The Victorious opposition

During the middle of the afternoon, she started boiling a beef tongue in a big iron pot. Tongue was one of her favorite foods. Alec liked it, too. So did Mort, but he preferred it with cloves stuck in it. Back on the farm, they'd always done it simply with carrots and onions and potatoes and whatever other vegetables they happened to have. Today she made it the way her husband liked.

He sniffed when he got back from the diner. "I know what that is!" he exclaimed.

"That's nice," Mary said with a smile.

"That's very nice," Mort said. "We don't serve tongue at the diner. We can't get enough of it, and not enough people would order it if we did."

"Well, here it is," Mary told him. "Sit down, make yourself at home, and it'll be ready in a minute." The way things turned out, making himself at home kept him from sitting down for a while, because Alec tried to tackle him. Any football referee would have thrown a penalty flag. Mort only laughed.

"And Mommy fixed something up in the kitchen," Alec said, trying to tell Mort about the day.

"I know she did, sport," his father answered. "And now we're going to have it for supper."

"No, something else. Something this morning," Alec insisted. Mary wondered if Mort would ask more questions. He didn't. Instead, he got Alec in a half nelson and tickled him with his free hand. Alec squealed and wiggled and kicked. Mary hoped he wouldn't have an accident. That sort of treatment was asking for trouble.

But Alec didn't. He was growing up. He'd start school pretty soon. Part of Mary reacted to that with surprise and horror, and not just because school would teach what the Yanks wanted taught. Where had the time gone? But part of her looked forward to getting him out of the apartment during the day. He really was starting to notice too much of what went on around him.

"Yum," Mort said when he dug into di

The next morning, the sun shone brilliantly. The mercury shot all the way up into the twenties. Mary wrapped the box she'd been working on in brown paper and binder twine. "Come on," she told Alec. "Let's get you dressed up nice and warm. We have to take this to the post office."

"What is it?"

"Something for your cousins, over in Ontario."

Getting to the post office took a while, even if it was only three blocks away. Alec threw snowballs and made snow angels and generally had more fun than should have been legal. He had snow all over his front when they went in. It promptly started to melt, because "Wilf Rokeby always kept his potbellied stove well fed with coal. The smell of his hair oil was part of the smell of the post office. He wore his hair parted right down the middle, the way he had when Mary was a little girl. It had been dark then. It was white now.

"What have we got here?" he asked when Mary set the box on the counter.

"Present for my cousins," she answered, as she had with Alec.

Like any small-town postmaster, Rokeby knew a lot about what went on in his customers' lives. "You don't have a lot to do with 'em," he remarked, "nor the rest of your family, either. Been years since I sent anything from you folks to Ontario."

"I got a wire from them," Mary said. "Laura had a baby."

His face softened. "A baby. That's nice." He put the package on the scale, then looked at a chart. "Well, you owe me sixty-one cents for this." She gave him three quarters, got her change, and took Alec back out into the snow.

Jonathan Moss got up from the table. He put on his overcoat and hat. "I'm going to head for the office," he said.

Laura nodded. "I thought you would." She gave him a quick, perfunctory kiss. "Do you really have to go in on a Saturday morning, though?"

"I've got to be in court Monday morning, and I'm not ready," Moss answered. "If I don't want to get slaughtered, I'd better know what I'm doing. Say good morning to Dorothy for me when she finally gets up."

"I will." A faint smile crossed Laura's face. "I wonder where she gets it." Their daughter loved to sleep late, a habit neither of them had.

"Don't know. Wherever it comes from, I wish I could catch it. Well, I'm off." Out the door Moss went. As soon as he closed it behind him, he dropped his right hand into the coat pocket where he carried his pistol. He didn't do that where Laura could see him. It made her nervous. But not doing it once he was out in the hallway made him nervous.

No one lay in wait there. No one troubled Jonathan on the stairs. No one bothered him on the way to his Ford, which he didn't park right in front of the apartment building. He examined the auto before getting in. It looked all right. Nothing blew up when he started the engine.

Maybe this is all so much moonshine, he thought as he drove to the office. But he couldn't afford to take the chance. What had happened to occupation headquarters in Berlin proved that. He might have laughed off threatening letters. Nobody but an idiot laughed off a bomb.

As usual, he chose a route to the office different from the one he'd used the day before. He didn't park right in front of the building where he worked, either: he used the guarded lot nearby. All the same, the ends of his daily trips to and from work made him nervous. If anyone was gu

Up the steps and into the building. No assassin lurking in the lobby. Up the stairs to his office, wary every time he turned. No crazed Canuck stalking the stairway. He opened the door, flipped on the light switch, and peered inside. Everything was exactly as he'd left it.

He closed and locked the door. Then he took care of the morning housekeeping: he made a pot of coffee and put it on the hot plate. Even though he'd had a cup with breakfast, waiting for it to get ready was a lonely vigil.

Meanwhile, the case ahead. Somebody-under occupation regulations, the military prosecutor didn't have to say who-claimed his client had played an active role in the Canadian uprising in the mid-1920s. Why whoever this was hadn't come forward years earlier was a question Moss intended to raise as loudly as the judge would let him. He'd been trying to find out who had a grudge against Allen Peterhoff. Somebody who stood to gain from Peterhoff's troubles was the likeliest to cause those troubles.

So far, Moss had had no luck finding anyone like that. As far as he could tell, Peterhoff was a pillar of the community. As for what he'd been doing in 1925 and 1926, nobody seemed to have a lot of hard evidence one way or the other. Of course, in cases like this, hard evidence didn't always matter. Hearsay counted for just as much, and often for more.

"Got to be some bastard after his money," Moss muttered to himself. He hadn't seen a case as blatant as this for a long time. It really belonged to the harsh years right after the revolt, not to 1941. But here it was, and the occupying authorities were taking it very seriously indeed. That worried Moss. Why were they flabbling about Peterhoff if they didn't have a case?

Moss had just poured himself his second cup of coffee from the pot when the telephone rang. His hand jerked, but not enough to make him spill the coffee. He set down the cup and picked up the telephone. "Jonathan Moss speaking."