man who looked grotesquely out of place in top hat and tails. More coaches and buggies followed, and a couple of cars as well. “All right, let’s get it moving!” an MP shouted when the procession finally passed.

“They keep us here any longer, we all go in the ovens from old age,” a local said, and several other people laughed as they crossed the street. Michaels wanted to ask what the ovens were, but kept quiet since he exposed himself as one of the hated occupiers every time he opened his mouth.

When he got back to the hotel, he stopped at the front desk to ask if he had any messages. The clerk there today was a Negro man in a sharp suit and tie, with a brass name badge on his right lapel that read thaddeus jenkins. He checked and came back shaking his head. “Rest assured, sir, we shall make sure you receive any that do come in,” he said—a Northern accent bothered him not in the least.

“Thank you very much, Mr. Jenkins,” Michaels said.

“Our pleasure to serve you, sir,” the clerk replied. “Anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant, you have but to ask.”

“You’re very kind,” Michaels said. Jenkins had reason to be kind to Northerners. The power of the federal government maintained Negroes at the top of the heap in the old Confederacy. With the Sixteenth Amendment disenfranchising most Rebel soldiers and their descendants, blacks had a comfortable majority among those eligible to vote—and used it, unsurprisingly, in their own interest.

Michaels mused on that as he walked to the elevator. The operator, a white man, tipped his cap with more of the insincere obsequiousness Michaels had already noted. He wondered how the fellow liked taking orders from a man whose ancestors his great-grandfather might have owned. Actually, he didn’t need to wonder. The voting South was as reliably Republican as could be, for the blacks had no illusions about how long their power would last if the Sixteenth were ever to be discarded.

Suddenly curious, he asked the elevator man, “Why don’t I see ‘Repeal the Sixteenth’ written on walls along with ‘Yanks Out’?”

The man measured him with his eyes—measured him for a coffin, if his expression meant anything. At last, as if speaking to a moron, he answered, “You don’t see that on account of askin’ you to repeal it’d mean you damnyankees got some kind o’ business bein’ down here and lordin’ it over us in the first place. And youain’t .”

So there,Michaels thought. The rest of the ride passed in silence.

With a soft whir, the ceiling fan stirred the air in his room. That improved things, but only slightly. He looked out the window. Ferns had sprouted from the mortar between bricks of the building across the street. Even without the rain—which had now let up—it was plenty humid enough for the plants to flourish.



Sitting around waiting for the phone to ring gave Michaels plenty of time to watch the ferns. As Morrie Harris had instructed, he spent most of his time in his room. He sallied forth mostly to eat. Not even the resolute hostility of most of white New Orleans put a damper on the food.

He ate boiled beef at Maylié’s, crab meatau gratin at Galatoire’s, crayfish bisque at La Louisiane,langouste Sarah Bernhardt at Arnaud’s, and, for variety, pig knuckles and sauerkraut at Kolb’s. When he didn’t feel like traveling, he ate at the hotel’s own excellent restaurant. He began to fancy his trousers and collars were getting tighter than they had been before he came South.

One night, he woke to the sound of rifle fire not far away. Panic shot through him, panic and shame. Had the uprising he’d come here to check broken out? How would that look on his FBS personnel record? Then he realized that if the uprising had broken out, any damnyankee the Johnnies caught was likely to end up too dead to worry about what his personnel record looked like.

After about fifteen minutes, the gunfire petered out. Michaels took a couple of hours falling asleep again, though. He went from one radio station to another the next morning, and checked the afternoon newspapers, too. No one said a word about the firefight. Had anybody tried, prosecutors armed with the Sedition Act would have landed on him like a ton of bricks.

Back in the Loyal States, they smugly said the Sedition Act kept the lid on things down South. Michaels had believed it, too. Now he was getting a feeling for how much pressure pushed against that lid. When it blew, if it blew . . .

A little past eleven the next night, the phone rang. He jumped, then ran to it. “Hello?” he said sharply.

The voice on the other end was so muffled, he wasn’t sure whether it belonged to a man or a woman. It said, “Be at the Original Absinthe House for the three a.m. show.” The line went dead.

Michaels let out a martyred sigh. “The three a.m. show,” he muttered, wondering why conspirators couldn’t keep civilized hours like anyone else. He went down to the restaurant and had a couple of cups of strong coffee laced with brandy. Thus fortified, he headed out into the steaming night.

