Walk in Hell (49 page)

“When they shoot you if you stand out, it’s not as bully as it would be otherwise,” Carsten said. Crosetti laughed. Then he got busy in a hurry, swiping a rag against the nearest stretch of painted metal. Sam imitated him without conscious thought. If somebody near you started working for no obvious reason, he’d spotted an officer you hadn’t.

Commander Grady—the fat stripe where a thin one had been before got sewn onto his cuff after the Battle of the Three Navies—said, “Never mind the playacting, Carsten.” He sounded amused; as sailors knew the nasty ways in which officers’ minds worked, so officers had some clues about how sailors operated. Grady went on, “You come with me. I’ve got some real work for you.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Sam answered. As he followed the commander of the starboard secondary armament, he knew without turning his head when Vic Crosetti would put down the rag and light himself a smoke. He also knew the little dago would be grinning like a monkey, because Sam had had to go do something real while he got to stand around a little longer.

Grady said, “We’re trying to get the number-four sponson into good enough shape so we can fire the gun if we have to.”

“Yes, sir,” Carsten said doubtfully. The number-four sponson had taken a hit from somebody’s secondary armament, whether British or Japanese nobody knew—nobody had been taking notes, and the shell hadn’t left a
carte de visite
: except for smashing the sponson to hell and gone, that is. Nobody had come out of there alive. Thinking about it gave Sam the horrors. It could have been the number-one sponson, easy as not.

“I think they can do it,” Grady said. “In fact, they damn near
have
done it. But the gun mount still isn’t quite right, and there’s not a lot of room in there, what with all the other repairs they’ve had to make. I want somebody familiar with a sponson as it’s supposed to be to pitch in with some good advice for them.”

“Yes, sir,” Sam said again. “Uh, sir, so you know, ‘Cap’n’ Kidde has forgotten more about sponsons than I’ll ever know.”

“He’s still helping with the rebuilding of the number-two on the port side. That got it worse than this one. He suggested you for the duty.”

“All right, sir,” Carsten answered. He didn’t know whether Kidde was mad at him and wanted to keep him hopping or whether the gunner’s mate was putting him in a spot where he could shine for the higher-ups. A little of both, maybe: that was “Cap’n” Kidde’s way. If he did this right, he’d look good where looking good could really help him. If he fouled up, he’d pay for it.

He ducked through the hatchway. Commander Grady didn’t follow; he had other fish to fry. Even the bulkhead around the hatchway showed the damage the sponson had taken. It was a mass of patches and welds, none of them smoothed down or painted over. There might be time for that later. There hadn’t been time for it yet.

Inside, the sponson was even more crowded than it had been when the gun crew filled it during the Battle of the Three Navies. A bunch of men in dungarees turned their heads to stare at Sam. One of them said, “You must be the guy Commander Grady was talking about.”

“Yeah, I’m Sam Carsten, loader on the number-one gun, this side.” Carsten pointed toward the bow.

“Good.” The fellow in dungarees nodded. “Then you know how one of these damn things goes when it’s working right.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “Pleased to meetcha, Sam, by the way. I’m Lou Stein. These here lugs are Dave and Mordecai and Bismarck and Steve and Cal and Frank and Herman.”

Sam spent the next couple of minutes shaking hands and wondering how the hell he was going to keep the repair crew straight in his head. The only one he knew he wouldn’t forget was Mordecai, who’d lost a couple of fingers in some kind of accident and whose handshake was strange because of it. He couldn’t have had any trouble with tools, though, or they wouldn’t have let him do his job.

At the same time as Sam was sizing up the repair crew, he was also sizing up the sponson. It was even more cramped than it would have been otherwise, because they’d welded steel plates inside the inner curve to cover up the damage the entering shell had done. They hadn’t covered quite all of it. Above the new steel, a dark, reddish brown stain still marked the inside of the armor plate. Carsten tried not to look at it. It might easily have come from a loader.

