But Toricelli only asked, “Sir, do you know a Miss Ophelia Clemens?”

“The reporter? I should say I do,” Dowling answered. “I spoke with her outside General MacArthur’s headquarters not more than a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact. Why?”

“Because she just pulled up in front of this building, sir,” Toricelli said. “I doubt like the dickens she’s here to talk to me.”

“Send her in. Send her in,” Dowling said. “How subversive do you think I can be?”

“I couldn’t begin to guess.” By Toricelli’s expression, though, he feared for the worst.

When Ophelia Clemens marched into Dowling’s office, she looked him in the eye and said, “General, I’d murder somebody for a drink.”

“Not me, I hope.” Dowling opened his desk drawer and, with the air of a vaudeville conjuror, produced the half pint. “Here you are, ma’am. At your service.”

“God bless you,” Ophelia Clemens said. “I hoped I could find a St. Bernard in all these Alps.” After that rhetorical outburst, she unscrewed the cap and swigged like a man. She eyed the bottle in her hand with a certain amount of respect. “That’s what they call panther piss, isn’t it?”

“Something like that,” Dowling allowed. “It sure isn’t sipping whiskey.”

She handed the half pint back to him. When he put it away without drinking, she said, “Keep it around just for poisoning visitors, do you?”

“By no means, ma’am. You misunderstand me. I’m about half an hour ahead of you, that’s all. And what besides bartender duty can I do for you on this none too lovely day?”

“Well, I’ve got my own cigarettes,” she replied, and lit one to prove it. “I don’t suppose you could spare me some truth?”

Dowling snorted. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“If you had it, I think you might give it to me,” Ophelia Clemens told him. “That’s more than I can say about most of the people in your line of work I know.”

“You flatter me,” he said. “Keep it up. I love it.”

“I’ll give you the reporter’s ultimate flattery, then,” she said. “How would you like to be ‘a reliable source’?”

Dowling knew what that meant: somebody who shot off his mouth without getting called to account for it. At his age and station, such a chance tempted him more than a twenty-two-year-old virgin-more than a twenty-two-year-old professional, come to that. “Go ahead and ask,” he said, “and we’ll see how reliable I am.”

“All right.” Ophelia Clemens took out a spiral-bound notebook, opened it to a blank page, and poised a pencil above it. “How bad do things look in Ohio and Pennsylvania?”

“You just named Pennsylvania. Right there, that says we aren’t doing as well as we ought to be.” Dowling shook his head. “No, I take it back. That’s not fair. I don’t know what things are like on the ground over there. I have my own troubles, Lord knows. You can say things aren’t going as well as we wish they were.”

Her pencil scratched across the page. “Do you think Featherston’s going after Pittsburgh?”

“Too early to be sure, but that’s how it looks right now,” Dowling said.

“Uh-huh.” Ophelia Clemens wrote some more. “Do you know, they wouldn’t give me a straight answer in the War Department? You never heard so many variations on ‘No comment’ in all your born days. Franz Liszt couldn’t write variations like that.”

“Heh,” Dowling said doubtfully as the allusion flew over his head. Had he been up in the War Department, he would have played it cagey, too-he knew that. You could get in trouble for saying yes and being right, for saying yes and being wrong, and conversely with no as well. No comment looked pretty good under those circumstances.

“Can the Confederates take Pittsburgh?” Ophelia Clemens asked.

When Dowling got questions like that, being a “reliable source” looked a lot less enjoyable. “I hope not,” he blurted.

Scritch, scritch, scritch went the pencil point. “Can we stay in the war if they do take Pittsburgh?”

No, this wasn’t any fun at all. “I hope so,” Dowling answered. “Losing it would hurt us. We make an awful lot of steel there. But it’s not like Birmingham-it’s not just about the only place where we make steel. As far as that goes, we can hold on and hold out. Even so…”

“Will the country stand for it?” she asked. “Cleveland was supposed to hold up the Confederates for a long time. It didn’t, not for nearly long enough. It’s gone. It’s lost. If Pittsburgh goes the same way, won’t we just say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t win this one,’ and throw in the towel?”

“That’s what Jake Featherston hopes we’ll do, anyhow,” Dowling said. “We’ve got elections coming up this fall. Now, I’m just a soldier. I’m not supposed to know anything about politics, and I mostly don’t.” Soldiers, even soldiers acting as reliable sources, had to say such things. Dowling-and, no doubt, Ophelia Clemens with him-knew he was being disingenuous, but he couldn’t help it. He went on, “One thing I haven’t seen is anybody from any party campaigning on a ‘Peace Now!’ platform.”

Scritch, scritch, scritch. “Well, neither have I,” the reporter said. “Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because everybody figures Featherston would kick us while we’re down,” Dowling answered at once. “Don’t you? What else could it be? He’s made it pretty damn clear that he tells lies whenever he opens his mouth. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

“Me?” She shook her head. “No, sir. Not even a little bit. You know the number of the beast, all right. I’ve been in this business for as long as you’ve been in the Army-longer, really, because I watched my father before I was old enough or good enough to do it myself. Jake Featherston scares the spit out of me. I’ve never seen anybody like him, not on this continent. Some of the people in Action Francaise, maybe, and that Mosley fellow in England, but nobody here comes close.”

“We should have smashed him when we had the chance, just after he got power,” Dowling said. But Featherston didn’t look so dangerous then. And the USA was stuck in the economic collapse. And so… Yes, Dowling thought sourly. And so…

Hipolito Rodriguez sat on his cot in the guards’ barracks at Camp Determination, methodically cleaning his submachine gun. He’d learned in the dirt and mud and dust of the trenches that a clean weapon could make the difference between life and death. The submachine gun had a more complicated apparatus than his old Tredegar, too.

Another guard, an Alabaman named Jonah Gurney, said, “Anybody’d reckon you was married to that gun.” He carried his weapon when he walked through the camp and ignored it the rest of the time. He was a younger man, not a recruit from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades. He’d never seen combat, and it showed.

“Married? No.” Rodriguez shook his head. “My wife screw me, I like that. This gun screw me, I don’t like nothin’ no more.” He pushed an oily rag through the barrel with a cleaning rod.

The rest of the men in the barracks laughed. “He got you, Jonah,” somebody said. “He got you good.”

By the dull flush rising on Gurney’s blunt features, he already knew that. He liked ragging on other people. Oh, sure-he liked that fine. It wasn’t so much fun when somebody turned the tables on him. If Rodriguez had had a dime for everybody like that he’d met, he would have been one of the richest men in Sonora, certainly too rich to be a camp guard.

Scowling, Gurney said, “You’re asshole buddies with the big cheese in the camp, ain’t you?”

“We were in the war together,” Rodriguez answered with a shrug. Because he’d practiced stripping and assembling the submachine gun so much, he could let his hands do it while he kept an eye on the other guard. “I dunno about asshole buddies. I don’t think I like the sound of that too much.” He did like the sound with which a full magazine went into place: a satisfying click.

Jonah Gurney didn’t seem to notice. “No?” he said. “What you aim to do about it, greaser?”