He soon concluded New Orleans’ idea of civilized hours had nothing to do with those kept by the rest of the world, or possibly that New Orleans defined civilization as unending revelry. The French Quarter was as packed as it had been when he went through it toward Jackson Square, though that had been in the relatively early evening, close to civilized even by Midwestern standards.

The Original Absinthe House, a shabby two-story building with an iron railing around the balcony to the second floor, stood on the corner of Bourbon and Bienville. Each of the four doors leading in had a semicircular window above it. Alongside one of the doors, someone had scrawled,Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder . Michaels thought that a distinct improvement onYanks Out! You weren’t supposed to be able to get real absinthe any more, but in the Vieux Carré nothing would have surprised him.

He didn’t want absinthe, anyway. He didn’t particularly want the whiskey and soda he ordered, either, but you couldn’t go into a place like this without doing some drinking. The booze was overpriced and not very good. The mysterious voice on the telephone hadn’t told him there was a five-buck charge to go up to the second story and watch the floor show. Assuming he got out of here alive, he’d have a devil of a time justifying that on his expense account. And if the call had been a Johnny Reb setup, were they trying to kill him or just to bilk him out of money for the cause?

Michaels felt he was treading in history’s footsteps as he went up the stairs. If the plaque on the wall didn’t lie for the benefit of tourists, that stairway had been there since the Original Absinthe House was built in the early nineteenth century. Andrew Jackson and Jean Lafitte had gone up it to plan the defense of New Orleans against the British in 1814, and Ben Butler for carefully undescribed purposes half a century later. It was made with wooden pegs: not a nail anywhere. If the stairs weren’t as old as the plaque said, they sure as hell were a long way from new.

A jazz band blared away in the big upstairs room. Michaels went in, found a chair, ordered a drink from a waitress whose costume would have been too skimpy for a burly queen most places up North, and leaned back to enjoy the music. The band was about half black, half white. Jazz was one of the few things the two races shared in the South. Not all Negroes had made it to the top of the heap after the North crushed the Great Rebellion; many still lived in the shadow of the fear and degradation of the days of slavery and keenly felt the resentment of the white majority. That came out in the way they played. And the whites, as conquered people will, found liberation in their music that they could not have in life.

Michaels looked at his watch. It was a quarter to three. The jazz men were just keeping loose between shows, then. As he sipped his whiskey, the room began filling up in spite of the five-dollar cover charge. He didn’t know what the show would be, but he figured it had to be pretty hot to pack ’em in at those prices.

The lights went out. For a moment, only a few glowing cigarette coals showed in the blackness. The band didn’t miss a beat. From right behind Michaels’ head, a spotlight came on, bathing the stage in harsh white light.

Saxophone and trumpets wailed lasciviously. When the girls paraded onto the stage, Michaels felt his jaw drop. A vice cop in Cleveland, say, might have put the cuffs on his waitress because she wasn’t wearing enough. The girls up there had on high-heeled shoes, headdresses with dyed ostrich plumes and glittering rhinestones, and nothing between the one and the other but big, wide smiles.

He wondered how they got themselves case-hardened enough to go on display like that night after night, show after show. They were all young and pretty and built, no doubt about that. Was it enough? His sister was young and pretty and built, too. He wouldn’t have wanted her up there, flaunting it for horny soldiers on leave.

He wondered how much the owners had to pay to keep the local vice squad off their backs. Then he wondered if New Orleans bothered with a vice squad. He hadn’t seen any signs of one.

He also wondered who the devil had called him over here and how that person would make contact. Sitting around gaping at naked women was not something he could put in his report unless it had some sort of connection with the business for which he’d come down here.

Soldiers and sailors whooped at the girls, whose skins soon grew slick and shiny with sweat. Waitresses moved back and forth, getting in the way as little as possible while they took drink orders. To fit in, Michaels ordered another whiskey-and-soda, and discovered it cost more than twice as much here as it had downstairs. He didn’t figure the Original Absinthe House would go out of business any time soon.

The music got even hotter than it had been. The dancers stepped off the edge of the stage and started prancing among the tables. Michaels’ jaw dropped all over again. This wasn’t just a floor show. This was a— He didn’t quite know what it was, and found himself too flustered to grope forle mot juste .

Then a very pretty naked brunette sat down in his lap and twined her arms around his neck.

“Is that a gun in your pocket, dearie, or are you just glad to see me?” she said loudly. Men at the nearest table guffawed. Since it was a gun in his pocket, Michaels kept his mouth shut. The girl smelled of sweat and whiskey and makeup. What her clammy hide was doing to his shirt and trousers did not bear thinking about. He wanted to drop her on the floor and get the hell out of there.