He shook himself.
Got to get down to business,
he thought. “Commander Grady said you were having some kind of trouble in here—I mean, besides all this stuff.” He waved at the roughly welded steel slabs. He wouldn’t have wanted to serve this gun—might as well put toilet paper between him and enemy gunfire as that thin metal. But then again, the armor plate over it didn’t look to have done the best job of protecting the sailors in here, either.

Mordecai said, “Damn gun won’t traverse the way it’s supposed to. It gets all herky-jerky about a third of the way through the arc. Here, I’ll show you.”

He demonstrated. Sure as hell, there was one point at which the five-inch gun would not hold a target steadily. “That’s pretty peculiar, all right,” Carsten agreed. “Acts like there’s a kink in the hydraulic line some kind of way, don’t it?”

“That’s what we figured, too,” Lou Stein said. “But if there is, we sure as hell ain’t been able to find it. Those things are armored, after all; they shouldn’t kink.”

“If I hadn’t done all the things I shouldn’t do, my mama would be a happier lady today,” Sam answered, which made the repair crew laugh. He went on, “Besides, in this mess, how the devil can you tell which way is up, anyhow?” He waved his hand. The plate on the inner curve of the armor wasn’t the only new, raw repair, not by a long shot it wasn’t. Other rectangular plates of metal covered damage to the roof and to the deck.

As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wondered if this crew had done all that quick, rough work. If they had, he’d just stuck his foot in his face. But Mordecai said, “Tell me about it, why don’t you?”

“Let me go under there and take a look,” Carsten said. “Got a flashlight I can borrow?”

Stein wore one on his belt. Hiram Kidde would have wanted one like it; it had the size and heft to make a hell of a billy club. The door that let Sam down below into the mechanism that moved the gun worked stiffly; the metal in which it was set had been bent and imperfectly straightened.

With the door open so he could call to the repair crew above, he said, “Run it through there, would you?” They did. He shined the flashlight on as much of the hydraulic line as he could see. “Damn. Doesn’t look like anything wrong here.”

“That’s what we thought,” Mordecai answered. “You’re doing everything exactly the way we did it.”

“Am I? All right.” Stubbornly, Carsten traced the hydraulic line from the gun back to where it ran behind the steel door through which he’d come. Behind the door…He whistled tunelessly between his teeth. Wondering if Lou or Bismarck or any of them had done it before him, he shut the door.

He whistled again, louder. A peeled-back strip of steel from the shell hit had been pushed between two links of the flexible armor the hydraulic line wore. You couldn’t see that from above, because the hasty repairs to the deck hid it. And you might not be able to see it when you came down here, either, because you literally shut the door on it. But when the gun moved to that particular position, the line moved and the steel pinched off the flow of hydraulic fluid.

“Lucky it never pierced the hose in the armor,” Sam muttered. He opened the door again. “Lou, you want to come down here and take a look at this?”

“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” Lou Stein said when Carsten showed him what he’d found. “Jeez, I wish it
had
pierced the line. Then we would have found out what the hell was wrong. Well, we can fix it, anyhow.”

A cutting torch made short work of the offending metal. Mordecai used it with as much assurance as if he’d had ten fingers, not eight. He said, “Sam, we get back to Pearl, everybody on this-here repair crew will buy you a beer. This one’s been makin’ us crazy for a while, let me tell you. Look
behind
the goddamn door. What do they call it? Hiding in plain sight?”

“Yeah.” Sam chuckled. “Hell, any sailor who doesn’t want to work knows how to do that.” He and Mordecai grinned at each other.

“What’s the matter, Ma?” Edna Semphroch asked. “Lord, you ought to be dancing out in the street at how bully things are, but you’ve done nothing but mope the past month.” She dried a last cup and set it in the cupboard. “We’ve got more money than I ever thought I’d see in all my born days, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of that awful Bill Reach since the Rebs hauled him off. I don’t miss him, neither. He gave me the horrors.” She shuddered.

“I don’t miss him, either,” Nellie Semphroch answered. She was drying silverware, and threw a fork into the drawer with unnecessary violence. “I wish to God I’d never set eyes on him.”

She waited for Edna to start prying again about who Reach was, who he had been, and what he’d meant to her. She’d fended off those questions for months now. What Edna would learn if she got the true answer would not only make her wilder, it would also probably make her despise Nellie.

But, for once, Edna took a different tack tonight. She said, “Is Mr. Jacobs across the street all right? You ain’t been over there for a while now, and you were going every few days for a long time.”

If Edna had noticed that, had some alert Confederate intelligence officer noticed it, too? Nellie grimaced; she wondered if she even cared. She dried a teaspoon. “As far as I know, he’s fine,” she answered, doing her best to sound unconcerned, indifferent.

Edna looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “Were you sweet on him, Ma?” she asked in a tone that invited woman-to-woman confidences. “Is that what it is? Were you sweet on him and you had a quarrel?”

“We’ve never had a quarrel,” Nellie snapped, all pretense of indifference vanishing before she could try to keep it. The irony was that she
had
discovered she was sweet on Hal Jacobs—and he on her—bare moments before she discovered he was working for Bill Reach, whom she still loathed with the deep and abiding loathing that clung to every part of her life before she’d met Edna’s father.

Too clever for her own good, Edna noticed the hot denial at once, both for what it said and for what it didn’t. “It’s all right, Ma, it really is,” she said tolerantly. “You know I wouldn’t mind if you found somebody. Pa’s been dead so long, I don’t hardly remember him anyways. And Mr. Jacobs seems nice enough, even if—” She stopped. “He seems nice enough.”

Even if he’s old and not very handsome
. Nellie could read between the lines, too. She sighed. Edna wanted license for herself, and was consistent enough, maybe even generous enough, to grant the same license to everyone else, even to her mother. That Nellie might not want it never occurred to her. But then, she didn’t know Nellie had had far too much license far too young. Nellie hoped she would never find out.

“You really ought to make up with him, Ma,” Edna said. “I mean—” She stopped again. This time, she didn’t amend anything. She didn’t need to amend anything. Nellie could figure out what she meant.
You’re not getting any younger. You’re not going to catch anything better.

“Maybe I will,” Nellie said with another sigh. She hadn’t brought Hal Jacobs any information gleaned at the coffeehouse since she found out to whom he’d been giving it. One reason—one big reason—the place flourished as it did was that his connections helped it get food and drink hard to come by in hungry, Confederate-occupied Washington, D.C. If she didn’t do anything for him, why should he do anything for her?

I’ll do this for you, and you’ll pay me off,
Nellie thought. How was that different from the sweaty bargains she’d made in little, narrow rooms back when she was too much younger than Edna? “Damned if I know,” she muttered.

“What did you say, Ma?” Edna asked.

“Nothing.” The coffeehouse had become so popular with the Rebels, they’d probably help keep her in supplies if the shoemaker across the street didn’t. But that felt like an illicit bargain, too. They hadn’t been the kindest nor the gentlest occupiers, and a good many of them frequented her place for no better reason than the hope of seducing Edna. Nellie was sure of that, too.

And, to make matters worse, who could guess how long the Confederates were going to hold on to Washington? If she aligned herself with them now, what would the reckoning be when the United States reclaimed their capital? She thought that
was
going to happen, and perhaps not in the indefinite future. Oh, the Confederates bragged about and made much of what a submersible of theirs had done in the Chesapeake Bay, but was that anything more than a pinprick when you measured it against the hammering U.S. forces were giving the Rebs in Maryland? She didn’t think so.

“You ought to go over there, Ma,” Edna said. “He’s a nice man.”