She was holding him too tight for that, though. She lowered her head to nuzzle his neck; the plumes from her headdress got in his eyes and tickled his nose. But under the cover of that frantic scene, her voice went low and urgent: “You got to talk with Colquit the hearse driver, mister. Tell him Lucy says Pierre says he can talk, an’ maybe he will.”

Before he could ask her any questions, she kissed him on the lips. The kiss wasn’t faked; her tongue slid into his mouth. He’d had enough whiskey and enough shocks by then that he didn’t care what he did. His hand closed over her breast—and she sprang to her feet and twisted away, all in perfect time to the music. A moment later, she was in somebody else’s lap.

Michaels discovered he’d spilled most of his overpriced drink. He downed what was left with one big swig. When he wiped his mouth with a napkin, it came away red from the girl’s—Lucy’s—lipstick.

Some of the naked dancers had more trouble than Lucy disentangling themselves from the men they’d chosen. Some of them didn’t even try to disentangle. Michaels found himself staring, bug-eyed. You couldn’t dothat in public . . . could you? Hell and breakfast, it was illegal in private, most places.

Eventually, all the girls were back on stage. They gave it all they had for the finale. Then they trooped off and the lights came back up. Only after they were gone did Michaels understand the knowing look most of them had had all through the performance: they knew more about men than men, most often, cared to know about themselves.

In the palm of his hand, he could still feel the memory of the soft, firm flesh of Lucy’s breast. Unlike the others in the room, he’d had to be here. He hadn’t had to grab her, though. Sometimes, facetiously, you called a place like this educational. He’d learned something, all right, and rather wished he hadn’t.



Morrie Harris pursed his lips. “Lucy says Pierre says Colquit can talk? That’s not much to go on. For all we know, it could be a trap.”

“Yeah, it could be,” Michaels said. He and the other FBS man walked along in front of the St. Louis Cathedral, across the street from Jackson Square. They might have been businessmen, they might have been sightseers—though neither businessmen nor sightseers were particularly common in the states that had tried to throw off the Union’s yoke. Michaels went on, “I don’t think it’s a trap, though. Ducange’s first name is—was—Pierre, and we’ve found out he did go to the Original Absinthe House. He could have gotten to know Lucy there.”

He could have done anything with Lucy there. The feel of her would not leave Michaels’ mind. He knew going back to the upstairs room would be dangerous, for him and for her, but the temptation lingered like a bit of food between the teeth that keeps tempting back the tongue.

Harris said, “Maybe we ought to just haul her in and grill her till she cracks.”

“We risk alerting the Rebs if we do that,” Michaels said.

“Yeah, I know.” Harris slammed his fist into his palm. “I hate sitting around doing nothing, though. If they get everything they need before we find out where they’re squirreling it away, they start their damn uprising and the war effort goes straight out the window.” He scowled, a man in deep and knowing it. “And Colquit the hearse driver? You don’t know his last name? You don’t know which mortuary he works for? Naked little Lucy didn’t whisper those into your pink and shell-like ear?”

“I told you what she told me.” Michaels stared down at the pavement in dull embarrassment. He could feel his dubiously shell-like ears turning red, not pink.

“All right, all right.” Harris threw his hands in the air. Most FBS men made a point of not showing what they were thinking—Gary Cooper might have been the Bureau’s ideal. Not Morrie Harris. He wore his feelings on his sleeve.New York City, Michaels thought, with scorn he nearly didn’t notice himself. Harris went on, “We try and find him, that’s all. How many guys are there named Colquit, even in New Orleans? And yeah, you don’t have to tell me we got to be careful. If he knows anything, we don’t want him riding in a hearse instead of driving one.”

A bit of investigation—if checking the phone book and getting somebody with the proper accent to call the Chamber of Commerce could be dignified as such—soon proved funerals were big business in New Orleans, bigger than most other places, maybe. There were mortuaries and cemeteries for Jews, for Negroes, for French-speakers, for Protestants, for this group, for that one, and for the other. Because New Orleans was mostly below sea level (Michaels heartily wished the town were underwater, too), burying people was more complicated than digging a hole and putting a coffin down in it. Some intrepid sightseers made special pilgrimages just to see the funeral vaults, which struck Michaels as downright macabre.

Once they had a complete list of funeral establishments, Morrie Harris started calling them one by one. His New York accent was close enough to the local one for him to ask, “Is Colquit there?” without giving himself away as a damnyankee. Time after time, people denied ever hearing of Colquit. At one establishment, though, the receptionist asked whether he meant Colquit the embalmer or Colquit the bookkeeper. He hung up in a hurry.