“Tomorrow.” Nellie didn’t often yield an argument to her daughter, but most of their arguments were about what Edna was doing, not about what she was doing herself. She turned off the gaslight in the kitchen. “It’s late. Let’s go on up to bed.”

The next morning, she did cross the street to Mr. Jacobs’shop. Dirt and gravel had been shoveled into the hole the U.S. bomb made in the street; the Rebs weren’t going to be bothered with proper pavement. She kicked at the gravel. Watching the little stones spin away from her shoe, she wished she could kick a lot more things.

It was early. She tried the doorknob anyway. She wasn’t surprised when it turned in her hand. Hal Jacobs didn’t sleep late. The bell above the door chimed. The shoemaker stood behind the counter, a hammer in his hand. His eyes widened a little beneath bushy eyebrows. His smile showed teeth not too bad, not too good. “Hello,” he said, and then, more warily, “Widow Semphroch.”

That he didn’t use her Christian name said he’d noticed how she’d not been in lately. “You can still call me Nellie, Hal,” she said.

He nodded. “Good morning, Nellie,” he said. He coughed a couple of times. “I was afraid I had offended you the last time you were here.”

Afraid he’d offended her by kissing her, she meant. “No, that’s all right,” she answered. As she had with Edna, she spoke before she’d fully figured out what she should have said. Claiming offense would have given her the perfect excuse for having avoided him. Now she couldn’t use it. She found a question of her own: “What have you heard about Bill Reach?”

He made a face. “In prison. In a Confederate prison as a burglar. This had to do with you, didn’t it?” She found she didn’t like him scowling at her. But after a moment, he went on, “But you knew him some time ago, is that not true?” He looked at her with mixed kindness and suspicion.

“I kind of knew him, yes, you might say so.” Nellie bit her lip. She wouldn’t have recognized Reach now, any more than she would have recognized any of the other men she’d kind of known. But he’d recognized her, and presumed on old…acquaintance. “I thought he was just a tramp. And I thought—” But she couldn’t say that.

“You thought, perhaps, he did not want to treat you as a lady should be treated,” Jacobs said. Nellie nodded, grateful for the graceful phrase. The cobbler sighed. “He did have an eye for pretty women. I sometimes worried it would get him in trouble. I did not think it would get him into this sort of trouble.”

“I wish to heaven he’d left me alone,” Nellie said, which was nothing but the truth. “Why he had to come around after all these years—”

“No one is perfect.” Hal Jacobs tugged at a stray curl of gray hair that had slid over the top of one ear. “You really must dislike him very much.”

“Why do you say that?” Nellie asked, in lieu of screaming,
I hated him. I still hate him the same way I hate all the other men who used me, and all the men who want to use Edna, too.

“Because if you were not embarrassed to come here for what we did, the only other reason you would not come here—the only other reason I can think of, anyhow—is that you dislike Bill Reach.”

“Well, yes, that probably had something to do with it,” Nellie admitted. “If Bill Reach was an angel, I’d think hard about rooting for the devil.”

Hal Jacobs looked distressed. “But you must not say this! Without him, the United States would not know half of what we’ve learned of the doings of the enemy from the Atlantic to the mountains.”

“Without
me
, you wouldn’t know half of that stuff,” Nellie returned with no small pride.

“I admit it,” Jacobs said. “I have been very worried here. I—”

He had to break off then, because a Confederate corporal brought in a marching boot with a broken heel. “Kin I have it this afternoon?” he drawled. “We-uns is a-movin’ out of here tomorrow.”

“I’ll have it for you, sir, I promise. By two o’clock.” Jacobs was, no doubt, noting the regimental number and state abbreviation the corporal wore on his collar. Word that that regiment was on the move might well head for Philadelphia before this afternoon. Confirming that, the shoemaker waited till the soldier was gone and then said, “As you see, Wid—Nellie, I have my own sources of information.”