Repeated failure left Michaels frustrated. He was about to suggest knocking off for the day when Harris suddenly jerked in his chair as if he’d sat on a tack. He put his hand over the receiver and mouthed, “Said he just got back from a funeral. She’s going out to get him.” He handed the telephone to Michaels.

After just over a minute, a man’s voice said, “Hello? Who’s this?”

“Colquit?” Michaels asked.

“Yeah,” the hearse driver said.

Maybe it was Michaels’ imagination, but he thought he heard suspicion even in one slurred word. Sounding like someone from the Loyal States got you nowhere around here (of course, a Johnny Reb who managed to get permission to travel to Wisconsin also raised eyebrows up there, but Michaels wasn’t in Wisconsin now). He spoke quickly: “Lucy told me Pierre told her that I should tell you it was okay for you to talk with me.”

He waited for Colquit to ask what the hell he was talking about, or else to hang up. It would figure if the only steer he’d got was a bum one. But the hearse driver, after a long pause, said, “Yeah?” again.

Michaels waited for more, but there wasn’t any more. It was up to him, then. “You do know what I’m talking about?” he asked, rather desperately.

“Yeah,” Colquit repeated: a man of few words.

“You can’t talk where you are?”

“Nope,” Colquit said—variety.

“Will you meet me for supper outside Galatoire’s tonight at seven, then?” Michaels said. With a good meal and some booze in him, Colquit was more likely to spill his guts.

“Make it tomorrow,” Colquit said.

“All right, tomorrow,” Michaels said unhappily. More delay was the last thing he wanted. No, not quite: he didn’t want to spook Colquit, either. He started to say something more, but the hearse driver did hang up on him then.

“What does he know?” Morrie Harris demanded after Michaels hung up, too.

“I’ll find out tomorrow,” Michaels answered. “The way things have gone since I got down here, that’s progress.” Harris nodded solemnly.



The wail of police sirens woke Neil Michaels from a sound sleep. The portable alarm clock he’d brought with him was ticking away on the table by his bed. Its radium dial announced the hour: five past three. He groaned and sat up.

Along with the sirens came the clanging bells and roaring motors of fire engines. Michaels bounced out of bed, ice running down his back. Had the Rebs started their revolt? In that kind of chaos, the pistol he’d brought down from the North felt very small and useless.

He cocked his head. He didn’t hear any gunfire. If the Southern men were using whatever the Nazis had shipped them, that would be the biggest part of the racket outside. Okay, it wasn’t the big revolt. That meant walking to the window and looking out was likely to be safe. What the devilwas going on?

Michaels pushed aside the thick curtain shielding the inside of his room from the neon glare that was New Orleans by night. Even as he watched, a couple of fire engines tore down Canal Street toward the Vieux Carré. Their flashing red lights warned the few cars and many pedestrians to get the hell out of the way.

Raising his head, Michaels spotted the fire. Whatever was burning was burning to beat the band. Flames leaped into the night sky, seeming to dance as they flung themselves high above the building that fueled them. A column of thick black smoke marked that building’s funeral pyre.

“Might as well find out what it is,” Michaels said out loud. He turned on the lamp by the bed and then the radio. The little light behind the dial came on. He waited impatiently for the tubes to get warm enough to bring in a signal.

The first station he got was playing one of Benny Goodman’s records. Michaels wondered if playing a damnyankee’s music was enough to get you in trouble with some of the fire-eating Johnny Rebs. But he didn’t want to hear jazz, not now. He spun the dial.

“—terrible fire on Bourbon Street,” an announcer was saying. That had to be the blaze Michaels had seen. The fellow went on, “One of New Orleans’ long-standing landmarks, the Original Absinthe House, is going up in flames even as I speak. The Absinthe House presents shows all through the night, and many are feared dead inside. The building was erected well over a hundred years ago, and has seen—”

Michaels turned off the radio, almost hard enough to break the knob. He didn’t believe in coincidence, not even a little bit. Somewhere in the wreckage of the Original Absinthe House would lie whatever mortal fragments remained of Lucy the dancer, and that was just how someone wanted it to be.

He shivered like a man with the grippe. He’d thought about asking Colquit to meet him there instead of at Galatoire’s, so Lucy could help persuade the hearse driver to tell whatever he knew—and so he could get another look at her. But going to a place twice running was a mistake. That let the opposition get a line on you. Training had saved his life and, he hoped, Colquit’s. It hadn’t done poor Lucy one damn bit of good.