“Yes, I see that,” she said. “And I see you’re managing to use ’em without having anything to do with Bill Reach. As far as I’m concerned, you can go right on doing that. If he rots in jail, I won’t shed a tear.”

“What did he do to you, to make you hate him so?” Jacobs asked. Nellie set her jaw and said nothing. The shoemaker let out a long, sad sigh. “Whatever it was, he does not deserve these feelings you have about him. He kept track of everything, sorted it out, put pieces of the puzzle together…If any one man kept the Rebs from reaching the Delaware and bombarding Philadelphia, he is the one.”

“A few hundred thousand soldiers had something to do with it, too, I think,” Nellie answered tartly. She looked down at the dingy rug on the dingy floor of the shoemaker’s shop. “Most important thing I’ve heard in the past week is that the Rebs think they’re going to be getting barrels—or maybe plans for barrels, I’m not sure which—from England sometime soon. I think they’re talking about barrels, anyway. Sometimes they call ’em tanks instead.”

“That’s what the English call them,” Jacobs said. “Worth knowing. I suppose we should have expected as much.” He did not sound very surprised or very interested. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he just didn’t want her to know how important her information was. Then he inclined his head in what was almost a bow, part of the old-time courtliness she enjoyed with him. “I hope you will come in again on such matters. And if you wish to come in for other reasons, I want you to know I am always glad to see you.”

Nellie felt her cheeks grow hot. He meant he wanted to kiss her again. She’d liked it when he’d kissed her before. She wasn’t used to being kissed any more, or to enjoying it when she was. He might even have meant he wanted to do more than kiss her. The idea didn’t disgust her as much as she thought it should.

Flustered, she said, “We’ll have to see,” and hurried out of there as fast as she could go.

A Confederate major stood outside the door to the coffeehouse. “Ah, here you are,” he said, tipping his cap. “I looked inside, but I didn’t see anyone.”

“That’s odd.” Nellie opened the door for him. The bell jingled merrily. “Please, sir, come in. My daughter should be here.” She raised her voice: “Edna!”

“Coming, Ma!” Edna called from upstairs, and came down as fast as anyone could have wanted.

“Get the major here his coffee and whatever else he wants,” Nellie said severely. “If we’re open for business, I want you down here ready to work. We lose customers if you aren’t.”

“Yes, Ma. I’m sorry, Ma.” Edna hurried over to the Rebel. “What can I get for you today, sir?”

“Cup of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich,” the major answered. To Nellie, he added, “It’s all right, ma’am. Don’t you worry about it.”

“I do worry about it,” Nellie said, “and it’s not all right.” But she let it drop; Edna had the coffee on the table for the major in jig time, and was frying eggs and slicing bread with practiced efficiency.

The bell jingled again. A couple of lieutenants came in. One of them leered disgracefully at Edna. Nellie made a point of serving that pair herself. Breakfast business was slower than usual, though. After an hour or so had gone by, the place was for the moment empty.

Nellie took advantage of that for a trip to the bathroom. When she came out, Edna was setting a cup of coffee in front of Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid. The big lieutenant nodded to Nellie. “Morning, ma’am,” he said, polite as usual.

“Good morning,” she answered coolly. She wished he wouldn’t come around here. He wanted to do more than leer at Edna; he’d made that plain. And she, young and foolish as she was, wanted to let him. Nellie shook her head. That wouldn’t happen, not if she had anything to do with it.

Suddenly, she stiffened. She hadn’t heard the doorbell ring. She should have heard it; the bathroom door was thin. She usually heard customers come in when she was in there. If she hadn’t…if she hadn’t, Edna had been upstairs before, and probably Kincaid had, too. Did Edna look smug?

She did. Without a doubt, she did. She looked like a cat that had fallen into a pitcher of cream. And Lieutenant Kincaid…As always, his eyes followed Edna. Still, that gaze was different now. He didn’t look as if he wondered and dreamt of what she was like under her clothes. He looked as if he knew.