He called down to room service and asked for a bottle of whiskey. If the man to whom he gave the order found anything unusual about such a request at twenty past three, he didn’t show it. The booze arrived in short order. After three or four good belts, Michaels was able to get back to sleep.

Colquit didn’t show up for dinner at Galatoire’s that night.



When Morrie Harris phoned the mortuary the next day, the receptionist said Colquit had called in sick. “That’s a relief,” Michaels said when Harris reported the news. “I was afraid he’d call in dead.”

“Yeah.” Harris ran a hand through his curly hair. “I didn’t want to try and get a phone number and address out of the gal. I didn’t even like making the phone call. The less attention we draw to the guy, the better.”

“You said it.” Michaels took off his glasses, blew a speck from the left lens, set them back on his nose. “Now we know where he works. We can find out where he lives. Just a matter of digging through the papers.”

“A lot of papers to dig through,” Harris said with a grimace, “but yeah, that ought to do the job. Shall we head on over to the Hall of Records?”

Machine-gun nests surrounded the big marble building on Thalia Street. If the Johnny Rebs ever got their revolt off the ground, it would be one of the first places to burn. The Federal army and bureaucrats who controlled the conquered provinces of the old Confederacy ruled not only by force but also by keeping tabs on their resentful, rebellious subjects. Every white man who worked had to fill out a card each year listing his place of employment. Every firm had to list its employees. Most of the clerks who checked one set of forms against the other were Negroes. They had a vested interest in making sure nobody put one over on the government.

Tough, unsmiling guards meticulously examined Harris’ and Michaels’ identification papers, comparing photographs to faces and making them give samples of their signatures, before admitting them to the hall. They feared sabotage as well as out-and-out assault. The records stored here helped hold down all of Louisiana.

Hannibal Dupuy was a large, round black man with some of the thickest glasses Michaels had ever seen. “Mortuary establishments,” he said, holding up one finger as he thought. “Yes, those would be in the Wade Room, in the cases against the east wall.” Michaels got the feeling that, had they asked him about anything from taverns to taxidermists, he would have known exactly where the files were hidden. Such men were indispensable in navigating the sea of papers before them.

Going through the papers stored in the cases against the east wall of the Wade Room took a couple of hours. Michaels finally found the requisite record. “Colquit D. Reynolds, hearse driver—yeah, he works for LeBlanc and Peters,” he said. “Okay, here’s an address and phone number and a notation that they’ve been verified as correct. People are on the ball here, no two ways about it.”

“People have to be on the ball here,” Morrie Harris answered. “How’d you like to be a Negro in the South if the whites you’ve been sitting on for years grab hold of the reins? Especially if they grab hold of the reins with help from the Nazis? The first thing they’d do after they threw us damnyankees out is to start hanging Negroes from lampposts.”

“You’re right. Let’s go track down Mr. Reynolds, so we don’t have to find out just how right you are.”



Colquit Reynolds’ documents said he lived on Carondelet, out past St. Joseph: west and south of the French Quarter. Harris had a car, a wheezy Blasingame that delivered him and Michaels to the requisite address. Michaels knocked on the door of the house, which, like the rest of the neighborhood, was only a small step up from the shotgun shack level.

No one answered. Michaels glanced over at Morrie Harris. FBS men didn’t need a warrant, not to search a house in Johnny Reb country. That wasn’t the issue. Both of them, though, feared they’d find nothing but a corpse when they got inside.

Just as Michaels was about to break down the front door, an old woman stuck her head out a side window of the house next door and said, “If you lookin’ for Colquit, gents, you ain’t gonna find him in there.”

Morrie Harris swept off his hat and gave a nod that was almost a bow. “Where’s he at, then, ma’m?” he asked, doing his best to sound like a local and speaking to the old woman as if she were the military governor’s wife.

She cackled like a laying hen; she must have liked that. “Same place you always find him when he wants to drink ’stead of workin’: the Old Days Saloon round the co’ner.” She jerked a gnarled thumb to show which way.

The Old Days Saloon was painted in gaudy stripes of red, white, and blue. Those were the national colors, and so unexceptionable, but, when taken with the name of the place, were probably meant to suggest the days of the Great Rebellion and the traitors who had used them on a different flag. Michaels would have bet a good deal that the owner of the place had a thick FBS dossier.

He and Harris walked in. The place was dim and quiet. Ceiling fans created the illusion of coolness. The bruiser behind the bar gave the newcomers the dubious stare he obviously hauled out for any stranger: certainly the four or five men in the place had the look of longtime regulars. Asking which one was Colquit was liable to be asking for trouble.

One of the regulars, though, looked somehow familiar. After a moment, Michaels realized why: that old man soaking up a beer off in a corner had driven the horse-drawn hearse that had slowed him up on his way back to the hotel a few days before. He nudged Morrie Harris, nodded toward the old fellow. Together, they went over to him. “How you doin’ today, Colquit?” Harris asked in friendly tones. The bartender relaxed.

Colquit looked up at them with eyes that didn’t quite focus. “Don’t think I know you folks,” he said, “but I could be wrong.”

“Sure you do,” Harris said, expansive still. “We’re friends of Pierre and Lucy.”

“Oh, Lord help me.” Colquit started to get up. Michaels didn’t want a scene. Anything at all could make New Orleans go off—hauling a man out of a bar very much included. But Colquit Reynolds slumped back onto his chair, as if his legs didn’t want to hold him. “Wish I never told Pierre about none o’ that stuff,” he muttered, and finished his beer with a convulsive gulp.

Michaels raised a forefinger and called out to the bartender: “Three more High Lifes here.” He tried to slur his words into a Southern pattern. Maybe he succeeded, or maybe the dollar bill he tossed down on the table was enough to take the edge off suspicions. The Rebs had revered George Washington even during the Great Rebellion, misguided though they were in other ways.

Colquit Reynolds took a long pull at the new beer. Michaels and Harris drank more moderately. If they were going to get anything out of the hearse driver, they needed to be able to remember it once they had it. Besides, Michaels didn’t much like beer. Quietly, so the bartender and the other locals wouldn’t hear, he asked, “What do you wish you hadn’t told Pierre, Mr. Reynolds?”

Reynolds looked up at the ceiling, as if the answer were written there. Michaels wondered if he was able to remember; he’d been drinking for a while. Finally, he said, “Wish I hadn’t told him ’bout this here coffin I took for layin’ to rest.”

“Oh? Why’s that?” Michaels asked casually. He lit a Camel, offered the pack to Colquit Reynolds. When Reynolds took one, he used his Zippo to give the hearse driver a light.

Reynolds sucked in smoke. He held it longer than Michaels thought humanly possible, then exhaled a foggy cloud. After he knocked the coal into an ashtray, he drained his Miller High Life and looked expectantly at the FBS men. Michaels ordered him another one. Only after he’d drunk part of that did he answer, “On account of they needed a block and tackle to get it onto my hearse an’ another one to get it off again. Ain’t no six men in the world could have lifted that there coffin, not if they was Samson an’ five o’ his brothers. An’ itclanked , too.”

“Weapons,” Morrie Harris whispered, “or maybe ammunition.” He looked joyous, transfigured, likely even more so than he would have if a naked dancing girl had plopped herself down in his lap.Poor Lucy, Michaels thought.

He said, “Even in a coffin, even greased, I wouldn’t want to bury anything in this ground—not for long, that’s for damn sure. Water’s liable to seep in and ruin things.”

Colquit Reynolds sent him a withering, scornful look. “Damnyankees,” he muttered under his breath—and he was helping Michaels. “Lot of the times here, you don’t bury your dead, you put ’em in a tomb up above ground, just so as coffins don’t get flooded out o’ the ground come the big rains.”

“Jesus,” Morrie Harris said hoarsely, wiping his forehead with a sleeve, and then again: “Jesus.” Now he was the one to drain his beer and signal for another. Once the bartender had come and gone, he went on, “All the above-ground tombs New Orleans has, you could hide enough guns and ammo to fight a big war. Goddamn sneaky Rebs.” He made himself stop. “What cemetery was this at, Mr. Reynolds?”

“Old Girod, out on South Liberty Street,” Colquit Reynolds replied. “Don’t know how much is there, but one coffinload, anyways.”

“Thank God some Southern men don’t want to see the Great Rebellion start up again,” Michaels said.

“Yeah.” Harris drank from his second High Life. “But a hell of a lot of ’emdo .”



Girod Cemetery was hidden away in the railroad yards. A plaque on the stone fence surrounding it proclaimed it to be the oldest Protestant cemetery in New Orleans. Neil Michaels was willing to believe that. The place didn’t seem to have received much in the way of legitimate business in recent years, and had a haunted look to it. It was overgrown with vines and shrubs. Gray-barked fig trees pushed up through the sides of some of the old tombs. Moss was everywhere, on trees and tombs alike. Maidenhair ferns sprouted from the sides of the above-ground vaults; as Michaels had seen, anything would grow anywhere around here.

That included conspiracies. If Colquit Reynolds was right, the ghost of the Great Rebellion haunted this cemetery, too, and the Johnnies were trying to bring it back to unwholesome life.

“He’d better be right,” Michaels muttered as the jeep he was riding pulled to a stop before the front entrance to the cemetery.

Morrie Harris understood him without trouble. “Who, that damn hearse driver? You bet he’d better be right. We bring all this stuff here”—he waved behind him—“and start tearin’ up a graveyard, then don’t find anything . . . hell, that could touch off a revolt all by itself.”

Michaels shivered, though the day was hot and muggy. “Couldn’t it just?” Had Reynolds been leading them down the path, setting them up to create an incident that would make the South rise up in righteous fury? They’d have to respond to a story like the one he’d told; for the sake of the Union, they didn’t dare not respond.

They’d find out. Behind the jeep, Harris’all this stuff rattled and clanked: not just bulldozers, but also light M3 Stoneman tanks and heavy M3 Grants with a small gun in a rotating turret and a big one in a sponson at the right front of the hull. Soldiers—all of them men from the Loyal States—scrambled down from Chevy trucks and set up a perimeter around the wall. If anybody was going to try to interfere with this operation, he’d regret it.

Against the assembled might of the Federal Union (it must and shall be preserved,Michaels thought), Girod Cemetery mustered a stout metal gate and one elderly watchman. “Who the devil are y’all, and what d’you want?” he demanded, though thewho part, at least, should have been pretty obvious.

Michaels displayed his FBS badge. “We are on the business of the federal government of the United States of America,” he said. “Open the gate and let us in.” Again, no talk of warrants, not in Reb country, not on FBS business.

“Fuck the federal government of the United States of America, and the horse it rode in on,” the watchman said. “You ain’t got no call to come to no cemetery with tanks.”

Michaels didn’t waste time arguing with him. He tapped the jeep driver on the shoulder. The fellow backed the jeep out of the way. Michaels waved to the driver of the nearest Grant tank. The tank man had his head out of the hatch. He grinned and nodded. The tank clattered forward, chewing up the pavement and spewing noxious exhaust into the air. The wrought-iron gate was sturdy, but not sturdy enough to withstand thirty-one tons of insistent armor. It flew open with a scream of metal; one side ripped loose from the stone to which it was fixed. The Grant ran over it, and would have run over the watchman, too, had he not skipped aside with a shouted curse.

Outside the cemetery, people began gathering. Most of the people were white men of military age or a bit younger. To Michaels, they had the look of men who’d paint slogans on walls or shoot at a truck or from behind a fence under cover of darkness. He was glad he’d brought overwhelming force. Against bayonets, guns, and armor, the crowd couldn’t do much but stare sullenly.

If the cemetery was empty of contraband, what this crowd did wouldn’t matter. There’d be similar angry crowds all over the South, and at one of them. . . .

The watchman let out an anguished howl as tanks and bulldozers clanked toward the walls of above-ground vaults that ran the length of the cemetery. “You can’t go smashin’ up the ovens!” he screamed.

“Last warning, Johnny Reb,” Michaels said coldly: “don’t you try telling officers of the United States what we can and can’t do. We have places to put people whose mouths get out in front of their brains.”

“Yeah, I just bet you do,” the watchman muttered, but after that he kept his mouth shut.

A dozer blade bit into the side of one of the mortuary vaults—an oven, the old man had called it. Concrete and stone flew. So did chunks of a wooden coffin and the bones it had held. The watchman shot Michaels a look of unadulterated hatred and scorn. He didn’t say a word, but he might as well have screamed,See? I told you so. A lot of times, that look alone would have been plenty to get him on the inside of a prison camp, but Michaels had bigger things to worry about today.

He and Harris hadn’t ordered enough bulldozers to take on all the rows of ovens at once. The tanks joined in the job, too, knocking them down as the first big snorting Grant had wrecked the gate into Girod. Their treads ground more coffins and bones into dust.

“That goddamn hearse driver better not have been lying to us,” Morrie Harris said, his voice clogged with worry. “If he was, he’ll never see a camp or a jail. We’ll give the son of a bitch a blindfold; I wouldn’t waste a cigarette on him.”

Then, from somewhere near the center of Girod Cemetery, a tank crew let out a shout of triumph. Michaels had never heard sweeter music, not from Benny Goodman or Tommy Dorsey. He sprinted toward the Grant. Sweat poured off him, but it wasn’t the sweat of fear, not any more.

The tank driver pointed to wooden boxes inside a funeral vault he’d just broken into. They weren’t coffins. Each had1 Maschinengewehr 34 stenciled on its side in neat black-letter script, with the Nazi eagle-and-swastika emblem right next to the legend.

Michaels stared at the machine-gun crates as if one of them held the Holy Grail. “He wasn’t lying,” he breathed. “Thank you, God.”

“Omayn,”Morrie Harris agreed. “Now let’s find out how much truth he was telling.”



The final haul, by the time the last oven was cracked the next day, astonished even Michaels and Harris. Michaels read from the list he’d been keeping: “Machine guns, submachine guns, mortars, rifles—including antitank rifles—ammo for all of them, grenades . . . Jesus, what a close call.”

“I talked with one of the radio men,” Harris said. “He’s sent out a call for more trucks to haul all this stuff away.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand, a gesture that had little to do with heat or humidity. “If they’d managed to smuggle all of this out of New Orleans, spread it around through the South . . . well, hell, I don’t have to draw you a picture.”

“You sure don’t. We’d have been so busy down here, the Germans and the Japs would have had a field day over the rest of the world.” Michaels let out a heartfelt sigh of relief, then went on, “Next thing we’ve got to do is try and find out who was caching weapons. If we can do that, then maybe, just maybe, we can keep the Rebs leaderless for a generation or so and get ahead of the game.”

“Maybe.” But Harris didn’t sound convinced. “We can’t afford to think in terms of a generation from now, anyhow. It’s what we were talking about when you first got into town: as long as we can hold the lid on the South till we’ve won the damn war, that’ll do the trick. If we catch the guys running guns with the Nazis, great. If we don’t, I don’t give a damn about them sneaking around painting YANKS OUT on every blank wall they find. We can deal with that. We’ve been dealing with it since 1865. As long as they don’t have the toys they need to really hurt us, we’ll get by.”

“Yeah, that’s true—if no other subs drop off loads of goodies someplace else.” Michaels sighed again. “No rest for the weary. If that happens, we’ll just have to try and track ’em down.”

A growing rumble of diesel engines made Morrie Harris grin. “Here come the trucks,” he said, and trotted out toward the ruined entryway to Girod Cemetery. Michaels followed him. Harris pointed. “Ah, good, they’re smart enough to have jeeps riding shotgun for ’em. We don’t want any trouble around here till we get the weapons away safe.”

There were still a lot of people outside the cemetery walls. They booed and hissed the newly arrived vehicles, but didn’t try anything more than booing and hissing. They might hate the damnyankees—theydid hate the damnyankees—but it was the damnyankees who had the firepower here. Close to eighty years of bitter experience had taught that they weren’t shy about using it, either.

Captured German weapons and ammunition filled all the new trucks to overflowing. Some of the ones that had brought in troops also got loaded with lethal hardware. The displaced soldiers either piled into jeeps or clambered up on top of tanks for the ride back to barracks, where the captured arms would be as safe as they could be anywhere in the endlessly rebellious South.

Michaels and Harris had led the convoy to the cemetery; now they’d lead it away. When their jeep driver started up the engine, a few young Rebs bolder than the rest made as if to block the road.

The corporal in charge of the pintle-mounted .50-caliber machine gun in the jeep turned to Michaels and asked, “Shall I mow ’em down, sir?” He sounded quiveringly eager to do just that.

“We’ll give ’em one chance first,” Michaels said, feeling generous. He stood up in the jeep and shouted to the Johnnies obstructing his path: “You are interfering with the lawful business of the Federal Bureau of Suppression. Disperse at once or you will be shot. First, last, and only warning, people.” He sat back down, telling the driver, “Put it in gear, but go slow. If they don’t move—” He made hand-washing gestures.

Sullenly, the young men gave way as the jeep moved forward. The gunner swung the muzzle of his weapon back and forth, back and forth, encouraging them to fall back farther. The expression on his face, which frightened even Michaels, might have been an even stronger persuader.

The convoy rattled away from the cemetery. The Johnnies hooted and jeered, but did no more than that, not here, not now. Had they got Nazi guns in their hands . . . but they hadn’t.

“We won this one,” Morrie Harris said.

“We sure did,” Michaels agreed. “Now we can get on with the business of getting rid of tyrants around the world.” He spoke altogether without irony.